Open Thread 62.75

This is the twice-weekly hidden open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:

Good news, everybody! Thanks to 75thTrombone, the ‘Report Comment’ option is back at the bottom right of every comment. Please resume snitching on each other.

To make it easier to use, I’ve restored the old comment policy, although I continue to reserve the right to occasionally ban people who I think are bad in ways that don’t technically violate any rules. Note that I’ve only done this once in the whole history of this blog.

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1,586 Responses to Open Thread 62.75

  1. Moon says:

    Ann Coulter’s linking to the Wolf post reminded me of a previous post of Scott’s.

    Some people here have read a lot of Scott’s posts and remember which ones are where, better than I do.

    Can someone tell me which post it was where he put a quote in a separate paragraph, separated from the rest of the text. Basically, it said that Scott takes a cool objective rational look at research support, or lack of it– for awful political ideas or movements.

    Scott responded to the quote, immediately below it, saying “Yes, that is precisely what I do” or something to that effect.

    Anyone remember the title of that post? Thanks.

    • FacelessCraven says:

      it sounded like the SSC Testimonials post, but I went and checked that one and couldn’t find a match. Sorry.

      • rlms says:

        I think we found it was In Favour Of Niceness, Community And Civilisation (the relevant part is section IV).

  2. Moon says:

    There’s something sad about the Wolf post, in our sad country right now. It’s like, as someone else guessed somewhere else in this thread, like Scott was bitten by a rabid SJW as a child. Maybe he grew up in San Fran, where there are many SJWs– as opposed to most other places where even progressives do not even know what a SJW is, like I didn’t before I came to this web site.

    And it’s as if Scott is telling some place like Vox.com “Please help me and others to heal from SJW bites we have experienced. Please, Vox, let go of your weird habit of going off the deep end with respect to identity politics, and help us to heal, so we can join you in the Blue Tribe.”

    But Vox can’t do that. Media is under threat and “news media” and investigative journalism have all but disappeared, in favor of infotainment. Those few serious news organizations that exist– and Vox is one of them– are incredibly rigid and non-responsive.

    Heavily stressed people and organizations tend to be that way. They just keep rigidly going along, on their narrow path. And Trump’s election certainly won’t improve that, as it will make new organizations become even more stressed.

    There is a reason why Vox does not allow comments to its articles. They don’t want any responses. They feel obligated to go through the motions of responding to some of Scott’s criticisms, because Scott has so many readers clicking on his web site. But that doesn’t go very deep.

    Most humans don’t respond thoughtfully to rational arguments anyway. Most humans prefer fake news, news that is full of falsehoods but that causes them to feel good righteous feelings and tribal superiority feelings. But news organizations are even worse at responding thoughtfully to rationality than your average human is.

  3. Deiseach says:

    Right, I’ve seen some discussion of the EM drive on here and the general consensus, if I remember rightly, was “unproven” at best and “not a chance” otherwise.

    So what is going on here?

    Music news: Kate Bush will be releasing a live album of her 2014 concert series. Pre-order now!

    • Fossegrimen says:

      I’ve been rooting for De Broglie-Bohm for a decade, so I count it as one point for the team 🙂

    • keranih says:

      So what is going on here?

      2016, man. Just…2016.

    • John Schilling says:

      They are still getting less than a hundred micronewtons of measured thrust, measured using a thrust stand with a nominal precision of about ten micronewtons. But, having wrestled with that exact model of thrust stand for several years, you only get the ten-micronewton precision if you are an expert with years of experience using that thrust stand. If you just use it out of the box, hundred-micronewton errors are quite plausible. And nowhere in their writings does the Eagleworks crew convince me they understand the problems they need to address to get the accuracy they are claiming.

      Really, this calls for independent replication, not more papers by the same guys. So far, the only really credible replication attempt I have seen is Martin Tajmar’s, and his results were ambiguous – though often misleadingly cited in the popular press as “proof that the EMdrive works”. Mostly, he proved that he needed a better experimental facility to unambiguously prove that the EMdrive works as advertised, or doesn’t, and put some quantitative details on “better experimental facility”.

      There’s a proposal to actually fly the thing and see, which would be helpful (though I expect somebody to present a null result as “it works!” due to neglecting or miscalculating some of the orbital perturbations). Alternately, if an 80-watt EMdrive produces results that are on the edge of significance on standard micropropulsion thrust stands, could someone please maybe build an 800-watt version?

    • hlynkacg says:

      Having looked at the schematics that were posted a while back, I’m still fairly confident that the effect is primarily magnetic and that all these guys talking about “quantum momentum” are talking out their asses.

      Then again, it would be kind of cool to be proven wrong.

  4. Wander says:

    As someone who likes normal folk music and sea shanties, does anyone have any advice on getting into filk? I see it mentioned a lot round these parts of the internet, but I’m not sure what the starting points are exactly. It seems to match a lot of old American labourer folk than any other genre, that about right?

    • I think of filk as part of science fiction fandom.

    • Trofim_Lysenko says:

      “Get Into” in the sense of produce and participate in? That would probably be going to cons with various filking events. There are also some filk-specific cons, but I only know of the one that produced an award.

      Or are you looking for song and artist recommendations? My taste admittedly runs much more to the parody/comedy Filks over the “serious” ones, but that said:

      Alexander James Adams is a good place to start

      Tom Smith is also quite good.

    • Glen Raphael says:

      The most common entry point is to attend a sci-fi or gaming convention that has a music track with a filk component, drop by the filk room, and get hooked. There also exist filk-specific conventions that are /just/ about the music.

      If you go to such a thing, the most common feature is an “open filk” room where people gather in a circle with instruments and play/sing songs. It’s a participatory scene – people go to sing along, to add instrumental bits, to appreciate the cleverness/humor (and sometimes musicianship) of others, to try out new material, and just generally enjoy music together. You will also find “concert” slots featuring particular performers and if you want to listen more at home there’s a table somewhere selling CDs. Also many of the people you meet in circle will have CDs and a bandcamp site somewhere (eg, here’s mine).

      There are also housefilks – song circles run by specific people here and there independent of the larger gatherings.

      Filk started out as folk music performed at scifi gatherings. So it shares some musical sensibilities with folk, including the characteristic that it’s mostly about sharing music in a group and following the “folk process”, with people making songs their own and adding new ideas over time.

      Here is a collection of filk conventions.

      Here are some resources on housefilks – filk events held in people’s homes.

  5. nimim.k.m. says:

    Let’s discuss some other politics that are not Donald J. Trump:

    Nobody seemed to notice that House of Lords passed Investigatory Powers Bill with barely any resistance.

    Perhaps the most controversial measure will require internet service providers to keep detailed information on their customers’ web browsing for the last year. There will be no way of opting out of that and the data will be collected on everyone, leading to fears that it could be stolen and leaked, especially given the huge scale of the Talk Talk hack earlier this year.

    • Dabbler says:

      My first impressions of this is that there’s nothing that can be done. No amount of politics is going to stop governments doing these things.

      • Mark V Anderson says:

        Dabbler, I hope I never get that cynical.

        This is a terrible thing. My computer won’t let me go to that link for some reason, but does it really mean anything when the House of Lords passes a law? I thought the House of Commons was the important body. Tell me when this is an actual law in Britain, and then I’ll stay out of that country.

        • phisheep says:

          It’s already passed the Commons, now just awaiting Royal Assent.

        • rlms says:

          The House of Commons (being elected) have the power to actually make laws, but they have to also be formally passed by the House of Lords (and the monarch). The House of Lords can delay and attempt to amend bills, but can’t permanently reject them. The Queen has to rubber stamp whatever is put in front of her.

          • John Schilling says:

            The Queen has to rubber stamp whatever is put in front of her

            In roughly the same sense that the Electoral College has to elect Donald Trump next month. But, yes, it’s certainly the safe bet that it will happen that way (in both cases).

  6. Moon says:

    I find myself wondering if and when big corporations that benefit from illegal immigrant labor are going to try to make a deal with Trump to let them stay. After all, almost everything that happens politically in the U.S. is because mega-corporations want it that way, and illegal immigration is no different. They don’t mind the GOP using anti-immigrant sentiment as a tool to get votes. But they have always kept the GOP from doing anything about illegal immigration and one would think they will always try to keep them from doing anything.

    These people are not here because someone felt compassion for them. Corporations are glad to pay these folks substandard wages, keep them in substandard housing, and work them in substandard illegal working conditions. If they object, they tell them “You’re here illegally, so there’s nothing you can do about it.”

    Time will tell.

    • CatCube says:

      You’ve hit on one of the central things that resulted in Trump’s rise: the perception that the GOP party apparatus would talk a good game about illegal immigration, but roll over and show its belly to the Democrats when push came to shove. Trump campaigned hard on doing something about it for realsies, and had a little more credibility because he wasn’t perceived as being beholden to the system that only talked about something the base wanted real action on.

      You’re absolutely correct that Trump won’t actually do anything about it, either. This nonsense about building a wall is stupid. Defending a border that long against small-scale smuggling is nearly impossible to do at any sort of reasonable cost. (Here, I’m using “small-scale” to refer to the volume of smuggling against things that need real transport corridors, which are regular commerce or an actual military invasion, which doesn’t require defending literally the entire border.) Similarly, a huge attempted deportation round-up will be expensive, and likely relatively ineffective.

      The only way to avoid it is to get people to self-deport, i.e., hammer employers. Is a restaurant employing illegal workers? $5000 fine per, and if it’s a franchise, divide the fine 50/50 between the franchising corporation and the franchisee. Illegal workers on a construction site? $5000 fine per, and divide it 50/25/25 between the Owner, Prime, and subcontractor. Franchisors and owners will be real enthusiastic about making sure their franchisees and contractors are in compliance, instead of pulling a Sergeant Schultz.

      • keranih says:

        Drying up the well of “unauthorized” sources of income is, imo, the most humane way of countering the immigration issue. As the jobs begin to dry up and people stop moving in and start moving out (as happens “naturally” when the economy tanks) individuals will be able to assess their own situations and move with deliberation, rather than panic.

        (Note: I say all this as a supporter of “no illegals, more legals, open to a path to citizenship but you won’t like my conditions, parents of anchor babies are not citizens and can’t use that as an excuse to stay, and eh, minor children are a special case” anti-Hillary voter.)

        However – firstly, we need to make e-verify “better” or “more evenly required” – so long as part of an industry can get away with not using it, it’s a burden on the compliant part of the industry, and it’s stupid to expect people to move against their best interests.

        Secondly, we’re going to have to do something about the minim wage. So long as it’s better to hire a motivated illegal at/near minim wage than it is to hire a second-generation unemployed at the same rate, there’s going to be a market for the first. Dropping the minim wage will reduce that market (but not eliminate, not so long as the wage/living conditions differential between the USA and Central America remains as it is.

        Thirdly, and this is my least concern, but that’s probably a mistake – we’re looking at having to get the government even more deeply embedded in our employment system, to the point of eliminating all cash-under-the-table payments. (Not “making them illegal”, as they pretty much are now, but making them *gone*.) I’m…not sure I want the downsides of this.

        At any rate, any discussion of increasing entitlements/support payments or changing to GBI is going to have to wait on managing illegal immigration. The math is quite difficult with that, and impossible without.

    • Mark V Anderson says:

      I find myself wondering if and when big corporations that benefit from illegal immigrant labor are going to try to make a deal with Trump to let them stay.

      Where did you get the idea that big corporations benefit from illegal immigrant labor? No large corp would touch an illegal immigrant with a ten foot pole. Big corps are extremely allergic to breaking laws and to bad publicity, because both those things are very expensive.

      It is little tiny companies that employ illegal aliens. A few years ago I did a bunch of tax returns at a free clinic where a lot of the taxpayers were illegals. I never heard of any of the companies they worked for.

      I do agree that extreme measures against illegals are somewhat anti-business. But then Trump is not a traditional Republican. He may well have difficulties getting a lot of the extreme measures through the Republican Congress precisely because it would hurt small business.

      • Moon says:

        Agribusiness has tons of illegal immigrants picking fruits and vegetables all the time. Are you claiming that those are all small businesses?

        In most cities, lots of unskilled construction workers are picked up from some place like Home Depot parking lots every day and given labor and pay for that day only, unless they get picked the next day too. Are those all tiny construction companies also?

        • dndnrsn says:

          A lot of actual on-the-ground work for things like agribusiness, construction, etc is done by contractors and subcontractors, as far as I know. At least in part so that the large businesses have plausible deniability when it comes to things like labour standards.

          • keranih says:

            Right. If one actually talks to the people in these trades, one sees that a non-trivial fraction of the labor isn’t required, week over week and year over year, and that people’s skills are not readily presented by a certificate or the like.

            So part of the usual hiring process for work crews is “okay, I’ll take you on for a day, see what you can do.” People who integrate well into the crew and bust their hump get another day’s work. People who do this (which includes showing up on time and sober) for a couple weeks, the boss wants their phone number so he can call them when he has more work.

            We could shift to a business model where the harvest & plant workers are permanent full time hires like is done in a plant, or where one construction company has to have people who can do everything from survey through foundation prep and pouring the slab, to framing, electrical, building windows, plumbing, tile, and roofs.

            But it would raise the cost of everything, and no developed country that I know of actually has that system.

        • Mark V Anderson says:

          Agribusiness has tons of illegal immigrants picking fruits and vegetables all the time. Are you claiming that those are all small businesses?

          In most cities, lots of unskilled construction workers are picked up from some place like Home Depot parking lots every day and given labor and pay for that day only, unless they get picked the next day too. Are those all tiny construction companies also?

          Yes and yes. I don’t know this for sure, but that would be consistent with my experience. Both agriculture and construction are dominated by tiny firms (well ag less and less, but I think most farms by quantity are still small). I have not worked in either of those industries, but I can’t imagine giant ag or construction companies taking the high risk of illegal immigrants, anymore than the large firms I have worked for. When I had a firm replace my roof about 15 years ago, none of them spoke English (all Spanish speaking), and I would not have been surprised if they were illegals. It was a little firm. One anecdote about a small construction firm. It is possible that I am wrong and some large firms use illegals, but if so, it would be a small group of large corps.

  7. Dabbler says:

    I’ve found an article I’m interested in help scrutinizing.

    http://hipcrimevocab.com/2016/09/08/the-dying-americans-2/

    Does anyone here have any thoughts on it? It appears to me a mixture of some good points, powerful emotive language which, while I can see why it is written, makes me wonder if it makes me biased about parts of the article, and some things that I simply cannot endorse (e.g. attacking individualism as a system).

    • dwietzsche says:

      I think it’s pretty clear that individualism is a perverse kind of myth-making and that’s about it. It doesn’t make sense in a modern economic context at all. Are you a hermit? Do you grow your own beans? How is it that you maintain the belief that you’re a self-sufficient person (if indeed this is a belief you have)? We’re not a society of mountain men, here. Modern societies are all hopelessly interdependent. That’s what makes them efficient in the first place. Saves a lot of time when you don’t have to invent optometry from scratch just to make a subpar pair of spectacles.

      The dying thing is really not that surprising. We have a problem that’s never existed before. We’re actually already post-scarcity. But when people use that term, they mistakenly associate it with material goods, when the only unit that really matters is some hypothetical unit of human labor. Because we’re post scarcity, we have a problem that we’ve never had before in human history: we don’t know what to do with all the people that we have.

      Now that is a simplification of course. Because obviously there’s some IT firm right now that can’t find enough guys who can write in Python. But there’s a cost associated with increasing that number of people, and there’s really not a mechanism for distributing training according to some algorithm designed to maximize the labor potential of our pool of unused laborers. Anyone who thinks there is is trying to masturbate with an invisible, intangible hand. In order for a person to become sufficiently skilled in a wide number of fields that are still hungry for workers, they would first have to come up with the idea that they should become a practitioner in one of those fields, then they would have to pay someone for the training. That first condition is pretty ad hoc, and people are doomed to make a mess of it. But the second condition is even more problematic, since the expense entails both risk, because not everyone who sets out to learn how to do something complicated learns it, and a threshold, because not everyone who can learn how to do something complicated can afford the training.

      That’s before we get into some of the more interesting problems. Like, what if I just don’t want to be somebody else’s bitch, and the only job options available to me involve being somebody else’s bitch? 42 percent of the job market is retail (I’m sure I read that somewhere, but that figure may be off), and that’s almost all retail is. A proper individualist both faced with employment options in the unskilled labor market and an unhealthy sense of personal dignity might elect to be unemployed instead, even at the cost of being homeless, because that’s more individualistic in its way than folding one’s self into a socio-economic hierarchy that regards its lowest ranking members with reflexive distaste.

      I might also be a paranoid schizophrenic abandoned by my family 12 years ago. There are lots of different ways people can get tossed into the junk drawer of humanity.

      The article blames neoliberalism, but it’s not fair to neoliberalism in much the same way that indicting communism for the fall of the USSR is unfair to communism. Neoliberalism has never been fully implemented in the US. The whole idea behind it is that you’re supposed to get out of the way of market driven private enterprise because it’s really efficient. But you’re also supposed to take some of the wealth concentrations that tend to form in unfettered capital systems and redistribute them back. In America, we let the rich get really rich, and then… that’s it. The other half of neoliberalism, the part that’s supposed to explain why it’s liberal, goes substantially unimplemented.

      There are a couple ways that could be fixed, but the ideas are at the moment just fever dreams. The labor left has advocated for a right to work, which would require the government to furnish jobs for people. And there’s also sometimes talk of a minimum income everyone would get regardless of employment. Either initiative would involve levels of redistribution we haven’t seen in decades (and maybe ever), and are at the moment political impossibilities.

      There are other issues that I think are more interesting but I really don’t know what to say about them. Like, if you think of human global society as a closed system (I don’t know if that makes sense), and you recognize that it has certain features now that it hasn’t always had-the absence of frontiers, mostly effective prohibitions against violence, the near total private ownership of all property, and a political class mostly indifferent to the problems of people who fall through the cracks-it seems pretty clear that corpsicles on the park benches are just an inevitable product of social entropy. That capitalism is a system that generates failure exacerbates these things, of course. But the main thing is that like any system there’s a cost to maintaining order.

    • John Schilling says:

      I think it’s pretty clear that individualism is a perverse kind of myth-making and that’s about it. It doesn’t make sense in a modern economic context at all. Are you a hermit? Do you grow your own beans?

      That’s not what individualism means.

      How is it that you maintain the belief that you’re a self-sufficient person?

      Because I pay for my own beans. Or more precisely, because not liking the taste of beans, I pay for my own meat and bread instead.

      That’s what individualism means. It means being a free and independent actor, and not just in economic affairs. But since that’s the facet of individualism you want to talk about, it means deciding what you want to have, what you want to create, and with whom you want to trade the one for the other. Rather than doing what you are told and accepting the ration you are given.

      You’ll forgive me if I don’t your next thousand or so words following from that misunderstanding.

      • dwietzsche says:

        Most people are not “free and independent” actors. Most people do what they are told and accept the ration they are given. That it’s Kroger Industries rather than the Central Planning Committee is irrelevant. What you subscribe to is a religion. It has very little to do with reality.

        • Paul Brinkley says:

          It is most certainly relevant that it’s Kroger Industries and not the Central Planning Committee. If you don’t like Kroger’s terms, you’re permitted to go to Walmart, or Target, or HEB, or Albertson’s, etc. If you don’t like the CPC’s terms, you’re not permitted an alternative.

  8. Electronic voting machine fraud is always undetectable and untraceable. The software is proprietary, so no one can see it. I am not saying I have seen proof that it happened. I am saying that if/when it did happen, there would be no way of proving it or tracing it.

    But that only applies to 13 states. The other 37 states (including Michigan and Wisconsin) use optical scan paper ballots, and distributed tabulating devices without any network connection.

    Machine counted results for each precinct are made public at that polling place, where runners from political parties, candidates, and the news media collect them. That serves as a check against altering the results at higher levels of aggregation.

    Stealing an election (or in this case, a state’s vote for president) would be much more difficult than many people realize. Historically, those who have literally stolen elections (notably, the 1948 Texas Democratic primary for U.S. Senator) knew exactly how many votes they needed.

    As it happened, Trump won the state by about 13,000 votes. But it was well within the range of possibility that either candidate could have won Michigan by ten times that number, and there was no way to know that in advance. All of the precincts are reporting pretty much at once after the polls close, and after that, it’s too late for a theoretical fraudster to change anything.

    Next month, a random sample of Michigan precincts (hundreds, all told) will be audited, and the ballots will be examined. This is routine in a number of states with optical scan ballots. If hand counted results in audited precincts are systematically different from the machine count, that would certainly be noticed.

    After that, all the ballots in the state are available for inspection via the Freedom of Information Act, so organizations and individuals can conduct their own hand counts.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      Next month, a random sample of Michigan precincts (hundreds, all told) will be audited, and the ballots will be examined. This is routine in a number of states with optical scan ballots. If hand counted results in audited precincts are systematically different from the machine count, that would certainly be noticed.

      This is why I doubt I will ever support eVoting or pure digital machines. The inability to do an audit of the voters intent.

  9. HeelBearCub says:

    I think all of Scott’s posting, on net, resulted in more votes for Trump.

    Agree or disagree?

    • Aapje says:

      That is pure conjecture. Scott did his best to push people to Clinton, IMO.

      Given the number of libertarians here, who talked a decent bit about Johnson, this site may have pushed more people to Johnson, merely by providing a platform for these discussions.

      But really, we have no clue.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        Well, of course it’s conjecture.

        But Scott has desired nothing more than to crush “political correctness” and expand the Overton Window of acceptable discourse.

        In addition, he didn’t endorse Clinton, he non-endorsed Trump. From a game theory perspective that is a statement that’s you don’t think Trump is really that bad.

        Most of what he has passionately done is defend Trump. Everything else has been anodyne.

        • carvenvisage says:

          But Scott has desired nothing more than to crush “political correctness” and expand the Overton Window of acceptable discourse.

          disagree: blatantly dishonest, malicious, microaggression

          • HeelBearCub says:

            I can’t tell if you are accusing me of something or trying to put something in place of “political correctness”.

          • carvenvisage says:

            was accusing you of something. Surely you don’t actually stand by that characterisation of Scott /his motives? You don’t recognise it in retrospect as a dishonest, malicious, microaggression?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            You really don’t think Scott wants “political correctness” stamped out? You really don’t think Scott wants to expand the Overton Window of acceptable discourse?

            In addition, can you defend calling me “blatantly dishonest” in that statement?

            I mean, “we should be able to talk about anything and no one should be constrained in saying what they believe” is sort of Scott’s jam.

          • Moon says:

            Hbc, let me translate for you. “Blatantly dishonest”, “malicious” “stupid”, “irrational” etc. generally mean “Left of Center” on this board.

            You see, since the “correct” position is always pretty far to the Right of Center, in the opinions of most people on this board, a Left of Center position can not be seen as reasonable, honest, well-intentioned etc.

            Politics is tribal. My tribe good, honest, virtuous, smart, strong — no matter what we do or say. Your tribe dishonest, malicious, stupid, weak– no matter what you all do or say.

            See how this works?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Moon:

            You aren’t helping me. Whatever your intent is, your effect is to work against my goals.

          • Moon says:

            Sorry. I didn’t realize that your goals were to deny the reality of what your experiences are, and what is happening, on this Right Wing board. Deny away.

          • Moon says:

            HBC, okay, let’s ask Carvenvisage to come up with a more credible explanation than mine, for his labeling of your statement as “blatantly dishonest.”

            Don’t hold your breath while waiting to hear from him.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Moon:

            You asked for an example of pointing out being correct, but for the wrong reasons?

            Here is one.

          • Moon says:

            Okay, Hbc, I look forward to reading Carvenvisage’s right reasons for his “blatantly dishonest” statement. I am not holding my breath waiting for it, either.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Moon:
            I expect none, because carvenvisage clearly doesn’t have a solid sense of Scott’s raison-d’etre as a blogger. He may also harbor animus towards left-wing sentiment, but that is a secondary mistake.

            Plenty of right wing commenters here would, I think, not criticize me in this manner. So it’s not the mere fact that carvenvisage is (presumably) right wing, nor general board bias towards left-wing statements, but rather misunderstanding Scott that is the primary issue.

            In other words, you are correct to criticize his take, but for the wrong reasons.

          • carvenvisage says:

            @HeelBearCub

            You didn’t just say, ‘wants’, you said, ‘wants nothing more than’.

            I don’t think Scott does want political correctness gone (or crippled) at all, let alone via ‘stamping out’, but I believe I know for a fact that it’s not what he wants above all other things.

            As for the overton window, uh, maybe? Depends what you mean. If it’s what you’d guess from the accompanying ‘crushing political correctness’, -a sort of free for all where everyone can feel free to go out of their way to indulge themself and try to offend and hurt other people, then I think it’s very very very clearly a no. -Does that match scott’s personality or what he’s written?

            If you mean, does he want people to be freer to make potentially offensive or insensitive claims, and have them engaged with rather than buried and their speaker punished (within limits -obviously he’s not for engaging with stuff approaching stuff like ‘you’re a cunt, shut up’),

            then I’m actually not sure,

            (yes, but with some very strong provisos would be my guess, and maybe as a side effect of other goals or maybe directly)

            But again I’m sure the implication that he wants this for the sake of being an asshole, or ‘freedom’, or ‘crushing’ enemies or something -rather than because he (evidently) believes in engaging with things (at quite some demonstrated length and some patience) is clearly nonsense. The more reasonable interpretation doesn’t seem like a plausible one because it would be accusing Scott of a) something good, and b) something Scott has (more or less?) explicitly stated he believes in.

             

             

            Maybe wanting more open discussion is a naive recipe for a political disaster, or stupid or wrong in some other way-but that’s not what you said. Instead you made accusations about not just Scott’s inner desires, but apparently his greatest desires. (!)

            Such accusations are generally dishonest when there isn’t a huge amount of (circumstantial or direct) evidence for them, (or when they’re necessarry), but in this case, there is neither a strong basis for speculation as to motives nor a necessity for it.

            And as well as that my own psychic powers tell me that the accusations in question are dead wrong, (as well as dead unfair), and it doesn’t fit with what I’ve read from him, or how he’s written it.

             

            Perhaps the ‘blatantly’ was excessive, -or ungenerous, but I think the mismatch between the picture you painted and the reality is very blatant. As for ‘Dishonest’ -well, if I’m gonna give a lot of benefit of doubt, then maybe it comes from a good place, but the end result seems isomorphic to one produced by a relatively typical dishonest process.

            In any case I think my characterisation, even if wrong and presumptious, is far less so than yours of Scott. If I’m wrong that doesn’t necessarilly (wholly) excuse me, but I think, even in that case, it at least partially, -and actually mostly, does.

             

             

            @moon. The above explanation is obviously far more creditable than yours. But seems to me too objective for a proper response to one as interpretive and forward about my reasons for posting such obvious tripe, as yours, so here is a (slightly) more direct one:

            you didn’t read what the fuck I said -and honestly ask yourself if it was true or justified, before you launched into your spiel.

            I don’t even resent that, -everyone’s done it, and my response was unambiguously hostile, and thus a good target for profiling as malicious, but if you’d paid a little critical attention to what I was replying to, or if you’d doublechecked for half a second what the reply was to, you wouldn’t have been shocked into cramming your round spiel into yet another square hole.

            (Hopefully it will survive the mangling. A little damage is unavoidable, though.)

        • “In addition, he didn’t endorse Clinton, he non-endorsed Trump. From a game theory perspective that is a statement that’s you don’t think Trump is really that bad.”

          His advice was to vote for Clinton in swing states, where it mattered, and for anyone but Trump elsewhere. How does that imply that Trump isn’t really that bad?

          • Matt M says:

            Endorsing Clinton in the only places where a vote might conceivably actually matter is, to me, 99.9% the same as “endorsing clinton”

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Safe states like Wisconsin and Michigan?

            How many positive words did Scott say about Clinton in that “endorsement”?

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            Nobody thought Wisconsin and Michigan weren’t safe states until about 10:00 PM Eastern time on the day of the election.

            And someone not saying positive words about either Trump or Clinton strikes me as a testament to their clear-headedness and good sense, not their bias.

          • Moon says:

            Clinton was smeared constantly for decades. There are plenty of good words that could have been said about her. But the media focused on her nothingburger email “scandal” instead.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @ThirteentLetter:

            Right. Safe states aren’t actually safe. In other words, if you really think it’s important not to elect Trump you fully endorse the only person who can beat him, because shit can happen.

            And if you really truly think that Trump is bad, and Hillary much better, you make the positive case for Hillary. You actually don’t think this, which is why you can’t grok what that case would be.

          • DrBeat says:

            Hillary Clinton’s emails were not a “nothingburger” scandal. The content of those emails revealed an absolutely terrifying, despair-inducing level of corruption and coziness between political officials and people who are supposed to keep them in check. Hillary Clinton had nothing but contempt for transparency and honesty in her dealings.

            You think it is “nothingburger” because you are literally and not figuratively incapable of noticing information that contradicts the narrative you want to believe, where you are the heroic liberal voice of reason surrounded on all sides by malicious brain-damaged brainwashed conservative conspirators, and your anointed candidate was (instead of being the human incarnation of political corruption made flesh) a blessed and sinless champion of about mainstream center-left politics, and therefore all that is good in the world.

            This election gave us the two worst candidates in modern history. Hillary Clinton was one of them, because Hillary Clinton is one of the two worst candidates in modern history. Hillary Clinton was one of the two worst candidates in modern history because she was preposterously corrupt. Everything about her nomination was due to her corruption, due to her calling in favors with the millionaire elite class and holding out her hand and saying “I am entitled to power, so now it is my turn to be given the power you owe me!” She had her finger on the scales the entire time. She rigged the Democratic primary. She straight up rigged it. The DNC chair was working for her for the purpose of ensuring she would win. The media was working with her and for her at every stage in order to ensure they did the most they could to get her to win, because they were cozy with her and in her pocket. The prospect of the media being as in bed with any President as they were with Hillary Clinton, as they obviously and incontrovertibly and utterly uncontestedly it is literally impossible to dispute this and have any factual grounding because all of this is common knowledge were in bed with Hillary Clinton, should be horrifying. Soul-crushing. It should drive anyone to despair, the level of brazen and shameless corruption exhibited by Hillary Clinton.

            The fact that Trump was worse does not make these things no longer true of Hillary. The fact you, and me, and everyone who hasn’t drunk his Kool-Aid has strong negative feelings toward Trump does not make these things no longer true of Hillary. Hillary was an awful candidate. She lost to Donald Trump with the entire mainstream media shilling her. This is not proof that the mainstream media were actually out to get her, because we have actual proof, actually, in real life in the world, of the media’s collusion with her in order to serve her campaign. This is proof that she was such a bad candidate that even though she cheated from start to finish, she still couldn’t manage to beat Donald fucking Trump, an emotionally incontinent imbecile.

            But you’ll never notice this. It can find no purchase. The narrative is omnipotent.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            Right. Safe states aren’t actually safe. In other words, if you really think it’s important not to elect Trump you fully endorse the only person who can beat him, because shit can happen.

            And if you really truly think that Trump is bad, and Hillary much better, you make the positive case for Hillary. You actually don’t think this, which is why you can’t grok what that case would be.

            And if you sing high praises for Clinton when trying to convince a crowd that flat out doesn’t like her, you’re going to lose your credibility with them.

            To be honest, you might be right about your “Scott is an anti-leftist” theory, but it seems like you’re overfitting here, Scott made two anti-Trump/pro-Clinton posts pre election to try to convince people, and delayed a vaguely pro-trump post in order to not give his supporters ammo prior to the election, him not having an “I’m with her” logo in the SSC during the election is poor evidence that he thinks “Trump isn’t that bad” (unless “That Bad” for you means “Apocalypic”, in which case, come on…)

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            Right. Safe states aren’t actually safe. In other words, if you really think it’s important not to elect Trump you fully endorse the only person who can beat him, because shit can happen.

            Once the conventions are over, it’s time to drop all pretense of honesty and become a shill for the candidate you want? I don’t think so. If one is going to comment on the election — and there is no sense in which it is ever an obligation of any sort — then one should be honest about one’s opinions. I realize this is old-fashioned in an era where everyone wants to annihilate their foe, but there’s no way people of good will can come to a political consensus if they aren’t honest with each other.

            And if you really truly think that Trump is bad, and Hillary much better, you make the positive case for Hillary. You actually don’t think this, which is why you can’t grok what that case would be.

            What are you talking about? Of course I can imagine a positive case for Hillary! She’s a candidate of stability and not rocking the boat, she knows all the power brokers in Washington, she supports progressive social blahdeblah and would nominate judges and install regulators who agree with that.

            But on the other hand, there’s the negative case for Hillary: she’s a candidate of stability and not rocking the boat, she knows all the power brokers in Washington, she supports progressive social blahdeblah…

          • Aapje says:

            I’m not even sure you can consider Clinton an agent of stability, when for the last decades, destabilizing forces have been in power. She would just continue on that path.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Once the conventions are over, it’s time to drop all pretense of honesty and become a shill for the candidate you want?

            Make a positive case for != shill. It is possible to be charitable to Clinton, steelman her positions, etc. Much as Scott does with most things (but not some).

            People who are completely unwilling to hear a positive case for Clinton probably aren’t persuadable anyway.

          • Moon says:

            HBC, almost no one is willing to hear a positive case for Clinton. Clinton has been bashed in the media– even the NYT– for decades, 24/7/365. Propaganda works. You can’t hear someone being bashed that often for that long, without strongly suspecting– inaccurately in this case– that there has to be some good reason(s) why she is such an “unlikable candidate.”

          • Moon says:

            Dr. Beat

            Trigger Warning: This is not fake Right Wing news like Fox or Breitbart or Alex Jones. This is from a real news web site that factchecks.

            The real Clinton email scandal is that a bullshit story has dominated the campaign

            http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/4/13500018/clinton-email-scandal-bullshit

          • DrBeat says:

            Moon, people’s on this board are not hostile to you because you are left wing. They are hostile to you because of what a massive hypocrite you are.

            You say the election was won for Trump by outlets peddling “fake news” that just told politically-advantageous lies that comforted one side. You give me a sarcastic trigger warning for something being real truth and not “fake news”, and link me to fucking Vox, which is like the single greatest example of a liberal “Fake News” source I can find.

            The article you linked me does not respond to what I was saying. It is entirely about the security implications of her having a private email server, not the CONTENT of the emails, when I was explicitly talking about what the CONTENT of the emails reveals. You were not actually paying attention to what I said, and you were not paying attention to the article you linked. You just saw they both had the word “email” in them, you pattern-matched to the thing you wanted to believe, you linked me toa fake news site that didn’t actually respond to my statements, and you got fucking unbearably smug about it.

            This is what right-wingers do that pisses you off so much! This thing! This exact thing! This exact thing you are doing here at this time! They don’t read and don’t pay attention to facts, they just pattern-match to the narrative they want to believe. They believe that anything that tells them what they want to hear is telling the truth, so peddle around fake news as ironclad truth.

            You do this all the time. You lament how politics are too tribal and conservatives only listen to their own tribe while only believing negative things about the other tribe, while doing exactly that. You lament how conservatives refuse to consider other views or consider they might ever be wrong about anything, while doing exactly and specifically that thing. Everything you think is wrong about politics is completely in control of how you interact with and notice politics!

          • Moon says:

            Regarding the content of Clinton’s emails, I am not going to go through all the tons of misinterpretations by Right Wing fake news like Fox, of what the Clinton emails said or meant. Although the DNC pushed HRC and disadvantaged Bernie, and I wish they had not done this because I preferred Bernie, it is not illegal for a political party to push the candidate they believe has the best chance of winning the general election.

            The one-sidedness of the email hacking made HIllary and the DNC look bad in areas that I have no doubt that the RNC and Trump acted far worse, but they just were not hacked. And the emails didn’t say or mean any of the things you claim they did. I know that Right Wing fake news says they meant or said or proved those things e.g. that “pay to play” Clinton Foundation donations bought influence with the U.S. government. But none of that actually happened. It’s just fake Right Wing news.

            I know that Vox is disliked by consumers of Right WIng fake news. But it fact checks, and it prints the truth, nevertheless.

            I know, I know, you think I owe it to you to spend many hours and hours of my time refuting the fake accusations of Hillary by fake Right Wing news. But I won’t. I’d rather re-read the thousands of pages of The Capitalist Manifesto (AKA Atlas Shrugged) and write a book report on it, than spend my time refuting fake news accusations of HRC. Because reading the most boring book ever written would be a less destructive waste of my time.

            As one progressive named Seth said, at the time that he wisely left this board after spending only a short time on it

            “The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            @HBC

            If you’re being rigorously intellectual honest, it’s hard to make a positive case for someone you don’t feel positively about.

            Key point from his endorsement:

            “I don’t like having to vote for the lesser of two evils. But at least I feel like I know who it is.”

            Claiming that a liberal, left-libertarian, or progressive is somehow failing to live up to their ideals by failing to speak more positively about “the lesser evil”, because the most important thing is defeating the other guy…You really can’t see how that is being interpreted as trying to chastise Scott for being insufficiently loyal to political fellow travelers?

            I get that unlike many liberals who felt very positively about Sanders and/or Stein but positively hated Clinton as a war-mongering corporate shill who was insincere in her adherence to progressive ideology, you felt she was a great candidate. Remember that there were an awful lot of liberals this electoral cycle who were holding their nose and voting for her just as much as there were conservatives and even a few libertarians holding their nose and voting for Trump.

            Frankly, you sound exactly like the conservatives bitching at people for voting libertarian in 2012 because they felt Romney wasn’t a good conservative choice.

          • The Nybbler says:

            it is not illegal for a political party to push the candidate they believe has the best chance of winning the general election.

            No, but it is unethical for a committee which is, by its own bylaws, supposed to be neutral on the primaries, to do so.

            I have no doubt that the RNC and Trump acted far worse, but they just were not hacked.

            The RNC did not bias the primaries in Trump’s favor. We know this because they were more or less openly working against him. There is no equivalence here; Clinton won with the help of the DNC, Trump won against the efforts of the RNC. Though the DNC/Clinton campaign did attempt to help Trump in the primaries, they did so without Trump’s connivance.

            I know that Right Wing fake news says they meant or said or proved those things e.g. that “pay to play” Clinton Foundation donations bought influence with the U.S. government. But none of that actually happened.

            Pay to play, from a left wing source:

            http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/hillary-clinton-foundation-morocco-wikileaks/505043/

          • Moon says:

            Atlantic’s Editor in Chief was one of the chief cheer leaders for the Iraq War, so I don’t really think of him as Left Wing myself. At any rate, even Left Wing publications publish articles from Right Wing writers.

            At any rate, nothing in the exchange was illegal. $12 million was raised for good causes, saving untold lives. No access was granted to US institutions. This is called “fundraising,”– not “Pay to Play.” And Hillary was a private citizen when it occurred, not a government official.

            The Clintons got raked through the coals for having an actual charity that helps people. Trump has a charity to helps himself, and no one has a problem with it at all.

          • “They are hostile to you because of what a massive hypocrite you are.”

            I can’t speak for others, but I don’t think I’m hostile to Moon and my reservations about her are not that she is a hypocrite. My guess is that she honestly believes both that people to her right have been brainwashed by propaganda and that she herself has an accurate view of the world based on true information.

            My reservations are that she is naive and holds a wildly inaccurate view of the world with great confidence.

    • keranih says:

      How would we know this? (for serious question)

      • HeelBearCub says:

        We can’t really know.

        We could have maybe set up some sort of test beforehand, but now it would be impossible. Too much water under the bridge.

        I’m not really interested in finding an answer, really more making a meta-commentary about what Scott likes to post about and what that means about the effect of his posts.

        • Paul Brinkley says:

          I think you’re right to try to work this point.

          However, to what extent do you believe Toxoplasma of Rage plays a factor here? To be more specific: what if Scott isn’t writing in-depth anti-right screeds because those won’t actually get many dissenting comments?

          (At this moment, I’m noticing over 1300 comments on a hidden open thread, most of which I’m betting are election-related, and 45 comments on a post about an Alzheimer researcher.)

          • Moon says:

            Interesting viewpoint there. Regardless of whether Scott wrote the post for that reason, posts about Trump’s virtues– or actually about lack of evidence for Trump’s flaws in one area– certainly draw a lot of comments.

          • jaimeastorga2000 says:

            (At this moment, I’m noticing over 1300 comments on a hidden open thread, most of which I’m betting are election-related, and 45 comments on a post about an Alzheimer researcher.)

            Come on, that was clearly a half-assed piece whose only purpose was to draw attention away from the “Wolf” post.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Paul:

            You know what drew more comments faster? His anti-Trump post. So I don’t think he is posting that position to get clicks or comments.

            I think he posted that article because he really hates the word racist or racism being used, pretty much at all. Probably because he thinks it’s like a nuke, too destructive.

            So much so, that he isn’t even willing to discuss why Trump and Bannon and Sessions and others are being so named. He won’t examine the charge in any charitable way.

          • Moon says:

            Jaime, true enough, but that doesn’t mean Toxiplasma of Rage didn’t apply to the Cry Wolf post.

          • Deiseach says:

            He won’t examine the charge in any charitable way.

            HeelBearCub, I don’t think there is any useful way to examine charges of racism, given that “racism” has been re-defined to mean “recipient of societal and cultural privilege due to centuries of institutional racism, and having imbibed such attitudes from your environment, so that even if your current circumstances are economically and socially inferior, as a white person (and even more as a white man) you benefit in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways that a minority person does not; in this way an unemployed Appalachian coal miner is – unless he examines, acknowledges, and works to overcome his internalised racism – a racist who benefits from racism even by comparison with someone like Oprah Winfrey”.

            Unless you unpack your invisible knapsack every morning, you’re a racist. How on earth can we have a discussion about actual racism and racists when this is the standard?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Deiseach:

            That’s not what being charitable means.

            Donald Trump ran as a populist nativist demagogue. He constantly looked for “the other” to blame. He scapegoats people who are foreign. His entire campaign is built around the idea that there is any enemy within the country or the government which needs to be identified and ejected. Elites, bankers, foreigners, the classic shibboleths of populist demagoguery.

            He makes such a habit of this that people who are endorsing him accuse him of saying things that are racist. People who do not at all subscribe to the idea of white privilege and invisible knapsacks.

          • Moon says:

            The academic invisible knapsack view of racism is well known among people who live in San Fran and people who went to expensive colleges, of whom there are apparently many on this site. And apparently a number of folks here have been bittern by rabid SJWs suring their lives, perhaps while in attendance at their expensive colleges.

            However, as I have mentioned here before, most progressives, including me before I came to this site, do not even know what a SJW is, and do not use the academic invisible knapsack definition of racism.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            So much so, that he isn’t even willing to discuss why Trump and Bannon and Sessions and others are being so named. He won’t examine the charge in any charitable way.

            The point I was attempting to make here is that if he did decide to examine Bannon, Sessions, et al. critically, he would likely not be able to produce much that hasn’t already been seen by his readership elsewhere. Hence, he would have produced a toxoplasma that can’t spread.

            That means he could either go through his usual trouble to write a long, well-thought-out post, with everyone nodding silently but thinking Scott isn’t really saying anything interesting, or he could write a pot-stirrer like “oppose Trump, but not because he’s racist”, and have readers get the thrill of being pressed through some of their usual bubble membranes.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            WRT Scott investigating the racist charge charitably: I think that there’s not really any way for him to do that without looking like he’s started from the premise that racism is the Absolute Worst Characteristic for Any Candidate to Have. That’s the very premise I see him as attacking. It’s not fair to ask him to staunchly reject the very point he believes is important to make.

            It’d be like arguing, I dunno, that someone with a grievance about the government is allowed to say whatever they want, as long as they never disparage the government.

    • carvenvisage says:

      agree. I think it’s almost obvious.

    • shakeddown says:

      I don’t think so. Not so much because of individual pro/anti Trump statements, as because Scott’s general narrative is pro moderation and incremental progress, which helps push people from the Trump/Sanders “burn the system down” camp towards responsible moderate government.
      I wouldn’t expect this to be reflected in the comments, for various reasons. In particular, the comments have a bunch of pro-Trump people who wouldn’t be convinced by anything – so even a persuasive article that convinced a whole lot of people to vote Clinton over Trump would still look like it had a pro-Trump readership.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        How many of Scott’s posts actually spend any time endorsing the broad American system?

        How many of Scott’s post basically encourage people to think the system is fucked?

        At this point I’d rather have Scott write “Against Liberals”. At least then he would think critically about the positive arguments for modern liberalism, a social welfare state, the necessity of government, what have you.

    • Urstoff says:

      I doubt any writing on the internet does much to change the minds of people.

    • Dabbler says:

      Query. Would you consider this in the sense of “Scott Alexander bears some responsibility for a Trump victory” or not?

      • rlms says:

        I don’t think one could reasonably hold that opinion since Scott was clearly trying to oppose Trump.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        Orthogonal to my interest in posting this. Any amount Scott pushed the vote one or the other is too small to have made a difference.

        This is more meta, thinking about thinking.

    • Disagree. But I could easily be wrong.

    • Moon says:

      No way to know. If I were to go for the Yes side (though am not sure that I would), I would argue that Scott has written so much about political correctness that he may have swayed people to the “Political correctness is the worst thing in the world” camp, which might be pro-Trump.

      As it turns out, we are all about to find out what is worse in the world than political correctness.

      Even if I decided that Scott contributed to Trump voters, I would think what he would contribute would be miniscule, in comparison to fake news. People actually thought that Hillary was a worse and more corrupt candidate than Trump, because the fake news said such outrageous and false things about her– that she was a child molester, that she murdered everyone who thwarted her in some way etc. etc.

      This is how Facebook’s fake-news writers make money
      https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11/18/this-is-how-the-internets-fake-news-writers-make-money/

      A relative of mine who lives in Germany says My brother in Germany says”No one ever made a mistake by underestimating the intelligence of the American voter.”

      Of course, it’s not just stupidity. All humans are vulnerable to propaganda, and we are absolutely immersed in it constantly.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      The difference in total votes changed is probably very small. I’m guessing SSC’s total daily readership is on the order of 10,000, based on a rough extrapolation from a remark he made on “You Are Still Crying Wolf”. If (a probably very generous) 1/10th of those changed to Trump, those 1000 votes would not have made a difference in any swing state AFAIK.

      Meanwhile, if we assume “changed vote to Trump” is a bad thing (as his professed preference declares), it doesn’t say how bad. And there are worse things in the world – such as voting for Trump and making one’s subsequent voting decisions based on flawed critical thinking. Given that, it stands to reason that Scott’s posts may be seen not just as possibly increasing the votes for Trump, but alternately as increasing the number of people who think more critically about their vote.

      In other words, Trump’s slight SSC-bump, if it exists, was a necessary market correction. IBM stock is a smart buy, but only to an extent.

    • FacelessCraven says:

      Disagree.

      My best hypothesis that would match this idea is that by highlighting problems with Social Justice in particular and Blue Tribe thought generally, Scott has catalyzed a backlash reaction in his readership against the Blue Tribe. Likewise, by pushing for norms of toleration and charity, he’s made people feel more comfortable with entertaining Crimethink, encouraging the spread of pro-Trump ideas. Is that the general idea?

      • HeelBearCub says:

        All of Scott’s passionate posts, the one’s where he is most engaged at an emotional level, are anti-left and/or anti-government. He does not seem to be able to view those issue with near the amount of dispassionate charity that he saves for people/ideas on the right.

        I think this skews his analysis and his posts. He is a self-admitted contrarian. A working theory is that because he doesn’t emotionally identify as being on the right, he can’t bring his whole self to bear against positions on the right.

        • The Nybbler says:

          What about his anti-Trump pieces?

        • Matt M says:

          HBC,

          I will try to keep this as respectful as possible.

          I feel like your attitude here is emblematic of everything that is wrong with modern political discourse.

          Scott writes a long post clearly and directly encouraging people in battleground states to vote for Hillary. He encourages people elsewhere to vote for whomever they want, Hillary, a third party candidate, a write in, any form of protest except Trump.

          And yet, here you are, insisting that he was secretly helping the Trump campaign all along because, in your view, he didn’t denounce Trump egregiously enough? He entertained the possibility that some people might vote for him for legitimate reasons. He occasionally defended Trump from attacks that were so far exaggerated they lost any basis in reality.

          This is the type of political discourse we should WANT. We should be very very happy that somewhere in the world there are still a small handful of people left who are capable of being honest and even charitable to those they disagree with.

          But you aren’t happy. You’re upset and you are trying to softly shame him for something he didn’t even do. This really really bothers me. If you want to shame or denounce someone, go find an actual Trump supporter and do it to them. Go take your anger out on Milo or Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity. They were the ones doing the thing you are accusing Scott of having done.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            …As a bystander, I disagree with your assessment. It seems to me that HBC is not questioning Scott’s motives, but rather whether Scott’s actions are effective at achieving his stated goals.

          • Matt M says:

            Perhaps getting Hillary elected was not Scott’s #1 goal among all possible goals. Perhaps his #1 goals include things like honest communication with his readers and transparency to his thought process.

            This is my problem with HBC’s attitude. It values Hillary winning above all else. Could Scott have done more to help ensure a Hillary victory? Almost certainly. That doesn’t mean he deserves criticism for taking the high road.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            And yet, here you are, insisting that he was secretly helping the Trump campaign all along because, in your view,

            I object to this line of thinking. I don’t think Scott is “secretly” doing anything, and there isn’t anything, as near as I can tell, in any of my posts that indicate such.

            I do think, that like everyone, Scott has biases and tendencies. Those biases and tendencies have effects. I’d like Scott to be aware of them, sure, but I don’t think Scott pays any attention to me. I think he may have directly responded to <10 of my posts.

            I would more like the commentariat to be aware. I have interaction with the commentariat, so to the extent I can make the commentariat aware of this, the more "true" I can make interactions with the commentariat.

            If I do influence Scott, it would be to spend more time steelmanning the positions of "the left" broadly, and/or ignoring the same kind of rhetoric he easily ignores coming from the right. I'd love for him to write something directed at awful behavior on the right that included 11 paragraphs that start with the word "stop".

          • Deiseach says:

            Okay, can we settle on some definitions of what is Right and what is Left? Because I’m seeing Scott being perceived as both right-wing and left-wing, which has got to mean we’ve got a lot of confusion going on.

            To me, Scott seems fiscally conservative and socially liberal, so I’d peg him as Centre-Left. Libertarianism, depending on how much and what kind he’s inclined to, I don’t have a read on. It seems vaguely right-ish to me, but I’m sure there are left-ish varieties as well.

            I am right wing, but I’d be socially conservative and (more) fiscally liberal than other right-wingers on here. I’d consider myself (not the same as what others might consider me as) Centre-Right.

            So lumping us all into baskets of “right wing = Republican and Republican = Right-wing” and the same for “left-wing = Democrats and Democrats = left-wing” is not the most helpful breakdown. I could see people being Republicans and socially liberal on a lot of the ‘culture war’ issues. I could see people being Democrats and not so liberal. If we can get some kind of semi-agreed definition so we don’t fall into “right-wing = this party always and on every thing” (and the same for the left), then we might make some progress towards understanding what we’re all talking about.

            I think Red Tribe and Blue Tribe helped a lot, but unfortunately it tends to get collapsed back into Red Party and Blue Party, which is not the case. You can have a lot of Red Party ideals and beliefs and a few that you’d agree on with the Blues as well, so you might end up Purple or Grey or “Reared Red Tribe, adopted into Blue” etc.

        • “All of Scott’s passionate posts, the one’s where he is most engaged at an emotional level, are anti-left and/or anti-government. ”

          Clearly an exaggeration. For one counterexample.

          Limit it to political posts and you might have a point.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            I guess I could have added anti-system as well.

          • Moon says:

            Yes, limit it to political posts, and that is true.

            “All of Scott’s passionate political posts, the ones where he is most engaged at an emotional level, are anti-left and/or anti-government. ”

    • Nadja says:

      Disagree, but could very well be wrong. I believe the sort of (potential) Trump voters who would also read SSC are those who are very turned off by anyone criticizing Trump solely or mainly based on Trump’s supposed “open racism”. Scott made no such accusations in his Clinton/Johnson/Stein-if-you-must endorsement article. His criticism is centered around completely different issues, and thus much more palatable and likely to be read with an open mind.

    • IrishDude says:

      1 data point: I planned to vote for Johnson before reading Scott’s posts and voted for Johnson after. Any regulars or lurkers feel comfortable noting that Scott influenced them to vote Trump? Or to vote Hillary?

      • HeelBearCub says:

        Perhaps more to the point, is there anyone here who was prompted to vote against Trump when they had been leaning towards him?

        Because I saw a lot of “well this makes me feel better about voting for Trump” comments on the book review.

        Edit:
        Hell, is there anyone who at any point updated away from Trump at all?

        • FacelessCraven says:

          Is there anyone who updated toward Trump?

          I’d initially planned to vote for Hillary, until Trump hit around 30% in the primary and the republicans and media started trying to take him down. After he won the nomination, I was all in. The only two things that swayed me toward voting Hillary again were Scott’s endorsement posts and the Access Hollywood tape.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Is there anyone who updated toward Trump?

            I gave you an example of that. There were multiple “I feel more comfortable voting for Trump” comments when Scott did his book review.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @HeelBearCub – “I gave you an example of that. There were multiple “I feel more comfortable voting for Trump” comments when Scott did his book review.”

            Those were people who by their own claim were voting for Trump anyway, at least if I parsed the quote right. If we can’t find examples of anyone flipping either direction, what ground is there to assume that his writing had any effect at all?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @FacelesCraven:
            They were worried about voting for Trump, and the book review made them feel better about it. That’s updating towards Trump.

            What would have happened a few months later, that I don’t know.

        • Moon says:

          Andrew, interesting to hear about Trump waverers. I haven’t met any, but I’ll believe your report of your experience there.

          “All of the polling I’ve seen suggests that no hacking was necessary to elect Trump- it’s normal (unfortunate) variation within the margin of error, and the natural outcome of undemocratic institutions like the Electoral College. (That’s just a description of it, not necessarily a criticism- it was designed by the founders to be a partial counter to normal democracy)”

          Electronic voting machine fraud is always undetectable and untraceable. The software is proprietary, so no one can see it. I am not saying I have seen proof that it happened. I am saying that if/when it did happen, there would be no way of proving it or tracing it.

          And I find it hard to believe that the party of lies about WMDs that sent American soldiers and plenty of Iraqis to their deaths for nothing– that that party would be so moral as to pass up the opportunity to commit electronic voting machine fraud. They’ve done every kind of voter suppression imaginable. Why not voting machine fraud also?

          Of course it was within the margin of error expected. Why do you think they needed help from Assange and Comey to smear Hillary constantly right up until the election? It would have looked far too suspicious to take every 3rd vote for Hillary and assign it to Trump. They needed to be in a position where they could take 1 out of every 50 votes for Hillary and assign it to Trump, in order for Trump to win. And say “within the expected margin of error.”

          There can never be any proof that fraud did or didn’t occur in electronic voting machines. With the trade secret law, we are essentially prohibited from ever finding out, whenever fraud occurs. Very convenient for those who control the voting machines.

          So, actually, the incessant smearing of Hillary with lies and conspiracy theories, did probably cause more damage than the voting machine fraud. But it was the combination of them that made Trump the winner. One without the other would have resulted in a Hillary win.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Moon – “Addiction to conflict and anger and your own adrenaline is what Trump voting is all about.”

            On the one hand, there was a certain visceral thrill to it. On the other hand, how many Trump supporters do you know really well?

          • andrewflicker says:

            Moon, I’m one of those “left-wingers” that doesn’t post as much as I would around here because of the chilling effects you frequently point out. I hope mentioning that gives you a little respect for my opinion here:

            All of the polling I’ve seen suggests that no hacking was necessary to elect Trump- it’s normal (unfortunate) variation within the margin of error, and the natural outcome of undemocratic institutions like the Electoral College. (That’s just a description of it, not necessarily a criticism- it was designed by the founders to be a partial counter to normal democracy)

            In addition, on the actual point- I’ve seen plenty of Trump voters that wavered, and I’ve seen a few Trump primary voters that didn’t vote for him in the general.

          • Moon says:

            Faceless, lots of them– at least I know them well enough, and have talked with them often enough, to be certain that addiction to conflict and anger and your own adrenaline is what Trump voting is all about.

            I grew up in a Red state, so some of them are relatives.

            In a sense, there are no red states or blue ones though. Almost all of the time, with a few exceptions, cities are blue and rural areas are red.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            cities are blue and rural areas are red.

            True.

            And not even all the cities. Working class cities based on (one time) manufacturing may be red, depending on how union they were. A bunch of those former union towns flipped in this election, at least that is my understanding.

          • Electronic voting machine fraud is always undetectable and untraceable. The software is proprietary, so no one can see it. I am not saying I have seen proof that it happened. I am saying that if/when it did happen, there would be no way of proving it or tracing it.

            See below.

          • “The software is proprietary, so no one can see it.”

            The fact that the software is proprietary may mean that nobody has a legal right to see it. Nobody has a legal right to see the software that drives World of Warcraft, but there are quite a lot of private servers out there.

            If the software is on thousands of machines, I expect that someone who really wanted to see it could manage.

        • Doctor Mist says:

          Hell, is there anyone who at any point updated away from Trump at all?

          For what it’s worth, I am on record here as having decided to vote for Trump (despite being in a deep blue state where my vote was certain to be irrelevant) because I found the “basket of deplorables” line to be so egregiously toxic.

          But in the end, I did not vote for Trump. I can’t say it was because of Scott’s eleventh-hour posts about the election, because I had already voted by that point.

          For your purposes I am probably not a very useful data point since the meaninglessness of my vote meant I could vacillate freely right up until the last minute. Moreover, the two constant threads in my vacillation were that I was sure Hillary would win and that I was sure that was the worst possible outcome, so “updating away from Trump” might not mean what you meant.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Did you feel better about your vote against Trump after having read Scott’s post?

          • Doctor Mist says:

            Did you feel better about your vote against Trump after having read Scott’s post?

            Well, that’s weird. I was going to say yes, I did somewhat. But I went back to review his post, to reconstruct my reaction to it, and I find that it was way less eleventh-hour than I thought — I did in fact read it before I voted.

            So perhaps it actually did affect my final decision — it’s certainly plausible that Scott’s observations in section IV that “US conservatism is in crisis” might have helped spur my vote for McMullin.

            On the other hand, most of Scott’s post about how high-variance Trump would be struck me, and still strikes me, as distinctly overwrought and hysterical. (Maybe this is how people feel who find the paperclip maximizer ludicrous.) So I could easily imagine my reaction having been “Ah, more of the Deep State making sure Hillary gets elected as we all know she will; frack that.” So if an effect like that is part of what you’re hypothesizing, I guess I can’t rule it out.

    • eh8 says:

      Two scenarios:

      I.

      If Scott’s legitimate criticisms of Vox, Salon, Slate, etc. are read by the journalists working at those media outlets, then Scott could have had an outsized effect on the compassion, integrity, and openness of the left-wing media.

      A commonly stated idea is that the US media exists in a bubble that prevented it from seeing the hopelessness and marginalisation of rural whites, and arguably rural everyone-else too. If Scott helped a few journalists step outside that bubble, he could have had a gigantically pro-Hillary effect on those voters, far offsetting any pro-Trump contrarianism of his actual readership.

      II.

      I once showed a friend who could be loosely described as alt-right Scott’s piece on outgroups. Ever since then, he’s referred to SSC as “that blog by the smart left-wing guy”. The response to Freddie deBoer’s blog was far less positive.

      People who lean left might perceive that Scott stands up for the right a lot. This doesn’t say anything about Scott’s effect on people who lean right. Acknowledging that the left gets a little bit crazy sometimes could be an important first step to convincing the right: someone who is only voting for Trump because they see the left as snooty elitists who care more about pronouns than unemployment might be perfectly okay with single-payer healthcare and funding for schools, and Scott’s writing emphasises concrete results over identity politics.

      So

      I have no idea whether these things actually happened. However, it’s entirely plausible that they did. If it’s possible to construct a plausible narrative for either binary option, just constructing a narrative is pointless.

    • TheBearsHaveArrived says:

      Disagree.

      Several times he argued for Clinton, or anyone but Trump. In several posts.

      He did argue that some of trumps policies could be fine, mostly for Steve Sailorian/secular right reasons.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        He tried several times to argue for clinton.

        I don’t think he actually did.

        He argued against Trump (after having spent previous time defending Trump and writing a rather pointless book review that hold approximately zipola to do with Trump’s campaign).

        • Moon says:

          Scott is a Center Right Wing guy who criticizes the Left a lot. He’s also a psychiatrist though, and Trump was probably a bit too crazy for him, even though he can’t come out and say so due to the Goldwater rule. So he was against Trump. Which is different from being for Hillary.

          Although Trump voters seem to mostly hate Hillary with a passion, they also passionately love Trump. Ardent love or worship for a candidate motivates voters at least as much as dislike of their opponent. So people who both idolized the savior of the working class– that is, Trump, LOL– and also hated Hillary were the ones most likely to vote for Trump, no matter what anyone else said.

          Except for Right Wing media of course, which said 1000X per week that Trump was the savior of the working class and middle class, and Hillary was a child molester, murderer etc. Unless Scott were to tell Trump supporters more than 1000X per week, and unless they trusted Scott more than they trusted their conspiracy theory media, then Scott wouldn’t have a very significant effect. He would only give them one more person to say “Eff You; I’m even more comfortable voting for Trump” to.

          Trump supporters love to say “Eff you” to everyone else except Trump supporters.

          But they would have voted for Trump already. And their vote didn’t have much impact anyway. It’s the electronic voting machine fraud that had the big impact.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Scott isn’t center-right. In that you are mistaken. I kow you won’t accept that, but nonetheless, this is true.

            Left libertarian? Maybe trending that way.

            Left contrarian? Absolutely.

        • TheBearsHaveArrived says:

          There is a difference between the political “defending” that you see media figures do, and the type of defending that you see here and places in similar ilk.

          Is it defending Trump to try and point out that before he thought he could be president, he was closer (in interviews) to a social democrat then a republican on lots of issues?

          There is a difference between trying to find the truth on an issue, and mindlessly defending pubdit style.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Except Scott did NOT try and find the truth out about Trump, in toto, in those earlier posts. He merely defended him against one specific charge of racism (without pointing out his nativism, IIRC, which seems quite uncharitable to my mind), and then reviewed a ghost written book from long ago.

          • Moon says:

            HBC, Scott’s a Right Winger– although he’s Center Right.

            I know that rationalists think people are objective. But in the real world, they rarely are–especially not on this board. Right Wingers are generally quite charitably cherry picking to others in various Right Wing tribes and to GOP nominees– but tend to be more uncharitably nit picking to the likes of Vox, Slate etc. That being said, Scott does have a point about Vox going off the deep end on the subject of identity politics.

            Also, Scott does go to a lot more trouble to attempt to be fair than the vast majority of the Right Wingers on this board. That’s for sure. But it’s less a matter of conscious intention than the direction in which one’s mind naturally tends to go, as a Right Winger.

            Politics is tribal. My tribe good no matter what we do. Your tribe bad no matter what you all do. Even when both tribes do the same thing, this still seems to be the case.

          • Moon says:

            “Is it defending Trump to try and point out that before he thought he could be president, he was closer (in interviews) to a social democrat then a republican on lots of issues?”

            Interesting question. I doubt that Scott intended to defend Trump by pointing that out. But in a way, it is a kind of defense of Trump, to people Left of Center. “Hey, he’s pretty similar to you.”

            The reality is though that Trump has never been close to or far from anyone with any ideology or policies or beliefs. He doesn’t have any of those things. He is purely and simply a self promotion machine designed to be a winner. In an election where he could just say stuff until he came up with words that people responded positively to, all he had to do was do that and keep saying what people liked to hear– regardless of whether he sounded like a Republican or a Democrat.

            You can’t win or do a good job as president though simply by bs’ing people. So his presidency will be controlled by those he surrounds himself with– people who are capable of doing somthing– whether bad or good– besides bs’ing people.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            How are you defining Right Wing, Center Right, and Left Wing?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @moon:

            I know that rationalists think people are objective.

            That is the opposite of what rationalists think.

          • Moon says:

            HBC, okay, I guess I should have said

            I know that rationalists think they themselves, and people who agree with them, are objective.

          • Winter Shaker says:

            I know that rationalists think they themselves, and people who agree with them, are objective.

            A major part of Less Wrong-style rationalism is becoming aware of, and consciously trying to compensate for, the ways you are not objective. Another important part is recognising when people who agree with you are doing so for bad reasons. To the extent that people succeed in doing these sorts of things, they would be less likely to think themselves objective than the average person.

            (Though to the extent that they don’t succeed …)

            Also, hot damn, there’s a ‘notify me of follow-up comments by email’ button now. Thanks, tech people. I hope that’s going to be only for comments in response to one’s own, rather than all comments on the typically-into-four-figures threads that spring up here.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            Hello tech people!

            Winter Shaker wrote:
            Also, hot damn, there’s a ‘notify me of follow-up comments by email’ button now. Thanks, tech people.

            Yes, thanks.

            What has become of the Hide Poster function?

          • Moon says:

            “Another important part is recognizing when people who agree with you are doing so for bad reasons.”

            Have you ever actually seen anyone do this?

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Moon – “Have you ever actually seen anyone do this?”

            All the time. Some of them came pretty close to convincing me to vote Hillary.

          • “Have you ever actually seen anyone do this?”

            Often.

            On the FB climate group I sometimes read, most people on both sides are making bad arguments.

            One of my common public lectures is on market failure, and part of the point of it is to persuade other libertarians that they are making the wrong response to a particular criticism of their position.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      So, with Ann Coulter now linking to Scott’s “Crying Wolf” post, I think we will see more of the effect I am describing (not sure of the magnitude).

      Scott concentrated on the flaws of the left, without mentioning, even blatantly ignoring, the flaws of the right in that post.

      I predict taunting and bad feelings.

  10. burninglights says:

    A comment about the Cry Wolf article . . .

    I think you may not be taking into account how social norms change over time. In the 1820s, an openly White supremacist politician might say, “Look, I love Blacks, but they are inferior and dangerous and should be enslaved. It’ll be good for them!”

    In the 1920s an openly White supremacist politican might say “Look, I love Blacks, but they are still kinda dangerous and should be segregated from Whites. It’ll be good for them!”

    I assume you wouldn’t argue that a) the 1920s pro-segregation candidate really wasn’t all that racist because at least he wasn’t advocating slavery, and b) it’d have been dangerous to call him racist because there may have be an even worse, pro-slavery candidate down the pike.

    Times change, and racism adapts with them. I think it’s unwise to let DT off the hook just because his racist rhetoric and sloganeering isn’t as striking as one’s may have been 100 years ago. We should be holding him to the standard of the day.

    • keranih says:

      We should be holding him to the standard of the day.

      There is not “a” standard of the day. There is a spectrum of standards, held in specific by individuals in discrete situations, which can be averaged out to ‘general’ standards held by groups.

      It is a curious sort of shock, which I think most of us have felt at some point, to realize that one’s own standards (values, priorities, ideals) are not universal.

      • There is not “a” standard of the day. There is a spectrum of standards, held in specific by individuals in discrete situations, which can be averaged out to ‘general’ standards held by groups.

        Fair enough. The ‘general standard’ of today that segregation by race is inappropriate, so we should be using a higher standard than that when evaluating the conduct and proposed policies of our representatives.

        • keranih says:

          I totally agree that we should advocate for the better angels of humanity to take the fore. I don’t agree that I saw DT advocating for race-based segregation.

          I do think I see liberals/progressives suggesting that race should be a factor in hiring and university entrance, that minorities are on average less capable than Caucasians, and that it’s perfectly fine to set up social spaces where people are excluded on the basis of race.

          • shakeddown says:

            …that minorities are on average less capable than Caucasians, and that it’s perfectly fine to set up social spaces where people are excluded on the basis of race.

            Grammar question, because I’m genuinely not sure: Do you mean that some liberals/progressives say that, or that you think that? If the first, I agree that some liberals say the second, but not the first.

          • keranih says:

            @ shakedown –

            All three of those things are things I have seen liberal/progressive people say/embody.

            Depending on the situation, I might be persuaded that each might be acceptable for various reasons, or as a side effect of a larger goal. But as a whole, I think that each stance is more harmful than helpful.

    • ThirteenthLetter says:

      This is an unfalsifiable argument, though, because one can keep coming up with “here’s the modern version of racism” as the old one cycles out. 1860, it’s enslavement. 1890, it’s the KKK. 1940, it’s segregation. 1980, redlining. 2016, it’s (according to the more prominent theoreticians on the topic) things like… implicit bias and microaggressions, which are so subtle that even the people who supposedly hold those racist views don’t know they hold those views? Once you’ve reached this far, is it not a kind of Racism of the Gaps? When can we decide that a qualitative change of some sort has taken place?

      I think it’s unwise to let DT off the hook just because his racist rhetoric and sloganeering isn’t as striking as one’s may have been 100 years ago. We should be holding him to the standard of the day.

      Absolutely agreed. If we shouldn’t hold people from the past to the standards of 2016 — and absolutely no person of good faith would think we should — then we shouldn’t hold Donald Trump to the standards of 1940. That being said, as Keranih pointed out you will find serious disagreement on what the standards of 2016 are, or should be.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        The thing being, as Scott points out in his piece, there is near universal agreement that Trump isn’t living up to the standards of 2016. So no matter how fuzzy they line may be, Trump is pretty clearly over it.

        But honestly, the whole thing strikes me as arguing over the definition of racism.

        “Mexicans are great, but most of the Mexicans here in America are awful and need to leave” is something bad, whether or not you want to put that under the definition of racism. Of course, thinking the foreigners that are here and have not yet assimilated are awful is pretty standard fare.

        • The thing being, as Scott points out in his piece, there is near universal agreement that Trump isn’t living up to the standards of 2016. So no matter how fuzzy they line may be, Trump is pretty clearly over it.

          Exactly. And in real time it is very hard to fully understand how events will be interpreted by future gens or to place current events into a historical context.

          My (I’d like to say ‘educated’) guess is that Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan, combined with his promises to ban/remove immigrants, among other hijinx, will be seen quite clearly by future generations as the acts of a modern White supremacist. Am I wrong? Maybe. We’ll have to wait and see.

          Trump isn’t proposing segregation, and that is good, but that’s a pretty low bar that, fortunately, past generations have helped to raise. If we want to continue to raise that bar we have to be willing to call out or representatives in real time, which means doing so before we understand the full context of their actions in history. If we wait for historians to tell us whether our leaders were bad, it’ll be too late.

          • The Nybbler says:

            History, despite common claims otherwise, does not have a set direction. Certainly if things keep moving in the social-justicey direction, future generations will see the Presidents (Reagan was the first) who used “Make America Great Again” as being white supremacists.

            On the other hand, it’s perfectly possible things move a different direction, and Trump is seen not as a white nationalist, but as a reformer who ensured the integrity of the United States in a world where the other developed countries are overrun by hostile immigrants.

            Both of these futures are rather dystopian to my mind.

            If we want to continue to raise that bar

            Yeah. That’s a big “if”. And begs the question over what is being done is really “raising” the bar.

          • Murphy says:

            I think The Nybbler isn’t accounting for how weird the future can look or how dry things in the distant past can look.

            Do we bother with terms like “racist” for Egyptian pharaoh’s slaughtering civilians in captured towns of foreign nations? So long enough in the future everyone will look so terrible that they won’t consider Trump very special.

            Nearer term it could go off in other weird directions. Human survivors might remember him for something weird like some off the cuff remark on nanotech that has an unusually large effect on history or american society as a whole might become dramatically more isolationist in which case his positions on border controls might be viewed by the common person on the street as overly weak and ineffectual.

        • ““Mexicans are great, but most of the Mexicans here in America are awful and need to leave””

          I don’t think Trump said that, or even implied it. His complaints were about illegal immigrants.

          The hispanic population of the U.S. is about 57 million. The current estimate for the number of illegal immigrants is about 11 million. Not all the illegal immigrants are Hispanic.

          I’m using Hispanic rather than Mexican because that’s what I’m seeing data on. My guess is that the point would be even stronger for Americans of Mexican ancestry vs Mexican illegal immigrants.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            This is belied by his reasoning for wanting Curiel removed from his case.

            Trump played the nativist demagogue from the jump. People should be willing to acknowledge that.

          • How does wanting a Mexican judge removed from a case in which you are the defendant because you think he is likely to be prejudiced against you imply that most Mexicans here are terrible and ought to leave?

            At the point when he made the argument, large parts of the media had been accusing him of being hostile to Hispanics and predicting that Hispanics would vote against him for that reason. So the belief that a Hispanic judge would be prejudiced against him was not unreasonable.

            Insofar as it implies any group prejudice, it’s against judges–the belief that they are likely to be swayed by prejudice.

            Is there something more specific in his reasoning that implies that he thinks most Mexicans in America are terrible?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @David Friedman:
            Trump’s espoused logic was that the mere fact of Curial being of Mexican descent should be presumed to bias Curial against him.

            If we are to take his argument as valid, we must accept that Trump believes he has done something that should be presumed to bias all those of Mexican descent against him.

            Trump thinks he offended all those of Mexican descent.

          • Aapje says:

            Or he thinks that he was character assassinated as hating Mexicans by Democrats & suspected Curiel of being a Democrat due to him being nominated by Obama.

            It is a logical error to think that another person cannot have a belief that other people have a false belief.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Aapje:
            You have to disbelieve Trump’s own explaination if this is true.

            He thinks Curiel is biased against him. And he thinks it’s because he wants to build a wall between the US and Mexico and also because Curiel is proud of his Mexican heritage. He says that he is “pro-Mexico”.

            Trump is always happy to talk about how unfair the media is, but he doesn’t do so in this case.

          • Aapje says:

            @HBC

            His statement is perfectly compatible with my possible explanation, if one allows for the possibility that Trump didn’t describe each step in his thought process. IMO, a great many people reason from A -> B -> C -> D and then shorten that to A -> D when talking to people:

            A: I argued for the wall
            B: The media has convinced left-leaning people that I hate Mexicans for doing A
            C: Curiel seems a left-leaning person and/or he has shown he hates me already by not ruling in my favor

            D: Curiel hates me

            I also want to argue again that Trump has strong reasons to specifically dislike Curiel, who he feels should have dismissed the lawsuits. Many humans rationalize their grievances by assuming bad faith on the part of the person they feel has wronged them. We know from Trump’s campaigning that he is especially vindictive.

            So I believe that Trump’s statements can be explained without assuming racist beliefs about all Mexicans, but merely by assuming that Trump is rather vindictive, rather poor at expressing himself and not very politically correct. Do you believe that Trump has these 3 ‘features?’

        • Paul Brinkley says:

          The trouble I see with “Trump’s clearly not living up to 2016 standards” is that it sounds like the motte to the bailey’s “Trump thinks blacks and Mexicans are non-people”. As in: the latter argument doesn’t hold up, and sure, Trump’s not up to 2016… but then, neither is Clinton.

          And so we end up right back at (where I think is) the status quo – two bad candidates.

          This doesn’t mean HBC has no complaint against Scott’s posting choices, but it does mean that I’m having a hard time seeing it if it exists.

          • burninglights says:

            sure, Trump’s not up to 2016… but then, neither is Clinton.

            And so we end up right back at (where I think is) the status quo – two bad candidates.

            Agreed. Two bad candidates. So what? If I criticized Stalin, you wouldn’t say, “Well, Lennin was bad too. So here we are, back to the status quo.”

            It is responsible to dissect why each candidate was bad, because they were bad in different ways. Also, Trump won, so obviously he’s the one who deserves greater consideration.

  11. hellandahandbasket says:

    To this blog’s post author/owner: “You Are Still Crying Wolf” Posted on November 16, 2016 by Scott Alexander
    I would like to leave a comment – as you know, you left no avenue within the above referenced post – since I am unaware of no other place to politely respond to you, I have chosen this area.

    Throughout this current Presidential election cycle – credulously continuing as if we hadn’t noticed what was done for the past 18-months – the world & most importantly, the USofA, have witnessed 1st-hand, the mainstream-media’s unrelenting push of propaganda, pure hatred, unmitigated distortions and lies toward one man, in order to discredit him; thereby blatantly campaigning for, and attempting to throw an election “win” toward the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.

    The well-written post referenced above, gave the reading public concise information, backed with neatly-compiled evidence, of the unsubstantiated and outright lies cast upon (then candidate) President-Elect Donald J. Trump.

    However, the post’s author thought it more wise to withhold truthful information.

    I can come to no other conclusion for this suppression of evidence, than the post’s author experiencing nothing other than fear of what the Liberal/Feminist-Cult members (or his Mother), would think of him…?

    Not only is this “failure to post” of the same degenerative thinking we’ve witnessed via the mainstream media, this is of a much higher ranking of degeneracy; in that the author purposefully withheld accurately researched information which would have had a positive impact; helped to exonerate an opposing candidate’s barrage of hatred thrown at him, and if viewership was of any substance, may have helped others to see truth {gasp!} before deciding where to put the “X” on Nov08.

    I can only conclude, you are admitting (and admitting it full-frontal for that matter), your fear of retaliation, fear of labeling, fear of skullduggery from what I assume to be, the very party you support (your post admitted you were not a Trump supporter, you could very well be a Libertarian, but for the sake of argument, we’ll go with Democrat).

    We (speaking as a supporter of Mr. Trump’s) have withstood such heinous acts from the Liberal/Feminist-Cult, of which I never thought Americans would cast against each other, in the name of “Democracy” – all based on LIES and PROPAGANDA (waged courtesy of the Clinton War Machine), against one man AND egregiously, against ALL of his supporters, whose only crime has been to tell American Citizens his desire to “Make America Great Again”.

    We have endured riots, beatings, threats against life, personal property damage (Molotov cocktail thrown into a RNC location, supporter homes defaced etc), public shaming, ridicule, loss of employment, etcetera etcetera etcetera to the point of projectile-vomiting hatred and disdain for Mr. Trump and his supporters, from what these Cult-Followers have been told was “TRUTH”.
    Then, you found “TRUTH” and didn’t tell anyone {sigh}.

    It’s all been a lie, and you held secret, a tool which would help to thwart the lie.
    You had thoughtfully and painstakingly, put together a very useful tool to use against the lie, but did nothing …because you feared the very party you support. Again …you feared your own party.
    If you take-away nothing else from my comment, it would be in your best interest to think about that last statement for a little longer than normal. You feared the very party you support.

    Is party affiliation and disdain for “the other side” so strong, that we will knowingly avoid truth just to “WIN”? Is fairness in reporting ALL elements, off-the-table when it comes to electing someone into the highest position in America? Are we such a dead society, that we will do anything to win, even if it means the destruction of ourselves to get that win? Eating oneself alive is really not the way to go!

    Superman had it right: “To Fight for Truth, Justice, and the American Way”. A damn fictional character had more credibility than we’ve wrongly convinced ourselves of which a delusional portion of our nation must have – they do not. (Side note: the Liberal/Feminist-Cult has managed to twist that fictional character’s sentiment into a politically-correct version by omitting “American Way”. Oh the humanity to believe an American character should represent “America”.)

    We have lost our way, and if we follow blindly alongside this warped ideology festering in America because we fail to tell the damn truth – what is to become of us? Well, we can see what is to become of us …the self-righteous Liberal/Feminist-Cult members are rioting across the land right now –
    – isn’t Marxism great…?

    I hope you are able to find and read my comment, and will think it best to NOT remove it.
    Opinions are like a-holes yes (we all have one), and these free society American opinions are THE one and only important opposition in the fight against tyranny.

    We will not always agree politically, but when we STOP conversation, when we STOP truth telling, just so “our team can win”, we don’t bother to notice what’s at the doorstep waiting to waltz right in.

    When we fail to notice what’s waiting in the wings because we’ve stopped communicating in truth, we can do nothing to block that tyrannical entrance, but instead – I guarantee, we will swing the door wide open and guide tyranny into America
    then, there’s no turning back.

    Thank you for your time.

    • Deiseach says:

      This comment would have been vastly improved by using TRVTH instead of TRUTH everywhere the latter was used.

      Gentlepersons of all persuasions, I believe we have been graced with the Bizarro version of Moon, though lacking her tastefulness, restraint and good humour. And if this is how some of us sound to her, I apologise to the lunar-named one.

      • The original Mr. X says:

        This comment would have been vastly improved by using TRVTH instead of TRUTH everywhere the latter was used.

        I think it would have been improved by using V instead of U everywhere. If consonantal “v” was good enough for the Romans, it ought to be good enough for us. :p

      • carvenvisage says:

        @deiseach wow I guess you really are a liberal.

        The post seemed sincere enough. Certainly some work went into it. Why not give its author the benefit of the doubt?

        • Deiseach says:

          Why not give its author the benefit of the doubt?

          Side note: the Liberal/Feminist-Cult has managed to twist that fictional character’s sentiment into a politically-correct version by omitting “American Way”.

          carvenvisage, because the last person I interacted with who spoke of Liberal/Feminist Cults and Feminazis turned out to be an intactivist loon.

      • Moon says:

        Thanks, Deisach. So nice of you to insult me, on a thread in which I was not even a participant.

        No wonder almost all Left of Center people leave this board.

        • Deiseach says:

          Moon, I was not insulting you. I really did mean that if I and others came across to you as that post came across to me, no wonder you think we are all frothing at the mouth Falangists, and I sincerely did mean an apology.

          You tend to be a tiny bit thin-skinned at times, but this may merely be that you are more sensitive and empathetic than I am, so where I see nothing but unvarnished statement, you see inchoate implication.

          Proof that I am an unempathetic, cold-hearted bitch: scored 6 out of 80 on this. Go me! 🙂

    • psmith says:

      Reads like the right-wing version of John Sidles.

    • Urstoff says:

      lizardpeople, amirite

    • Dabbler says:

      Since a lot of people seem to be opposed to this post, speaking out in defense of it. We don’t know what Scott Alexander’s motives were, but in particular I would like to point out that fear is a reasonable possibility.

      • “but in particular I would like to point out that fear is a reasonable possibility.”

        Not given the things he has been unafraid to say over the past several years.

        • Dabbler says:

          I distinctly remember Scott Alexander trying to get rid of some of the more radical reactionaries citing fears of his blog being stigmatized.

          Scott Alexander has more courage to speak out than most, but he has limits.

        • Jiro says:

          Fear is a reasonable possibility, but on the other hand, I’m entitled to take him at his word. If he says that one of the reasons he didn’t post it before the election was that he didn’t want people to read truthful information and then vote for Trump, I believe him. If he had fear as a second reason, fine, but I still get to criticise the first one.

          And I made the same criticism before, and a lot more coherently than, hellandahandbasket.

    • “I can come to no other conclusion for this suppression of evidence, than the post’s author experiencing nothing other than fear of what the Liberal/Feminist-Cult members (or his Mother), would think of him…? ”

      You reject the obvious alternative–that he thought Trump would do a bad job as president, an opinion shared by about half the population?

      The only reason I can see for you to reject it is that you think it is so obvious that Trump will be better than Hillary that you cannot imagine an intelligent person disagreeing with that view, hence the only reason to say he disagrees with it is fear. That is rather like the attitude of the other side with candidates reversed, and in both cases implausible.

      It’s especially implausible in this case, given that Scott has quite often posted things likely to offend the left.

    • Nadja says:

      Unless I’ve missed something, in which case, please let me know, I don’t believe Scott had this article all researched and finished before the elections were over. The way, I imagine, that Scott works is that he has a 1000 ideas for a 1000 articles at any given time. All these potential articles would presumably contribute to furthering the truth in one area or another. I really can’t see how anyone can blame him for not writing this particular article earlier. That would have had to happen at the expense of other good things Scott has undoubtedly been up to. So, if he had to choose between writing a truth-furthering article that might result in something he thought would be bad versus writing a different truth-furthering article (or holding a different truth-furthering conversation within his social circle) that he didn’t think would result in anything bad, then how can we blame him for choosing the latter?

      Anyway, I have nothing but admiration and awe for Scott’s intellectual honesty here. Scott clearly despises Trump, but thinks that some of the mainstream accusations against Trump are either untrue or greatly exaggerated. So he comes out and says it. Imagine our political discourse in general were this honest.

    • John Schilling says:

      I can come to no other conclusion for this suppression of evidence, than the post’s author experiencing nothing other than fear of what the Liberal/Feminist-Cult members (or his Mother), would think of him…?

      Not being a regular here, you may have missed the part where our host argued explicitly and effectively that President Donald Trump would be substantially more likely to start a nuclear war than would President Hillary Clinton. I’m not sure I agree with that assessment, and did give him a bit of pushback, but it’s hardly a unique view and Scott seems to come by it sincerely.

      Given the competing hypotheses “Scott is afraid of what his mommy will say” and “Scott is afraid an incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue with no idea how to run a country might decide to play a game of Global Thermonuclear War”, it might be charitable to run with the second.

      And, for the record, anyone who thinks the poorly-timed publication of one of their essays might in even a small way increase the risk of a nuclear apocalypse, has my support and understanding if they decide to hold off for a week or two.

    • Murphy says:

      None of what Scott posted was secret info.

      Why didn’t you write it? You could have pulled together everything he did.

      If I see someone I don’t want to be president being verbally attacked for things I don’t believe are true but I have no special or secret information then I have no duty, moral or otherwise to defend him. I am not obliged to do work to support a candidate I think is shit even if i think some of the things they’re being attacked for are unfair. I am not and cannot be obliged to aid a candidate I oppose on their campaign trail.

      Scott is not your slave. Scott has no duty to support a candidate he thinks is shit.

      I’m sure there’s been some shit said about Hillary that was not supported by evidence if you search, was it your duty to track it down and refute it and publish that before the election even if you think Hillary would have been a shitty president?

  12. Matt M says:

    Thought: Post-election, many on the left are behaving somewhat shamefully – violently protesting, denouncing large swaths of the public at large, refusing to accept the results as legitimate, etc.

    The response by many who are either on the right, sympathetic to the right, or wish the left would at least adopt a different strategy seems to be something like: “Go ahead, keep behaving this way, see how that works out for you, you’ll lose even harder next time!”

    I don’t think this is true – or even a logical conclusion to hold given recent events. I don’t think elections are decided based on the behavior of partisan groups – or the behavior of high-level politicians within either party. Trump didn’t win because of anything organized Republicans did from 2008 – 2016. IMO, he won simply because, in a few large states, the economic recovery Obama promised never materialized, so they voted for the other party instead.

    Trump has also promised these people significant economic improvements. Based on his stated policies, I do not expect him to deliver improvement either. Therefore, I consider it extremely likely that in either 2020 or 2024, Democrats will regain the Presidency (and will probably regain the legislature even sooner), completely and totally regardless of how either side behaves.

    I’m not sure it’s helpful to make predictions like “go ahead and keep rioting that just guarantees you will lose” when there’s a good possibility they WON’T lose. Because then if they riot, and everyone told them rioting guarantees political losses, but they make political gains instead, the message that will be received is “rioting works! let’s do more of it!” (I think this is similar to how the left believes that openly pandering to racism was the official GOP strategy and is responsible for Trump’s victory and therefore likely to get worse)

    • FacelessCraven says:

      @Matt M – “I don’t think this is true – or even a logical conclusion to hold given recent events. I don’t think elections are decided based on the behavior of partisan groups – or the behavior of high-level politicians within either party.”

      People observe that Trump was a lot worse than previous Republican candidates, and has in fact done better than previous Republican candidates. There’s a number of conclusions one can draw from that. One of them is that Social Justice’s attempts to enforce their views via labeling and social pressure has led to labels and social pressure being devalued, possibly to the point of actually losing them votes they otherwise would have.

      I would agree that the connection is not obvious and may not exist at all. On the other hand, it’s my best guess as to what’s going on. I’d agree that it doesn’t guarantee victory, and it’s entirely possible that the left will win the next election despite or even because of their behavior. On the other hand, I don’t see what can be done about this. If they respond to losing by rioting, and they respond to winning by rioting, I think we’re probably going to just have to get used to dealing with rioting.

      • Matt M says:

        My general point is that it seems like a bad idea to strongly insist that rioting won’t help them achieve their desired ends when we don’t at all know that conclusively.

        If you think it’s reasonably likely that a Democrat will win in 2020 or even 2024, regardless of whether a bunch of hipsters burn Portland down or not, it seems very irresponsible to me to loudly declare “rioting will cause you to lose” because in the event they DON’T lose, they will turn right around and say “no, rioting caused us to win” which is probably a sub-optimal outcome.

        It’s fine to discourage rioting for practical or moral reasons, but tying it to a predicted outcome that is incredibly uncertain just seems like a very bad way to go about this…

    • carvenvisage says:

      You don’t think trump was a protest vote for a lot of people?

      (Or is that nor implied?)

      • Matt M says:

        Honestly – no, not really. Or at least, not in a significant enough way to matter.

        The narrative that Trump represents an overall cultural backlash against political correctness is nice, and I’d LIKE it to be true – because I’m sympathetic to that end. But I just don’t see it in the voting patterns.

        Political correctness is a problem that manifests itself mainly in blue-tribe environments. In California. In universities. At high level white collar employment environments. If Trump is supposed to be a counter to that – I would expect him to outperform in places and demographics like that. But he didn’t – he did even worse in those places.

        I’m not convinced the rural rust belt voters were making a statement against political correctness. In the spirit of Occam’s Razor, the simplest explanation is probably the right one – or to directly quote James Carville, “It’s the economy, stupid” The places that carried the victory for Trump are almost exclusively places that were hurting in 2008, abandoned Republicans to give the Democrats a chance, nothing got any better for them (despite things getting better in many other parts of the country), so now they’re abandoning the Democrats and giving the Republicans a chance. And either 4 or 8 years from now, when things STILL don’t get any better, it’s back to the Democrats they go, political correctness or no.

        • carvenvisage says:

          Do you listen to the radio or watch mainstream news?

          At my last job, (dishwashing btw), the mainstream and national-official radio stations we’d listen to spoke about feminism and progress like stereotypical christian missionaries speak about the good news. And listening to that radio was the only hard part of the job, but god was it hard.

          And I’m hardly a typical poor rural right winger, -atheist, and I have good prospects in the long term. If I was someone who’d been working in a factory for the last 40 years, allowing myself to slowly be closed in on for the last 10 years in the name of progress by people who clearly have no sympathy for what monotonous hard work year on year requires of and does to a person, just contempt that some such people would resort to crude humour, or, god forbid, outright actual crudeness, (-well, the white ones anyway), I would be pretty fucking enraged about now.

          -Having finally realised that this so called movement for progress is just one more grasping cult that wants to intimidate heretics and bask in the glow of its own self righteousness just for the self indulgence of it all.

          I mean, I really have only the slightest sample of an idea of how much that would piss me off in that scenario-

          I’m sympathetic to a lot of these hypersensitive left wing ideas, -microaggressions, trigger warnings, even reparations actually, and I’m young with good long term prospects. And, I have no children to make me beholden to the future and thus obligated to stand against dangerous cults in a way others aren’t.

          How is a died in the wool traditionalist/red father to feel when they realise they’ve been duped and their children/country are in danger (structural, long term, but that’s even worse, you won’t be there to protect them)? That the contempt and palpable superiority they’ve been ignoring for years is neither a fad nor anything like a genuinely more elevated alternative, just a bunch of recreational intellectual thugs trading on MLK and white guilt, (how fucking generous is -or rather was, white guilt? People sorry for things other people’s grandfathers did, ready to jump as soon as somebody said boo) -and beyond squandering them. -At institutions your limited tax dollars are directly funding.

          -That somehow the left have conspired to vindicate the most paranoid and malicious right wingers of the past? I’d just about lose my mind.

          And surely a lot of people have seen or heard about some of the mass contortions against people who made some minor doctrinal error or spoke against something vaguely left wing or didn’t want to bake someone a cake.

          -Things like Brendan eich’s ousting are not central cases of, but they are technically, and in fact, terrorism. -A movement is showing that they can hurt you for believing or having believed, the things that you, (or at least some decent people in your family), believe, and seemingly they are doing it just because they can, just because they won.

          You’re told that black lives matter, as if you’re 1. a fucking retard, and 2. your life is a paradise that clearly matters to policymakers employers etc. The universities you perhaps held in superstitious awe, or at least respect (if only for your kids sake, -then still), turn out not to be bastions of learning, but of (recreational) parasitic movement building.

          I don’t think it is the simplest explanation that something like a weak economy, or even losing your job, or even losing all prospect of a job, would push someone to vote for trump. It’s not just a switch to the other party, it’s much more than that, more like a switch to the most insulting candidate to the political establishment, and moreso to left wingers, and to a candidate who is on the face of it quite dangerous.

          -And ‘not being racist’ is a value take seriously, or used to, in america, at least nominally -and people will have heard of many of the things trump has been accused of, and has said with his own mouth, so I think a bigger effect is needed to explain people flocking to him.

           

          Actually just here is a link to a very highly rated ‘thedonald’ post on reddit: maybe not representative of the rural rust belt voters, but certainly of some trump supporters, and very much matches my perception that the gradual progressive boiling-lobster-pot ratchet has really, well, ratcheted up (and imo accelerated in doing so) a lot over the last ten years or so (highly recommended reading):

          https://web.archive.org/web/20161111071559/https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5c5ctg/they_just_dont_fucking_get_it/

          Imo it’s a very strong argument in favour of trump. If you poke a bear with a stick long enough it’s liable to rip your head off.

          And it’s not a bad idea either. There’s no other good way to get an asshole with a stick to stop prodding. Maybe ripping the head off isn’t a good idea either, but what does it matter at this stage?

           

          Is the economy so much worse now than in past elections that it’s a good/sufficient explanation?

        • dndnrsn says:

          @Matt M:

          For people who disliked both leaders, they went for Trump more than they went for Clinton, 49 to 29 percent. People who said neither were qualified went for Trump 69 to 15 percent. Those who thought neither candidate had the right temperament went for Trump 71 to 12 percent.

          Those dissatisfied or angry about the federal government went for Trump 58 to 36 percent. Those who thought the economy is in poor condition versus good went for Trump 63 to 31 percent. Those who thought the country is headed in the wrong direction went for Trump 69 to 25 percent. Those who thought life for the next generation of Americans will be worse went for Trump 63 to 31 percent. (Source)

          Maybe he wasn’t a protest vote against political correctness, but he certainly was a protest vote of some sort to some people who voted for him. I think the most significant evidence for this is that people who disliked both and thought neither was qualified went for Trump over Clinton by a significant margin. Disliking someone and thinking they’re unqualified and still voting for them screams “protest vote”.

          • Moon says:

            “For people who disliked both leaders, they went for Trump more than they went for Clinton, 49 to 29 percent. People who said neither were qualified went for Trump 69 to 15 percent. Those who thought neither candidate had the right temperament went for Trump 71 to 12 percent.”

            I definitely see this as a protest vote, as you do.

            All of this is also a testament to the power of fake news. Anyone consuming real news could not have believed that Clinton was unqualified. She had qualifications out the wazoo, while DT had none. Those who thought Clinton’s temperament was as bad as Trump’s must also have been consuming fake news.

          • Aapje says:

            Being considered qualified can be a negative, if people think that your goals are opposed to theirs.

            If you think that one person has a policy that will cost you your job and is good at implementing their policy, while another person has a policy that keeps you your job, but he is poor at implementing his policy, who would you vote for?

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Moon:

            I don’t know if it’s about fake news. I think it’s more likely that people will say someone they don’t like is unqualified for the same reason they’ll say someone they don’t like is stupid. A lot of people find it hard to attribute any positives to someone they view negatively.

            @Aapje:

            Well, this is how I felt with regard to Clinton’s foreign policy. I still think that she would have been a considerably better choice than Trump, and were I an American voter I would have voted for Clinton. But “foreign policy experience” was, to me, a poor sell – as far as I’m concerned, American foreign policy 2009-2016 has been as bad as American foreign policy 2001-2008. Some major screwups have happened on her watch.

            Most people, though, are not going to say “she has experience and is clearly very intelligent and knows her stuff, but I think that her tenure as Secretary of State has been marked by some very bad decisions and a worrying combination of hawkishness and half-measures”, and that wasn’t an option on the CNN poll.

    • Matt M says:

      I feel like you’re all distracting from my greater point. Even if I concede Trump was a “protest vote” for many people the following still holds true:

      1. It’s very likely that the Democrats will win another election in one of the next two cycles

      2. It’s very likely that whether they do or not has VERY little to do with how ill-behaved far left students are

      People have advanced like 50 different plausible explanations for Trump’s success. “People voted for him because they’re upset at entitled liberal brats” is but one of many. I see no overwhelming evidence that it’s the primary reason, or that it will hold as a reason indefinitely into the future.

      Therefore, it’s a bad idea to promise the left that their bad behavior will lead to electoral failure – because if they continue to behave badly and achieve electoral success – you will lose all credibility and they will be incentivized to continue said bad behavior.

      • FacelessCraven says:

        I agree with everything you’ve written here. I see no reason to be highly confident that Republicans will win the 2020 election, regardless of how crazy the Blue Tribe partisans get.

        My question is, why do you think the right has any control over the left’s behavior at all?

        “Therefore, it’s a bad idea to promise the left that their bad behavior will lead to electoral failure – because if they continue to behave badly and achieve electoral success – you will lose all credibility and they will be incentivized to continue said bad behavior.”

        …What evidence do you have that the right has any credibility to lose? Even before Trump, did they have any credibility? Are you confident that the right is the side actually incentivising bad behavior in the first place? If not, why can’t whatever is incentivising this behavior just keep right on incentivising it indefinitely? You’re talking like there’s some sort of engagement here, some connection or shared understanding between the two. It is not obvious to me that such a connection actually exists.

        • Matt M says:

          This is a fair point.

          I guess the analogy I would make is to a literal spoiled child. Telling the child to behave properly because virtue is its own reward is unlikely to work well. The child doesn’t really care about your own opinions regarding virtue and will mostly just do whatever they want.

          But if you DO threaten the child with punishment, you better be able to deliver on that punishment. If the mother says, “Bad behavior means that your father is going to spank you when he gets home!” and then father comes home and no spanking – that almost certainly does, in fact, encourage more bad behavior. The parent is better off making no threat at all than threatening punishment that they cannot deliver.

          The left doesn’t “listen” to the right in the sense that they agree to do what they’re told – but they do listen in the sense that they are vaguely aware that the right is telling them that continued protests and denounciations of regular Trump voters will lead to electoral defeats. But we have little control over that outcome. So it would probably be better to make no threat at all. I’m not sure what the best way is to discourage protests and encourage civility, but it’s probably something like referring to people they respect (Obama, Hillary, Colbert, whoever) rather than saying “lol yeah keep it up you’ll just lose more” which is adversarial in nature and just makes them want to prove you wrong.

  13. Luke the CIA Stooge says:

    Related to “your still crying wolf”
    It seems to me the very act of calling someone or their ideas “racist” is fundamentally intellectually dishonest and should be avoided.

    Once you call someone or their ideas racist you have ruined the discourse just as surely as if you had start insulting them and arguing that you could kick their ass.

    This community and movement (the rationalist movement) was built around the quest for truth and honest discourse, but as soon as accusations of racism are thrown the question in discussion is no longer “is this idea true?” it becomes “is this idea racist?”. The accusation of racism does nothing to enlighten us about the truth value of a statement but instead is a device used to discredit ideas without concern for it truth value. the statement “jews have weak stomachs”, despite being “racist” is about as factually correct as a four word statement can be: their are numerous stomach ailments which are especially present in various Jewish groups, notably crohn’s disease.

    Additionally there are numerous Anti-racist “facts” which get privileged in such discussions despite their clear a pressing falsehood or unprovability because arguments against them get bogged down in discussions of whether or not the person or ideas questioning them are racist.

    I think at this point a strong case can be made that accusations of “racism” are used as cheat codes for discourse to avoid intellectual discussions, to avoid the need to charitably engage with ideas you disagree with, and to discredit ideas and people you don’t like.
    I can’t count the number of thoughtful reflective people i know who as soon as Trump or other alleged racists are brought up shut down there critical faculty, stop charitably analyzing ideas and just start engaging in ad-hominems.

    Even if trump actually was an Openly white supremicist candidate, that tells us nothing about the accuracy of his ideas. The accusations of racism from the media told Americans nothing about trumps policies, ideas, or their implications but told us everything about their hysterical need to discredit him and avoid seriously engaging with his ideas.

    If the anti-racism left was sent back to 1920s Germany, i doubt any part of history would change as according to them they are surrounded by racist argument today and are helpless to argue against them.

    • Urstoff says:

      It’s definitely overused, but if one actually is racist, that seems like a bad thing to me. My own definition of racism is considering those of other races as having lesser moral value, which often comes hand in hand with a willingness to believe the worst of other races regardless of evidence (and ignoring the basic concept of statistical distribution). Calling someone a racist, even if they are by this definition, is an ad hominem when it comes to particular arguments, but I would prefer that our political leaders consider all lives to be of equal moral worth.

      • Aapje says:

        My own definition of racism is considering those of other races as having lesser moral value

        Most accusations seem to use a much less strict definition, which often boils down to: what you said is outside of the Overton Window, so it is not allowed to be true.

  14. BBA says:

    November 19 is International Men’s Day, a “holiday” apparently created for the sole purpose of getting anti-feminists to stop whining about International Women’s Day.

    In what is almost certainly a complete coincidence, November 19 is also World Toilet Day.

    (Speaking honestly: these are both legitimate and are meant to address genuinely important issues, but I need to have something to harmlessly snark about.)

    • DrBeat says:

      Would you consider it “harmless snark” to talk about how International Women’s Day proves that caring about women is stupid and terrible? Or would that make you upset and demand concessions from someone who said that?

      • Fossegrimen says:

        The human race needs to be allowed to snark about something, and if white cisgender male Scandinavians is all there is left, then by all means go ahead.

        The problem is not the snarking about us, the problem is that more and more potential snarks is getting out of bounds.

        • DrBeat says:

          When it comes to men, “snarking” is often hand in hand with “absolute and comprehensive callousness to pain, contempt for the idea they could ever have problems in need of addressing, a limitless desire to punish them for the crime of being able to be punished, and constant commitment to reinforcing and empowering sexism because it causes harm to them.”

          If you are okay with snarking about Women’s Day, fine, there’s no problem. If you think it’s okay to snark Men’s Day but not Women’s Day because men don’t really have real problems and don’t really deserve consideration but women are imperiled and in constant need of defense even against symbolic harms, you are every single thing you claim to be fighting against, and you need to stop.

          Almost every single person I have ever met, or seen, or seen evidence of, that believes it is “harmless snark” when aimed at men also believes it is horrifying, perilous, bigoted, and harmful when aimed at women. Those people are sexist, and are why sexism will never get better, ever, and life will never be worth tolerating, ever.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @DrBeat – “Those people are sexist, and are why sexism will never get better, ever, and life will never be worth tolerating, ever.”

            The world is not that bad a place.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @FacelessCraven

            The world is that bad a place as long as those people are in power. And they are, at least in the parts of the world I know how to live in. I’m too old to retrain as a tradesperson.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @TheNybbler – How bad is it day-to-day for you?I’ve found operating in crypto-mode is somewhat stressful, but survivable. It helps that I have trusted friends to vent to, and having a clear understanding of how Social Justice works makes it relatively easy to avoid being stepped on, but for me it’s only been a relatively short-term deal, and appears to be mostly over at the moment.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @FacelessCraven

            I got stepped on, “bigly” as Trump would say. I can’t go into details publicly however.

          • As some evidence that even the academic world is not as oppressive as many seem to assume …

            For the past 21 years I have taught at a university with two ideologies–Catholicism (it’s a Jesuit school) and soft leftism. That I fit neither was obvious when they hired me, and has never been a problem since.

            A few years back, the school had a week devoted to sustainability and asked professors if they would like to give a talk on the subject. I emailed them back, asking if they had any objection to my giving a talk against sustainability. They didn’t. I gave it.

            If anyone is curious, it’s webbed.

          • neciampater says:

            To clear my bias, I frequent MRA sites and consider myself an advocate.

            Great comment. I think it can be summed up as “double standard”.

      • BBA says:

        Mostly I just think these International Days of Whatever are dumb.

        International Men’s Day stood out to me as being uncharacteristic of the typical politics of the organizations that set up these things – you would expect them not to care about men qua men, and yet they do, or are at least giving lip service to it so they can stop getting complaints and focus on IMPORTANT things.

        I don’t think men are necessarily terrible. But I know that I’m a man and I’m terrible, so I can see how that notion could arise.

        • Aapje says:

          The news is full of manufactured news, where organizations manipulate the media into giving coverage. (Fake) research that makes the media talk about things in a way that benefits an advocacy group or company, conflicts that were initiated by some trolling to get the media to cover the outrage, etc, etc.

          An International X Day is just another such tactic and one of the easiest, you don’t even necessarily have to do anything more than send out a press release.

          It does work very well for the Men’s Rights Movement, actually, because every year there are some feminists that are totally supportive of Men’s Rights, as long as the discussion is about women or just demonstrate their misandry or go with the old: every day of the year is International Men’s Day. The latter gives an opening to argue that certain topics are not discussed every day of the year.

          • BBA says:

            International Men’s Day has nothing to do with the MRAs, who are a movement of very recent vintage; it started in the ’90s and has been endorsed by UNESCO (!!!). It was meant as a counterpart to the longstanding International Women’s Day.

            (World Toilet Day, incidentally, is about the role of sanitation technology in preventing the spread of communicable disease, and the UN Water group apparently picked the same date as IMD by pure coincidence.)

          • Aapje says:

            I didn’t say that they created it, I said that they benefit from it (a little).

    • Wander says:

      As a lot of people have mentioned, indoor plumbing and sanitation technologies are one of the single most important health developments in history. People take them for granted and give them a lot of shit (har har), but a lot of our modern society is built upon the assumption that they’re always there doing their vital work. Maybe there’s a good association there.

  15. Anatoly says:

    It dawned on me why the crying wolf post makes me uneasy. It’s because it seems more widely applicable than (perhaps) it actually is. I agree 100% that presenting Trump as openly racist, Bannon as literally KKK etc. is terrible and stupid and counterproductive etc. But who’s doing that? Scott’s examples seem to come mostly/almost completely from left-wing and progressive media. Vox, Slate, the Nation, thinkprogress, laprogressive.com… But he’s *talking* about “the media”. “The media responded to all of this freely available data with articles like…” “The only thing the media has been able to do for the last five years…” (IMPORTANT: I do not think that Scott is doing any sort of deliberate deception and it’d be terrible to interpret my comment in this way).

    Is it true that “the media” has been presenting Trump as openly racist, white nationalist etc.? I mean the mainstream media, as much as that notion still makes sense, which to some degree it certainly does. I mean NYTimes, WP, WSJ, the Atlantic Monthly, LATimes, USA Today, Time, CNN, network news, etc. etc. If they’re driving the “Trump is an openly racist KKK sympathizer” narrative, I want to know, if they’re not, I want to know. In this article I think I’m mostly getting Vox and Slate and ThinkProgress defined as “the media”. I already know Vox is terrible. I don’t think it’s accurate or helpful to think of Vox as a central example of “the media” though. To me, a central example of “the media” is NYTimes. I went on NYTimes and searched for “openly racist” and found just a handful of examples over the last few years, almost all of them quoting someone else saying it in the story. There was one recent example with “openly racist” in the non-quoted text – and it was in a letter to the editor! And when I went back and checked the impressive list of “openly racist” links in Scott’s post, turned out the NYTimes one is that letter! I think it’s fair to say that NYTimes is not doing its utmost to push the “Trump is openly racist” narrative.

    This also explains why Scott Adams was ecstatic about this post and wants everyone to read it. People in the right-wing bubble often think that all media is like Vox and the Nation. (I don’t know if Scott Adams is actually in the right-wing bubble, or playacts at it. In my opinion, he’s become remarkably dishonest over the last few months of the campaign, and his post are now manipulative and lying by default to me). Scott’s post is remarkably effective, very convincing, and if you don’t check all the links you may end up convinced that “the media” in general has been pushing “openly racist” and “literally KKK”. But if you look at it more closely, all of Scott’s refutations actually come from “the media”, now meaning the actual media, not its progressive segment. “The media” – not right-wing sites, not NR, not Breitbat, but “the media” seems to be doing quite a lot to present Trump’s words and actions accurately.

    • keranih says:

      To me, a central example of “the media” is NYTimes. I went on NYTimes and searched for “openly racist” and found just a handful of examples over the last few years, almost all of them quoting someone else saying it in the story.

      To be clear, was this a search of “openly racist” + “Trump” or just “openly racist”?

      Because if it’s the second, and nothing came up, that’s probably a clue that the NYT doesn’t use that particular phrase against anyone, and so they are emphasizing negative racial bias in a different way.

      (The racial bias of NYT’s reporting is there – there is a reason why the old joke is “When the SMOD comes, the headline on the NYTs will be “WORLD ENDS – Women and Minorities Hardest Hit”.)

      The Old Grey Lady is old, and wealthy, and so acts like an old wealthy lady – moderate in tone in public. Openly calling someone racist is fighting words, which a lady tends to avoid.

      • Matt M says:

        I have no hard evidence to confirm this, but I would also suggest that a lot of NYT reporters probably use much harsher language in their public (but unofficial) communications such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.

        Paul Krugman I know uses a much harsher tone on Twitter than is typically published in his actual NYT columns. If he were to (and I’m not saying he has) call Trump openly racist on Twitter, does that count as “the media” or not?

      • Iain says:

        The second Google hit I get for “‘openly racist’ site:nytimes.com” is this one about a German politician.

    • The Nybbler says:

      Here’s a New York Times hit piece on Bannon

      http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/us/politics/reince-priebus-chief-of-staff-donald-trump.html?_r=0

      Here’s an editorial (not an op-ed)

      http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/opinion/turn-on-the-hate-steve-bannon-at-the-white-house.html?_r=0

      Here’s an editorial (again, not an op-ed) from last year calling him a racist.

      http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/24/opinion/mr-trumps-applause-lies.html?_r=0

      Yeah, it’s the mainstream media, not just the explicitly left-wing media.

    • shakeddown says:

      This is true, but I think a lot of mainstream media has fallen into the well of considering this as a relevant question. So you’ll get NYT articles discussing the question of whether Trump is a racist and to what degree, that are written as part of the narrative set by the Voxlike places, but are responding to it by attempting to take a “both sides” response to it. So even if they aren’t pushing the Openly Racist narrative, they’re still discussing it.

      • Anatoly says:

        Yes, but this goes both ways. The mainstream media also spent incredible amounts of time and space discussing the narrative of the “treasonous Hillary server” and other “scandals”, even when they weren’t pushing those narratives.

  16. Deiseach says:

    Turning to something less contentious than the election – mad science!

    Okay, once I got over the What The Fudge? instinctual response to this, what I thought was that (a) this is a perfect chance to test out cryonics and the hopes for eventual “they can unfreeze and cure us in the future/they can upload brain readings” (as in the recent case of the 14 year old girl who wants to be a cryonic subject) because “the … operation … would see [the] head “frozen” to stop brain cells from dying and tubes connected to support key arteries and veins” (b) why does the guy have to look like a Bond supervillain mad scientist? (c) what the actual fudge, how can anyone think this will work on a real human being?

    Comments and opinions invited: genuine scientific opportunity or publicity stunt but it’ll never go ahead and isn’t planned to do so, it’s meant to drum up interest and support, and likelihood if it goes ahead, that the result will out-perform a snowball in Hell?

    Third possibility: this isn’t about head transplants, it’s Inventum Bioengineering Technologies being really sneaky and clever about publicising themselves and their VR system?

    This seems legit, but I don’t know?

    • The original Mr. X says:

      (b) why does the guy have to look like a Bond supervillain mad scientist?

      Because only a Bond supervillain mad scientist would try to do such a thing?

      • Deiseach says:

        Yes, but when trying for permission for such a unique operation, you really should look like “grandfatherly Louis Pasteur type”, not “will commence with ‘Ah, Mr Bond!’ when you’re strapped into this VR rig” 🙂

  17. IrishDude says:

    Is spanking a child ever appropriate?

    Before having children I told myself I’d never spank, as I see violence as wrong in most situations, and didn’t want to teach my child that it was acceptable to hit. I have a 2 1/2 year old boy now who I have probably spanked a handful of times in his life. My spanking technique is one medium strengthed slap on his bottom that doesn’t leave a mark. For a rough split of the proximate cause of the spankings:
    *Let’s say 4 were due to being slapped or punched, usually in my face.
    *2 were for disobedience, like repeatedly refusing to get in the car when told to, screaming at me when I go to lift him and put him in the car, and physically resisting.
    *1 was for running into the road when a car was coming and scaring me silly.

    My goal with the spanking is to deter behavior I think inappropriate, though frustration on my part is sometimes a contributing factor. I feel most justified spanking after I’ve been hit, as I feel hitting is justified for adults when you’ve been unjustly hit, and also a spanking clues my son into the types of reaction he might reasonably get if he hits another person. I feel less justified spanking for disobedience and have felt more guilty after those spankings. After all spankings, once the situation was under control, I have apologized to and hugged my son and told him I didn’t want to spank, but that his behavior had to improve.

    So, is spanking ever okay? I still have mixed feelings on it.

    Note: the vast, vast majority of his discipline is two-minute time outs, losing out on a treat, a stern talking to, or losing toy privileges.

    • Patrick Merchant says:

      If you only spank him when he’s managed to get you frustrated, then I think you’re on the wrong track. It’ll teach him that rule-breaking is only wrong when it inconveniences an authority figure. If the spankings are being applied as a consistent response to any kind of serious rule-breaking or bad behaviour, regardless of your emotional state at the time, then that will make him associate the punishment with his behaviour, not your mood.

      Basically just try to keep the punishments as consistent as possible, even if its tempting to be more forgiving on some days and harsher on others. I think the situations where you spanked him were appropriate, but again, be sure to apply the same punishment no matter who he hits/screams at. If you only do it when he attacks you, again, the lesson becomes “don’t screw with authority figures” instead of “don’t hit/scream at people.”

      • Mark V Anderson says:

        Yes. I believe there are two very important attributes of parenting that dwarf any other factors:
        1) You care about your child and genuinely try to do what is right for him.
        2) You are consistent.

        Parenting is worst when #1 isn’t present. But for the vast multitudes of parents, #2 is the biggest stumbling block. When you tell the kid a certain consequence will occur if he does something, that consequence should occur, or else your kid won’t believe what you say, and will spend his whole childhood begging you to change your mind. Of course the key to this is not to punish the kid in the draconian ways you promise, but to not promise those punishments in the first place that you aren’t going to do. I always told my kids that begging will NEVER work; once I say no that is it. But that doesn’t mean I won’t change my mind if they convince me by reason. I try to encourage reason but not whining.

        If you succeed at #1 and #2, spanking vs. non-spanking loses its significance. Many kids that were spanked grow up happy and adjusted; the same with those not spanked. But if you don’t care for your kid, you will raise an unhappy and uncaring kid. If you aren’t consistent, you will raise a spoiled unreasoning kid.

      • IrishDude says:

        Thanks for the feedback. I agree consistency is important, though due to the social stigma of spanking I’d find it more difficult to spank my son after he hit another child where other adults were present. Is the stigma as strong as I perceive it to be?

        • Mark V Anderson says:

          Yes I think the stigma is very real. At least amongst the Blue Tribe where I live, and I suspect increasingly amongst Red Tribe also. Although I was neutral on spanking in my previous comment, I do think that it is usually not necessary. There are other punishments that work, and are not subject to the stigma. I assume your kid is pre-school, since hitting other kids usually happens at that age? Time-outs are the usual punishment for that kind of thing (although I haven’t had pre-schoolers for 20 years, so maybe I am out of date). If it gets serious enough, I would think there are other things you can do to tell your kid how serious it is. I knew my kids well enough that I knew what mattered to them, so it wasn’t hard to find things to take away that they cared about. Of course not for frivolous reasons; the point is get your kid through a bad stage without causing too much unhappiness on their part. Back to #1 again.

    • keranih says:

      Kids are not rational creatures. The neekid apes that we are have reactions to violence hardwired in. We have to be taught rationality. And losing toy privileges, for example, might be too little, too far from the prompting event to force a connection between the offense and the punishment.

      (And you want to put some immediate visceral connections into the kid’s brain – like, oh, “If I’m running and Mom hollers stop, I stop.” V. useful when the kid is running towards traffic.)

      IMO, spanking – if done as a deliberate tool to reach a kid at the sub-rational stage, and not out of anger or frustration – can be very effective.

      But kids – like older adults – vary wildly in terms of how they respond to various incentives. Some adults need a long, profane rant to get their attention. Others wilt at a change in silent body language. You need to judge your kid’s reaction to inputs, and adjust accordingly.

    • Deiseach says:

      If spanking is only spanking (slaps with the hand on the clothed buttocks or across the legs), and not hitting and not some kind of ritualised performance that will only instill fear and dread into the kid (the whole solemn “wait till your father gets home”, the inquest, the belt or stick or whatever*, etc) then it’s fine.

      I might not spank for physically resisting, etc. because in those cases sometimes it’s better to let them scream themselves out or just physically pick them up and move them. Tantrums are frustrating for toddlers as much as for the parents and a slap or verbal rebuke isn’t much good to get their attention off their psychological meltdown because they don’t have the focus. Letting them lie on the floor kicking and screaming, even if in a public place and it draws tut-tutting**, works out better because they exhaust their energy, you’ve shown you can outlast them, and that having a meltdown doesn’t achieve their ends.

      I wouldn’t worry about spanking when they’ve scared the pants off you, as long as you explain “this was dangerous, don’t do it, that’s why the spank” and don’t just let them think “that was because I scared mommy or daddy” so they keep doing the dangerous things and try not to let you catch them doing them. Keep the “You scared me because you could have been hurt” separate from the “this is to reinforce that this is bad/dangerous behaviour”.

      But hey, you’re human, you’ll screw up at times. As long as you don’t spank out of pure anger and frustration (the classical example of “boss yells at dad who has to take it, dad comes home and yells at mom, mom yells at junior, and junior pulls the cat’s tail” relieving of emotion you can’t express elsewhere), then you and the kid will be okay.

      *Generations of Irish children were reared on “now you’ve done it, now you’re getting the wooden spoon

      **And you know, to hell with the tut-tutters. If they don’t have kids themselves, they have no idea. If they do have kids, they should know better than to tut-tut. Tut-tutting is only appropriate when kids are let run wild and be destructive and the parent doesn’t do anything or just hits but doesn’t tell the kid why “no, don’t do that”. Raising children is tough, to quote Chesterton’s experience of a day’s child-minding:

      Playing with children is a glorious thing; but the journalist in question has never understood why it was considered a soothing or idyllic one. It reminds him, not of watering little budding flowers, but of wrestling for hours with gigantic angels and devils. Moral problems of the most monstrous complexity besiege him incessantly. He has to decide before the awful eyes of innocence, whether, when a sister has knocked down a brother’s bricks, in revenge for the brother having taken two sweets out of his turn, it is endurable that the brother should retaliate by scribbling on the sister’s picture book, and whether such conduct does not justify the sister in blowing out the brother’s unlawfully lighted match.

      Just as he is solving this problem upon principles of the highest morality, it occurs to him suddenly that he has not written his Saturday article; and that there is only about an hour to do it in.

      …Then the journalist sends off his copy and turns his attention to the enigma of whether a brother should commandeer a sister’s necklace because the sister pinched him at Littlehampton.

      • IrishDude says:

        On Chestertons experience, I haven’t yet had to intervene in tit for tat sibling interactions, but as my three week old grows it’ll be interesting playing arbiter between him and his older brother.

      • Mark V Anderson says:

        I very much agree that the best approach to tantrums is to just let them burn themselves out if at all possible. I do remember once when my daughter was very small she threw a terrible tantrum at the mall. My wife and I sat down and waited for it to end. People stared but that was fine. When she was done we continued on as if nothing had occurred. I don’t think she had a tantrum after that, because it wasn’t effective. One time when I picked up my son at daycare, he cried and screamed that he didn’t want to leave. I picked him up and took him to the car, and buckled him in. Then I shut the door and waited outside the car until he was done. You can’t always ignore tantrums, but it is best when you can.

    • Deiseach says:

      Let’s say 4 were due to being slapped or punched, usually in my face

      Reminiscences of an Irish childhood 🙂

      When I was two or three, I went through the biting when angry stage. I once bit my mother so hard on the thigh I drew blood. She bit me back (no, she didn’t bite to the point of drawing blood or leaving a mark, I was more shocked than anything) but hey, I never bit anyone again. The fact that I still remember this and can picture it in my mind means the lesson stuck.

      So the kid hits or punches or kicks, a slap on the legs is appropriate response to teach “don’t do that, it hurts and is not nice, don’t hurt people”.

    • carvenvisage says:

      My 2c, YMMV.

      (Phrasing probably not very generous)

      Imo the answer is basically no: it’s either a calculated phisical overpowering/humiliation from someone bigger and stronger than you, or it’s the same thing, except turning against your child in a fit of emotion. -You’re either physically humiliating and hurting them to manipulate them, or because you allow yourself to see them as an enemy.

      The first is probably a lot better, but even then my instinct is that it’s unnecessarry, unnecessarilly adversarial, and, potentially innefective, -or indeed counterproductive. On the first point, parents already have complete financial and almost complete legal power over their children, so demonstrations of physical strength are probably unnecessary avenues of leverage. On the second point, as you say, what lessons does it teach them? Particularly, what independence can someone learn when their guardian uses conditioning by violence for the difficult scenarios, which independence is important because there isn’t always going to be someone to kick their ass for them. You have to equip them to understand why what they did was harmful or wrong. Maybe there’s a place for spanking early, but it’s not a long term solution.

       

      Seperately, If your son is old enough for the “I’m so sorry I didn’t mean it spiel” (MAJOR RED FLAG imo), then surely he’s old enough to be reasoned with, because that’s exactly what that is trying to be.

      -You think he’s irrational enough to need to be kept in line by violence, but rational enough to understand its necessity immediately in its aftermath? That’s self-contradictory and absurd.

       

      And I don’t want to be an asshole, but there’s no nice way to say this: going after someone’s consent/sanction, verbally, right after they’ve been softened up by violence is incredibly poor form. Mixed message, taking advantage of shock + fear + willingness to hurt on display, etc, -showing two faces back to back, looking like you view them like a thing to be conditioned rather than a person… It’s just bad all around.

      -So if you’re going to spank, preferably do so in a principled manner that you believe is right, and don’t have to apologise for, but MUCH more imporatntly don’t apologise right afterward when they’re softened up and least capable of rationally processing it, -as opposed to taking away the message that people overpowering them is okay and when it happens they have to aquiesce to that persons preferenes, help them out with any guilt which may be present, and generally sympathise with violence upon their person that they don’t undestand.

      -If you have anything to apologise for, it’s not for doing what you think is good for your son, it’s for trying to connect with them afterward as if you haven’t just done so.

       

      After all spankings, once the situation was under control, I have apologized to and hugged my son and told him I didn’t want to spank, but that his behavior had to improve.

      Also unless by ‘apologised’ you mean ‘expressed regret’, this quote should answer your question. As a rule You wouldn’t apologise for things that were truly necessarry. And if you do you’re ruining the (-costly-) effect.

       

      disclaimer: just my view etc

      More serious disclaimer: I was a sensitive and obedient child, so maybe things are different if someone is the opposite of both. -I don’t think so, I think it’s almost inherently unhelpful, but I could be wrong. Also, most of my arguments should still stand, but maybe they’re less important than I think, or maybe other things are more important.

      • IrishDude says:

        To clarify, my apology is not that I didn’t mean what I did but that I didn’t want to do it. I’ve punched one of my brothers and one of my good friends in the face before, thought they deserved it and told them so both times, but still apologized after. That may be contradictory to you, but it’s how I often feel after doing something I don’t like but think I must do.

        My son is 2 and a half, so I think there is only very basic reasoning going on with him. I still explain as best I can all of my decisions even when I think he doesn’t understand, as it’s good practice for me to explicate, good practice for my son to hear a reasoned process, and it’s also possible that his reasoning abilities are better than I suspect.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      Existence proof: my father spanked me when I was a child. It was extremely controlled, rare, swift, and consistent. He was overtly not angry whenever he did it; I remember him doing it twice, for example, and asking, calmly: “wanna go for three?”. It felt like I imagine corporal punishment in boot camp feels like, which makes sense, given that he served in the Army during the Vietnam War. The mission is to deter a specific type of behavior, not to let the spanker take out their anger on the receiver.

      So I very much endorse Patrick Merchant’s comment: a parent can be unhappy, but control is absolutely essential.

      I do think there is room for different responses while still appearing consistent. The next time your kid does the same thing, you can probably get away with a stern admonition, particularly if it’s clear you could spank again. This is useful if you’re trying to avoid a spectacle, or even if you’re just tired (but be careful not to look tired).

      • Jiro says:

        There’s a reason why scientists dispassionately carrying out experiments on helpless people are considered horrific above and beyond the fact that people are being hurt.

  18. Moon says:

    Facebook fake-news writer: ‘I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me’
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11/17/facebook-fake-news-writer-i-think-donald-trump-is-in-the-white-house-because-of-me/

    Some Republicans will believe anything that is anti-Hillary or anti-Dem. They have helped Macedonian teenagers make 10K a month or more off of fake news.

    • Sandy says:

      I think this guy grossly overestimates his relevance and reach, and I think outfits like WaPo have a pretty good incentive to believe the real problem with the media is “fake news”.

      • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

        He reminds me of the story from A Scanner Darkly about the guy who posed as a great impostor.

    • The Nybbler says:

      Turns out, the story about Trump being in office due to fake news… is fake news.

    • Timothy says:

      I feel like there needs to be a deeper classification of news. Fake fake news, real fake news, fake real news. I don’t know if there’s any real real news.

      Fake real news – This is what the media’s current “fake news” narrative is calling “fake news.” It purports to be real news but it’s just trash non-factual clickbait like “Pope Francis Endorses Trump”.

      Fake fake news – The Daily Show, Colbert Report, etc., shtick. Purports to be fake news to gain more latitude to work with and freedom to be biased (it’s like “hey, we’re just a comedy show, not the actual news”), but is trying in practice to function the same as any other news.

      Real fake news – MSM, right wing media (Fox, Breitbart, etc.), left wing media (Gawker metastasis, Mother Jones, etc.) – Differentiated from the “fake real news” by higher production values and the tendency to use of nuggets of fact in a hill of bullshit, but with the occasional whopper like “A Rape On Campus” or Iraqi WMDs. Claiming to be real news, but so much is just artifice – like the “fake news” story, which would not be a story if Hillary had won, despite the same non-factual clickbait being around in the Hillary Timeline.

      Fake real fake news – The Onion types that parody the above.

  19. rlms says:

    I went to a talk by Maajid Nawaz yesterday, in which he echoed SSC-style thoughts on the role of left-wing identity politics and the tight grip the Baby Boomers have on the media/academia in the rise of the alt-right (he has also interestingly adopted the term ctrl-left for SJWs). There was a slightly jarring moment when he mentioned Jim in the context of the alt-right, leading me to think for a moment that Trump was appointing James MacDonald to some government role (he was actually talking about Jim Woolsey).

    The comparison between Islamism, the alt-right, socialism, and semi-classical liberalism raised some interesting questions in my opinion. How can liberalism/libertarianism outcompete more populist ideologies making wild promises of utopia, if all they have to offer is “a society more or less like this one, but maybe a bit more efficient and nice”? Or should they accept a permanent place on the sidelines acting as a moderating force?

    • Deiseach says:

      he has also interestingly adopted the term ctrl-left for SJWs

      Okay, that made me laugh.

    • dndnrsn says:

      This is something I have been thinking about. I can’t really talk about libertarianism, but liberalism strikes me as an ideology that has as its advantage and its disadvantage that it’s fairly lukewarm. Especially when times are hard, something that says “in exchange for struggle and sacrifice, you will get utopia” will often look more attractive than something that says “in exchange for keeping doing what you’re doing, you will get more of the same, but increasing at 2.5% per year!” Especially since, when things are bad, the latter might not even be true, and even when things are good, it’s not going to be true for everyone.

      • Aapje says:

        I think that liberalism suffers from severe flaws which decrease it’s attractiveness compared to liberalism from yesterday (which was different).

        For example, (neo)liberalism has mostly chosen supply side ‘fixes’ for the economy, which results in bubbles and poor growth that mostly benefits the elite, while also harming workers in many ways.

  20. Le Maistre Chat says:

    Lessons about politics from Transformers:

    Sneaking around disguised as vehicles is only deception when the other tribe does it.
    Values statements like “Freedom is the right of all sentient beings” are completely empty. Have you ever seen Optimus Prime free farm animals?

    • Skivverus says:

      True, but in the interests of not having two sets of armed-to-the-teeth mecha out to destroy and/or enslave humanity, might I suggest deriving a third political lesson of “not publicly pointing this out to the ones on our side”?
      At least, not until they’ve (we’ve?) won.

    • jaimeastorga2000 says:

      He is obviously using “sentient” in the colloquial sense. Which is just as well, since I don’t think most little boys know the word “sapient”.

  21. dndnrsn says:

    I’ve decided to get more towards the EA side of things when it comes to my charitable donations this year. By which I mean you will need an internet connection at all times to benefit from my charitable donations.

    Wait, no, what I mean is – GiveWell is 100% legit and anybody they link to for donating for non-Americans is legit, right? As a non-American, I have to be careful about what charities are and aren’t registered with the local tax authorities.

    I’m thinking of splitting my money between deworming and iodine – partly because I think environmental factors harming cognitive development are underappreciated as a cause of human suffering – and partly because I’m a hipster and it looks like malaria nets are so mainstream.

    Based on GiveWell’s site, it looks like Charity Science would be the best way to donate and still get that sweet sweet tax credit. Am I correct in thinking this? Additionally, if anybody wants to argue me into deciding malaria is the #1 priority by a big margin, you can try that too.

    • Douglas Knight says:
    • Mark V Anderson says:

      I give money to Doctors Without Borders. I have pretty much given up on the idea that development aid actually helps poor people in other countries, but I am pretty sure medical aid both helps them directly, and probably results in more economic development (sick people aren’t productive). But as far as what medical aid is the most useful — that I would prefer to delegate out to experts who know better than me. So I prefer to give to more generic medical aid than a particular kind.

      • keranih says:

        I am pretty sure medical aid both helps them directly, and probably results in more economic development (sick people aren’t productive)

        I’d advise looking a little more deeply into this, and consider pluses and minuses of various actions.

        MSF has several ‘arms’, but what they are best known for is being adrenaline jockey trauma surgeons. From their website:

        At its core, the purpose of humanitarian action is to save the lives and ease the suffering of people caught in acute crises, thereby restoring their ability to rebuild their lives and communities.

        This is not development. This is emergency care – stepping in during a crisis and providing “modern” “developed” medicine that the local government and doctors could not provide even on a best day in a non-emergency situation.

        It is awesome at saving lives there in that moment. It is fairly crap at developing infrastructure and skills in the local population so they can continue to care for the population after the crisis passes. It can – and often does – teach the local population that their community and national leaders are useless and/or stupid (or corrupt) and that the ideal method of bettering their lives is to leave their homeland and go elsewhere.

        At it’s best, medical intervention in an area is aimed at just above the existing local expertise, and provides training in skills at that level, plus funds to purchase local supplies so as to stimulate the market for domestic production of medical supplies (even if it’s just at the level of “promote the repair of trucks to ship in supplies from the capital”.)

        At its worst, it’s performing four-limb amputations in a modern surgical suite on Haitian victims of the earthquake and then trying to return those patients to a society without any infrastructure to take care of quadriplegics.

        Most interventions aren’t that bad. Most aren’t that good, either.

        People in poor countries who are chronically ill and so depressing the productivity of that area need long-term, dedicated, expensive, widespread changes in the environments in which they live – changing ventilation in housing, to reduce TB transmission; draining swamps to reduce the skeeter load, improving toilets to keep the pigs out of the human latrines and the cholera out of the water. They also need changes to their legal system, their building codes, their roads, their property titling system, and their banking systems. Some of these are much more important to the overall production of the society than the TB or HIV rate.

        And none of them are easy, or else the Top Men who have been throwing their lives at these problems for decades would have already fixed it all.

        (Sorry, bit of a rant. I think that money is better spent on MSF than on a second dress, or a second bottle of wine to be shared with friends, but there are better ways if one is intent to aid “development”.)

        • Matt M says:

          Do you have any suggestions of better ways, aside from the obvious ones that are routinely discussed here? Or are those the ones you think are better?

          • Aapje says:

            I like leprosy aid, because:
            – These people are often treated as lepers (unsurprisingly), so they don’t get normal aid even when it is available
            – It doesn’t replace aid for the general population, so doesn’t teach them to distrust local medicine
            – It provides immense quality of life improvements for these people, who go from being totally marginalized to being able to mostly participate in normal life
            – If we manage to completely eradicate infections like these, we will achieve a permanent ‘win’ for humanity. With the high rate of travel of modern times, infections are a great threat to the world community and can literally fly around the world in a day.

          • keranih says:

            I think that the Gates Foundation is about the best secular effort that can be presently found.

            My ideal/idea of a best solution would be something closer to:

            – Learn a valuable skill like general practitioner medicine or civil engineering (or one of the more staid trades like welding or plumbing) Spend 4-6 years learning the trade in the weeds in a developed nation.

            – Choose an underdeveloped nation with severe chronic failed nation status. Move to a non-central small city/large town in that country.

            – Practice one’s trade in partnership with a local professional. Marry a local. Spend one’s free time leading a local national saloon/pub-crew of rationalist/Enlightenment thought.

            – Raise up one’s children (of which there need to be multiple) and the children of one’s professional partner(s) and fellow travelers in Enlightenment and heavy emphasis on critical thinking (NOT in ‘critical theory’.) Emphasize math and reading widely.

            – Mold these children into becoming teachers or other local professionals, brought up familiar with the local culture but accepting rationalist thoughts and priorities, so that they can teach the next generation to use moderation, inclusiveness, inquisitiveness, and respect for the scientific method of observe, question, test, revise, repeat. Teach them to abhor intolerance and respect free expression and self-agency.

            Two – three generations down the road, you’d be long dead and burnt, but you’ll have changed that nation.

            Forty or a hundred people do this, and the world will be completely different.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @kerinah – You missed a step:

            – Watch as everything you built is burned down and the children you raised get chopped up with machetes, because doing so allowed someone somewhere far away to bank another couple million to their private account.

            The world is the way it is because people want it to be this way.

            [EDIT] – apologies for the pessimism. I thought your post was a very good one. The world just seems like a really awful place to me these days.

          • keranih says:

            @ Craven –

            I hear you, but I would yet counsel hope. We-as-humanity have survived far worse.

            I take exception to your comments re: machetes and bank accounts. If stopping murderous plagues were so easy as that, we’d all be living in Omelas, and dancing around the maypole with the little lost boy, laughing.

          • “The world is the way it is because people want it to be this way.”

            Unlikely. Each individual whose actions affect the world knows that his effect is tiny. There are situations where the combined effect of individual actions adds up to what those individuals want, but that’s very much a special case.

            Consider the simple example of a lot of producers, farmers say, competing with each other on the market. Very likely they would all be better off if all of them reduced their output and so drove up prices. But each of them is better off producing the quantity that maximizes his profit and ignoring the effect on the profit of the others.

            For one recent example, consider what has happened to oil prices. The producers as a group would be better off holding down output and up prices, but it’s very hard to get them to do so.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Keranih @ David Friedman – My observation is that destruction is easier than creation. It is much easier to destroy a million or a billion dollars worth of value than it is to create a million or a billion dollars worth of value. Further, I observe that destroying value can be highly profitable; overthrowing a stable country to put yourself on top of a new, unstable country for example. Absent overwhelming deterrence, it seems to me that looting in one form or another carry the day.

            I am not optimistic that the third world will get better any time soon. When they are not burning their own countries down, we burn their countries down for them.

        • Mark V Anderson says:

          @keranih. I find your information very interesting, but am skeptical. How do you know all this about MSF? I don’t know a whole lot about what is really happening in undeveloped countries, but that is largely because most people don’t know and it is very hard to know what is true and what isn’t. Why is your information better than what I’ve heard elsewhere? I would like to have more definitive information about these things, because I want my money to be effective, but I have seen too much mis-information to trust easily.

          If what MSF does is acute care in crisis situations, that would be a good thing. IT is solving the more chronic problems that most development aid has been so woeful at, and in fact I think there is a good case to be made that development aid has been a net negative. I am pretty cynical about your advocacy of long-term changes. It is my impression that this simply cannot be achieved by outsiders. But outsiders can provide acute medical care, which does immediate good, and may help a bit in productivity for the moment. IF you have some sources that will back up your statements and maybe even give evidence of a better charity, I’d love to see it.

          • keranih says:

            @ Mark V Anderson –

            Please, be skeptical. Question. Investigate. Don’t take the word of random people on the internet.

            How do you know all this about MSF?

            Well, for one, it’s all right there on their website. They’ve revised their fundraising over the last decade or so, as public interest has shifted away from crisis intervention and towards “sustainable” actions, but MSF has been a conflict-based acute care organization and that’s where it’s center of gravity is going to stay for the forseeable future.

            They are *very* good at it, and while I think that standing on the river bank to pull people out of the water (much less jetting about the lake in a fancy speedboat) is far less useful than fixing the crumbling bridge, it is more exciting than sitting through zoning meetings getting the new bridge approved. (Also, fewer environmentalists picket you.)

            And if I had fallen off the bridge, and was drowning? Heck yeah, I’d think the people who pulled me out were *awesome*.

            that is largely because most people don’t know and it is very hard to know what is true and what isn’t.

            Most people don’t know because they have neither been there nor talked to reliable sources who have. See what I said above, re: random people on the internet. I will not give you more satisfying credentials than that. (Sorry.)

            I will say that I believed Three Cups of Tea when it came out, because I wanted to think that kind of intervention was possible, despite knowing better.(*)

            I think there is a good case to be made that development aid has been a net negative.

            I think the degree of negative is very situational, and that I have seen strong differences of opinion in very dedicated, very smart people as to what is the best use of resources. However, even the most frivolous of aid – like Christmas care packages that don’t make it out to the village until March – aren’t *useless* – they do bring joy and a change of topic for gossip. It’s just that most people agree that more could have been done with the same amount of resources.

            But if all you’re ever going to do is wrap up a shoebox, then do that. It’s better than nothing.

            I am pretty cynical about your advocacy of long-term changes. It is my impression that this simply cannot be achieved by outsiders.

            Well, yes, which is why I wrote the post I did. It’s not you-the-outsider who is changing the nation, it’s the students of your children, who are not outsiders.

            And outside of our own family and village, we’re all outsiders. Should we then think that none of us can change anything?

            There is an issue with providing sources and citations for this which meet objective rationalist criteria – firstly, the time frame is huge (what is a long term, sustained change? 10 years? Twenty? Seventy?) and subject to so very many outside factors (culture, geography, which superpower the local dictator cozied up to, the price of oil, the price of steel, etc).

            Secondly, for many years, interventions were measured in inputs (so many doctors, so many pounds of supplies, so many dollars) or in activities (so many surgeries, so many vaccines given, so many houses built.) “So many lives saved” is a better measure…but difficult to do well. The global acceptation of “Quality years of life” is really pretty recent, and fantastic, and where Givewell applies this properly, they do pretty good.

            My preferred charities are not secular. If you’re still interested, I’ll list them.

            If you want to give to an organization with European/Western values of equality, charity, and professional excellence that has a long track record of “doing good” at what they do well, and doing so in miserable parts of the world, then you could do far, far worse than MSF. (WHO and FOA would be high on my list of money-wasters.)

            But MSF is a surgery to remove a non-healing ulcer. It’s not preventing the ulcer from occurring in the first place, and most of the time it doesn’t care, because there’s always another ulcer to treat.

            (*) The Central Asia Institute’s failing is, I think (but don’t know for sure) in the span/degree of success, rather than in actual success. From the outside, it was a miracle, too good to be true. And, as it turned out, same-same for the view from the inside.

          • “However, even the most frivolous of aid – like Christmas care packages that don’t make it out to the village until March – aren’t *useless* – they do bring joy and a change of topic for gossip. It’s just that most people agree that more could have been done with the same amount of resources.”

            Some aid is not merely useless, it is harmful. Any kind of “foreign aid” that results in increasing the resources available to a government simultaneously increases the incentive to gain control of that government and the resources available to keep that power. That might easily do harm that more than outweighs any benefit due to the direct effect of the aid.

          • keranih says:

            @ David Friedman –

            That’s a step or two beyond where I would start counting “harm” by aid distribution – first would be the effect on immigration/internal movement (concentrating people in places where generally they would not) and secondly for impact on local suppliers, who by virtue of capital and scale can not compete with the government (or the UN) and quickly go out of business, and thirdly due to the corruption it breeds in a logarithmic manner.

            Yes, I agree that there is aid which is toxic at nearly all levels, but at some point, people do get fed/get treated. But not all people agree that concentrating power in the hands of the government is a bad thing.

            (The young AA gal who worked for me in the summer of 2009, and who thought it would be ideal if “we just made President Obama king so he could get some shit *done*” certainly would disagree.)

            One might take the stance that this is the same sort of error where one buys $500 of flour, makes 600 loaves and sells them at $0.50 each for a profit of $300 (to use another development program lesson), and the person in question needs to be dissuaded of that line of thinking straight off. But other people would disagree that the math error, and the power concentration error, were of the same sort.

            *shrugs* Higher order primates are hard.

          • Mark V Anderson says:

            @keranih. By all means, tell us your preferred charities, and why you give to them. I would even give to religious charities if I thought they helped the poor more than others, despite that I am an atheist. Most advertising I’ve seen from religious charities seems to emphasize the do-gooderism of the donors instead of the effectiveness of the donee, so I haven’t been impressed. But it is likely that the more effective charities do less advertising.

            As far as your metaphor goes, I think that saving the drowning is probably more effective than fixing the bridge, because fixing the bridge will make it more likely that other bridges won’t be fixed, and that this bridge will not be fixed in the future. That is my point that long-term fixes can’t be done by outsiders.

            I just finished a book called “The Great Escape,” by Angus Deaton, whose final chapter discusses what can be done about very poor countries. (I think the book as a whole is so so because of shallow economic analysis in earlier chapters, but the final chapter is very good). Deaton’s thesis is that once foreign aid becomes significant, this has a profoundly negative effect on the government. Significant aid might be >10% of GDP, which he says is the case for most sub-Saharan African countries. At that point, these governments focus their energies on the aid instead of people in the country, to the detriment of people’s welfare. He compares this to resource rich countries, which are also known to have poor governments. Deaton is even more pessimistic about aid than I am, but I think he is mostly correct. That’s why I prefer more acute aid instead of chronic aid, which I hope will not have the same negative effects.

      • Douglas Knight says:

        Who are the experts? Givewell is attempting to be the experts in this precise question.

        It is quite plausible that the work MSF does preventing cholera epidemics in crises is the most valuable medical work in the world. But this is not the only work that MSF does. It is even possible that this is so valuable that MSF accomplishes more by the average dollar it spends than any other charity. But this is not the relevant question. The relevant question is the value of the marginal dollar given to MSF.

  22. Deiseach says:

    Stick a fork in me, I am done 🙁

    • Dahlen says:

      … I still don’t get what great reason you have to follow / take so much delight in this, as an Irishwoman.

      • Deiseach says:

        Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto

        Was going to do a Reply. But I think we’re all about all argued out by now.

        This is why I’ve somehow managed to end up bingewatching old unsubtitled Telugu-language mythological movies on Youtube where I have only the very vaguest idea what the heck is going on but the bling is fabulous. Great for washing the taste out of your mouth.

        • Dahlen says:

          Thanks for nothing. *is left scratching head*

          I mean, I too am a non-USian and I follow this because, depending on what President Camacho does, my country may or may not end up at war, since it’s already hanging by a geopolitical thread.

          But you mostly seem to be in it for the taste of liberal tears. And that’s what my question was about, why US liberal tears would mean anything to you.

          But alright, if that’s what you want to and my question bothered you so greatly, then by all means answer back with meaningless snark.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            America is so important and culturally influential that what goes on there is in fact quite relevant to other Anglosphere countries. If a lot of people are going to pick up their views from cultural osmosis via Hollywood, American TV shows, and the like, the cultural situation in America is actually pretty darn important, even for foreigners.

      • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

        At least as much reason as we here have to follow Brexit, I would think. Back in 2008, when Obama was campaigning in Europe for some reason, foreigners were expected to be pretty interested in our politics.

        • Matt M says:

          Not only that, but Americans were expected to take into account the preferences of foreigners when considering our own votes.

          • Deiseach says:

            But you mostly seem to be in it for the taste of liberal tears. And that’s what my question was about, why US liberal tears would mean anything to you.

            But alright, if that’s what you want to and my question bothered you so greatly, then by all means answer back with meaningless snark.

            That’s okay, Dahlen, I wasn’t bothered at all. And I don’t drink liberal tears, I bathe in them à la Countess Bathory!

            Now, for the people not clutching their Hillary plushies and wearing incontinence pads because they are wetting themselves over President Trump’s Death Camps (snarky enough for ya?) – also, when Americans are saying “Are we really going to let this guy have control of the nuclear arsenal?” and debating if he’s going to kick off The Big One, the rest of us inhabiting this globe have some interest in what happens next, you know 🙂

            Singin’ the song one more time (though I don’t expect the True Blues to take any notice): it’s not that I like Trump, his policies, think he’ll be great, am a Republican in the American sense, think the Republicans are great, hate Obama, think he’s anything other than what he is (a career politician in the mould of Hillary who went from an academic career, via community organising and getting plugged into the machine in Chicago, to political office and finally got the brass ring – not the Lightworker Messiah and not the Anti-Christ), or want to destroy all Democrats.

            I would fit into the mould, like so many of my emigrant countrymen, of “if I were voting for an American party, I would vote Democrat”. I’m the traditional blue-collar support. I would quite like the Democrats to have a decent candidate to run for president. I did not think Hillary was that candidate.

            On the other side, I wasn’t hugely impressed with any of the Republican candidates either, and loathed the idea of a Bush dynasty with Jeb slotting into the next place (I don’t like Irish dynastic politics either but we’re stuck with them). I considered Trump, as so many others did, a joke candidate and never thought he had any chance at all of pulling off getting the nomination, much less winning the election.

            But the response from the left (using the term very broadly to cover a coalition ranging from centrists to what passes for socialists in the USA to real socialists/communists to the swivel-eyed loon fringe) dismayed me. I’m used to the left painting the right as the devil out of hell and vice versa. I don’t like it, but it’s where politics is at.

            But being fiscally liberal (if socially conservative), I do expect the left to be somewhat responsible in its vision of what kind of alternative they can present, and more importantly, how they will live with and govern the other half of the nation whom they have been painting in the worst and blackest colours.

            And when you have people (either seriously, or perhaps not seriously but culpably and cynically riding the tide of panic for temporary kudos) stating in print (or pixels) that a member of the incoming administration is a literal Nazi who will literally kill literal Jews, and that this is an obedience test to make sure all the sheeple fall into line for the time the literal Jew-killing commences – then I go “Wait a minute”.

            Because some people believe this kind of tripe. And a lot of people (on both sides, let’s be fair) are regarding their fellow-citizens as enemies in a war, not the people they need to live in the same country as.

            I’m not saying “don’t criticise, don’t point out genuine concerns’. I’m saying “don’t lie, don’t warp reality, don’t make it so that the terms ‘racist’ and ‘fascist’ have lost all meaning past ‘i think you’re mean’, don’t set the little streets against one another when you should be setting them against the great”.

            So yes, I will respond with mockery and snark when I see such egregious overwrought, hysterical, panic-mongering, fear-mongering, Jingoism (and it is Jingoism, be it for party not country). If it is so brazenly shameless as to be impervious to reason (as in Scott’s attempt) then I’ll laugh at it even if that gains nothing. I will not bow to it, at the very least. So shove me into the basket with the other deplorables, but I do not accept your right on your naked word alone to judge between the sheep and the goats.

            We need Dean Swift and Diogenes the Cynic in our times, but I greatly fear that an encounter between Hillary and Diogenes would not go as with Alexander, but that she’d trample him underfoot on her way to kiss the hems of the robes of the real billionaires. (And no, I’m not picking on Hillary or liberals here and saying Trump et al would behave better; I’m saying Hillary tried to be all things to all men in a campaign that was insincere at its core because she showed by whom she complimented and whom she felt it safe to dismiss where her real inclinations lay. Hillary would never choose to be Diogenes).

            Why do I care what happens in American politics? For the reasons others have listed above, and for the broader reasons of: I am a human, and this is a very large slice of humanity losing its wits. For the sake of truth being trampled into propaganda and partisanship by those who plumed themselves on being part of the reality-based community (yes, I do have higher expectations of the Democrats, if they’re going to position themselves as the party of the dispossessed. Put your money where your mouth is). For the forlorn hope that we – humans – can exhibit the instincts of the bridge-builder and not the scorched-earth approach to our fellows with whom we disagree, because forget AI risk or anthropogenic climate change, that is what will save or damn us.

            We’re all very good at seeing the splinter in our brother’s eye but not the beam in our own. There’s been too much “look at all these huge splinters!” in the media lately, and it only makes things worse when for once you really are talking about an actual huge beam but people have been desensitized by the fifty times you said “that’s a beam!” and it turned out to be a splinter – or a dust speck.

          • Matt M says:

            “I don’t like Irish dynastic politics either but we’re stuck with them”

            So who is YOUR giant rich jerk that can help pull you out of them?

            For whatever else Trump does or has done, he deserves at least TWO giant statues somewhere in the US.

            One for eliminating the Bush family from political relevance for the foreseeable future.

            AND a second for eliminating the Clinton family from political relevance for the foreseeable future.

            About a year and a half ago, Bush/Clinton was seen as virtually inevitable and dreaded by almost anyone. I think if you would have taken a poll at the time of “What would you rather have? A guaranteed President Trump or a race between Hillary and Jeb?” then the “President Trump” option would have won with well over 65% of the vote.

            Trump single-handedly took out BOTH of our two most powerful political dynasties with virtually zero help. That’s, uh, not nothing!

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            Are you expecting less nepotism from Trump?

          • Matt M says:

            less from him personally? no

            less approval of it by the public at large? sure

            The progressive freakout about him asking for his children to be given security clearances strikes me as rich coming from a crowd who told us how “qualified” Hillary was when her political career literally started for reasons as credible as “happened to be married to the guy who was President” coupled with demands for Michelle Obama to run in 2020.

            I don’t expect his children to have successful legitimate political careers following his presidency, but I may be wrong.

          • Deiseach says:

            So who is YOUR giant rich jerk that can help pull you out of them?

            God alone knows. We have rich jerks, but if they want to meddle in politics, they tend either to the “Eh, I’ll just buy a politician” or use their media empire to dictate the course of policy.

            Well, until they lose their media empire to a bitter rival, which amused me to see the same set of journalists who had (at the bidding of their former master’s voice) been writing opinion pieces denouncing the evil rival and declaring they’d quit if he won the boardroom battle then sucking up with all their might to the guy when he won. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

            The rich jerks we do have, I like even less than the shower of politicians already in place, so there’s no hope for us! (The least objectionable are the ones who don’t meddle in politics but just stick to owning racehorses and making fortunes).

    • The Nybbler says:

      You’d have saved yourself a lot of trouble by stopping at “As seen on jezebel.com”. But I missed that too and wasted perhaps a minute of my life reading that.

      Incidentally, I have an emotional reaction to swastikas too. Boredom. As in “Oh, another edgy neo-Nazi who would probably run for his mama if Bernie Sanders caught him painting that”. At least until recently, now it’s more like “oh, another edgy progressive pretending to be an edgy neo-Nazi, and who would run screaming to xir safe space if Bernie Sanders caught xir painting it”.

      • BBA says:

        Have there been any documented cases of leftists false-flagging swastikas? I’m aware of other false-flag incidents but swastikas fall under “you don’t even joke about this”, at least in my circles. Maybe the more extreme commies might.

        But yes, when I see a spray-painted swastika, I don’t think Kristallnacht, I think edgy kids.

        • Matt M says:

          I don’t have the link handy, but a reason.com article about this found a guy in San Francisco who flew a Nazi flag over his house. When confronted, he revealed he was a progressive Hillary supporter who was trying to make a point about Trump’s America.

        • The original Mr. X says:

          Have there been any documented cases of leftists false-flagging swastikas? I’m aware of other false-flag incidents but swastikas fall under “you don’t even joke about this”, at least in my circles. Maybe the more extreme commies might.

          Well, there’s this case; maybe not strictly speaking a false-flag operation, because the guy in question doesn’t seem to have been trying to pose as a Trump voter, but nonetheless an example of a swastika being set up by a liberal.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          @ BBA – “Have there been any documented cases of leftists false-flagging swastikas?”
          Here ya go.

          More generally, yes. Tons.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            I’ll push back on this one. You cite proof of one false flag. I followed that link, and the only hard evidence they have is video of someone who isn’t identified, let alone having any clear false-flag motive.

            Moreover, even if this one was a FFO, where are the “tons”? The most I’ve seen was an article in Reason, I think, citing a half dozen or so fabricated stories, including the “stolen hijab” incident. This is enough to be worth noticing, but I wouldn’t call it “tons”.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Paul Brinkley – Appologies. I’ve had a long week, and don’t really feel like digging through a bunch of annoying stories on google, so I just tossed out a terse low-effort reply and moved on. In retrospect, that was probably a bad idea.

            Having re-read the Philly story, I noticed that the police have stated the perp’s race is “unknown”. When I first watched the video, he sure as hell didn’t look white to me, but on further reflection it’s a low-quality shot and low-light cameras do weird things to contrast, so who knows.

            As for the tons, I used to follow those sorts of stories with a fair amount of interest, and both swastikas and nooses are employed in bids for sympathy with enough frequency that it’s now my default assumption when I hear about one of these. Ditto, for example, stuff like this. Or this, this or this. If you’d like more and can tolerate Red Tribe Assholery, there’s a reddit.

            [EDIT] – I’m expecting a major media story in the next month or so about the current wave of hoaxes, so I guess in a month or two we’ll see if I’m right. The thing is, swastikas, writing “fag” on a cake, mailing people nooses, those aren’t actually how right-wing people think, they’re how left-wing people think that right-wing people think.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            Huh. I had no idea there was a site (if only a reddit) dedicated to that. Now I know, and now I have it bookmarked in case I ever have to deep-dive on something.

            I’m glad someone has following this as a personal hobby; no doubt it was easier for you to find these than it would have been for me.

          • Jiro says:

            I’m expecting a major media story in the next month or so about the current wave of hoaxes, so I guess in a month or two we’ll see if I’m right.

            I would be surprised to see such a story (except maybe on Fox News, and even then I’m not so sure). The media isn’t exactly known for publishing things that suggest that hate crimes have been exaggerated.

  23. eh6 says:

    Hey Scott, given your predictions, I’d be happy to bet:

    against #3 at 95%, if it’s Muslim population as a proportion of the total
    for #4 at 30% for a >=%30 minority cabinet
    against #5 at 99%, if “explicitly neo-Nazi” means any group advocating white nationalism (including subsets, e.g. ethnic Swedish or ethnic Greek) as part of its core platform, such that Generation Identity and Golden Dawn would be included

    Pools of either $10 or $100 per bet are nice and round, but suggest anything. Currency preferably USD. I’m happy to send you the money and let you handle judging, since your reputation is worth much more than the stakes and since $36 ($5+$30+$1 if 3x$100 pools) isn’t a huge sum to lose anyway.

    Feel free to delete this comment if you don’t want to take the bet or if you feel it’s inappropriate.

    EDIT: also, I’m using throwaway accounts for plausible deniability, so I won’t be watching the mailinator email.

    • Anonymous Bosch says:

      I believe he said on Twitter he was going to start a separate post for people who want to accept bets.

      Does this work on an odds-as-confidence basis? Like, if Scott is 95% confident about something, is the bet at 19:1? If so I’ll probably accept bets 1, 4 (the 20% threshold), and 5. I actually think a no-bet is the most likely outcome for bet 1, there will likely be some change in hate crime methodology under a Sessions DoJ. But winning is more likely than losing, at that confidence.

  24. Nancy Lebovitz says:

    A general point: One of the tenets of SJ is to take it seriously when marginalized people talk about prejudice/systematized oppression. This is somewhat reasonable– people are more likely to notice when they’re being hurt than when someone else is being hurt.

    The problem is that SJ says (in effect) to ignore it when marginalized people say say they are *not* being hurt.

    This produces a bad ratchetting effect.

    • The Nybbler says:

      SJ also says to either ignore it or revel in it when privileged people say they are being hurt.

    • Iain says:

      The problem is that SJ says (in effect) to ignore it when marginalized people say say they are *not* being hurt.

      Can you give an example of what you mean by this?

      There are, for example, social-justicy-y people who are pro-sex-work. See, for example, this discussion of Bedford v Canada, a court case which struck down some of Canada’s anti-prostitution laws. In particular:

      The women who brought the Bedford case to the courts and their supporters argued for the decriminalization of sex work. This means removing all laws that make activities related to prostitution criminal. This position argues that sex workers should be treated the same as other self-employed workers with equal rights, responsibilities and protections under the law. Many sex worker advocacy groups consider decriminalization the most desirable option because it signals that it is legitimate work between consenting adults.

      That seems like a counter-example: a group of marginalized people say that they are not being hurt by the act of prostitution, and social-justice groups work to change the laws on their behalf.

      More centrally to your claim: there obviously has to be a balance. If you have a hundred women, and only one of them claims to be the victim of systematic sexism, then it is reasonable to dismiss her. If fifty women make the same claim, then there is probably something there, even if the other fifty are lucky enough not to experience it. I don’t know where the exact line should go. I certainly don’t want to argue that every social-justice person on the internet does a good job of balancing. I also don’t think anti-social-justice people have a particularly good track record of crunching the numbers themselves. For example: the Crying Wolf post highlights a number of cases of Jews who support Trump. Why should we consider that to be a knock-down argument that Trump’s election should not be a concern for Jews, while dismissing Jews who claim that it should? (I am deliberately avoiding the use of the word ‘antisemitic’ in the previous statement, because I think it casts more heat than light.)

      At its best, the social-justice injunction to take it seriously when marginalized people talk about their oppression is a call for epistemic humility. It is easy to forget that your experience is not universal; it is therefore beneficial to make a deliberate effort to counter-balance that bias. Certainly it is possible to take the idea too far, or use it as a weapon. But that is not a refutation of the basic idea – no more than the existence of people being snarky in the comment section is a refutation of the value of “true, necessary, and kind: pick at least two”.

      • lvlln says:

        I think Nancy’s point is the very issue of balancing you mentioned. It’s not just that social justicey people aren’t good at finding the balance by looking at the evidence, in practice, they tend to show gross disregard for finding that balance by looking at the evidence. Not just disregard, but often disdain, actually. That the very idea of finding such a balance is offensive in the face of real hurt claimed by an individual.

        For a personal anecdotal example, I’ve seen the idea that asking Asian-Americans “Where are you from?” is offensive and hurtful thrown around in SJ circles. As an Asian-American, whenever that topic comes up, I’ve said it’s not only not hurtful, it’s actually very affectionate for it shows a genuine interest in learning about me and the culture from where I originate. This has never been responded with, “Oh, I should update my belief” or “But look at this poll of Asian-Americans who disagree!” Usually it’s, “But you’re just one person,” or, at best, “I’ve heard another Asian-American say the opposite.”

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          Here’s a minor example. I’m Jewish. I don’t think the casual use of “Nazi” to mean authoritarian is in any way a problem. In fact, I like to imagine neo-Nazis grinding their teeth in aggravation at the cultural appropriation of it all.

          I’ve been told in effect that my being Jewish doesn’t give me standing to have a contrary opinion on the matter.

          • Eltargrim says:

            While my personal (non-jewish) feelings agree with yours on the use of Nazi, I’m somewhat reconsidering it on the basis of the Crying Wolf post. If we accept Scott’s thesis that the dilution of the accusation of “racist” inoculates us against actual racists, would the same pattern not emerge if Nazi-as-descriptor is used liberally? Or is the association of “Nazis are bad” stronger than that of “racists are bad”?

          • rlms says:

            How many people have a principled dislike of use of “Nazi” in a general sense, rather than a specific dislike for the term “feminazi”?

          • Iain says:

            @lvlln:
            Sure. I could also claim, with the same level of accuracy: “It’s not just that anti-social-justice-y people aren’t good at finding the balance by looking at the evidence, in practice, they tend to show gross disregard for finding that balance by looking at the evidence. Not just disregard, but often disdain, actually. That the very idea that a person could be offended or hurt by something that seems innocuous to the speaker is laughable or pathetic.” There are asshats on both sides.

            Furthermore, balancing is a difficult problem. There’s no way to objectively analyze who is right in most of these cases, and everybody is naturally going to perceive their own side as having the best of it in contentious cases. All I’m saying is that, questions of people going overboard aside, you will get closer to the truth by accepting the “SJ” tenet in question than by rejecting it. (And, furthermore, that it is possible to keep it in mind without going overboard.)

            Regarding specific examples: I think a reasonable balance on “where are you from?” is that:
            a) The question itself is pretty innocuous.
            b) Following up an answer of “San Francisco” with “No, where are you really from?” starts to get more dubious.
            c) It is reasonable for individual Asian-Americans to find it aggravating to answer the question over and over again, especially if they frequently encounter instances of b).
            d) Therefore, it is good for Asian-Americans not to bite heads off for innocent questions, but it is also good for people asking questions about origin to keep the context in mind. In cases where one person asks an innocent question and the other person is fed up and lashes out, we should have sympathy for both sides.
            Do you disagree?

            As for the Nazi thing, Nancy, I think you have the right of it, and I would strongly defend your choice to call authoritarians Nazis whenever it pleased you. On the other hand, if a different Jew told me that she found it particularly unpleasant to hear “Nazi” tossed around casually, then I would not find it onerous or unreasonable to stop using it in that context while talking to her. That just seems polite.

          • Evan Þ says:

            @Eltargrim, I’ve agreed with that argument for a while just on the basis of precision in language. “Nazi” should, at least, mean something more than “Mayor Daley-like,” or even “Pinochet-like.”

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            As I recall, I didn’t call authoritarians Nazis. I was just more comfortable in a culture where other people did.

          • lhn says:

            I wonder how much is a factor of age. As came up here previously, there’s a cultural watershed somewhere in the 1970s or so where the default cultural image of “Nazi” started to go from “authoritarian” to “obscene genocidal monster”. Not all at once, but around that time is when I recall the friction between its invocation as a comparatively casual epithet (a martinet manager might be mocked with a stiff armed salute) and the term being Serious Business.

            In the 80s, IIRC, PJ O’Rourke could still talk about regulatory nannies as “Safety Nazis”. I don’t think you’d see something like that as a new term today unless the speaker wanted to actually suggest a connection to potentially murderous bigotry.

          • Matt M says:

            “I don’t think you’d see something like that as a new term today unless the speaker wanted to express mild displeasure at someone marginally more conservative than they are.”

            fixed

          • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

            What’s different about accusations of nazism is that they were never taken seriously in the first place, save among a small coterie who themselves aren’t taken seriously. Real racism, unlike real nazism, happens often enough for us to get sensible people raising justified alarms, so it becomes a problem if too many false alarms from foolish people get mixed in.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            lhn, The Soup Nazi— a television episode about an authoritarian restaurant owner and his groveling customers– came out in 1995.

          • Chalid says:

            “Grammar Nazi” became common in the 2000s and is still common AFAIK.

          • lvlln says:

            Sure. I could also claim, with the same level of accuracy: “It’s not just that anti-social-justice-y people aren’t good at finding the balance by looking at the evidence, in practice, they tend to show gross disregard for finding that balance by looking at the evidence. Not just disregard, but often disdain, actually. That the very idea that a person could be offended or hurt by something that seems innocuous to the speaker is laughable or pathetic.” There are asshats on both sides.

            I disagree that you can say that with the same level of accuracy. Whereas a disdain for balance seems to be a central or nearly definitional trait among social justice-y folks, the same can’t be said for those that are anti-social justice-y folks.

            The reason you seem to believe something with which I disagree may be an issue with terminology, i.e. who exactly is Nancy talking about when she says “SJ?” I interpreted it, based on what she wrote, as being about SJWs, not just “people who are pro social justice.” I.e. the ones who are the loudest and most influential on the side of “social justice” at this moment.

            You might have interpreted it as just being “people who are pro social justice,” but I believe this isn’t what Nancy meant. By that definition, I am firmly a social-justice-y type, since my views on social justice issues are just about indistinguishable from most SJWs. And if Nancy were implying that people like me who were pro-SJ but anti-SJW behave in such a way, I think she’s wrong on that. I just don’t believe that’s what Nancy was saying.

            Unfortunately, the terminology surrounding these types of people seem to be ill defined and rarely agreed upon. I like to just stick with “SJW” to make clear that I’m talking about those who behave in a way that implies that they believe that they’re at war, but I know even that term has its issues.

            As for the “Where are you from?” question, I didn’t intend to start a whole discussion about it, but I agree with you 99% there (I’m not convinced that it starts getting dubious at B, but I’m open to it), and I believe that the general anti-social-justice-y person would also agree with you and the general social-justice-y person would disagree with you.

          • Randy M says:

            As for the “Where are you from?” question, I didn’t intend to start a whole discussion about it, but I agree with you 99% there (I’m not convinced that it starts getting dubious at B, but I’m open to it

            As someone with toddlers, I can’t help but empathize with hearing the same thing over and over. But as to the intent of the question, someone who looks different and has an accent probably traces their heritage back to a particular place that the questioner is not familiar with. They are trying to update their mental model of the world. There may be stereotyping going on, but human psychology loves pattern recognition, and, absent non-verbal cues otherwise, it’s counter-productive (and probably wrong) to assume any malice, or even micro-malice.

            If one doesn’t want inaccurate conclusions to be drawn, one could say “I grew up in Jersey but picked up my parents Australian accent. I don’t know much about their culture, though.”
            If you enjoy being offended, you could say “I’m from Jersey–in America. Do you think only people who speak a certain way deserve to be American, jerk?”

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            For what it’s worth, I use SJ as an adjective for grammatical reasons. I didn’t realize it could lead to confusion about who I meant.

            In some circles (maybe even here) I pass for an SJWish sort of person.

            About three months into RaceFail (2009), I concluded that anti-racism (as it was called then) was the pursuit of somewhat legitimate ends by emotionally abusive means. I still think I was right.

            Social justice is a name for a more civilized effort at inclusivness (I think) which was co-opted by SJWs. I don’t know enough about it to have strong opinions, but sometimes I distinguish between sj (the mild stuff) and SJ (the toxic stuff). This is no doubt completely unclear to anyone who’s reading what I write.

            I think part of the problem is people imprinting on emotionally traumatic experiences. Some of my reflexes date back to RaceFail, which was worse than contemporary SJW in at least one way. No, really.

            Back then, there was “Educate yourself!” In other word, anti-racists knew they were angry, but there wasn’t clear material about what they were angry about, and they were tired of answering questions. So they’d just attack anyone who didn’t know what they meant. That might be somewhat unfair, but it certainly seemed like being attacked for ignorance.

            After a while, it occurred to me that there are two kinds of people who might say “You figure out why I’m angry!”– abusers and abused people who’ve been up against someone who can’t or won’t hear it that they’ve been hurting someone.

            Anyway, lvlln, if you want to write about what you do and don’t agree with about SJW, I’m interested in reading it.

          • Iain says:

            @lvlln: This is precisely why I think the profligate use of “SJW” in this community is so damaging. You have a definition of SJW that means “people with whom I mostly agree on an object level, but whose tactics I find damaging”. Meanwhile, in a previous thread, somebody described the notion of nominating Keith Ellison, a populist Democrat from Minnesota, for head of the DNC as “SJW lunacy” because he is Muslim.

            Many of the claims made in these parts about the awfulness of social justice become much less impressive when you have to actually define your terms.

          • John Schilling says:

            lhn, The Soup Nazi— a television episode about an authoritarian restaurant owner and his groveling customers– came out in 1995.

            Roswell had it’s “Christmas Nazi” in 2001, for excessive and authoritarian zeal in arranging a perfect Norman-Rockwellish(*) Christmas for her family and friends. I’ve used “Safety Nazi” in the O’Rourkian sense fairly frequently, e.g. online in 2004, and never received any pushback.

            I’m pretty sure “[X] Nazi” is still safe and uncontroversial for any value of X that isn’t political by default.

            *Secular version, if it matters

          • The Nybbler says:

            @Nancy Lebovitz

            I’ve seen SJWs attack over a snow-clone of Soup Nazi (i.e. “Soup” was replaced with a different food item, and the SJW insisted it was insensitive to Jewish people to use the term. Whether the SJW in question knew of the Seinfeld episode I do not know)

            @Iain

            Nominating Keith Ellison might be “SJW lunacy” because one characteristic often attributed to SJWs is extreme virtue signalling; putting a Muslim in a high political position directly after the election of someone who has antipathy towards Muslims might appear to be such. I noticed that the SSC commentariat wasn’t convinced about this, however.

          • lvlln says:

            @Nancy
            I don’t want to start a whole new thing about the various issues covered under the SJ umbrella, but in generalities:

            Where I agree with SJWs:
            – I believe that the paradigm of privilege is generally a useful and accurate one by which to describe the world – society does grant unearned privilege to some people based merely by luck of what demographic they happen to fall into, whether that be race, gender, sexuality, etc.
            – I believe that, in most aspects – and the vast majority of the ones that matter – whites enjoy privilege over non-whites in US society, as well as males over non-males, heterosexuals over non-heterosexuals, cisgender folks over transgender folks.
            – I want a world in which such privilege no longer exists, and I even believe that I have an obligation to help to create that world, or at least not to perpetuate current injustices.

            Where I disagree with SJWs:
            – I believe that reasonable, unbiased, un-bigoted, un-evil, well-intentioned, highly virtuous people can disagree with me on all of the above and that disagreeing with me is no reason for them to suffer ANY social consequences whatsoever.
            – I believe that individual anecdotes are less than worthless for building an accurate model of society, because they feed our biases while adding negligible new information.
            – I believe that population proportion statistics is nowhere near enough evidence that there is any bias or oppression or anything unjust at all happening in the mechanism that produced those statistics.
            – I do not believe that there currently exists enough evidence that the model of media consumption where exposure to media that contains -ist behavior – even if it glorifies that behavior – causes individuals on the margins to do more of such -ist behavior is a true model.
            – I believe privilege needs to be analyzed in a highly context- and individual-dependent way for it to have any meaning at all. Whites may have privilege over non-whites in some (many) dimensions, while in some (few) dimensions, non-whites have privilege over whites. Furthermore, these dimensions only work when all other things are equal, and all other things are NEVER equal.

            Nowhere near exhaustive and fairly general. Again, I am pro-social justice, heavily anti-SJW. I identify as, among many things including feminist and leftist, anti-SJW. I know anti-SJW covers a wide, wide spectrum of political views, and my belief is that I probably lie somewhere on the far left side of that spectrum.

          • In the SCA, “authenticity Nazi” still gets used. Unfortunately.

          • Brad says:

            @Randy M

            As someone with toddlers, I can’t help but empathize with hearing the same thing over and over. But as to the intent of the question, someone who looks different and has an accent probably traces their heritage back to a particular place that the questioner is not familiar with. They are trying to update their mental model of the world. There may be stereotyping going on, but human psychology loves pattern recognition, and, absent non-verbal cues otherwise, it’s counter-productive (and probably wrong) to assume any malice, or even micro-malice.

            The internet famous video about this that was floating around had an Asian-American woman with no accent, or more accurately with a baseline American one.

            I’m not sure that asking someone her ethnicity is necessarily rude, though it might be in some contexts, but asking it in the form of “No, where are you really from” certainly is.

          • Randy M says:

            Accent was a stand in for obvious non-majority possessed trait.

            I’m not sure that asking someone her ethnicity is necessarily rude, though it might be in some contexts, but asking it in the form of “No, where are you really from” certainly is.

            Most people aren’t sophisticated enough to maneuver the minefields around discussing another person’s identity.
            “Rude” implies that they should know or be able to figure out the rules, though; I’m not sure that it is fair to expect Joe off the street to keep up with fresh out of academia inoffensiveness technology.

            I’ll grant that it’s uncouth to inarticulately inquire about someone’s heritage.

          • Iain says:

            The important distinction between accent and, say, epicanthic folds, is that one sends a fairly clear signal that the person you are talking to personally originated somewhere else, and the other just means that one of their ancestors did at some unspecified point in the past.

          • Brad says:

            I don’t think it takes a Phd in “academia inoffensiveness technology” to know that “No, where are you really from?” is rude. As far as I’m concerned it is right up there with asking a woman you just met how much she weighs.

            That said, while I’ve lived in a few different parts of the country, I haven’t experienced every subculture. Perhaps Mormons in northern Utah see nothing at all wrong with asking a woman how much she weighs. But if so, the onus is on them to learn the local norms when they travel or move, just as the onus would be on me to learn their norms if I went to northern Utah.

          • Randy M says:

            Iain, I could see “Where are you from?” asking either question, “Where did you grow up?” or “What people are you descended from?”

            Somewhat relevant video clip
            The Texas native’s are trying to get to know their neighbor, in an annoying and ignorant way. The new neighbor can take the opportunity to get offended, or not.

            “No, where are you really from?” is rude.

            I’d guess that the reason it is being phrased this way is that the person is curious about the race or ethnicity of the person they are asking, are afraid to say ‘race’ and the words ‘ethnicity’ and ‘culture’ aren’t ones they use frequently–more like known jargon than what pops to mind when trying to put their thoughts to words.

            As far as I’m concerned it is right up there with asking a woman you just met how much she weighs.

            Clearly you think so. If you like, you can explain why. If you do so convincingly, I might not think you are looking for ways to be offended should it come up in the future.

          • Brad says:

            Can’t say that’s a very enticing offer. You want to raise rude kids, that’s their problem.

        • “As an Asian-American, whenever that topic comes up, I’ve said it’s not only not hurtful, it’s actually very affectionate for it shows a genuine interest in learning about me and the culture from where I originate.”

          I live in an area with a lot of immigrants from a lot of places. I quite routinely ask people where they are from, sometimes get into a conversation with them about it—yesterday’s cab driver was Ethiopian, had lived in Germany and now in the U.S. Last year, when I spent some time in the Stanford medical center, I counted countries. I think the doctors and staff totaled ten, not counting the U.S.

          I don’t think I have ever gotten a hostile response, often gotten interesting conversations.

          • Polycarp says:

            I often ask people where they are from if they have an accent. I am interested in languages, and I always try to signal somehow that that is why I am asking. This has led to many interesting conversations about language and about much else. I am always a bit concerned that my question might offend, but as far as I can tell it has never had that effect.

          • carvenvisage says:

            purely for your information, it annoys me but I would never give a hostile response to it, as it’s a universal conversational topic.

            More fully: If I thought it would be better if cars were driven on the other side of the road, I wouldn’t be hostile to people who do so, because that’s not only a common norm for which people cannot be blamed, should there be anything morally objectionable about the current schelling point, it’s also a coordinating mechanism.

            Similarly, that question, being a commonly asked one, is a coordinating mechanism for conversation- people are used to answering it, to transitioning from that question into a broader conversation, to connecting with people.

            (there’s also no ethical element to my dispreference /aesthetic incompatibility)

            If someone asks, so what about that game last night? and I have no interest in the game, am just now learning there was a game of some sort on las night etc, then the person talking to me is still trying to make conversation, -in a traditionally approved fashion, so I’m not going to view this as an either an innovation or as an assertion that everyone ought to be interested in [insert sport]. (though on occasion it turns it be)

            (the football question is also arguably more forward, as it’s assuming an interest exists in the other party, rather than expressing an interest of one’s own)

    • keranih says:

      I’d go a step further and say that the problem is not encouraging people to speak up when – for a classic example – someone steps on their foot in the subway. (*)

      It’s the automatic assumption of malice on part of the specific stepper, plus all other people who walk, against people sitting down. This assumption of malice and of intent to harm is then spread against all people who walk.

      So instead of the harm being a marginal/accidental side effect of a purposeful behavior aimed at some benign/beneficial goal, the foot-stepping is made out to be what it is not – a deliberate hurtful action. And of course, the suggestion that maybe people sitting down pay attention to people moving around and draw their clodhoppers out of the general way is another oppression.

      (*) “Bearing the minor slings and arrows of life with cheer and fortitude” does seem a lost cause in the SJ world, though.

      And now I’m wondering if this example is so frustrating to me, because I’m from the South, where we don’t even really honk horns at people that much, and I’ve only ridden subways or trains when I am out among heathens. I get the impression that in the NE seaboard, everyone, of all social classes, might be okay with people yelling “get off my foot, you oaf” at each other.

      So the idea that yelling “you stepped on my foot, stop it” isn’t actually, you know, a personal attack, isn’t native to me.

      (And it’s odd, because I recognized quite a lot of the White Privilege Knapsack idea to be highly regional/culturally dependent when I first came across the concept, but never thought that much about the “stop stepping on my feet” complaint.)

      (Still not sure if I’m right.)

  25. JRM says:

    Re: Trump.

    The Curiel thing was racist, and severely so. The birtherism was kinda racist.

    That said: I have mad respect for our host, who I think has made an error in opposition to his general views. I also think the thrust of the post is right: It’s not the grabbing or other dumb things we ought to worry about, but rather the millions of people in the Baltic states who may die if we roll a two. If we roll a one, instadeath.

    No es bueno.

    • shakeddown says:

      Was the Curiel thing racist? I’m an immigrant, and I wouldn’t be offended if Trump said that I wouldn’t judge him fairly because of his anti-immigration rhetoric. It seems like a perfectly reasonable concern – I know judges are supposed to be objective, but so are police officers, and I don’t think it’s crazy or racist to imply that they can be racially biased.

      Re: birtherism. I’ve been here four years now, and I’m just starting to understand American racial politics enough to see why it’s considered racist. Trump is remarkably socially oblivious in a lot of ways – I can easily imagine him hearing a rumor spread by an explicit racist that a president he disliked was foreign-born, and pushing it really hard without understanding the context. He has a history of doing things like this, like when he said America should default on the debt like a casino.

      • Iain says:

        Trump pushed birtherism for years. At some point, you lose the benefit of the doubt. At the very least, we know that Trump loves reading about himself in the media.

        And again, I’m not sure why minorities should feel reassured by “Trump isn’t deliberately racist! He’s just stupid and clueless and keeps supporting racist ideas by accident!”

        • BBA says:

          Nobody should feel reassured. It’s just that for typical unwoke white people, there’s juuuust enough plausible deniability that “OMG HE’S A RACIST!!!” is a losing argument. Focus on some other way to attack him, god knows he’s got a bigger attack surface than an unpatched copy of Windows ME.

          • Urstoff says:

            Haha, that’s exactly it. Giving him every benefit of the doubt and steelmanning every last thing he says, he might not be racist but instead just be a bottomless well of terrible ideas. However, that’s just treating each statement or action in isolation. When you start piling them on (Curiel, Bannon, Birtherism, rapist Mexicans, build the wall, housing discrimination, black accountants, etc.), him not being racist starts to seem dubious.

            This is a separate issue from whether voting for Trump means you are racist. I don’t think racism is like cooties, so whether Trump is or is not racist (and he probably is), calling all Trump voters racists or even saying he was elected because of racism is not warranted.

          • Jiro says:

            However, that’s just treating each statement or action in isolation. When you start piling them on (Curiel, Bannon, Birtherism, rapist Mexicans, build the wall, housing discrimination, black accountants, etc.), him not being racist starts to seem dubious.

            I think you missed the point of Scott’s post. If someone is creating a theory by cobbling together lots of bits of poor evidence, refuting it is going to look like treating each statement in isolation.

          • BBA says:

            I think it’s quite possible that Trump is not guilty of racism under the M’Naghten rule – he is incapable of distinguishing right from wrong. Of course, this would be much more frightening than him being an actual out-and-proud racist.

          • Urstoff says:

            I think you missed the point of Scott’s post. If someone is creating a theory by cobbling together lots of bits of poor evidence, refuting it is going to look like treating each statement in isolation.

            It’s not poor evidence, it just weakly supports the proposition that he’s racist. We obviously can’t get inside his head, but when there are 10+ instances where either he’s racist (because it’s something a racist would do) or holds a particularly nuanced view (not something Trump is known for), the best explanation for the fact that there are so many instances of potential racism is that he’s racist. Taking each in turn and saying that there’s an interpretation of his action in which he’s not racist doesn’t address the fact that there are so many of these instances where he might be racist.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        What people are missing about the Curiel thing is that it is a de facto admission by Trump that he knows his proposals are offensive to Mexicans and anyone who has Mexican heritage.

        “I’m building a wall. He’s Mexican.” This is the entirety of his reasoning for wanting Curiel removed from his case.

        This is Trump announcing in big, bold letters that he is trying and succeeding in offending those who can trace their heritage to Mexico. Otherwise, why would Curiel need to be removed from the case?

        • Well... says:

          This is Trump announcing in big, bold letters that he is trying and succeeding in offending those who can trace their heritage to Mexico.

          I don’t think that’s a logical conclusion. What Trump announced in big bold letters was that he knew a lot of people of Mexican heritage were offended by his proposals. It doesn’t mean he made those proposals because he wanted to offend those people. Sometimes you make a proposal that you know is going to offend a group of people, but you make it anyway because you believe it’s a good proposal, or that there are benefits of making the proposal that outweigh offending that group of people.

          If Trump could have proposed to build a wall and deport illegals without offending a single Mexican-American, do you think he still would have made that proposal? I do.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Trump posits that any judge of Mexican heritage would be unable to properly adjudicate his case.

            That is the complete opposite end of not offending a single “Mexican”. Trump believes that every person of Mexican heritage should automatically be assumed to harbor prejudice against him.

          • Deiseach says:

            Trump believes that every person of Mexican heritage should automatically be assumed to harbor prejudice against him.

            Wasn’t that part of the Clinton/her supporters campaign? If you’re a minority, how can you vote for Trump? Look at all the racist things he’s said, look how he’s said he’s going to build a wall, that’s going to directly affect you and your families, how can you possibly have any other opinion about him than that he’s a racist and a fascist and someone who will round you all up and deport you in the morning?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Deiseach:
            Trump says many offensive, demeaning and dehumanizing things.
            Trump proves that he thinks those things are offensive.

            In what way does Hillary pointing out that those things are offensive change the truth that they are offensive?

            In addition, his argument was not “HRC has poisoned the well”. His argument was “I’m building a wall. He’s Mexican.”

            This is such bizarre bullshit. Everyone is trying to litigate whether Trump falls just on the other side of an arbitrary line as if somehow falling just short of it makes everything peachy.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            Part of the reaction against Trump was that Curiel is an American with Mexican parents.

          • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

            HBC is changing the argument here from “Trump’s statement about Curiel was racist” to “Trump’s statements about building a wall were racist”.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Cerebral Paul Z:
            I have not used the word racist. And I have done that intentionally.

          • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

            I stand corrected: HBC is trying to change the subject entirely. Since Scott’s article was specifically about accusations of racism and stipulated to Trump’s other flaws (which most of us seem to agree on as well), I expect the attempt will fall flat.

          • Deiseach says:

            In what way does Hillary pointing out that those things are offensive change the truth that they are offensive?

            Because it was “Look! He’s said terrible things about your ethnicity and culture! Aren’t you outraged? If so, vote for me! If not, why are you not outraged?”

            Trump probably was trying to pull something to get a more favourable judge or some other legal trickery. It was crappy to do it based on “I can’t get a fair shake from this guy because….”, but it was the same reasoning as “Why aren’t you outraged at his insults?”

            The idea being that you would not sit down and examine the case for Trump on its merits, the idea being it was open-and-shut: he said nasty things about Mexicans, I’m Mexican, that’s it I hate him and all he stands for (so I won’t consider his policies/his case on their merits or lack of it, but based on my ethnic loyalties). Curiel-the-judge was supposed to be able to separate out the law case and the man in it, Curiel-the-voter is being appealed to on the basis of his ethnicity and his presumed loyalty to it and opposition to anyone who insults it.

            I agree you can campaign by appealing to voters on “My opponent thinks you’re all maroons” but it’s disingenuous to then turn around and say “But just because you know he thinks you’re a maroon, it won’t have any affect on you”.

            I do think the judge should be presumed to be able to rule according to the law and not bias, but then again, that would mean lawyers couldn’t challenge a jury based on “this potential juror is a fifty year old married white woman, she’s going to be prejudiced against my eighteen year old black male client”.

            tl, dr: Trump shouldn’t have said that about a judge, but he shouldn’t have said that about any judge, he should have let his shyster do all the quackery on his behalf. Minority-ethnicity appeals to voters can’t be assumed to have no effect unless we’re expecting everyone to compartmentalise every area of their lives, and the progressive call to action is based on “but you can’t compartmentalise, being black/latino/asian/trans/whatever affects every part of your life and it’s White Privilege to demand calm, ‘rational’ discourse and impartial logic from a person so affected”.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Cerebral Paul Z:
            I assume you are familiar with tabooing a term.

            @Deiseach:
            You are not addressing my point at all. Trump’s argument posits that the mere fact that he is building a wall should be enough to presume bias towards him on the part of anyone of Mexican heritage.

            Leaving aside any questions of voter strategy, or lawyer strategy, or who “should” have said what, we have this piece of evidence of Trump’s thought process spoken though his own lips, repeatedly. He was challenged on the statement multiple times in order that he be clearly understood.

            We can even disregard whether Trump actually thought Curiel would be unbiased. All that matters is that Trump thinks that the broad audience will agree that Curiel should be presumed to be biased.

            (As an aside, I am relatively confident that you cannot strike an individual juror for the reason you cited. A lawyer might strike someone for that reason, but they can’t make that argument. The challenge used will be peremptory).

          • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

            I know about tabooing words but I don’t think it answers the need here. What many of us are arguing is that the objectionable parts of Trump’s conduct in these incidents don’t appear to have anything to do with race at all. Again, the assumption that Hispanics have an animus against Trump is all but universal. Where Trump made a huge jerk of himself was assuming that this animus would be enough to make Curiel violate the most sacred obligation of his office. But there’s no evidence that that further assumption was based on any belief about Hispanics’ unusual grudge-holding ability or lack of judicial temperament; most likely he was projecting his own famous vindictiveness onto the judge.

            If we’re right about this, it’s not sufficient to taboo the word “racist”– we need to taboo the subject matter.

          • Matt M says:

            “most likely he was projecting his own famous vindictiveness onto the judge.”

            Honestly, it’s not even this.

            It was an obviously intentional strategy to cast doubt upon a judge that was presiding over his case. From a legal perspective, it seems like an obviously good idea – especially if your case is weak (as many insist his is). If you have ANY means to pre-emptively cast doubt on the eventual verdict why WOULDN’T you do that?

            Like, if you get pulled over and ticketed by a police officer who is a different race than you and your only options are “say nothing and pay your ticket” or “go to court and claim the officer was racially prejudiced against you” then why wouldn’t you bother at least giving it a try?

            Trump didn’t do this because he’s a huge jerk who hates Mexicans – he did it to help increase his odds of winning an appeal on his legal case.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Cerebral Paul Z:

            Again, the assumption that Hispanics have an animus against Trump is all but universal.

            Again, (why do I have to keep making this point) it is Trump’s own reasoning for the source of that animus that matters.

            He assumes that “building a wall” is inherently objectionable to anyone who is Mexican. His words and his reasoning. This is Trump trying to convince people of the correctness of his position. The fact that you want to disengage from this example should tell you something.

            Otherwise your position seems to be “I am losing this argument therefore I think it should be off limits”.

          • Matt M says:

            “He assumes that “building a wall” is inherently objectionable to anyone who is Mexican. ”

            You seem to be treating this as “Trump admits to being racist” and I’m not sure that’s fair.

            How about an analogy? Imagine you’re falsely accused of murder. One of the potential jurors witnessed their parents being murdered at age 10. Your lawyer asks for that juror to be removed under the premise that they may be biased against you.

            Is that unreasonable bigotry against people whose families were murdered? Are you admitting guilt by suggesting that someone who hates murderers might hate you?

            No – you’re entertaining the possibility that said person might have a personal reason to judge you differently than a regular person wholly uninvolved with murder. It’s a reasonable thing that every sane accused criminal and defense attorney would do and nobody would begrudge them of that.

            But when Trump does it, it’s either direct evidence of bigotry in and of itself, and/or an admission that his past behavior was totally bigoted (otherwise why would this guy be a problem?)

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Matt M:
            Taboo the word racist. I’m not interested in debating the definition of racist, and that is all that happens (especially here) when the word is used.

            Your analogy implies that Trump has done something to Curiel or Curiel’s parents. What do you think he has done to Curiel or his parents?

          • Matt M says:

            “Your analogy implies that Trump has done something to Curiel or Curiel’s parents.”

            No it doesn’t.

            The question of whether Trump’s prior statements were actually offensive to hispanics is up for debate – with Trump presumably suggesting that they are not. Some think they were, some think they weren’t.

            Trump is saying “my statements weren’t offensive, but it’s clear some hispanics took offense anyway, therefore I don’t want hispanics judging me” just like the accused murderer says “I didn’t kill anyone, but nonetheless, I’d rather not have a juror who may be predisposed to judge accused murderers harshly”

          • The original Mr. X says:

            He assumes that “building a wall” is inherently objectionable to anyone who is Mexican.

            Not necessarily. He might be assuming, for example, that building a wall isn’t inherently objectionable to Mexicans, but that the press have spent so much time and effort using it as proof of his alleged anti-Hispanic bigotry that a large proportion of Mexicans will (falsely) think that the wall thing proves that he’s a racist. Or, he might be assuming that building a wall isn’t inherently objectionable, but that lots of Hispanics are going to object to it anyway.

          • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

            He assumes that “building a wall” is inherently objectionable to anyone who is Mexican. His words and his reasoning. This is Trump trying to convince people of the correctness of his position.

            Wait, you’re claiming Trump has said he wants to build a wall for the purpose of offending Mexicans? That’s a good deal sillier than the argument I thought you were making.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Matt M:
            If Trump’s words weren’t actually offensive to hispanics, why would Trump think that Curiel could not be objective based on the mere fact of his ancestry?

            @The original Mr. X:
            Again, his own words were “I’m building a wall. He’s Mexican.”

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Cerebral:
            Are you being deliberately obtuse here? C’mon man.

          • Matt M says:

            “If Trump’s words weren’t actually offensive to hispanics”

            This is the matter in dispute – and Trump knows it.

            I assume Trump’s position is that his words are not (or at least should not be) offensive to Hispanics.

            But it’s clear that there exist some amount of hispanics (possibly even approaching a majority) who think that his words are offensive to them. The overwhelming majority of the media has also uncritically reported this to be the case.

            Trump’s position can very well be “I don’t think my words were offensive but it’s clear some hispanics do therefore I’d prefer not to have a hispanic judge” just like the accused murderer can say “I didn’t murder anyone yet I’d still rather not have a juror who is more likely to hate murderers than the average person”

          • The original Mr. X says:

            @The original Mr. X:
            Again, his own words were “I’m building a wall. He’s Mexican.”

            …So?

            Saying that a lot of Mexicans are offended by his wall-building proposal doesn’t amount to saying that they’re justified in feeling offended, still less that the wall-building proposal was put forward for the purpose of offending them.

        • Randy M says:

          No, it is Trump making clear he knows that there is a trade-off between the interests of his country and the interests of those who identify moreso with Mexico.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Randy M:

            No, it is Trump making clear he knows that there is a trade-off between the interests of his country and the interests of those who identify moreso with Mexico.

            He provided no evidence or reasoning that Curiel “identified moreso with Mexico” other than the fact that he had Mexican heritage.

            Curiel’s country is the United States of America. I don’t know why you would presume he has less of an interest in the success of America than Trump. I presume you didn’t intend to imply that Curiel was somehow less American than Trump, nonetheless the implication sits there.

          • Randy M says:

            This was what I was responding to (emphasis mine):

            “I’m building a wall. He’s Mexican.” This is the entirety of his reasoning for wanting Curiel removed from his case.

            This is Trump announcing in big, bold letters that he is trying and succeeding in offending those who can trace their heritage to Mexico.

            Trump’s wall isn’t trying to offend Mexicans, but that may be a side effect.

            Assuming Curiel would react negatively to this because he has mexican heritage may well be racist in the sense of stereotyping recent immigrants (or 2nd generation, etc.) as caring about their prior homeland, but in the same way as assuming that they will vote against Republicans because Republicans don’t want easy immigration from Mexico is stereotyping them and thus assuming they are less American, etc. as you said.

            (That’s one convoluted sentence, I know…)

          • Evan Þ says:

            Plus, as he or his supporters pointed out at the time, Curiel is a member of a Hispanic judges’ group – which says he at least identifies with people of Mexican heritage to some degree.

            (Yes, still a huge difference.)

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Matt M:

            Trump assumes that he will most likely have offended anyone who is of Mexican heritage. That is baked into his statement.

            When I said “trying to” offend, I meant it in the sense of not attempting to ameliorate the offense he believes he is giving. The offense that he believes is inevitable. If you object to that framing, that’s fine.

            He caused offense knowing full well he was doing so.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Evan Þ:
            No one is questioning that Curiel is of Mexican heritage and embraces it.

            Again, why should that bias him against Trump? Why would Trump say it should be presumed to bias him? Why does Trump think the fact he is proposing a wall should be presumed to bias anyone proud of Mexican heritage against him?

          • Randy M says:

            … so?

            I disagree about allowing offense to be taken as some great character flaw. Not terrific diplomacy, perhaps. But feelings are not the end goal of policy.

            Also, knowing someone is going to take offense isn’t the same as believing that their feelings are legitimate.

          • Evan Þ says:

            @HeelBearCub, as Scott said, when the media’s been chanting “IDENTITY POLITICS” for years and someone on the right finally joins in, don’t you have a good guess where they got it from? Hasn’t the media been repeating the same syllogism about Trump, walls, and Hispanics? I’m not saying that Trump believes it to be the case, or that a majority of Hispanics do… but there’s a chance, and enough of a chance that I can see why Trump would’ve asked for a new judge.

            (Yes, I would’ve advised against it if I were Trump’s lawyer. Yes, Trump could’ve been clearer. What else is new?)

          • Matt M says:

            “Yes, I would’ve advised against it if I were Trump’s lawyer. ”

            May I ask why? What does he have to lose?

          • Evan Þ says:

            @Matt – biasing the judge against him even more, on the basis of personal attacks that were highly unlikely to actually get another judge assigned to the case.

            (Yes, Curiel will probably do his best to set aside his bias and give Trump a fair trial. But it’s still worth it to try to be nice to him.)

          • Matt M says:

            But I thought we were operating under the premise that the judge was a total professional and would be fair and free of all bias?

            I think a lot of it depends on the strength of the case. My guess is that Trump’s lawyers said “you are probably going to lose this” so he threw out a hail mary.

            How do you feel about coaches in sports “working the refs.” That’s basically what Trump was doing here.

          • Spookykou says:

            My understanding is that judges are not free of bias at all and Lawyers try very hard not to offend judges, even in clear situations where the judge has a conflict of interest, you want to present that opinion to the judge polity, because if they disagree, you now have to go through trial with a judge you might have pissed off. I think the whole ‘judges are holier than thou’ thing is not a belief held by lawyers and is mostly popular fiction.

            Anecdote, this is almost word for word what a Lawyer I know said about why it was a stupid thing to do regardless of motivation.

      • Earthly Knight says:

        I know judges are supposed to be objective, but so are police officers, and I don’t think it’s crazy or racist to imply that they can be racially biased.

        Note the important difference between saying of a class of people that they tend to be biased against members of other races and saying of an individual that he is biased because of his race.

        Compare:
        “White police officers tend to treat hispanic suspects more harshly than they treat white suspects.”
        “That cop treated me unfairly because he’s white and I’m hispanic.”

        Or:
        “Female judges tend to be biased against male defendants.”
        “That judge was biased against me because she’s a woman.”

        Or:
        “Jewish journalists hold Palestinians to a different standard than they hold Israelis.”
        “That journalist holds Palestinians to a different standard than he holds Israelis because he’s jewish.”

        (Both statements in the last pair strike me as offensive, but the latter clearly more so).

        • Well... says:

          I think if I were Curiel, Trump’s statements would offend me as a professional judge, not as a person of Mexican extraction. “I’m a professional judge! Putting my personal biases aside and attempting to decide a case fairly based on the relevant facts presented is the bread and butter of what I do for a living!” I might bellow. But I’d also understand if a lot of people find that hard to understand or believe.

        • Well... says:

          PS. Curious why the last two statements strike you as offensive. Do you think journalists have some special ability to be unbiased? Do Jewish journalists? Or is it because you feel like the statement is disregarding all the Jewish journalists who consistently take the Palestinians’ side?

          I ask because I’ve never noticed journalists–Jewish or otherwise–having any such ability. A journalist’s only peculiar talent, so far as I can tell, is for writing narratives in ways that most 3rd graders can understand, and doing so on tight deadlines.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            Well, the hope was that in reading each pair of sentences you would have the linguistic intuition that the second sentence was substantially more offensive than the first. I expect that people without acquired racism-blindness will indeed have the intuition that it’s offensive to say that an individual can’t properly carry out their professional duties because they’re a woman, or because they’re jewish, or because they’re white. This suggests that shakedown’s analogy between “white cops tend to treat black suspects unfairly” and Trump’s attack on Curiel fails, as the former refers to a statistical trend among a large group of people, while the latter accuses a specific person of being racially unfit.

          • Well... says:

            I understood what you were trying to say. I’m saying this:

            By default, I expect a judge to be able to put aside his personal biases.* If a judge is accused of not being able to do so, he should be offended as a professional judge, not as whatever identity is being tied to his alleged bias. Same goes for a cop.

            But with journalists I have no such default expectation of them being able to put aside their personal biases. Do you? And if so, why?

            *This doesn’t mean I expect a professional judge not to have any personal biases. Trump apparently didn’t either. You’re calling him racist for expecting a judge to have personal biases; I’m calling him uncharitable for expecting a judge to be unable to put aside his personal biases. (Though likely Trump figured there was some likelihood Curiel would be able to put aside his personal biases, but he wanted to maximize his odds by getting a different judge without that obvious potential source for bias.)

          • Earthly Knight says:

            No, I’m calling him racist because he said a judge was treating him unfairly because the judge was a mexican. This is, as the congressman said, the textbook definition of a racist comment.

          • Matt M says:

            “I’m calling him uncharitable for expecting a judge to be unable to put aside his personal biases. ”

            I’d just like to say that I agree with this 100%.

            I think Trump did in fact make a rather crude personal attack on Curiel that is a bit distasteful, but what he attacked was Curiel’s ability to properly do his job as a judge – not his identity as a hispanic man.

            This incident is a good piece of evidence that Trump is a boorish jerk, but a poor piece of evidence that he is “openly racist”

          • Aapje says:

            @Earthly Knigh

            Do you believe that no Mexicans have a bias towards Mexicans?

            Note that this is a choice between making an absurd statement vs proving yourself a hypocrite.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            Try asking the question at a level of generality that makes sense. Are you asking whether hispanic judges tend to show favoritism towards hispanic defendants or hispanic plaintiffs that appear before them? I don’t know for sure, but given what we know about white and black judges, probably not.

          • Aapje says:

            That is counter-intuitive, as I believe that it is the other way around for the non-judge population.

            If someone honestly believes that judges act like other people, which doesn’t seem like a weird assumption in the absence of evidence (I’m assuming that Trump isn’t aware of that study, like I wasn’t), then do you still consider it racist?

            If so, do you consider it more racist than believing that non-judges give preference to their own group?

          • Earthly Knight says:

            You seem to be ignoring the distinction I pointed out above between saying that a group of professionals tend to be biased against members of other races, and saying of an individual that he is biased because of his race. It’s okay (although apparently false) to assert that black judges tend to biased in favor of black defendants or white judges in favor of white defendants, but it’s racist to say that a particular judge is biased against you because he’s black.

          • Aapje says:

            @EK,

            I agree that it is stereotyping and not OK, but it is a very common error by humans to assume that statistical group characteristics hold for each individual within that group, also when the group is not defined by a born trait, but something else (like people who like games).

            In those cases we don’t disqualify these people by using a word that has such strong connotations of the person being inherently evil.

            So I prefer to limit the accusation of racism to people who believe that one group of people is better than another group of (differently colored) people.

    • Well... says:

      The Curiel thing was racist, and severely so. The birtherism was kinda racist.

      It’d be cool if you stated your reasoning here, because neither of those points are obvious to me.

      I totally get why people thought those things were racist. But that’s the same as how I totally get why a lot of people think Starbucks is really high quality coffee.

      So here’s why the Curiel thing wasn’t obviously racist to me:

      Trump of course knew that some of his campaign promises about immigration had offended lots of Hispanics. He knew that Curiel was likely to be one of those offended Hispanics (for more reasons than just that Curiel was himself of Mexican extraction). So Trump used it as a reason to say Curiel wouldn’t judge his case fairly.

      It’s in the same class of reasons why cases will change venue: to neutralize some of the likely bias about the defendant that’s swirling around in the courtroom. In this instance, it was a severely weak legal play by Trump, but it wasn’t a severely racist one. At least not in any obvious way, to me.

      Here’s why birtherism isn’t obviously racist to me:

      The birther argument was that Obama was actually born in Kenya as a non-US citizen, and therefore was ineligible to serve as president. Opinions about whether not being born a US citizen ought to disqualify one for the highest elected US office are irrelevant to the birther argument, which merely sought to use this law as a technicality to keep Obama out of office. Even if the desire to keep Obama out of office was based on racism, the birther argument itself doesn’t have anything to do with race: a 100% non-racist Obama opponent (if you can’t imagine a real one, then imagine a hypothetical one) could pick up the birther argument and use it to oppose Obama.

      • shakeddown says:

        I’m more ambiguous on the birther argument:
        For the first one, it seems like Obama was targeted with birtherism mostly due to looking/seeming foreign (Foreign name, non-white). I’m not usually inclined to believe things are motivated by racial coding, but there seems to be a reasonably strong case for this.
        Regarding the second part of your argument: Assume that a significant number of people were making the explicitly racist argument that Obama couldn’t be a good president because he was black. Would a non-racist republican who opposed Obama on policy alone join in on this?
        I can imagine he would, if he thought it was a good attack vector, but only if he was ambiguous on racism – I can’t imagine anyone who genuinely believes in fighting racism seizing on an overtly racist method of attack unless he felt he had no alternative (and there were republican criticisms of Obama that had nothing to do with birtherism, so that doesn’t apply).
        It seems like in this case, the racism is ambiguous enough that Trump’s generic social insensitivity and lack of ability to admit error give him plausible deniability on being motivated by racism (though I do think it’s evidence that he just doesn’t care about racial issues).

        • Well... says:

          It seems like in this case, the racism is ambiguous enough that Trump’s generic social insensitivity and lack of ability to admit error give him plausible deniability on being motivated by racism (though I do think it’s evidence that he just doesn’t care about racial issues).

          That’s pretty close to what I think as well.

          Trump got a lot of positive reinforcement throughout his campaign from saying edgy things. Birtherism has a distinctly edgy feel to it, so he picked it up and put it in his toolbox.

          • Iain says:

            This doesn’t make sense, because he was pushing birtherism in 2011. Here’s a list of Trump quotes supporting birtherism; only the last two are from after he announced his candidacy. (The link is to ThinkProgress; feel free to skip the preamble and scroll down to the quotes.) Note that all of these quotes are from after Obama had released both the short-form and long-form versions of his birth certificate.

          • Matt M says:

            Birtherism was plenty edgy during Obama’s presidency.

            It’s also worth noting that in Trump’s version of events – his involvement was the thing that finally got Obama to agree to release his actual birth certificate thus conclusively ending the issue.

            A significant achievement and a clear example of Trump solving problems, getting things done, and successfully conducting a negotiation that the GOP establishment failed at for years!

          • Well... says:

            @Iain:

            I rescind part, but not all, of my argument based on what you said.

            See my comment on our parallel conversation further upthread: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/open-thread-62-75/#comment-435781

          • Deiseach says:

            I suppose the only test as to whether “Birtherism” is racist or not is to see if a white candidate in a similar situation was ever hit with cries of “show us your birth certificate to prove you’re eligible/an American citizen!”

            Has there ever been an American candidate for political office whose citizenship was ambiguous, who was white, and who wasn’t rebuked by their opponents for this? Any examples? No because there aren’t any such cases?

          • Iain says:

            John McCain was born on an army base in Panama, putting him in a similar spot vis-a-vis “natural-born” as Ted Cruz. Obama never brought it up against him, and Democrats in the Senate (especially Claire McCaskill) were involved in the effort to clear up the confusion. It was a non-binding resolution, because an actual fix would have required a constitutional amendment, but I think there is sufficient difference between “rebuking their opponents” and “sponsoring a resolution in defence of the presidential nominee of the other party” to prove my point.

    • ThirteenthLetter says:

      > The birtherism was kinda racist.

      Nah, and I’ll tell you why.

      There’s a certain strand of magical thinking on both sides of the aisle, where the attitude is “we just need this one legal thing to happen just right, and our evil opponent will be instantly disqualified and disappear, and we win!” Birtherism is pretty much the perfect example on the right: this Obama guy is popular and has the media backing him and our party is in the trash right now, but there’s this magic sword hidden in the records office in Honolulu, and if Frodo can get it he can beat Voldemort with one good swing! And a non-Obama example would be Republicans who thought that the FBI was going to indict Hillary Clinton. On the left, one might proffer all the people frantically advocating a revolt in the Electoral College right now, or the wild, insane theories about voting machines being hacked.

      When the voters incomprehensibly refuse to vote the right way, the temptation to find some instant way around them is very hard to resist. It’s worth resisting, though, as all it actually does is give you a seductive excuse to avoid doing the hard work. There is no way that years of flirting with Birtherism helped the GOP, and there is no way that wailing about voting machines or doxxing EC members is going to help the Democrats.

      • Earthly Knight says:

        There is no way that years of flirting with Birtherism helped the GOP,

        How can you say this with a straight face, when the republicans control both houses of congress and the most prominent birther of all is slated to become our next president? Obviously, spreading insane lies about your opponents is a winning strategy. The democrats should never have listened to the people who advised them to be calm, rational, or measured. The American people want paranoid delusions, give them paranoid delusions.

        • suntzuanime says:

          Obviously, spreading insane lies about your opponents is a winning strategy.

          How can you say this with a straight face, when the republicans control both houses of congress and the most prominent birther of all is slated to become our next president?

        • Deiseach says:

          The democrats should never have listened to the people who advised them to be calm, rational, or measured. The American people want paranoid delusions, give them paranoid delusions.

          The Democrats gave the American people “Pepe the Frog – Nazi!” warnings. How did that work out for them in the greater scheme of things?

          When your campaign is reduced to stoking fears about a cartoon frog, it begins to look less like “calm, rational and measured” and more like “Sky! Falling! Unless vote for us!”

          This is like the Clinton-supporting response to why all these white women voted for Trump explaining it as self-hatred and internalised misogyny and being influenced by their fathers and husbands. Because the poor little women can’t think for themselves, you see, their brains have been washed by society and the male influences in their lives. Also, the reason Hillary isn’t president is because SEXISM! because men think women can’t think for themselves, you see.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            The Democrats gave the American people “Pepe the Frog – Nazi!” warnings. How did that work out for them in the greater scheme of things?

            Okay, but is it actually false that pepe is commonly used by hate groups? I saw him all the time over at the Donald Trump subreddit, in between calls to exterminate various minorities and dire warnings that brown men are coming to rape all of the white women.

            This is like the Clinton-supporting response to why all these white women voted for Trump explaining it as self-hatred and internalised misogyny and being influenced by their fathers and husbands.

            From talking with some of the commenters here, it appears that a fair number of female Trump voters have had to convince themselves that the women accusing Trump of sexual assault might all be liars or part of some elaborate conspiracy in order to rationalize voting for him. That looks an awful lot like stockholm syndrome to me.

          • Deiseach says:

            Earthly Knight, we’ve had two women presidents in Ireland. Granted, the position is more ceremonial figurehead of state than the active political role it is in the USA.

            However, my point is this: I didn’t vote for one of them and I did vote for the other.

            I didn’t vote for one, even though she was going for FIRST FEMALE PRESIDENT, not out of sexism or Stockholm Syndrome but because I didn’t like her, didn’t like her politics, didn’t agree with the views she held on certain topics, and didn’t want her representing the country as president. Also, I got the same whiff of claw-out-your-eyeballs ambition from her as from Hillary, but that’s by the way.

            I did vote for the second one (even though again there were views I didn’t agree with on certain topics) because this time round I thought she was okay for the job.

            There are probably a lot of women in the USA who’d be happy to vote for the first female president. They just don’t want that to be Hillary.

            I’ve quoted this New York Times breast-beating before, but really now, come on:

            54% of all female voters voted for Hillary – perfectly normal result, nothing to comment on here

            53% of all male voters voted for Trump – SEXISM! Only explanation why they didn’t vote for a woman!

            Expecting all members of one gender to vote for a candidate based solely or primarily on shared gender is either sexism or it’s not sexism. It cannot be “sexism for thee but not for me”.

            Expecting all women to vote for Hillary and berating the “white women traitors to the sisterhood”/Stockholm Syndrome/”white women chose power over feminist solidarity with black women” is hypocrisy, to be blunt about it.

            Vote for X because she’s a woman is just as sexist an appeal as vote for Y because he’s a man.

          • bean says:

            Vote for X because she’s a woman is just as sexist an appeal as vote for Y because he’s a man.

            Well said. Of course, this is generalizable to any trait that isn’t directly related to policy. Yes, including race.

          • DrBeat says:

            Okay, but is it actually false that pepe is commonly used by hate groups?

            It is not false, but only in the sense that “hate groups regularly use adjectives and prepositions” is not false — it ascribes unique significance to one group’s usage of a thing that is ubiquitous. And rare Pepes are ubiquitous among people who identify with the culture of the Internet itself, in the same fashion as image macros, rage comics, and advice animals.

          • CatCube says:

            My favorite rebuttal to the notion that women are obligated to vote for Clinton because she’d be the first female president is that she’d “accomplish” being the first female president in the first second of her presidency, then be Hillary Clinton for the remaining 126,143,999 seconds.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            @ Dieseach

            I said that a lot of female Trump voters sound like they have stockholm syndrome because I’ve witnessed them going through ludicrous contortions to persuade themselves that Trump isn’t really a sexual predator despite the fairly overwhelming evidence that he is. I don’t know why you’re talking about Hillary, I don’t think women are obligated to vote for female politicians or whatever the hell tangent it is you went off on.

            @ Dr Beat

            It is not false, but only in the sense that “hate groups regularly use adjectives and prepositions” is not false — it ascribes unique significance to one group’s usage of a thing that is ubiquitous. And rare Pepes are ubiquitous among people who identify with the culture of the Internet itself, in the same fashion as image macros, rage comics, and advice animals.

            I’m guessing that the proportion of all pepes transmitted by hate groups is much higher than the proportion of all prepositions used by hate groups. I mean, the swastika is commonly used as a religious symbol in south asia, does that mean it’s be foolish to associate it with racism?

          • Deiseach says:

            I don’t think women are obligated to vote for female politicians or whatever the hell tangent it is you went off on.

            Earthly Knight, you’re wiggling. That ‘tangent’ was demonstrating the blindness on the pro-Hillary side that expected women en bloc to vote for her and saw nothing unusual in campaigning on “women, vote for a woman because she’s a woman!” but which then jumped onto the “men voted for Trump because of sexism” explanation, despite the fact that a slightly larger proportion (54% as against 53%) of one gender voted for a person of their own gender and that was not to be considered sexism.

            Either voting (or not voting) for someone based on gender is sexism or not; it’s not a “it’s sexism if you do it but not if I do it” thing.

            Explaining women voting for Trump as Stockholm Syndrome is as much sexism as saying men voted for Trump because of sexism.

            The women who voted for Trump all had their reasons, which can’t be conveniently boiled down to “sexism!” and “race gender traitors!”

            Lay not that flattering unction to your soul.

            (As for sexual predators on the Democrat side, do you really want to start throwing stones in that glasshouse?)

          • Earthly Knight says:

            Explaining women voting for Trump as Stockholm Syndrome is as much sexism as saying men voted for Trump because of sexism.

            Uh… For the third time, I’m saying that female Trump supporters still in denial about his long history of sexually assaulting women sound like they have stockholm syndrome. Please don’t go off on another weird tangent, I feel like I’m talking to one of my relatives with dementia.

          • John Schilling says:

            Trump supporters still in denial about his long history of sexually assaulting women sound like they have stockholm syndrome

            How do you distinguish between Trump supporters in denial about his sexual misbehavior, and Trump supporters who just don’t care? Is there some significant population of Trump-voting women explicitly denying that Trump ever groped anyone, or do you just assume that anyone who believed he did that sort of thing would necessarily vote against him no matter who the alternatives were?

            Because, if it’s the latter, I give you the Clinton dynasty’s second term.

          • DrBeat says:

            I’m guessing that the proportion of all pepes transmitted by hate groups is much higher than the proportion of all prepositions used by hate groups.

            Your guess is incorrect. Your guess is based on nothing, but you believe it because the media made this association. The media made this association based on hatred and contempt for nerds. There is no factual basis. There is no “there is smoke, there must be fire.” A baseless accusation being repeated by enough people — especially when all of those people are ideologically captured in the same way and serving the same goal and suffering under the same biases — does not make it real.

            You know when I said elsewhere that facts do not matter because people do not interact with them and see what they want to see? That is exactly what is happening, right here, right now. There is less evidence for Pepe being a hate symbol than for Obama not being born in the US. But you believe it and think it is common-sense and observable to everyone, because it is emotionally satisfying for you to repeat the accusation. Because it fits the narrative you want to believe.

            The next time you ask “How could someone believe that Obama was born outside the US without being a Bad Racist?”, stop, and ask yourself “How did I believe that Pepe was a hate symbol?” because it is exactly the same process, exactly, at every single stage.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            @ John Schilling

            Is there some significant population of Trump-voting women explicitly denying that Trump ever groped anyone,

            I can’t say for sure how significant the population is, but that’s what I’ve heard from two of the female Trump-supporters here.

            @ Dr Beat

            Your guess is incorrect.

            Really? You think that the ratio of (pepes posted by hate groups/all pepes) is no higher than the ratio of (prepositions spoken by hate groups/all prepositions)? Who are you kidding?

            Your guess is based on nothing, but you believe it because the media made this association.

            I believe it because I see pepes posted on the Donald Trump subreddit all the time, in between the slurs and the calls for genocide.

          • DrBeat says:

            I believe it because I see pepes posted on the Donald Trump subreddit all the time, in between the slurs and the calls for genocide.

            You also see prepositions posted there all the time. This is not proof. This is called “confirmation bias”.

            Someone who wants to believe that Obama was not born in the US can notice things that fit this narrative, and not notice the things that do not fit this narrative. They can point to things that, if they were the only bits of information, would hint-but-not-prove that Obama was not born in the US — but they aren’t the only bits of information. They, because it is a narrative they want to believe, are only capable of seeing the bits of information they want to see and that fit the narrative. Exactly the same way that you can only see bits of information that fit a narrative you want to believe, and think that — because it is something you want to believe — your confirmation bias is ironclad truth and other people are foolish for not seeing it. You are doing the same thing, in the same way, for the same reasons.

            “Pepe is a hate symbol” is not true. It is garbage. It is without value. It has no basis in fact. Nothing useful can be derived from it. But you will never stop believing it. Because it fits the narrative you want to believe. And the Narrative is invulnerable.

          • keranih says:

            >>Is there some significant population of Trump-voting women explicitly denying that Trump ever groped anyone,<<<

            I can’t say for sure how significant the population is, but that’s what I’ve heard from two of the female Trump-supporters here.

            Speaking as one of the female anti-Hillary voters here – my priors weigh strongly for assumptions of innocence before judgement (oddly enough, I was pretty sure this was a progressive stance, but I may have to re-examine that assumption) and just as strongly against believing 11th hour ‘October surprise’ antics which reek of planned political maneuvering.

            At this point, EK, even if you did manage to harangue me into shamefully changing my vote to Hillary –

            – and really, it’s not going to work, the way you’re going about it –

            – this election’s over. You’re putting way too much effort into burning bridges that could more fruitfully be spent trying to persuade people to see it your way for the next election.

            But – up to you. Go on telling women they’re deluded and brain damaged. If you’re still at it in six months, though, you might want to see if the GOP would add you to the team as a community supporter, rounding up votes for the Republicans.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            @ Dr Beat

            You also see prepositions posted there all the time. This is not proof.

            Yes, but prepositions are just as common on other subreddits. The overwhelming majority of pepes I’ve see in my lifetime, on the other hand, have come from The_Donald. Now, it’s still entirely possible that the number of pepes transmitted by hate groups represent a small fraction of the overall number of pepes. But the suggestion that hate groups have no special affection for the frog is not worth taking seriously.

            @ keranih:

            You’re putting way too much effort into burning bridges that could more fruitfully be spent trying to persuade people to see it your way for the next election.

            What makes you think that belittling Trump supporters isn’t the best way to change their minds? I mean, Trump won their votes by insulting pretty much every demographic in the country, women, mexicans, immigrants, veterans, muslims… And it’s not like Trump supporters are going to be responsive to evidence or reasons anyway, if they were, they would never have voted for Trump.

          • DrBeat says:

            But the suggestion that hate groups have no special affection for the frog is not worth taking seriously.

            You are now moving the goalposts. One specific subset of hate groups — the alt-right — likes Pepe. This has nothing whatsoever to do with Pepe actually being a symbol of hate, and everything to do with being a symbol of high-Internet-usage nerddom and memery. Certain types of hate groups also like My Little Pony and (certain) Disney Princesses. This does not make either of them symbols of hate. The accusations that they are symbols of hate has nothing to do with whether they are actually symbols of hate, and everything to do with whether they are liked by nerds who popular people enjoy hating and expressing contempt for.

            The Democrats, and the mainstream media, said that Pepe was a symbol of hate and was particular to hate groups. This was false. It was utterly, categorically, incontrovertibly false. We all talked about how it was false, and ridiculed it for how utterly false it was. You then said it was true, and persisted in saying it was true, despite this being exactly the same as the behavior of Birthers, working on the same logic, for the same reasons.

            Now you are claiming that your argument was about whether hate groups like Pepe, which it never was, and was never what you were arguing, and was never what other people were arguing against. I specifically argued that Pepe was not particular to them, and you specifically denied this, and now you claim the argument was always about something that does not contradict what I said at all.

            You will not even be able to notice this change even after it has been pointed out to you. Inside of you, The Narrative is invulnerable and omnipotent.

          • The Nybbler says:

            I dispute the characterization of r/the_donald as a hate group.

            But if you’re looking for symbols used by hate groups — and here I mean actual hate groups, no-kidding white supremacists — feel free to look to Taylor Swift. (or “Aryan Goddess Taylor Swift” as they put it). I’m sure Ms. Swift is not happy about this, but at least the ADL hasn’t put her on a list.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            What makes you think that belittling Trump supporters isn’t the best way to change their minds?

            Because the left spent pretty much the entire election belittling Trump supporters, and lost?

          • Aapje says:

            I would argue that Pepe became a self-fulfilling accusation. Pepe is a very old meme that became a temporary hype in various Internet communities and then died out. It just looks very ridiculous, which makes it very memeable. Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj posted images of Pepe at one point. The same simply happened with the alt-right, Pepe was having its 5 minutes of fame in that community, but then people from the outside made a huge stink about it.

            At that point, the alt-right and people who disliked the people who got upset noticed that this meme gave them big publicity value, which turned the temporary meme into a valuable propaganda tool.

            So the people that went overboard in portraying Pepe as a alt-right symbol, were actually the ones that turned Pepe into an alt-right symbol.

          • @Dr Beat:

            “You also see prepositions posted there all the time.”

            The claim you were attacking was:

            “I’m guessing that the proportion of all pepes transmitted by hate groups is much higher than the proportion of all prepositions used by hate groups.”

            If you look at a random web page, you will probably see prepositions. You probably will not see Pepe the frog images.

          • Moon says:

            “What makes you think that belittling Trump supporters isn’t the best way to change their minds? I mean, Trump won their votes by insulting pretty much every demographic in the country, women, mexicans, immigrants, veterans, muslims… And it’s not like Trump supporters are going to be responsive to evidence or reasons anyway, if they were, they would never have voted for Trump.”

            Trump supporters are like religious believers except angrier. They only trust Trump and other Trump supporters. There is likely nothing you can do to change their minds. Yes, Trump won their support, not by insulting his supporters– or so they believe– but by bullying everyone else on their behalf. They’re responding to his tough guy macho swagger. And voting a big Eff You to the establishment.

            On a Trump supporter board I went to, someone there called him the Man God. It’s quite religion like. They think that the rest of us are going to hell, or wanting to send the country to hell. And that DT is the Way, the Truth and the Light. And that they are feeling righteous anger at the rest of us. They are addicted to their own adrenalin. You probably can’t change that.

            Luckily, you don’t need to. We just need to work to get rid of electronic voting machines, and Voila! Problems solved. No more election fraud, no more people like DT winning elections. A lot of people are that immature, but not enough to elect a baby in a man’s body as president, without the use of election machine fraud.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Moon – “On a Trump supporter board I went to, someone there called him the Man God.”

            I am pretty sure you mean “God-Emperor”, or possibly the “God-Emperor of Mankind”. The GEoM is a character from the tabletop game Warhammer 40k, which the meme-inclined Trump supporters appropriated for complicated reasons that are actually pretty interesting. Claiming that Trump is the “God-Emperor” is a tribal in-joke, similar to jokes that Trump will “make anime real” or calling each other Centipedes.

            Trump support is not, in my experience, anything like a religion, at least not any more than support for a truly popular president is. Compare to the “Hope and Change” mantra from Obama’s first election.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            @ Dr Beat

            The Democrats, and the mainstream media, said that Pepe was a symbol of hate and was particular to hate groups.

            I’m not sure what you mean by “particular to hate groups,” but the SPLC’s article on Pepe makes clear that the meme was not intended as a symbol of hate and is not exclusively used by hate groups.

            I specifically argued that Pepe was not particular to them, and you specifically denied this,

            Again, I don’t know what you mean by “particular to them.” I made one claim about pepe, and I’ve been quite consistent about it: from what I’ve seen, he’s substantially more popular among hate groups than among internet-users who do not belong to hate groups.

            @ The Nybbler

            I dispute the characterization of r/the_donald as a hate group.

            Okay. Would you concede that it’s a hate group if I tracked down a dozen calls for genocide on the subreddit that have twenty or more upvotes?

          • “Okay. Would you concede that it’s a hate group if I tracked down a dozen calls for genocide on the subreddit that have twenty or more upvotes?”

            I don’t know if he would but I wouldn’t, at least unless I knew that the total membership of the group was under a hundred. I wouldn’t describe the Internet or the Web as a “hate group,” although the same evidence would apply to it.

          • Sandy says:

            I would consider characterization of r/the_donald as a hate group quite funny because the r/altright sub has turned against the former group with a vengeance, condemning them as spineless cucks who don’t have the stomach for ethnic cleansing and who believe in racial equality far too much.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @David Friedman:
            I’m assuming he means net upvotes.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @Earthly Knight

            r/the_donald has nearly 300,000 members and 11,000 online right now. (and you can add to that the people who use RES to vote without being members.) There are about 4 posts per minute happening right now, and it was much higher leading up to the election. So no, finding a dozen hate posts with 20 upvotes doesn’t make it a hate group. It means there are hateful people there.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            How about if I can find a dozen comments calling for a genocide with 100 net upvotes? That might take a little effort, but I think it could still be done. Would you concede that the_donald is a hate group then?

          • The Nybbler says:

            @EK

            I’m not really interested in a game of trying to numerically probe my beliefs.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            How about if I can find a dozen comments calling for a genocide with 100 net upvotes? That might take a little effort, but I think it could still be done. Would you concede that the_donald is a hate group then?

            If they are not denounced by posts with significantly more upvotes, and if at least some of them are recent-ish, I’d find this sufficient.

        • ThirteenthLetter says:

          The democrats should never have listened to the people who advised them to be calm, rational, or measured. The American people want paranoid delusions, give them paranoid delusions.

          Are these some other Democrats you’re referring to? Because here in the United States, our Democratic Party is the ones who insisted that Mitt Romney killed a woman with cancer, hadn’t paid taxes for ten years, and was going to ban tampons. Oh, and Bush knew about 9/11 in advance.

          • Moon says:

            Yes, if you take the most extreme examples you can find of anything any Democrat ever believed, you can have a Democrat straw man to criticize.

            But I don’t think all Americans want paranoid delusions. The voting machines were rigged. That was the biggest problem. And the fake news. Whether they wanted paranoid delusions or not, Right Wingers got them and believed them because they trusted their “news sources.”

            Still time for an election audit: Column
            http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/11/18/election-audit-paper-machines-column/93803752/

            Exit Polls Predicted Hillary Clinton to Win Four of Donald Trump’s Key Victories (Opinion)
            http://www.inquisitr.com/3719288/exit-polls-indicate-hillary-clinton-might-have-won/#pYVRsvZvgsBPtyZJ.99

            SNOWDEN”S ZACHARY QUINTO (He was in the movie Snowden) EXPLAINS VOTING MACHINE HACKING IN 2 MINUTES
            https://www.wired.com/2016/09/zachary-quinto-explains-voting-machine-hacking/

            Here’s how hackers might mess with electronic voting on Election Day
            http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/heres-how-hackers-could-mess-with-electronic-voting/

            Some states — including swing states — have flawed voting systems
            http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/11/1/13486386/election-rigged-paper-trail-audit

            Could the 2016 Election Be Stolen with Help from Electronic Voting Machines?
            http://www.democracynow.org/2016/2/23/could_the_2016_election_be_stolen

            Note in the article linked below here from wikipedia, that in the list of presidential elections where winner lost popular vote, there were 2 of these in the past 16 years, both won by Republicans. Prior to the last 16 years, the next most recent one was in 1888. It’s almost as if, once electronic voting machines came into heavy use, the machines in Swing states were programmed to add just enough votes to make the favored Republican candidate win the electoral college. In this most recent election, e.g., it could be done by assigning 1 out of every 50 or 100 votes for Hillary, to Trump instead.

            This couldn’t be done in Obama’s 2008 case, because he won by so many votes, that too many votes would have to have been changed, and it would have been obvious that fraud was occurring. To get this to work, the nonfavored candidate can’t have a landslide vote. Hillary might have had a landslide if it hadn’t been for Comey’s and Assange’s help in casting her in a negative light.

            List of United States presidential elections where winner lost popular vote
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_elections_where_winner_lost_popular_vote

            BTW, in the 2012 Obama case, the hacker group Anonymous claimed that Rove had attempted to hack the machines, and that Anonymous had blocked him, so that the true winner of the most votes would actually be registered on the machines as the winner.

            Anonymous, Karl Rove and 2012 Election Fix?

            http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/12845-anonymous-karl-rove-and-2012-election-fix

            If this is the way it works, then all of our presidents from here on out will be whoever was the GOP nominee, no matter how crazy or incompetent or ignorant or demented that person may be. Unless the Democrat can win in a landslide, despite one sided leaks of all of the Democrats’ emails by WikiLeaks and Russia, and news media obsession with possible meanings of the contents of those emails.

            Now Assange is ready to collect his reward from Trump.

            Julian Assange lawyers to appeal to Donald Trump to end US probe

            http://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/julian-assange-lawyers-to-appeal-to-donald-trump-to-end-us-probe-a3396906.html

            FAKE NEWS

            This is how Facebook’s fake-news writers make money
            https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11/18/this-is-how-the-internets-fake-news-writers-make-money/

          • Incurian says:

            I can’t tell if you’re trying to be ironic.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Moon – “But I don’t think all Americans want paranoid delusions. The voting machines were rigged. That was the biggest problem.”

            I used to believe this, back during the Bush administration. Ironically enough, Trump winning the election was the final proof to me that both the liberal narrative about hacked voting machines and the conservative narrative about election fraud were both equally bunk.

            Unfortunately, Trump’s election worked for me in this way because my specific priors allowed me to make predictions in the 2008 and 2012 elections which eroded my fear of electoral lock-down by malicious elites, and Trump was just the last straw. But that’s over a decade of living in fear of something that I’m now pretty sure never existed in the first place, and it’s only the random chance of events that let me come to what I know think are my senses.

            You are heading down a dark road. I say this because it is exactly the same road I went down from 2002 to 2012. I wish there was something I could say to dissuade you from going down it, but I don’t think there was much anyone could have said to me. If you are open to advice, the best I can give is to make firm predictions about what you think is going to happen, pay attention to the results, don’t let yourself explain away contrary evidence, and above all remember that a clear understanding of the political world is a means, not an end. If your understanding of the world doesn’t help you live a better life, it’s worthless.

            Good Luck.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            Yes, if you take the most extreme examples you can find of anything any Democrat ever believed, you can have a Democrat straw man to criticize.

            The Democrat who said Romney hadn’t paid taxes for ten years was Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader.

            The Democrats who said Bush knew about 9/11 were about 46% of the party, as per polling.

            Straw men.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            You’ll have to refresh my memory, did Harry Reid continue repeating the claim five years after it was disproven, and then become the democratic nominee for president?

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            Are you serious? You can’t be serious.

            You know what, I give up, you win. Have fun with the conspiracy theories and accusations instead of actually trying to figure out where the party went wrong. Let us know how it works out in 2018, I bet the Senate’ll be blue again in no time at all.

          • Sandy says:

            You’ll have to refresh my memory, did Harry Reid continue repeating the claim five years after it was disproven, and then become the democratic nominee for president?

            No, but when Harry Reid was confronted with his obvious lie after the election, he replied “It worked, didn’t it?”, so clearly both parties have given blatant deceit the thumbs-up if it furthers their goals.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ ThirteenthLetter
            The Democrats who said Bush knew about 9/11 were about 46% of the party, as per polling.

            I saw a poll saying that, and another from the same source giving a similar proportion of Republicans believing something equally ridiculous. It appeared to be a respectable source; my thought was, “Where did they find all these idiots?”

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @ThirteenthLetter:
            70% of Republicans continued to doubt (at last in polling) whether Obama was born in the US.

            At least Bush actually did have foreknowledge of a planned attack (not specific enough to be actionable). But yeah, to the extent that Dems think 9/11 was Cheney trying to wag the dog, 46% isn’t good.

            Romney was breaking a norm that had existed for quite a while, for good reason, in not releasing his tax returns. Lo and behold with Trump we understand how important that norm is. Romney should have released his returns going back many years, as other candidates have.

            I really don’t

          • Deiseach says:

            Moon, you are going to quote Zachary Quinto as a reputable source? He’s an actor! I know of him from the TV series “Heroes” and from the reboot Star Trek (I think he’s a decent Spock considering the tripe that Abrams and Bad Robot gave him to do, haven’t seen the third movie yet but am heartened that Pegg wrote it and it’s been getting thumbs-up from other fans).

            He knows no more than you or me about voting machines and is going on second-hand knowledge. His qualifications, as you may see here, are a degree in drama not science or politics or ‘how to work a voting machine’. I don’t think he’s stupid but I also don’t take him as any kind of expert.

            Exit polls can be bad or good. It depends on the truthfulness of the respondents – and, given the opprobrium about voting for Trump, it’s equally as possible a lot of people when asked who they voted for said “Hillary” even if they voted Trump – the methodology used, the pollsters, etc.

            As for vote-rigging via meddling with the machines, one of the people publicising such a claim rowed back on it when interviewed: in the PR material for his book, he was claiming “Definitely happens!” but when asked directly, he stepped that back to “Could do, I’m only raising the possibility”:

            “Election fraud has been occurring via the targeting and manipulation of computerized voting equipment across America,” Simon says in the publicity materials for his book.

            But in an interview this week with the news site Raw Story, Simon was more restrained.

            “We’re stuck at a place where I pivoted to is looking at the risk involved in having a computerized, privatized, unobservable vote counting system and just taking on faith that that system is not being manipulated when there is such a obvious vulnerability (on which the experts strongly agree) of the system to malfeasance and manipulation,” Simon told the site. “That is where I’ve tended to go, is to look at that risk rather than screaming fraud from the rooftops and claiming proof.”

            Simon said that he’s reached the conclusion that due to the imprecise methodology of exit polls and the possibility of manipulation in computerized vote counts, neither system is trustworthy.

            So even a guy promoting a book about vote machine fraud says exit polls are untrustworthy!

            And even more interestingly, in the linked interview, he tells us about the methodologies used, which to me seems to permit bias – such as presuming Hillary should win here, so let’s weight the data that way:

            JS: Of course, we don’t get the raw data. The raw data would be… we have three definitions here. There’s raw data, which is the actual questionnaires and the simple numerical toning up of answers on the questionnaire. That is never publicly released. It’s if you want to characterize it as such, it’s what’s inside the sausage of exit polls, and we are not privileged to see that. I’ve had one opportunity in my life through an inside source to actually look at some of the raw data, but that’s a very rare thing. It’s not generally accessible to the public. Many of us have clamored for the public release of that raw data, certainly in the aftermath of the 2004 election and have been denied it.

            Then there is the weighted exit poll data and that’s what the exit pollsters put out as soon as the polls close. This has been demographically weighted to their best approximation of what the electorate looked like and it is very valuable information. That’s what I was able to download in 2004 and that’s what I was able to download in many of the elections since, and that’s what I was able to download this Tuesday.

            Then you have adjusted exit polls and what happens is they take the vote counts as they come in and they use the term as the art of “forcing,” they force the exit polls to [be] congruent with that vote count data so that by the end of the night or by the next morning when you have your final vote counts and final exit polls the exit polls and the vote counts will match, but that’s only because in essence they’ve been forced to match the vote counts.

            Could it happen? Sure, elections have been rigged all over in many ways. Did it happen? And enough to cheat Hillary of her win? Very doubtful. Given that everyone and his dog expected Hillary to win, and that Trump had not been the favoured candidate of the Republicans and had prominent Republicans speaking out against him, it unfortunately takes a very conspiracy-skewed mindset to think they hated Hillary so much, they’d rig the election for Trump to win (personally, were I a Republican big-wig, I’d bank on letting her win and that her term in office would be such a stinker, come 2020 the next Republican that we picked and groomed, rather than this buffoon, would stroll in).

          • Earthly Knight says:

            @ Sandy

            No, but when Harry Reid was confronted with his obvious lie after the election, he replied “It worked, didn’t it?”, so clearly both parties have given blatant deceit the thumbs-up if it furthers their goals.

            It’s not absolutely clear that Reid was lying– he claimed an anonymous source from Bain Capital told him that Romney had not paid taxes for ten years– but I agree that it’s entirely possible and that this was, in any case, an obvious subterfuge to prompt Romney to release his tax returns.

            But there’s not really any point of comparison between Reid having once played a dirty trick and 73% of republicans remaining unconvinced that Obama was born in this country after eight years of his birth certificate being widely circulated in the news media and on the internet. Three-quarters of republicans are apparently drooling lobotomy patients.

          • Aapje says:

            In my country we also have the populist candidate consistently outperforming the polls. We stopped using electronic machines and this didn’t change. These people are simply so anti-establishment that they don’t trust the pollers.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ Moon
            Still time for an election audit:

            Hi, nice to see you. Thanks for pointing out some interesting patterns.

            There’s one obvious factor that could be improved to foil what happened in 2000 and this year: stop rushing the count/concession.

            2000 was an obvious ‘run out the clock’ strategy; recount delayed is recount denied. Whether enough low-hanging votes could be found for Hillary this year, an unhurried, careful audit could reveal what (if any) cheating was done, and discourage its use in future.

          • Moon says:

            “There’s one obvious factor that could be improved to foil what happened in 2000 and this year: stop rushing the count/concession.”

            I definitely agree there.

            And use of electronic voting machines should be discontinued everywhere in the U.S. ASAP. Too easily manipulated. Recounts ought to be done. But fraud done by manipulating the machine software can be untraceable and undetectable, once the election is over.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Moon – “But fraud done by manipulating the machine software can be untraceable and undetectable, once the election is over.”

            Yup. If you lose faith in the people writing the software, there’s no real way to get it back. I’m pretty sure the software isn’t corrupt, but this is a reason I still prefer paper ballots; physical objects can have a meaningful chain of custody, have to be moved from place to place, etc. Given the deep splits we have in this country, maintaining faith in the people writing the software is probably impossible, which makes e-voting a bad idea.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ FC

            Cheaters gonna cheat. We’ll never get 100% safety.

            But here’s a system I’d like. Online banking has been well-tested; use that kind of approach. Log in, enter password, click on buttons. Confirmation screen comes up: “You have voted for George Washington? Are you sure?” … “Printer-friendly version”

            Any time during Election Week, you can log in to a Read-Only ledger that shows your ballot so you can report any errors.

            The ledger also shows how many votes have been cast in your area. If the numbers don’t add up, take your Printer-Friendly printout and a screen capture to the authorities — This, or some elaboration of it, would give some protection to the common cheat of a ballot box going missing.

            I don’t know how we could catch Moon’s fraud idea of adding a single vote to a large number of votes, where it would not be noticed.

          • Moon says:

            “I don’t know how we could catch Moon’s fraud idea of adding a single vote to a large number of votes, where it would not be noticed.”

            You can’t catch it. That’s why electronic voting machines have to be eliminated.

            I had hoped that Soros really owned some election machines, but it turned out to be one more Right Wing conspiracy theory. If he owned them, he would likely keep them free of fraud.

          • But here’s a system I’d like. Online banking has been well-tested; use that kind of approach. Log in, enter password, click on buttons. Confirmation screen comes up: “You have voted for George Washington? Are you sure?” … “Printer-friendly version”

            Any time during Election Week, you can log in to a Read-Only ledger that shows your ballot so you can report any errors.

            No, no, no. The banking system model is incompatible with the concept of the secret ballot.

            Moreover, the Internet is far too insecure, and probably always will be. See, e.g., http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/bruce-schneier-internet-of-things/

          • John Schilling says:

            I don’t know how we could catch Moon’s fraud idea of adding a single vote to a large number of votes, where it would not be noticed.

            Because that could never, ever happen with paper ballots?

            Sorry, but I don’t think this one can be solved with One Clever Trick involving the machinery of voting. You’re going to need to deal with the intractably messy human side of the equation. Fortunately, being messy, your imagined human enemies are never going to be able to hide a conspiracy to rig a national election.

          • Eltargrim says:

            @houseboatonstyxb: probably worth pointing out that there have been a number of major bank penetrations in the last few months; most bank security is surprisingly poor (e.g. my bank sets a maximum password length of 6 characters); and that the faith in online banking is largely due to the fact that what damage can be done is undoable.

            While I’m not convinced either way as to online voting, the online banking system is not one I would use to inspire faith in the system.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ Larry Kestenbaum
            The banking system model is incompatible with the concept of the secret ballot.

            How so?

            Anyway, I drive to the polls in a car with Hillary stickers all over the bumper. I walk toward the building wearing Hillary buttons all over, and a Hillary T-shirt.*

            Oh, and a pantsuit.

            So I should worry someone knows who I’m voting for?

            * And take it all off at the legal distance. Except the pantsuit.

          • Moon says:

            Houseboat, good for you. Proud to be a progressive.

            In some areas of the country it’s risky to be a member of the tribe that is in the minority in that geographic location. In others, no one bothers you much, as long as you are smart enough to never start political conversations with strangers.

          • @ houseboatonstyxb, quoting my statement about the incompatibility of voting with the online banking model, asks:

            How so?

            I will take this to the current open thread.

    • John Schilling says:

      The birtherism was kinda racist.

      Birtherism is straight-up nativist, and we don’t need any deep window into Trump’s soul to tack that label onto him.

      But really, if instead of “President Barack Hussein Obama” we had the lily-white “President Boris Dzhugashvili Orlov”, with a Soviet Russian father and raised in Castro’s Cuba, does anybody here actually believe the issue would have been put to rest by a piece of paper saying he had been born when his parents were studying at an American university?

      • Evan Þ says:

        Er… yes? As a legal argument, it would be put to rest, and then his opponents could get to work convincing the country that Mr. Orlov’s policies would be harmful to America.

        • bean says:

          Which is why we haven’t had any other political conspiracy theories persisting in the mainstream the country, even after the facts come out. Such as the amount Bush knew about Iraq’s chemical weapons program before the invasion. (Answer: Saddam’s scientists were lying to everyone, including him.) Oh, wait…

        • Matt M says:

          Keep in mind, Trump has also been smeared for linking Ted Cruz’s father (Cuban but treated as white) to the Kennedy assassination… was that also racially motivated?

        • John Schilling says:

          Er… yes? As a legal argument, it would be put to rest,

          As a legal argument, it would then hinge on whether the alleged birth certificate was genuine or an FSB forgery, just like the legal argument over Obama’s eligibility hinges on his alleged birth certificate being genuine or a DNC forgery.

          Refresh my memory, is “The Russian government meddles in American elections to ensure the election of pro-Russian candidates” a credible hypothesis or not?

  26. I’ve been thinking about this, and I don’t have a resolution, but does this mean anything in electoral politics? When a team loses at basketball by 1 you can say “look, if they just made the last shot that they missed they probably win the game, it was very close, any one turn in either direction could have changed the outcome”. In politics, especially on a large scale with an electoral college, this is tough to say. How much time and effort would it have taken for Hillary to win Wisconsin? Would putting that time in have prevented her from winning another state she needed to?

    The more visible the political race, the more the public is engaged, the less it matters what the candidates’ campaigns actually do. Presidential elections are the extreme example of this.

    When you’re running for a local office, and most people don’t know who to support, you might sway a lot of voters with a small effort. By putting up a billboard, or distributing campaign flyers, you might get thousands of votes.

    But when you have competition, loose votes become more scarce. You can put commercials on TV to try to convince people to support you rather than your opponent, but he’s doing the same thing. You can put up signs and talk to voters door to door, but again, so is your adversary.

    Once the race gets to be so visible that the media is discussing it, people are talking about it, the actions of a political campaign itself have less and less salience. You can introduce a new attack, or make a bold statement, but you can’t control how it will be received. Most of the information the voters have about you didn’t come from you.

    With each step toward an electorate saturated with information, the cost per marginal vote rises. If Trump puts up a billboard next to a busy expressway, how many votes is that worth? If Clinton’s campaign paid $10,000 to put a commercial on the air in Wisconsin, how many votes did she gain? Very few, if any.

    Just in general, advertising is far less powerful and motivating than most people imagine. And a political campaign is mostly advertising.

    Donald Trump won Michigan by the razor-thin margin of about 13,000 votes out of some five million cast. If someone was able to go back in time, to a couple weeks before the election, and whisper in Hillary’s ear, “You need 20,000 more votes in Michigan,” what could she have done to change the outcome? How much would it have cost?

    The answer is that there is nothing she could have done. A million dollars worth of ads would have been a drop in the bucket. A million dollars for voter turnout efforts could never have found another 20,000 voters. It’s not like get-out-the-vote efforts in swing states had been neglected.

    Ten million dollars? A billion? With only two weeks left, no presidential campaign could have effectively mobilized that much; it would look ridiculous and wasteful beyond belief. Probably no amount of money could have changed the minds of 10,000 Michigan voters from Trump to Clinton, or gotten 20,000 more people to the polls.

    • Deiseach says:

      If someone was able to go back in time, to a couple weeks before the election, and whisper in Hillary’s ear, “You need 20,000 more votes in Michigan,” what could she have done to change the outcome? How much would it have cost?

      She could have done what Bill did; she could have personally turned up and stumped for votes. Better still turn up with Bill to do the charm bit while she smiles and waves and delivers a rah-rah message written by her campaign about how she’s concerned about [insert local issue] and will address it in [unicorns and rainbows policy].

      That was part of the problem, Larry; here’s Bill, who has (whatever else you may say about him) superb political instincts, and he’s out there campaigning off his own bat and on his own while Hillary is listening to her analytics team about “don’t bother going there, go here to talk with the wheelchair-using Latinx trans polytheists group instead”. It sends a hell of a bad message when “the candidate themselves can’t bother their arse to turn up and talk to us”, and probably did cost her some of those 20,000 votes.

      Maybe it wouldn’t have pulled them all back, but she didn’t even try is the thing. I mean, look at this paragraph of the report:

      The national election spotlight shone brightly on Michigan Sunday as a state that could be pivotal with Lansing-area residents lined up for blocks for Bill Clinton’s 1 p.m. rally at the union hall of UAW Local 652, which was full to capacity with more than 600 supporters when the nation’s 42nd president took the stage. The union hall rally followed visits to two churches in Flint earlier Sunday, where enthusiastic congregants were on their feet applauding during most of his remarks.

      Now, how much more energised would Michigan voters have been had Hillary been there herself rather than very visibly in absentia?

      EDIT: Okay, she did turn up in Grand Rapids to do the vote-stumping thing, fair play to her. But again – too little, too late. Bill was able to read the political writing on the wall and was out working the boondocks while she and Obama turned up with last-minute Monday tour of one place each to try and pull the votes.

      No, I blame her for this: the lady presumed this would be a coronation as she took her rightful place on the throne, and going through the motions of an election campaign was a tedious necessity to let the little people think they had any meaningful say. She had no taste for the hard graft of going out and cajoling votes – probably because she’s bad at that and she knows it and sticks to what she can do, which is schmooze billionaires. It’s ironic that she drove herself to collapsing in a faint because she was too stubborn to admit she was sick and the pneumonia got worse, but she cooled off on the last stretch of the race from putting in the effort where it was needed. Maybe her health was poor enough that she physically wasn’t able to do it?

      • This is a very big country, and we here in Michigan got FAR more than our fair share of visits from Clinton and Trump and all their surrogates.

        Yes, the candidate showing up is always good. If you’re running for state senator, and you come to someone’s door and give your pitch in person, you’re more likely to get his vote. But even a state senate district has a lot of doors, maybe more than a candidate could visit in years of campaigning. And, again, your opposition is doing the same.

        Holding a campaign rally and giving a speech is exciting for the people who attend. But almost all of those are committed supporters who are voting for you anyway. Maybe it would give people in that town a warm feeling of “I didn’t go to the rally, but it’s good that she cares enough to come all the way out to East Podunk”. Balance that against all the people who were annoyed by Secret Service blocking off roads and creating traffic jams. Within a 50 mile radius, most voters won’t even notice that it happened.

        Nationwide, some will read about it, or maybe see an excerpt on television, and the physical location where it happened is just a detail.

        Again, if the Clinton campaign somehow knew, two weeks out, that she needed 20,000 votes in Michigan, giving a speech here, or a dozen speeches, is just not going to generate that many votes.

        And in the meantime, what about Pennsylvania? What about Wisconsin? Those states were crucial, too.

        For a presidential campaign, there is no simple mathematical relationship between effort expended and votes received. As I wrote earlier, most of what voters know about you (the candidate) does not come from you or your campaign. The candidates keep working (if they stopped, people might think they gave up), but the cost per marginal vote approaches infinity.

        That’s why Clinton outspending Trump two-to-one made no difference at all.

        In the end, Michigan voters were moved by the exact same factors that moved voters all over the country. The outcome here differed from Illinois, say, because the mix of voters is different here.

        • Deiseach says:

          It’s very hard to judge what’s the best thing, I agree. I think you’re right that, past a certain point, pumping money into a campaign gets you little or nothing.

          But that’s part of what I’m arguing: spending money on big ad campaigns isn’t going to get the same bang as Actual Candidate Pressing The Flesh. I know Hillary couldn’t be everywhere, but one of the flaws in her campaign does seem to have been the advice from her wonks (or Mooks) that “Never mind East Podunk, we probably won’t pick any votes up there anyway, or we can just run a billboard campaign, but where you need to go and be seen and make speeches is The Rich Fat Cats’ Big City Club”.

          Maybe the burghers of East Podunk don’t expect you to come in person to grace their small but thriving community. But seeing media coverage splashed all over of you making like a comedian to get laughs from the Rich Fat Cats in their Big City Club – that does curdle the milk for a lot of people. Oh so we’re not good enough for her? Well, guess she can just do without my small town backwards rube vote, then!

          You can apply what the late Gene Wilder in “Blazing Saddles” said about the common folk of the West to voters: voters are the public, and the public (all of us) can be petty-minded spiteful jerks 🙂

        • dndnrsn says:

          @Larry Kestenbaum:

          You’re making it sound almost … deterministic. You definitely know more than I do about this but … it just seems so unintuitive. While the truth is often unintuitive, I just find it very hard on a less-than-rational level to accept that what the candidates do doesn’t really matter.

          Additional thought: How much of a hassle is it for everyone in the area when the Secret Service is protecting a presidential candidate/president? Back when I was in university there was a visit to my college by the PM, and the RCMP security was very obvious (“plainclothes means all-black tactical gear, right, guys? That’s how the Youths of Today dress?”) but in no way obtrusive.

          • You’re making it sound almost … deterministic.

            I don’t think so. Of course things happen that affect how people will vote. In a presidential election, very few of those things are directly controlled and manipulated by the campaigns themselves.

            I just find it very hard on a less-than-rational level to accept that what the candidates do doesn’t really matter.

            If you’re a previously-unknown candidate for an office that isn’t interesting to the public or news media, then what you and your campaign do is ALL that matters. Your presentation of yourself is unchallenged; everything that voters know about you comes from you. You will systematically get more votes in the areas where you targeted your efforts.

            By contrast, in a presidential race, information about the candidates is coming from a million different places, practically drowning out what little a campaign organization can say. It seems everybody is expressing an opinion, and listening to them, you might be swayed by any of them.

            Yes, the candidates make speeches to voters, but their pronouncements are curated and analyzed and re-packaged and re-interpreted and spun by people with different agendas in mind. Most of political ads are created by political action committees which are not allowed to coordinate with the candidates.

            If a candidate makes a mistake or says something stupid, the consequences of that event are well outside of either campaign’s direct control. Is it a devastating gaffe or not even noticed? The aftermath could go either way, and the candidates don’t get to decide which way.

            Imagine that, a few days before the election, the entire SSC commentariat gathered in a room to spend an hour talking directly with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Or maybe an hour with each one. How many of us would be persuaded to change our votes as a result?

            That number is probably zero. In an environment rich with information about the candidates, among people who are interested and informed, there isn’t much they could say or do to change our opinion of them.

          • Additional thought: How much of a hassle is it for everyone in the area when the Secret Service is protecting a presidential candidate/president? Back when I was in university there was a visit to my college by the PM, and the RCMP security was very obvious (“plainclothes means all-black tactical gear, right, guys? That’s how the Youths of Today dress?”) but in no way obtrusive.

            Obviously it varies. I was in grad school at Cornell University when Dawda Jawara, the president of Gambia (the only veterinarian ever to lead a country), came to visit. Indeed, he was scheduled to speak in a classroom in “our” building. We got notes in our mailboxes telling us to cooperate with the Secret Service, but I never saw them.

            On the other hand, when the president or equivalent figure visits a place, the Secret Service will often close roads, take over buildings, restrict access to areas usually open, etc., as part of protecting the VIP. In my experience in Ann Arbor, there are almost always complaints about the extra traffic congestion, detours, and delays.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Larry Kestenbaum:

            Imagine that, a few days before the election, the entire SSC commentariat gathered in a room to spend an hour talking directly with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Or maybe an hour with each one. How many of us would be persuaded to change our votes as a result?

            That number is probably zero. In an environment rich with information about the candidates, among people who are interested and informed, there isn’t much they could say or do to change our opinion of them.

            It’s highly likely that the US voters here are more interested and informed than the US average, though.

            Do you think most voters don’t interpret a candidate paying attention to them as proof the candidate is on their side?

          • Do you think most voters don’t interpret a candidate paying attention to them as proof the candidate is on their side?

            Yes, based on my experience, I think most voters do not interpret a candidate paying attention to them as proof the candidate is on their side.

          • Matt M says:

            Agree with Larry.

            Trump spent a non-trivial amount of time (probably a similar amount of time as Hillary did) deliberately appealing specifically to African American voters and they still voted overwhelmingly for Hillary.

          • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

            Additional thought: How much of a hassle is it for everyone in the area when the Secret Service is protecting a presidential candidate/president? Back when I was in university there was a visit to my college by the PM, and the RCMP security was very obvious (“plainclothes means all-black tactical gear, right, guys? That’s how the Youths of Today dress?”) but in no way obtrusive.

            The second presidential debate was held at Washington University, across the street from my workplace. We were notified to be out of the building by a certain time on Friday, and there were a large number of road/building closures in the immediate area around campus, but as the debate was on a Saturday that was no great inconvenience. Most everyone who didn’t have a reason to be there kept clear, to avoid the hassle.

      • baconbacon says:

        Now, how much more energised would Michigan voters have been had Hillary been there herself rather than very visibly in absentia?

        This is the type of assumption I am questioning. Why should we assume that Hillary could have won if she did X, Y or Z? It is possible that Bill alone gets 90% of the effect of Bill and Hillary. Heck its possible that Bill alone > than Bill + Hillary at a rally (and it is even possible that Hillary’s campaign knew this).

        No, I blame her for this: the lady presumed this would be a coronation as she took her rightful place on the throne, and going through the motions of an election campaign was a tedious necessity to let the little people think they had any meaningful say

        I think this is an odd image to have of a person who has aggressively built her own brand for 20+ years in an attempt to land the highest political office that she could. While she may have assumed that she would win it doesn’t appear that she sat back, she went for the biggest win she though she could get.

        Bill was able to read the political writing on the wall and was out working the boondocks while she and Obama turned up with last-minute Monday tour of one place each to try and pull the votes.

        I think Bill likes running for president at least as much as being president.

  27. Sfoil says:

    lvlln (or other Korean speakers): I picked up some very basic Korean on my last visit to the country. I’d like to improve a bit before I go back and I’m also curious what’s out there, so I’ll ask: is there any good source on the Internet for Korean-language science fiction? I’ve searched and haven’t turned up anything but a few comment-less review blogs.

    • lvlln says:

      I don’t really read stuff in Korean these days, and I don’t know any resources to help you. Maybe scifi books translated into Korean from other languages might be one resource? Living in the US, I’ve successfully purchased Korean books from bandibooks in the past.

      Otherwise, you could always read news on sites like Naver, I guess. What’s going on with the prez right now doesn’t seem entirely dissimilar to a story set in some dystopian future setting.

  28. Mark says:

    What does the Slate Star Codex comment section think about ‘member berries?

    I don’t get it. Seems like a failed satire to me? I don’t think you can really link Star Wars Episode 7 to the Trump Presidency.

    I really liked the thing they did last year though, with PC AI, so maybe there is some incredible twist coming.

    • Well... says:

      Member berries are a clever way to visually represent people’s tendency to indulge in nostalgia. This can be nostalgia for an “earlier, simpler time,” or for the stuff they miss from when they were kids (to the extent those aren’t already the same thing). The South Park writers are implying that nostalgia is both the reason we keep making reboots of old movies, and why Trump’s message of making America great again resonated so widely.

      I find the member berries an effective metaphor because now whenever I see any rehashing of something from my youth or earlier, I turn to my wife and in a high nasally voice say “‘Member?” It’s fun.

      • Well... says:

        Update: I’ve now seen this weeks episode and I feel like they jumped the shark with the member berries. They lost a lot of incisiveness and thematic clarity (not to mention comedic value) when they stopped being passive objects that people consumed.

    • FullMeta_Rationalist says:

      I watched a few YouTube clips of Member Berries. Regarding the connection between Star Wars VII and Trump, the common thread is nostalgia.

      There’s a theory that each decade of U.S. Pop Culture reflects the maturity of the Baby Boomers, which is a disproportionately-large demographic. E.g. Radical 60’s = angsty teens; Disco 70’s = young adults; Reagan 80’s = settling down; etc. This is true of someone born around 1950. Wikipedia loosely defines a Baby Boomer as anyone born between 1946 – 1964. (Unfortunately, I can’t find the source of this theory. The 90’s and 00’s had their own explanations, but I don’t remember them.)

      If we extrapolate to 2016, the “archetypal 1950 Boomer” is 66 years old. Which is about retirement age. Retirees like to reminisce about the good ol’ days. Consider that Trump’s campaign slogan was “Make America great again”. This implies that the target-demographic: A) believes everything sucks; or B) is old enough to remember Pax Americana. And lo, the Boomers satisfy both these conditions.

      Maybe this doesn’t reflect reality. But it’s probably the narrative that South Park was aiming for.

      • Well... says:

        I thought maybe you were talking about the theory that says generations recur cyclically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory

        • lhn says:

          I’ve gone back and forth for years re the extent to which Strauss and Howe hit on a legitimate insight re American history, and how much is that their generational descriptions are general enough that it’s possible to fit anything to them (a la horoscope signs). But I have to admit that their 1991 prediction that as of now we’d be in a crisis era (expected to culminate in something big circa 2020) doesn’t look implausible, nor does their description of what the present generational constellation would look like.

  29. I see that my one political point in this thread sank without a ripple, so maybe I should talk about something more random.

    Which USA county has the longest single-word name? Without a reference right at hand, I thought of relatively exotic names like Koochiching (eleven letters) or Androscoggin (twelve letters) or Chattahoochee (thirteen letters).

    But it turns out the two counties that share the title, in Virginia and Pennsylvania, are both named Northumberland. That’s in tribute to the most sparsely populated county in England, right below Scotland, obviously one of the places where Borderers originated.

    If you broaden the scope of the question to include multiple-word county names, the clear winner is a Louisiana parish called St. John the Baptist. “Parish” is the Louisiana equivalent of “county”, which must be very confusing to Catholics and others who use the same word in ecclesiastical administration.

    When it comes to USA city and town names, which are of course enormously more numerous and varied than counties, I was surprised to discover (in an incomplete but very extensive list of US cities) more than a dozen single-word-name places with 14 letters, and none at all with more. The ones with 14 were all of exactly the same form: a 10-letter word followed by “-ville”. So, Washingtonville, Livingstonville, Charlottesville, Carpentersville, etc.

    Of course, Penetanguishene, with 15 letters, beats them all, but it’s in Canada.

    Some kind of ringing conclusion about the way Americans assign names to their geographical units would be appropriate here, but I don’t know what that would be.

  30. antilles says:

    Since comments are closed on the Trump thread I’ll leave a comment here:

    Scott, you are being a bad Bayesian. Your basic method is to take the thousands of things Trump said that are banal and boring and compare them with a couple of the norm-violating and frightening things he said and the wacky and inexplicable but not frightening things he says and conclude, well, Trump is just wacky and inexplicable compared to the average politician, not racist and frightening, and anyone who says enough wacky and inexplicable things will also say wacky and inexplicable and offensive things. But those two are not equivalent.

    Pretend that uttering a sentence is an event drawn from the probability space of possible sentences. Even if norms aren’t ethically valid or justified or whatever, social norms exist and drive down the prior probability that someone will say something frightening and norm-violating. Saying something banal and boring has a high prior probability, saying something weird and inexplicable has a low prior probability, but saying something weird and inexplicable and norm-violating has a joint probability that’s even lower.

    When we are updating our mental model of what Trump’s personality looks like based on his statements, we weight the outliers more *because* they are improbable. And norm-violating statements are double outliers crying out for explanation. If someone says a million times they are not racist (what we’d expect) it can be less impactful on our view of that person than the couple extreme outliers of the terrifying racist things they said because the prior probability is so low.

    • Dabbler says:

      What about the theory that Donald Trump, whilst not personally racist, decided to embrace a quasi-racist policy (which is far closer to racism but not technically open racism because that requires outright claiming to believe another race is inferior) in order to get elected?

      Or the theory, reinforced by, for instance, Donald Trump’s losing his twitter feed, that Donald Trump is an idiot only partially controlled by behind the scenes masterminds and made racist statements partially out of stupidity?

      (EDIT: “stupidity” defined here as a sheer lack of ability to think about political self interest. In this theory, Donald Trump would not give a crap about the morals of it one way or the other)

    • Mark says:

      If someone says a million times they are not racist (what we’d expect) it can be less impactful on our view of that person than the couple extreme outliers of the terrifying racist things they said because the prior probability is so low.

      You’re making the same adjustment twice – (1) This statement is terrifying and racist (not because of the content of the statement (per se) but because it is unusual) (2) terrifying and racist statements have a higher weight because they are unusual.

      Double counting of unusualness.

  31. Ryan says:

    I hope this isn’t a violation of the rules. You disabled comments on “You Are Still Crying Wolf,” and if you didn’t want any comments on the open threads as well please delete this comment and accept my apology.

    There is good, too good, and then light years past them is what you just wrote.

    I can see why you held that until after the election. If you ever switch sides, the Blue tribe would be annihilated.

    • keranih says:

      Hey Ryan –

      Welcome in. A few thoughts:

      Ideally, we tend to try to not talk so much of annihilation as of conversion, and less of conversion as of conversation, no matter what side we are on. Passions flare, and people get testy, but this is a multi-pov area.

      If you look up through the thread, you’ll see that this (the merits of Donald Trump, or lack thereof) is a multi-month ongoing conversation. Open threads is where we talk about anything not specifically prohibited for that thread.

      Finally – Scott works in a fairly large fixed facility with doors of a limited size. He already thinks he’s a pretty cool cat. Keep buttering him up, and his head will swell even further to the point he’ll cause structural damage when he goes into the conference room. Nobody wants that.

      • Dabbler says:

        Query. I’m trying to branch out a bit here. What are some good blogs for the precise task of covering things Scott Alexander is likely to be blind to, in your view?

  32. bean says:

    Way, way upthread there’s been some discussion on doing an RPG of some sort from the membership here. My thoughts on the subject:
    1. Plan for a short game. That will make scheduling easier, and opens the possibility of doing it again with different people and settings.
    2. Online play, probably via Roll20. I have a premium account (macros make GURPS so much easier), and would be willing to serve as campaign creator, which gives access to all of that stuff.
    3. I’d suggest Pathfinder for the system, on the grounds of accessibility.
    Anyone interested? (Schedule permitting, obviously.)
    Edit:
    1 should be interpreted as this basically being a one-shot. Figure 2-4 sessions.

    Edit 2:
    I’ll set up a Roll20 group for this when I get home. My guess for schedule (at least for my involvement) is weekday evenings US time. This is obviously subject to change, and I have nothing against other groups being set up.

    • rlms says:

      Yes, interested (approximately no experience though).

    • dndnrsn says:

      Tentative yes, based on schedule.

      1. How about a one-shot? Plan for a maximum of 2 or 3 sessions.

      2. Never used Roll20 so I’ll defer to people who have.

      3. I’m not huge on D&D and so forth – is low-power/low-magic Pathfinder OK? My issue is that I can never remember what magic powers I have.

      • bean says:

        1. That was basically what I meant.

        3. I’m not wild about D&D/Pathfinder either, but it has the advantage of being the closest thing available to a universal system. And while it’s up to whoever runs the game, my guess is that we won’t start at high level.

    • Randy M says:

      I would like to try. Do you want an e-mail?

    • Skivverus says:

      Similar to dndnrsn, tentative yes based on schedule. East coast US and office job means evenings and weekends preferred, but two other campaigns mean a good chunk of those weekends are already filled (Fridays in particular are out). Pathfinder is fine, haven’t yet investigated Roll20.

      As for contacting me, I am, so far as I’m aware, the only Skivverus on the ‘net.

    • Wrong Species says:

      Another vote for tentatively interested.

    • Eltargrim says:

      Not able to commit, but just wanted to say thanks for being willing to DM for a group of (effectively) random people. DMing is a big job at the best of times.

    • Evan Þ says:

      Tentatively interested. The sum total of my experience is a single one-shot campaign, and reading comics like Darths and Droids.

      I’d suggest a short campaign to start with – start after Thanksgiving; finish before Christmas. Also, Monday evenings are out for me.

    • BBA says:

      Tentatively in. Total n00b to tabletop RPGs here (I’ve played other tabletop games, and computer/video game RPGs). And I’ve got a foreign trip coming up, so I may not be able to make it for much, but let me know how the schedule works.

    • Anonymous says:

      Interested, but unlikely to make the schedule.

    • birdboy2000 says:

      I’m interested and have too much time on my hands. But I’m not in the IRC or anything, so how should I keep up with knowing when we play?

    • bean says:

      I’ve set up a game in Roll20. Join it here. You’ll have to sign up for a Roll20 account. When you get in, exit the game. There’s a journal post outside the game itself for scheduling discussions.
      Caveats:
      1. I’m sort of assumed to be running this game, which I’m OK with, but not dead set on. I don’t have any great ideas at the moment. If someone does have one and wants to run (and is capable of doing so, obviously), I’m perfectly OK yielding to them. I can make people GM of the game in question, and they get to keep the nifty premium features.
      2. Clicking on that link does not obligate you to play in any way, shape, or form. In fact, I may just keep it as a catchment for our RPG discussions, and set up other games for actual play to keep player numbers in the game in check. (I know I labeled it Pathfinder, but so what.)
      3. If we get too many people, I plan to select in rough order of posts in this thread/the schedule thread.

  33. Cathedra says:

    What if the paper-clip maximizer is here now, just in the form of an anti-racism memeplex? Much as paper clips are a good thing to produce when they are needed, but you don’t want them to consume all matter in their light cone, anti-racism is a good thing to have (to combat racism), but it’s pretty bad to overproduce it to the point where all rational discourse is destroyed. Somehow Western civilization failed at this (admittedly much less scary) alignment problem and so anti-racist memes propagated out of control. For this (crappy) analogy to hold, maybe this is actually a multipolar scenario where the other tribe was simultaneously being subsumed by an anti-anti-racism meme maximizer. Not racism per se, just the belief that the anti-racist memeplex was out of control. Multipolar, but only quasi-stable.

    • Mark says:

      I think you’re onto something.

      All reasonably intelligent people will have increasing amounts of their mental space occupied by hyper-powerful anti-racism/anti-anti-racism memes.

      The only solution is to develop an anti-meme meme.

      We need to weaponise this:

      The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits….
      The last thing that can be said of a lunatic is that his actions are causeless. If any human acts may loosely be called causeless, they are the minor acts of a healthy man; whistling as he walks; slashing the grass with a stick; kicking his heels or rubbing his hands…

    • Tekhno says:

      I think in this sense, all ideologies that try to push a single overriding principle are the equivalent of paper-clip maximizers, so that means that any ideology that tries to measure everything based on a single criteria (race, class, freedom, equality, etc) will tend to lead to runaway purity spirals. Other ideologies that try to cross multiple principles against each other will fare better.

      Extreme modes of thought like communism, anarchism, national socialism, anarcho-capitalism and primitivism are all the ideological equivalent of paper clip maximizers.

      Examples:
      -Communism attempts to resolve everything on the basis of a classless society
      -Classic Anarchism is basically the same just with different theories of why and how
      -National Socialism on the basis of race
      -Anarcho-Capitalism on the basis of property
      -Primitivism on the basis of anti-civilization
      -Landian TechCom on the basis of intelligence (thus making the paper clip maximizer analogy literal)

      The reason none of these ideologies have killed us all by converting the planet into [insert ideology] is not because they haven’t attempted to, but because they have never had the power to do so (though the more effective ones have caused industrial scale genocides). This means that if Friendly AI turns out to mean AI That Agrees With The Ideology Of The Humans Who Programmed It, then we really want to avoid these kind of values being inputted, since then we will have avoided paper clip maximizing only to maximize Nazism or something else.

      Mainstream ideologies don’t have as much risk of this since they involve large coalitions and can’t resolve everything down to a single principle.

      Examples:
      -Left-Liberalism attempts to balance negative rights with positive rights, freedom with equality
      -Liberal Conservatism attempts to achieve a path towards individual freedom balanced against established traditions

    • Incurian says:

      SJWs, unions, standing armies.

    • Well... says:

      I’ve made the metaphor that anti-racism is an allergy in the cultural immune system. Or maybe even something like lupus–the cultural immune system turning upon the culture.

    • jaimeastorga2000 says:

      To a first approximation, humans are status maximizers. The Blue Tribe controls America (and, through it, the rest of “the international community”), and it accords status for signalling anti-racism, so there is a lot of optimizing for signalling anti-racism going on in the West. But focusing on anti-racism is a mistake; other societies have had holiness spirals revolving around different memeplexes, with no less disastrous results. See “Leftism Is Just an Easy Excuse”.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        What’s your definition of “control”?

        • jaimeastorga2000 says:

          The Blue Tribe dominates education, academia, journalism, television, and movies, which gives it control over the opinion-forming organs of society. It also dominates the judiciary and the bureaucracy, which gives it more control over domestic policy than elected politicians have.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            The Internet is quickly making most of those obsolete.

            On the other hand, the Blue Tribe dominates most of the concentrations of power on the net as well. It’s pretty obvious why we’re talking about “Fake News” at this precise moment in history.

          • John Schilling says:

            The Internet is quickly making most of those obsolete.

            The internet is largely dependent on those for the content it repackages.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @John Schilling – I think this is heavily dependent on the person using the internet, and to the extent that it’s true generally, I think it’s getting a lot less true over time. I’ve been watching a lot of video lately; very little of it was sourced in any way from mainstream TV or Hollywood. I read a lot of political content, but very little from primary or even tertiary sources. How about you?

            If you want a vision of the future, imagine PewdiePie screeching in your ear forever.

          • Well... says:

            The Blue Tribe dominates education, academia, journalism, television, and movies

            You forgot sports administration (or is that just a subset of television?) and the upper ranks of most of the large Western religious hierarchies. And what about big business? Ever hear of a right-wing HR department at a Forbes 400 company?

            And don’t leave this one out: software.

            Now, let me clarify: in many of these categories at least, dominates is not the same thing as controls.

      • Tekhno says:

        The Blue Tribe controls America

        Well, that’s pretty much ended now that America’s blue tribe has been completely stone walled and locked out of power for 2 years and out of the Presidency for 4. The red tribe is going to be pretty brutal in reversing things and disenfranchising blues. We may yet get a race purity spiral in the other direction, even if it takes a few cycles, and a purity spiral in the direction of racism has been historically far far far worse than purity spirals in the direction of anti-racism.

        Soon will come the time when the right are the establishment – Brexit and Trump I think are the start of a new trend – and so soon they won’t be able to use the same kind of excuses that underdogs use.

        • Sandy says:

          Depends on your definition of “control” — last I checked, the blue tribe is still the dominant cultural force and as far as I can tell, virtually unchallenged in that regard.

          The red tribe is fundamentally uncool, whether interstate truckers or Wehraboo frogposters. Uncool people don’t get to dictate society’s norms. I doubt President Grab-‘Em-By-The-Pussy is going to change that. As many have noted in the last week, he’s great fodder for 4 years of late night comedy.

          • Mark says:

            I’ll see your 4-chan trollster and raise you a stereotypical SJW. Not exactly the epitome of cool.

            Anyway, I think that “cool” probably means what “respectable” used to mean. There isn’t any reason why it can’t, in turn, be replaced by something else.

            To be honest some this stuff – like cannabis use – is becoming a bit too conventional to even be cool anymore.
            It’s hip to be square.

          • Sandy says:

            Trigglypuff may be embarrassing, but she’s really bottom of the barrel. And that’s more about how she behaves than what she believes, because her views are the views of the popular crowd on campuses.

            So you can repackage Trigglypuff’s views with a cleaner, smarter container and it will find vogue among the blue tribe, and thus cultural force. What Trigglypuff says about mansplaining, hate speech and misogyny sounds cringeworthy, and the blue tribe would never try to popularize it. But that’s not because of the message — it’s because Trigglypuff is fat and unattractive and everything about her screams “low social status”, and thus she makes for a bad messenger. If, on the other hand, Samantha Bee echoed Trigglypuff’s views down to the last word, it would be shared and retweeted and circulated everywhere with taglines like “Samantha Bee SLAMS/DESTROYS/EVISCERATES the red tribe!”.

            This debate is highly illustrative of what I’m talking about. I don’t know if Bill O’Reilly can properly be called a representative of the Red Tribe, but he probably can. He certainly talks about Jesus and the War on Christmas a lot. Jon Stewart, on the other hand, is the representative of the Blue Tribe. Just watch that debate and see that it doesn’t really matter what they’re saying or how they’re saying it — Stewart is winning because he’s much cooler than O’Reilly and everyone knows it. Nobody in the audience is going to go away from that debate thinking “Man, Bill O’Reilly had a couple of decent points when you think about it”; they’re going to be thinking “Haha, Jon Stewart is so effortlessly cool, that was just embarrassing for Bill O’Reilly”, and why shouldn’t they?

            There’s no equivalent carrier for red tribe views that can make them seem cool the way Samantha Bee can make Trigglypuff’s views seem cool. The most high-profile red tribe celebrity is probably Clint Eastwood; critics already make sneering references to his political views in their reviews, and Eastwood is 86 years old. Not exactly in the limelight a lot, not exactly the center of American culture anymore, and talking to an empty chair just made him look senile.

            To some lesser extent, the importance of coolness is clearly at work in Hillary Clinton’s defeat. People liked to turn out for Obama because Obama is cool, and especially because he is cool in a way that has a substantial bit of cross-tribal influence. Hillary is not cool and never has been. Some feminists try to make her cool with their SLAY QUEEN SLAY memes, but these are forced — no one’s buying it. Donald Trump is cool but only in a way that appeals to the internet-based red tribe and mental deviants like Kanye West. The blue tribe finds him abhorrent, and so the odds of him increasing his perception of coolness among the public are very low.

          • Mark says:

            Sorry – yes – my comment above originally said “Trigglypuff” instead of “stereotypical SJW”.
            —————————————
            I was watching Bill Maher the other day, and I just thought, “my God, are they still showing this stuff?”
            It’s all very 90’s.

            Um… yeah… I guess if the blue tribe exists as a kind of permanent corps de culture, then the sign that they are weakened won’t be that bin men are hosting the nightly news, it’ll be that no-one listens to what the news is saying.
            I’m definitely reaching the stage where I’d rather listen to a bin man than a full-on “blue tribe” lefty.

            Though, if the political views and presentation of the blue-tribe shift, I may change my mind.

          • carvenvisage says:

            Anyway, I think that “cool” probably means what “respectable” used to mean. There isn’t any reason why it can’t, in turn, be replaced by something else.

            Great point. (imo)

  34. Cathedra says:

    Suppose that all policy was made according to some [insert your ethical system here] set of rules. Then imagine over time that large parts of policy space, and even discussion of adjacent policies, was gradually banned by social pressure, and so the policies we were left with were only those that could still be openly discussed by well-meaning people. Then give every citizen a score equal to something like “how much they are annoyed by not being able to achieve or discuss optimal policy anymore” minus “how good and important the original goal of forbidding those discussions was”. Naturally all the people who thought the original ban was really important to achieve some social goal would mostly have negative scores, whereas all the people who really care about good policy (even if they thought the ban had some merits) would mostly have positive scores. People who actively despised the original ban would also have positive scores (a negative minus a negative) even if they didn’t care about policy at all.

    If people more or less spoke and acted and affiliated on the basis of their score, it might be hard to tell apart the people who had a positive score because they hated the ban, and the people who had a positive score because they wanted good policy discussion/options and weren’t enthusiastic about the ban. We might think that people who were indifferent to the ban actually hated it, and really just wanted to flout the ban. This is more or less how I think about the challenges in characterizing Trump voters and possibly Trump himself. Probably most just don’t really care about the ban, because it never really served any purpose in their lives, or doesn’t anymore. The ban just seems to be in the way to them. But it is easy to mistake this for wanting them to flout the ban just to be hateful. This seems to be some sort of fundamental attribution error.

  35. Wrong Species says:

    This whole Trump discussion is focused on the technicality of what “openly” racist means. Everyone of course has their own definitions and disagrees vigorously with those who don’t feel the same. None of this matters right now though. Donald Trump is going to be President. We’ll see soon enough whether his policies are racist then. I know it’s too much to ask but could we at least shut up until January 20?

    • Jordan D. says:

      I think the answer is “no” and for a relatively good reason.

      Donald Trump won the election, but- and I know there’s a lot of danger in assuming anything about him because he’s kind of bonkers- the signs point to him being not particularly interested in most of what his administration does. That’s why there’s so much interest in Trump’s Cabinet picks as opposed to the median President; the opinions and strategies of Trump’s EPA chief, for example, could be a lot more important than whatever Trump himself thinks about environmental issues.

      Now, I think it’s very likely that the focus on Trump’s cabinet selections won’t sway Trump in the least, but a lot of them require confirmation. It could very well be a productive strategy for blue tribe members to sway key Senate Republicans to keep certain people out of office entirely.

    • Mark V Anderson says:

      @ WS. Yeah you are probably right. Although it should more like April before we know anything substantial.

  36. TSHadley says:

    So much of the enigma of Donald Trump seems explained to me by the pathology of narcissistic personality disorder. But Scott is in the mental health field and has not (to my knowledge) raised this possibility, so I’m wondering what I’m missing.

    I never thought Trump was sincerely racist or sexist because he doesn’t seem to self-identify particularly with whites or men, he “identifies” with the grandiose image of being Donald Trump. He seems to be an equal opportunity exploiter, seems willing to work with anyone of any race, sex, or creed as long as they are appropriately loyal and sycophantic, he shows no empathy and gives nothing to those in need. Exactly what you’d expect from someone consumed and preoccupied daily with thoughts of power, success, admiration.

    I don’t think people appreciate how weird this guy is. His weird way of speaking. His catchphrases like “haters and losers!” or “Sad!”. His tendency to avoid perfectly reasonable questions in favor of meandering tangents about Mar-a-Lago. The ability to bait him into saying basically anything just by telling him people who don’t like him think he shouldn’t.

    The hypersensitivity to criticism, the short-attention span, the resistance to any work or sophisticated thought that doesn’t have an immediate glorious payoff. Isn’t this NPD?

    Trump is just randomly and bizarrely terrible. Sometimes his random and bizarre terribleness is about white people, and then we laugh it off. Sometimes it’s about minorities, and then we interpret it as racism.

    His bizarre patterns seem to fit one non-bizarre pattern: Trump will do and say whatever he thinks is the quickest shortcut to adulation and power. He seems to have an ability to morph himself into the leader that people want, saying whatever they want to hear to get that all important praise and loyalty. But ultimately, there seems to be no core principle inside him, no guiding vision at all except: fill the void.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      You’re missing the Goldwater Rule, which I take very seriously.

      • Moon says:

        Good you are aware of this, Scott. Others are free to state the obvious about Trump, but psychiatrists are legally prohibited from doing so. Fortunately, there are plenty of non-psychiatrists on the board who are not legally bound to silence themselves.

      • Winter Shaker says:

        I think that’s a bit uncharitable. Psychiatrists are ethically bound to avoid speculating in a fairly narrowly defined way about Trump, but are otherwise as free to state the obvious as anyone else, and I think our host has availed himself of the freedom to state the obvious about Trump outside of those narrow restrictions enough to allow us to be confident that he is not engaging in undue self-censorship.

        • shakeddown says:

          I feel like if Scott said “Donald Trump seems explained to me by the pathology of narcissistic personality disorder”, people would be inclined to take it as a professional psychiatric opinion, which would conflict with the Goldwater rule.

          • Winter Shaker says:

            Sorry, my comment was meant in reply to Moon, but I seem to have accidentally clicked one place upthread. I have no disagreement with Scott or you on this one.

      • Jake says:

        Does this apply to the dead, as well? Is there a time limit? Would you be forbidden, for example, from opining on whether Isaac Newton was autistic?

      • TSHadley says:

        Thanks for that!

        Your article is excellent, by the way, race and identity worries (regarding Trump presidential policy) are a dangerous red herring now, you’ve convinced me. It seems to me like the part of the country that is most afraid of obsolescence has voted in a man who they think will roll back a decade of economic/technological/social change just for them, but I’ll bet he’s going to be more interested in rolling around the country in the presidential motorcade playing “King”.

    • nyccine says:

      I’m wondering what I’m missing?

      Literally everything. Nothing you mentioned rises to the level of Narcissism as a psychological disorder; they aren’t even close to being symptoms of it. Narcissism isn’t “guy who thinks his shit doesn’t stink”, it’s a person who inverts the “identity-behavior” dynamic.

      A normal person has an identity, and molds their behavior to match the identity; if confronted with evidence that their behavior doesn’t match the identity, then they change one or the other. The narcissist cannot do this; for one, all his energy is devoted to convincing others (and himself) that he is his ego-identity, that he has none left over to actually work on becoming the identity, and two, when confronted with evidence that there is a discrepancy between his identity and his behavior, his reaction is to deny and attack – he’s suffered a “narcissistic injury” and responds with “narcissistic rage.”

      If you’re looking for narcissism in the aftermath of the election, you need to redirect your vision 180°.It’s the protesters who are the narcissists

      here is a difference between a narcissistic injury and an ordinary shock to the ego.
      The latter involves damage to one of the egos objects. In this case that would be simply when some self esteem is lost by having your side lose.
      A narcissistic injury is one which exposes the gap between an ego-ideal (grandiose self) and a realistic sense of one self. In this case the ego-ideal of the left seems to be moral righteousness or perfectionism. The blow from the right has been not only discounting that ego-ideal, but also invalidating the response. Those who are labeled “cucks” still play into the notion of a morally perfect ego ideal and therefore don’t invalidate it. They just argue about who is morally perfect, which becomes a kind of game. Most of the alt right does not care if their opponents think they are bad, which is the appropriate response when someone is playing a game of “who’s perfect, you or me?” “Fuck – you. Nobody’s perfect, but especially you.”
      The solution to an ordinary “blow to the ego” is to repair the damaged object (find a way to live with the loss and focus on the positive) or find a new object of attachment (change). Their is no solution to a narcissistic injury other than “undoing” or destroying the offender – or endless repetition of the same. Doubling down.
      If you ever want to send a narcissist through the roof tell them the way you’re handling this makes you look really bad right now.

  37. Nancy Lebovitz says:

    Would anyone care to take a crack at my highest-assigned-probability worry about Trump? It’s that he (and presumably his cronies) will steal a tremendous amount of money, possibly enough to affect the economy. Plausible?

    If so, is there anything to be done about it?

    • Mark says:

      All of the money has already been taken. Shifting rankings within the elite isn’t going to make much economic difference.

    • shakeddown says:

      I’m estimating it as plausible, but within an upper bound. They can’t steal enough money to cause large-scale damage to the economy without congress finding an excuse to impeach them. I’m pretty sure they will find ways to get moderate amounts of money (probably measured in the tens of billions): Enough to just barely noticeably damage the economy.

      • Moon says:

        They will probably actually start to do this, well beyond the upper bounds. Then Congress will impeach, and then Pence will be president.

    • lhn says:

      While I’m not happy about the prospect (which I agree is likely) of that sort of graft at the national level, as a Chicagoan I recognize that it’s a parasitic drain (if potentially a serious and injurious one) rather than an intolerable threat. I hope he doesn’t do it, and I hope that if he does that he faces appropriate legal consequences for it.

      But if he does it and gets away with it, he won’t be the first high politician to benefit from naked graft (as the Caro biography of Lyndon Johnson I just started already makes eminently clear), and his merely stealing a bundle is among the better cases I can imagine for his presidency.

    • baconbacon says:

      How much money do you think needs to be stolen to effect the economy? 1% of GDP is in the low hundreds of billions. Stealing that much money for himself would make him the richest person in the world by 3x the 2nd place guy.

    • Matt M says:

      Given what the government typically spends most of its money on (foreign interventionism, the surveillance state, increasingly burdensome economic regulation), I’d rather it be in Trump’s bank account than theirs. Trump personally is less likely to kill or harm me than the state in general is.

    • Chalid says:

      The various comments saying that you can’t steal enough money to make a difference to the economy are off-base. Corruption is negative-sum.

      Imagine something like Trump changing the regulatory structure affecting companies he owns in order to give them advantages over their rivals, or having prosecutors go on fishing expeditions to find excuses to lock business rivals up. This sort of thing potentially makes an entire sector of the economy uncompetitive while enriching him only slightly compared to the size of the economy. (Not saying that these specifically are plausible, I haven’t done any homework on what exactly could be done.)

    • John Schilling says:

      I’m reminded of the South Korean reaction to their recent presidential scandal. Which basically came down to, “We expect our presidents to steal ten billion dollars or so and hand it out to their family; that’s only natural, and we can handle it. Tens of millions stolen and handed over to some creepy religious cult, that frightens and confuses us because we can’t even guess at what else is going on and what will happen next”.

      We can handle a president stealing ten billion dollars. We could handle a president stealing a hundred billion dollars. I’d rather have a do-over on the last eight years with a competent benevolent dictator whose only vice was stealing a hundred billion dollars. A trillion dollars would hurt, and hurt enough to overshadow anything else an administration could do, but it probably wouldn’t actually crash the economy if it were siphoned off slowly and skillfully over eight years. Ten trillion, and we’re done for.

      I am fairly confident that the limit on what a POTUS can steal without being caught, sufficiently red-handed for an impeachment even with a Republican majority, is no more than ten billion or so.

      • baconbacon says:

        The primary danger is in how it is stolen. The amount of money that Haliburton got in terms of profit form the Iraq was is negligible for the economy, but if you think that the Iraq war was started expressly to enrich the owners of Haliburton then it has a large impact. To make a $100 billion from outright theft will have less on an impact than making $100 billion by skimming a few percent off trillions in transactions set up purposely to skim from.

    • suntzuanime says:

      I’m reminded of Scott’s bit in Reactionary Politics in a Planet-Sized Nutshell where the King of America builds himself a massive palace plated with gold (does that sound like anyone you know?) and it turns out to be way cheaper than the ordinary democratic sloshing around of corporate welfare. I think it would be possible to loot the country badly enough to meaningfully harm it, but not easy, especially without prompting a coup. Personal direct theft is just so low-leverage compared to making bad governmental decisions in terms of harming the country.

    • The Nybbler says:

      Steal personally? Seems unlikely. The US economy is really big, and while C.S. Lewis was probably somewhat optimistic about a robber baron’s cupidity being satiated, the US economy probably contains more than enough to do it without hurting the country too much.

      A much bigger danger is he’ll waste huge amounts of money on useless and counterproductive programs. Possibly including a very tall border wall with his picture included every 10 feet, but more likely terrorism or health care related. But that’s a danger with all politicians.

    • Reasoner says:

      A few reasons I’m not super worried about this:

      * Trump is very rich already. Diminishing marginal utility for money and all that. If Trump’s primary concern was living a life of luxury, I don’t think he would have run. Diminishing marginal utility also suggests that graft will not be sizeable enough in scope to ruin the economy.

      * Trump made ending corruption a big plank of his platform: he accused Hillary of accepting foreign donations, talked about draining the swamp, talked about the evils of campaign donors, etc. A lot of his base thinks this is what he stands for.

      * The media will be extremely willing to call Trump out if he pulls something like this.

      • Moon says:

        I hope you are right and I am wrong. But the way I see it:

        Money is not something to buy stuff with. It’s status. People who already have more of it than they or their families could ever spend, are more likely to want to make more of it than your average middle class person wants it. It’s a matter of focus. Spend your life focused on gaining more money to gain more status, and you won’t remember how to focus on anything else.

        Trump seems unlikely to me to follow through on promises he made in his platform, because he’s too dumb about government and how it works to actually govern. The people whom he surrounds himself with, will make almost all decisions, because of his lack of interest in anything except having the title of POTUS. If they don’t like his platform, they won’t do any of it.

        Trump is already threatening lawsuits against the media. They’ll bow down and suck up to him, in order to get access to the White House, just like they did with W. He won’t even need to carry out the lawsuit threats. All the media care about is making money themselves. There is no news media any more. It died and became infotainment media years ago.

      • John Schilling says:

        Trump is very rich already.

        This is unclear, and depends on your definition of “very rich”. More to the point, it depends on Trump’s definition of “very rich”, because that’s what will decide whether he tries to loot the treasury (figuratively speaking) to get more.

        Trump claims a net worth of ten billion dollars, but independent assessments typically credit him with three billion or so. It seems quite plausible that he doesn’t meet his own standards for “rich enough; time to worry about other things”. Also, that $3E9 figure has rather large error bars, particularly on the debt side of the equation. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that Trump is close to bankruptcy, in which case he has found himself an interesting way to hide from his creditors while he replenishes his accounts.

        Also possible that actually winning the presidency has so radically altered his priorities that the things that were important to him before (gold-plating everything, big ‘Trump’ logos everywhere’) are fading in significance. If that hasn’t happened yet, I’m guessing it will some time next February.

      • shakeddown says:

        I don’t see these as likely to stop him:

        * Trump isn’t really the type to say “oh well, I’m rich enough already, guess I shouldn’t take any more risks.”, based on past behavior.

        * Trump also made being an outsider a big part of his platform, but is now surrounding himself with the likes of Gingrich and Romney. And he has a history of dishonest business dealings, so I wouldn’t trust him on this.

        * Trump doesn’t really seem to care about the media calling him out.

    • keranih says:

      It’s that he (and presumably his cronies) will steal a tremendous amount of money, possibly enough to affect the economy. Plausible?

      If plausible, it’s a problem we need to address whether or not Trump is likely to do so.

      Making rules and running the government as though we are all honorable men is…well, again, the Founding Fathers did recognize the folly of this.

  38. HeelBearCub says:

    Why am I harping on this?

    I work in mental health. So far I have had two patients express Trump-related suicidal ideation. One of them ended up in the emergency room, although luckily both of them are now safe and well. I have heard secondhand of several more.

    Scott,

    This article doesn’t help. In fact, it hurts.

    By systematically either ignoring or apologizing for all of the ways in which Trump’s rhetoric is, in fact, a dismissal of those who are “the other” you convince those who are in fear that you don’t care about that rhetoric. You confirm that you will happily ignore all of their legitimate fears.

    And you legitimize that rhetoric by Trump and the team he is assembling. The legitimization is what is sparking the fear, and you are contributing to it.

    • drethelin says:

      the fears are not legitimate. they are exaggerated to the point of insanity. The most insane part: Any rational argument that the fears are not justified is taken as proof that the fears are justified. Did you even READ the article? Trump’s rhetoric is consistently inclusive and NOT about “the other”. The rhetoric that is terrifying people is almost entirely on the anti-trump side.

      • Anonymous Bosch says:

        Trump’s rhetoric is consistently inclusive and NOT about “the other”.

        Trump’s rhetoric is not “consistently” anything. For every inclusive cherry Scott picks in his essay you can find one that’s divisive. And usually the latter are found in interviews or rallies, which I find more telling than something written for him in a prepared speech or official campaign press release.

        • Matt M says:

          “Trump’s rhetoric is not “consistently” anything. For every inclusive cherry Scott picks in his essay you can find one that’s divisive. ”

          No you can’t. It’s more like for every divisive thing Trump has said you can find 99 inclusive things he has said. Which suggests there’s nothing to worry about. Which is exactly and entirely the point.

          • Moon says:

            Yes, this is a Right Wing board, so 99% of the cherry picking here will be done by Right Wingers, in ways that will defend the Republican president-elect, not make him look less than pure as the driven snow.

            Reality, of course, does not agree. As the great Stephen Colbert has said “It is a well known fact that reality has liberal bias.”

          • Wrong Species says:

            @Moon

            You aren’t being cool and edgy by complaining about this being a “right wing board”. You’re just being irritating. You can make a point without doing that every single time you comment.

          • Moon says:

            I could. But 99% of the time when people respond to my posts, they either assert Right Wing views, or else criiticize me for saying that this is happening.

            You are really in a fantasy world, if you think that I think I am being cool and edgy. All I am doing is saying the truth about what I am experiencing. If that is too much for you to handle, feel free to go to your safe space.

            Oh, I forgot, you expect this board to be your safe space. And most of the time it is. I am the only one interrupting the rule that everyone must be Right of Center, or else be put down for not being so. Even the few other Left of Center people here, usually keep asking me to act as a one of the liberal door mats here. Oh, the joy.

          • Randy M says:

            You are really in a fantasy world, if you think that I think I am being cool and edgy.

            I am the only one interrupting the rule

            edgy
            adjective \ˈe-jē\
            new and unusual in a way that is likely to make some people uncomfortable

          • Mark says:

            This board is very right wing, but I find it kind of invigorating.

          • Dahlen says:

            You know, Jill, I stopped complaining about the commentariat’s right-wing bias around the time you showed up, because I suspected that such comments would have been evaluated to the lowest common denominator. So that would mean I don’t think you were necessarily wrong. But in the meantime, the situation around here improved, while you didn’t.

            I still wonder whether the person behind the Jill account isn’t some very dedicated individual play-acting as the Democrat straw-(wo)man testing our patience to the limits For Science, because I’m getting some whiffs of a failed Ideological Turing Test here. Alternate hypothesis: Jill/Moon is really old.

          • Anonymous Bosch says:

            I still wonder whether the person behind the Jill account isn’t some very dedicated individual play-acting as the Democrat straw-(wo)man testing our patience to the limits For Science, because I’m getting some whiffs of a failed Ideological Turing Test here.

            Ya think?

            As the great Stephen Colbert has said “It is a well known fact that reality has liberal bias.”

            ◔_◔

          • Dahlen says:

            I don’t know, I’ve been disappointed before.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            The working theory is that they’re too commited for it to be just a ruse.

          • baconbacon says:

            I still wonder whether the person behind the Jill account isn’t some very dedicated individual play-acting as the Democrat straw-(wo)man testing our patience to the limits For Science, because I’m getting some whiffs of a failed Ideological Turing Test here.

            Not getting whiffs would be better evidence, your typical person (even as a poster here) won’t have researched every possible position and have rational defenses on every position. They will have a mixture, some of which will be at odds with the average.

          • Wrong Species says:

            This isn’t directed to Moon but other progressives:

            Is it really so bad that I enjoy discussing things on one of the few places on the internet that isn’t steeped in progressive ideology? What alternatives are there anyways? Most of the Internet is toxic and it’s nice to go to place that I can have interesting discussions without having to be defensive. This isn’t to say that I think people who disagree with me should go away. No one is “triggering” me. I just don’t think SSC should be under any obligation to be “politically diverse”, especially when people on the left have the rest of the Internet to do what they want. No internet board is going to be fully representative of the internet population. There is nothing wrong with that.

          • Anonymous Bosch says:

            Is it really so bad that I enjoy discussing things on one of the few places on the internet that isn’t steeped in progressive ideology? What alternatives are there anyways?

            The comments section of pretty much any right-wing news source? The political forum of any given message board about sports, or guns? A metric fuckload of Facebook groups?

            I don’t really believe in safe spaces or artificial balance either but sheesh, you aren’t looking very hard if you think this is the final bastion of non-progressivism.

          • Dahlen says:

            @Wrong Species:

            If that’s what you’re looking for, then I don’t see what could possibly single out SSC as the ideal space for that, at least as far as Scott’s “master” posts are concerned (rather than us petty peons). He blogs a lot about “inter-faith” mutual understanding and charity. He doesn’t blog a lot in a style that could be unambiguously identified as right-wing bias.

            So, why here rather than some other right-wing-friendly space? Off you go to 8chan or Breitbart (or if that’s too alt-ish, I’m sure there are a lot of mainstream conservative spaces). They’ll share your assumptions alright, and your time spent there won’t have to feel like a swim upstream. In theory, yeah, okay, we could democratically do away with a commitment to diversity, but before that majority turns into a unanimity (considering the current status quo), there will be some people who need to be “evacuated”, and perhaps they too feel at home around here and have good reasons to oppose “evacuation”.

            The point being, the way from “interesting discussions” to “echo-chamber” passes through a lack of norms encouraging political diversity, and this is the mechanism by which you may find yourself driving off people disagreeing with you, which you half-heartedly claim not to seek. Well, it’s not enough not to actively seek it. The equilibrium leans that way anyhow.

          • Randy M says:

            He doesn’t blog a lot in a style that could be unambiguously identified as right-wing bias.

            Be fair, WS didn’t say he wanted a place that was safely right wing, he said:

            I enjoy discussing things on one of the few places on the internet that isn’t steeped in progressive ideology?

            I think Scott is committed to truth, honesty, and fairness and I think him seeking to court a specific balance is detrimental to any extent that it changes that.

            (of course, you are right that there are plenty of places to the right of Scott without progressive tilt, so WS’s comment was at least incomplete if this is his favorite hang-out).

          • Wrong Species says:

            Quite frankly, there aren’t many places on the internet that have intelligent conversations and are also right leaning. And whatever groupthink people believe we have here doesn’t hold a candle to a place like Breitbart. The right is not some monolithic group. There are libertarians, traditionalists, vaguely pro Trump supporters and even conservatives who despise everything Trump stands for. Not only that but there are active commenters who do bring a left-wing perspective. They aren’t exactly marginalized.

            I’m not denying that an echo chamber can be a problem and maybe is to some extent. But it’s not always a good thing either to have equal representation either because you can find yourself repeating the same 20 arguments over and over again drowning out everything else.

            Again, I want to make this clear. I don’t think this should necessarily be a right wing site, especially not an explicit one. If every progressive decided they didn’t want to be here anymore I would consider that a great loss. And if the site started leaning left I wouldn’t abandon ship. I just don’t think we should go out of our way to accommodate every group of people who feels like their views need to be thoroughly represented.

          • Dahlen says:

            @Randy M:

            I don’t know, it looks to me as if those who argue against the necessity of political diversity (not necessarily tailored to the proportions found in the general population), in the event that they don’t see bias of their specific colour as an extra strong dose of reality, ignore the tendency of bias to fester. It’s a problem that gets worse by itself unless you actively do something about it. Even if you start out as fair-minded.

            Then again, I’m not sure that maximal viewpoint diversity is exactly excellent either. We’ve had lots of discussions around here where the participants had values too different to agree that one party of the discussion shouldn’t be murdered as a consequence of their views, in a real life context, under ideal conditions for the other party. That’s about as much divergence as a social group can imaginably tolerate.

            @ Wrong Species:

            Okay, when you put it like that, I agree. See my italicised point above; I don’t believe either in proportional representation relative to some external societal standard, much less would I agree to local “affirmative action” for leftists.

          • Tekhno says:

            @Moon

            The prevailing position here doesn’t seem to be “Trump is awesome and not a racist!”. The prevailing position seems to be “Trump is terrible, but not at all a racist and harping on about that aspect when there are so many other legitimate ways in which he is terrible is harmful.” If the latter is somehow a right wing position, then that’s a low bar, or maybe defending Trump from any inaccuracy at all is just a super-secret version of “Trump is awesome”?

            I’m not sure where this idea that we want to make Trump look pure as snow is coming from.

          • Randy M says:

            Dahlen, note I framed my objection in terms of a trade-off. If you get more diversity of opinion without Scott consciously tailoring his posts to do so, all well and good. I just don’t want him nagged into it watering himself down or backing away from any conclusion.

          • Dahlen says:

            @ Randy M:

            I just don’t want him nagged into it watering himself down or backing away from any conclusion.

            That’s as unfeasible as it is undesirable, Scott scores top marks at integrity from what we’ve seen so far.

            Anyway, if I were the kind who wanted the message shoe-horned for nefarious purposes tailored to an ideal audience, I’d go bitch about e.g. his second-latest post, but notice how I don’t do that.

          • Randy M says:

            Sorry, perhaps you didn’t notice, but people have complained about the make-up of the comments section in the past. I was pointing out gently why I would by wary of such claims.

            I wasn’t imputing such motives to you, just ranking for the record as an aside where commenter-viewpoint-diversity comes for me–well below blog post quality.

      • lvlln says:

        I’m not convinced that Trump’s rhetoric is consistently inclusive, but that wasn’t Scott Alexander’s point with his post anyway. His point was that there the evidence that Trump is “openly” racist or white supremacist is extremely shoddy, and by calling him that, we are hurting our credibility in calling anyone “openly” racist or white supremacist, which will end up handcuffing us if and when we have to fight against someone who literally is a cloak wearing white supremacist.

        That this gets rolled up as being a denial of or apologizing for Trump’s rhetoric of dismissing the “other” makes me sad. It’s evident to me that Scott Alexander hates Trump and his rhetoric just as much as the most ardent Hillary supporter. What he doesn’t do is to make unjustified exaggerations of Trump’s rhetoric. And it is precisely those unjustified exaggerations he’s fighting against, because he sees those unjustified exaggerations as doing lots of harm.

        If someone is having major issues with their life because they can’t go outside for fear that the CIA will conspire to kill them when in public, the right move seems to be to figure out whether that fear is reasonable based on who they are and who the CIA is interested in, and if not, convince them that they aren’t in such danger. And doing so can’t reasonably be interpreted as excusing or apologizing for the fact that the CIA really is a part of a harmful surveillance state.

        My pet theory wrt the “openly” racist/white supremacist phenomenon is that a sort of a treadmill effect is going on. In the past, “racist” used to mean “views members of other races as inferior or different in some meaningful way,” and “openly racist” meant “is open in public about holding those views.”

        Recently, “racist” has been expanded to include that but also “is white and does not acknowledge or attempt to make up for the systemic privilege they gain by nature of being white in US society” (in some circles, we could just stop at “is white” but I think that still isn’t super common – however, I may be wrong about that). So “openly racist” followed along and became “is open in public about holding those views.” I’m not aware if Trump has come out and outright denied his white privilege, but his behavior in public seems far more consistent with someone who doesn’t buy into the whole white privilege paradigm and doesn’t care about hiding it than someone who does buy into it and wants to find a way to correct for it.

        So when some people call Trump an open racist, they’re, in their minds, making, at most, an entirely reasonable inference based on his behavior. Not calling him a literal Nazi or white cloak wearer. The idea that most people in the US might interpret those words that way seems either false to them, irrelevant to them, or convenient to them.

        But that’s just my pet theory and is probably wrong or missing some critical components.

        • Anonymousse says:

          Scott’s article seems to go a bit further than necessary to excuse what could perhaps be characterized as “subtle racism” (if we want to introduce a third option on this apparently binary racism scale). Trump doesn’t seem to recognize that other interpretations of his words are inevitable and valid, and he needs to respect this.

          In the section defending Trump’s comments on illegal immigrants from Mexico, Scott cites it as a “balanced assessment of Latinos, both good and bad.” I don’t believe that perpetuating criminals, drug mules, and rapists as the default and putting the existence of some “supposed” good people in doubt (and I think this is the intended reading of his statements) is in any way fair or balanced.

          Through this implication, and by saying that Mexico is “sending” criminals to the US, Trump is implicating Mexicans, and painting all illegal immigrants in a negative light. Contrast this with the Clinton quote, which focuses on illegal activities committed by illegal immigrants, without implicating Mexico directly or doubting that sometimes people cross the border for very sympathetic reasons and then cause little to no harm.

          I don’t believe I’m splitting hairs here. It is an important distinction, and Trump doesn’t need to say “I will ban Mexicans” to be spreading a subtle message that can be easily interpreted as “all Mexicans are part of the problem, and that people should be wary.”

          This is the dangerous element, and it falls in the wide chasm between open racism and a message of inclusiveness. And I don’t think weirdness excuses it.

          Notes: I admit that Trump’s delivery plays into my uncharitable reading of his message, and that there are ultimately bigger fish to fry.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        Trump’s rhetoric is not consistently inclusive. The most consistent aspect of his rhetoric is to assert that there are “others” who are screwing America or Americans. Mexicans, Muslims, Chinese. He frequently asserts that these foreign others are inside America now and need to be removed.

        Trump, in fact, admitted that his rhetoric was anti-Mexican and should cause bias towards him on the part of those of Mexican heritage. “I’m building a wall. He’s Mexican.” Trumps own thoughts reveal that he believes his rhetoric is insulting to Mexicans.

        He came to political prominence by literally (and that is literally, literally) questioning whether Obama was, in fact, American. How much more blatant does it have to get?

        When he is called on it he does the standard “I don’t mean anything by it” dodge.

        What I am saying is that arguing against “openly” racist is a fig leaf to hide behind when you don’t want to look at the legitimate concern that has been voiced by people across the political spectrum, left and right.

        A law professor recently tried to calm the foreign law students in his class saying that Trump had never expressed any desire to take away student visas and they were in no danger of deportation. There was nothing to fear.

        Several students then mentioned how they had been planning to travel back to their (majority Muslim) home country over the winter break, at which point the professor said, “Perhaps you should plan to be back in the States before January 20th.”

    • SUT says:

      Much Trump hysteria comes down to one phenomenon: Projection.

      Communists like yourself HBC, ultimately condones political purges and gulags to consolidate victories. They condone stirring up racial and religious riots, see Crown Heights Riot. Seriously, go read through the account again to remind yourself: Al Sharpton is on the scene and within 24 hours, someone shouts “Let’s go to Kingston Avenue and get a Jew!” [and ultimately they do get said jew and beat him to death, oh and nobody ever gets convicted of a crime for it]

      I understand when you play by these rules how scary it must be to lose the game. But seriously, be assured the American Right will never stoop to this level. You have nothing to fear and deep down you know this, you know you’d never wear a Trump hat, or put a Trump bumper sticker on your car and go through one of Hillary’s 90% strongholds.

      But by all means, keep burning flags, smashing windows. The next generation is getting their education of the left’s M.O.

    • herbert herberson says:

      I think the problem is conflation and trying to map 20th Century style politics on a very 21st Century style politician. Trump’s analogs aren’t David Duke and the KKK. Instead, he’s the American equivalent of Marie le Penn and Gert Wilders (or, at least his core base is). So is he especially anti-Black? Not really, and certainly not openly, despite the documented historical pattern of prejudice. Is he especially anti-gay? Not at all! If anything, he’s pro-gay, because he’s defending liberal, even libertine values against a perceived threat. It’s that perceived threat where he deserves “openly” as an adjective–immigrants and, especially, Muslims.

      • Matt M says:

        The justification I most often see for him being anti-gay is that he picked Pence as VP, who we’re all supposed to accept as a given is incredibly anti-gay based on the fact that he supported a bill allowing business owners freedom of association for a couple weeks before backing away from it when various corporations in his state pitched a fit.

        • Anonymous Bosch says:

          The justification I most often see for him being anti-gay is that he picked Pence as VP, who we’re all supposed to accept as a given is incredibly anti-gay based on the fact that he supported a bill allowing business owners freedom of association for a couple weeks before backing away from it when various corporations in his state pitched a fit.

          Pence supported the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and also opposed civil unions. He signed a state-level law making it a felony for gays to apply for a marriage license. As a Congressman, he demanded federal funding for conversion therapy.

          • Evan Þ says:

            Has Pence done anything about conversion therapy more recently than 2002?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Evan Þ:

            He signed a putative religious freedom bill in 2015 that caused the NCAA to contemplate leaving the state, as it would have allowed public accommodations to refuse service to gay people on religious grounds (among other things).

            He subsequently had to sign a revised law.

          • Evan Þ says:

            @HeelBearCub, yes, I clearly remember that – and the frenzied condemnations from the Red Tribe for his lack of a backbone when he backed down. I was asking more specifically about whether he’d supported conversion therapy.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Evan Þ:

            Sorry. I misread what you wrote

        • herbert herberson says:

          There’s a little more it than that. He’s given more than one indication that he would appoint anti-Obergefell SCOTUS justices (views dissent-author Scalia as an exemplar, said that he would “strongly consider that, yes” in reply to the question “you might try to appoint justices to overrule the decision on same-sex marriage?”).

          But, yeah, mostly it hangs on Pence. On the one hand, I’m not sure I agree that Pence is nothing more than a defender of wedding bakers and pizza parlors. On the other hand, though, Pence is not a Trump guy. He is a synecdoche for the wing of the establishment GOP that was willing to form a coalition with Trump. So, while I think it’s fair to say Trump is allied to anti-gay forces, I really don’t see any reason to think his heart is in it, nor does he strike me as a person who is willing to put much energy into things he doesn’t care about just because some begrudging allies do.

          As far as I can tell, gays are not under any particular threat, and are probably in a better position than they would be under a regular Republican president with a unified Congress–and that’s speaking as someone who loathes Trump and thinks he poses a non-zero danger to the republic.

          • Anonymousse says:

            So, while I think it’s fair to say Trump is allied to anti-gay forces, I really don’t see any reason to think his heart is in it, nor does he strike me as a person who is willing to put much energy into things he doesn’t care about just because some begrudging allies do.

            But will he be willing to put energy into preventing Pence et. al. from advancing their agendas? My guess is no, and as such one may be reasonably worried.

            Larger issue, I still can’t figure out why he wants to be President other than brand recognition and, on the condition of a win, furthering his business ventures.

          • herbert herberson says:

            Definitely agree that it’s reasonable to worry, particularly about SCOTUS–but, at the same time, I think it’s worth noting and repeating that we’re pretty much just talking about the same old GOP here. Gays can expect the Trump administration to be (at worst) comparable to previous GOP presidents. I don’t think immigrants and Muslims are as lucky.

            As far as Trump’s motivations are concerned, I don’t think it’s any more complicated than it being fun and cool to have an arenaload of people cheering your name.

          • suntzuanime says:

            My guess is that he wants to make America great again.

            EDIT: He has many hotels in America, after all.

          • Anonymousse says:

            That’s a reason for running, but not for winning. Or was that last bit an accident?

            Reasonably curious what the most convincing argument is, despite my snark.

          • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

            Once we’ve settled the vexing question of why Trump wants to be President, we can have a go at the even more puzzling question of why he ever wanted to be rich.

          • “Larger issue, I still can’t figure out why he wants to be President”

            Most humans value status. My assumption is that Trump is simply an extreme case of that.

  39. Cliff says:

    Thank you Scott for your most recent post. Brave, and very well said. In my opinion this rhetoric is what allowed Trump to win in the first place, and doubling down is only going to make his reelection more likely. I’ve been sort of making this argument but it’s wonderful to have it laid out so thoroughly.

  40. Thursday says:

    In response to the Crying Wolf post:

    When “honorable and decent men” like McCain and Romney “are reflexively dubbed racists simply for opposing Democratic policies, the result is a G.O.P. electorate that doesn’t listen to admonitions when the genuine article is in their midst”.

    This is one of my main problems with the anti-Trumpers. The most powerful argument against Trump is that he is more likely to cause conflict and instability around the world, but McCain was far crazier than Trump in this regard and I never heard the same kind of hate directed at McCain. In fact, a lot of people in the mainstream media looked on him as a lovable “maverick.” This tells me that foreign policy risk isn’t really what is driving anti-Trump sentiment.

    • birdboy2000 says:

      I know saying “this” is bad form, but I’ve argued in the past that Obama deserved the Noble Peace Prize for keeping McCain out of the white house, so. This.

      Romney’s economic policy would also have caused a lot of people to suffer, but the suffering wouldn’t have been on idpol lines and the kind of rich liberals who make up Hillary’s base don’t care any more about poverty than Romney did.

    • Matt M says:

      “but McCain was far crazier than Trump in this regard and I never heard the same kind of hate directed at McCain”

      Maybe not QUITE at the same level, but I think recent events have caused us to forget just how nasty some anti-McCain rhetoric was. I distinctly remember one of the hosts of the view (probably Joy Behar at the time but don’t quote me on that) suggesting that he probably suffered PTSD as a result of his experience as a prisoner of war and that he might nuke North Vietnam in order to get revenge.

      That’s the most extreme thing I can think of but the notion that McCain would plunge us into WW3 for no reason because that’s what republicans do was not exactly some ultra-rare, out of bounds idea…

      • Thursday says:

        Sorry, but Anti-McCain rhetoric was not even close to anti-Trump rhetoric.

        • Matt M says:

          I agree. But let’s not pretend that the left was calling McCain “honorable and decent” in 2008. He only gets to be honorable and decent when being compared to Trump. When being compared to Obama he is still a warmongering racist sexist homophobe who hates the poor.

  41. TheBearsHaveArrived says:

    http://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/gre_guide_table1a.pdf

    https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/sat/sat-percentile-ranks-subject-tests-2015.pdf

    Almost every national test math or spatial skill heavy, besides math-contest specific tests, don’t scale to the 99+ percentile. Physics, engineering, it does not matter. The SAT 2 test perfect score is about the..81’th percentile.

    Calculus BC has the highest rate of 5’s on the test as any AP test.

    It keeps happening I noticed. I am pretty sure the answer ends up as political correctness weakening the nations ability to track top scientific talent.

    This makes me believe the reason there is no engineering specific exam (with mechanical and electrical as the topics) is due to spatial reasoning gender gaps, since even if the ceiling of the test was the 80th percentile its gaps would be noticeable with protests in lots of the education fields.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_visualization_ability#Gender_differences

    http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/06/human-capital-mongering-m-v-s-profiles.html

    • StellaAthena says:

      Is this “hypothesis: American standardized tests are deliberated dumbes down to please the PC crowd”? In that case, I look forward to reading your analysis of the increase in the average grade and the decrease in the percentile of a perfect score over the past 30 years as such ideas have become more popular.

      • TheBearsHaveArrived says:

        From an old university I went to, the levels of grade inflation varied a great deal depending on discipline, with engineering having the least, the sciences next(a normal 3.0 average), and some liberal arts fields have horrid grade inflation to the point where it seems like the department existed solely to put people in high ranking law and medical schools(its not like those courses had any objective way to grade papers and projects anyways,besides misspellings and dull grammatical errors. Which is great if the school needs fake courses for political purposes). Though, even in engineering, the senior classes had higher GPA averages then the freshman *weeder* classes.

        The issues for grades and test scores are very different. But a profit maximizing high school/college may try pulling some tricks with GPA and giving out honors if it thinks it can get away with it. The reason for my analysis is noticing that verbal tests, with minimal gender differences, are allowed to go to the 99.5th percentile, while mathy/spatial tests(with significant to very large differences) often top out at the 90th or less.

        • StellaAthena says:

          If you want to blame this on “political correctness weakening the nations ability to track top scientific talent” you need to show that the increase in interest in political correctness at a bare minimum correlates with this effect that you’re describing. I doubt you have any such evidence.

          Grade inflation being dependent on major seems pretty irrelevant to your claim. Additionally, treating “science” as a monolith is (in my experience) completely wrong. At my alma matter (UChicago), the average physics major GPA was significantly lower than the average bio major GPA. The school newspaper ran an article on grade distribution across majors last year but I can’t seem to find it online.

          There isn’t an objective way to grade anything as long as you assign partial credit, so that part of your argument seems bunk. I see no reason to think grading a math proof is any different from grading a philosophy or history paper in terms of subjectivity.

          My school didn’t have an engineering program so I can’t talk about that, but really there’s a million potential explanations for the reason people score higher in math SAT than writing, but positing a PC-police conspiracy sounds rediculous since you’re not providing any supporting data.

          • rlms says:

            A proof is a lot more objective than an essay (that’s kind of the point of proofs). I guess the marking could vary by a few marks on the basis of style and clarity, but there is no subjectivity in whether a series of logical implications are valid.

          • StellaAthena says:

            Except mathematical proofs aren’t a series of logical implications. They contain ideas strung toerhed and mediated by logic, but so do philosophy papersp

          • rlms says:

            They don’t contain “ideas” strung together by logic, they contain specifically defined mathematical statements (strung together by logic). A statement that P implies Q is either true or false, and in maths P and Q are always well-defined enough that if you disagree about them you can chase that disagreement back to first principles and see who is right (whereas in philosophy there is rarely unanimous agreement).

          • dndnrsn says:

            The impression I got from friends of mine who did math or science, and from my experience doing language courses (far more objectively marked than essay-based “soft” stuff – you either remember the grammar and vocabulary and translate the sentence right, or you don’t), with the humanities and social sciences it was easier to get mediocre marks, harder to fail, harder to get extremely good marks. Caveat: not an American school, and various reasons to believe grade inflation wasn’t much of a thing.

            Instructors are usually loath to fail people, but they were also under pressure not to give out too many high marks. In something really subjective, it’s easy to find enough marks floating around that someone doesn’t fail, but also easy enough to find enough reasons to mark someone down that you don’t hand out too many A-s and As. Whereas if someone has just screwed up the math or the grammar or whatever, it’s hard to paper over that, and if they’ve done a perfect job, it’s harder to deny that.

            In comparison, one of my worst marks in university was in a language course I didn’t work that hard on, and some of my best marks were in language courses I did work hard on. With the ones I tried hard on, I spent a lot less time worrying that I just didn’t know how I’d done on an exam.

          • StellaAthena says:

            Sorry about how that was written, my phone must have glitches out on me.

            99% of mathematics is not written in formal language. It’s written in natural language mathematical prose. The question of if a mathematical proof is sufficiently riggorous is an actual debatable and subjective topic that depends on the course, the ta, and thé student’s background. I additionally have philosophical objections to you’re view, but as a description of the work a mathematics student does in University it is just not correct.

          • rlms says:

            Yes, certainly most proofs are not written to a level of detail that would allow them to be checked by a computer, but all proofs should be transformable to such (otherwise they are not valid). There is subjectivity in how much rigour should be used, but I think it is of a different kind to that in the humanities. Two people disagreeing about how good a history essay will do so on many small aspects of it and contextual factors. Two people disagreeing about whether a proof is appropriately rigorous will do so based on whether it uses concepts taught in the course.

            Practically speaking, you could experimentally test differences in subjectivity of grading. Get a selection of essays and a selection of proofs to be graded by different people. I am confident that the variance of the essays’ grades would be much greater than the proofs’, and that the proofs’ could be reduced to pretty much zero if the graders conferred.

          • StellaAthena says:

            That is definitely possible, I’ll concede. I don’t think it particularly supports the OP’s point though.

          • rlms says:

            Yes, I was pedantically disagreeing with that specific part of your comment. I agree that in general OP’s point is wrong.

    • Dahlen says:

      the reason there is no engineering specific exam (with mechanical and electrical as the topics) is due to spatial reasoning gender gaps

      Uh. Mechanics and electricity aren’t all that heavy on spatial reasoning. Geometry is. 3D modelling is. Driving is. Architecture is. Navigating a complex environment such as a city, or an unmarked environment such as a forest, especially is. Perhaps even chess or sports.

      Mechanics and electricity are a mere matter of quantitative reasoning. No stuff that’s actually heavy on spatial reasoning is taught in school, aside from geometry. That may be reason enough to look elsewhere.

      • Mark says:

        Isn’t it possible that spacial intuition/reasoning could underlie our understanding of a principle, even if that principle can be expressed in words?

        • Dahlen says:

          Not all of the physical laws involved in circuits or mechanisms relate primarily to spatial dimensions. It’s not the wording of the principles that I’m contrasting this with, but all of the other physical quantities involved that are in no way made easier to understand by very high spatial reasoning, trust me.

          • Mark says:

            Not that I don’t trust you, but I’m interested – the interest rate and increase of money in my bank account doesn’t have a spacial element, but it can be represented spatially.

            I’m thinking that someone who can reason spatially might be able to leverage that ability to have more mathematical insight than someone without that capacity.
            Or am I completely missing the point?

          • Dahlen says:

            The fact that something can be represented spatially, by which I’m assuming you mean graphs and especially those of a 3D variety, does not mean that the main abilities involved in the processing and understanding of a graph and of its relation to that which it represents are spatial abilities. That one has more to do with capacity for abstraction and analogy, for understanding how one situation can map to another even when the context is fundamentally changed.

            The abilities associated with spatial reasoning are mental rotation, spatial memory, capacity for orientation by cardinal directions, navigation of mazes, estimation of distances and sizes (I guess?), 3->2D projection, the capacity to tell how a fabric would look like if folded a certain way (also speculative). Two examples of tests for spatial ability: ask a person to start walking from a known point and then take odd-angled turns in a maze-like structure (like a medieval city or a shopping mall), and then, after n number of such turns, point north; give someone a picture of a place in the morning or afternoon, in sunny weather, tell them the hour, and ask them to, again, point north. Or, a test suitable for someone with no previous experience in such things: ask them to cut a fabric so as to sew a pair of pants (extra difficulty: several pairs of pants with a different fit), or to UV map a 3D model (they’re almost the same sort of task). Super duper difficult test to sort out the >3 SD from the rest: ask them to make sense of a tesseract.

            For what it’s worth, I’m good enough at spatial visualisation that some 95% of my dreams relate to the exploration of places (usually slightly surreal versions of my own city), am always aware within the dream about where on the map I am located and what cardinal direction I’m facing, have enough spatial memory to have built quite a high-res alt-map that way (down to around 100m for a surface area of maybe 12 sq km, but somewhat incomplete), and there is consistency in these dreams between the cardinal direction being faced and the way shadows fall upon buildings — and these things stand up to scrutiny when I double-check the intuitions when awake. (I still fail the tesseract test.) And I still can’t say that any of this has helped me with studying circuits or mechanisms. It’s always other branches of abilities that are drawn upon for the solving of such problems.

            Edit: Oh! And relating to projection ability. Drawing is a very good test of that. The deeper you get into perspective drawing (especially if we’re talking e.g. a spherical surface reflecting things), or drawing of humanoid shapes in odd poses, the more spatial-ability-intensive the activity is.

            I’ve often found that I can check whether I got my projection wrong by holding the drawing in front of a mirror. It seems like the brain processes the mirror-flipped version of a familiar image as an entirely new image, and thus, if sheer familiarity can prevent you from noticing something in a mirror, flipping the image can solve the problem.

      • TheBearsHaveArrived says:

        What? I did EE courses before, and did quite well. Its clearly weighs spatial ability even more then general physics coureses(at least some of them)

        I can’t say there is a really simple way of minimizing a large messed up logic gate besides looking at it, grouping items together and then using simple rules to find the cheapest way to build that function, besides using spatial skills.

        If I were to explain it to someone, it would be really useful to do so mostly pictorially, though with verbal explanations here and there to help.

        You see that a lot in clever C code solutions. A lot of clever algorithms in C rely on spatial manipulations of the underlying hardware and how its structured. AKA, to be the best possible C coder, you need to know how bits move in the machine itself to get the most out of it, or those extra percent reductions that matter in large contracts.

        And I can’t say how spatial abilities are not important in mechanical engineering, with its gears and levers. How a lot of it is understood and explained to others is done pictorially, with some math and physics added.

        • Dahlen says:

          That’s all well and good, but I thought we were talking about high-school level physics here. AFAIK logic gates and active circuit components in general don’t get studied at the high-school level, for that to be relevant to a hypothetical end-of-highschool engineering exam. At least in my country.

          And, sure enough, my EE courses might not have taken place at a top university alongside top peers, but I did some of that too, at least up until building babby’s first finite state machine, and at least for that part I remember relying on mathematical logic rather than spatial visualisation. I really don’t think that yours is everybody’s style of learning and conceptualising these things.

          I would say that spatial ability matters, indeed, a lot in, e.g. visualising the 3-dimensional diffusion of some physical quantity along some dimension, particularly in complex systems, but really… that edge doesn’t come up until much later than high school. If we could have had the kind of engineering notions you’re talking about here, at the educational level that you talked about in your initial post, it would have been fantastic.

      • rlms says:

        I agree with this, and also with the more general point that male-dominated subjects maths and computer science don’t rely on spatial reasoning much.

      • Chalid says:

        A lot of mechanics and electricity classes is about finding ways to use symmetries, which can be very spatial.

        More generally, there are multiple ways to approach all kinds of problems, and if you have a spatially oriented brain you’ll think of things spatially when someone else might not.

    • Winter Shaker says:

      Veering wildly off-topic, but since engineering, 3D modelling, spatial awareness etc have been brought up … I’m looking to get more into woodwork as a hobby, and would like to be able to model things on computer before making them. I have had a very tentative go at SketchUp, and an almost equally tentative go at Blender, and I get the impression that SketchUp is maybe slightly better for that kind of thing (though I find SketchUp’s trackpad, i.e. no mouse, scrolling / zooming / orbiting interface much more annoying that Blender’s).

      Before I sink lots of time into doing a course, am I right in that assessment, and can anyone recommend any particularly good courses (including series of YouTube tutorials – there are a lot to sort through) … or is there a money-cost programme that is so obviously superior that I should just go for that instead?

      • Dahlen says:

        I find Blender’s interface annoying, so not that I’ve heard before of this SketchUp thing, but the way you’re selling it, neither do I want to.

        I first learned basic 3D modelling through an even more annoying program, and from there on I’ve gotten 3ds Max and started jamming its buttons until I got them to do what I wanted. In other words, mostly trial-and-error. Only looked up a few things.

        What kind of woodwork are we talking? Furniture, or organic shapes (e.g. little horsies)?

        • Winter Shaker says:

          Ultimately, musical instruments, including accordions, so would want to have some ability to make simple curves, but also some ability to have mechanical parts interact with each other on screen before I try to build them.

  42. Anonymous Bosch says:

    I thought about sending this as an email, but I figure Scott’s probably slightly more likely to read criticism here.

    For a Bayesian, he seems bound and determined to ignore several large priors in making the contrarian case against Trump-as-racist. The words “housing discrimination” or “Central Park Five” or “birth certificate” do not appear in the post. Nor, as others have noted, does the name “Curiel,” which was the most explicitly racist statement he made during the campaign and the most difficult for someone making this case to refute.

    As a general rule, I find that when someone attempts to make a point by structuring their argument in the form of a faux dialogue or FAQ in which they respond to arguments that they themselves have selected and phrased, the temptation to weak-man, even unconsciously, is unavoidable. Most of the article’s considerable length takes that form. The parts that don’t are largely a collection of anodyne public statements; but every modern racist politician, even David Duke, has anodyne public statements one could front-load if they were so inclined. After all, part of the non-racial case against Trump is his constant self-contradiction. But even if he’s racist only 50% of the time, or only racist when he’s playing to racists as part of his sales pitch, that’s still rather more racism than we generally see from politicians. And at this point the argument is reduced to litigating the definition of “openly.”

    Also, a word on dog whistles.

    Dog whistling seems to be the theory that if you want to know what someone really believes, you have to throw away decades of consistent statements supporting the side of an issue that everyone else in the world supports, and instead pay attention only to one weird out-of-character non-statement which implies he supports a totally taboo position which is perhaps literally the most unpopular thing it is possible to think.

    Dog whistling is not about the rarity of a statement or the extent to which it is out-of-character. In fact for it to even work, dog whistling has to be consistent. Groan if you must, but Wikipedia has it mostly right.

    political messaging employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has an additional, different or more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup

    As a person who has discussed politics on the Internet, I’ll assume everyone has heard the relevant Lee Atwater interview. This, along with the fact that Scott doesn’t actually link someone saying “appeals against crime are inherently appeals to racism,” makes me believe this is not just a weak man, but a straw man. Of course many people are genuinely concerned about crime, especially many non-white people. That’s not at all inconsistent with Trump’s appeals being dog whistles to racists, especially when they’re presented to largely white audiences, especially when the solutions are “get the immigrants out and stop hassling cops about civil rights,” and especially combined with the above-listed priors.

    • Thursday says:

      “all appeals against crime are appeals to racism”

      All appeals against crime in U.S. politics have been accused of being appeals to racism.

      BTW, the guy who designed the Willie Horton add has said that the main reason he used Horton was because he was so memorably ugly. What were they going to do, not use the most memorable example of one of your opponents fuck ups, just because he happens to be black?

      Anyway, Ross Douthat has done yeoman’s work defending the Willie Horton ads and I’d advise people to look his writings on the subject up.

      • Anonymous Bosch says:

        All appeals against crime in U.S. politics have been accused of being appeals to racism.

        This is a statement Obama made in a debate in his 2004 Senate campaign.

        OBAMA: The fact is I’ve passed 150 pieces of legislation that toughened penalties for violent criminals, everything from sex offenders to domestic abusers to gang bangers. So there’s only one candidate who’s ever dealt with hardened criminals on this stage and that’s me. The other guy only talks about it and I think that’s something voters will be focused on in this election.

        Who accused it of being an appeal to racism?

        • Jiro says:

          Okay, all appeals against crime by Republicans, in a context opposed by Democrats, have been accused of being appeals to racism.

        • Thursday says:

          Who accused it of being an appeal to racism?

          I am sure that portions of the left have already done so, but, even if not, I expect they will be in the near future, just like the anti-crime steps the Clintons took have been accused of being appeals to racism.

    • Buckyballas says:

      Let’s also not forget Mr. Trump’s conflation of “black people” and “the inner cities” and his apparent notion that African Americans and Latinos “are living in hell”. As well as his support of nation-wide stop-and-frisk. Sure there is some evidence that Trump is not racist, but there is plenty that he is. If Scott is arguing that we should have a more nuanced discussion, then ok I’m for it, but hyperbolically attacking “the media” does not seem the optimum way to achieve that:

      I realize that all of this is going to make me sound like a crazy person and put me completely at odds with every respectable thinker in the media, but luckily, being a crazy person at odds with every respectable thinker in the media has been a pretty good ticket to predictive accuracy lately, so whatever.

      I can only assume that here Scott is attacking the accuracy of predictions on the presidential election. But to be fair, fivethirtyeight (a “respectable thinker in the media”) gave Trump a reasonable chance of winning. Furthermore, predictive accuracy and epistemic accuracy are not the same.

      Somewhere in America, there are still like three or four people who believe the media, and those people are cowering in their houses waiting for the death squads.

      Aren’t we concerned that this attacking of “the media” from all sides is leading us further down an epistemic death spiral? Who are you going to believe, the lamestream media, or your Facebook feed?

      Also, re: the illegal immigrants from Mexico being “rapists” and “some, I assume, are good people” quote seems pretty racist to me. Or at least a dog whistle. Not sure how we are reading that so differently. If someone said “These nerds are fedora wearing, neck bearded creeps who just won’t take no for an answer, but some, I assume, are good people.” wouldn’t you take offense?

      • Scott Alexander says:

        Trump talking about black people living in the inner cities, is a hasty stereotype which gets at a basically correct point (that a lot of African-Americans live in poor areas and that improving inner cities is an important African-American issue).

        People are saying he is an overt white supremacist, but the evidence they give is more “he doesn’t watch his words super-carefully”. I am sure someone this election has conflated “uneducated whites” and “rural voters”, yet nobody in a million years would think there is anything wrong with this, let alone that it makes someone a member of the Black Panthers.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I’m fine at you pointing out things I left out, but I’m kind of annoyed at the implication that I did it on purpose. People have accused Trump of seven zillion things that election. I tried to look through them and find the stuff that people were talking about most so that the essay didn’t have to be over 10000 words. I’m sorry you disagree with my choices, but honestly after reading hundreds of articles on this topic I had never even seen anything about the Central Park Five and I didn’t even know Trump had an opinion on them until this moment. Don’t tell me the only possible reason I could leave this out is because I secretly know my case is weak.

      • Anonymous Bosch says:

        I’m sorry you disagree with my choices, but honestly after reading hundreds of articles on this topic I had never even seen anything about the Central Park Five and I didn’t even know Trump had an opinion on them until this moment. Don’t tell me the only possible reason I could leave this out is because I secretly know my case is weak.

        I have a higher opinion of you than that, hence the “even unconsciously” qualifier. I don’t think you secretly know your case is weak or did it on purpose, I think you see a bunch of obviously logically terrible arguments (such as “A supports B, therefore B supports A”) and feel the need to refute them. To the extent the case for Trump-as-racist relies on this sort of deductive reasoning, it’s indeed awful and I consider those arguments duly dispatched. I just think the inductive reasoning got short shrift.

      • Moon says:

        True enough that every article about Trump’s utterances would have to be over 10K words, for no one to say “You left out something important.”

        Trump is a nonstop word generating machine, much of it nonsense, and much of it contradictory to other things he’s said.

      • Earthly Knight says:

        Forget about the central park five, but it’s real, real hard to understand why you wrote an article defending Trump against charges of racism and didn’t think it was important to mention Curiel or the years Trump spent insinuating that the president was born in Kenya. This is something like writing a piece about how President Bush’s legacy has been unfairly maligned that contains no reference to the Iraq war or the financial crisis.

        • Doctor Mist says:

          I still don’t get this.

          Note that I believe Obama was born in Hawaii. Note also that my layman’s reading of the law is that where he was born is moot in any case, because his mother is a U.S. citizen.

          But there are certainly other laymen who parse the law differently, and if they were right, it would matter where he was actually, physically born. This has nothing to do with his race: there is no argument on either side that his father is black. Nobody is claiming that the blackness of his father rendered him ineligible to be President.

          If Obama’s black father had lived in London and there were rumors that Obama had been born there, would that have been racist?

          Suppose (contrary to fact) that Obama had been born in Kenya to Kenyan father and, say, a Canadian mother, had moved to America at the age of four, had attended American public school and college, and had been elected to the Senate in 1997, and had been a model American immigrant for five decades. Would there be any doubt that he was nevertheless ineligible to be President, because he was not a natural-born citizen? Would it be racist to point that out?

          Or is this all about dog whistles again?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Ask yourself this.

            And really think about it, on an emotional level.

            If his father had been John Fitzgerald of Ireland, or Paul Smith of England, do you think the birther movement would have had any legs?

          • Earthly Knight says:

            The birther conspiracy theories have thrived for eight years in the face of overwhelming evidence that Barack Obama was, in fact, born in Hawaii. The most likely explanation for why this is so is that a large portion of the population buys into a racist stereotype according to which non-white immigrants and their descendants are inherently suspicious and foreign, their citizenship automatically dubious. The strongest piece of evidence for this explanation is that no white president or presidential candidate who was unequivocally born in the US has ever been the target of similar attacks.

            I drew an analogy, above, to the blood libel being directed at a specific jewish politician. Suppose that for eight years Bernie Sanders is dogged by groundless rumors that he likes to bathe in the blood of gentile children, rumors that persist no matter how much evidence he produces to the contrary. Suppose also that no non-jewish politician has ever faced similar accusations. Would you be suspicious that the rumors about Sanders were motivated in part by anti-semitism? If so, you should also be inclined to think that the birther conspiracy theories are animated by racism.

          • Moon says:

            I don’t see the birther conspiracy theory as being primarily racist in nature. Maybe it’s racist, but the primary reason for its use is that Obama was not getting blow jobs from one of his interns or trading cattle futures, and he didn’t have a foundation so that Republicans could make up lies about “pay to play.” Republican pundits and Right Wing media grab onto every little shred of a fact they can grab onto, to spin a tale about the criminality or illegitimacy of Democratic officials and candidates.

            Propaganda and lies are easier to tell and to get them believed if they have some tiny shred of truth to them. And those were the only shreds they could find on Obama.

            Obama spent time outside the U.S. during his childhood. He had a Middle Eastern sounding middle name. That was all they could find to grab onto. Hillary, by contrast, was involved in lots of activities that Republicans could make up lies about. Once ten tons of emails were hacked and revealed, they combed through them all and made up a false story of criminality about any email they could.

          • John Schilling says:

            Ask yourself this.

            And really think about it, on an emotional level.

            If his father had been John Fitzgerald of Ireland, or Paul Smith of England, do you think the birther movement would have had any legs?

            Does it matter whether I imagine Smith as black or white? I believe they have both of those in the United Kingdom these days.

            And what does your gut say about my earlier hypothetical Boris Dzhugashvili Orlov, out of the former Soviet Union, who we can presume is the white-skinned Slavic descendent of proper Aryan Vikings?

            There’s definitely a sliding scale of Tolerable Non-Americanness for presidents, but race isn’t the variable you are looking for. For a real edge case, how about the descendent of former slaves whose family has lived alternately in Chicago and Toronto over the years? Someone would certainly whine about it, but would it be e.g. a McCain-level non-controversy, Obamaesque birtherism, or somewhere in between?

          • Doctor Mist says:

            If his father had been John Fitzgerald of Ireland, or Paul Smith of England, do you think the birther movement would have had any legs?

            Well, gee. I saw opponents of McCain and opponents of Cruz doing the exact same thing. Was that racist?

            As for having any legs, how many legs did it actually have? Obama won both elections handily.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            McCain and Cruz were mostly being trolled in reaction to the Obama birther stuff. It’s obviously hard to create the counter factual, but we do have McCain’s 2000 run where what he got hit with were (completely false) rumors of a black child rather than rumors about his legitimacy to be president.

            And as far as legs, Trump was still pushing it as late as 2014.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            McCain and Cruz were mostly being trolled in reaction to the Obama birther stuff.

            Well, that’s one interpretation. Not how I remember it particularly, but maybe my memory is colored by the fact that arcana about eligibility is way more interesting to me than innuendo about race.

            we do have McCain’s 2000 run where what he got hit with were (completely false) rumors of a black child rather than rumors about his legitimacy to be president.

            Don’t remember that, but see above about what interests me. Granting your accuracy, I’ll grant that this sounds racist, but I don’t see what that has to do with the issue at hand, unless it was the same people promulgating both these attacks on McCain and also the Obama birtherism. (Maybe it was; I’d be very interested if so.)

            But even in that case, what you mean is that racists were calling Obama’s eligibility into question, not that calling Obama’s eligibility into question was racist. You can’t support an accusation of racism by citing actions that are not themselves racist.

            We’re both talking into the wind here, as neither of us is particularly interested in whether or not the label “racist” applies — call Trump out for objectionable actions all you want; I just (still) don’t understand why this particular action is in itself objectionable. If an ineligible person tries to run for President, I want people to object, whether that person is Kenyan or Irish or English or Canadian or Panamanian. (Please remember that I do not doubt the eligibility of any of the three people we are discussing.)

            If by “really think about it, on an emotional level” you mean “questioning Obama’s eligibility, while not racist in itself, was grandstanding to attract the support of people who hate Obama because he is black” then I’m afraid we are back on dog whistles. Any attack on Obama could be thus characterized.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Doctor Mist:
            The rumors about McCain were circulated (almost certainly) by GW Bush’s campaign in SC right before the Republican primary.

            For people who like examining the minutiae of law and precedent, McCain and Cruz are both interesting. Given that you are such a person, I think you are typical minding and ignoring that most people do not care about these things. Most people don’t realize that Obama would have been almost certainly* eligible to be president no matter where he was born, by dint of having been born to a married US citizen.

            (* Yes, I know there are those who would question this conclusion. Largely irrelevant to this discussion)

            The question is not whether is it inherently racist to wonder whether Obama is eligible to be president, but rather, given our priors, whether we should count as likely that Obama’s race contributed to the ongoing significant popularity of a conspiracy theory that has been completely discredited.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            I think you are typical minding

            No doubt. So?

            Obama would have been almost certainly eligible to be president no matter where he was born, by dint of having been born to a married US citizen.

            As I said myself above.

            The question is not whether is it inherently racist to wonder whether Obama is eligible to be president, but rather, given our priors, whether we should count as likely that Obama’s race contributed to the ongoing significant popularity of a conspiracy theory that has been completely discredited.

            No, the question was

            it’s real, real hard to understand why you wrote an article defending Trump against charges of racism and didn’t think it was important to mention…the years Trump spent insinuating that the president was born in Kenya.

            or, if I may paraphrase, how can you claim Trump isn’t racist when he performed this essentially non-racist act?

            I totally understand why somebody might want to claim, might sincerely believe, that Trump is a racist. All I can say is that if I had thought Obama were not a natural-born citizen I would not have hesitated to say so, and I do not believe that saying so would make me a racist. If you want to claim Trump is a racist, call him out for racist actions.

            If Trump’s questioning Obama’s eligibility is racist only because of what you believe are Trump’s motives for doing so, it’s pretty weak tea. Surely there are better things you can point to.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Doctor Mist:
            You appear to be trying to assert that Trump is merely dispassionately interested in the minutiae of presidential eligibility. I consider that highly unlikely.

            And more to the point, were the theories about Obama’s eligibility uniformly unpopular, Trump would not have continued to mention them. The popularity of the theory is part and parcel of why Trump continued to push it long after it was manifestly clear that it was completely untrue.

          • Moon says:

            Trump is totally unaware of truth vs. falsehood. All he knows is what crowds around him respond positively to. And he says that stuff. Truth or falsehood is totally irrelevant to him. He’s a “winner”, and winners of elections get voter approval and get votes. So if the people at his rallies are racist, he will be too. If it had gained Trump popularity to say that Obama was a kangaroo, he would have said that too.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            You appear to be trying to assert that Trump is merely dispassionately interested in the minutiae of presidential eligibility.

            Nope. I’m just saying I don’t understand why people like you and Earthly Knight consider it so much of a smoking gun for racism. If a non-racist could honorably express an identical thought, how does Trump’s expression of it imply that he is a racist? Why is this particular issue supposed to be so very revealing of Trump’s inner heart?

            I am sincerely puzzled by this, but I begin to despair of understanding. Perhaps I am a hopeless case.

          • “Most people don’t realize that Obama would have been almost certainly* eligible to be president no matter where he was born, by dint of having been born to a married US citizen.”

            According to the relevant .gov page:

            “In a general, a Child Born Outside the U.S. is a Citizen at Birth when the Child’s Parents Are Married to each other at the Time of Birth IF One parent is a U.S. citizen at the time of birth and the birthdate is on or after November 14, 1986”

            On the other hand:

            “In general, a Child Born Outside the U.S. is a Citizen at Birth when the Child’s Parents Are Not Married to each other at the Time of Birth…IF

            The genetic or non-genetic gestational legal mother is a U.S. citizen at the time of birth, and the birth date is after December 23, 1952”

            Obama’s parents married each other, but I gather there is an argument that it wasn’t a valid marriage because the father had a wife back in Kenya who he had not divorced. Is that your point?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Dafid Friedman:
            With a cursory search, I can’t find the page I looked at back when.

            What I know is that the relevant laws have changed over time and that I recall marriage being important for birth in 1961, although that seems not to be the case, since his mother was the citizen.

            But the other argument I am talking about has to do with esoterica about original intent and what the phrase “natural born” meant to the founders. Basically anyone with a foreign parent would be excluded under that interpretation. Another would be that, because Obama, if born outside the US, would have been made a citizen by an act of congress, and not the constitution, this doesn’t satisfy the requirement “natural born”.

            All essentially irrelevant to this thread.

    • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

      For a Bayesian, he seems bound and determined to ignore several large priors in making the contrarian case against Trump-as-racist. The words “housing discrimination” or “Central Park Five” or “birth certificate” do not appear in the post.

      So, what’s the deal with the Central Park Five? Where they guilty or not? I’m getting conflicting sources.

      • Eltargrim says:

        A quote taken from your linked article:

        Taken together, the police and prosecutor’s reports consider the same facts, but draw opposing conclusions, the police defending their actions and the prosecutors theirs, with neither acknowledging mistakes by investigators in 1989.

        Given that the convictions were largely based upon confessions (notably unreliable) by teenagers (absolutely unreliable), my instinct is to say that the vacating of the convictions was likely the right course of action.

        • Rob K says:

          Suffice it to say that anyone who follows the reactions of police and DAs to DNA evidence is mighty familiar with the “even though the theory of the crime that we convicted X on has now been disproven, [convoluted story that contradicts the original narrative] remains viable and more likely than us having gotten the wrong person/people” dance.

          Radley Balko’s done good work documenting this sort of thing. Too few instances of the legal system admitting mistakes when presented with exculpatory evidence, too many of digging in the heels and spinning bullcrap stories.

    • Chalid says:

      “Central Park Five”

      Truly. It’s amazing how little attention that’s gotten overall.

      Also, this is pretty straightforwardly a case of using falsehoods to whip up hatred against Muslims and Arabs for political gain.

      • The Nybbler says:

        Except the fact is that there were reports of Muslims celebrating in Jersey City (and Paterson). Dozens, not thousands, granted. Politifact complains that the reports weren’t credible (on rather thin grounds), but for the purposes of Donald Trump’s statement, it doesn’t matter whether they were later termed “credible”.

        A charitable view would have Trump conflating reports of Muslims celebrating in Jersey City with video of a whole lot of Muslims celebrating in Gaza. A less charitable but still reasonable view would have him simply exaggerating the number.

        Using falsehoods to whip up hatred against Muslims and Arabs for political gain makes no sense, because in fact Muslims (including Arab Muslims) were celebrating in large numbers overseas

        As for the Central Park Five, that shows Trump’s disturbing tendency towards authoritarianism, not racism.

        • Chalid says:

          I understand that there’s there’s a continuum between an exaggeration and a lie, and one can blur into the other, but when you’re multiplying an event by a factor of 100s to 1000s that’s definitely on the “lie” side of things. (And even the accounts of dozens really are pretty thinly sourced.)

          The most charitable view that is that he misremembered, and when called on it repeatedly, decided to gaslight the country by repeating a lie that he must have known would promote hatred against Arabs and Muslims, because he can’t ever admit he was wrong about anything. Or perhaps that he just never even bothered to find out what was true even after being told he was wrong (and wow *that* would be disturbing in a president). So perhaps a view like this gets you to “recklessly promoting hatred” as opposed to “deliberately promoting hatred.”

          Using falsehoods to whip up hatred against Muslims and Arabs for political gain makes no sense, because in fact Muslims (including Arab Muslims) were celebrating in large numbers overseas

          Huh? What do celebrations by Muslims in the Middle East have to do with whether it’s politically advantageous to attack Muslims in a US Republican primary?

          As for the Central Park Five, that shows Trump’s disturbing tendency towards authoritarianism, not racism.

          These aren’t mutually exclusive.

          • “Huh? What do celebrations by Muslims in the Middle East have to do with whether it’s politically advantageous to attack Muslims in a US Republican primary?”

            The question is what does it have to do with whether it’s politically advantageous to argue against allowing Muslims from the Middle East to immigrate to the U.S. Surely the answer is obvious.

      • Tyrant Overlord Killidia says:

        Unless you’re familiar with the (ominous) phrase “the Central Park jogger”, people probably wouldn’t know to pay attention.

    • Reasoner says:

      So the most explicitly racist statement he made, the very best example you have, is when he accuses someone of being biased on account of their race. And yet the left does this with white people all the time. I hope you’ll forgive me if this sounds like a double standard.

  43. SUT says:

    I’d like to add to imperative “Stop Crying Wolf” another imperative which has already lost all its meaning, which is “Stop Cultivating Hatred at Home” which I’ve seen way too much since Nov 9.

    I’m looking at you Paul Graham, who approvingly shared a picture his 4 year old drew “kicking Trump’s ass”.

    Imagine Paul Graham visiting a founder’s home and looking at the drawings up on the refrigerator. “That’s little Johnny bashing in Obama’s head! Isn’t he adorable?”.

    Founder: “Hey Johnny, what do we say about president elect Obama?”
    Johnny “He’s a secret muslim and a threat to the values this country was founded on”
    Founder: “So smart for a four year old!”

    Now if the founder secretly blogged about his pet conspiracy theory, or held the opinion in private among like minded adults, as partisan as it may seem, there’s not too much wrong with that. It’s good to have citizens willing to think outside the center.

    But Mr Graham is apparently very proud about inculcating his theories into his kids, before they could possibly make their minds up for themselves. This is they type of _actual_ hatred that you see in Palestinian communities, and Old Dixie die hards.

    • shakeddown says:

      This is they type of _actual_ hatred that you see in Palestinian communities, and Old Dixie diehards.

      The level of similarity I’ve seen between the tones of Americans talking about this election and Israelis talking about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is disturbing.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      I hate it when parents view their kids as soldiers.

      My father was very politically minded, but he made sure his kids would make up their own minds. When I would repeat Democratic talking points to him, despite him being a doctrinaire Democrat, he would tell me exactly what the other side’s position was and why my view was too simplistic.

      At one of my son’s youth activities, another boy would go into screaming fits about Trump every time his name got mentioned. He had to be physically restrained to stop him from vandalizing a poster about the mock election. Children under 10 should not care that much.

      • Matt M says:

        My experience as well. My father was pretty darn far left but I remember from an early age when I asked him about the difference between the political parties, he was very careful to steel-man the republicans and explain in as neutral as he could why people might disagree with his views.

        • lhn says:

          Likewise. My dad was good enough about it that I didn’t realize how liberal he actually is till I was a (Republican-leaning/libertarianish) adult.

          (Given his mystification at my voting for Johnson this election, it’s possible that he now has some regrets about that. 🙂 )

        • Murphy says:

          My parents always had very strong feelings about voting privacy. It’s one of the less “sexy” constitutional rights in ireland but it’s about the only issue on which both my parents were always clear about their position and occasionally would openly praise a celebrity who’d refused to say how they planned to vote on some recent issue.

          I have no idea what party my parents vote for or how they voted on most issues and they’re both good at steelmanning the different sides.

          They have stated that they didn’t want to choose my and my siblings political positions for us.

  44. TheBearsHaveArrived says:

    Antidepressants and severe depression(adjectives are useless, its some category of score past threshold Y where the percentage of people varies), supposedly the sub-category where the pills work.

    I am highly skeptical of the results. There are all the known tricks of medications pulls, there is how easily something becomes significant (if you give a pill that makes people eat more(weight loss is on the hamilton, weight gain is not) and sleep more, without doing anything else, it qualifies for depression (hey there seroquel) )

    http://healthnet.umassmed.edu/mhealth/HAMD.pdf –why is there nothing about eating *too* much food in there, when all of society worries of getting too fat…and obviously more worry is placed on eating too much then too little? There isn’t a good reason to not include that, when when should be on there is the difference from one ideal’s set point consumption…..and why are feelings of guilt on there in the first place? Or hallucinations being on 4 on the guilt feelings? Normal guilt is good in lots of situations, being an internal socially corrective emotion, the latter is normal insanity. What the hell, why have I not read this more before? Why is insight in your condition not able to be attributed to being sick or stressed about work or life, or being ugly, but goes from a 1 to a 0 if you accept that you need help(just like religion)?How is this the gold standard used to justify *treatment*? How can the gold standard utterly disregard anything that happens in real life to someone as a lack of insight?

    There is also the large societal need to track possibly suicidal people. If people think there is a pill for severe depression(approaching or at suicidal thoughts), even if it useless, people are more likely to reveal themselves to government agencies(and businesses allowed to use gov and health data) that they are the type of person to have suicidal thoughts. Society *does* use that data of who takes the pills to make hiring decisions.

  45. Deiseach says:

    This is what happens when you disrespect the Hibernian Conspiracy 🙂

    Last year, a prominent group of supporters asked Hillary Clinton to address a prestigious St. Patrick’s Day gathering at the University of Notre Dame, an invitation that previous presidential candidates had jumped on.

    Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr. had each addressed the group, and former President Bill Clinton was eager for his wife to attend. But Mrs. Clinton’s campaign refused, explaining to the organizers that white Catholics were not the audience she needed to spend time reaching out to.

    Why do you think we elected a leprechaun as our president?

    More seriously, Bill (who for all his faults has consummate political instincts) is telling her where to pick up some easy votes and she is (or her advisors are) too stubborn to listen? Did her campaign want her to lose?

    Early on, Mr. Clinton had pleaded with Robby Mook, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, to do more outreach with working-class white and rural voters. But his advice fell on deaf ears.

    Though it never fails to delight me that the Empress-in-Waiting had a literal Mook working for her.

  46. TheBearsHaveArrived says:

    Ok. Statistics on terrorist/mass murders/general human caused aggressive calamities significant enough for major news coverage in america. Does anyone have them or know where I can find them?

    There must have been population statistics done, correct?

    Mostly, a devils advocate argument for Trump’s ban on muslims. Last time I checked, with the (perhaps not so great) ones I read, that those of muslim origin were around 30x more likely to commit those attacks then other populations.

    I mean, what inspired this image?

    http://www.theonion.com/article/no-one-murdered-because-of-this-image-29553

    • Deiseach says:

      I mean, what inspired this image?

      Ganesha is not a hermaphrodite and that’s a Buddha, not the Buddha. Also, Moses is not considered a divinity, demi-god, or similar.

      Get your offensiveness theologically or pantheon-correct! 🙂

    • TheBearsHaveArrived says:

      Note- I still think Trumps language of it is still a bad international play. Its better to just have a general policy of strict h1-b immigration standards, while simply having a policy of greater foreign aid and *safe spots* in the world for refugees.

      • Anonymous Bosch says:

        *safe spots* in the world for refugees

        Much like Trump’s appeal to “take the oil,” this is incoherent when you drill down to how it could actually be instantiated. Such “safe spots” would require indefinite military intervention and occupation to create and defend (since obviously they would be juicy targets), and be extremely expensive in terms of housing infrastructure, medical and legal personnel, time-consuming vetting to keep out terrorists, etc. I don’t see why one would choose that route over simply accepting the refugees here, where only the time-consuming vetting part is necessary.

        • TheBearsHaveArrived says:

          It falls on its face. But so does a first world country having a continuous policy of accepting refugees, without believing its going to start turning into those countries eventually.

          *There are very different types of refugees, I admit.

          • Anonymous Bosch says:

            It falls on its face. But so does a first world country having a continuous policy of accepting refugees, without believing its going to start turning into those countries eventually.

            Turning into “those countries” is a nonsensical statement. We accept refugees from lots of countries. And at a historically low pace compared to, say, the Iranian influx of the 1980s.

          • The Nybbler says:

            That depends on how many refugees are coming in compared to the size of the country and how assimilationist the country is. The US is quite large; if it returns to its assimilationist (“melting-pot”) ideals it can absorb a fairly large number of refugees.

            But a country with ideals which insist that it encourage immigrant or refugee communities to maintain their own cultural integrity, then importing such communities which have expansionist ideals will convert the host country instead.

            (tldr; “give us your tired your poor your hungry and we’ll convert them to Americans” works)

          • Mark V Anderson says:

            Nybbler: +1

    • Matt M says:

      I would have appreciated an NSFW tag on that.

    • keranih says:

      For a global perspective, look up “Clash of Civilizations” – the book, not the original article. Goes into more detail, iirc, about the extent to which Muslim-majority nations have internal civil wars, internal to Muslim civilization conflicts, and border-fires between Muslim and non-Muslim nations at a higher rate than other civilizations.

  47. …the people who elected Trump, imagine him to be the savior of the working class. Those people are going to be in for a rude awakening.

    No, they’re not. There is just about no such thing as mass regret of voting behavior. Do not let yourself be motivated by that chimera.

    Remember that few people are as tightly attached to politics as we are. After a few weeks, most people do not accurately remember which presidential candidate they voted for, or whether they voted at all.

    Normally, there is a strong bias toward reporting that they voted for the winner. But that reverses if things go sour. During Watergate, polls showed that (if I recall correctly) about two-thirds said they voted for George McGovern (the anti-Nixon candidate) in 1972.

    And they weren’t lying, rather, their new distaste for Nixon changed what they remembered doing.

    If Trump’s presidency turns out to be an epic disaster, sure, there may be a “mea culpa” or two from Chris Christie prominent, known Republicans who will say they misjudged him.

    But millions of non-activists, who voted for Trump but forgot that they did (or who didn’t bother to vote at all), will be thinking, smugly, “don’t blame me, I voted for the other one.”

    • Anonymousse says:

      I noticed you posted below that no one replied, so here I am! My reaction to this post was incredulity, but I know you work in this field, so then I was simply stunned. That is an impressive amount of memory alteration, and just another point in favor of me not understanding most people…

      • The act of voting is very unimportant in most people’s lives.

        To get a little more empathy for how the average person conceives of this, ask yourself who you voted for in the last school board election (before this month).

        Don’t beat yourself up about it; I can’t remember that, either. I don’t even remember who the candidates were.

        Just don’t tell anyone who closely follows school district politics, because they may be shocked.

        • Anonymousse says:

          I appreciate the analogy, but with a school board member, I may not be reminded of their existence until the election. With a president, I am reminded of who they are on a regular basis. There is no opportunity for me to forget the event like there is with a school board.

    • John Schilling says:

      I wonder if the rise of social media might change this to any significant degree? Who you voted for is secret, but who you screamed at your facebook friends for not voting for is preserved for all eternity. Also, the act of writing things down does tend to fix it in the otherwise-ephemeral memory. Also also, the knowledge that a lie might be quickly and conclusively exposed seems like it ought to discourage casual lying, and I believe the sort of real and sincere memory drift you describe, begins with a multitude of little white lies aimed at others but mostly heard by the speaker.

      OTOH, I don’t know what fraction of the population discusses their vote or their assessment of candidates in social media.

      • Agreed, but I doubt that a significant proportion of people announce their votes on social media. The sheer number of political posts (on Facebook, Twitter, etc.) may seem overwhelming, but they’re coming from a relatively limited set of very political people.

        Those who passively share or repost content generated by others can be weirdly inconsistent about it. I have seen catchy liberal and conservative clickbait memes posted non-ironically by the same person.

        When I first started out as a voter, my ambition was to maintain a voting journal, and carefully keep track of who I supported, for every office, and compare it to the vote totals for my precinct.

        I didn’t keep it up very long, but from that experience I do remember my that first school board vote, in 1974, was cast for Allen J. Abedor, a friend of my father’s.

        However, I don’t remember if he was elected or not.

      • Anonymous Bosch says:

        I wonder if the rise of social media might change this to any significant degree? Who you voted for is secret, but who you screamed at your facebook friends for not voting for is preserved for all eternity.

        There was a funny series of Twitter screenshots going around where Kurt Eichenwald (a guy who ever other liberal hacks consider a hack) got called out on making multiple contradictory Tweets about who he voted for (I believe it was a bullshit attempt at the “I voted for Bush, but…” convert’s fallacy).

    • onyomi says:

      This sounds suspiciously like the sort of mass hallucination the magic sex hypnotism guru talks about (which is to say, I increasingly believe such things happen; as Jaskologist says, when I search my feelings I know it to be true, because I’ve seen it. I’ve seen people lie to me and to themselves about basic facts, especially ones that are hard to check on, like whom you voted for, as a defense mechanism against cognitive dissonance).

      • baconbacon says:

        Is it automatically lying?

        1. vote
        2. Honestly forget who you voted for since it was mostly a meaningless gesture
        3. When asked later assume you voted for the person you would prefer now

        • onyomi says:

          “Lying” may not even be the right term, since it implies something intentional. And intentional deception of others, though it surely happens, is not what I’m talking about. “Lying to oneself,” however, implies a kind of delusion. Like, “I don’t remember all that clearly what really happened, so I subtly, maybe even subconsciously choose a version of events which is more flattering to my self conception. Once I repeat it to myself and others, it becomes the memory.”

          Related, isn’t there something in psychology about “memories” and “memories of memories”? There are many events in my life which I remember, for example, purely as a kind of narrative I have of my own life, long after the vividness of the actual experience has faded, sometimes into nothing.

          There are some events which happened recently, or which were unusually intense, which I remember at a visceral, somatic level, but I think they are in the minority. Most of the rest of my life is “memories of memories.” I know, for example, that I graduated high school. I know the year I graduated high school. I have some vivid memories of high school. But I can’t, right now, call up any vivid memories of my actual high school graduation ceremony. If you were to show me a picture of it, it might spark something, but for the most part, my high school graduation ceremony is something which only exists for me as an abstract fact. I’m sure it was lovely.

          “Mass hallucination” sounds bizarre and crazy, like something that only happens at places like Jonestown, but the reality is we are all always reconstructing our own personal narrative all the time. And the impulse is, when there are holes in the fabric, to patch them with things that are congruent with our current view of ourselves.

          • “Lying” may not even be the right term, since it implies something intentional. And intentional deception of others, though it surely happens, is not what I’m talking about. “Lying to oneself,” however, implies a kind of delusion. Like, “I don’t remember all that clearly what really happened, so I subtly, maybe even subconsciously choose a version of events which is more flattering to my self conception. Once I repeat it to myself and others, it becomes the memory.”

            Yes, exactly.

            I know, for example, that I graduated high school. I know the year I graduated high school. I have some vivid memories of high school. But I can’t, right now, call up any vivid memories of my actual high school graduation ceremony. If you were to show me a picture of it, it might spark something, but for the most part, my high school graduation ceremony is something which only exists for me as an abstract fact. I’m sure it was lovely.

            Thinking about this, I do remember a number of interesting scenes from my high school graduation, more than four decades ago. I will spare you the details, but thank you for bringing that material to mind.

          • onyomi says:

            Somewhat related to this, I’ve mentioned many times on here the problem with democracy where no individual voter has much incentive to do his/her research and make an informed decision.

            Taking it a step further, the most rational choice for the individual with respect to voting is the following: don’t vote at all and tell everyone you voted for whomever you guess will most raise your status in your social group to claim to have supported. I wonder how common this exact pattern is?

  48. Anonymous Bosch says:

    Despite Scott’s request, I’m seeing the crying wolf post circulating a ton on some of the more fetid fever swamps. Guessing we should brace ourselves.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      I’ve seen a few links to the Crying Wolf post on facebookand one on livejournal. I expect that someone’s going to publicize this OT discussion. Just for the hell of it, I’ll give an estimate of within a day or two.

      • Jaskologist says:

        I think the trivial inconvenience of having to respond in a different place will actually prevent it from being a real problem (especially once the next fractional OT comes up). We might even net a few passionate leftists out of it, which wouldn’t be terrible.

        • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

          Yeah, the new registration feature plus the hidden thread thing pretty much killed the chance of a flood IMO.

          Hatemail, on the other hand…

    • Urstoff says:

      The most common complaint I see is that Scott didn’t mention Trump’s birtherism or his comments about the Mexican judge. Also, that comparing Trump’s performance against McCain and Romney is a bit misleading since they were both facing Obama, a black candidate who was also a generational talent as far as political charisma goes. However, Scott’s main point can still be true even if we admit that, yes, the Trump campaign did play more on racial fears than past Republican candidates (see, e.g., the general presence of Steve Bannon).

      • Rob K says:

        Not exactly good practice to write around the strongest points for the opposing side, though. I thought those omissions made it an uncharacteristically weak essay.

        • Urstoff says:

          Right. I think both the birtherism and the comments about the judge can be argued either way, but you’re not going to convince anyone without addressing those. The Steve Bannon / Breitbart connection seems less easy to argue away.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      Reading the essay, I went through the thought process of “oh, I need to share this” –> “wait, he said not to” –> “you know, it’s probably too late anyway” –> “well, I’m not going to make it worse by sharing.”

    • jaimeastorga2000 says:

      Scott Adams is linking to it. It’s over.

    • suntzuanime says:

      Yeah, I’ve seen it come up in multiple fetid fever swamps I frequent, raised by people who AFAICT are not Scottosphere members. It’s gone viral.

      I just want to tell Scott to be brave, we’re all here behind you, your voice is one that deserves to be heard, don’t let the tumblr commies get you down.

  49. gbdub says:

    A take on Bannon, I found mostly interesting for the little article within an article written as an exercise in accusing the Times of being anti-Semitic (turns out it’s not that hard).

  50. Moon says:

    I wonder how deep the Rep/Dem tribalism goes. The majority of Libertarians veer toward the Right. And politicians who claim to be Libertarians usually run as Republican. So I would assume, if you have to choose, and most people think they do, a Libertarian chooses usually to side with the Republican tribe.

    So if Trump gets us into a massive nuclear WWII of the Small Hands, if he explodes the federal budget like he says he plans to do (Note that Obama was rather austere with the budget compared to Trump’s plans) doing), if Trump muzzles the press so that no one can ever criticize him again etc.– if he does practically everything Libertarians are against, will that be okay with most Libertarians, since most of them side with the GOP usually?

    Would Libertarians think: Well, Trump did blow up the entire world, but at least he angered those evil Democrats, and that’s the important thing to do? Or would some Libertarians actually work with Democrats to regain civil liberties and freedom of speech, to regain freedom from unnecessary wars etc.?

    Or would the tribal warfare of Rep vs. Dem be far more important than those little matters?

    • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

      Well, we can conjecture about it, Or you can read libertarian sources and see what they think. Examples: Reason, popehat.

      Additionally, you can search news related to prominent libertarian figures like recent presidential nominee Gary “All outta’ Leppos” Johnson, and maybe also Rand Paul (since he’s a more Republican aligned libertarian).

    • Anonymous Bosch says:

      The red tribalism of libertarians is much weaker than conservatives, and their veering towards the right is not a constant or something that would be unmoved by awful Trump policies. It’s no coincidence that the LP tried much harder to appeal to Sanders voters than to NeverTrumps.

      • I’m a moderately prominent libertarian, and I have been urging the Democrats to try to pull libertarians out of the Republican coalition for at least a decade now.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          How’s it going?

          My impression is that the biggest thing moving libertarians leftward has been getting video evidence of police brutality.

        • The Nybbler says:

          They’re not interested; for all its talked about, freedom doesn’t actually have much of a constitutency.

        • Doctor Mist says:

          The problem is, both major parties are solidly in favor of Big Government, but the Republicans are at least not quite as keen on gutting the First and Second Amendments. That makes it a pretty easy choice when the chips are down. I’m afraid your argument that the Democrats could court Libertarians by supporting medical marijuana is pretty small beer in comparison.

        • Trofim_Lysenko says:

          I’m a bit more contrarian in that I’m more likely to vote third party or write-in than accept a Republican candidate, but I have to concur with Doctor Mist.

          If and when I see a democrat candidate serious on 1A and 2A issues and education reform, I’ll start getting more excited at the prospects for a “liberaltarian alliance”.

          Unfortunately, that does not seem to be survivable in democratic primaries or for a career within the party as a whole, no matter how good their bona fides might be on GLBT issues or the like.

    • Deiseach says:

      Would Libertarians think: Well, Trump did blow up the entire world, but at least he angered those evil Democrats, and that’s the important thing to do?

      Oh Moon, you are the one beautiful constant in this entire morass. Shine on, silvery orb of righteousness and beautify our little comment sections, shine on!

      • Moon says:

        For a moment, I thought someone had complimented me there. But then I remembered what site I was on, the one where I am consistently abused, but where it is usually kept just under the level that would result in Scott banning someone. And then, of course, I realized that this was sarcastic.

        • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

          I think abuse might be too strong a word for what’s going on.

          • Moon says:

            Change places with me and see what you think then. Were you around when that guy went from one thread to another, complaining about what I supposedly did on a previous thread (some of it was untrue or or distorted) in a new thread? Actually, there were 2 of them who did that.

            How many instances of low level abuse does it take to equal one bannable offense, in its intensity? It happens to progressives here all the time. I notice that most of them have had better sense than I have had, and have left. Or maybe they’ve been banned because they finally blew a gasket and insulted someone else in a major way, after ten tons of insults, dog piling, nit picking etc. from the more rude of the Right of Center folks here. Some folks never do this stuff, but a whole lot of people do.

            I didn’t even understand about the Report button previously though. So there were also tons of bannable offenses that I didn’t realize at the time I could report.

          • Mark says:

            I like you, moon.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            You mean I should start constantly making random sarcastic remarks regarding the people I disagree with, while accusing them of being a combination of evil and stupid, make assumptions about what they think, and be generally abrasive for no good reason, and then lash out at people when they call me out on it, even when they’re from “my side”?

            While that sounds like fun, I’m guessing it’d get me banned pretty fast.

            More seriously, though: what of the response you’ve gotten would you claim crosses the threshold of abuse?

        • Deiseach says:

          Dear Moon, sometimes you exasperate me, but I would not wish to be abusive to you. And I love too well the silvery radiant orb which gives you your nom-de-guerre to wish to fling opprobrium at the one who has taken Selene as their inspiring patron.

          You may be quixotic in your tilting at the windmills, but I never found laughing in mockery at Don Quixote amusing, either.

          Though please pardon me if betimes, smitten a little too hard by your cogitations, I bat a paw at you in return and unintentionally leave a scratch.

  51. AlphaGamma says:

    Nitpick on Crying Wolf:

    though most Muslims are white(ish)

    Are they? From a 2011 Pew research centre study there are around 1.6 billion Muslims. About 500 million of those live in South Asia (split fairly evenly between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh), with roughly another 250 million each in Southeast and East Asia (the vast majority in Indonesia) and in Sub-Saharan Africa (significant plurality in Nigeria but that’s mainly because Nigeria is huge). I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of those Muslims are not “white(ish)”.

    • Anonymous says:

      I thought it plausible until I looked into it. You are right.

      According to the wiki, 1.2 billion out of 1.7 billion Muslims are very definitely not white-ish.

      • The Nybbler says:

        To some degree this shows how arbitrary racial classifications can be. Arabs are “white”, South Asians are “Asian”. But look at Hamad Karzai and tell me he’s not at least white(ish).

        • Anonymous says:

          Hamad Karzai is white-ish, but he’s also from the greater Persian region, and Persians are conspicuously white-looking.

  52. Anonymous says:

    Regarding the recent article with comments closed, you might as well have called it “The Best Case Against Trump”. Because I’ll be damned if I’ve read a better rundown of how Trump is not the messiah of right-wingers everywhere. (Not that I ever supported him, being non-demotist, mind.)

    • Moon says:

      What? The dictionary is of no help in defining demotist in a way that makes sense here.

      “An expert or specialist in ancient Egyptian demotic script or language.”

      • Moon says:

        Oh, never mind, I just found it on a weird political site. You don’t believe in government by the will of the people.

        That’s an interesting position, because what else is there? Rule by someone(s) whom you believe to be superior to the people, I would think. Yes, everyone wants to be king and rule the world. I guess the non-demotist is the person who fantasizes that in a world ruled by one or a few people, that he would be one of those very few people who would be sitting in the cat bird seat, and that other people would be doing his will– despite the astronomically large odds against this.

        Essentially a person who fantasizes being Trump, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and living the high life, until he made the mistake of running for president. This is going to be difficult for DT– but not as difficult as it will be for the country.

        • Anonymous says:

          Oh, never mind, I just found it on a weird political site. You don’t believe in government by the will of the people.

          Precisely.

          That’s an interesting position, because what else is there? Rule by someone(s) whom you believe to be superior to the people, I would think. Yes, everyone wants to be king and rule the world. I guess the non-demotist is the person who fantasizes that in a world ruled by one or a few people, that he would be one of those very few people who would be sitting in the cat bird seat, and that other people would be doing his will– despite the astronomically large odds against this.

          “What else is there” is simply accepting the de-facto iron law of oligarchies as de-jure. The few rule – that’s it. The non-rulers opinion is irrelevant, and popularity contests are not a good way to make good decisions.

          • Moon says:

            And it’s hard for me to imagine a person believing in this position, unless they somehow expect to win the lottery, so to speak, and to get to be one of the very few rulers whose opinion is relevant.

            But humans are capable of infinite self-delusion. E. g. the people who elected Trump, imagine him to be the savior of the working class. Those people are going to be in for a rude awakening.

          • Anonymous says:

            And it’s hard for me to imagine a person believing in this position, unless they somehow expect to win the lottery, so to speak, and to get to be one of the very few rulers whose opinion is relevant.

            What I expect to get from this is better decision-making at the top and less tribal conflict – especially the sort of tribal conflict that can happen in an age of mass media. While being at the bottom.

            There’s this Chinese triple-curse: May your wishes be granted, may you live in interesting times and may you be noticed by people in authority. I very much want the people in authority to completely disregard me, think of me irrelevant, or, at least, an object that can be taken from my current master and will serve the new one just as well. I do not want to be viewed as a tribal fanatic in the service of an enemy power who is best disposed of because he cannot ever be trusted under another authority when conquered.

            But humans are capable of infinite self-delusion. E. g. the people who elected Trump, imagine him to be the savior of the working class. Those people are going to be in for a rude awakening.

            That’s not very charitable.

          • “unless they somehow expect to win the lottery, so to speak”

            Which makes me wonder if you know that the classic version of democracy, Periclean Athens, in fact chose all government officials (except generals) by lot.

        • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

          I guess the non-demotist is the person who fantasizes that in a world ruled by one or a few people, that he would be one of those very few people who would be sitting in the cat bird seat, and that other people would be doing his will– despite the astronomically large odds against this.

          I don’t think that’s a fair assessment of the position.

      • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

        It’s Nuevo-Reaccionario speak for “person who kind of likes democracy”, IIRC.

        • Anonymous says:

          I am slightly surprised that it isn’t among the Words That Shall Not Be Spoken.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            It is. Thankfully, speaking Spanish doesn’t seem to be among Scott’s many talents (a proper spanish translation would probably just use the greek prefix. My way is funnier, though).

          • Anonymous says:

            I meant “demotist”.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            The ban is not of En Arr Ex ideas, just the word, and just for the purpose of both tricking Google and to force people to be explicit about what they mean, rather than just use it as a blanket term for “weird right wing ideas”… I wish he had done this with “alt-right” too, but oh well.

          • Dahlen says:

            I wish he had done this with “alt-right” too, but oh well.

            Depending on how it works, the hyphen might be a problem. We certainly do not want, or need, either of “alt” or “right” banned.

          • Wander says:

            I disagree, I’m quite in favour of a number of words arbitrarily banned for the sake of making us talk in different ways. Who needs to identify the opposite direction to left by name? Or why try to shorten things-that-are-different-from-the-mainstream?

          • Dahlen says:

            Oh, yes, we could spell “alt” as “the three-letter combination that you get when you replace [X] in Ctrl-[X]-Del to get the sequence of keys that must be pressed in order to launch Task Manager in Windows”, that would be super effective!

            Oh, and apparently it also affects words that contain the banned sequence as a substring. So we’d have to use the above replacement for spelling “Caltech”, “salt”, “Baltimore”, “cobalt” etc. 😀

          • BBA says:

            As any user of the One True Editor Emacs knows, the modifier key next to the spacebar is properly called “Meta”.

          • lhn says:

            I wonder if the Cyrillic lookalike character substitution dodge (e.g., “аlt” instead of “alt”) would be sufficient to solve the search engine problem.

            (Note: whether or not it would currently work, I strongly recommend against using the method to write any currently banned terms without Scott’s explicit approval. If it doesn’t address the problem for some reason, that would create extra work for him if, e.g., it became necessary to start trying to add all those variants to the ban list.)

          • suntzuanime says:

            Have you considered the possibility that banning words like this is just a very silly idea to begin with?

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            I mean, yes, but if there’s going to be a silly wordfilter to begin with, we can at least make it consistently silly.

          • Wander says:

            Actually, to update my opinion, I’m in favour of wordfilters that automatically change things. Wordfilters have given us such excellent terms like weaboo.

        • Tekhno says:

          Part of NRs definition for demotist isn’t just democracy but packages in populism, so that the Nazis and the communists were also “demotists” even though they abolished democracy once they got into power. From this view they were a product of liberal thinking about the “General Will” only with race or class.

          This is why NRs are basically not a threat. Their entire philosophy is based on a self-paralyzing concept, in which even political activism is demotic. This reminds me of the self-paralyzing nature of the NAP in (some popular interpretations of) ancap philosophy, which isn’t surprising because NR is a post-libertarian thing. The idea is to become worthy enough to simply accept power when it is given (called Passivism – no that’s not a typo). It’s underpants gnome philosophy for neo-monarchists.

          Now the alt-right are running around being very populist and promoting white nationalism, and are far more numerous than NRs, and willing to engage in activism to push neo-nazism. Recent media analyses of the two tend to conflate the two or portray NR as simply being the intellectual hub of the alt-right, but that’s not really accurate. The alt-right are a credible threat. I wonder why the alt-right isn’t a censored term.

          The moniker “Death Eater” was used for NR but it better fits the alt-right. From what I’ve seen NR is racist, but not white nationalist or interested in race purity as a primary motivator. It’s all about absolute sovereignty magically falling out of the skies, and a market in the feudal city-state of your “choice”.

          Essentially, the alt-right are the Nazis you should be worried about, working within existing systems, using tried and tested political activist methods, whereas NR are the modern equivalent of wacky characters like Julius Evola who believed in navel gazing about esoteric values.

          • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

            And in the opposite corner of the (demotist-vs-non-demotist) x (democratic-vs-non-democratic) matrix, we have Schumpeter’s view: that the “general will” does not exist, but that democracy is necessary just the same because it allows governments to be replaced without revolution.

          • Tekhno says:

            I feel this is pretty close to my view that democracy is not something that should be treat as valuable for its own sake (otherwise we end up with misguided neoconservatism), but that it allows for peaceful transfers of power, and acts as a pressure valve. Of course, democracy is basically a truce, not something you can just plug into a society, so it only works if the populace in question accepts it (which is why toppling dictators to bring other groups democracy isn’t always a good idea). Nonetheless, if a populace can cooperate and accept such a truce, they benefit by enabling power sharing and peaceful competition instead of violent competition. Free speech is a similar kind of truce between rival groups within the same state.

            This is why the main contention of NR reads as so obviously false to me. Democracy is certainly low level civil war, but this doesn’t mean that an absolute monarchy is peace. You’ve just left the opponents of the regime with no other option than full scale for reals civil war.

            I’ve never read Schumpeter though.

          • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

            I think you might like Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (PDF; the relevant chapters are XXI and XXII). Among other things, it includes an early (and IMO still the best) account of what has since come to be known as public choice theory. (His prediction of the inevitable triumph of socialism over capitalism, albeit for non-Marxian reasons, has not stood the test of time quite as well.)

          • Tekhno says:

            Thanks.

          • Anonymous says:

            Part of NRs definition for demotist isn’t just democracy but packages in populism, so that the Nazis and the communists were also “demotists” even though they abolished democracy once they got into power. From this view they were a product of liberal thinking about the “General Will” only with race or class.

            More precisely – a demotic ideology or system is any that places the will of the people or their opinion as a source of legitimacy of the government. All three of Nazism, Communism and Liberal Western Democracy appeal to the people as the source of their legitimacy, hence they are demotic, albeit quite different in overall application of the purported will of the people.

            This is why NRs are basically not a threat.

            This is by design and it makes me very glad to hear. Please don’t purge. 🙂

            Their entire philosophy is based on a self-paralyzing concept, in which even political activism is demotic. This reminds me of the self-paralyzing nature of the NAP in (some popular interpretations of) ancap philosophy, which isn’t surprising because NR is a post-libertarian thing. The idea is to become worthy enough to simply accept power when it is given (called Passivism – no that’s not a typo).

            Sort of.

            The Death Eaters are not the King, and the King is highly unlikely to arise from the ranks of Death Eaters. The Death Eaters merely hope that their works will provide the King with a framework for ruling wisely and stably, and maybe appointing some advisors from among our descendants.

            There is also a more personal level to Passivism – disengaging from the political circus of demotic politics, and actually doing something useful. Passivism is not sitting on a couch all day posting from memes or attending rallies and protests; Passivism is getting married and having kids, building a business, passing down practical know-how, building good relations with neighbours, etc.

            The moniker “Death Eater” was used for NR but it better fits the alt-right. From what I’ve seen NR is racist, but not white nationalist or interested in race purity as a primary motivator. It’s all about absolute sovereignty magically falling out of the skies, and a market in the feudal city-state of your “choice”.

            Empires falling and being replaced by new ones is hardly an aberration. So far, it is a certainty. History has not ended and seems unlikely to end even if we nuke ourselves to the stone age. I cannot predict the future, but I’m betting that tables will yet be flipped.

            My grandparents lived under a Republican Dictatorship (narrowly missing various types of Monarchy), then Communism, then Western Liberal Democracy. Before I turned ten, I myself had already lived under the latter two. I don’t quite see why I would believe that the story ends with WLD. Maybe I’ll live in a Theocracy before I die, for all I know.

            (Also, “absolute sovereignty” is a late period aberration. As a stable government framework, it does not seem very good at all. Very few, if any, Death Eaters want that.)

          • Anonymous says:

            I feel this is pretty close to my view that democracy is not something that should be treat as valuable for its own sake (otherwise we end up with misguided neoconservatism), but that it allows for peaceful transfers of power, and acts as a pressure valve. Of course, democracy is basically a truce, not something you can just plug into a society, so it only works if the populace in question accepts it (which is why toppling dictators to bring other groups democracy isn’t always a good idea). Nonetheless, if a populace can cooperate and accept such a truce, they benefit by enabling power sharing and peaceful competition instead of violent competition. Free speech is a similar kind of truce between rival groups within the same state.

            This is why the main contention of NR reads as so obviously false to me. Democracy is certainly low level civil war, but this doesn’t mean that an absolute monarchy is peace. You’ve just left the opponents of the regime with no other option than full scale for reals civil war.

            Have they considered not being traitors, sitting down and getting on with their lives, instead?

            The modern state (hell, medieval monarchs too) has plenty of options for suppressing would-be civil warriors – starting with efficient persecution. After all, neither Communist China nor the Soviet Union were toppled by popular revolution, nor did the vast amounts of people genocided by the Nazis successfully revolt. The state does not need to care about the opinions of its subjects, so long as it is very serious about crushing any opposition and would-be rebels (which is also a fascinating indictment of the French and Russian monarchs, who were insufficiently zealous about preserving their power). Other methods include proselytizing passivist outlooks (say, Catholicism with its “don’t revolt” doctrine), combating class and tribal consciousness, censoring reports of and repressing ethnic conflict, and not collecting statistics.

            The conclusion I draw here is that the existence of a pressure valve is not necessary for the self-preservation of a single-faction state.

      • Deiseach says:

        “Demotic” being the vulgar tongue, that spoken by the common people, the rabble, the mob – you can guess from that what a “demotist” is – at least, in the opinion of a non-demotist.

      • Maybe we should come up with a sigil for terms invented by Moldbug.

        • Anonymous says:

          Hey, that’s a pretty good idea – in fact, could do a kind of rectification of names here. I can practice my Chinese and come up with zi versions of the concepts, which do not trigger the Ur-Quan’s instinctive territoriality spamming the comment.

          Hey, Jaime, do you still have that list of banned words?

      • rlms says:

        You may find this (and the associated anti-re act ornery FAQ) helpful.

    • Dahlen says:

      … So, to rephrase, “Trump’s not racist — and that’s bad”?

      • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

        You’ve got to admit it’s a fresh take.

      • Anonymous says:

        Somewhat rhetorical, but it’s a pretty good way of putting it, yes.

        • Dahlen says:

          Do I even need to ask your views on race, or… okay, this is SSC, this is a familiar situation, never mind.

          TBH, I don’t even know why someone with your perspective needed to be convinced about this regarding Trump. Let alone that he’d be shooting himself in the foot by playing the intelligence/civilisation card; he’s probably not knowledgeable enough to even bring up HBD.

          • Anonymous says:

            Do I even need to ask your views on race, or… okay, this is SSC, this is a familiar situation, never mind.

            I’m not sure what the current legal situation is regarding even discussing race in open threads. I prefer to err on the side of moderation, lest I be punished severely.

            TBH, I don’t even know why someone with your perspective needed to be convinced about this regarding Trump. Let alone that he’d be shooting himself in the foot by playing the intelligence/civilisation card; he’s probably not knowledgeable enough to even bring up HBD.

            Tribalism is instinctive. Even someone with my perspective may find it hard to avoid perceiving Trump as their own and supporting him on these emotional grounds. Trump is a sort of guilty pleasure for my lot.

      • T’s not a racist, and hes’ still bad.

  53. Moon says:

    I like Vox.com very much, especially some of their charts and stats. But I do have to agree with Scott here that Vox goes off the deep end on identity politics in the particular ways that Scott describes.

  54. Anonymous Bosch says:

    I wonder if Scott would be willing to hold bet #5 constant under the condition that Trump gets to replace one of Breyer, Ginsburg, or Kennedy (which seems likely, given their ages). If so, 95% seems insanely high. Trump is nominating judges to decide these issues, not deciding these issues directly. And given that Republicans will hammerlock the Senate, the odds of Trump nominating some off-the-wall choice outside of the judges on his Heritage list are very low. Similarly, the odds that said Heritage judge will be willing to accept stare decisis on Obergefell but not Roe are also low, especially since Kennedy grounded Obergefell (to the extent it is grounded at all, which is very weakly) in due process rather than equal protection.

    • John Schilling says:

      Don’t know about Scott, but I would. The kind of person who rises that high through the ranks of the judiciary may have private biases on the subject of e.g. gay marriage. They almost universally have a strong professional bias in favor of a strong judicial branch, and (lacking any battalions or even much of a budget), that power comes from its perceived legitimacy and impartiality. At the level of the Supreme Court, that translates into a consensus assertion of something resembling Papal Infallibility.

      Supreme Court justices, including anyone Trump can get past the Senate, are very very very reluctant to directly repudiate previous Supreme Court rulings. That, not forty years of liberal-dominated benches (math, anyone?), is why Roe v. Wade still stands. That is why Obergefell vs Hodges will stand, with 95% confidence. Note that conservative judges don’t have to support gay marriage in their Obergefell II decisions for this; they just have to deny cert in cases that would force them to make such a stand. And lower courts will not be lining up to send them such cases, for the same reason.

      There may be nibbling around the edges with less clear-cut cases, and maybe recalcitrant county clerks in Utah get to not perform gay marriages in-state while still being required to give full faith and credit to marriages performed across the border in Nevada.

      • Anonymous Bosch says:

        Supreme Court justices, including anyone Trump can get past the Senate, are very very very reluctant to directly repudiate previous Supreme Court rulings.

        They really aren’t these days. They’re not all as open about it as Thomas, but refer to Stenberg v Carhart and Gonzales v Carhart. The cases are seven years apart and the reasoning in these precedents is completely contradictory; the only difference between these cases was Alito replaced O’Connor. (One involved a state law and one involved a federal law, but the conservative blocs in both cases supported the law and the federal law was the one upheld, so nothing about it maps to federalism.)

      • Brad says:

        I was a member of the Federalist Society for several years. Went to the conventions in Washington DC, heard the speakers, read the publications and so on. I think you are off base here.

        The movement has building an intellectual case for radical transformation for decades. Multiple generations of law students and then lawyers have spent their entire professional lives in that culture. Their heroes are Thomas and Scalia (with Alito an emerging favorite). Roberts, is treated with suspicion and Kennedy is seen as totally unprincipled.
        Meanwhile Souter is considered the movements biggest failure ever and no more Souters is an outright obsession.

        Is it possible that someone from the heritage foundation will break towards Roberts? Yes, it’s possible, but far more likely is that he or she will become a Thomas ally. And even Roberts is not nearly so Burkean conservative as you are portraying all SCOTUS judges. Yes, he tries to avoid the big splashy overruling of precedent but he has a habit of writing opinions that leave a precedent technically in place while massively undercutting and/or narrowing it. The lower court judges certainly get the message.

        • John Schilling says:

          Yes, he tries to avoid the big splashy overruling of precedent but he has a habit of writing opinions that leave a precedent technically in place while massively undercutting and/or narrowing it

          Agreed, but I was trying to explain why he (and others like him) do it that way and will continue to do it that way rather than actually overruling the precedent.

          And with something like Obergefell, there’s only so much narrowing you can do while still having an acceptable fig leaf of “respecting precedent”.

    • The Nybbler says:

      The main reason for stare decisis being stronger on Obergefell than Roe is that Roe is older; easier to argue there has been some fundamental change since the decision was made which justifies a change (not that I can think of one, but I’m pro-abortion). But I don’t expect either one to be overturned; rather, Roe might be nibbled away at with increasingly allowed restrictions on abortion. That’s not something which can happen with Obergefell; whether gays can marry is pretty binary.

      • Jordan D. says:

        If Trump makes two replacements, I’ll bet we’ll see a case to try to overturn Obergefell, though I’m not at all sure that Roberts will be as interested in overturning as he was in dissenting. With one replacement, my bet is that we see a ‘county officials have religious freedom right not to issue that license’ case, which might end up being demeaning and inconvenient but probably won’t lead to any actual reduction in marriages.

  55. Murphy says:

    I wish Scot would append these to his list of legit reasons at the end of the post:

    https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/449525268529815552

    https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/507158574670573568

    This person will now have power over the CDC. Being a reality TV star is not the problem.

    • Moon says:

      Well, being a reality TV star is the problem, only in the sense that it makes a person popular and gets them elected– possibly with a little help from voting machine fraud, as my comment in a previous thread further up this page describes– even if they are incredibly incompetent at absolutely everything related to government policy.

      I added a comment to the thread about voting machines just now. It’s not hacking from outside forces that’s the problem. It’s the original software that is put into the machine. BTW, that software is proprietary and kept secret from the public by a kind of patent law. So all voting machine fraud is legally protected from being discovered by the public.

      • Murphy says:

        You probably mean trade secret law, patent law doesn’t protect secrets, quite the opposite.

        • Moon says:

          Yes, thank you. I knew it wasn’t literally named a patent, but that was the closest term I could think of, to what I was talking about.

        • Moon says:

          Actually no one ever wants to believe that voting machine fraud is, has been, and can continue to be a problem, even now that it is getting reported on by fairly mainstream sources like Vox and PBS.

          I suppose thee disbelief is because it questions the very foundations of our democracy. Republicans are glad to steal elections. And the majority of Democrats tend to be naive– too naive to believe the truth when it doesn’t fit into a kind of Kumbaya peace and love and everybody-is-a-nice-person kind of box. So Dems will never believe what has happened to them twice in the past 16 years.

          So we’ll probably keep having the makers of electronic voting machines determine our elections forever.

          The only way this problem has ever been affected positively– if indeed it’s even true that this happened– is here:

          Anonymous, Karl Rove and 2012 Election Fix?

          http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/12845-anonymous-karl-rove-and-2012-election-fix

          But Anonymous is probably not a big enough organization to unhack large numbers of voting machine throughout the Swing States.

          And if they can do this, then why didn’t they do it in this election? Was it because they heavily supported Trump in his vendetta against HRC, just like Wikileaks and Julian Assange did? Are the organizations memberships overlapping?

          Anonymous does have a message for Donald Trump, saying he should not have wars. If he doesn’t stop the wars, they don’t say what they plan to do about it. A lot of the stuff they have said in the past has turned out to be empty threats, so probably they will do nothing if he starts WWIII of the Small Hands.

          Anonymous Message to Donald Trump: For The Sake Of World Peace
          http://anonhq.com/anonymous-message-donald-trump-sake-world-piece/

          WikiLeaks, or at least Assange, by contrast, seems to expect to be paid back handsomely for Assange’s extreme and effective support of Trump.

          Julian Assange Lawyers to Appeal to Donald Trump to End U.S. Probe

          http://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/julian-assange-lawyers-to-appeal-to-donald-trump-to-end-us-probe-a3396906.html

          So the guy who claims to be a great rescuer of humanity, simply wants to get himself out of legal hot water and will control the outcome of the elections in the nation that used to be the head of the free world, in order to save himself from legal trouble — and the heck with humanity, LOL. Or maybe he convinces himself that he’s done the people of the world a favor by causing an totally ignorant and clueless fellow like Trump to become the president of the U.S.

        • Moon says:

          Here are the basic voting machine fraud reference links again, so that no one who is interested in the subject, has to search for them where they are way up further in this thread.

          Here’s how hackers might mess with electronic voting on Election Day
          http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/heres-how-hackers-could-mess-with-electronic-voting/

          Some states — including swing states — have flawed voting systems
          http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/11/1/13486386/election-rigged-paper-trail-audit

          Could the 2016 Election Be Stolen with Help from Electronic Voting Machines?
          http://www.democracynow.org/2016/2/23/could_the_2016_election_be_stolen

          Note in this last article below here, that in the list of presidential elections where winner lost popular vote, there were 2 of these in the past 16 years, both won by Republicans. Prior to the last 16 years, the next most recent one was in 1888. It’s almost as if, once electronic voting machines came into heavy use, the machines in Swing states were programmed to add just enough votes to make the favored Republican candidate win the electoral college. In this most recent election, e.g., it could be done by assigning 1 out of every 50 or 100 votes for Hillary, to Trump instead.

          This couldn’t be done in Obama’s case, because he won by so many votes, that too many votes would have to have been changed, and it would have been obvious that fraud was occurring. To get this to work, the nonfavored candidate can’t have a landslide vote. Hillary might have had a landslide if it hadn’t been for Comey’s and Assange’s help in casting her in a negative light.

          List of United States presidential elections where winner lost popular vote
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_elections_where_winner_lost_popular_vote

          If this is the way it works, then all of our presidents from here on out will be whoever was the GOP nominee, no matter how crazy or incompetent or demented that person may be– unless the Democrat can win in a landslide.

          • Wander says:

            The left wing just spent several months screaming abuse at people suggesting it was possible to rig an election. You’re not going to get any traction with these ideas, quite deservedly.

          • Moon says:

            Oh, I forgot, Wander. Everyone on the Left is the same as everyone else on the Left. Everything one person disagrees with on the Left, everyone else on the Left must disagree with. Of course that’s not the case with the Right.

            That’s because this is a Right Wing board. Right Wingers get to do everything they want to do , and they are always correct– at least according to their Right WIng tribe.

          • Evan Þ says:

            @Moon, and every Right Wing poster on this board listens to Fox Faux News every day and must agree with every criticism they make, right?

            Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander…

          • “Everyone on the Left is the same as everyone else on the Left. ”

            Obviously not. You, for instance, are sufficiently different from most people on the left that, when you changed the name you posted under, people rapidly recognized you as the same person.

            It’s the combination of extreme ideological bias and naivete, I think.

  56. Nancy Lebovitz says:

    One suicide, but it was about insurance, not racism, or at least mostly about insurance.

    What I saw of the birther movement was about Obama being Kenyan, but at least the parts I saw were about the law, not about Kenyans being awful people. This gets to the whole subconscious/concealed racism thing.

    The people who are pushing panic about Trump presumably have some responsibility for violence against Trump supporters.

    Thanks for the reassurance about how small the actively racist groups are in the US. One of the serious problems with Social Justice is that it doesn’t quantify.

    On the other hand, I think the Flint water crisis has something to do with lack of empathy, and I think it’s plausible that racism has something to do with that.

    • DrBeat says:

      Except that in popular imagination, due to things like “Roger and Me” and the cultural things informed by it, the perception of Flint is that it is a city of poor white people. And while demographics may change since 1989, it isn’t like the Bad Racists had a devoted effort to get people to update their perceptions to think of Flint as a city of black people so they would not feel empathy.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        I’m assuming that the more or less local politicians ould have known the racial proportions in Flint, but i’m guessing.

        Or it might be lack of empathy for poor people regardless of race.

    • Matt M says:

      “What I saw of the birther movement was about Obama being Kenyan, but at least the parts I saw were about the law, not about Kenyans being awful people. This gets to the whole subconscious/concealed racism thing.”

      I’ve always thought it was somewhat bizarre that both sides spent so much time and effort debating where he was physically born and so little on the fact that he spent the vast majority of his youth being raised essentially Muslim in Indonesia.

      To me, this would suggest that it was entirely about “here’s how we can disqualify this popular guy on a technicality which would help us politically” and not at all about “let’s smear him BECAUSE HE’S DIFFERENT.” There were plenty of other less controversial avenues of attack that could have confirmed him being different that were clearly more likely to win.

  57. Alsadius says:

    Re your crying wolf post, I have a question about details on prediction #6. You’re comparing 8 years of Obama to 4 of Trump – do you mean the perceived increase per year, or the perceived total increase? (I don’t want this to turn into a discussion thread of that post, of course, but this question seems like it’s probably safe and non-controversial)

  58. paulmbrinkley says:

    Testing to see if my nickname displays properly now.

    Edit: So, not only do I not know how people happened upon https://slatestarcodex.com/wp-admin/profile.php , which is different from whatever profile editor WordPress gives me, neither one appears to alter my display name.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      …and there we go. I kept hitting the little combobox below it, but only in edits of existing posts, never in new posts…

  59. Mark says:

    I think that the house-shop divide perfectly describes the emotional contours of the immigration debate.

    Tucker Carlson interviews open borders advocate – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFFP6GJPVpw
    @1:56

    Tucker: Alex, do you think that people have a right to lock their doors? Or do you think they have an obligation to let anyone in who chooses to come?
    Alex: Uh… I’m not sure..?
    Tucker: You’re saying that the United States has no right to prevent people who want to come here from coming here, and I’m asking you does the same apply to us as individuals? Do you have the right to keep people out who want to share your apartment with you?
    Alex: *confused silence*
    Alex: I think, uh… I think that’s not really a direct analogy… that, obviously, a nation state, a sovereign nation state is very different from an individual.
    Tucker: Well, it belongs to its citizens, so they should be able to decide…

    You can see that the analogy just makes no sense to the open borders advocate. It’s like this Tucker guy is saying, “well what if Mexico is on the moon?”

    So, I think what’s happening here is that I feel like I’m the middle aged dad of the household, and my irresponsible teenaged daughter wants to have a party. And I’m saying, “Darling, we can’t open up our house to everyone. We have no idea who will come, they’ll ruin the house, I mean, this just isn’t going to happen.” And she’s shouting back “Dad, you’re such an ASSHOLE! My friends are good people! Oh my god I can’t believe you’re doing this you FUCKING FACIST! You’re ruining my LIFE!”

    Meanwhile open borders advocates see us as customers in a shop, and I’m some weird old guy who keeps sending letters to management trying to get them to stop new customers, who happen to look a certain way, from coming in. And, I give reasons like “the shop might run out of food” or “the aisles will be too crowded”, but they’re looking around and they’re like, “Dude, there is loads of space here. We can just get more food. These reasons make absolutely no sense – are you sure you aren’t just a racist?”

    • Anonymous Bosch says:

      I think the problem with this map is that the rules an owner can make in their house are far broader than the rules a government can make for its population. As a homeowner I can forbid swearing, or premarital sex, or guns, or prayer. But in a country, these are general rights, that most people do not even think should be subject to a popular vote.

      I would also point out that while “I should determine who enters my house” is offered as an analogy, the individual economic components of immigration involve the actual rights of property owners. An immigrant wants to take a job offered by a factory, which is the property of its owner. He also wants to rent an apartment, which is the property of its landlord. Etc.

      Most of these interactions are between willing participants deciding how to make use of their property, and where it breaks down (e.g., immigrant has kids who qualify for SNAP or WIC) the anti-immigration argument proves too much, when other measures such as altering welfare eligibility or citizenship rules would suffice.

      • Mark says:

        I think the problem with this map is that the rules an owner can make in their house are far broader than the rules a government can make for its population.

        Well, rules that apply to the nation have to be a subset of rules that apply in the house, so, for some specific nation, yes.

        But, there are of course countries where guns, certain words, forms of worship, and sexual promiscuity are banned. So, no.

        I would say that the rights of property owners are only actualised in a social context. Where other people in a society feel that there is no justification for those rights, they stop existing.

      • Jiro says:

        the anti-immigration argument proves too much, when other measures such as altering welfare eligibility or citizenship rules would suffice.

        Neither of these alternatives are practical, and even if they could be done they would lead to political backlash so bad that by comparison, the backlash against border control is nothing. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

        • Anonymous Bosch says:

          Neither of these alternatives are practical, and even if they could be done they would lead to political backlash so bad that by comparison, the backlash against border control is nothing.

          Altering welfare eligibility has been done very recently; the 1990s welfare reform contained several provisions relating to immigrants. What’s the most recent precedent for Trump’s plans? Operation Wetback?

          • hyperboloid says:

            I think there is a relatively simple, and throughly Trumpian, solution to the question of the cost of welfare benefits given to immigrants. Send Mexico a bill.

            We have a lot of economic leverage over our southern neighbor, and demanding that the Mexican elite pay their fair share to care for their own poor is likely to go over a lot better with the Mexican public then trying to get them to pay for a wall.

          • hlynkacg says:

            I think there is a relatively simple, and throughly Trumpian, solution to the question of the cost of welfare benefits given to immigrants. Send Mexico a bill.

            I like this plan.

          • Winter Shaker says:

            “You all misheard me. I said we’re gonna bill the welfare, and make Mexico pay for it”
            🙂

    • carvenvisage says:

      You can see that the analogy just makes no sense to the open borders advocate. It’s like this Tucker guy is saying, “well what if Mexico is on the moon?”

      Or maybe, -just maybe, he didn’t have a prepared off the cuff pithy remark immediately at hand for a novel (imo strong) argument?

      (and still managed to point out the most likely place a weak point is to be found, if it is)

       

      Come on, credit where it’s due. A little decorum please

  60. Sandy says:

    Scott, you’re currently trending on Twitter. You might attract the wrong kind of attention.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I don’t know how to prevent this except never to talk about controversial things. If anyone knows, tell me.

    • Reasoner says:

      It looks like most of the feedback he got was positive, which pleasantly surprised me. Even his critics were less harsh than I expected.

  61. hyperboloid says:

    Scott’s “You Are Still Crying Wolf” post is the single worst thing he has ever written.

    Maybe, as an asexual, his inability to follow the commandment to be fruitful and multiply from has so alienated him form Jewish tribal identity that he has come to reject the cosmopolitan values of the diaspora. Maybe he was bitten by a rapid social justice warrior as a child, I don’t know. But his opposition to identity politics has clearly so warped his sense of reality that he no longer believes that Blacks and Hispanics in the United States could , under any circumstances, have distinctive interests worth considering at all.

    The truth is I don’t give a solitary flying fuck if Trump is personally a racist. I will argue, in all seriousness, that Amon Göth was not an antisemite. He was a psychopath who took advantage of the racism of the Nazi regime to inflict suffering on defenseless people.

    Donald Trump’s defining policy proposal during the campaign, other then building a wall and making America great (in some unspecified way) again, was to form a deportation force and in the course of two years expel 11 million illegal immigrants.

    Of these elven million roughly eight million are Mexicans and the majority of the rest come from central America, mostly the nations of the northern triangle (El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala). These are weak violence plagued states, that each owe between ten and twenty percent of their GDP to remittance payments from the US. Mexico might is some sense be able to ”take the hit” of mass deportation, central America can not.

    People unfamiliar with the history of Latin America may not realize the grim consequences likely to result from Trump’s policy. In 1969 El Salvador and Honduras fought the so called “guerra del fútbol” mostly over the question of illegal immigration to Honduras. At the conclusion of this indecisive conflict two hundred thousand Salvadoran campesinos were deported back to their home country were they found themselves thrown, desperate and impoverished, into a nation were eighty percent of the arable land was owned by only fourteen families.

    With the growing economic desperation came a wave of political radicalism and violence, various leftist groups representing a tangle of different ideologies spread across the country. Paralyzed by fear of revolution and unable to make even basic reforms, the deeply authoritarian government responded with a massive counter insurgency program. Believing it was necessary to cleanse society of potentially subversive elements from they launched a campaign of political repression that introduced the world to the phrase “Escuadrone de la muerte”.

    On march 14th 1980 archbishop Oscar Romero made a public appeal during his weekly radio address:

    I would like to make a special appeal to the men of the army, and specifically to the ranks of the National Guard, the police and the military. Brothers, you come from our own people. You are killing your own brother peasants when any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God which says, “Thou shalt not kill.” No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you recovered your consciences and obeyed your consciences rather than a sinful order. The church, the defender of the rights of God, of the law of God, of human dignity, of the person, cannot remain silent before such an abomination. ….In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: cease the repression.

    Ten days latter he was assassinated while giving mass and the nation descended into open civil war. By that spring the death squads were killing a thousand people a month.

    In October of 1980 Manuel ”Barba Roja” Piñeiro, the head of the Americas section of the Cuban intelligence service, brought together the leaders of the various leftist factions fighting the Salvadoran government forming the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional. In January of 1981 with Cuban and Nicaraguan arms the FMLN launched an ironically named “final offensive” that failed to take any major cities but met with some success in rural areas; in particular in the province of Morazan.

    In Morazan one village in particular did not heed the call for revolution, this place was called El Mozote. The village differed form others in region in that it’s people were predominantly protestant evangelicals. As members of a pentecostal denomination called the assembly of god they were known for holding stridently anticommunist views and being indifferent if not hostile El Salvador’s catholic hierarchy.

    On December 10th 1981 members of the elite Atlacatl battalion under the command of lieutenant colonel Domingo Monterrosa barrios occupied the village. On the 10th of December there were around one thousand residents of El Mozote, on the 13th there was one. Her name was Rufina Amaya Mí­rquez and when she reached the refugee camps in Honduras she told a chilling story.

    When Monterrosa’s men first arrived in El Mozote they forced the people of the village into the street and held them at gun point while their houses were searched. When the search was finished they locked them inside their homes for the night.

    The next morning the killing began.

    The soldiers separated the villagers into small groups for interrogation and rape before executing them with rifles and machetes. Rufina was able to slip away in the chaos and hide while the Atlacatl battalion slaughtered the entire village including her four children, Cristino, María Isabel, María Dolores, and María Lilian.

    María Isabel was 8 months old.

    Even in the brutal context of the times the army’s actions at El Mozote were shocking. The villagers were not supporters of the rebels and Monterrosa almost certainly knew it. In other villages the population simply fled when the army approached, the people of El Mozote on the other hand believed they would be safe. The sad irony is that this trust cost them their lives.

    Many have wondered why a government would kill so many potential supporters. And in this lies the ultimate mystery of the wars in central America, How could an eight month old child born to evangelical parents become the target of a war against Communism?

    Carl Von Clausewitz, the great Prussian philosopher of military affairs, identified an essential concept still taught at military academies today, the “center of gravity”. Which he defined as “the source of power that provides moral or physical strength, freedom of action, or will to act”. The center of gravity is that capability possessed by a combatant force with out which victory becomes impossible. In the context of the central American wars the center of gravity of the insurgency was the civilian population itself.

    The word genocide comes from the Greek root genos- (γένος), meaning race, stock, family, or kin; from that root also derive the English words gene, genetic, and genealogy. And the act of genocide is best defined as an attack on a community, aimed at its destruction, and directed at it’s most basic unit; the individual family.

    The problem that faced the governments of central America was demographic in nature; too many people too little land. Mao Zedong once said that the guerrilla was like a fish that swam in the sea of the people; the men who led these countries aimed to drain the sea. Monterrosa’s aim in El Mozote was to destroy the reproductive capacity of the population. To kill the men, and to drive out or kill the children and women of reproductive age to make sure another generation did not take their place.

    In so much as it is concerned with reproduction genocide is an essentially sexual act.

    Donald Trump’s thesis that the nations if Latin America are using the United States as a dumping ground for their poor is not wrong. Unwilling or unable to reform their corrupt economies countries from Panama to Rio Bravo send their undesirables north. But the sad truth is that if we send them back I am afraid that they will dispose of them the only other way they know how. Emigration has served as a pressure valve for the tensions that drove the wars of the 1980s, and if that pressure valve is closed suddenly and without due preparation I fear the result will be military rule, civil war, and mass murder.

    The fear felt by immigrants in the United States is the fear of violent undignified death. It is not based on any delusion fostered by politically correct propaganda, it is based on a generation old shared memory of Terror and brutality. How Scott, a Jew with full knowledge of the history of his people, could show so little sympathy for their condition I do not know.

    I hope for the sake of the lives of millions of innocent people that Donald Trump does not follow through on his promise, but I wonder how much I can do besides hope.

    People are crying wolf because the wolf is here. The fact that some refuse to see him does not change that fact.

    • Tekhno says:

      You seem to be saying that Trump is bad because he’ll send undocumented immigrants back and then they’ll be killed in the countries they came from, and that Scott isn’t showing enough sympathy by… what exactly? Not opposing Trump?

      Scott already agrees that Trump is terrible and made a post saying that SSC specifically endorsed anyone but Trump, and now he’s only published this new article after the election, precisely because he opposed Trump and he didn’t want it to interfere with that.

      The argument Scott just made in “You Are Still Crying Wolf” isn’t an argument that sending back immigrants might result in terrible consequences, it’s an argument that Trump isn’t a racist or a white nationalist, and that racists and white nationalists make up a tiny demographic slice of his support, and are a tiny proportion of the overall population. You haven’t rebutted that argument. You’ve talked past Scott to argue something he likely already agrees with.

      Trump isn’t a racist and his supporters aren’t mostly racists =/= Trump’s deportation of undocumented residents won’t lead to them being killed in South America.

      • hyperboloid says:

        My main point is that the motivations of Trump, or his supporters, are irrelevant. If we have good reason to believe that the policies championed by the man who will soon be president of the United States will lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths, racism or no racism, we have reason to be concerned.

        A direct quote from Scott’s post:

        Stop fearmongering. Somewhere in America, there are still like three or four people who believe the media, and those people are cowering in their houses waiting for the death squads….. Stop telling people they’re going to be killed. Stop terrifying children. Stop giving racism free advertising. Stop trying to convince Americans that all the other Americans hate them. Stop. Stop. Stop.

        The death squads were not imaginary, they were terrifyingly real.

        If you let me, I could buy a plane ticket tomorrow, fly to Guatemala drive you to the killing fields, where the people from the UN are still digging up mass graves, and put in your hands the skull of a child that has been split open with a machete.

        I can not look into the eyes of central American immigrant and tell him that he should not be afraid. He should be afraid.

        He should be involved with the protesters, with human rights groups, with the church, doing what ever he has to make his case heard. And he should be ready to get his family somewhere safe, if that’s what it takes.

        • Tekhno says:

          The death squads were not imaginary, they were terrifyingly real.

          But they aren’t United States death squads. They are South American death squads. Perhaps what protestors and activists should have been doing all this time is attacking the genocidal aspirations of these countries, and protesting outside of embassies. Otherwise the implicit argument here is that the USA should have de facto open borders.

          The media focused a lot of effort on screaming about Donald Trump’s racism and comparatively little on the genocidal tendencies of the countries immigrants were escaping from as an argument against the knock on effect of Donald Trump’s policies.

        • Aapje says:

          @hyperboloid

          If you let me, I could buy a plane ticket tomorrow, fly to Guatemala drive you to the killing fields, where the people from the UN are still digging up mass graves, and put in your hands the skull of a child that has been split open with a machete.

          I can not look into the eyes of central American immigrant and tell him that he should not be afraid. He should be afraid.

          This is pure demagoguery. Argue facts, not emotions.

          What you are effectively doing is arguing that the West has the obligation to save people from themselves. Apparently, we are responsible to ensure that enough money flows to Guatemala so they won’t kill each other.

          However, if the money going there is/was already not enough to prevent the problems that you are describing, you can just as easily call Clinton’s or Obama’s policies genocidal for not opening the border completely or giving billions (more) to Guatemala. It seems very arbitrary to paint Trump as exceptionally bad, even if one believes your arguments.

          International refugee agreements also merely require that people who are directly under threat get asylum. Not people who are not under threat, but can earn money to send to their family, who then might not be tempted to revolt, who then might be killed when that revolt is suppressed.

          Your position is truly very extreme and based on a ton of conjecture, which makes a weak case for assuming that Trump will cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

          • hyperboloid says:

            @Tekhno

            The death squads were, at least originally, largely funded, trained, and equipped by the United States. I thought that was common knowledge.

            Putting pressure on Latin American governments to improve their human rights records is a great cause. And a number of activists in the US have done great work in this area, the trial of Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt, was largely the result of just this kind of activism. But, given that central American oligarchs are pretty uninterested in the complaints of protesters , there are limits to what it can achieve.

            I want to make clear that I actually agree with Scott that most Trump voters are not raving white supremacists, and I think that many of them may be open to a humanitarian appeal on behalf of potential deportees.

            @Aapje

            This is pure demagoguery. Argue facts, not emotions.

            The facts about the tactics used by US backed governments in Latin America may make you uncomfortable, but they are facts none the less.

            What you are effectively doing is arguing that the West has the obligation to save people from themselves.

            I never said anything of the sort, and I never advocated “open borders”, few people do.
            Notice, I never said that the United States should pay reparations, for the damage done by our imperial schemes, and I never said anything about foreign aid.

            Nor have I said that the United States should not make efforts to reduce the rate immigration from Latin America, I have only argued that Latinos raus is a morally unacceptable policy.

            The United States helped to brutally oppress these countries for decades and, when their people came across our borders did they come to commit acts of terrorism, or to seek revenge? No, they came to preform menial labor for fare market wages. Next time an Arab complains about American imperialism, remember no Guatemalan ever flew a plane into an office building.

            There are good reasons to want reduce immigration to the US. If nothing else I don’t think exporting their own citizens is a healthy long term economic model for central American countries. But your complete unwillingness to try to find a humane solution speaks to a mindset of deep seated cruelty.

          • Aapje says:

            The death squads were, at least originally, largely funded, trained, and equipped by the United States. I thought that was common knowledge.

            This has nothing to do with Trump or with deportations.

            Your examples of violence in S-America were caused by a confluence of factors, where deportations might be a factor, but almost certainly not the main cause. Yet somehow you feel justified in claiming with high certainty that Trump’s policy will result in the same.

            I think that many of them may be open to a humanitarian appeal on behalf of potential deportees.

            The question will be why these people didn’t ask for asylum in the first place, if they actually have a solid case. If they did, they wouldn’t be illegal and they won’t be deported.

            I never said anything of the sort, and I never advocated “open borders”, few people do.

            You claimed that:
            – migrants in the US sending money to S-America is critical to reduce violence over there
            – that violence in S-America is very high because they have insufficient money
            – that the US has an obligation to keep the violence in S-America low

            The logical consequence of your beliefs are that you want more money going to S-America, presumably through the same payments by migrants that you want the new presidents to keep happening. The way to achieve that is by letting in more migrants….

            But your complete unwillingness to try to find a humane solution speaks to a mindset of deep seated cruelty.

            I wasn’t discussing solutions, I was criticizing your lack of logic.

          • hyperboloid says:

            @Aapje

            You claimed that:
            – migrants in the US sending money to S-America is critical to reduce violence over there
            – that violence in S-America is very high because they have insufficient money
            – that the US has an obligation to keep the violence in S-America low

            Not to be pedantic, but it’s central America I’m talking about. And I only hold to the the last of those propositions, and even then only with significant caveats. In general I think you have an obligation to help strangers only if it isn’t an excessive burden on you, or if you had some role in their misfortune. Both of which seem to be conditions that are met in this case.

            The idea that violence in central America is caused only by poverty is easily disproved by looking at the case of Nicaragua which is many time safer than it’s neighbors despite being the poorest country in the region.

            The logical consequence of your beliefs are that you want more money going to S-America, presumably through the same payments by migrants that you want the new presidents to keep happening. The way to achieve that is by letting in more migrants….

            No the logical consequence of my beliefs is that central American countries need massive social and economic reforms before they can ween themselves off dependence on remittance payments. Their is no rational reason for, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, to have economies based on exporting bananas, coffee, and their own citizens. Costa Rica is a successful market orientated democracy with a diversified economy that is not hemorrhaging emigrants to the US. If they can do so can their neighbors.

          • Aapje says:

            In general I think you have an obligation to help strangers only if it isn’t an excessive burden on you, or if you had some role in their misfortune. Both of which seem to be conditions that are met in this case.

            The issue is that many of the people who support Trump do think that it is an excessive burden on them. I also think that it’s not fair to blame the US for the misfortune of all illegal immigrants, who are a fairly diverse bunch that you stereotype severely.

            For example, I don’t see how the misfortune of most Mexicans can be blamed on the US. Even if you blame the illegal drug trade to the US, it was never a desire by the US government that illegal drug trade happened.

          • Anonymous Bosch says:

            For example, I don’t see how the misfortune of most Mexicans can be blamed on the US. Even if you blame the illegal drug trade to the US, it was never a desire by the US government that illegal drug trade happened.

            What does desire have to do with blame? I’m sure the US also didn’t desire to have a self-styled Islamist caliphate rise in the ashes of a failed Iraqi state (unless you buy some wacky conspiracy theories) but we can still be blamed for it. Accidents still have parties at fault.

          • Winter Shaker says:

            Even if you blame the illegal drug trade to the US, it was never a desire by the US government that illegal drug trade happened

            Not exactly, but it was a desire by the US government that the legal trade in recreational drugs be shut down, thus making the illegal trade the only game in town (and incentivising the Mexican cartels to move in to supply the market), and it was also a desire by the US government that the enforcement of the War on Drugs be conducted internationally, thus creating a sort of Darwinian pressure on the cartels to become brutal enough to survive.

            That is, the US government may not have specifically wanted the violent illegal drug trade to flare up in Mexico, but it continued to pursue policies of which that was the reasonably foreseeable consequence, long after anyone could plausibly claim not to be aware of it.

            Of course, one of the silver linings of this election was the near clean sweep for all the recreational and medical cannabis initiatives, including California. If Trump decides to respect State-level votes on this, then we have a good chance of seeing the violence in Mexico considerably reduced as the size of the market worth fighting over shrinks.

          • Aapje says:

            So if a country bans vigilante justice, they are responsible for creating a market for illegal hit men? If a country has no open borders, they are responsible for illegal migration?

            It’s utterly absurd to blame a country for the consequences of other people being unwilling to follow the law, which the country simply cannot completely prevent.

          • Winter Shaker says:

            So if a country bans vigilante justice, they are responsible for creating a market for illegal hit men?

            Yes, of course. Or at least, people are responsible for not just the desired consequences of their actions, but also the non-desired-but-entirely-foreseeable consequences. In most cases, the market for illegal hitmen is small enough that banning vigilante justice is a good policy, even if it creates such a market.

            But the war on drugs is an attempt to repeal basic economics on such a grand scale that no one who support it should be able to wash their hands of blame for the suffering that it causes by this point in time. If you
            a) prohibit a popular commodity for which there is widespread demand in your country
            b) do not have the resources (or willingness to make your country into an omni-surveillance dystopian police state) to enforce that prohibition among your own population to anything like the degree you would need to make it uneconomic to supply the illegal market, and
            c) live next door to a relatively poor country with a decent enough climate for producing that commodity, then maybe you can be surprised initially if lots of people from that country start producing that commodity for export to your country, but you can’t continue to call it an unexpected consequence for decades.

            If you then
            d) know that your neighbouring country has even less resources for law enforcement but
            e) nonetheless cajole them into criminalising the industry on their own territory, and into spending their own resources in trying to enforce that criminalisation (and indeed, funnel resources to them specifically for the purposes of ramping up operations against the producers on their own territory), there’s only so long you can get these sorts of results before it becomes reasonable to think that you consider them consciously a price worth paying for whatever benefits you think your policies bring you, rather than a surprising unforeseen consequence of your policies.

            I don’t disagree with your general point, that where policies do have unforeseen negative consequences, it is not reasonable to blame someone as if they were deliberately inflicted. Just that the War on Drugs is a bad example, because we know full well what happens when you create a huge gap in the market that can only be filled by criminals, and then create a violent enforcement regime where only the most ruthless criminals can survive.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            I’m in general agreement, but I’ll add that even if people don’t forsee the plausible results of their actions, if those plausible results are happening on a large scale, people are responsible for updating their beliefs and changing their actions.

        • Moon says:

          “the motivations of Trump, or his supporters, are irrelevant. If we have good reason to believe that the policies championed by the man who will soon be president of the United States will lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths, racism or no racism, we have reason to be concerned.”

          This.

          • DrBeat says:

            If the motivations of Trump are irrelevant, then maybe spend less than one hundred percent of your time talking about how Trump’s motivations are spiritually contaminated and how everyone should be maximally afraid of Trump’s motivations.

        • Anon. says:

          So your argument is that South Americans are prone to violence, therefore they should all go to the US? How does this make any sense from the perspective of US citizens?

          If Guatemala really is so bad, deportation and the wall are an even greater imperative. Do you want mass graves north of the border as well?

        • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

          Uh, but I’m confused. How do death squads decades ago – during the Guatemalan Civil War, which ended in the ’90s – mean that deporting Guatemalans today will end in mass murder? I spend most of my summers roaming around the Guatemalan highlands. It’s not an anarchic hellhole.

          Mexico, with its ongoing drug war, is a better example. But most of Central and South America are not currently ruled by genocidal dictators.

          • hyperboloid says:

            How do death squads decades ago – during the Guatemalan Civil War, which ended in the ’90s – mean that deporting Guatemalans today will end in mass murder?

            Two basic reasons. One is because the people who carried out the dirty work of those death squads now, more or less, run the country. The small unit commanders who ordered their men to go out and hack Indians to death with machetes were lieutenants, Captains, and majors then, they are generals, congressmen, and big ticket drug traffickers today.

            The other reason is because the Guatemalan is heavily dependent on remittance payments, to the tune of ten percent of total GDP.

            So put two and two together. Hundreds of thousands of people are deported to one of the most violent countries in the world , that is experiencing an economic crisis equivalent to some of the worst years of the great depression, and happens to have governing class with huge amounts of blood on it’s hands. Something like what happened in El Salvador in the 70s and 80s seems like a good guess as to the end result.

    • Mark says:

      Isn’t this the bit Scott was talking about where you can have different conceptions of what a nation is? A shop or a home?

      I mean, I know that there are people out there who are being battered, or face abuse, but unless they have some pretty incredible personal qualities, I’m not going to invite them to live permanently in my home.
      (I hope that there is some alternative institution available to make their lives more bearable.)

      I don’t think that means that I “hate” those people. And if you started castigating me for not allowing victims of domestic abuse to sleep in my spare room, start insinuating that that position makes *me* a domestic abuser, well… that’s not going to be very effective, is it? It just makes me feel like you’re shouting at me for wanting to have a nice home.

      (Edit: Most people are willing to take *some* people in need into their nation/home – they want to have some choice about the matter, though.)

    • Sandy says:

      So your argument is that the United States is honor-bound to suffer for the incompetence and greed of Central American governments?

      Because that is what will happen: America will suffer. Whether it is by murderous gangs, mountains of drugs, ethnic strife, the Hive Mind effect, civic decline or steady balkanization, America will only suffer as more floods of people from Central America come through the southern borders with virtually no filtration. What is the upside? The benefit of feeling warm and fuzzy inside? The downside far outweighs the upside. That has not been true for Jews anywhere in the world, going back to at the very least the successes that followed the Ottoman Empire sheltering Jews expelled from Spain by the Alhambra Decree. As Bayezid put it, it is a fool who impoverishes his country by getting rid of the Jews.

      Demographics matter. Singapore has 5 million people. Israel has 8 million people. Norway has 5 million people. I think you could empty out these countries and bring every last inhabitant into the United States and on the net, the benefits would vastly outweigh the costs.

      If you tried the same thing with say, the 6 million people of El Salvador, there is no reason at all to think it would not be disastrous and something America would regret for decades. Again, I ask: what does America get out of this?

      I have absolutely no doubt at all that Trump’s policies will lead to thousands of deaths, because I don’t even remember the last President whose policies didn’t lead to thousands of deaths. Perhaps it was Jimmy Carter. I’m not sure he actually did anything in those 4 years he held the office.

      • The Nybbler says:

        There is an alternative, but I doubt anyone would like it. The United States tells those Central American governments, “Look, buttheads. We’re sick and tired of you treating your people so badly they’re willing to live as undocumented aliens in our country. And we really don’t like it that you’re probably managing to use the remittances they send home to feather your own nest even more. So here’s what’s going to happen: You’re going to institute reforms such that the flow of illegal immigrants is much reduced. Or you’re going to find the entire might of the United States army on your doorstep, we’re going to kill you and every last one of your cronies, and we’re going to install a puppet government no more corrupt than that of the city of Chicago, and directly answerable to us.”.

        Because, after all, if the US is responsible for the suffering caused by those foreign governments, it is certainly up to the US to decide how to alleviate it.

    • hyperboloid says:

      If anybody here is under the impression the United States is innocent of the conditions that exist in central America, let me disabuse you of that impression.

      A look at the history of Guatemala is particularly illustrative.

      At the beginning of the century under the presidency of Manual Estrada Cabrera, Guatemala granted enormous concessions to the the untied fruit company, including massive land grants and control of much of the nations rail system.

      Guatemala had been for decades a deeply racially polarized society, and while a small European elite closely allied to the United States profited from the export economy the indigenous Maya majority lived in near feudal conditions. The political class of the country held most of the population in almost total contempt. One of Estrada Cabrera’s successors, president Jorge Ubico Castañeda (An ardent Fascist sympathizer who openly compared himself to Adolf Hitler) would describe the natives as “como animales“, racially inferior, of subhuman intelligence and incapable of self government.

      From 1946 to 1948 the under the direction of Joseph J. Cutler, one of the doctors responsible for the infamous Tuskegee experiments, the US national institute of health conducted human tests in which 1500 Guatemalans were deliberately infected with syphilis. American officials, it would seem ,held an opinion little different than Ubico’s.

      Starting with the overthrow of Ubico’s government in the revolution of 1944 the country experienced a short lived period of liberalization, “la primavera Guatemalana”. In 1950 Jacobo Árbenz was elected president on a platform of large scale reform. He promised to transform Guatemala into a modern capitalist state; a pledge that ironically earned him the support of the country’s small communist movement, as orthodox Marxist philosophy held that societies always progress through ordered stages of feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and communism.

      After he took office Árbenz instituted decree 900, redistributing land belonging to united fruit company to hundreds of thousands of landless peasants, who had until then lived under a system of debt bondage. In response, calling Árbenz a communist, UFC lobbied the Eisenhower administration to intervene on their behalf. In 1954 as part of a plan called operation success CIA personnel helped to organize a military coup that brought an end to the Guatemalan spring.

      For the next two and a half decades Guatemala suffered under the burden of a slow burning civil war, with American advisors building up a massive security apparatus to suppress liberal dissidents and Marxist rebels.

      In 1978 General Fernando Romeo Lucas García took power after disputed elections. Almost immediately he was faced with wide spread student protests and, in September, a general strike. Over the courses of the next year tensions mounted and, in the wake of the revolution in Nicaragua, it seamed that discontent was spreading from the rural poor to the urban working class. As the tide of unrest rose employers, land owners, and members of the military turned increasingly to the tactics taught by their US military and CIA advisors, resorting to paramilitarism and targeted killings.

      The following communique, posted publicly in the capital in January of 1979 is illustrative:

      “The command of the Secret Anticommunist Army [ESA] by means of this bulletin presents an” ultimatum “to the following trade unionists, professionals, workers and students: (…) it warns everyone that it already has them located, and knows very well where find these nefarious communist leaders, who are already condemned to DEATH and will be executed ruthlessly”

      In 1982 general Efraín Ríos Montt seized power in a military coup declared a state of siege and implemented a new counter insurgency program. Rios Montt’s rule would turn out to be the bloodiest period in Guatemalan history since the Spanish conquest. Between 1982 and 1983 the army launched a policy of total war, annihilating hundreds of indigenous villages in the central highlands and killing an estimated 75,000 men women and children, roughly one percent of Guatemala’s population at the time. An act even the US government now describes as genocide.

      Stretching back across the twentieth century similar stories can be told of most of Guatemala’s neighbors. If you don’t believe me I give you words of general Smedley Butler, two time medal of honor winner and one of the most decorated officers in marine corps history:

      “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints.”

    • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

      Of these elven million….

      Ship ’em back to Lothlórien, I say.

      • hyperboloid says:

        Hey, cut me some slack, I wrote a lot of stuff very quickly, I’m amazed there weren’t more typos.

        But, fair is fair. From now on anybody who catches a mistake in one of my posts receives one hyperbo-point. Collect one hundred and you get a free meal at any Baltimore area Subway.

        • JulieK says:

          I wrote a lot of stuff very quickly

          You certainly did. Did it ever occur to you to omit the crude remarks toward our blog host?
          Scott, if you would ban someone who said something like that about anyone else, feel free to do the same on your own behalf.

          • hyperboloid says:

            The asexual thing was defiantly a low blow. But, if Scott bans me he probably doing me a favor, I waste too much time around here anyway.

        • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

          I never pounce on typos unless they’re amusing. This was amusing.

    • Deiseach says:

      hyperboloid, did you post this somewhere else? Because I could swear I read it before.

      Now. A lot of the death squad rhetoric has nothing to do with immigrants, it is coming from people who are saying that women, or LGBT people, will be in danger of their lives – will actually die – as a result of the Trump presidency. I’ve seen comments about the Vice President, Pence, and how he supports forced conversion camps and torturing gay teens into being straight by electrocuting them.

      Immigrants, I regret to inform you, are not the first on the list when such fear-mongering is being passed around from post to reblog to tweet.

      • hyperboloid says:

        I’ve posted something almost identical before, somebody linked to it up thread. I hate to harp on the same thing over and over again, but his attitude towards immigrants is my number one reason for hating Trump.

        A lot of the death squad rhetoric has nothing to do with immigrants, it is coming from people who are saying that women, or LGBT people, will be in danger of their lives

        I wouldn’t know, but that sounds crazy to me. The real fears that I’ve heard expressed in meat space have all been from Hispanics afraid of deportation. And black folks afraid of draconian criminal justice policies, and threats to their voting rights.

        I’ve seen comments about the Vice President, Pence, and how he supports forced conversion camps and torturing gay teens into being straight by electrocuting them.

        what? I mean….. I don’t even… no wait, what?

        • Iain says:

          I think this is an important point. Yes, some of the concerns out there are overblown. But there are people who are legitimately deeply concerned about their future well-being. Trump is already talking about massive deportations and forcing Muslims to register with the government. He talked a lot during his campaign about spreading stop-and-frisk nationwide. Assuming that the Republican party does not break its campaign promises about Obamacare, a lot of people are about to lose their access to affordable health insurance.

          Every time a Democrat gets elected president, gun sales skyrocket based on the fear that this is definitely going to be the time that They Come and Take Our Guns. I wonder if the people who are pooh-poohing scared people in this thread are equally contemptuous of gun owners.

        • Deiseach says:

          Yes what, which is why snarky comments about asexuality diluting your tribalism and cutting you off from the cosmopolitanism of your culture – and how exactly can you be both tribalist and cosmopolite? – don’t impress me very much when leading into a screed about the admitted sorrows of South America.

          Someone else could equally say your heated invocations of death squads in regard to Hispanic/Latino immigrants are off the wall.

    • Wander says:

      So your argument is that Trump is bad because a number of illegal immigrants are actually really refugees?

    • carvenvisage says:

      In so much as it is concerned with reproduction genocide is an essentially sexual act.

      What the fuck are you talking about? What the fuck is this?

      Here I was taking your post seriously

      I don’t know if I my bullshit detector is either weak or too generous, or if the post thus far was as it appeared to me, but you somehow think comparing things like mass murder to sex is sophisticated and daring, (or just titilating/sexy?!!!!) but either way, it’s very dissapointing. What kind of world is this that someone who seemed so serious and sincere can come out with something like that? Either I’m an idiot who can’t recognise a fraud when I see one, or, like ~”sick falseness”, for lack of a better term, is, something like a fundamental force that can manifest itself through anyone, loose in the world, latching onto decent people and making itself known.

      (I mean, obviously both are true, in a manner of speaking, -my bullshit detector isn’t magic, nor my focus, and poisonous lies and nonsense are popular out of all proportion to even their selfish benefit, -which is low, but I’m still shocked. It was so sudden! Not even a right turn off a cliff- Just the cliff out of nowhere!)

      Ack

       

      edit: I should have paid more attention to the start of the post and profiled harder:

      “Scott’s “You Are Still Crying Wolf” post is the single worst thing he has ever written.

      Maybe, as an asexual, his inability to follow the commandment to be fruitful and multiply from has so alienated…

      An assertion straight into an insult and we’re off.

      My only excuse is that I’m tired

  62. skybrian says:

    For what it’s worth, Vox doesn’t think much of the FBI hate crime statistics:

    http://www.vox.com/identities/2016/11/15/13628200/trump-hate-crimes-racism

  63. Sniffnoy says:

    Did the whole Stephen Bannon part of the post just vanish? I guess none of us get to point out that actually, yeah, Stephen Bannon is pretty racist? 😛

    Anyway, I just wanted to highlight this paragraph as wholly endorsed:

    Stop centering criticism of Donald Trump around this sort of stuff, and switch to literally anything else. Here is an incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue with no idea how to run a country, whose philosophy of governance basically boils down to “I’m going to win and not lose, details to be filled in later”, and all you can do is repeat, again and again, how he seems popular among weird Internet teenagers who post frog memes. In the middle of an emotionally incontinent reality TV show host getting his hand on the nuclear button, your chief complaint is that in the middle of a few dozen denunciations of the KKK, he once delayed denouncing the KKK for an entire 24 hours before going back to denouncing it again. When a guy who says outright that he won’t respect elections unless he wins them does, somehow, win an election, the headlines are how he once said he didn’t like globalists which means he must be anti-Semitic.

    (Related stuff from Paul Christiano here: https://sideways-view.com/2016/11/11/on-trump/ )

    …I was going to go on here a bit about why I would still say that Trump is a racist (and sexist! 😛 ) (some of these points have already been brought up by other people), but, y’know what, I’m going to just not do that, on the basis that it remains a dumb thing to focus on.

    • Anatoly says:

      Trump->Bannon->Milo is a pretty short chain from Trump to the alt-right. I mean, I’m pretty sure you can’t come up with a similar chain that connects Trump and David Duke.

      Also, I’m surprised at the estimates of the alt-right’s size by reddit/4chan/Stormfront readership estimates. Those are *maybe* estimates of the activist base, but the number of people identifying or strongly sympathizing has got to be much larger. Come on, Milo had >300K followers on Twitter before being booted.

      (still like almost all of Scott’s post and strongly endorse its overall message)

      ETA: /r/blacklivesmatter has 4k subscribers, compared to /r/altright’s 5k. If alt-right is a small online movement irrelevant to the election, what does that make BLM?

      • Sandy says:

        That BLM sub requires individual approval of subscribers by the mods. You can subscribe to the alt-right sub just by clicking on the button.

        Also Reddit is largely white; I suspect most people who would want to subscribe to a sub about BLM are black and most who would want to subscribe to a sub about the alt-right are white.

      • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

        Trump->Bannon->Milo is a pretty short chain from Trump to the alt-right. I mean, I’m pretty sure you can’t come up with a similar chain that connects Trump and David Duke.

        Milo is only alt-right in the sense that “alt-right” is right wing people on the internet that use memes. In the “actual white nationalists on the internet” definition, which is the one in which the associations are damning (and the correct one, but people like equivocating between them for some reason. Fun, I presume), what they think of Milo is this

        • Anatoly says:

          I think restricting to actual white nationalists is too motte. You don’t need to literally David Duke to be deplorable. I read these three blogs from the alt-right constellation regularly, to keep up to date:

          Heartiste
          Vox Day
          Jim

          I think all of those qualify as alt-right, and none of them will disavow Milo. I don’t know if you’d count any/all of them as white nationalists, but I think they’d all likely self-describe as “race realists” instead. There’re few white nationalists David Duke-style, but there’s a whole ton more woke race realists that run the gamut from Heartiste to Steve Sailer. There’s a smooth continuum from them to Milo, and it’s all alt-right.

          I think the most useful operational definition of alt-right is “outside the comfort zone of a 2000s conservative”. That’s how the alt-right sees itself, hence their insistence on the “cuckservative” slur. Anyone under that umbrella is likely to be embraced by almost everyone else under that umbrella, under the principle of no-enemies-to-the-right. That a small group of 1488ers would insist on stricter selection is irrelevant. And if you look at the alt-right this way, then

          – Heartiste, Vox Day and Jim are alt-right
          – Most of Breitbart is just right-wing, but Milo is alt-right
          – unlike with white nationalist authors, who are only read by a tiny set of white nationalist activists, the alt-right has a large base of lurkers. Lots and lots of people with college degrees “woke by Trayvon Martin” and such. Definitely not the 50k of Scott’s estimate, though not 10M either.

          • Wander says:

            I’d argue against those sites being alt-right. I think the easiest definition of alt-right is “the sort of ideology that /pol/ developed”, and none of those sources are ever mentioned there. Even Milo is only begrudgingly accepted at the edge of the umbrella.

        • asmallpostaboutgrouprepresentations says:

          Milo has ‘race realist’ (i.e. racist) views, and is pretty open about it. His connection to Breitbart is what distinguishes it from (say) UK tabloids, and makes Bannon’s closeness to Trump unprecedented despite the history of (say) Rupert Murdoch’s political ties. I could buy that Scott’s piece still stands despite omitting the Curiel and birther incidents/sagas, but the Bannon connection seems extremely significant to me.

          • Aapje says:

            If you are referring to genetic differences between ethnic groups, then that is scientific consensus. So if that is racist, then nature is racist.

          • asmallpostaboutgrouprepresentations says:

            He’s not talking about sickle cell disorder, if that’s what you’re referring to.

          • Aapje says:

            He was actually talking about ethnically targeted medicine (google “science-and-racism-book milo” for the article, I am not allowed to add the link).

            He also argued that Western PCness doesn’t allow for the possibility that other traits are different between ethnic groups due to genetics.

            If it is racist to disallow research into this possibility, because the outcome might give other explanations for disparate outcomes than the causes that we want to be true, then any non-dogmatic, rational, scientific person is racist.

          • asmallpostaboutgrouprepresentations says:

            I have no idea what you’re talking about. I haven’t read anything by Milo on genetic differences influencing healthiness. The joke was that he seemed to focus on something else. And for future reference, google results are dependent on your search history, and I’m pleased to say that performing your suggested search turned up nothing relevant.

          • Aapje says:

            I spend 10 minutes to try to get the comment with the link to post, so don’t blame me.

            Google this: “Political Correctness Makes Race and Genetics Taboo in the West, Which is Why China is Winning”

            The article is on the website that shall not be named where Milo normally writes.

          • Aapje says:

            I guess you don’t care about what Milo actually believes, you just want to slander him without backing up your statements.

    • Tekhno says:

      Milo was the guy watering the alt-right down into values conservatism. He was making it more popular by making it weaker, which pissed off the white nationalists who started using the term alt-right to begin with as a big tent for white nationalism. So if anything Milo was a good thing, and was only broadening the appeal by making it less racist.

      MILO: “Oh the Nazi frogs are just being ironic and playing with free speech! This movement is really about cultural libertarianism!”

      HARDCORE: “WE’RE NOT F****CKING JOKING YOU SUBVERSIVE F*GG*T J*W!”

      • dndnrsn says:

        Values conservatism? I’d argue that he’s just ripping off Pim Fortuyn.

      • Tekhno says:

        By “values conservatism” I just mean he’s not a white nationalist. Unless values conservatism means something more specific.

        • dndnrsn says:

          I had thought “values conservatism” meant prayer in schools, anti-gay, anti-abortion, etc. At least in a US context.

          Yiannopoulos seems to basically be cribbing from Fortuyn’s “liberal social values are Western values so we need to protect the West!” right down to claiming that preferring darker guys as sexual partners proves he’s not a racist. Although I don’t know if Fortuyn was an anti-feminist.

      • Wander says:

        I strongly endorse this idea. It’s almost exactly what I witnessed.

  64. StellaAthena says:

    You didn’t address claims that he is a fascist, for example as discussed in this Slate article. There seems to be pretty good reason to believe he has fascist tendencies (I’m not going to rehash it, read the Vox article). Do you (Scott) / y’all agree or disagree? You also didn’t address sexism at all

    On the fence about all this (am a member of multiple groups he will supposedly target). My attitude has always been “ask me in 6 months and I’ll tell you how I feel” especially because Trump seems super duper flakey. He’s already changed his position on Obamacare to one I agree with, for example (keep things like pre-existing condition rules and extended time on parent’a insurance but rehaul the actual gov’t insurance plan).

    EDIT: As pointed out, this article doesn’t make a particularly good case for Trump being fascist (and in fact concludes he’s probably not). I’m personally on the fence, but he has had some worrying behaviors such as:

    He’s strongly encouraged a massive strengthening of the police to control the citizenry such as stop and frisk and deportation squads. He has threatened to jail political opponents (assuming it’s not a stunt. There’s little to no evidence of any wrongdoing on Clinton’s part in any of the several things the right hates her for). He has several times threatened to curtail the free press, and eventually banned the NYT from covering him because he didn’t like the coverage. His popular appeal is largely predicated on blaming minority groups and elevating himself as the One Leader (“Only I can fix it”)

    • gbdub says:

      Did he really “change his position” on Medicare? The Republican position has always been “repeal and replace” which I read as “we’re going to call it a full repeal but we’ll find a way to keep the politically popular parts”.

      As for fascism – I don’t know. Fascist has been abused as an all purpose insult for so long I’m not sure it means anything. A nationalist authoritarian? Maybe, the guys a big business type used to getting his way without “checks and balances”. Then again, Obama has been pushing the limits of executive power and got praised for it. Good for the goose, good for the gander.

      • StellaAthena says:

        Obamacare, not Medicare. Throughout the campaign he went back and forth between “repeal and replace” and “repeal and free market” as far as I remember. Now he’s on “edit and fix.” It’s possible that this is a pragmatic move, but he doesn’t have anyone to concede ground to yet, that seems like something he would do after meeting with Congressmen

      • Moon says:

        Good for the goose, good for the gander? In our tribalized political system, perhaps you are right there. No one cares what happens to the country. Nothing matters except getting revenge on the other tribe’s political party.

        If Trump turns us into a fascist country within a year, for the GOP, that is that all to the good then, since Republicans can blame Dems for expanding the limit of executive power, at a time when Congress blocked the POTUS in almost everything he tried to do– even preventing a hearing on his SCOTUS nominee.

        As long as one attains the ultimate goal of destroying the opposite political party, is destruction of our entire country and our democracy just “collateral damage” that doesn’t matter at all?

        That seems to be the spirit of the times. Poliitical conflict to the death. No cooperation or compromise allowed.

        • gbdub says:

          It should be clear that I think it bad for both goose and gander. But at this point it would be hard for Democrats to take a principled stand against executive overreach given Obama. It’s clear at this point that both sides just want to do what they want, however they can get away with it, rather than having a principled dedication to constitutional checks and balances.

    • suntzuanime says:

      AFAICT the Vox article says “his campaign is populist, like the fascists were, but his actual political program is radically different”. This is a “Hitler was vegetarian” article, just trying to get people to see “Trump” and “fascism” in the same sentence and mentally link them together.

      Please try not to make me read Vox in vain.

      • StellaAthena says:

        Sorry, the linked article is actually from Slate 😛

        He’s strongly encouraged a massive strengthening of the police to control the citizenry such as stop and frisk and deportation squads. He has threatened to jail political opponents (assuming it’s not a stunt. There’s little to no evidence of any wrongdoing on Clinton’s part in any of the several things the right hates her for). He has several times threatened to curtail the free press, and eventually banned the NYT from covering him because he didn’t like the coverage. His popular appeal is largely predicated on blaming minority groups and elevating himself as the One Leader (“Only I can fix it”)

        • suntzuanime says:

          Did you read the article? I find it more than a little frustrating to read an article you posted in good faith, respond to it, and find you pulling this sort of bait and switch.

          • StellaAthena says:

            In the original post, I linked to a Slate article. I had labeled it as a Vox article by mistake. I did not change the link, so if you clicked the link to read the article then you read a Slate article.

            The article admittedly doesn’t make a strong case for him being a fascist. I didn’t reread the article before posting it but did after posting it. I am less impressed than I remember being, but specifically decided to not change it. I’m sorry for making you read a Slate article in vain.

          • Moon says:

            What a horrible thing to do– make someone read a Slate or Vox article in vain. The person might have to take a whole 10 minute break from reading Breitbart and listening to Alex Jones. They might read something true. Horror of horrors.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            Tbh, I find using Vox and Slate interchangably kind of disrespectful to Vox. I don’t agree with all of their politics, and certainly don’t think the non-whiteness of cast & crew is a good predictor of a series’ or movie’s quality, but they’re leaps ahead of Slate in non-raggishness.

          • Sandy says:

            I think Slate puts out quality stuff every now and then. I liked Emily Yoffe’s work, for instance.

            I dislike Vox on a very fundamental level, though.

          • Deiseach says:

            What a horrible thing to do– make someone read a Slate or Vox article in vain.

            Could have been worse. Could have linked to an article in Salon 🙂

    • Sniffnoy says:

      It’s true that Scott didn’t address “fascism” (a pretty meaningless term IMO, but we can say instead “authoritarian” or “autocratic”, which I’ll agree he is)… but that explictly wasn’t the point of Scott’s post. Read the second-to-last paragraph. The point isn’t “Donald Trump isn’t terrible”, it was “stop focusing on his (purported?) racism”. And that, I think is something absolutely worth saying, whether Trump is racist or not.

      As a number of people have already said, we need to focus on what makes Trump exceptionally bad, and that is certainly not it.

      (Leaving out sexism does seem like a weakness of the post, since that naturally goes in a bucket with racism; it should be “stop focusing on his racism and sexism”.)

      • StellaAthena says:

        I understood that point, but Scott doesn’t stick to racism as the only -ism he discusses and so I was curious about his thoughts on the ones that didn’t make it into the piece, if he had any.

        I guess it depends highly on what you want to take to be “similar to racism and homophobia.” You could interpret that is “bigoted” as you have seemed to, but I took it more generally to refer to the “racist mysogenistic homophobic fascist” mantra that I’ve seen a lot of. Drawing sharp boundaries might be an excersize in futility, and ultimately might come down to a “true or false” division rather than one based on the category of labels

        • Sniffnoy says:

          Yes, exactly; I’m considering various forms of bigotry as being “like racism”. It’s not clear to me why you would group “fascist” in there except for other people saying it. His authoritarian / autocratic (or “fascist”, as some would have it) tendencies are, IMO, a much bigger deal than which groups of people he dislikes / stereotypes / slots into roles / etc, and probably the main thing we should actually be focusing on. Including that in there would basically make me invert my opinion of the whole thing. 🙂 (Unless it could be shown that this was not in fact an accurate characterization, but it certainly seems like it to me.)

          • StellaAthena says:

            The link is the narrative. This felt to me to be more about the narrative than about bigotry. “The narrative is bullshit and we should talk about something else” is fine if it’s true, but excluding sexism and autocratic (sure let’s ditch the word fascist) feels cherrypicking-y. It makes for a cleaner article than “some of the narrative is right and some of the narrative is wrong but let’s focus on the right parts” but I’m not sure it’s a good idea. It invites the rebuttal that some of the narrative is right, which I feel leads to talking past each other about “what is the point of the article” rather than interesting discussion about how it’s really not okay to brag about sexual assault or ban the NYT

          • Sniffnoy says:

            But “the narrative” is broader than that anyway. Do you not think it includes “incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue with no idea how to run a country”? Scott is already talking about which parts of the narrative we should talk about, rather than declaring the whole thing bullshit.

          • StellaAthena says:

            This isn’t going to go anywhere because we have different ideas of “reasonably similar.” Let’s leave it at that.

    • sflicht says:

      IDK if it was brought up on SSC.com, but over in the subreddit this piece by Nick Land on fascism made the rounds last month. Eminently relevant to this particular subthread, and highly recommended.

    • Tekhno says:

      @You Are Still Crying Wolf

      I would agree that probably nobody cares that much about British or German immigrants, suggesting that some racial element is involved.

      Or cultural element? The reason I don’t want a large number of third worlders from Africa and the Middle East suddenly moving into my town isn’t because they’re “brown”. I have a fairly positive opinion of Indian immigrants, but I imagine that might be ignorance, or the distance making for better filtration.

      So people can even be extreme bigots without being racist at all. It’s interesting that “culturalist” never gets thrown about as a label like “racist”.

      Clinton supporters are more atomized and individualist, Trump supporters stronger believers in culture and community.

      This should be true*, but there are good reasons for people with an individualist personal disposition to support immigration controls, since higher concentrations of people are assumed to be associated with bigger government and more internal controls (compare cities to rural areas). If you’re individualistic and rich you can just live in a gated community, but if you are individualist and poor you need government to erect external barriers instead of private internal ones.

      There are “Let’s be cosmopolitan and mingle with many new exciting people” individualists, and then there are “Everyone should fuck off” type individualists. In neither case is an appeal to a large fixed collective being made.

      *I’d love to see some way of measuring this. It seems intuitive when you consider US conservatives as a family based community, but they also like self-reliance and the romantic individualism of the cowboy. Maybe there’s a distinction to make between independent families and independent individuals.

      • Sandy says:

        I think American conservatives are individualistic in the sense that they dislike being forced into social relationships against their will (this might be poorly phrased, but I can’t think of how else to put it). They believe that they have inalienable rights that cannot or should not be altered based on how those rights may affect others, like freedom of speech, gun ownership and property rights. Whereas American progressives are more likely to think of it as “No man is an island, you are part of a society, and to keep peace within the society you must accept limits or modifications to those rights”, and therefore more likely to support things like gun restrictions, discouragement of speech that “punches down” and redistribution.

        This gets complicated when you bring up abortion and gay rights, but those have to deal with the complicating factor of religion.

        Conservatives have stronger family/church community relationships, but those are voluntary relationships. Progressives are communitarian in the political sense, but individualistic in the social sense i.e. most of them live in cities and their culture is loose and shifting.

    • Reasoner says:

      His popular appeal is largely predicated on blaming minority groups

      This is one of those claims that gets tossed around without much evidence. Search on Youtube for raw Trump rally footage and tell me what fraction of his time he spends blaming minority groups. Then head over to /r/The_Donald on reddit and search for terms like “legal immigrant”, “black supporter”, “latina supporter”, etc.

      • shakeddown says:

        Are you arguing he’s okay with legal immigrants? Because his campaign site makes it clear he at least wants to sharply reduce legal immigration.

        • Reasoner says:

          I was arguing against the claim I quoted: “His popular appeal is largely predicated on blaming minority groups”. I think it’s a huge stretch to say that wanting to reduce legal immigration proves his appeal is based on blaming minority groups.

        • The Nybbler says:

          I’m looking at the immigration section of the campaign site and I don’t see anything saying that. I seem to recall that during the second or third debate he talked about increasing legal immigration from Mexico, but he’s nothing if not inconsistent over most things.

          The page makes it pretty clear he wants to curtail immigration from Iraq and Afghanistan and presumably other Islamic countries. But in terms of total legal immigration, all he says is “Reform legal immigration to serve the best interests of America and its workers, keeping immigration levels within historic norms.” Given that historic norms have varied considerably, that’s very ambiguous.

          If “minority groups” means only “ethnic minorities” I’d have to disagree that Trump is blaming them. If it includes “illegal immigrants”, it is certainly true that Trump is blaming them. Trump is also playing on fear of Islamic immigration, but isn’t spending a lot of time blaming Islamic immigrants for current problems in the US.

          • shakeddown says:

            Looking again, it looks like he’s remodeled his site and I can’t find it anymore – when I checked a couple of months ago, he had a section about drastically cutting down on H1-B visas to reduce legal immigration.

  65. Moon says:

    It is actually possible that there is one and only one reason why Trump won the election, and that all the rest of my, and others’, analysis about it is bs. I do know that a certain group of voters responded to him positively. But it still might have been nowhere near enough to elect him, without this particular factor.

    Here’s how hackers might mess with electronic voting on Election Day
    http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/heres-how-hackers-could-mess-with-electronic-voting/

    Some states — including swing states — have flawed voting systems
    http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/11/1/13486386/election-rigged-paper-trail-audit

    Could the 2016 Election Be Stolen with Help from Electronic Voting Machines?
    http://www.democracynow.org/2016/2/23/could_the_2016_election_be_stolen

    Note in this last article below here, that in the list of presidential elections where winner lost popular vote, there were 2 of these in the past 16 years, both won by Republicans. Prior to the last 16 years, the next most recent one was in 1888. It’s almost as if, once electronic voting machines came into heavy use, the machines in Swing states were programmed to add just enough votes to make the favored Republican candidate win the electoral college. In this most recent election, e.g., it could be done by assigning 1 out of every 50 or 100 votes for Hillary, to Trump instead.

    This couldn’t be done in Obama’s case, because he won by so many votes, that too many votes would have to have been changed, and it would have been obvious that fraud was occurring. To get this to work, the nonfavored candidate can’t have a landslide vote. Hillary might have had a landslide if it hadn’t been for Comey’s and Assange’s help in casting her in a negative light.

    List of United States presidential elections where winner lost popular vote
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_elections_where_winner_lost_popular_vote

    If this is the way it works, then all of our presidents from here on out will be whoever was the GOP nominee, no matter how crazy or incompetent or demented that person may be– unless the Democrat can win in a landslide.

    • ThirteenthLetter says:

      So all that stuff from two weeks ago about how if someone says the election was rigged, or refuses to accept the results, they’re committing treason — that’s, uh. Inoperative, now, huh?

    • sohois says:

      But why wouldn’t Democrat hackers just operate in a different direction and cancel it out? Do Republicans have some inherent advantage amongst good hackers? You would presume that the massive amount of Dem support in California would give them the advantage there.

      And what about foreign actors? What if Russia hacked for Trump whilst China hacked for Clinton?

      • Moon says:

        Hacking by an outsider is not the main way this is a problem. That could likely be prevented. The main way this is a problem is in the programming of the voting machine to start out with, e.g. to take every 50th vote for Hillary and assign it to Trump– and the same with the governor’s race etc. for GOP vs. Dem.

        The politicians who have control of the voting machines, have control of the software that is put into them. Once a state has a Republican governor and Republicans in high offices where they could control the voting machines, it’s all over. So Red states with voting machines get redder and redder. A lot of these are the Swing states that control the presidential election.

        • Fossegrimen says:

          You appear to have an unconventional view of how software is made and “controlled”

          • Moon says:

            See the later thread on this subject of electronic voting machines below. The hacker organization Anonymous seems to have the same unconventional view of how software is made and controlled, as I do. Perhaps you should contact them and educate them.

          • Vorkon says:

            LOL, the “hacker organization” Anonymous. There’s an expert opinion for you! If our voting booths were, for some reason, connected to the Internet, and we had a rash of DDOS attacks on election day, maybe you’d have a leg to stand on here, but please, quit while you’re ahead.

        • Aapje says:

          @Moon

          The voting machines are generally controlled by a company who has a contract with the government. The contract is public. So there is no direct control by the governor over the machines; nor a way to achieve that through the normal procedure.

          If I wanted to fix an election through voting machines, I would just cut out the middlemen and blackmail/bribe a programmer on the team to build in a hack. Or I would directly contact the CEO of the voting machine company, if he is a strong advocate for my candidate. Both are way more likely to work than going through the official channels.

          • Moon says:

            In the past, most voting machines were owned by companies who contributed to the Republican party, and that’s why the Republican state government officials gave them the contracts. I don’t know if that is still true. But it would obviously be unnecessary for the companies to contribute money to the GOP any more. They could simply contribute votes to the GOP.

        • Deiseach says:

          The politicians who have control of the voting machines, have control of the software that is put into them.

          And Blue states with voting machines get bluer and bluer under a Democratic governor? Because unless we’re operating under “All the bad people are over there and all the good people are over here“, corruption is as likely to happen to anyone. Maybe the Dems are hacking voting machines in urban areas and that explains why cities suddenly became blue? It’s as legitimate a reason why “27 out of the nation’s 30 most populous cities voted Democrat” in 2012 as “Evil Republicans are hacking the voting machines”.

          • Moon says:

            Republicans control most of the Swing states, which control the electoral college votes. As we have seen twice in the past 16 years, it is not necessary to win the popular vote.

            Oh, and I forgot that we always have to operate under false equivalence e.g. to assume that MSNBC lies as much as Fox News. That’s not the truth, but that is the fantasy that people are comfortable with.

          • Moon says:

            Oops, what did I say there? I must correct myself. We only operate under false equivalence if someone criticizes Republicans, of course. The answer has to be “Both sides do it equally.”

            In all other situations, 90% of commenters here assume that conservatives are beacons of truth, justice, and light, whereas liberals are stupid, evil, irrational, weak, silly etc.

          • JulieK says:

            @Moon:
            If you have such a poor opinion of the commenters here, why do you bother coming?

          • Aapje says:

            In all other situations, 90% of commenters here assume that conservatives are beacons of truth, justice, and light, whereas liberals are stupid, evil, irrational, weak, silly etc.

            I think that everyone is stupid, evil, irrational, weak, silly actually…

            Except….us, the wise ingroup at SSC.

          • Moon says:

            JulieK, because I do like some of the people here. And I also don’t want the other 2 progressives to be all alone here all the time.

          • keranih says:

            Moon, I am pleased to see that you think there are more than one other left-leaning person here besides yourself.

            I think you are missing a great many others, and encourage you to read more fully the comments posted so that you can better see the many fellow travelers you actually have.

          • Deiseach says:

            Republicans control most of the Swing states, which control the electoral college votes.

            Ah yes, Moon, I was forgetting the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. So careless of me, now I’ll never get my “Congratulations, you iz a bigot!” badge that I’ve been working so hard towards!

          • Spookykou says:

            Actually I really appreciate some of Moon’s comments, in particular moon seems to have a bit more faith in humanity. I greatly prefer “Right wing news outlets convince people that [some bad thing isn’t true]” to some other people here saying “All trump supports must be horrible monsters horrible monsters who eat freedom and hate puppies”.

            I consider myself ‘liberal’ and, I have almost exclusively had conversations with those who I would consider to the right of me, and have found them fair, honest, and genuinely interested in discussion. Maybe I am not a real liberal though, or something. I swear I would have voted for Hillary if I didn’t live in Texas!!

          • Aapje says:

            My issue with Moon is not her opinions, but rather the snarkiness and persecution complex.

          • Spookykou says:

            Aapje, I think moon dishes out some snark for SSC commenters, to be sure. Still I just think there is a really huge and important distinction between,

            People who disagree with me might be uninformed/misinformed(and maybe this does not apply to SSC commenters)

            and

            People who disagree with me have the same information I have, and interpret that information the same way I do, so they must be evil if they disagree with me.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            People who disagree with me might be uninformed/misinformed(and maybe this does not apply to SSC commenters)

            This is not the distinction Moon appears to be making. She’s claimed on multiple occasions that SSC is a right-wing site. She’s also given no indication that people who disagree with her might be {un|mis}informed; rather, she claims that they necessarily are so.

    • Wander says:

      Aren’t a significant portion of the voting machines owned by a Soros-backed company? You know, the guy who is currently attending a meeting of the literal liberal elite to discuss how to stop Trump’s presidency?

      • Moon says:

        No, that is just one more unfounded Right Wing conspiracy theory.

        http://www.snopes.com/george-soros-controls-smartmatic-voting-machines-in-16-states/

        • Wander says:

          With the advent of electronic voting systems — and public unease with casting ballots that are not tangible physical objects — every election cycle brings rumors that some individual or group with a heavy investment in the outcome of the election owns or controls the machines that record and count votes — and those parties will use their powers to “rig” the voting systems they control to ensure the election outcome conforms to their preferred results.

          This applies to you as well.

  66. Moon says:

    As for crying wolf, the actual policies that Pence would carry out, or the ones Romney would have carried out, could have been pretty awful also, for the environment, women’s rights, voting rights, minorities screwed over by for-profit prisons etc. Just because we have the most incompetent president of all time right now, does not mean that it was unjustifiable that people cried or protested in the past, when someone truly awful, but not totally incompetent in every way, was running for pres. I wish Trump weren’t president. But the fact that he is, in no way makes up for things like GW Bush’s disastrous Iraq War based on lies about WMDs.

  67. birdboy2000 says:

    Thanks for the crying wolf post. I spend a lot of time on 4chan and it makes /pol/ seem a lot bigger and more influential than it is.

    Still profoundly horrified at the prospect of 4 or 8 years (or more) of Trump, but I’m glad we didn’t elect an actual nazi. It’s seriously a weight off my shoulders.

    • Moon says:

      There are many horrific possibilities for types of people who could be president. Actual nazi is not the only personality type that could be a total disaster in that office.

    • hyperboloid says:

      No, we just elected an authoritarian con man, who is, at least for now, beloved by actual Nazis. which is better….. I guess.

      Ugh, I desperately need a scotch.

    • John Schilling says:

      but I’m glad we didn’t elect an actual nazi

      Did you miss “incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue with no idea how to run a country”, et seq?

      • suntzuanime says:

        Isn’t that better than a Nazi? By a significant margin? I mean I guess it depends what your goals are.

        • Moon says:

          “incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue with no idea how to run a country” is pretty bad.

          Only time will tell how bad it will be, since Trump is rather unpredictable. The people he surrounds himself with, will determine how bad it is, since Trump is too incompetent to run the country, so others will have to do it for him, in any case. But he will likely insist on control, on the few issues that make a difference to him.

          Let’s all pray that we do not end up in nuclear WWIII, AKA the War of the Small Hands.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            “Incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue with no idea how to run a country” is pretty bad, but “actual Nazi” is worse.

            When you’re expecting things to be really awful, finding out that they’re actually only somewhat awful can be a great relief.

        • hyperboloid says:

          I’ve never thought Trump was a Nazi, and don’t think most of the people who say that do either. It’s like saying “Obama is a Communist”, It’s mostly a term of abuse. For trump to be “literally Hitler” he’d have to be planing on invading Mexico, and exterminating it’s population to create lebensraum for American settlers. Even his most extreme critics don’t believe he going to do that.

          But when people tell me that Trump is no Fascist, I’m not really reassured. His ideology is less the problem then his personality.

          The thing that bothers me most about Trump is the king Joffrey factor; we’ve had vicious presidents, and we’ve had idiot presidents , but I don’t think we’ve ever had a vicious idiot president.

          Nixon and Kissinger were cold blooded bastards who had very little respect for democracy, but they were smart enough to understand the limits of their power. Trump, on the other hand, might do something really insane, like declaring that LAPD special order 40 constitutes insurrection against the federal government, and ordering the military to begin mass deportations. If he does that east LA will look like the Warsaw ghetto.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          Having identified the problem, there are better solutions that would otherwise be off the table.

          For example, if Trump were an actual Nazi, you would want everyone competent to stay as far away from his administration as possible. We would shame everyone who gets involved.

          However, if he’s just someone who sees the world a little sideways, then it’s essential that we pack his administration with smart and competent people. Because we don’t want things going down the tubes, such as with nuclear powered enemies, skittish allies, or the domestic economy.

        • carvenvisage says:

          suntzuanime you are so fucking funny. You seem to know that, but still.

      • Wander says:

        Despite the popular media depiction as Nazis as bumbling fools, the thing about them is that they were good at what they did. Generally, if someone holds an ideology you don’t like as well as institutional power, you can be reassured that they’re not going to implement their ideas as cleanly as they could. Someone who’s powerful, has a dangerous ideology, and is competent? That’s where things start to go bad.

        • baconbacon says:

          The Nazis killed a lot of people that they hated, but their goal was also to have their ideology thrive for a “thousand years”. Long story short they completely failed at one of their major goals, and made everything about them from their name (not their choice of name, but still) to their symbols taboo in the West. To steal from Norm Mcdonald, you don’t lose a battle to cancer since when you die it also dies, which is a tie.

          • Aapje says:

            If I may steelman the comment by Wander:

            The Nazi’s were very good at execution and bad at choosing goals. Basically, they overreached beyond what could ever be achieved by their coalition.

          • Wander says:

            They had to do a lot of very effective work before they could get to the part where they bring the world down upon them and get destroyed. It’s not like they were defeated in a battle of ideology, it was mostly the bombs that did it.

          • baconbacon says:

            To respond to that steel man a google search for victims of the holocaust by country gives a link here that puts German Jews at ~140,000 while victims in Poland, the Soviet Union, Hungary and Lithuania were 3 million , 1 million, 500,000 and 270,000 having significantly more victims than Germany and the rest of the countries on the list combine for far more as well. It is difficult to separate the scale of their atrocity from the military expansionism that was conducted in parallel. Getting rid of 150,000 Jews in Germany would have made them a run of the mill genocidal administration rather than a contender for the worst ever.

          • Aapje says:

            @Wander

            Their limited access to resources was also a major reason for their loss. The US simply outproduced the Axis coalition.

        • baconbacon says:

          They had to do a lot of very effective work before they could get to the part where they bring the world down upon them and get destroyed. It’s not like they were defeated in a battle of ideology, it was mostly the bombs that did it.

          Their primary stated goal was to have their ideology reign over all of Europe and the elimination of Jewish people was a portion of that they could not have killed nearly the number that the did without setting themselves up to be wiped out. Had they stayed within the borders of Germany they might have reigned for decades but they wouldn’t have been exceptional in the historical record, I believe Saddam had more Kurds killed in total number in the 80s than German Jews were killed in the 40s.

          • Wander says:

            I suppose then the secret to a successful ideology is to have a lower bar for success! Anyway, I still stand by my original point that, given my choice of political candidates, I’d take incompetent>Nazi any day (because I don’t think that real Nazis tend to be incompetent).

          • baconbacon says:

            To try to express my point better- its hard to even define competent/incompetent in this type of situation. When you fail at a situation that is clearly achievable because others have done something similar dozens of times over that clearly means you are “incompetent” at that task, but in a situation where no one has actually accomplished (or even tried in some cases) where does that leave us with the labeling.

    • birdboy2000 says:

      I did say “still profoundly horrified” didn’t I?

    • Murphy says:

      Don’t forget anti-vaxer. Who now has power over the CDC

      https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/449525268529815552?lang=en-gb

  68. Moon says:

    I think Trump is racist in some senses, but I also think that is the least of the problems with him. He is racist in the sense that he is fine with acting racist or speaking in a racist way to get what he wants. He is racist in the sense that he will use racism when it helps in his self-promotion. But he actually seems to not have any beliefs, or any interest in what the truth might be, in any matter.

    He’s simply a self-promotion machine. He’s an actor like Reagan– except totally lacking in any competencies other than acting, and perhaps real estate negotiation.

    Trump acts the part of the politically incorrect tough macho billionaire, riding in on his white house to save the common folk. And people who respond positively to that sort of act– and find it believable– find him charismatic. People who are turned off by that sort of thing are disgusted. Also people who are turned off by nearly total incompetence, and total disregard for the truth, are disgusted too.

    All we can predict about a self-promotion machine as president, is that he is going to try to use the presidency for self-aggrandizement. But the presidency is not the same as running for office. It’s not just bs’ing at rallies to say what people respond emotionally to, in order to get their admiration and their votes.

    Trying to use the presidency solely for the purpose of bringing more wealth and glory for his incompetent self, is going to be really weird. And since he can’t do anything much except bs, it’s all going to depend on the people he surrounds himself with. He’s incapable of handling the job of president. So those who end up handling it for him are going to determine how it will come out.

    • John Schilling says:

      In the sense that he is fine with acting racist or speaking in a racist way to get what he wants

      But that’s not what he has been doing, unless you stretch the definitions almost to the breaking point. As Scott notes, he mostly does the exact opposite, and the few exceptions are pretty weak stuff.

      What Trump has been doing, is conspicuously not defending himself against charges of racism. That stands out, and to some people it stands out in a bad way. Standard Operating Procedure is, the Democratic Party accuses essentially every Republican candidate of racism. Every Republican candidate defends themselves against that charge, distracting them from their actual campaign but the alternative is unthinkable. The defense is necessarily mediocre, because it is nearly impossible to prove a negative. So the baseline is, Republicans are all somewhat racist, offer only mediocre defenses against charges of racism, and the latter is proof of the former.

      Trump, offering no defense at all, must obviously be much more racist than the average Republican with their mediocre defense. Or, possibly, he’s just the first one willing to stake his political career on the Keepers of that particular Ideological Superweapon having allowed their powder to get a bit damp.

      He won’t be the last. And some of those who follow in his path will be actual racists. You all got a plan B?

      • suntzuanime says:

        Easier for Trump to stake his political career than most, since he didn’t have one. Although he did risk damage to the valuable Trump brand.

        • Matt M says:

          Risk?

          It will be interesting to see, but I think even in victory, he did actually do significant damage to the Trump brand. There are probably far more resentful rich liberal celebrities who will refuse to stay in a Trump branded hotel than there are people rich enough to afford one who will deliberately go there because they like Trump or just think it’s cool that they’re staying in a hotel built by the President.

          I think the other Scott A addressed this earlier, but the that Trump is only in this to help promote his business is insane – from any rational perspective this probably hurts him financially.

          • Wrong Species says:

            If Trump didn’t win, there was speculation about him capitalizing on his fame through a political television show or something to that effect. If he did that, and didn’t lose enough people repelled by his brand than he could could have made some money. I highly doubt that was his intention though.

          • dndnrsn says:

            I recall some speculation being specifically that his plan was to lose in such a way that it could be blamed on a rigged system, then start up a right-wing news network as a rival to Fox.

          • Matt M says:

            Destroying the value of the core business your family has been in for several decades all to help you launch a new business in a ridiculously competitive arena with negative growth that is not at all adjacent to your old one in which you have no brand value or expertise seems like a VERY poor business strategy.

            But I guess this plays into the “lol he’s a terrible businessman anyway” argument the left kept throwing out there too…

      • Acedia says:

        Or, possibly, he’s just the first one willing to stake his political career on the Keepers of that particular Ideological Superweapon having allowed their powder to get a bit damp.

        Yes. I think the alt right as a whole might be glibly summarized as people who’ve figured out that the most rhetorically effective reply to “You’re a racist!” isn’t “No I’m not!”, it’s “So?” Most accusers have no idea how to respond to it and just end up repeating themselves, like someone who pulled out a cross against a vampire and discovered it didn’t work.

        • Matt M says:

          Right. And I think there’s a huge disconnect between the left, who sees the response of “So?” as people essentially admitting that they agree with the accusation and totally are racist – and the people (a group that includes, but is not limited to, Trump and the alt-right) who actually employ this tactic and do NOT see it as an admission of racism, but rather as simply the most effective way to move on and discuss something more important.

          I think an overwhelming amount of the logic of “Trump is openly racist” rests on the unstated premise of “well we called him a racist and he DIDN’T spend 40 hours systematically denying it so he must be admitting it’s true!”

        • Wander says:

          I strongly agree that this is the case. It’s a tactic that I’ve had to use myself in the Guardian comments, where I make a comment about immigration policy or whatever and get called a racist. The best response tends to be something like “okay, sure, lets go with that, but am I wrong?”

      • Moon says:

        Since more minorities than white people are in the lower socioeconomic class, and since the GOP is even more the party of the .01% than Dems, then GOP candidates’s policies affecting minorities badly. But to me that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re racist. It just means they’re the party of the .01%, They just don’t see the 99.99% at all.

        Although I do see Trump as somewhat racist– although not unusually so for a Fox News watcher of his generation– like Scott, I am less concerned about that quality in and of itself, than about Trump’s overall incompetence.

        • Mark V Anderson says:

          IT sure is amazing how Trump captured the White house with only the votes of the 0.01%. Those votes are more weighted than I thought.

      • In the sense that he is fine with acting racist or speaking in a racist way to get what he wants

        But that’s not what he has been doing, unless you stretch the definitions almost to the breaking point. As Scott notes, he mostly does the exact opposite, and the few exceptions are pretty weak stuff.

        i think you are focussing on the wrong point there — it’s not that T. is using insincere racism to get his way , it is that he is using insincere racism (and many other things) to get his way. He is a winning machine with no core beleifs.

      • Deiseach says:

        What Trump has been doing, is conspicuously not defending himself against charges of racism.

        Possibly. But how do you do that? If you do spend time defending yourself against such charges, the opposition campaign goes “Whoo-hoo! We’ve got the magic button! Keep them tied up in charges of racism and they’ll be so busy responding to that, they can’t get their own message out!”

        Because if Smith and Jones are running in a political race, what both their campaigns will be trying their utmost to do is get the opposing candidate into a position where the next day’s headlines in the newspapers are “Smith (or Jones) denies charges of baby-eating”.

        Because they know damn well that what the public will take away from that is not “I knew there was nothing to it” but “OMG! I had no idea Jones (or Smith) was a baby-eater!”

        I’m wondering if that’s what was behind Trump and that Duke incident; that his campaign team had coached him (not specifically about racism, but about everything) “If they try to get you to denounce or decry or refuse or revoke or whatever anything to do with any group or putative support, say nothing. Don’t say yes, don’t say no, put them off”. Because even had he said “I don’t want Duke’s endorsement”, the next day headlines would not have been “Okay, Trump is not a racist”, they would have been “Trump rejects KKK support” – and what the public would have taken away from it, as they did take away, was “OMG, I never knew Trump was friendly with the KKK!”

    • Tyrant Overlord Killidia says:

      Yes, Trump’s main problem is that he’s just dumb. His stupidity comes across as racism.

      Lashing out at a Mexican judge had Paul Ryan castigate Trump by Ryan basically saying “You can’t do that Trump, that’s literally the definition of racism”.

      The birther thing, again, is Trump being an idiot. Along with the birther conspiracy theory, he also accused Cruz’s dad of being involved with the assassination of JFK. I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump’s major news source is the National Enquirer. At the least, Trump doesn’t have the cognitive wherewithal to discern good information from bad information.

      There was that one time about 30 – 40 years ago that Trump was sued (?) for not letting black people live in his buildings. Housing discrimination was probably, again, Trump’s incompetence instead of malice in this instance though who really knows at this point.

      More on the incompetence looks like racism front: Trump didn’t know that calling a black person “Uncle Tom” was offensive:

      Lil Jon has confirmed reports that Donald Trump called him “Uncle Tom” during recording of All-Star Celebrity Apprentice in 2013.

      The rapper posted a statement on Twitter saying Trump had used the racist term, but did not confirm whether or not the Republican presidential nominee was aware of its meaning. He wrote: “When this ‘Uncle Tom’ incident happened on Celebrity Apprentice in the boardroom several of my cast mates and I addressed Mr Trump immediately when we heard the comment. I can’t say if he knew what he was actually saying or not, but he did stop using that term once we explained its offensiveness.”

      […]

      They refer to an episode in which Lil Jon wore an Uncle Sam costume as part of a task. According to one member of The Apprentice’s production team, staffers kept trying to explain to the business mogul that patriotic mascot Uncle Sam was not the same as the racially loaded term Uncle Tom: “He just couldn’t grasp that it was offensive,” they told Billboard.

      I think Trump is the living embodiment of the “don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity” mantra.

      • Moon says:

        “I think Trump is the living embodiment of the “don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity” mantra.”

        Good point. Still, doing an awful thing– whether through malice or stupidity– still effs things up just as badly.

      • Iain says:

        Here’s a fairly long article about the housing discrimination issue. It’s pretty clear that there was a policy of racial discrimination; Trump’s best defense might be to blame the policy on his father, but he was president of Trump Management at the time, so you have to be grading on a pretty steep curve to claim that he doesn’t bear any responsibility.

        More broadly: the claim that Trump is too dumb to avoid being accidentally racist is not particularly reassuring.

      • ump’s main problem is that he’s just dumb. His stupidity comes across as racism.

        He’s stupid in terms of epistemic rationality, the thing where you try to build a true worldview, or at least a consistent one. His winning speaks for itself in terms of instrumental rationality. Smartness is more than one thing.

        • yodelyak says:

          I don’t think that’s correct. http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/path-of-a-hero

          Yes, he won. But as SSC’s pre-election post pointed out–a close race either way shouldn’t have us substantially updating our priors differently than a close race that ultimately went the other way. Someone had to win, and it was close.

          • shakeddown says:

            Especially considering he ran similar campaigns before and was laughed out pretty fast.

          • baconbacon says:

            Someone had to win, and it was close.

            I’ve been thinking about this, and I don’t have a resolution, but does this mean anything in electoral politics? When a team loses at basketball by 1 you can say “look, if they just made the last shot that they missed they probably win the game, it was very close, any one turn in either direction could have changed the outcome”. In politics, especially on a large scale with an electoral college, this is tough to say. How much time and effort would it have taken for Hillary to win Wisconsin? Would putting that time in have prevented her from winning another state she needed to?

            I don’t see people tackling this problem, trying to define what “close” means in an election. If Hillary was absolutely wiped out, had exhausted all of her fundraising and saturated ads to the point where extra dollars wouldn’t make a difference, would it make sense to say it was close? How close to the truth is this description? The 76ers might play the Warriors close for 45 mins and only lose by 6 or 7, but is it a close game if the outcome was never really in doubt (not that this is a parallel, but just as a thought experiment).

          • I’ve been thinking about this, and I don’t have a resolution, but does this mean anything in electoral politics? When a team loses at basketball by 1 you can say “look, if they just made the last shot that they missed they probably win the game, it was very close, any one turn in either direction could have changed the outcome”. In politics, especially on a large scale with an electoral college, this is tough to say. How much time and effort would it have taken for Hillary to win Wisconsin? Would putting that time in have prevented her from winning another state she needed to?

            See below.

          • Anonymous Bosch says:

            How much time and effort would it have taken for Hillary to win Wisconsin? Would putting that time in have prevented her from winning another state she needed to?

            There has been a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking about how she played for a blowout and put money and resources into Arizona, Utah, Texas, Georgia, etc., while the local parties in the Rust Belt couldn’t get six-figure help to hire canvassers.

          • Iain says:

            The polls narrowed from a 5.7% Clinton lead on October 28 to a 2.9% lead a week later. That’s a 2.8% swing, which would have easily been more than enough to give Clinton the win. Trump’s margin in Florida, for example, was only 1.3%. Pennsylvania was 1.2%. Wisconsin was 1%.

            James Comey released his letter about “new” Clinton emails on the 28th, and retracted it a couple of days before the election. There’s obviously no way to determine how much of an impact it had on the polls, but there’s at least a superficially plausible case that it might have cost Clinton the election. Voters who decided in the last week broke heavily for Trump in all three of the states I listed above. It is, of course, possible that they were going to go for Trump all along. There isn’t really any way to know.

            It’s also worth pointing out that nobody thought Wisconsin would be important the day before the election, and neither campaign was spending much time there. It definitely wasn’t saturated. Clinton spent much of her last week trying to expand her map; for example, she did a big rally in North Carolina the night before the election. She lost North Carolina by nearly 4%.

            In short: it was a close race, and the evidence seems to show that it could easily have gone the other way.

          • Anonymous Bosch says:

            It’s also worth pointing out that nobody thought Wisconsin would be important the day before the election, and neither campaign was spending much time there.

            Trump had multiple rallies in both, which mystified people at the time. He also outspent Clinton on ads.

          • Iain says:

            Oops, looks like you’re right. I might be misremembering an article about how Clinton wasn’t spending time in Wisconsin. Mea culpa.

        • carvenvisage says:

          Smart is not an extremely specific term but neither is anywhere near as vague as that. It doesn’t just mean competent. -Or impressive, or a force reckoned with, or anything like that. Of course someone can be smart while being epistemically weak, or unconcerned, but being the greatest arm wrestler in the world doesn’t have anything to do with the qualities the word smart has to do with.

          -At all, even a little bit. Conflating smartness with general ability is stupid at best, and from where I’m sitting more likely dishonest.

           

          It’s also making the exact same mistake that it’s nominally responding to -Pretending that qualities of high intellect are the only ones that matter. One side of the pendulum assumes that only smart people can achieve things (or deserve to or whatever), and the other insists that all people who achieve things be granted the label smart, as if without it they’d be incomplete. How sad is that?

           

          (Also his winning doesn’t quite speak for itself on even the quality you’re wrongly misapropriating the word smart for, but that’s a less relevant point.)

  69. Acedia says:

    The internet is making everyone crazy. So many people I know seem to be on the verge of hysterical psychosis over the election result that sometimes I’m genuinely not sure whether I’m the one in the wrong for feeling relatively calm and optimistic.

  70. razorsedge says:

    As someone who most probably had ADD but would like to avoid stimulants ( Ritalin , Adderal , Vyanse , Ect), what are the possible methods to circumvent my ADD naturally. I have a hard time focusing, like its close to impossible, coffee helps for a bit but it subsides pretty fast. I got by high school somehow but its catching up to me in college. Any advice from SSC.

    • Sebastian_H says:

      Music. Something soothing and familiar. It will distract some of the running around in your head without causing enough distraction to keep you from doing good work.

      • razorsedge says:

        I listen to pop punk and pop rock and pop while working. Is that decent or do i need calm and mellow music that is instrumental.Ive heard non instrumental music hurts productivity.

        • Fossegrimen says:

          I use semi-white noise when I actually have to concentrate, music for less intensive stuff. Try rainy mood

        • StellaAthena says:

          Punk, Rock, and pop are what I listen to too. However, I think it’s important to remember that other people can give you recommendations, but can’t tell you what’s good or bad. Don’t do something because someone online tells you it’ll make you more productive. Do something because after trying out what someone tells you online, you seem more productive.

    • StellaAthena says:

      I’m an unmedicated ADHD (also autistic, and those two things can be hard to untangle so take this with a grain of salt) person. The single best thing I have found is to let my mind do what it wants. I experience periods of intense focus in which I get crazy obsorbed with things and super productive, periods of extreme distractedness and non-productivity, and periods where I seem roughly normal in these respects.

      With practice, I’ve become very attune to what mode I am in. In college I basically wrote all my essays while hyperfocused. I could churn out multiple pages an hour (I think my record was a 12 page (2x spaced) essay in just under 4 hours). When I’m not in a productive place, I stop trying. I’ll play a video game, or read three pages from 10 different books or take a nap. Fighting it felt counterproductive, as it was exhausting and was a fight I’d usually lose. In college you have a huge amount of flexibility in your assignments. Use that to your full advantage. Learn what times and environments make you the most productive. I’m the most productive after 10 pm. So often times I would wake up, go to class, then dick around for a few hours and take a nap before dinner. Eat a late dinner, chat with people, and at 9:00 go to start working (trying to start at 9 usually meant I was started by 10).

      I really think of it as a rhythm. I have a work rhythm, and so I adapt my working to fit the appropriate places in the rhythm.

      I’m extremely fortunate to have found a job that accommodates such habits. I telework 4 days a week and as long as I bill 40 hours a week they don’t care how it’s broken up. So some days I work 12 hours and other days I work 4

      • razorsedge says:

        I dont have productive periods though. Like there is no hyperfocus. If its something i love like SSC reading then yes i can read fast and understand well and stay focused. But if it is just regular college work than that comes with no focus periods.

        • StellaAthena says:

          I’m really sorry to hear that 🙁

          Honestly, my next thought was “unhealthy amounts of caffeine?” But if I come up with a different answer I’ll be sure to let you know. In the meanwhile, even if your settings are only “no productivity” and “”normal people” productivity”, it’s worth discovering any patterns that might exist in that

        • Inky Llama says:

          I too am missing these hyperproductivity periods, but have made do with the aforementioned unhealthy amounts of coffee, and pomodoro timers.

          An audible indicator that “it doesn’t matter how effective you believe you’ll be at your next task, X, you must start it now,” combined with the almost mental safety net of “continuing to work on this is driving me insane, but I can bear it for another 2.5 minutes,” has really worked for me.

          Your circumstances may be different, of course, but combined with other recommendations in this chain (white noise or music, coffee, and adequate sleep) pomodoros were ridiculously effective for me. When I started using them, I had just lost my scholarships and was being placed on academic probation. Now I’m in a place where I have a successful programming career, and have self-published several books in my writing hobby.

          It’s all about finding what works for you. I never would’ve imagined reaching this point when I first started thinking about dealing with with my ADD, and it sounds like you’re thinking about it a lot earlier than I was. No matter how you end up dealing with it, by dealing with it at all you’re on the right track.

    • Incurian says:

      I believe there are non-stimulant medications that can help treat ADHD.

      To answer your question though, when I really need to focus I blast some music (either relaxing or intense, depending on the task), drink a whole lot of caffeine, eat sunflower seeds (Spitz are the best), and convince myself that I actually will enjoy the challenge of whatever stupid stupid thing I’m doing.

      Also, I imagine if you describe what you mean by having a hard time focusing, people may be able to tailor their advice more appropriately.

    • Dahlen says:

      Well, bad news: caffeine is a stimulant — even though it doesn’t produce its primary effects through the same mechanisms as classic CNS stimulants like amphetamine or methylphenidate. Lots of people with ADHD end up inclined to use not-quite-stimulants to cope with the symptoms.

      If your inattention problems are severe, try modifying your environment so as to reduce distracting stimuli. For instance, I’ve had some computer trouble recently which left me without access to it for about a week. I suddenly understood the early lives and education of prominent 19th century scientists. It was boring as all hell! Consequently, I embarked on an intensive exercise regimen and was this close to entertaining myself with partial derivatives. Get yourself stuck in a room with nothing but your college books for a while.

      Also, general psychotherapeutic techniques (scheduling, searching your heart for the reasons why you dislike your work, cannily timing breaks and rewards, and just holding the goal in your mind) take you about 10% through the road to your goal. In my experience their effectiveness is unsatisfying, leading you to mediocre results at best. But I’ve gone years without doing even that. And let me tell you, 10% is still better than 0%.

      Also also, may I ask why you dislike the idea of medication? Is it that you don’t have a diagnosis and prescription, or that you want to avoid the side effects? For me, it’s the first time meddling with my neurochemistry and it shows; I’m finally able to do stuff ahead of time and show up in class without absolutely needing to. It doesn’t solve all your problems, particularly regarding interest/pleasure in doing work, but it’s a big step ahead.

      • Anonymousse says:

        If your inattention problems are severe, try modifying your environment so as to reduce distracting stimuli.

        Seconded. Physically (or virtually, in the sense of website blocking and the like if the work involves a computer) removing distractions works far better for me than just trying to apply will power.

        Interestingly, medication did make me feel like I was more interested in and derived more enjoyment from my work.

        • Dahlen says:

          Interestingly, medication did make me feel like I was more interested in and derived more enjoyment from my work.

          Hmm. What were you on, if you don’t mind me asking? And what kind of work was it?

          • Anonymousse says:

            Concerta, and it was most work, from attending classes to practicing chemistry problems while listening to ambient music.

            I now find it difficult to read text books without falling asleep, though whether that is a long-term side effect of medication or a general reflection on poor sleep habits is a bit beyond me.

    • bean says:

      Serious ADD here. I’d suggest just taking the pills. At the very least, try it. I’ve been on them for over 17 years now, and haven’t had serious problems. It really, really helps.

      • One approach to ADD I have seen described is to have multiple projects running. Whenever you get bored with one you switch to another.

        • bean says:

          I do a lot of that. The problem is that there are some things which are just not interesting enough to do regardless of how short a time you’re going to do them for.

        • Dahlen says:

          If we’re talking multiple projects of the same type (e.g. studying 5 different textbooks or working at 40 different 3D models), all done for the same reason (“become a STEM buff”, “release this set”), this is likelier to result in a feeling that you’re never getting anywhere close to the final goal, despite a subjective impression that you’re working all the time. (I have a failure mode where I read several introductory chapters to textbooks at a time and end up feeling like a perpetual novice in everything.) People need to pass milestones and finish stuff to feel like they’re progressing, which is the psychological reward that fuels persistence. “Jack of all trades, master of none” etc.

          It may work if the projects you’re juggling are of a different nature each (e.g. exercising + studying + coding + learning a practical skill), but even so there’s the natural limit of available hours in a day.

      • razorsedge says:

        Stimulants make anxiety worse , id rather be a mediocre college student than be anxious and miserable all the time. Plus anxiety zaps my productivity much more than Add does. ADD might make me crap at working and lower my grades from like an A- to a B , but bad anxiety can make me give or take non-functional, academically speaking.

        • Anonymousse says:

          I had a similar reaction of increased anxiety when I was on medication, though not crippling. So hey, N = 2!

          • razorsedge says:

            I havent tried it yet, but the warnings are just a bit too dire in terms of anxiety effects.

          • Anonymousse says:

            Ahh. Sorry to assume! Hope some of the suggestions here have been helpful.

          • Incurian says:

            In the last month I started taking prescription stimulants.

            Adderall did not make me anxious. In fact one note I made was how stable and calm I felt. I didn’t feel hyper and anxious like when I drink caffeine, I just felt like whatever demon was keeping me from focusing had been banished. I just felt normal and could do my work and stuff. On the other hand, it also kept my heart rate at 110bpm for 12 hours at a time and eliminated my appetite and sex drive.

            So I switched to Ritalin, and at first I did think that it made me anxious and felt very similar to caffeine. Then I dropped the dose by 5mg and I just felt normal again. It doesn’t seem to work quite as well as Adderall, but it also doesn’t shoot my heart rate up quite as high or for as long, and if anything I think it has increased my appetite and sex drive. I do have dry mouth though 🙁

            Anyway, YMMV since brain chemistry is like complicated and stuff, but I wanted you to know that anxiety does not necessarily come bundled with stimulants, and your anxiety may even be reduced if you’ve been feeling anxious about not getting any work done.

        • bean says:

          Really, if you haven’t tried it, get to your doctor and do so now. I can understand worrying about side effects, but the chances of something going horribly wrong in the short term are basically zero. Make sure you have a couple of days where you don’t have much going on (I often played with my meds over school breaks), and try it. It might change your life. The day I took my first dose was also the day I learned to read.

    • yodelyak says:

      ADD is sometimes related to depression, in ways I do not understand at all. Someone I know is a very high-functioning ADD person when she feels she is loved and has purposeful work. She’s worse than useless in a situation where she is pursuing extrinsic motivation from an impersonal amoral authority–like writing a paper for a professor she doesn’t understand or relate to. I can’t even tell you how many weeks of 10- and 12-hour days she can sink into an 8 page paper, and come up empty at the deadline. She seems only to relate to her work as a deeply meaningful project–a labor of love–so when she doesn’t love it, and/or doesn’t feel it can succeed, she is impressively ineffectual.

      So, some good advice might be to cultivate your interests–do the (healthy) stuff you love, and lots of it, which helpfully is pretty good advice for anyone. Another good piece of advice may be to guard your motivation–don’t do things that don’t work, you’ll get discouraged. So unless there’s a good reason to think “staying at it” is going to make the difference, keep working at finding ways to work smarter (or achieve hyperfocus, or etc) before you settle for just slogging it out.

    • carvenvisage says:

      My 2c/theory:

      Take something you like doing, and try to do it really really well, -to improve at it, all that malarkey.

      -Because you like doing it, you’ll have an easier time focusing, so it’s a good place to build up focus from remedial beginnings.

      Try to spark the beginnings of an ability to focus here in an evvironment friendly to it -providing natural interest. -A spark, away from cold winds.

      And at some point try to duplicate it/apply it elsewhere.

      And growing it from there you might end up with something that can survive in a neutral environment, and eventually thrive in a hostile one.

       

      (potential lifehack: make ~’attempting to focus’ something you really really like /take pride in doing.)

       

      (Alternatively, start with a hostile environment, -that tries to disrupt your focus, and focus on resisting the disruptions (even if there’s nothing for them to disrupt).)

       

      (unstated theory: focus can come from interest, manually, or from resistance to distraction. Mobilisation of these can be made a habit/ability from nothing, -there doesn’t need to be a preexisting habit to improve. Also: Some people have 0 of the second, maybe some people have 0 of the third. Almost no one has zero of the first. Using the first and third, -or just the first, the second can be inculcated.)

       

       

      edit:

      Another way to approach it is that being unable to focus is like not being able to convince the part of you that has the reins on attention assignation, that the thing you deem important, is important.

      -Some part of you controls how to assign attention. You can look at this as a subagent of you, or (/and) as an agent in itself that can be convinced, appealed to, made friendly, etc. (imo it’s both)

  71. TheBearsHaveArrived says:

    Welp. I like the crying wolf essay.

    I’m hoping for the best for the next 4 years, and will do my duty to support our president the way my generation knows how to.

    Facebook likes.

    • Randy M says:

      #Doingmypart
      #Makingadifference

    • Murphy says:

      The trend was starting to get to me.

      When I was chatting to a friend the other day and they said “oh, you hear about trump appointing a KKK’er to the cabinet” and all I could respond with was “uh, you mean literally?” “ya!” “someone he’s actually appointed, not just someone that someone else said they felt sure he’d appoint? Someone he literally appointed who was literally in the KKK” “um…. maybe”

      After some digging it turned out that the person in question was Bannon and the “proof” of his racist credentials was a bunch of quotes from authors who weren’t him but did publish on a site he was running and a third hand quote from his ex wife who said he was totally an anti-Semite in the middle of an ugly divorce.

      His actual articles, even from years ago were remarkable only in how boring they were and how none of the articles attacking bannon actually quoted them because they’re so dull.

      On forums I’ve tried to bring this up when people were calling him a nazi (asking for anything he’s actually written, not editorials from people talking about him or things he’s simply failed to block others from publishing) only to be threatened with banning because defending a branded-nazi apparently makes you a sympathizer or something.

      Eventually the “proof” regurgitated was that he made some party political films including scenes like blossoming flowers and regrowth combined with Wagner music and since Wagner was an antisemite and the Nazis made propaganda films with blossoming flowers that means that Bannon is 100% an antisemite nazi.

      I don’t find the guy particularly appealing, everything I can find indicates he’s a bit of an asshole and probably a bit of a sexist asshole but actual physical reality appears to go out the window and since he’s on team trump it’s ingroup-outgroup hate in pure form and no proof can be too crap to brand one of *them* a nazi because all of them are nazi’s.

      • the anonymouse says:

        Reminds me of the old joke about how whenever you get a ten-man Klan meeting, two will be Klansmen, four will be FBI agents, and four will be hillbillies trying to get paid for turning in a Klansman to an agent.

      • TheBearsHaveArrived says:

        I just hope Trump pays attention to meritocracy and average group intelligence for his cabinets and advisers.

        I mean, would people refuse to be an adviser to the president himself if they disliked his campaign? I doubt many would refuse.

        Environmentalists seem to jump at the prospect of changing the guys mind, at all levels.

      • IrishDude says:

        I found this transcript from a speech/interview with Bannon illuminating: https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world?utm_term=.jsDKrr0l3#.uqx100dvk

        He praises the Judeo-Christian West which seems to be a strong argument against him being an anti-Semite. He praises nationalism which is a stance I strongly disagree with though.

        • I read a talk by Bannon, a National Review piece attacking him, and a Mother Jones piece attacking him.

          The Mother Jones piece claims “”We’re the platform for the alt-right,” Bannon told me proudly.” The NR piece repeats that. No evidence is given that he actually said it, merely that the author of a hostile article said he said it. As best I can tell by a little googling, the Mother Jones piece is the sole source everyone else quotes.

          The NR piece also has, about Breitbart, “In May, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol was labeled a “Renegade Jew.”” It does not explain that the article in question, written by David Horowitz, was attacking Kristol for his attempts to block Trump on the basis that “To weaken the only party that stands between the Jews and their annihilation, and between America and the forces intent on destroying her, is a political miscalculation so great and a betrayal so profound as to not be easily forgiven.”

          My conclusion is that NR is now worthless as a source of information. There are lots of good reasons to be critical of Trump. There is no need to do it dishonestly.

          Does anyone here know of any source than Mother Jones for the claim that Bannon identified Brietbart as the platform for the alt-right?

          Judging by Bannon’s talk, he is a nationalist, almost certainly hostile to free trade and immigration. But I can see no evidence that he is racist, anti-semitic, or regards himelf as part of the alt-right.

  72. StellaAthena says:

    Re: Crying Wolf

    Hilary had a greatly decreased vote count from Obama, and the only data I’ve seen showing Trump gains among minorities is percentage wise. Are actual numbers out yet? I’m wondering if Trump’s gains are just relative

    • ThirteenthLetter says:

      Votes are still being counted. Turnout, it turns out (ha) was up from 2012, not down. I don’t know specifically what Trump’s vote count is at the moment but it’s likely that it’s higher than Romney’s, which means his better performance with minorities is numbers-wise as well as percentage-wise.

      I dunno how much noise you can really make out of that, since it wasn’t that much higher than Romney. Still, if the GOP made a habit of getting ten or fifteen percent better performance with minorities, it would cripple the Democratic Party, so… worth paying attention to.

      • suntzuanime says:

        It’s kind of funny because the pre-election narrative among the poorly organized and generally dysfunctional unemployed was that this was going to be the election that proves that you don’t have to reach out to minorities, just really crush it among whites. Even the guys who were saying “hell yeah, a wolf!” turned out to be wrong.

      • Earthly Knight says:

        I think what we want to know is whether the share of minorities who were eligible voters in 2016 and supported Trump is larger than the share of minorities who were eligible voters in 2012 and supported Romney. Trump didn’t really do better with minorities than Romney if all that happened was (1) minorities didn’t turn out for Hillary as much as Obama or (2) there are more voting-age minorities in the population now than there were in 2012.

        • StellaAthena says:

          Agreed

        • gbdub says:

          How relevant is it exactly whether he did the same, slightly better, or slightly worse than Romney? That it’s a question at all implies that the “cry wolf” theory has legs – minorities were not strongly more motivated to vote against Trump for his “open racism” than they were against the much milder Romney.

          • Matt M says:

            Because the people who were crying wolf were very explicitly stating that Trump was uniquely racist, even compared to other Republicans, with Romney being the easiest direct comparable (because he was the most recent GOP nominee).

            How he did compared to Romney is the ONLY relevant question if you are addressing the claim that his unprecedented open racism would lead to dramatically different results (in either direction)

        • Deiseach says:

          Trump didn’t really do better with minorities than Romney if all that happened was (1) minorities didn’t turn out for Hillary as much as Obama or (2) there are more voting-age minorities in the population now than there were in 2012.

          I think the question is that Trump did anything with minorities, when everyone was forecasting he’d do poorly or even turn them off in droves with his racism and xenophobia. There was one article where the writer said Trump was struggling to get even 1% of the African-American vote.

          By the graphs Scott provided, Trump ended up with 8% of the African-American vote, 29% Hispanic/Latino, and 29% Asian. That is a respectable result for someone who was constantly being pilloried as the KKK candidate, fascist, racist.

          Yes, it’s not impressive, but it wasn’t supposed to happen at all – witness Mr 1% there. Again, not so much a case of “Trump won the votes” as “Hillary lost the votes”, and that was in part at least to over-confident assumption that the votes from minorities would just flap their little wings and fly into her ballot-boxes because where else were they going to go?

      • roystgnr says:

        Votes are still being counted.

        Some people just claim that eliminating the Electoral College would be a disaster, but only California and Washington have the dynamism to forge ahead and prove it. Very charitable of them.

  73. Nathan Taylor (praxtime) says:

    Scott –
    1. thank you very much for writing this. more viewpoint diversity is needed right now. Guess that’s my main reason for wanting to comment. But since I’m here….
    2. agree not mentioning birtherism is a very noticeable a gap. It’s foundational to how Trump got elected. If you decide to add an update note, that’d be the one I’d pick.
    3. disagree about needing to discuss Judge Curiel. If you the read exact (almost completely incoherent) words Trump said, it’s not that different than other examples. So adding it in won’t change the argument much either way.

  74. jaimeastorga2000 says:

    Scott, something is wrong with your latest. The Washington Post quote is not where its supposed to be; it appears right after the Politico quote. Also, the Politico quote doesn’t have a link to its source.

  75. Earthly Knight says:

    Scott’s newest post arguing that Trump is not a racist contains no mention of either (a) the years Trump spent promoting the racist birther conspiracy theory about President Obama or (b) Trump’s racist criticism of Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge presiding over the Trump University fraud case. No less a social justice warrior than Paul Ryan called the attack on Curiel the “textbook definition of a racist comment.”

    The fact that Scott ignores the two most egregious examples of Trump’s racism seems to me sufficient to refute the post. And what is the evidence Scott cites in defense of his view? That Trump panders to black churches and eats a taco bowl? Is this serious?

    • Acedia says:

      The pandering and taco bowl were used as evidence against his being openly racist, unless I misread.

      • Earthly Knight says:

        “Mexico is great to visit, I’ve been there a few times. I respect all peoples of the world.”

        “I have spoken all over the world and I have great respect for Muslims, I have great respect for the African people, I have respect for the other races. Even back home in Lousiana, I’m called a racist, but I have respect for the Black people of my country and I want them to have their own life, too, and I want them to be able to pursue their own destiny and not be controlled, and not be damaged.”

        Clearly, if talking about how much you love and respect minorities proves that you’re not openly racist, the man who said these things couldn’t be an open racist. It was David Duke? Whoops.

        • Jiro says:

          An individual instance doesn’t prove it, but a pattern does. Scott was giving examples of a pattern.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            David Duke also has a pattern of saying flattering things about other races. This is just how open racists speak in order to make their message more palatable.

    • Sebastian_H says:

      I tend to think that the Curiel case is Trump’s vindictive nature, which is definitely why he shouldn’t be president.

      But if you think Scott forgot key points, it certainly adds to the idea that maybe there was lots of crying wolf which distracts from dealing with the real issues when they are there.

      There definitely seemed to be a scattershot style of media reporting, rather than a good focus which would have been more effective.

      Its true though, there were so many things wrong it was hard to focus on just the worst.

    • Iain says:

      Yeah, birtherism and Curiel are the two giant elephants in the room. (Especially birtherism.) Maybe part of the post is missing? I don’t know how else it is possible to write a post arguing that Trump is not a racist without tackling those two issues head on.

      • suntzuanime says:

        He did the same thing against Ted Cruz, who is considered white and unable to be the target of racism. The Constitution does lay out eligibility requirements for the presidency. It’s not unreasonable to want to verify that they’ve been met.

        • Earthly Knight says:

          He did the same thing against Ted Cruz, who is considered white and unable to be the target of racism.

          Cruz is hispanic. The federal government classifies “hispanic” as an ethnicity rather than a race, but, pretty much universally, bigotry towards hispanics is called racism. Hence, Cruz can indeed be the target of racism.

          It’s not unreasonable to want to verify that they’ve been met.

          Obama’s eligibility for the presidency was proved beyond any shadow of a doubt in 2008, when he released his short-form birth certificate and notices of his birth were located in the archives for the Honolulu Advertiser and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Trump was still promoting the racist birther lies four years later.

          It is sad that birther apologia is starting to crop up here.

          • suntzuanime says:

            I mean I don’t want to break out the skull-measuring calipers here, but Ted Cruz is AT LEAST as white as George Zimmerman. Look at how the media treated him, even comparing like to like with his fellow Republican candidates Marco Rubio and Ben Carson. If race is a social construct, Ted Cruz was constructed white as hell.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            I agree that media accounts which identified George Zimmerman as white, ignoring his hispanic and african ancestry, were inaccurate and manipulative. Bigotry towards hispanics is still racism.

          • Sniffnoy says:

            This subthread is terrible and you all need to lay out what you mean by “racism” and/or taboo it.

        • Iain says:

          The attack on Cruz was significantly different. Everybody agreed on the facts: Cruz was born in Canada to American parents. The wording of the constitution is not specific about the meaning of “natural-born citizen”. Trump filed a lawsuit to see if he could get Cruz thrown out of the race. It failed, so he shut up about it.

          As Earthly Knight says: in Obama’s case, there was clear proof by 2008, before he was even elected. Trump was still spewing falsehoods four years later.

          • I don’t see how “birtherism” was racist. The racial fact is that Obama’s father was African, which everyone agrees on.

            Obama was born very shortly after his mother came back to the U.S. That suggested an obvious and striking story in which a presidential candidate was really not qualified because the facts of his birth had been cleverly altered.

            One of my standard rules of thumb is that one should view with suspicion any historical anecdote that makes a good enough story to have survived on its literary merit. Similarly here. It doesn’t have to be true to have legs.

          • Iain says:

            The story didn’t stand up to even the faintest scrutiny. (His parents published fake birth announcements in two newspapers with the expectation that their son would someday run for president?) It had legs because it appealed to white people searching for a way to dismiss the legitimacy of a black president with an unusual name.

            But don’t take it from me. Take it from Michael Steele, former RNC chair, on Breitbart.com.

          • JulieK says:

            It had legs because it appealed to white people searching for a way to dismiss the legitimacy of a black president with an unusual name.

            How do you know they specifically objected to having a black president, as opposed to some other factor such as having a left-wing president?

          • keranih says:

            There was also evidence (ie, autobiographical blurbs in published books) that as a student, Obama tried to play up his Kenyan (vs American) heritage, to the point of contemporaries actually thinking he had been born in Kenya.

            Of course, this – even if true – no more disqualified Obama from being a candidate than did John McCain’s birth in the Panama Canal Zone to a military family. But it didn’t stop people from making the charge that McCain was ineligible, either.

            Given that this is a repeat of a charge laid against a Caucasian, I’m failing to see this as inherently racist. Sure, a racist person might make that charge against Obama, but a racist person might note that the sky is blue, as well.

          • bean says:

            Of course, this – even if true – no more disqualified Obama from being a candidate than did John McCain’s birth in the Panama Canal Zone to a military family. But it didn’t stop people from making the charge that McCain was ineligible, either.

            That’s not actually true. US law at the time placed certain restrictions on blood citizenship that his mother didn’t meet. I believe they had to have lived in the US for 5 years continuously after reaching age 15 for children born abroad to gain citizenship, and his mother was 19 when he was born.
            (I’m not defending this law, which seems very poorly implemented even as a way of stopping someone who has never lived in the US passing on their citzenship. But it was the law at the time AFAIK.)

          • Earthly Knight says:

            Of course, this – even if true – no more disqualified Obama from being a candidate than did John McCain’s birth in the Panama Canal Zone to a military family. But it didn’t stop people from making the charge that McCain was ineligible, either.

            Do you really not see the difference between questioning the eligibility of a candidate who was born in Panama and questioning the eligibility of a candidate who was born in Hawaii? Have you ever looked at a map?

          • bean says:

            Do you really not see the difference between questioning the eligibility of a candidate who was born in Panama and questioning the eligibility of a candidate who was born in Hawaii? Have you ever looked at a map?

            Did you miss the qualifier ‘if true’ in his statement? He was asserting that if Obama had been born in Kenya (and nobody here is seriously asserting that he was) he would still have been a citizen by blood. (This isn’t true, but it seems like it should be.)

          • Earthly Knight says:

            That was part of what keranih was saying. The other part is that the questions about Obama’s eligibility couldn’t be rooted in racism because similar questions have arisen for white candidates like McCain. But this ignores that in the case of McCain the questions were at least serious, while for Obama they were never more than baseless fantasies driven by the racist fear of seeing a black man with a foreign-sounding name rise to power.

          • bean says:

            But this ignores that in the case of McCain the questions were at least serious, while for Obama they were never more than baseless fantasies driven by the racist fear of seeing a black man with a foreign-sounding name rise to power.

            Begging the question. Have you ever actually known any birthers? I have, and all of them seemed genuinely worried that Obama was born in Kenya. They may be factually wrong, and are almost certainly engaging in motivated reasoning, but they weren’t simply motivated by fear of a black President. (I think they’d have been OK with Ben Carson. Yes, I’m sure you’ll claim that doesn’t count.)

          • Earthly Knight says:

            Your birther pals, were they ever worried that Romney was secretly born in Windsor? Why not?

          • Evan Þ says:

            I know some birthers too, and for a while (before 2011, when Obama actually released his long-form birth certificate) I was sort of one myself. That was before Romney, but we were worried about Obama specifically because – most significantly – he hadn’t released all his birth certificates despite numerous people demanding that he do so. Why in the world would he refuse, I asked myself, unless he had something to hide?

            “Politician we’re tribally primed to disagree with does something suspicious” can explain a whole lot without bringing in racism at all. Looking back, I have every reason to think we would’ve have reacted to Kerry or Clinton or Gore doing something equally suspicious in the exact same way.

          • Controls Freak says:

            @Earthly Knight

            I’m curious what you think about America’s first Canadian President, Chester A. Arthur.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            he hadn’t released all his birth certificates despite numerous people demanding that he do so. Why in the world would he refuse, I asked myself, unless he had something to hide?

            But why did the “numerous people” demanding that Obama release his long-form birth certificate– he had already released the short-form certificate by this point– never place similar demands on any white presidential candidate from either party who was unequivocally born on American soil? What is it about Obama that made him different from everyone else?

          • Evan Þ says:

            @Earthly Knight, as far as I knew up until today, every other President or candidate already had released their birth certificate without any hesitancy or controversy? From a quick web search, that appears to not in fact be the case – but absolutely no one on either side mentioned it at the time.

        • The Nybbler says:

          There was also a similar bit of controversy around Dick Cheney. It had to do with whether Bush and Cheney were both residents of Texas and therefore electors could not vote for both. Cheney claimed to be a resident of Wyoming. Even after the court case was settled, people would put up all sorts of claims that Cheney cheated to get the Vice Presidency, often quoting a section about residency in the Fish and Game section of Wyoming law (without, of course, mentioning that it applied only to Fish and Game).

    • Nyx says:

      That’s not the point. You can, if you like, find displays of “racism” from Reagan, and Clinton, and Bush 41 and Bush 43, and probably every President at some point. And hell, maybe they are racist. What they aren’t is Greater Openly White Supremacist+1. That’s the criticism that’s been trotted out regularly against Trump, mere “racism” having lost its bite. Trump is kind of racist, in the kind of clueless way that you are when you’re totally insulated from other races. The variety that causes you to think that eating taco bowls is going to impress Latinos. Which isn’t a great trait but is unlikely to be the foundation for a new ethno-nationalist regime. Hitler didn’t try eating latkes to impress Jews, I can tell you that.

    • Well... says:

      a) I keep hearing that Hillary made up the birther thing back when she was running against Obama. Is that wrong? I don’t really know. In any case, it never struck me as inherently racist even if it was genuine. Can anyone explain that? Someone else used the example of Trump questioning the legitimacy of Ted Cruz, but if the argument is that was racist too, then isn’t that just equating racism with the null hypothesis?

      b) The way I heard it (and again, please correct me if I’m wrong) was that since Trump knew that some of his campaign rhetoric had offended a lot of Hispanics, and since Trump had good reason to think that Curiel was one of those offended Hispanics (apart from being of Mexican extraction, Curiel was also involved in a Hispanic immigrant lobby, or something…maybe another SSC reader can fill in the details), Trump claimed that Curiel couldn’t objectively decide the case. I see an obvious reason why Trump might have been wrong to say that (Curiel is a professional judge who can put his personal feelings aside) but I don’t see why that obviously makes Trump a racist.

      PS. Scott, I thought your Stop Crying Wolf piece was one of the best posts of yours I’ve ever read.

      • StellaAthena says:

        Trump kept peddling the idea that Hilary invented it, or people working for her did. AFAIK that has no basis in the truth.

        • gbdub says:

          There does not seem to be any direct connection to the Hillary campaign, but it may have started among Hillary supporters, and its initial polarity was during Hillary’s primary campaign against Obama. There were certainly a non-zero number of pro-Hillary birthers.

          None of which excuses Trump’s birtherism. But I also don’t think birtherism is sufficient for the super duper racism Trump is accused of. Obama’s biography is unusual – part of my annoyance with birtherism is that it’s overshadowed a lot of interesting discussion over Obama’s backstory (not that he hides it, it’s in his book).

      • Deiseach says:

        I keep hearing that Hillary made up the birther thing back when she was running against Obama. Is that wrong?

        It possibly arose out of polling back in 2008 that her campaign did on Obama and McCain etc to test what were the areas of vulnerability.

        They said (in regard to Obama) that it was to find out and defend against areas of vulnerability, to which I say “Yes, I would be interested in buying that desirable bridge you’re selling”. They didn’t start the rumours but they would have been happy to take advantage of any bad PR for Obama, since Hillary would have stepped over his bleeding dead body to graciously accept the nomination as the Democratic candidate for president then. (And in 2012. And, as we all saw, in 2016):

        * 7 Obama (owe-BAHM-uh)’s father was a Muslim and Obama grew up among Muslims in the world’s most populous Islamic country.

        …”We could not coordinate with either campaign, and worked to prepare to defend either candidate in the general election,” Begala explained in an email. “It was called ‘McCain survey’ because it was designed to test attacks that might come in the general election. Our entire focus was the general election. Both Obama and Clinton supporters were, at the time, concerned the eventual nominee would emerge wounded and vulnerable for the general election.”

      • Earthly Knight says:

        I keep hearing that Hillary made up the birther thing back when she was running against Obama. Is that wrong? I don’t really know. In any case, it never struck me as inherently racist even if it was genuine. Can anyone explain that?

        The birther conspiracy theories are racist for exactly the same reason that claiming that some jewish politician feeds on the blood of gentile children is racist. The blood libel is plausible only if you buy into a rigid, irrational and negative stereotype of jews according to which they are parasites who deceive and victimize their christian hosts. Similarly, the birther theories are plausible only if you buy into a rigid, irrational and negative stereotype of non-white immigrants and their descendants which says they can never be real Americans (no matter what their birth certificates say!) because America is a nation for whites.

        and since Trump had good reason to think that Curiel was one of those offended Hispanics (apart from being of Mexican extraction, Curiel was also involved in a Hispanic immigrant lobby, or something…maybe another SSC reader can fill in the details), Trump claimed that Curiel couldn’t objectively decide the case.

        Trump claimed that Curiel wasn’t adjudicating the case impartially, and inferred that this must be because the judge had Mexican heritage and was therefore automatically biased against him. As far as I know, there was never any independent evidence that Curiel was offended by Trump’s policy proposals, and, even if there were, Curiel’s being offended does not have anything to do with his ethnicity.

        • bean says:

          Similarly, the birther theories are plausible only if you buy into a rigid, irrational and negative stereotype of non-white immigrants which says they can never be real Americans (no matter what their birth certificate says!) because America is a nation for whites.

          This predicts that Ben Carson’s supporters would have been much less likely to be birthers than other Republicans. Interestingly enough, that data exists (see page 14). And more interestingly still, Carson’s supporters were more likely than the Republican average to say that Obama had not been born in the US. Less so than Trump’s, but more than Cruz’s or Bush’s.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            Tell me, of democrats who think that the nation is secretly controlled by a shadowy cabal of jewish elites, do you think more voted for Clinton or for her opponent, the jewish senator from Vermont? It’s probably a mistake to expect purveyors of racist conspiracy theories to be consistent, or to be single-issue voters.

          • bean says:

            It’s probably a mistake to expect purveyors of racist conspiracy theories to be consistent, or to be single-issue voters.

            You know what, I’m not even going to bother with a long reply. I don’t think it’s likely to be worth it. What evidence would convince you that birtherism isn’t actually racist?

          • Earthly Knight says:

            You might start by showing how the birther conspiracy theory is in any respect different than directing the blood libel at a jewish politician.

          • bean says:

            How is accusing someone of racism not like blood libel?

          • Earthly Knight says:

            Is that a serious question or are you vying for a spot in one of those compilations of ridiculous shit slatestarcodex commenters say?

          • Spookykou says:

            @Earthly Knight

            It seems to me that a key difference would be what is implied versus what is expressly stated.

            In blood libel you have someone stating that they think a group of people murder and eat their children.

            A birther is stating that they think somebody might not have been born in America. You read an implication in this that the person thinks that only white people can be true Americans, but importantly this is not actually stated directly in birther ideation(from what I understand).

            This difference between these two things is actually so large, it is hard for me to imagine you are arguing in good faith, unless I am just profoundly confused about what the birther conspiracy was.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            In blood libel you have someone stating that they think a group of people murder and eat their children.

            The case I gave involved directing the blood libel at a specific jewish politician, so this is no good. Say that one of Trump’s supporters accused Bernie Sanders of bathing in the blood of gentile children (if this sounds far-fetched to you, remember that some of Clinton’s campaign staff were being accused of ritual satanism two weeks ago). Is this different than what Trump did to Obama? Why?

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            Blood libel has gotten people killed. Birther theories haven’t.

            There’s a difference between an accusation of fraud and an accusation of murder.

            Also, blood libel plays into a stereotype of Jews as treacherous.

            Birtherism plays into a stereotype of blacks as outsiders in the US, but I think that’s a vaguer thing.

          • Spookykou says:

            I see, in that case.

            There is nothing implicitly racists in a person thinking that another person was not born in the United States of America.

            Your belief that the only way somebody could hold this view is if they were racist is not an objective fact about reality that you should assume all other people hold.

            This is technically also true of ALL racist statements of the form you are talking about. “So and So eats babies” is not implicitly racist(the statement itself makes no reference to race), it is assumed to be racist because of historical context. (see confused Europeans getting yelled at for black face costumes).

            But even accepting this, between the two things I think the vast majority of reasonable people would think that accusing a person of murdering and eating Christian children is more likely motivated by racial animus than accusing a person of not really being born in America.

            Obviously these are ‘fuzz’ areas, but again the fact that you seem to think you can equivocate between them is shocking. You must exist in a social environment that is so radically different from my own it is hard for me to even imagine it, for you to honestly try and argue there is no difference between the historical context and racial use of BLOOD LIBEL and the birther conspiracy.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            Blood libel has gotten people killed. Birther theories haven’t.
            There’s a difference between an accusation of fraud and an accusation of murder.

            I don’t see how either of these suggestions could explain why blood libels against a specific politician are racist while birtherism is not. Can a conspiracy theory only be racist if it leads to someone’s death? That doesn’t make any sense. Could a conspiracy theory only be racist if it accuses someone of a more serious crime than fraud? That also seems doubtful.

            Birtherism plays into a stereotype of blacks as outsiders in the US, but I think that’s a vaguer thing.

            The stereotype is that non-whites with foreign-sounding names aren’t real Americans. This is pretty common, it’s why (for instance) people of east Asian descent constantly get asked where they’re from, and are met with incredulity when they respond “New York” or “San Francisco.”

          • Earthly Knight says:

            This is technically also true of ALL racist statements of the form you are talking about. “So and So eats babies” is not implicitly racist(the statement itself makes no reference to race), it is assumed to be racist because of historical context. (see confused Europeans getting yelled at for black face costumes).

            Okay. I’m happy to assent to the conditional that if directing the blood libel towards a jewish politician is not racist, then the birther conspiracy theories about Obama are not racist, because I know that pretty much everyone will think the antecedent is false.

          • Spookykou says:

            I’m happy to assent to the conditional that if directing the blood libel towards a jewish politician is not racist, then birther conspiracy theories are not racist

            I am very clearly saying that ‘so and so eats babies’ is only contextually racist, seeing as how you are already loading the context back into the statement, your subconscious agrees with me, even if you are trying very hard not to argue in good faith.

            I want you to imagine something.

            A ‘I think Earthly Knight eats boogers!’

            B ‘No I don’t!’

            How much racism was involved in this exchange?

            Now lets imagine the exact same thing again, only Earthly Knight and I live in the same town in the same country, and Earthly Knight is Green, and I am Brown, and for a thousand years the Browns accused the Greens of eating boogers and murdered their men, raped their women, and sold their children into slavery, but we made peace a hundred years ago.

            A ‘I think Earthly Knight eats boogers!’

            B ‘No I don’t!’

            How much racism was involved in this exchange?

          • Earthly Knight says:

            I agree that the historical context is part of what makes the blood libel racist. But I don’t see how that’s any different from the birther conspiracy theories. The stereotype that non-whites with foreign-sounding names aren’t real Americans has been kicking around for decades or centuries now, too. (See, for instance, the Japanese internment).

          • Spookykou says:

            I have already covered this.

            Obviously these are ‘fuzz’ areas, but again the fact that you seem to think you can equivocate between them is shocking. You must exist in a social environment that is so radically different from my own it is hard for me to even imagine it, for you to honestly try and argue there is no difference between the historical context and racial use of BLOOD LIBEL and the birther conspiracy.

            and yes, I am still shocked, but to try and unpack this a little bit.

            First, blood libel is an expressly racial idea, it is a specific doctrine which states ‘group of people murder and eat our children’.

            The Birther Conspiracy does not come from any doctrine, it is not an intentionally taught belief structure, you will not find old books talking about it, Birthirsm was exclusively the belief that Barack Obama was not actually born in the United States of America.

            You can not directly tie

            The stereotype that non-whites with foreign-sounding names aren’t real Americans

            to Birtherism even if you think there is an implied connection.

            That in and of itself is a very important distinction when trying to determine the context of a racially charged belief.

            However, in an effort to argue in good faith, I will now assume that the stereotype that non-whites with foreign-sounding names aren’t real Americans is directly related to the Birtherism conspiracy.

            First, you are mistaken if you think that non-whites is actually a factor here, the belief that a person who appears foreign is foreign is not based on any normally understood racial lines. Blond haired blue eyed pale as the freshly driven snow Sven with a thick Swedish accent will be asked ‘where do you comes from’ by the same people who ask random Asian Americans where they come from. This is vaguely ethnocentric, and your anthropology professor will tell you it’s terrible, but its really stretching ‘racist’ pretty thin.

            Blood Libel on the other hand, is expressly targeting a racial group, is not vague at all, and is clearly a racist doctrine.

            Second, you are deeply uncharitable if you assume that every instance of ‘where do you come from’ is motivated by some sort of racial ideology and malice. Is it really so hard to believe that this is often just a social fopaux by people trying to make small talk and express an interest in the people around them?

            Blood Libel on the other hand is never, not ever, a social fopaux by people trying to make small talk and express an interest in the people around them.

            Even if I agree that the particular behavior of asking foreign appearing people where they are from is directly linked to the Birtherism Conspiracy in the same way that the long history of blood libel is directly linked to accusing a person of eating children(I don’t, if anyone is wondering)

            I still find the fact that you seem to think you can equivocate between them shocking. That you are truly incapable of appreciating the massive difference between the historical context and use of, blood libel and ‘where are you from’ beggars belief.

            P.S. Japanese internment camps had nothing to do with ‘where are you from’ ideation, they were viewed as “enemy aliens” as were the Italians and Germans who also found themselves in internment camps

            Edit: Preemptive additional clarification. I started responding after reading this comment,

            You might start by showing how the birther conspiracy theory is in any respect different than directing the blood libel at a jewish politician.

            To me, it is not obvious that the birther conspiracy is racial motivated, but as I said above, even assuming it is there is a huge difference between the two. Racism, as you have acknowledges is contextual, and not all racism is created equally.

            If a bunch of white men surround a black man alone at a truck stop, throwing racial slurs and talking about trees and rope. Then the man is probably terrified for his life, and there is an unquestionable racial malice behind the white mens actions.

            If a fourteen year old white girl asks the Asian American sitting next to her to help her with her math homework, because ‘of course he is good at math’ then yeah, that is a racial stereotype, but no, it is not the same thing as the example above. You can’t equivocate between the two of them and say one is as bad as the other.

            I hope those examples more clearly define the difference I see, and that I had always assumed most people saw, between things like blood libel, and asking somebody ‘where are you from’.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            Blond haired blue eyed pale as the freshly driven snow Sven with a thick Swedish accent will be asked ‘where do you comes from’ by the same people who ask random Asian Americans where they come from.

            Yeah, Asian-Americans get asked these sort of questions even if they were born here. I mean, I’ve personally witnessed this scores or hundreds of times in my life. (Haven’t you?) On the other hand, white Americans with exotic-sounding surnames are seldom subjected to the same sort of interrogation. I say this as a white American with an exotic-sounding surname.

            Blood Libel on the other hand is never, not ever, a social fopaux by people trying to make small talk and express an interest in the people around them.

            You are badly confused about the dialectic here. The comparison is between the blood libel (directed at a specific politician) and the birther conspiracy theory. No one goes around accusing people of being secret Kenyans perpetrating an elaborate fraud in the course of making small talk, either. The example of Asian-Americans being questioned about their place of birth was just to cite another concrete manifestation of the stereotype that non-white immigrants and their descendants don’t count as full Americans, in case there was any doubt that this stereotype exists and is fairly commonly held. Many more examples could be given, although I’m probably not going to bother if you’re seriously suggesting that racism played no role in the Japanese internment.

          • Spookykou says:

            You are badly confused about the dialectic here. The comparison is between the blood libel (directed at a specific politician) and the birther conspiracy theory.

            I am comparing the context, I don’t actually think that the vague notion that foreign appearing people might be foreign is particularly racist, or particularly linked to the Birther conspiracy, but since you are asserting that it is, the ‘racist context’ of the birther conspiracy is “where are you from” style comments and feelings which needs to be compared to the ‘racist context’ of “so and so eats babies” which is blood libel if I am to illustrate how they are different. The historical context for one, is very clearly an aggressive, negative, intentional racial attack, that brooks no compromise and has been passed down from generation to generation for the purpose of spreading hate. The historical context for the other is a vaguely uncomfortable possibly racially insensitive social habit of middle aged white people. The difference between these two things, should be clear.

            Which is a direct response to a question you asked, and my primary problem with what you have been saying…

            seriously suggesting that racism played no role in the Japanese internment.

            Constantly with the worst possible interpretation of what somebody else says to you. My point about the internment camps is that it is not a coincidence that they happened very shortly after the US and Japan went to war. It was not a policy based on some ‘foreign looking people are not American’ idea, please try and remember the myriad of foreign people living in the US at the time, just as ‘foreign’ as the Japanese Americans, who did not end up in camps. I was certainly not trying to say that the extent,nature, and practices at the camps where not driven by good old fashioned Racism, but, to be clear, you do know that Racism, and thinking a foreign person is not an American, are not actually the same thing. I actually know and have spoken to racist people, and they say some pretty terrible shit, but I actually have not met one who held the rather strange notion that foreign people could not be American Citizens. In case you did not know this, assuming that a foreign appearing person is foreign, is not actually the same thing as thinking it is impossible for foreign appearing people to be American Citizens because they are not white.

            As a poor Mexican American who is constantly misidentified as white, I don’t really assume that people get my ethnicity wrong out of malice, and I try not to hold it against them that they assume I am white, although it is frustrating when they try to share their racist opinions on Mexicans with me.

          • Matt M says:

            re: internment camps

            I’m far from an expert on this, but is it not true that…

            a) They were designed to be limited to Japanese only. While I’m sure some others were mistakenly rounded up, the intent was for Chinese, Filipino, etc. to not have to be interred – despite clearly being racially distinct from white Americans.

            b) They were only instituted on the west coast. That Japanese in parts of the country where they were a small enough minority to not pose any sort of threat as a critical mass may have been badgered by the government, but were not kicked out of their homes.

          • Spookykou says:

            Matt M

            You are mostly correct, but the US also did interned some Italians and Germans, not in the same numbers as the Japanese though.

            Edit, Several other countries also had internment camps during WWII Australia, Canada, etc.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            the ‘racist context’ of the birther conspiracy is “where are you from” style comments and feelings

            Do you think that this exhausts the historical context of the stereotype that non-white immigrants and their descendants don’t count as real Americans? If not, you will need to include the rest of the historical context to accurately compare it to the blood libel. If so, uh…

            It was not a policy based on some ‘foreign looking people are not American’ idea, please try and remember the myriad of foreign people living in the US at the time, just as ‘foreign’ as the Japanese Americans, who did not end up in camps.

            Right. The Japanese internment was caused jointly by the outbreak of war with Japan and the stereotype that Japanese-Americans, being non-white immigrants and their descendants, were specially suspicious and unamerican. Do you agree with this assessment?

          • Matt M says:

            spookykou,

            I think that supports my point – that internment was based primarily on factors other than “let’s round up all those people who look and act different from us”

            Chinese look and act different – but were not interred. Italians look and act similar – but were.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            A whopping 418 Italian-Americans were interned during the second world war. Compare to 110,000 Japanese-Americans. What accounts for the difference, I wonder?

          • Spookykou says:

            Do you think that this exhausts the historical context of the stereotype that non-white immigrants and their descendants don’t count as real Americans

            I am saying ‘where are you from’ while a form of stereotyping is hardly overt racism. I hesitate to even call it racism, racially insensitive maybe. It was one of two examples you gave to support the idea that non-white foreign appearing people are not considered real Americans, the other was the Japanese Internment camps. Of course, I am sure you know the Canadians had Japanese Internment camps, I am not sure how much they cared about who was or was not a Real American. Maybe, it had very little to do with America and foreign appearing people in general, and more to do with normal Racism, and being at war with Japan.

            I think you are trying to construct this new racist paradigm of non-white immigrants are not real Americans, and I don’t think it is really a thing. It doesn’t have a clan, or a movement, people don’t have a word for it, or even a word for this group of people who are targeted by it. All red flags that it might not be a real thing(not proof though). I think what you are grasping at is just Xenophobia. The problem with xenophobia is that every other thing is xenophobic, the left is xenophobic about the right, the right is xenophobic about the left. New York isn’t the Real America, or wait, New York is the Real America, I actually can’t remember where we finally landed on that one. (notice the ‘real america’ language). The fact that the Birther Movement has Xenophobic undertones, means that you can literally link every single historical example of Xenophobia as ‘historical context’ for how ‘racist’ the Birthers must be, but I am sorry, I am not buying it.

            Now, lets move onto my only real point. Please list whatever you think the actual historical context of your ‘non-white immigrants not considered real Americans’ looks like, and then list out the historical context for blood libel. Then compare the two on a few things.

            Are they both as concrete and defined historically, see if one is a bunch of vague personal interpretations and implications of events and the other is a bunch of hate groups who actually publish literally blood libel.

            See how many people you think died or suffered because of the historical context (this will not be light reading, and goes back quite a few years, but I trust you can handle it)

            If you personally had to experience both, which do you think would make you more uncomfortable.

            If after looking into it, you still think that ‘Non-white immigrants not being considered real Americans’ should have an equal weight with blood libel, then I am sorry, I tried really hard to explain to you how these two things are not the same as best I could and I failed.

          • Sandy says:

            What accounts for the difference, I wonder?

            Italy didn’t commit a war crime on US soil that killed a couple of thousand Americans? I’m also not sure there was an Italian equivalent to the Niihau incident.

            Also, Americans of Chinese and Filipino descent were not thrown into internment camps; in fact many Chinese and Filipinos were granted US citizenship for joining anti-Japanese battalions. Most of them would also qualify as non-whites with foreign-sounding names.

            I don’t doubt that there was a racial component to it all, but another component was that there was a fascist Japanese empire across the Pacific trying to kill Americans, which in fact had already succeeded in killing thousands of Americans, and which was trying to get Japanese US residents and Japanese-ancestry citizens to kill more Americans.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            @ Spookykou

            Of course, I am sure you know the Canadians had Japanese Internment camps, I am not sure how much they cared about who was or was not a Real American.

            Jesus. Obviously, the relevant stereotype in the case of Canada would be that non-white immigrants don’t qualify as real Canadians. Since you’ve decided to bring up other countries, though, let’s not stop halfway. Let’s strip the references to America out of the stereotype I claimed was responsible for the birther conspiracy theory, and look at the schema in historical context.

            Racist nationalism schema: [Country] is a [dominant race] nation, non-[dominant race] immigrants and their descendants don’t count as real [country demonym].

            We had, as one instance of the schema:

            [America] is a [white] nation, non-[white] immigrants and their descendants don’t count as real [Americans].

            Here’s another one we’re all familiar with:

            [Nazi Germany] is an [aryan] nation, non-[aryan] immigrants and their descendants don’t count as real [Germans].

            Here’s another:

            [Cambodia] is a [Khmer] nation, non-[Khmer] immigrants and their descendants don’t count as real [Cambodians].

            And here’s an instance that’s currently causing a genocide:

            [Myanmar] is a [Burman] nation, non-[Burman] immigrants and their descendants don’t count as real [Burmese].

            Do you still want to claim that this “new racist paradigm” is something I “constructed” which has no historical significance?

          • Spookykou says:

            I covered this in the comment that you are directly replying to.

            The fact that the Birther Movement has Xenophobic undertones, means that you can literally link every single historical example of Xenophobia as ‘historical context’ for how ‘racist’ the Birthers must be, but I am sorry, I am not buying it.

            And wow, you just go ahead and make a list of all the worst examples you can think of for Xenophobic or Nationalist belief. Maybe you are not getting my point, which is not that Xenophobia is not bad, and it is not that Xenophobia is not real, it is that Xenophobia is so overly broad, that the paradigm you are trying to create allows you to,

            call Birthers

            [Nazi Germany] is an [aryan] nation, non-[aryan] immigrants and their descendants don’t count as real [Germans].

            literally Nazi’s.

            But why stop at Birthers, using your definitions, anything that even SOUNDS like nationalism or xenophobia can be called, literally Nazi’s.

            Any person who want to reduce immigration, literally Nazi’s

            Any person who doesn’t want open boarders, literally Nazi’s

            Any person who has ever used the phrase ‘True Americans’ or ‘Real Americans’ (used to refer to people or ideas, not in an explanatory way as we have in this conversation, don’t fret), literally Nazi’s

            Any person who does not believe that their country should immediately adopt the most atomized and globalized positions it is possible for them to adopt, you guessed it, literally Nazi’s.

            Birtherism, the belief that Barack Obama was not born in the US, does not implicitly make any reference to race. To say the same thing, again, so that maybe you will read it. The paradigm you are trying to create, lets you ascribe every single horrible xenophobic or nationalist thing in the history of the world, to Birtherism. This is overly broad, and not even kind of useful.

            But yeah, well, that’s just like, my opinion, man.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            One data point: I asked a birther what he thought would happen if Obama were found to not be a natural born American, and the birther hadn’t thought about. I think think this is good evidence that the birther community also hadn’t thought that far ahead, since the person I was talking with seemed to know a lot of details about birtherism.

            This doesn’t prove racism, but it does suggest that there was specific animus towards Obama rather than any sort of thought about practicality.

            Arguably this is just how deontological thinking looks– there’s a rule (laws are important) and that’s what counts.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            And wow, you just go ahead and make a list of all the worst examples you can think of for Xenophobic or Nationalist belief.

            No, I suggested a list of historically significant events which were caused by either (a) the racist stereotype I identified as being responsible for the birther movement or (b) one strictly equivalent to it with only the nationality and dominant ethnic group having been changed.

            In your zeal to deny that racism animated the birthers, you ended up claiming that I, personally, constructed the notion of racist nationalism, that it had never actually appeared in history before today. Congratulations, that’s got to be one of the most profoundly stupid things anyone has ever said on this website.

          • Spookykou says:

            I covered this in the comment you are directly responding to

            Maybe you are not getting my point, which is not that Xenophobia is not bad, and it is not that Xenophobia is not real, it is that Xenophobia is so overly broad, that the paradigm you are trying to create allows you to, call birthers …literally Nazi’s

            I guess I can understand how you got confused.

            I floated two ideas a few comments ago, either you are constructing a NEW paradigm, that directly involves the word ‘american’. Which might have been unreasonable, except you only ever referred to america for a while, and all of your examples were american examples. But this paradigm does have the added advantage of being potentially more directly linked to Birtherism, if it was a real thing.

            I think you are trying to construct this new racist paradigm of non-white immigrants are not real Americans

            OR

            You are just trying to ascribe xenophobia(read racism, nationalism, racist nationalism, all great examples of xenophobia) to birthers.

            The fact that the Birther Movement has Xenophobic undertones, means that you can literally link every single historical example of Xenophobia as ‘historical context’ for how ‘racist’ the Birthers must be, but I am sorry, I am not buying it.

            I am not saying that racism and nationalism are not things, I am not saying racial nationalism is not a thing. I am saying, for like the tenth time now, the paradigm you are trying to create is overly broad. Lets look closely at your own words.

            the racist stereotype I identified

            aha, your subconscious comes to save the day once more.

            [Nazi Germany] is an [aryan] nation, non-[aryan] immigrants and their descendants don’t count as real [Germans].

            Is not actually a word replace for.

            Barack Obama was not born in the United States of America.

            It is a word replace for a position you ascribed to that position, the position that you ascribed to birtherism can just as easily be ascribed to almost any position that even hints at nationalist or xenophobic things, seeing as how you ascribed it to something that literally makes no reference to xernophobic or nationalist things this should not surprise you. On its face, Barack Obama was not born in the United States of America, is a vaguely legal claim, that he does not have a right to be president.

            To clarifiy incase you still don’t get it.

            ‘I want to address the problems of Real America’

            [America] is an [christian] nation, non-[christian] immigrants and their descendants don’t count as real [Americans].

            Well that sure looks like racist nationalism, I guess that person is a Nazi, good thing I noticed the insidious connection. Or maybe, it is really easy to apply
            [country] is an [group] nation, non-[group] immigrants and their descendants don’t count as real [country].

            To anything that, wait I have a quote for this,

            SOUNDS like nationalism or xenophobia

            P.S. Oh, and I am not even trying to argue that the Birther movement wasn’t racist in some way, my whole point is that the historical context of the birther movement=/= the historical context of blood libel, and in your attempt to say that the Birther movement was motivated by the same level of hate and racism as blood libel, you have tried to construct a paradigm that lets you apply Nazi Germany as a historical context to anything that even looks kind of nationalist, which in my opinion is overly broad and not useful.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            I am not saying racial nationalism is not a thing.

            Great. So you agree that racist nationalism exists, that it has been common and important throughout history, and that the attitude that non-white immigrants to America and their descendants are suspiciously foreign is an instance of it? And do you see, also, how being irrationally certain that a black man with a foreign-sounding name couldn’t have been born in this country, no matter what his birth certificate says, could be a manifestation of this attitude?

          • Spookykou says:

            So, my edit covers this, but I will also post a reply.

            Do you think my hypothetical ‘Real American’ and their followers ‘could be a manifestation of this attitude?’ Maybe? We have the same evidence in both cases. The worst possible interpretation of their stated belief looks like racist nationalism. I am certainly willing to believe that some birthers are actually racist.

            I have always been responding to your claim that so and so eats babies = birtherism.

            We agreed that both are contextual

            I have since then been trying to make the claim that not all racism is created equally, and the historical context around so and so eats babies =/= the historical context around birtherism.

            You are trying to link birtherism through it’s xenophobic and nationalist pattern matching, to all racist nationalism through all of history, but importantly, this link is fundamentally manufactured. As I clearly stated, birtherism has xenophobic undertones, this does not mean that it is motivated by the same kinds of feelings and beliefs that motivated Nazi Germany, it does not engender the same feelings in the victims victim, you can’t just assume that any example of xenophobia is Nazi level bad.

            To ask you a question, How likely is it, or what percentage of birthers do you think hold deep genuine hate for all non-white immigrants?

            What percentage of people who hear the birther platform, understand it as genuine hate for all non-white immigrants?(feel free to reference this thread)

            How likely is it, or what percentage, of people who engage in blood libel, do you think hold a deep genuine hate for Jews?

            What percentage of people who hear blood libel, understand it as genuine hate for all Jews(feel free to reference this thread)

            It is not my intention to claim that racism is not involved in birtherism, just like I would not deny that racism is involved in asking an Asian kid to help you with your math, just because they are Asian. But the impact to the victim, and the feelings and motivations of the ‘attacker’ in these two cases, are totally different.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            The worst possible interpretation of their stated belief looks like racist nationalism. I am certainly willing to believe that some birthers are actually racist.

            Wonderful. Since you appear to concede that the birther conspiracy theories were motivated in part by racism of exactly the type I suggested, I see nothing left to dispute.

          • bean says:

            Re Japanese internment, Earthly Knight what do you make of this? Was it still all racism, or does that give suspicion which might have started it all?

          • Spookykou says:

            Well, that was never my dispute? The idea that nobody who believed in the birther conspiracy could have been racist is a particularly ridiculous belief, and I don’t think many people hold it? The belief that the birther conspiracy was motivated by the same racial animus as the Nazi party, is rather a different claim, and what I have been disputing.

            But I guess you would rather tilt at windmills.

            Just for fun,

            ‘It’s outrageous that multi-millionaires and billionaires are allowed to play by a different set of rules than hardworking families, especially when it comes to paying their fair share of taxes.’

            Do you think you could find any person in all of america who believes this, and is also racist against Jews and word replaces [millionaires and billionaires] with [Jews]?

            If you think such people exist, at all, then you concede that the Hilary Clinton Campaign was motivated in part by racism of exactly the type you suggested, I also see nothing left to dispute.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            @ bean

            I do not recall saying that racism was the sole cause of the Japanese-American internment. Is the problem here that people don’t understand that one event can have multiple causes?

            @ Spookykou

            The idea that nobody who believed in the birther conspiracy could have been racist is a particularly ridiculous belief,

            You’re backsliding. The claim is that racism, specifically the type of racism which sees non-white immigrants and their descendants as inherently suspicious and foreign, played a crucial role in the spread of the birther conspiracy theories. Are you on board with this or not?

          • baconbacon says:

            @ Bean

            Re Japanese internment, Earthly Knight what do you make of this? Was it still all racism, or does that give suspicion which might have started it all?

            What do you make of this?, a German spy ring of 30+ was discovered, with naturalized citizens who had been naturalized as early as 1920. How many Germans were rounded up and put into camps again?

          • Spookykou says:

            The Detained something like 10,000 Germans I think, but they only interned a small fraction of that.

            EK

            specifically the type of racism which sees non-white immigrants as inherently suspicious and foreign, played a crucial role in the spread of the birther conspiracy theories. Are you on board with this or not?

            Do you think antisemitism plays and has played a crucial role in spreading anti elite and anti wealth ideas. Are you on board with this or not?

            I am on board with your question to exactly the same degree that you are on board with my question.

            Wherever we end up standing, all forms of anti elite anti wealth ideation are as racist as the birther movement.

            Edit for clarity, You seem to be working under the assumption that the vast majory of birthers hold or held deeply racist opinions towards non-white people with foreign sounding names. This is not my model of Birthers, having a few in my family. The impression I got was, they heard a news story about somebody asking for Obama’s birth certificate, and him refusing to show it, they then thought some version of ‘If he was really born in America why wouldn’t he show it?!’ and thus, a birther is born. The only ‘proof’ that you have that the birther movement was racist, is the ideation you want to ascribe to it, I accepted that it was not impossible that some birthers might hold those positions, just like plenty of anti-elite people actually hold antisemitic positions.

          • lhn says:

            It at least looks from what I can see as if most/all German internees were classed as enemy aliens (though citizen family members sometimes voluntarily joined them in the internment camp), where the Japanese internment included some 70,000 American citizens.

          • bean says:

            @Earthly Knight

            I do not recall saying that racism was the sole cause of the Japanese-American internment. Is the problem here that people don’t understand that one event can have multiple causes?

            Be honest. Did you even know about that incident before I brought it up? Yes, this is very relevant, because when I found out about it, it shifted my opinion of how much racism had gone into that decision a lot.

            @baconbacon

            What do you make of this?, a German spy ring of 30+ was discovered, with naturalized citizens who had been naturalized as early as 1920. How many Germans were rounded up and put into camps again?

            My grandfather’s family got kicked out of Texas for being German in 1942, and his father was denied work in the shipyards until he’d gotten an affidavit that he was born in the US (very shortly after the family arrived from Germany). It wasn’t just the Japanese who suffered.
            I do see two big differences. In Niihau, the Japanese involved were, as far as anyone knows, totally uninvolved before the war, and were born over here. Japanese aviator lands on their door, and they immediately switch sides. This is very different from a few self-selected naturalized citizens continuing to hold loyalty to their original country. For that matter, the spy ring was wound up before the US entered the war.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            Did you even know about that incident before I brought it up?

            Uh, Sandy mentioned it earlier in the thread. As some of the other commenters have noted, there were a lot of Nazi sympathizers in the country with German heritage, too, but this didn’t lead to any large-scale round-up and internment of German-Americans.

            The Niihau incident also occurred in Hawaii, but only about 2% of the ethnically Japanese population of Hawaii ended up being sent to camps. It was the better-integrated mainland Japanese-Americans who suffered the most, which makes no sense if the internment was substantially a response to this specific incident.

          • bean says:

            Uh, Sandy mentioned it earlier in the thread. As some of the other commenters have noted, there were a lot of Nazi sympathizers in the country, too, but this didn’t lead to any large-scale round-up and internment of German-Americans.

            It did lead to those people being denied positions in vital war industries. As for why they weren’t rounded up, have you stopped to consider the relative strengths of the German and Japanese navies as perceived in 1942?

          • Spookykou says:

            which makes no sense if the internment was substantially a response to this specific incident.

            Being more concerned about possible traitors on the mainland makes some sense to me.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            @ bean

            I don’t think arguing that the Japanese internment was a rational response to the perceived strength of the Japanese navy is going to be a winner for you.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            @ Spookykou

            Do you think antisemitism plays and has played a crucial role in spreading anti elite and anti wealth ideas. Are you on board with this or not?

            I think that there is a rational basis for having “anti-elite and anti-wealth ideas” and that those ideas propagate chiefly on their own merits. Ludicrous conspiracy theories like birtherism and the blood libel have no basis in reason or fact, so we have to look to other possible causes to explain how their spread. In the case of blood libel, this is coherence with the racist stereotype of jews as villainous parasites. In the case of birtherism, it’s coherence with the well-worn racist stereotype that immigrants who are not members of the dominant race– in our case, non-white immigrants to America– can never qualify as real citizens.

          • bean says:

            I don’t think arguing that the Japanese internment was a rational response to the perceived strength of the Japanese navy is going to be a winner for you.

            Why not? There were serious public worries that the Japanese were going to be appearing off of California any day now, and the military wasn’t ready to completely discount the possibility. In hindsight, it’s obviously ludicrous, but that’s why I used the word perceived. And if you’re worried about invasion (never a concern with the Germans, who couldn’t even invade Britain) then rounding up everyone who might suddenly decide to help them when they come ashore isn’t totally irrational.
            (Oh, and just to be clear, sources are Samuel Eliot Morison’s Rising Sun in the Pacific and the Nimitz War Diary.)

          • Earthly Knight says:

            The Battle of Midway, which effectively ended the threat of Japanese naval supremacy in the Pacific, took place while Japanese-Americans were still being moved to the camps. Like I said, the argument that the internment was in any way rational is not a winner.

          • Cerebral Paul Z. says:

            In politics, ideas don’t have to have “basis in reason or fact” to spread; they only have to have political usefulness. Isn’t that what the big “fake news” flap of the moment is about?

          • Spookykou says:

            Ludicrous conspiracy

            I think we have pretty wildly different opinions on what counts as a ludicrous conspiracy, also I think you are still conflating birtherism with your worst possible form of birtherism. ‘It is literally impossible for a black man with a foreign name to be American’. I did not hear that, I am not sure where that idea was stated, I am willing to believe that some people who are birthers also believe that, but like I said from the start, unless I am very confused about the birther conspiracy, that was not the main thrust.

            Given that, my explanation

            The impression I got was, they heard a news story about somebody asking for Obama’s birth certificate, and him refusing to show it, they then thought some version of ‘If he was really born in America why wouldn’t he show it?!’ and thus, a birther is born.

            seems considerably more reasonable then everyone being a closet racist nationalist. I then simply pointed out that your ‘evidence’ for your case, could be applied pretty liberally to almost anything, so it in and of itself should not change any minds.

            WWII stuff

            took place while Japanese-Americans were still being moved to the camps.

            This does not seem to prove your point, unless you are calling for a sudden change in policy, after the threat of the Japanese Navy was diminished, which might have been warranted. It does not speak to whatever original plans the US government laid for the internment, before the battle of Midway.

            Edit, Ninja’d by Bean

          • bean says:

            The Battle of Midway, which effectively ended the threat of Japanese naval supremacy in the Pacific, took place while Japanese-Americans were still being moved to the camps. Like I said, the argument that the internment was in any way rational is not a winner.

            This is self-refuting. The decision to intern was made in February, when the Japanese were sweeping all before them. If you don’t understand why it might have taken time to carry out, or why it continued after the threat of invasion ended, then I’d suggest looking up ‘bureaucratic inertia’.
            Edit:
            A bit more digging turns up that the full timeline is more complicated. The authority for internment was issued in February, but the full roundup didn’t happen until May, on the orders of General DeWitt. I will admit that he appears to have been an out-and-out racist, and it is an indictment of Roosevelt that he didn’t step in when DeWitt widened the scope after the threat had passed. I will stand by my statement that the order which gave DeWitt the authority to do what he did (which was issued in February) was at least defensible.

          • baconbacon says:

            And if you’re worried about invasion (never a concern with the Germans, who couldn’t even invade Britain) then rounding up everyone who might suddenly decide to help them when they come ashore isn’t totally irrational.

            What if you are worried about sabotage? Germany using U-boats to pickup and drop off trained operatives seems like as reasonable a threat (at least as reasonable as Japan’s navy conquering California).

          • Earthly Knight says:

            @ bean

            Racial minorities with an alien culture are put in concentration camps for three years after any glimmer of threat they may have represented is extinguished, and your go-to explanation is bureaucratic inertia? Would you accept this as a plausible account of any other ethnic cleansing in history?

            @ Spookykou

            ‘It is literally impossible for a black man with a foreign name to be American’. I did not hear that, I am not sure where that idea was stated,

            Tell me, do you think most people who repeat the blood libel say or even hold the explicit belief that jews are villainous parasites? The birther theory didn’t need a bunch of cackling Bull-Connor-style racists to spread. It just needed to take root in the minds of people who were a little too eager to believe the president was foreign-born in light of the color of his skin, his exotic surname, and his immigrant ancestry.

          • Spookykou says:

            🙂

            I asked you this exact question a few comments up.

            I honestly believe that almost anyone who would engage in blood libel believes that Jews are villainous parasites.

            This plays into a theme that I have been repeating in a lot of my comments, blood libel is ‘real’ racism, with real racial animus, the birther conspiracy is, racist adjacent at best.

            Do I think the main reason the birther idea spread was secret mild racism, no, I think it was politically useful and blasted all over the media. Do I think some birthers might secretly be mildly racist, sure.

            Does that make Birtherism = Blood libel, in terms of its impact, or how we should judge those involved, no.

          • bean says:

            @baconbacon:

            What if you are worried about sabotage? Germany using U-boats to pickup and drop off trained operatives seems like as reasonable a threat (at least as reasonable as Japan’s navy conquering California).

            More reasonable, given that that actually happened, but rounding up all Germans on the East Coast wouldn’t do anything to help. I already pointed out that Germans were excluded from places where they could commit sabotage, and terrorism wasn’t really a thing back then.

            @Earthly Knight

            Racial minorities with an alien culture are put in concentration camps for three years after any glimmer of threat they may have represented is extinguished, and your go-to explanation is bureaucratic inertia?

            You may have missed my edits, where I addressed some of this. All of the country was covered by the same authority, and it wasn’t targeted only at Japanese. The difference is that DeWitt was much more racist than the generals in charge of the other Defense Commands. For bureaucratic reasons, DeWitt was never replaced with someone who was more reasonable.

            Would you accept this as a plausible account of any other ethnic cleansing in history?

            I think you’re slightly abusing ethnic cleansing here, but yes. I’d absolutely accept this as a plausible explanation for something similar happening elsewhere.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            Here, incidentally, you can read about the US infantry regiment from WWII comprised primarily of Japanese-Americans, many of whom volunteered directly from the internment camps. In aggregate, the regiment was awarded 9,500 purple hearts, and 21 medals of honor.

          • bean says:

            Here, incidentally, you can read about the US infantry regiment from WWII comprised primarily of Japanese-Americans, many of whom volunteered directly from the internment camps. In aggregate, the regiment was awarded 9,500 purple hearts, and 21 medals of honor.

            Of course I knew about the 442nd (if you haven’t noticed, I’m a fairly serious WWII geek), and I’m certainly not making the claim that there was any substantial disloyalty among the interned. That doesn’t mean there weren’t reasons besides racism that some of the decisions were made.

          • bean says:

            I’ve looked into this more, and I may have been unfair to Gen. DeWitt. I found the Army’s official history of US continental defense during the war. According to them (and I’ll admit that the whole thing was probably considered embarrassing by 1962, when it was published), the major push came from the citizens of the states in question, not the military. DeWitt’s orders were executing what had been agreed on in February, not the rogue actions I’d read them as. Chapter 4 is also interesting for a view of the apparent threat to the coast.

        • Aapje says:

          @Earthly Knight

          Trump claimed that Curiel wasn’t adjudicating the case impartially, and inferred that this must be because the judge had Mexican heritage and was therefore automatically biased against him.

          Is it racist to claim that other people are (subconsciously) racist?

          This is something that the social justice people do quite a lot to white people too. Are those insinuations equally racist to what Trump said?

          • Matt M says:

            As I’ve said elsewhere in the thread, Trump only said that Curiel would be unable to judge him fairly after MONTHS of the media insisting that Trump cannot possibly win over hispanic voters because of his racist anti-hispanic comments.

            So CNN saying “Hispanics will judge Trump not on the merits of his policies but on his anti-hispanic comments” is a-ok, but Trump saying “this particular hispanic will judge me not on the merits of my case but on my anti-hispanic comments” is unconscionable racism.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            “The Hispanic Vote” includes a lot of dumb hispanics, Curiel, no matter how much AA he got, is presumably at the very least a pretty smart guy.

          • Randy M says:

            What does smart have to do with it? A smart judge could more easily justify or obscure his bias.

          • Matt M says:

            So CNN is less racist than Trump because they implied a lot of hispanics are dumb and he didn’t?

            More specifically, they are saying that it’s DUMB of hispanics to judge Trump solely on his anti-hispanic comments, and presumably DON’T want them to do that?

            Really?

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            More specifically, they are saying that it’s DUMB of hispanics to judge Trump solely on his anti-hispanic comments, and presumably DON’T want them to do that?

            Really?

            I mean, it’s implicit in what they said, no? Except for the part that they don’t want them to do that, you made that one up.

            So CNN is less racist than Trump because they implied a lot of hispanics are dumb and he didn’t?

            To be fair, the implication that there’s a lot of dumb hispanics is not the same as the implication that there’s a disproportionate amount of dumb hispanics. There’s a lot of dumb people, and there’s a lot of hispanics, there’s nothing racist about that.

            Trump is implying, on the other hand, that this other guy’s ethnic loyalty will supersede his objective judgement. Now, I don’t think that’s super racist or anything, but it’s probably more racist than the CNN thing.

          • keranih says:

            A wise Latina judge, on the other hand, that one you’d never catch making an error in judgement.

            I don’t see how it is possible to claim that “black people are not given a fair trial if only white people are on the jury” and then say that it is racist to charge that a Hispanic judge might have the (presumed) biases of many other Hispanics.

            Again, these claims of racism on the part of Trump are not supportable given the preferences and prior claims of the people making those claims.

            He was a crap candidate and I have no hope of him being an excellent president. People who object to him on those grounds have my full support.

            People who go on and on about Trump’s “white nationalist racism” make me happier and happier I voted for him.

            I hope you’re pleased with yourselves.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            I don’t see how it is possible to claim that “black people are not given a fair trial if only white people are on the jury” and then say that it is racist to charge that a Hispanic judge might have the (presumed) biases of many other Hispanics.

            Have you ever heard someone claim that a black person can never be given a fair trial if the judge is white? I haven’t. And yes, it is indeed racist to claim that a hispanic judge’s presumed racial loyalties will prevent him from properly carrying out his professional duties. Compare: “How can a woman judge be trusted to be fair to the husband in divorce proceedings?”

            People who go on and on about Trump’s “white nationalist racism” make me happier and happier I voted for him.

            You’re “happier and happier” that you voted for a sexual predator?

          • keranih says:

            Have you ever heard someone claim that a black person can never be given a fair trial if the judge is white? I haven’t.

            Honey, under what rock have you been???

            And *of course* I’ve heard people say – for decades that women can’t get a fair shake in sexual assault trials going before a male judge, and that of course a female judge is going to be more sympathetic to the wife.

            I agree that we should agree that equality before the law is the best and highest virtue, but the whole concept of affirmative action in government positions is to get “people who look like the community” in positions of power, as opposed to “the white folks” running everything (unfairly).

            And now it gets flipped around so that “white folks” are starting to suspect that a black or Hispanic judge is going to be biased against them, and you blame the white folks for that notion? Really?

            happier and happier that you voted for a sexual predator

            Happier and happier that, given the two options, I declined to believe the hogswallow being piped in by the Democrats and their pet MSM about how awesome their candidate was, and how lousy the other guy was.

            The anti-Trump arguments are emotionally-based and factually groundless. There is no telling what else was being misrepresented by the people making those arguments, and I am better off listening to the people on the other side of the power incline.

            This doesn’t change the fact that I still wish it was Rubio or Walker. Or Webb.

            But I wasn’t given that choice.

          • Aapje says:

            @EK

            Have you ever heard someone claim that a black person can never be given a fair trial if the judge is white?

            A very common explanation by left-wing people about why there are so many black people in prison is that they are policed harder, sentenced harder, etc. Their solution to this is to demand more ‘diversity’ aka more black cops/judges. Their proposed solution only makes sense if they believe that white people are biased against black people in a way that black people themselves are not.

            Now, I don’t really mind you calling Trump a racist for this IF you also are willing to use the same slur for out the other tribe when they do the same thing.

            I hate, hate, hate, hate hypocrisy much more than sloppy accusations.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            And *of course* I’ve heard people say – for decades that women can’t get a fair shake in sexual assault trials going before a male judge,

            That wasn’t the question. I asked: Have you ever heard someone claim that a black person can never be given a fair trial if the judge is white? If the answer is yes, I would like to see evidence to that effect. If the answer is no, you’ll have to concede that Trump’s racist attack on Curiel was different from the sort of criticism leftists typically make about racial bias in the justice system.

            The anti-Trump arguments are emotionally-based and factually groundless.

            >”factually groundless”
            >Voted for birther

            Question: you voted for a known sexual predator, so should we assume that you’re pro-rape, or do you just not care about the welfare of sexual assault victims?

          • keranih says:

            you voted for a sexual predator, so should we assume that you’re pro-rape, or do you just not care about the welfare of sexual assault victims?

            …yeap. You just said that.

            Bugger off, mate. And be glad I’m still smarting from the last banning, or else I’d go into more detail about your blindness, projection, bad faith, unsupported arguments, and in general sore-loser-tude.

            Again, you wanna talk about how Trump is so totally not a great choice to run this country, I’m right there with you. You want to limit the discussion to how -ist Trump is, and so how -ist I must be for preferring him to the train wreck of yet another Clinton administration…

            …you go right ahead.

            You won’t convince *me* that Trump’s a better option than *anyone* else out there, but no telling what the lurkers will conclude.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            You want to limit the discussion to how -ist Trump is, and so how -ist I must be for preferring him to the train wreck of yet another Clinton administration…

            Yeah, I can see how the horror of having to suffer through another eight years of peace and prosperity like we had under Bill could definitely justify voting for a sexual predator.

          • suntzuanime says:

            I’m not sure Bill Clinton being a sexual predator was actually the reason for the peace and prosperity, but it’s an interesting idea.

          • Spookykou says:

            God bless FamousChineseAuthorMovingPictures you nearly had me out of my seat.

          • Moon says:

            “The train wreck of a Clinton administration” is a real thing in many Right of Center people’s minds. Look at Breitbart or Fox News or listen to Right Wing radio. A ton of people really believe all those falsehoods and conspiracy theories. And that’s why they voted for Trump.

          • Moon says:

            “you voted for a known sexual predator, so should we assume that you’re pro-rape, or do you just not care about the welfare of sexual assault victims?”

            Listen to Fox or Right Wing radio or read Breitbart and you will know why. According to a lot of Right Wing “news sources”, Trump was innocent of everything he was accused of, while HRC was guilty of everything any conspiracy theory creator accused her of, like killing almost 100 people who got in her way, being a sexual predator, treason by means of emails etc. etc.

            People really believed this bs. That’s why they voted Trump. We have a huuuuuge propaganda problem in the U.S. No conspiracy theory was ever too ridiculous for Right Wing media to push, or for their consumers to believe.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ suntzuanime
            I’m not sure Bill Clinton being a sexual predator was actually the reason for the peace and prosperity, but it’s an interesting idea.

            I thought that at the time — that Bill was exercising his testosterone in the right kind of place, rather than in politics. Make love not war.

            Mild evidence: the only military action of his era was Kosovo — after the Impeachment.

            ObPedantry: Bill was not a ‘predator’; she snapped her thong at him, pursued him for quite a while afterwards. Not, I hope, that you meant Bill was the ‘predator’, but I’m clarifying for the sake of the children under 40.

          • Is it racist to selectively claim that other people are (subconsciously) racist?

          • stevenj says:

            “the only military action of his [Bill Clinton’s] era was Kosovo — after the Impeachment”

            Not true.
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_military_operations#1990.E2.80.931999

            Some of the major military operations initiated by Bill Clinton:
            Bosnia 1993-1995: Operations Deny Flight (no-fly zone) and Deliberate Force (Large-scale air strikes against Serbian targets).
            Haiti 1994-1995: Operation Uphold Democracy (invasion to overthrow the government and restore the previous administration).
            Iraq 1992-2003: Various airstrikes
            Kosovo 1999

          • Matt M says:

            Also I’m not sure we can just brush off Kosovo as no big deal. While it was small in scale relative to many other operations, it was also completely and entirely unnecessary, resulted in a whole lot of death and destruction in that particular region, and widely speculated to have been undertaken for the specific purposes of distracting the public from Clinton’s political troubles…

          • While it was small in scale relative to many other operations, it was also completely and entirely unnecessary, resulted in a whole lot of death and destruction in that particular region, and widely speculated to have been undertaken for the specific purposes of distracting the public from Clinton’s political troubles.

            I strongly disagree with almost all of that, particularly as to Bill Clinton’s role, but I really don’t want to go back and re-litigate the Yugoslav break-up right now.

            I will say that the ultimate outcome, with Kosovo as an independent republic, strikes me as ludicrous, as if the Balkans needed yet another small land-locked country.

          • “And yes, it is indeed racist to claim that a hispanic judge’s presumed racial loyalties will prevent him from properly carrying out his professional duties.”

            Suppose he makes the corresponding claim about other judges, that their decisions are biased by their racial, gender, ethnic, political, … loyalties.

            You might say he is prejudiced against judges. You might, more plausibly, say that he is prejudiced against humans, think them less honest and rational than they should be.

            But I don’t see why you would say he was a racist, unless the race you were referring to was the human race.

          • Controls Freak says:

            I’m not sure we can just brush off Kosovo as no big deal…

            …not to mention the mess of international law we made. Item 1 of Russia’s justification of operations in Ukraine follow from Kosovo.

          • Aapje says:

            @TheAncientGeekAKA1Z

            Is it racist to selectively claim that other people are (subconsciously) racist?

            Imagine that he also believes that white judges are racist in favor of white people.

            Now imagine an alternative reality where the judge is white.

            The logical conclusion is that he would either expect to benefit from racism or that racism would not play a role (if the students are also white). In the first case, it would harm him to point out the racism. In the second case, it would be a nonsensical to link the lawsuit to racism.

            I would argue that it is not racist to point out racism that harms you personally, but not racism that doesn’t. It is merely rationally selfish.

      • nyccine says:

        I keep hearing that Hillary made up the birther thing back when she was running against Obama. Is that wrong?

        Technically, yes. It was his literary agent.

        But yes, the Clinton campaign most definitely made an issue of the possibility. Hillary personally? Arguably not. But gbdub is just flat-out wrong when he claims there was no direct connection to the Hillary campaign in 2008.

        • Matt M says:

          The sheer timing of it points a huge arrow of obvious suspicion directly to the Clinton campaign in the sense that it started being raised as a potential issue well before Obama had the nomination completely wrapped up.

          • Well... says:

            OK. But that’s a side issue anyway–it ought to give the people crying racist some pause, but it doesn’t refute them. The real issue is whether birtherism is a racist argument in itself, and I just don’t see how it is. If Bernie Sanders had won the primary and then there was a lot of focus on how his father was born in Poland and maybe some obscurity over where Bernie was born, you’d have Trump voters asking to see his papers too.

            It’s one of those “Lots of douchebags wear trucker hats; you’re wearing a trucker hat; you must be a douchebag” type things.

          • Iain says:

            The entire point of the people “crying racist” about birtherism is that no white politician has ever been subjected to this kind of sustained attack. It’s not just that people wanted to “see his papers”. It’s that after the short form birth certificate was released, people rejected it, called it a conspiracy, and demanded the long form birth certificate – and then when that was released, Trump still kept pushing it, literally for years.

            The closest thing to a counter-example was Trump’s attack on Cruz – and, as I think I mentioned somewhere else, that was a short-lived attack based on a procedural question about the definition of “natural-born”.

          • Well... says:

            I rescind the portion of my argument where I say Trump became a birther opportunistically for this election. The rest of my argument (about birtherism not being intrinsically racist) stands.

            I am most surprised, though, to see that Trump took a stand on ANYTHING (except NAFTA & general grumbling about “deals”) before 2015, particularly a stand shared by anyone on the Right.

          • Iain says:

            So you’d probably be surprised to know that he took out a full-page ad in 1989 to argue for the death penalty in the case of the Central Park Five, a group of five black or Hispanic teenagers who confessed under duress to a brutal gang rape and were later exonerated by DNA evidence?

          • Controls Freak says:

            @Iain

            The entire point of the people “crying racist” about birtherism is that no white politician has ever been subjected to this kind of sustained attack.

            I ask the same question that Earthly Knight seems to have ignored above: I’m curious what you think about America’s first Canadian President, Chester A. Arthur.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            There was some legitimate question whether Chester A. Arthur was actually born in the country, wasn’t there? If you’re aiming to produce evidence that the birther conspiracy theory is not racially motivated, you will need to locate an example of a white politician who has faced sustained accusations of being foreign-born where the accusations are totally scurrilous.

          • Iain says:

            @Well….

            To reply to your broader point: You are right that asking for somebody’s birth certificate is not inherently racist. That isn’t the argument, though. The argument is about what happened after Obama released it. For any white politician, releasing a birth certificate would have been the end of the issue. Obama released two birth certificates, and the story still had legs, because it fit into racist narratives about non-white people not being “real” Americans. Donald Trump chose to stoke those narratives with bald-faced lies. (“An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that @BarackObama’s birth certificate is a fraud.” – Aug 2012) Maybe he did it because he is racist; maybe he is not racist himself, but deliberately pandered to racists; maybe he somehow accidentally stumbled onto One Weird Trick Minorities Hate. I don’t really care. Whatever his motivation, Donald Trump spent years trying to undermine the legitimacy of the first black president by pandering to racists.

            @Controls Freak: As a Canadian, I am in strong support!

            More seriously: I know very little about Arthur. Based solely off the Wikipedia article:
            a) Racist or not, spreading rumours about Arthur clearly didn’t cover Hinman in glory.
            b) It does not appear that Hinman was actually successful in spreading rumours about Arthur.
            c) It seems that Hinman first tried rumours about Arthur being Irish, and only fell back on Canada when that failed. This was the 1880s, and Irish people weren’t completely white yet; “Irish need not apply” signs were still a thing at the time. Arthur’s father was born in Ireland. To that extent, it seems at least plausible to me that part of the appeal of Arthur-birtherism was anti-Irish sentiment (although I freely admit that I am extrapolating a lot here and am welcome to being proven wrong.)
            If that doesn’t satisfy you, then feel free to mentally amend “no white politician” in my previous post to “no white politician in the last 130 years “. I’m not convinced that events from 136 years ago are particularly relevant to the current context.

          • Jiro says:

            So you’d probably be surprised to know that he took out a full-page ad in 1989 to argue for the death penalty in the case of the Central Park Five, a group of five black or Hispanic teenagers who confessed under duress to a brutal gang rape and were later exonerated by DNA evidence?

            They didn’t confess to committing the rape themselves, they confessed to being accomplices while someone else raped her. It’s hard for DNA evidence to exonerate them from that. Furthermore, Trump had no way of knowing even that much in 1989, short of never arguing for serious punishment for black criminals just in case one of them might be found innocent years later and lead to an accusation of racism.

          • Iain says:

            They didn’t confess to committing the rape themselves, they confessed to being accomplices while someone else raped her. It’s hard for DNA evidence to exonerate them from that.

            No, but the guy who actually committed the rape confessed in 2002, had his involvement confirmed by DNA, and said he committed the rape alone. Moreover, the confessions that they did give were mutually inconsistent and didn’t fit with various bits of independent evidence – and that part, at least, was knowable in 1989.

            Arguing for serious punishment in the abstract is one thing. Taking out a full page advertisement in a newspaper arguing for the death penalty for teenagers in a specific case is another.

            Put another way: if George Soros had taken out a full-page ad about the Duke lacrosse case, and refused to recant when it fell apart, would you count this as evidence that he was an “SJW”?

          • DrBeat says:

            There was some legitimate question whether Chester A. Arthur was actually born in the country, wasn’t there? If you’re aiming to produce evidence that the birther conspiracy theory is not racially motivated, you will need to locate an example of a white politician who has faced sustained accusations of being foreign-born where the accusations are totally scurrilous.

            The only difference between there being “legitimate question” about something and the accusation being “totally scurrilous” — the only reason there has ever been and the only reason there will ever be, ever, ever ever ever ever ever until the Sun is cold and dead — is whether the accusation is emotionally satisfying to the speaker to repeat.

          • Matt M says:

            “No, but the guy who actually committed the rape confessed in 2002, had his involvement confirmed by DNA, and said he committed the rape alone. Moreover, the confessions that they did give were mutually inconsistent and didn’t fit with various bits of independent evidence – and that part, at least, was knowable in 1989.”

            Not sure this is easily analogized to Duke Lacrosse in which everybody, from day one, categorically denied any and all wrongdoing with 100% consistency and an almost complete and total lack of any evidence that would indicate their guilt.

          • Iain says:

            Sure, and Soros didn’t actually take out an ad. It’s a hypothetical question. If you need to pretend that the Duke case lasted longer before falling apart, you have my permission.

          • “no white politician has ever been subjected to this kind of sustained attack”

            Have there been white presidential candidates who were born to a citizen mother and a non-citizen father very shortly after the mother arrived back in the U.S.? That seems to me to be the situation that made the story believable enough to be pushed.

            Obviously his mother didn’t know he would be running for president. But, if I correctly understand the relevant law (from a very quick web search), if he was born outside the U.S. to a citizen mother and non-citizen father he would not be a citizen, if born inside he would. So if he had been born just before she returned to the U.S. there would have been an incentive for her to claim he was born just after. And since he wasn’t a presidential candidate at the time, there is no reason why anybody would have been paying close attention.

            That was enough to make it an initially believable story and the combination of it’s being a good story and his running for president was enough to keep it going even with evidence against.

            Do you know how hard it would have been at the time to get a bogus birth certificate, perhaps by bribing a clerk? I don’t and, more importantly, the average American doesn’t. So even with the evidence of the birth certificates, it isn’t astonishing that some people continued to believe the story.

            At only a slight tangent, do you remember the FLDS mess in Texas some years back? The Texas child protection authorities were making public statements about how many of the fundamentalist Mormon women whose children they had seized were minors. They were basing those statements on ignoring documentary evidence of age in the belief that it was fraudulent, and simply treating their guesses at women’s ages as facts. It was obviously their view that birth certificates were not proof of when someone was born.

            An old post of mine with links to more relevant stuff.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            @ Dr Beat

            The only difference between there being “legitimate question” about something and the accusation being “totally scurrilous” — the only reason there has ever been and the only reason there will ever be, ever, ever ever ever ever ever until the Sun is cold and dead — is whether the accusation is emotionally satisfying to the speaker to repeat.

            By “legitimate question” I mean that the accusation has some non-trivial amount of evidence in its favor, by “totally scurrilous” I mean that the evidence is trivial or non-existent. This seems pretty straightforward. Or do you think there’s no such thing as evidence?

            @ David Friedman

            Well before Trump entered the fray, journalists had located notices of Obama’s birth in two separate Hawaiian newspapers. It’s not just a question of forging a birth certificate, birthers had to believe that a large group of actors were actively conspiring to conceal the circumstances of the president’s birth. Hence, “conspiracy theory.”

          • massivefocusedinaction says:

            I supported raising a stink because I wanted to know just how often did he claim one background when it benefits and another when it ceases to benefit. Whether he had a birth certificate or didn’t makes little difference to the issues where I wanted to see further answers.

          • DrBeat says:

            The assessment of whether something has a non-trivial amount of evidence in its favor is identical in every possible respect to the assessment of whether something is emotionally satisfying to repeat.

            There is such a thing as evidence; nobody involved interacts with it at any stage beyond claiming it justifies them saying the things they already wanted to say and already committed to say regardless of evidence. The pieces of evidence pointing to Chester A. Arthur not being in the US could be just as legitimate or illegitimate as the evidence pointing to Obama not being born in the US, but none of the people involved in making that distinction will ever be capable of making that assessment based on anything other than what they find emotionally satisfying to say.

          • Controls Freak says:

            @Iain, Earthly Knight

            I’m going to make a broad point by way of two examples.

            1. I am active in the academic literature on dynamics/control theory, robotics, autonomy, etc. I often make fun of a phenomenon where a paper will state, “Group X did sensor fusion with lidar and vision; Group Y did sensor fusion with vision and ultrasonic; Group Z did sensor fusion with lidar and ultrasonic.” Then, they will proudly proclaim, “We are The First to do sensor fusion with all three!” Of course, there’s literally nothing different about the methods they’re using, but by golly, they’ve found a case that no one has quite bothered to publish yet. It’s even better if they include, “The first aerial platform to…” or, “The first rotorcraft platform to…” or the like. Somehow, these papers get published, but everyone knows that they’re not actually doing anything new here.

            2. In the original PPACA case (NFIB), the government made an argument that the health care market was unique. They identified six features that distinguished it (broadly construed) from other markets. Ignoring the fact that I can construe examples broadly enough to make it non-unique, one justice cut straight to the problem during oral arguments. It’s all well and good to come up with a list of properties which distinguish Item X. You can do this for any X, because, uh, nonidentical things are distinguishable. However, you need an argument for why those properties distinguish Item X for the purposes of the Constitution.

            So, I’m sure that given enough time, you can find some list of properties which distinguish the instant case from prior cases (though, you guys should probably get together and agree on what those properties are going to be ahead of time). However, (especially in the case when other combinations of said properties have existed in the past) you need to show (from first principles) why that particular set of properties implies that something is racist. So far, you seem to have:

            A. “People questioned a candidate’s Constitutional eligibility to run for President. The candidate in question is black, so it’s racist.” Uh. We have examples of this happening before. Hmm.

            B. “People questioned a candidate’s Constitutional eligibility to run for President in a sustained fashion. The candidate in question is black, so it’s racist.” Uh, we also have an example of this happening before. Hmm.

            C(i). “People questioned a candidate’s Constitutional eligibility to run for President in a sustained fashion under circumstances which I subjectively find to be unreasonable,” or

            C(ii). “People questioned a candidate’s Constitutional eligibility to run for President in a sustained fashion within a completely arbitrary timeline.”

            Ok. Given enough time, we can probably drill it down to a unique case. There’s only been 44 presidents, so maybe on the order of 100-200 candidates. That doesn’t require a very high VC dimension. Your challenge is to (come to an agreement with your side about which properties you’re going to roll with, then) show that these properties aren’t totally ad hoc. Show us why they’re relevant for purposes of showing racism. Given that all of the components have been plentiful in the course of politics as usual, why is this particular combination new and special? From first principles, why does going from B to (your future choice of) C take us from “not racist” to “totally racist”? This is especially challenging when multiple other individuals have given non-racist reasons for making such a jump (e.g., ‘When politicians seem like they’re hiding something, I assume they’re hiding something important,’ (said every person who mentioned Trump’s tax returns)).

          • Douglas Knight says:

            Iain,

            Arguing for serious punishment in the abstract is one thing. Taking out a full page advertisement in a newspaper arguing for the death penalty for teenagers in a specific case is another.

            Have you read the ad?

          • Earthly Knight says:

            @ Dr Beat

            The pieces of evidence pointing to Chester A. Arthur not being in the US could be just as legitimate or illegitimate as the evidence pointing to Obama not being born in the US, but none of the people involved in making that distinction will ever be capable of making that assessment based on anything other than what they find emotionally satisfying to say.

            I am still not sure where this is coming from, unless it’s some kind of general skepticism about evidence. If you prefer, we can restate the claim in terms of probabilities, as follows:

            P(S was not born in the United States|all we know about the circumstances of his birth is that he was born to a family who frequently traveled across the border between Vermont and Canada) > P(S was not born in the United States|we have a copy of S’s Hawaiian birth certificate & two notices of his birth in Hawaiian newspapers).

            This strikes me as about as straightforward as saying the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow is greater than the probability that it will rain in New York two weeks hence. Or do you think this claim also boils down to emotional satisfaction?

            @ Controls Freak

            I agree that there must be a principled basis for dismissing Chester A. Arthur as a counter-example to the hypothesis that the spread of the birther conspiracy theories was animated by racism. Fortunately, there is. We advance racism as an explanation for the birther movement only because (a) there is a phenomenon here in need of explanation, remarkable in terms of its longevity, virulence, and intractability in the face of contrary evidence, and (b) it cannot be explained in the standard way, that is, in terms of its proponents rationally responding to the evidence available to them. If you find birther attacks on a white presidential candidate, but they were either not sustained or not widespread, that will fail condition (a), because occasional, fleeting smears are a routine feature of politics. If you find birther attacks on a white presidential candidate, but there was some legitimate question about his eligibility, that will fail condition (b), because there would then be some rational basis for the attacks and they would require no special explanation. It appears that the birther attacks on Arthur fail on both counts, hence, they are no real evidence against the proposed connection between racism and the birther conspiracy theories targeting President Obama.

          • Matt M says:

            “(b) it cannot be explained in the standard way, that is, in terms of its proponents rationally responding to the evidence available to them.”

            What about conspiracy theories regarding 9/11 or the JFK assassination or the fake moon landing?

            There are thousands of conspiracy theories that have not immediately gone away because people presented some evidence that pretty clearly disproves them. Are they all racist too?

          • Controls Freak says:

            there is a phenomenon here in need of explanation, remarkable in terms of its longevity, virulence, and intractability in the face of contrary evidence

            Sounds like bog standard politics + conspiracy theory.

            it cannot be explained in the standard way, that is, in terms of its proponents rationally responding to the evidence available to them

            Sounds like bog standard politics + conspiracy theory.

            I mean… I really hope you can come up with examples all on your own this time.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            Part of what needs explanation is why there were no other birther conspiracy theories (meeting conditions (a) and (b)) targeting white presidents, why the birthers waited for a black guy with an exotic-sounding surname to show up before it became imperative that the president prove he was born here beyond the slightest doubt. As far as I can tell, no plausible explanation of this other than racism has ever been proposed.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            Other than the several plausible explanations that have just been proposed right here in this comments section, you mean?

          • Earthly Knight says:

            Namely…?

          • Sandy says:

            Without condoning birtherism, I don’t think it would have come with just any black guy who became President — I don’t think it would have come up if Cory Booker had become President, for example. I think it was easier to smear Obama like that because of his international background – son of a Kenyan national, born in Hawaii, raised in Indonesia, only really started living on the mainland when he started attending college in LA.

          • “Namely…?”

            I’m not sure if it was in this thread, but the explanation I proposed was that Obama was born just after his mother returned to the U.S. If he had been born slightly earlier, or she returned slightly later, he would not have been a citizen (as I understand the relevant law) and not have been qualified to run for president.

            So it made a good story to claim that the timing was just a little off, that his mother came back with a newborn and pretended he had been born in the U.S.

            At the same time, it fit with other strange things–a foreign name, a foreign father. The package was a dramatic story. In addition, of course, it was a story that some people wanted to believe, since if it was true (and demonstrable) it meant he couldn’t be president and, like most candidates, he was someone many people didn’t want to be president.

            Are there any other presidential candidates for whom a similar story works? In the other recent cases I know of, the issue was not what had happened but the detailed interpretation of the law, which is less interesting.

          • Controls Freak says:

            @Earthly Knight

            You’re still running into the lidar+vision+ultrasonic problem. There are plenty of examples of other political attacks/conspiracy theories meeting (a) and (b). There are plenty of other birther conspiracy theories. Why is this particular combination super duper unique and fundamentally different… rather than just being another combination of the same three elements that have been around forever… but which just happens to not have happened simultaneously before (because of the aforementioned small VC dimension required).

            If we call the Constitutional eligibility challenge item (c), it seems like you’re claiming, “I totally understand how people could have non-racist reasons for every other combination of (a),(b),(c)… but if we put them all together, I have no explanation for it. Therefore, in the absence of an alternative explanation (perhaps ignoring the various alternative explanations given), I revert to the null hypothesis of racism.”

            I don’t buy it. At all. All of the reasons for people adopting all of those other combinations of (a),(b),(c) almost certainly directly apply for adopting the union of them. You’ve still said nothing to show that this combination is fundamentally different from other combinations.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ Earthly Knight

            Part of what needs explanation is why there were no other birther conspiracy theories […] targeting white presidents [….]

            I presume that most US politicians had more (if needed) than a piece of paper to back up their claim of birth in the US. Such as would result from having stable parents in a stable marriage with some position in a community, continuity of friends of the family who would remember the baby shower, the baptism in a local church, the child in kindergarten, etc.

            Lack of backup for the BC of course does not make the BC worthless. The question I’m addressing was, why such suspicion of Obama’s BC when no one questioned other politicians’ BCs.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            @ David Friedman

            I’m not sure if it was in this thread, but the explanation I proposed was that Obama was born just after his mother returned to the U.S.

            I can’t find evidence anywhere that this is true. The biographies all say that she met Obama’s father while they were students at the University of Hawaii and shortly thereafter became pregnant. They don’t say anything about a trip to Kenya. Do you have a citation?

            @ houseboatonstyxb

            I presume that most US politicians had more (if needed) than a piece of paper to back up their claim of birth in the US.

            You mean like notices of their birth appearing in local newspapers?

          • Iain says:

            Furthermore: yes, this is a standard conspiracy theory. That is obviously not incompatible with it being racist. There are extremely unsurprising studies that find correlation between racial prejudice and perception of how “American” Obama is. (This particular study used Biden as a baseline, so it is not simply a reflection of opposition to Democratic politicians.)

            Random nutcases support conspiracy theories all the time. Sometimes those conspiracy theories are racist. The reason we’re talking about birtherism instead of the moon landing hoax is that nobody ever got elected president by spewing lies about Neil Armstrong.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            And conspiracy theories tend to be concretely connected to some kind of bigotry, although not always racism. Jews, Catholics, and Muslims are popular targets. Even the truther conspiracy theories have pretty strong anti-semitic overtones.

          • John Schilling says:

            I presume that most US politicians had more (if needed) than a piece of paper to back up their claim of birth in the US.

            As did Barack Obama, most notably in the form of local newspaper announcements of his birth, made at the time of his birth and subsequently archived in digital and hardcopy form. That’s the first thing I looked for when the issue came up, and that’s what convinced me very quickly that the claims were pure hokum.

            But the Obama administration itself didn’t emphasize those, if it mentioned them at all. Neither did most of his supporters and apologists. Some of the more rigorous journalists and fact-checkers did, but mostly it was “short-form birth certificate so shut up or you’re an Evil Racist!”

            I have long suspected that this was deliberate, at least on the part of the Obama campaign and later administration. They let the GOP have enough rope to hang themselves, confident that the GOP would be dumb enough to do just that.

          • @Earthly Knight:

            “I can’t find evidence anywhere that this is true. ”

            Apparently it isn’t. Somehow I had gotten that impression.

            My error.

          • Moon says:

            Whether it is racism or not about the birther issue, it just fits the overall pattern of GOP propaganda. It is goal oriented. The GOP propagandists don’t have beliefs, except a belief in collecting donations from the .01% and from crony capitalist mega-corporations, and in serving them in return.

            So if racism is a belief, then they’re not racist. They’re like Trump. They just use anything they can to get votes for their party– lies, racist statements, whatever. They don’t care, as long as the goal looks like it will be attained.

            They often start with something that has a tiny grain of reality or truth though. If the president as a child spent time outside the U.S. in a culture that rural white people would find strange, that’s a starting point for coming up with stories about how the president is illegitimate. So is the situation of his father coming from a Muslim country.

            GOP propagandists will take any shred of anything, to paint the U.S. presidential candidate of the other party as The Scary and Illegitimate Other. And once he’s president, they’ll double down harder.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ John Schilling
            I have long suspected that this was deliberate, at least on the part of the Obama campaign and later administration. They let the GOP have enough rope to hang themselves, confident that the GOP would be dumb enough to do just that.

            I’ve thought that too,* for years: Obama was trolling. When his lawyer did ask for the LFBC, it arrived promptly — just in time to humiliate Trump at the Washington Press Correspondents’ Dinner. So Trump’s pressure was effective, though partly in a backhanded way.

            * Well, not the whole GOP.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @John Schilling – “I have long suspected that this was deliberate, at least on the part of the Obama campaign and later administration. They let the GOP have enough rope to hang themselves, confident that the GOP would be dumb enough to do just that.”

            As a pro-Obama partisan at the time, this was my conclusion as well.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ John Schilling
            >> I presume that most US politicians had more (if needed) than a piece of paper to back up their claim of birth in the US.

            > You mean like notices of their birth appearing in local newspapers?

            You and I accept those notices as conclusive (the birthers found them dodgy). But the question is why no one has made such charges against other recent politicians … who may be presumed to have the massive backup that Obama’s birth claims lack.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            You and I accept those notices as conclusive (the birthers found them dodgy). But the question is why no one has made such charges against other recent politicians … who may be presumed to have the massive backup that Obama’s birth claims lack.

            Didn’t you just answer your own question? There isn’t even a plausible avenue to assert that, say, George W. Bush wasn’t born in the United States. The very idea is ridiculous, because he has just that massive backup (father was President, family has been in the public eye in the United States for generations, et cetera.) So instead, the conspiracy theories used against him were things like the Texas ANG memos, which — while just as false as Birtherism — have the microscopic scintilla of plausibility that “George W. Bush wasn’t born in the United States” lacks.

            Like I said, partisans love the idea that there’s some magic document out there that will instantly disqualify the guy they hate. For Obama, it was the long-form birth certificate. For Bush, the ANG memos. Romney, his tax returns. They may seem popular in polls sometimes, but that’s because agreeing with the conspiracy theory is a great way of booing the guy you hate. You would have hated him anyway, absent the conspiracy theory, just for some other reason.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @ThirteenthLetter:

            It’s a conspiracy theory, and it took hold for all the normal reasons conspiracy theories take hold.

            But, when a kid calls you a “fag”, it doesn’t mean he actually thinks you are gay, but it still shows animus towards homosexuals. A conspiracy theory about Ted Cruz or John McCain’s birth was never going to take hold on the left, , because the left is far less prone to xenophobia.

            And I really, really doubt the conspiracy theory would have had the kind of legs it did if he had been “John Fitzgerald” and his dad was Irish.

          • Moon says:

            I do think conspiracy theories about Hillary had a huuuge effect on this election. Without them being circulated to naive people, I think she’d have won the electoral college, as well as the popular vote.

            This is how Facebook’s fake-news writers make money
            https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11/18/this-is-how-the-internets-fake-news-writers-make-money/

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            Moon, please stop smugly spamming this comments section with endless politicized links. You’re annoying people, not convincing them.

          • Moon says:

            13th Letter, please ignore my comments. I am not writing them for you.

            I am very aware that I am annoying to Right Wingers who can’t handle anything outside of their bubble, and that such folks feel entitled to have all comments here reinforce their bubble. So stay in your safe space, away from my comments. Feel free.

    • Jiro says:

      Scott delayed that post because he didn’t want to accidentally convince people to support Trump. Which I find bizarre. It shows a certain ruthlessness on Scott’s part to want to take Trump down even if it involves knowingly not correcting people who will vote against him based on falsehoods, but as part of the search for truth it pretty much sucks.

      It’s like being a Republican in 2008, knowing that Obama was not born in Kenya, and refusing to say so until after the election because you might accidentally convince someone to vote for Obama.

      • StellaAthena says:

        Do you think it was the wrong choice? I would have done the same

        • Jiro says:

          Would you be in favor of a Republican refusing to correct Birthers until after Obama’s election, on similar grounds?

          Edit: Also, people here tend not to distinguish action and inaction. So if it’s okay to deliberately refuse to correct falsehoods to keep people from voting for Trump, would it also be okay to deliberately spread falsehoods to keep people from voting for Trump?

          • StellaAthena says:

            I would actually have no objection to that as well. I think that there’s a big asymmetry between telling falsehoods and not correcting them though.

          • Spookykou says:

            I also think there is a difference between action and inaction. I have a moral duty not to harm other people through my actions, I do not believe I have a moral duty to take action to prevent all harm to all other people.

          • StellaAthena says:

            I think that inaction is a kind of action a la arguments of Elizabeth Anscombe, i.e. saying “I can’t be blameworthy for not pulling the lever because I didn’t do anything” is bullshit. However, this doesn’t seem to be what you’re saying and I’m pretty sure I disagree with what you’re saying.

          • Jiro says:

            I was alluding to the kind of utilitarianism we commonly see here which fails to distinguish between action and inaction, and even pooh-poohs the idea that people who are involved have more responsibility than people who are not involved.

            Also, in this case, it’s not just “not correcting” the falsehood–it’s deliberately withholding a correction that you would otherwise have produced. It’s not as if I’m saying that random people are obliged to act–here we have someone who normally would have acted, and deliberately refrained from doing so with the specific intention that people would vote based on misconceptions.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ StellaAthena
            I think that inaction is a kind of action a la arguments of Elizabeth Anscombe, i.e. saying “I can’t be blameworthy for not pulling the lever because I didn’t do anything” is bullshit.

            Did the Trolley Problem come into the debate with Lewis?

          • Spookykou says:

            ‘strategic inaction’ perhaps.

            I was alluding to the kind of utilitarianism we commonly see here which fails to distinguish between action and inaction, and even pooh-poohs the idea that people who are involved have more responsibility than people who are not involved.

            I think that Scott sees this as a potential ‘problem’ but intentionally rejects it for mental health reasons, I vaguely remember reading something to that effect when he was giving an endorsement of give well, or some other charity he is involved with, I could be wrong though. As for his personal moral calculus on this issue.

            He is also I think at least kind of consequentialist I think, I am really not good at philosophy, but shouldn’t that kind of absolve him or something?

      • Robert Liguori says:

        Seconded. On the other hand, I feel like the righteous wrath which made the piece be written in the first place only got invoked after the election and the wolf-crying started in real earnest. Calling a presidential candidate a double-secret super racist is just business as usual, but turning and saying to people “Yup, Trump will definitely put you in a camp and kill you.” is beyond that.

        • Deiseach says:

          turning and saying to people “Yup, Trump will definitely put you in a camp and kill you.” is beyond that

          Scaring the pants off vulnerable people by saying that is beyond the beyond, which is what is making me so angry when I see it all around. There are people who really do think their door will be kicked in and they will be hauled off to forcible gay conversion camps, or raped on the streets and it be no longer a crime, or driven out of the country back to their ancestral nations, and they’re not the angry ones posting online, they’re scared and worried and tying themselves up in knots over it.

          • Matt M says:

            I’m willing to take Scott’s word that he is seeing real patients who are really going through these sorts of struggles.

            But part of me wonders if no small part of the people claiming this are faking it explicitly for political reasons. I mean, it’s somewhat obvious to many that the protesters who are blocking traffic and committing vandalism in cities that voted overwhelmingly for Hillary are not doing the leftist cause any particular good.

            But let’s say you’re an upset Hillary supporter who isn’t giving up on the idea that you still have a great opportunity to damage Trump or his supporters. Say that “taking to the streets” isn’t really your style or you just think it’s dumb. What else might you do? Well, you might report yourself as clinically depressed due to the election – such that the NYT can write articles on how Trump is depressing people. You might try to play the sympathy card rather than the anger card. Make yourself the victim here. Talk about how Trump makes you feel unsafe (the one plea that society still seems to universally respect regardless of how baseless it might be).

            I’m not saying ALL cases are this – but I think it’s overwhelmingly likely that some of them are… I would also suggest that anyone who is legitimately scared and tying themselves in knots over Trump probably had some serious emotional, psychological, or intelligence problems that pre-dated Trump and are only manifesting themself now.

          • Randy M says:

            I would also suggest that anyone who is legitimately scared and tying themselves in knots over Trump probably had some serious emotional, psychological, or intelligence problems

            Given that this is my assumption as well, if it is a deliberate strategy, I don’t think it will be an effective one.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            But part of me wonders if no small part of the people claiming this are faking it explicitly for political reasons.

            I’m sure lots of people area, although Scott’s patients probably aren’t. At any rate, going to see a psychiatrist seems like more effort than is necessary if you’re just pretending.

          • Matt M says:

            Given that this demographic probably consists of neurotic millenialls who may have prior conditions, perhaps they’re already seeing psychologists? So the only cost is lying to your psychologist.

            Or, as George Costanza said on Seinfeld, it’s not a lie if you believe it…

      • Deiseach says:

        I give Scott the benefit of the doubt because I imagine, in part, he thinks that most people on here would not be Trump voters anyway (despite the aspersions that we’re all right-wing fanatics cluttering up the comment boxes nowadays) and that Trump voters would not be likely to read this blog. But some people might be wavering on Trump as against Clinton (or Johnson), and his article might tip the scales for them to vote for Trump, and that he thinks Trump is such a disaster (and I’m not saying he’s wrong there), that would be irresponsible and blameworthy.

        I appreciate his honesty and fairness in writing this piece and publishing it at all, given that he vastly dislikes Trump, is a liberal not a conservative, and (probably pretty much accurately) forecasts a lot of pain in the neck from people reading this and thinking he’s a fascist nazi racist misogynist homophobic xenophobic apologist – you know, crawled straight out of Hillary’s basket of deplorables to type this up – and might even indulge their feelings beyond abusive communications and would try doxxing him or getting him in trouble with his employers or worse, any future employment in the fair utopia of California in a private practice as a psychiatrist applying unction to the hurts of the blissful inhabitants of that happy wonderland.

        • I’m with Scott on this, in part because I do see a difference between action and inaction.

          I see a lot of people saying things that I think are wrong. I don’t have the time and energy to answer all of them. One basis for selection is whether I think the error is interesting or I have something interesting to say in response, or some easy way of demonstrating the error. But another is what effect I think correcting the error will have.

          The clearest example would probably be the case of climate arguments. I think the widespread confidence that AGW, if not stopped, will have large net negative effects is unjustified. So when I see an obviously mistaken or dishonest argument for such effects, I’m much more likely to respond to it than when I see an equally bad argument on the other side. That doesn’t mean that I am willing to make arguments I believe are bad, and I don’t.

        • Jiro says:

          But I don’t think that’s one anyone would accept in any other context. Consider my example of a Republican refusing to correct the false belief that Obama was born in Kenya, because he’s afraid that it would lead someone to vote for Obama.

          Or if you want a left-wing example, if it was 2004, and Bush was up for reelection, and Scott was going to debunk 9/11 conspiracy theories, would it be appropriate to wait until after the election, because telling people “Bush didn’t cause 9/11” before the election might get some of them to vote for Bush?

          What kinds of misapprehensions is it appropriate to intentionally withhold corrections about? What if it’s 2008 and I was going to debunk the idea that Obama is a Muslim; should I wait until after the election so that people who believe Obama is a Muslim won’t vote for him?

          and that he thinks Trump is such a disaster (and I’m not saying he’s wrong there), that would be irresponsible and blameworthy.

          The reasons that most people think Trump would be a horrible disaster like the world has never known, are exactly the reasons he’s debunking. The remaining reasons are reasons to think he’s bad, but not reasons to think he’d be a unique apocalyptic disaster evil mutant. I think Scott is caught up in the anti-Trump narrative even while being too smart to actually believe it’s true.

          Furthermore, taking the attitude “this candidate is so bad that it’s better that people vote against the candidate based on lies” is exactly the type of bad discourse he’s complained about in the past, except that instead of spreading lies, he’s just intentionally letting people believe the lies.

          • Spookykou says:

            The reasons that most people think Trump would be a horrible disaster like the world has never known, are exactly the reasons he’s debunking. The remaining reasons are reasons to think he’s bad, but not reasons to think he’d be a unique apocalyptic disaster evil mutant.

            To be fair to Scott, he obviously did not buy into the ideas that he was recently debunking and yet clearly thought Trump was so horrible, and yes even potentially apocalyptic, that he wrote a post which he seemed(to take him at his word) reluctant to write.

            More broadly I would agree that the main stream media painted a picture of Trump as some sort of domestic horror, but here, a fair deal of the anti-trump talk was focused on his foreign policy and personality. His pulling support from our mutual defense treaties and generally being a hot head were, I think, almost exclusively the reasons that people on SSC thought Trump was apocalyptic, nothing to do with death squads and door kicking.

      • carvenvisage says:

        Which I find bizarre. It shows a certain ruthlessness on Scott’s part to want to take Trump down even if it involves knowingly not correcting people who will vote against him based on falsehoods

        lmao duh

        as part of the search for truth it pretty much sucks

        Maybe that’s because, (as Scott explicitly and unequivocally stated) said-delay was not chosen “as part of the search for truth”, but (as you said), “because he didn’t want to accidentally convince people to support Trump”.

         

         

        It’s like being a Republican in 2008, knowing that Obama was not born in Kenya, and refusing to say so until after the election because you might accidentally convince someone to vote for Obama.

        This comparison is false and proves nothing if true: Scott didn’t stumble across heretefore unknown hard evidence, of the kind someone would need to ‘know’ where Obama was born, -or stumble across heretofore unknown evidence of any kind. He paid attention, collected and collated things in one place, and made arguments. -If not for Scott, there’s no Scott’s article, -it’s a creation of his.

         

        And if it was true so what? Not being so charitable as to hang yourself with your own persuasiveness, evidence gathering skills, and analysis, freely provided to others, is not a crime.

        Not being so charitable as to (what-you-believe-is-) hang your country, -whether in the case of trump or obama, is absolutely, utterly, beyond reproach. It’s a disgrace to criticise Scott for not upholding standards of truth even higher than he already does, first of all absolutely, but more importantly, relatively.

        -It’s not exactly Atlantis here.

        Or some alternative ancient athens that didn’t kill socrates, or indeed the ancient athens that did. Or the next thing down, or the next or the next…

         

        It’s as if Scott was roaming an apocalyptic wasteland*, unarmed but for the power of Ki, and his bare hands, -no nukes nor poison gas nor guns nor knives, and you criticise him for, once, closing them into fists, when (he perceives) the stakes were very high.

        Except that not providing people with something quite as soon as they in retrospect would like, is not an offensive weapon of any kind, even a fist.

        (*representing ‘the current state of ‘public discourse’ ‘ in this metaphor, if that isn’t clear)

        • Jiro says:

          This comparison is false and proves nothing if true: Scott didn’t stumble across heretefore unknown hard evidence, of the kind someone would need to ‘know’ where Obama was born. he paid attention, collated things in one place, and made arguments. If not for Scott, no Scott’s article. If not for publishing of evidence, still evidence.

          You didn’t need to stumble across heretofore unknown hard evidence to know that Obama wasn’t born in Kenya either, or to know that Obama isn’t a Muslim. You just needed to pay attention, collate things in one place, and make arguments–just like here.

          It’s as if Scott was roaming an apocalyptic wasteland*, unarmed but for his hands, -no nukes nor poison gas nor guns nor knives, and you criticsed him for once closing them into fists, when (he believed) the stakes were very high.

          If that analogy truly held, it would justify a lot of other things than just deliberately withholding arguments that rebut lies. It would justify outright making lies. It would justify getting people fired for supporting Trump. Basically, it would justify every single bad thing that social justice says is okay to do because, after all, the enemy is really bad and we need to do what we can to fight it.

          • carvenvisage says:

            I really thought the “(*representing ‘the current state of ‘public discourse’ ‘ in this metaphor, if that isn’t clear)” was unnecessarry, but apparently you thought the apocalyptic wasteland represented just SJWs, and missed it, so actually it wasn’t enough. Alas life is hard.

            And no, it wouldn’t because somehow the purity of the ki makes it really really effective. We can observe for ourselves the warrior monk’s capability to dismantle fleets of hate-machines (pun obviously intended).

            And again, no, obviously, because using closed fists doesn’t even mean you’re going to use even a knife for defense, never mind a sword or a gun, and it certainly has nothing to do with the kind of weapons that fuck up the environment, especially ones which do so on a large scale, -like I already ever so cleverly already outlined in my brilliant onion-like metaphor.

             

            No one knows where obama was born. The issue is socially settled but I would assume it’s not that difficult to fake a birth certficate. You used the word know. Take it seriously or use another.

            Scott’s post also doesn’t conclusively prove anything. It certainly makes a strong case, but it doesn’t mean we all know trump wasn’t-really really-racist. It doesn’t ‘debunk’ the idea, it presents really strong arguments against it. Probably not even as much as obama’s birth certificate, which is a really low bar.

             

            Also debunk is a stupid word for liars that think vehement and/or smug assertion is magic. Rebut is a little better.

    • drethelin says:

      Neither of those are racist in any useful sense of the word.

    • Earthly Knight says:

      For those of you who have the surprisingly common form of brain damage that prevents you from recognizing any kind of racism that isn’t anti-semitism, imagine that, any time Scott posted something approving about Israel, the first comment was someone saying, “How can we trust you to be fair on this issue? You’re jewish!” This is pretty much identical to Trump’s remarks about Curiel.

      • Matt M says:

        What do you think about the 1,000 media personalities who said, “How can Trump expect Hispanics to vote for him? He wants to build a wall!”

      • Mark V Anderson says:

        EK, apparently most of SSC commentary must have brain damage, because it appears to me that most of us agree with Scott on this issue. Neither of the examples you brought up amount to racism. The birther one obviously has nothing to with race if you don’t already have priors in that direction, and the one with the ethnically Mexican judge was because Trump reasonably thought Mexicans might have some bias against him (as many many leftists would have agreed, until this particular episode came up). These two incidents indict Trump for not having much concern with reality, but by no means make him a racist.

        I thought the same thing about your arguments about Trump being a sexual predator. You apparently have a really string dislike for Trump, and it is overriding your otherwise sensible intellect. I haven’t noticed you letting your emotions override your intellect in any other discussions, so it must be something about Trump that gets you riled up. I think you need to accept that this isn’t the case for most others. There were a few pro-Trump folks in these comments a month or two ago that were similarly over the top, but they let up after a while. I think you should also stop with the Trump discussions too. Maybe we could re-visit in 6 months.

        • Earthly Knight says:

          apparently most of SSC commentary must have brain damage

          Well, let’s test that. I gave a straightforward analogy above. Is it racist to say that Scott’s views on Israel shouldn’t be trusted because he’s jewish? The answer is yes, right? If so, how does this differ from Trump’s remarks about Curiel?

          I thought the same thing about your arguments about Trump being a sexual predator.

          This suggests that you’re pretty deeply steeped in delusion, and I shouldn’t give any weight to your opinion on Trump’s racism, either. A dozen women accuse Trump of doing exactly what he bragged about doing on the tape, many of them provide some degree of corroborating evidence, and you don’t think that’s enough to make the case? Tell me, were you part of the mob of commenters here who were keen to accuse Hillary of all sorts of crimes, on a much flimsier basis?

          • Moon says:

            People who watch “America’s most trusted news source”– Fox News– or listen to Right Wing Radio, or Breitbart– believe every conspiracy theory in the book about Hillary.

            We just have a huuuuuge propaganda problem in the U.S. And we have many people who believe every bizarre conspiracy theory about HRC that their propaganda ‘news sources” spew out– and believe that Trump is innocent of even of things he even admitted himself to doing, in tapes that are not played on Right Wing “news sources.” The Right Wing media watchers/listeners/readers must think that someone else made up those tapes and that they don’t really exist.

          • Mark V Anderson says:

            Is it racist to say that Scott’s views on Israel shouldn’t be trusted because he’s jewish?

            Well we certainly have different views of what is racism. Isn’t racism something about thinking that one race is superior to another? No I don’t think it would be racism if someone said that about Scott. Stupid in this case, yes, but not racism to claim that someone might be defensive about one’s tribe. What is racism to you? Is it simply consciousness that various people have a particular race, and believing that sometimes that might affect their behavior? If so, then you are right; Trump is a racist. And 90% of the rest of America.

            A dozen women accuse Trump of doing exactly what he bragged about doing on the tape, many of them provide some degree of corroborating evidence, and you don’t think that’s enough to make the case?

            I haven’t read about those particular cases. I am sure however, that it would be easy to find 1000 anti-Trump woman to totally fabricate stories about Trump if it would hurt him. Probably 10,000. And the tape they had of Trump did not have one word of predation; it was simply him boasting about his ability to get women. Do you believe Trump when he boasts about how smart he is, or how much money he makes? Do you only believe his boasts when it makes him look bad?

            No I doubt most of the comments made about Hillary too. I am very very skeptical about any stories that are clearly made by political partisans. I take that you only believe the stories if you don’t like the person being slandered? That is a nasty shot, but it does follow from your comment.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            I haven’t read about those particular cases. I am sure however, that it would be easy to find 1000 anti-Trump woman to totally fabricate stories about Trump if it would hurt him. Probably 10,000.

            If this were true, wouldn’t pretty much every controversial male politician get accused of rape by scads of women?

            And the tape they had of Trump did not have one word of predation;

            Okay, the problem is definitely that you’re delusional, then. Do you have a daughter, or a wife? Would you appreciate it if a man walked up to her and didn’t even wait, just started kissing her, then decided to see whether she would let him grab her by the pussy?

          • Jiro says:

            If this were true, wouldn’t pretty much every controversial male politician get accused of rape by scads of women?

            Exactly what each politician gets accused of is based on chance and depends on random initial conditions; once a potentially viable accusation gets popular because of random fluctuations, it builds on itself and gets more popular.

            This also means that each politician has some unique accusations made about him, and you can always point out, post-hoc, that no other politician has the same accusations made so clearly everyone specifically hates this politician because of racism or sexism (if you support the politician) or because the politician is uniquely bad (if you oppose him).

          • Matt M says:

            I would be willing to bet that prominent political figures (and probably celebrities as well) are far more statistically likely to be accused of rape than an average person is.

            And that this proportion will increase as society continues to travel down the “automatically believe all victims 100% of the time” road…

          • Earthly Knight says:

            What other cases have there been of major public figures facing mass allegations of sexual misconduct? Bill Cosby, Jimmy Savile, Roger Ailes, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Bill Clinton had a few accusers. But we’re pretty sure all of those people are guilty, aren’t we? It seems like it’s actually fairly rare for numerous people to credibly accuse a celebrity of committing the same crime, and when it does happen, the allegations tend to be true.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Earthly Knight:

            Considering Savile, I wonder how common it is to have a sudden mass of accusations against a living vs a dead celebrity. My understanding in the Savile case is that there were rumours and maybe some accusations while he was still alive, but the vast majority of it came out after he died, and it became apparent that credible charges had been ignored or papered over.

          • Moon says:

            Earthly, if one chooses one’s ‘news sources” carefully enough, one can hear over and over that Trump is the savior of the working class and that he is innocent of everything bad that he is accused of.

            Humans believe things that they allow themselves to hear, uncritically, thousands of times in a row. And, for propagandists, stirring people up into fear and rage works great for turning off the rational logical analytical centers of the mind and leaving the mind defenseless against incoming propaganda.

          • Matt M says:

            Fortunately our good tech overlords are about to fix that and not allow us to pick our own news sources anymore!

          • Moon says:

            Matt, no they are not. Our tech overlords are interested in making money. Circulating lies and propaganda makes a lot of money for them.

            That’s the problem with a crony capitalist system like ours. It’s incompatible with democracy. Because one can make so much money circulating lies and propaganda and info-tainmnent, that everyone does it. And one loses money by pissing off powerful rich propagandists, who make a stink and get their supporters to boycott your services.

            Investigative journalism disappeared a long time ago. Places like Facebook can make the most money by circulating propaganda, and not angering powerful rich purveyors of falsehoods, like GOP propagandists, so they’ll probably end up doing it.

            The lies you want to read are probably very safe, Matt. You must be very happy about that. You’ll be able to continue to read about Hillary being involved in child sex trafficking and having murdered 100 people or so who tried to investigate her in some way.

          • CatCube says:

            @Moon

            Humans believe things that they allow themselves to hear, uncritically, thousands of times in a row.

            Yes, we have ample evidence here of people allowing themselves to hear–uncritically and thousands of times in a row–and believe that “propaganda” is purely a sin committed by the Right.

        • keranih says:

          @ Mark V Anderson –

          You apparently have a really string dislike for Trump, and it is overriding your otherwise sensible intellect. I haven’t noticed you letting your emotions override your intellect in any other discussions, so it must be something about Trump that gets you riled up. I think you need to accept that this isn’t the case for most others.

          This is well put, and I agree. We all have our bugbears & blindspots.

          (I don’t mind that EK disagrees with me on my assessment of Trumph, it’s him labeling me brain-damaged (and “you are just like [this thing I am trying to convince you Trump is]”.

          Dunno if six months is enough, though.

    • Moon says:

      I don’t know if I think that the birther thing is racist. Trump didn’t start it. He just has no respect for or interest in the truth. He uses anything he can to defeat any opponent of his. If he was against Obama, and he was, then he would use any lie that anyone made up that came along. Although Trump may act racist, I don’t think he is racist in his beliefs. Since he has no beliefs, only strategies to win against his opponents. But acting racist does have just as bad results as believing in racism, so it really doesn’t matter.

      People talk about who Trump is, as if he is a consistent character. He isn’t. He shifts constantly. He just wanted to get votes and to win. His actions can’t be consistent with his beliefs or character, because he has no beliefs or character– only a determination to defeat people, and to win votes during the election campaign. Any popular lie– or truth– would be something he would definitely say, because you win elections by being popular. Just a reality TV star playing a part, from a script.

      • Evan Þ says:

        “But acting racist does have just as bad results as believing in racism, so it really doesn’t matter.”

        It seems to me that it does matter in forming an image of Trump and predicting what he might do, which has obvious implications for judging how bad a President he’ll be.

        • That’s true in both directions. If he was an honest racist, that would predict one pattern of behavior. If he was a dishonest non-racist, which is Moon’s view (with which I am inclined to agree), it would predict a different pattern of behavior. On some issues one would be worse, on other issues the other.

  76. Nyx says:

    At the moment, my cooking ability is laughably rudimentary (I can just about cook two of meat, pasta and eggs, and put them on a plate next to each other). Can anyone recommend a good, simple cookbook?

    • Eltargrim says:

      I don’t know if it’s quite simple enough, but I’ve found that Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything is a good combination of recipes and techniques ranging from basic to advanced. It includes a lot of basics, including “how to prepare this vegetable” and “here’s how to use a knife”, and the recipes are typically straightforward. It’s my go-to in my kitchen, and my first stop if I’m looking to try something new.

    • andrewflicker says:

      The web is the best cookbook ever generated.

      • Randy M says:

        This is pretty much true; paper cookbooks are useful to browse for inspiration or to carry around while cooking, but any recipe or lesson is found easily on-line.

    • Hummingbird says:

      I’ve used this cookbook for years, and there are multiple copies within my family.

      I realize that it’s called “Southern Living Cookbook”, but it’s not very southern-themed, and includes a wide range of dishes, both easy and more difficult. It also prefaces each section with detailed instructions on the basics, whether it’s a meat or pie crust. And, since it was written in 1987 it should be easy to find a very cheap copy online.

      https://smile.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0848707095/ref=olp_page_2?ie=UTF8&f_used=true&f_usedAcceptable=true&f_usedGood=true&f_usedLikeNew=true&f_usedVeryGood=true&startIndex=10

      Have fun!

    • sohois says:

      This depends somewhat on what kind of cooking you intend to do, or rather what style of cooking you prefer. Are you looking to just stick to recipes, and get a book with a nice long list of classic recipes, or do you want to learn more about the techniques of cooking, so you can be confident in making up your own dishes and varying what you cook?

      If it’s the latter, I would recommend the cookbook from seriouseats chef J. Kenji Lopez Alt (https://www.amazon.com/Food-Lab-Cooking-Through-Science/dp/0393081087/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1479382785&sr=1-1&keywords=kenji+lopez+alt). The style is classic American, but the recipes in the book are largely extremely complicated, such as a Chili requiring 40 ingredients and 3 days preparation. However, I’d still say its very useful for a beginner since the recipes themselves are only a small part of the book; much of it is instead braking down the science behind the recipes and why the various extra ingredients work, which means you can basically just pick out a few innovations and put them into much simpler variations. There are also a lot of guides to things like knife skills, choosing meat and vegetables, deep frying, etc. That being said, the total number of recipes does end up being a little small, so it works best in conjunction with another cookbook so you have more potential dishes to apply the lessons to.

      For the former I’d say it very much depends on what kind of food you like or where you are; I presume you’re an American and looking for an American guide, which I couldn’t offer. My go-to for a long list of recipes in the UK would be Mary Berry’s Complete Cooking (https://www.amazon.com/Mary-Berry-Complete-Cookbook/dp/1405370955/ref=sr_1_15?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1479383058&sr=1-15&keywords=mary+berry), but obviously a lot of the recipes in it might be different or unknown to an American reader.

    • Dahlen says:

      Look up recipes for stuff on the internet, and follow the directions therein. I for instance use Yummly, it’s a recipe aggregator (with quite a lot of search filters too).

      It doesn’t take a genius to not mess up a recipe too badly, which is why I could manage to remain utterly uninterested in studying cooking techniques in and of themselves, and still ended up a decent cook. I think I own some hardcover Jamie Oliver book or another that discusses cooking techniques, but am generally unfamiliar with its contents. Still, you might want to try it out.

      Some cooking blogs offer tips on e.g. kneading dough, choosing chopping knives, searing meat etc. either within recipes or as separate posts.

      Oh, and by the way — the other cookbook I own is a local one from the 1930s (implicitly addressed to women, obviously), that surprised me in how laconic it was with recipes. It doesn’t discuss quantities, barely touches upon techniques, and many recipes are like “same as the previous recipe, only with ingredient X swapped for Y”. It’s basically assumed that the reader learned all the basic stuff from her mother. And I could still make use of it as a beginner.

    • Deiseach says:

      Delia Smith. How To Cook (online, there’s cookbooks as well as a whole range of gear to go with it but this is fine to start).

      Walks you through everything from how to boil an egg to how to cook Christmas dinner.

      Warning: uses British measurement so you’ll probably need to convert to American. But good basic dishes that even the culinary challenged like me can follow 🙂

  77. shakeddown says:

    Question (asking about, um, let’s say a friend): When you get a job offer from a big tech company, should you negotiate? what would you focus on, and what’s a reasonable range to negotiate to (assuming you did particularly well on the interview)?

    • andrewflicker says:

      As in all negotiation, BATNA is crucial. If you’ve got the resume to support job offers from other big tech companies, then definitely angle for a good offer. If this is more in “stroke of luck” territory, take the starting offer and do great work in your first 6 months to angle for a new pay-scale/position.

    • John Schilling says:

      What andrew said. Also, money isn’t the only thing worth negotiating for, or necessarily the most important, but it is what everyone expects you to negotiate for. Depending on what you really value, you might consider accepting their salary offer as is but contingent on their guaranteeing a measure of flex time or an extra week of vacation or a private office or whatnot.

      Given usual tech-company cultural attitudes, I’d put the private office at the top of the list on sanity grounds and defend it on productivity grounds, but as with salary you have to stay within the range of plausibility and if this is your straight-out-of-college job that might not be a plausible demand. But keep an eye on the work environment when you interview, and scale your position accordingly.

    • garrett says:

      I’ve worked for a couple of mega-tech companies, at least one of which I can guarantee you’ve heard of. Figure out what you want, and why. Then get all of the details about the offer. Next, go to sites like the Bureau of Labor Statistics and find out where the wage is relative to people with similar positions in your area.
      Tech companies have their own bureaucracy. What one company will be willing to negotiate with another will consider fixed. My last company had a hard time recruiting because of a very rigid vacation policy, but getting a larger starting bonus in lieu (which you could use to take “unpaid” time off) was pretty trivial. Some companies might have a fixed dollar amount for salary but are happy to shower you in stock grants (which for a big tech company, you can sell on the open market for cash).

      Things which I’ve seen as negotiable:
      Salary, stock options/grants, starting bonus, vacation schedule, computer equipment (if you demand a Mac but the standard is a PC), working remotely, work schedule (eg. 4-10 vs. 5-8).

      Ultimately, figure out what matters. My first job I was initially offered a starting salary below what I was expecting. I quoted labor statistics and the offer immediately jumped 60%, to above the range I was expecting.
      If the offer comes in as good enough you’d take it, but not great, it’s worth asking once about something. Eg. ask if there’s room to bump the salary by $5,000. If not, you can accept-as-is. If so, you’ve made $5k/year in 30 seconds. Great ROI.
      If the offer comes in as better than you were expecting, say yes before they have an opportunity to change their mind!

    • The Nybbler says:

      Negotiating salary is a bit of a suckers game; if other big companies are anything like IBM (and big companies tend to converge to IBM), each position has a salary band. If you negotiate yourself a higher salary to start, you’ll get smaller increases in the future. If you can actually get a higher level position, that’s a much bigger win, but generally harder to do. Negotiating sign-on bonus or other one-time things is more straightforward. Negotiating vacation can be a big win; many companies you have to wait 5 years to get an extra week.

    • Eric Rall says:

      In my experience, big tech companies generally won’t budge on salary or benefits. Benefits are uniform for all full-time employees in a given region, and salary is calculated based on the job role and seniority level assigned to you by the interview process. There may be a little bit of leeway in salary if you have a competing job offer, but otherwise most companies have a policy of not negotiating salary from their initial offer.

      Where there often is room to negotiate is signing bonus and on-hire stock award. The hiring manager or your HR contact will likely have the authority to sweeten one or both of these by a few thousand dollars in order to close the deal. I’ve successfully negotiated signing bonuses from tech companies twice, once on the basis of a competing offer, and the other time on the basis of having a loan I’d taken out from my 401(k) which I would need to pay back within six months if I changed jobs.

    • Reasoner says:

      You have to negotiate your offer. You have to have to have to HAVE TO. For any given company, you’ll be able to get them to up their offer at least once and potentially thrice. Example: Google upped my offer three times.

      Maximizing Your Donations via a Job

  78. andrewflicker says:

    My lovely wife has been trying to expand her taste and experience in fantasy/sci-fi fiction. A lot of my recommendations have been from the usual Hugo/Nebula assortment of the last 50 years, but she’s been under a lot of stress studying for the GREs and dealing with her neurotic husband- so any recommendations for well-written, interesting, but relatively-low-stress fantasy or sci fi novels? Bonus points if it’s relatively recent work- I’d prefer not to just go back to Golden Age material or CS Lewis and the like.

    • lhn says:

      Fantasy: Sharon Shinn is pretty much pure comfort read fantasy– sort of the opposite of George R.R. Martin. (And Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor was deliberately written to be just that.) So is a fair amount of Rachel Neumeier’s work, notably her just-released The Mountain of Kept Memory. While it’s a few decades old by now, Barry Hughart’s Bridge of Birds is just lovely, and is available as an ebook with its two lesser but still enjoyable sequels as The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox.

      Science Fiction: Lois McMaster Bujold’s books are frequently tense for the characters, but I find most of them low-stress reads nonetheless. Becky Chambers The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is Trek meets Firefly meets Mass Effect and is mostly pretty light. Karen Lord’s The Best of All Possible Worlds is a series of picaresque adventures in a very Star Trek TOS-influenced setting (with a bit of Abrams Trek in the backstory).

    • Incurian says:

      Fantasy:
      Dresden Files are low stress and easy to read (they start off poorly but get better around book 3 or 4).
      Discworld is pretty fun and easy.
      Both series have oodles of books.

      SciFi:
      Snow Crash is good fun.
      Now that I think about it, a lot of scifi really stresses me out.

      • StellaAthena says:

        Warning about Dresden Files: the author clearly has a very tenuous grasp of Chicago geography. If you’re familiar with Chicago you might find this confusing or off-putting (I sure as hell did).

      • andrewflicker says:

        She’s a huge Discworld fan, and has read them all- so good call, even if it doesn’t help here. I turned her on to Snow Crash a few years back, and she enjoyed Diamond Age as well.

        I had the same realization about my scifi habits- it seems I enjoy the “safe” stress on some level.

    • shakeddown says:

      Low-stress: My ultimate fantasy calming books are Earthsea (though they do vary by taste). Other (non-fantasy) that I find incredibly calming is anything by either Murakami or James Herriot.

      • Wander says:

        Earthsea is excellent, one of my favourite settings of all time.
        Unfortunately, the series really seems to follow a linear decrease in quality.

    • houseboatonstyxb says:

      Is The Butterfly Kid too old? The Xanth series, early middle (CN sexism). Silverlock. I think of all these as not part of any SF period, really.

    • Hummingbird says:

      As far as less-stress goes, short stories are the way to go. They can usually be read in a single sitting, you feel like you finished something each time you read, and you don’t feel bad about not finishing the book in a timely manner.

      For Sci-fi/Fantasy short stories I suggest two collections:
      1. Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. I can’t suggest this enough. This is every story (about 10?) Chiang has written over several years, and includes a few Hugos and Nebula winners. About half are sci-fi, and half are speculative fiction involving unsong-esque religious realism. I especially like “Understand”, “Hell is the Absence of God”, “The Tower of Babel” and “Liking What You See: A Documentary”. Some of the best short stories I have ever read.

      2. The Hard SF Renaissance. This is a large collection of great Hard SF stories over the recent few decades. Lots of variety. Memorable favorites are: “Wang’s Carpet”, and “Beggars in Spain”.

      Good luck with the reading, and have fun!

      • ThirteenthLetter says:

        I like Greg Egan, but I don’t think I’d describe him as a “low-stress” writer!

      • andrewflicker says:

        I’ve read a great deal of these, and while I mostly agree with your taste, they aren’t quite what I meant by low-stress.

        • Hummingbird says:

          I agree that Chiang and Egan (and other writers in the Hard SF Collection) don’t really have a light-hearted writing style.
          But the difficulty and complexity isn’t so high that it stresses me out, like reading a textbook, or a Shakespeare play or something. They are also enveloping to the point of escapism, which as long as you are escaping from something more stressful (GREs were mentioned), this can be de-stressing.

      • Wander says:

        When I first started reading Unsong I was absolutely certain that it had to be inspired by Hell is the Absence of God and 72 Letters. The concepts run together so smoothly.

      • lhn says:

        I think Ted Chiang is the best SF short story writer currently active, and certainly second the recommendation generally. That said, I find many of his stories unsettling to a greater or lesser degree, so I wouldn’t necessarily turn to his work if I wanted to destress.

    • Tracy W says:

      Terry Pratchett.
      Patrica C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer wrote a good three books set in a magical Regency England, if she’s a fan of Jane Austen.
      Mercedes Lackey’s earlier books.
      Steven Brust.
      Kelley Armstrong.

    • StellaAthena says:

      The Name of the Wind and its sequel Wise Man’s Fear is some of the best low fantasy I’ve read in a while. Also seconding Pratchett,Dresden, and Murakami. I personally think kafka on the shore is one of his best.

    • StellaAthena says:

      The Name of the Wind and its sequel Wise Man’s Fear is some of the best low fantasy I’ve read in a while. Also seconding Pratchett,Dresden, and Murakami. I personally think that Kafka on the Shore is one of his best.

    • drethelin says:

      Quozl, or really most of Alan Deal Foster’s books tend to be fairly low stress and fun, while still having interesting premises and being very much in the scifi rather than the scifantasy category (by my lights).

      I also recommend the Jumper series by Peter Gould, The Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt, and Kage Baker’s short stories.

    • herbert herberson says:

      Terry Pratchet and Steven Baxter’s Long Earth books are my recommendation for that. They’re not… necessarily good, but they’re very fun and light as a feather

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        I tried the first one, and found it was too slow-paced to be interesting.

        It is a good match, though, for James Scott’s ideas about government reach being limited by “friction”– difficulties of travel and communication.

        I recommend Zelazny’s Doorways in the Sand as light-hearted sf.

        • herbert herberson says:

          Love to see more people paying attention to James Scott, he’s great!

          They ended the Long Earth series without going too far in the future, but, yeah now I kind of want to write some fanfic that takes place a few thousand years in the future that plays with the endstate of that situation. Long Earth had the government nearly break down due to the ease of exit, but at the end of the day there’s not much friction to prevent new states from arising once the population gets up to a certain density.

    • keranih says:

      How about “more recent but also quasi-classical but also still on-going at a high level of quality”?

      Sharon Lee and Steve Miller’s Liaden Universe series. A far-future star-system-hopping space opera with giant sentient turtles, tribal loyalties, planetary explorers, mercenaries, life-mates, blood feuds, courtly manners, conflicting moralities, and all sorts of giant sentient things.

      Oh! And Trade. Must not forget the Trade.

      Comes in small stories and sort-of-stand-alone-novels and multi-novel series. I recommend starting with Conflict of Honors and/or Agent of Change.

      Also Doris Egan’s Ivory series (Gate of Ivory) which is an on-planet adventure/romance (but mostly just a romp through Another Culture), Judith Tarr’s A Wind in Cairo (Arabian fantasy) (content note: non-explicit rape, essential to the plot) and the first three or four of Patricia Brigg’s Mercy Thompson series. (After that, same warning as for aWiC, except explicit and non-essential.)

      (These are recommended more or less in order – but if one already tried and really disliked Laura K Hamilton, give Briggs a miss. If one kinda liked Hamilton, but thought she went too far with, ah, well, everything, try Briggs, as it might be more to your liking.)

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        It’s been a while since I’ve read Briggs’ earlier work, but I remember liking her conventional fantasy better than her paranormal romances/urban fantasy.

        • keranih says:

          I liked the theme of the Dragon books better, but her writing was better in the Thompson books.

          (And can I just say that I really wish Thompson was a real mechanic/metal head? Because that side of the character, which is what I thought was a big part of what made her so cool, was never adequately developed.)

          (I know of no way for an author to fix this, outside of working engine repair themselves for pay for months at a time, but still.)

          She has a couple new spin offs from the Thompson series which are less Hamilton-esque, and supposedly pretty good but I have yet to get around to them.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      I’m a bit surprised no one’s mentioned Christopher Stasheff’s Warlock series. This was a popular read for me in the 1980s. Maybe it’s not as well known as I’d thought.

      I also think Asimov’s Robot stories are easy to get into; they’re often short, and I don’t think the golden-ageyness of them is a detractor. For that matter, does it have to be SF/F? I find Asimov’s nonfiction to be very readable for anyone who’s into SF/F. Particularly, she might try Adding A Dimension, or Beginnings.

      Other stuff: Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom; Connie Willis’ Bellweather.

    • yodelyak says:

      A nice thing about young adult fiction, as a genre, (and this is someone else’s point, but I can’t figure who) is that young adults still have a foot in a child world, where there is good and evil and a hero and wise elders and imagination is powerful, but also have a foot in the adult world of sex, power, corruption, etc. Young adult can consequently explore both themes. Going forward on my own steam, I might say that young adult as a genre is also somewhat protected from the kind of stress that reading (say) Lolita or Lord of the Flies tends to induce, without having to entirely avoid those topics.
      Temeraire is a young-adult-dragon-story that is quite pleasant.
      The Amulet of Samarkand and subsequent Bartimaeus books are a favorite of mine. I’ve given them as presents to several adults of my acquaintance, so I’ve put money behind that one.

      • shakeddown says:

        I’ve mentioned this before when people mentioned Bartimaeus, but Stroud’s Lockwood &co series probably compares favourably with it (the same general style and originality/fun, but more polished and better planned out). Both are good, though.

    • jdbreck says:

      A fantasy/sci fi writer I enjoy for low-stress reading is Matthew Hughes. I first read his short stories in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and enjoyed those stories enough to seek out his novels. My favorite are the stories about Henghis Hapthorn, an investigator in a far-future Old Earth, who is a scientific person in an age when the world is turning once again to where magic works. The stories are funny and fun.

    • carvenvisage says:

      I would conditionally recommend Steven Brust’s ‘Vlad Taltos’ series*: It’s a bit ‘dark grey’, but much less so than what passes for ‘grey’ nowadays- the protagonist is *genuinely* amoral -not worse, the narration has a lighthearted tone, and the tenor of things is fun, rather than somber or bleak), -so if she’s read game of thrones etc, then it’s like a breeze through a flower filled and rainbow topped meadow.

      -My experience was that it was an extremely easy, and entertaining, read, but I was aware that it might not have been quite as easy if I hadn’t read a lot of so called ‘grey’ stuff beforehand that was actually quite twisted and negative.

      (with the exception of book 3, ‘Teckla’, which centres around the activities of a communist style organisation (which the author is very sympathetic with), through the eyes of our amoral protagonist (who inevitably comes off as a foil for said organisation’s aggrandisement).

      (The books stand so well alone though that you wouldn’t even need to read a plot summarry on wikipedia for continuity)

       

      Also: Tolkien, specifically the hobbit.

       

      edit: also, not a fantasy, ‘the camels are coming’, first book of the biggles series by W.E. Johns. Paints a beautiful picture of the british airforce in ww1, based on the authors experience at the time. Of the three this would be my strongest recommendation.

  79. James Miller says:

    My article about why Clinton supporters shouldn’t fear a Trump presidency got published in Business Insider and the Independent. I tried to use a bit of this community’s reasoning.

    • lhn says:

      I’m not a Clinton supporter, but “we don’t really mean our commitment to our most central defense alliance, so there’s no harm in saying so out loud” doesn’t make me less inclined to fear a Trump presidency.

      (If Putin were really already certain we wouldn’t lift a finger to defend the Baltics, I expect he’d already have moved into them as he has the other states in the near abroad that failed to toe the line.)

      The Presidency’s comparatively unaccountable military and foreign policy powers concern me much more than domestic policy issues where the courts, state governments, and maybe even Congress could potentially impede bad policy.

      • James Miller says:

        Putin, as I’m sure you know, did move into Ukraine even though we (mostly) promised to protect Ukraine in return for Ukraine giving up its atomic weapons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Security_Assurances

        • hyperboloid says:

          I hate that I have to keep debunking this myth over and over again. But the Budapest Memorandum never committed the United States, or any other country, to defending Ukraine. I will post the relevant text here:

          1) The United States of America, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance with the principles of the CSCE Final Act, to respect the Independence and Sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.

          2) The United States of America, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

          3) The United States of America, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance with the principles of the CSCE Final Act, to refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by Ukraine of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind.

          4) The United States of America, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, reaffirm their commitment to seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine, as a non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used.

          5) The United States of America, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, reaffirm, in the case of the Ukraine, their commitment not to use nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, except in the case of an attack on themselves, their territories or dependent territories, their armed forces, or their allies, by such a state in association or alliance with a nuclear weapon state.

          6) The United States of America, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland will consult in the event a situation arises which raises a question concerning these commitments.

          No part of that obliges any country to come to the defense of Ukraine against any conventional threat.

          Now, you may ask why the Ukrainians would agree to giving up their nuclear deterrent in exchange for such a worthless security guarantee; the answer is that, as John Shilling has rightly pointed out, they never truly had a deterrent in the first place . Yes, nuclear warheads were present on their soil, but a complete weapons system capable of meaningful military action was not.

        • John Schilling says:

          We’ve been through this before, and no. The only thing we even “mostly” promised Ukraine, was that we would protect them from nuclear attack. The Ukrainian government openly and explicitly acknowledged this. And, indeed, Ukraine has not been subject to nuclear attack.

          • hyperboloid says:

            And even then our only commitment was to “seek action” from the security council.

            Imagine the scene, a phone rings in New York and…..

            “Hi Boutros, this is Bill. Can I call you Boutros?”

            “Well anyway, here’s the thing, Al was just showing me and Hillary how this new electronic mail, or “E-mail”, he invented works, and we got this news alert form AOL.”

            “The thing is It seems Boris tied one on pretty hard last night, and now Kiev is a smoking crater! Can you call François, and John, I think we might have to get the boys together on this one….. Hil, honey would you mind taping the X-files for me? I think this might be an all nighter.”

          • lhn says:

            Never mind Boutros– how exactly was that supposed to go with a Russian veto on the Security Council again?

            (I’m pretty sure the Russians weren’t going to repeat the mistake that led to UN intervention in Korea.)

    • Spookykou says:

      Imagine that you see a tennis player with a seemingly horrible swing win game after game. Although you don’t understand this guy’s playing style, you shouldn’t conclude that he is too stupid to handle a racket.

      When you look across the net and see a dead cat with a racket taped to its face, you should probably just withhold judgment on his tennis ability altogether.

    • Nyx says:

      Your main thrust seems to be “he won an election, how stupid can he be?”, which is not without merit, but I would point out that for all his “master persuasion” techniques, he did not actually win the popular vote. Unless these advance Jedi mind tricks only work on the weak minded voters in Rust Belt swing states, clearly their power has been overrated.

      • James Miller says:

        He wasn’t trying to win the popular vote. Doing so would have required targeting his persuasion differently. Also, he didn’t just win the election, he won given enormous obstacles including that Access Hollywood recording, the hatred of most of the media, a popular incumbent president that supported his opponent, and the opposition of much of the elite Republican party.

        • Nyx says:

          > Doing so would have required targeting his persuasion differently.

          What on earth does that mean? Maybe you can explain how Trump specifically called Clinton “nasty” in order to win over swing state whites? Would he have called her a nagging shrew if the race was by popular vote, or a cold-hearted whore under the Westminster system, or a heathen wench in the Witenagemot of 10th century England? Does Trump have a whole thesaurus of gendered insults, sorted and evaluated by demographic appeal?

          No, I still don’t buy that Trump is a Jedi Master. It’s so easy to look back and say that gee, that precise insult just there caused a 1% swing in Michigan. Please. If Trump is such a master manipulator, why didn’t he just say the magic words to get 55% of the vote? Or 60%? Why come so close to losing that even your own internal polling estimates your own defeat?

          • Matt M says:

            “Maybe you can explain how Trump specifically called Clinton “nasty” in order to win over swing state whites? ”

            Easy. It’s entirely possible that comments like this (and other “controversial” statements he made) were specifically engineered such that they may have cost him an average of 1.2 votes in California for every 1 vote they gained him in Ohio. But because of the EC, losing 1.2 votes in California is no cost at all – and gaining 1 vote in Ohio is a hugely important win.

            I mean, the media was REALLY REALLY sure that his offensive statements would cause him to lose, and then they didn’t. Perhaps that’s because they evaluated the logic of “offensive statements really turn off voters” based on people they knew in New York and California and never once considered how such statements might actually increase a candidate’s popularity amount working class white males in rust belt states.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Seems pretty straight forward to me. Where you need to go and who you need to convince will be different in a Popular vs EC based election, and these difference will influence a candidate’s strategic choices.

          • Randy M says:

            This is precisely what Trump claims to have done (in a recent tweet mentioned on Steve Sailer’s site). Whether it was luck or skill is left to individual judgement.

          • Gobbobobble says:

            I disagree with the Jedi Master theory, too, but since when is “nasty” a gendered insult?

          • The Nybbler says:

            @Gobbobobble

            He called her a “nasty woman”, which is obviously gendered. Nobody asked whether he calls men “nasty man”, which I would guess he does. He’s crude and abrasive… towards everyone.

            Amusingly, it appears that Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren called Trump a “nasty man”, though of course she wasn’t termed sexist for it.

            Part of the whole SJW culture war is that saying something in any way opposed to or hostile to a member of a “marginalized group” automatically makes your statement sexist or racist, even if you treat members of “privileged groups” the same way.

          • Matt M says:

            Right. There is no negative adjective he could have used in combination with “woman” that would NOT have resulted in the phrase being deemed sexist.

      • MF says:

        Considering Trump’s campaign was basically a disaster compared to Clinton’s – she massively outspent him *and* put a ton of effort into high-tech ways to target likely voters – I think you’re underestimating to what degree his “master persuasion” techniques were effective. I think the master persuader thesis is a load of crack myself, but losing the popular vote is weak evidence given what he was against.

        I don’t personally know if spending a ton of money actually increases the amounts of votes you get significantly, and the efficacy of the Democrat’s tech is yet to be determined. So *shrug*.

        • Moon says:

          The master persuader thesis is bs. However, you can be sure Trump had people on his team researching how to do negative campaigning against HRC in the most effective way, and that this was some of the advice he actually followed.

          Trump has always been a highly efficient self-promotion machine though. Which I see as somewhat different than being a master persuader, but perhaps others do not see any difference. Self promotion is far easier for brash rich billionaire celebrites. And after they become reality TV stars, that ability increases. It is not a studied ability but a natural personality style.

          Trump has tons of charisma to certian people, because he is “rich white trash” which appeals to the so-called “poor white trash” and to a number of other groups such as people who identify as working class.

          He also was the “change” candidate to people because of his rhetoric about it. So people who were dissatisfied with government and wanted a change– and were naive enough to think that this guy was their best option for that– voted his way.

          He also appeals to very wealthy people who want very low taxes– not due to charisma– but due to their being one issue voters and he is on the right side of their issue.

          Negative campaigning works almost all of the time though, as Newt Gingrich learned, and he applied that learning, decades ago. So just negative campaigning– without any charisma or other persuasion on Trump’s part– may have worked just as well. And Comey and Assange certainly gave Trump ten tons of help in making Hillary look more negative than she actually is in reality.

          Almost nonstop negative impressions of one candidate, but not the other, being fed into voters’ brains, almost guarantees the election of the alternate not-so-negative-seeming candidate.

          The political scientist who saw Trump’s rise coming
          Norm Ornstein on why the Republican Party was ripe for a takeover, what the media missed, and whether Trump could win the presidency.

          http://www.vox.com/2016/5/6/11598838/donald-trump-predictions-norm-ornstein

        • That depends on whether you seen persuasion as a technocratic thong, where you can sell any message with enough money and tech behind it, or something much simpler based on a willingness to say things other people aren’t willing to say.

          • Iain says:

            In the spirit of pointing out typos when they are delightful, allow me to be the first to compliment how good you look in your technocratic thong.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ Iain

            Thanks. I still thought TheAncientGeekAKA1Z was making a serious metaphor, and seriously trying to figure it out.

            Maybe ‘thong’ was the elastic part of a slingshot type of weapon, especially with enough power “behind it”. That’s after I discarded the kind of thong you snap at someone you want to seduce. (Which image just now kept me from saying ‘I was still chewing on the thong metaphor’.)

    • Walter says:

      Congratulations man! Well done. That is no small accomplishment.

  80. lycotic says:

    It seems that one of the losers of the last election was PolitiFact, and at least one of the following is true:

    A: Post Fact: Facts don’t matter, or at least the truth value of politician’s statements don’t really matter, so they should just go home and do something productive with their lives.

    B: Bias: PolitiFact, despite its claims of nonpartisanship, is left-leaning, and its rankings are bogus, so they should just go home and do something productive with their lives.

    C: Structural: Facts matter, and checking them matters, but no organization can really present itself as an unbiased referee, so they should just go home and do something productive with their lives.

    D: Voice Crying In the Wilderness: Facts matter, and eventually holding the faith and fighting the fight will prevail.

    Personally I think it’s (C), and (D) is very unlikely, so they should probably just give up.

    • bean says:

      There was at least one case where they rated reasonably similar statements by Trump and Sanders about the black unemployment rate very differently on what seemed to me to be a technicality. I’d say that B shouldn’t be ruled out.

      • The Nybbler says:

        Yeah, doesn’t take much to find Politifact nonsense with respect to Trump.

        Here they fact-check Trump saying he’s a bigger draw than Jay-Z and Beyonce:

        http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/nov/07/donald-trump/closing-argument-donald-trump-wrongly-says-he-outd/

        They compare Trump’s crowds with a 2014 tour featuring Jay-Z and Beyonce, when clearly Trump is referring to the Clinton rallies featuring same. They then admit that some of Trump’s rallies were bigger than the Jay-Z and Beyonce’s Clinton campaign appearances, but still rate the statement False.

        That example’s rather petty, of course, but illustrative.

        • Wander says:

          Here’s a good one: Trump saying that Clinton wants open borders.

          In a brief speech expert from 2013, Clinton purportedly says, “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable.”

          But we don’t have more context about what Clinton meant by “open borders” because she has not released the full speech. Her campaign has said she was talking about clean energy across the hemisphere.

          We rated Trump’s claim Mostly False.

          • lycotic says:

            I’m not really here to fight this point by point. For the record, I believe, having looked at it some but not spent significant time on it, that they’ve a liberal bias at an average shift of about 1. *And* that being off by about 1 in one direction or the other is the best you can hope for in such an organization.

            In this particular case, FWIW, I read Clinton’s statement as a dream of rainbows and unicorns, not a policy position. Trump seems to be arguing for it being her policy position, which would be misleading at best. *shrug*

          • Aapje says:

            That seems like absurd logic, where you claim that Clinton said conflicting things, but then call Trump a lair for believing one of the things that she did say. That seems absurdly uncharitable and biased.

            I think that if someone says ‘my dream is,’ then the words after that can logically be regarded as their personal goal in life. Now, many people work under a boss and don’t get to set their own agenda, but the job of president is clearly an exception. So it’s not unreasonable to assume that this would be the end goal of a president Clinton.

            Many politicians clearly lie in their campaign policy (making promises they know that they can’t keep, but which attract many voters). So when a stated ‘dream’ conflicts with ‘policy,’ I don’t see how you can blame someone for picking the former over the latter. At most you can blame Trump from stating it with high certainty, rather than hedge, but Clinton clearly did that too during the campaign and I don’t think that Politifact called her out for that.

          • lycotic says:

            @Aapje

            I think I can say “my dream is that I can spend all day playing with my kid” without anyone expecting me to go quit my job right now. The actual concerns I have to deal with in the world mean that my dream and my plans are different.

            I can say “I dream of a world with no war” while still believing that the world we actually live in requires us to have a military.

            OTOH, it is pertinent information that Clinton dreams of a world with no borders as a final state, as many would never like to get there. Nonetheless, it is a very imprecise guide to what a Clinton presidency would have actually attempted to do.

            There’s a tiresome strand of political discourse that talks about the dark motives of what a politician “really” wants. Scott was just complaining about it aimed a little differently. It’s not really fair in either direction.

            If Politifact can’t check this kind of discourse, then they can’t really provide a useful function, as most of the nasty, shady political ads look something like that.

          • Aapje says:

            I think I can say “my dream is that I can spend all day playing with my kid” without anyone expecting me to go quit my job right now.

            That doesn’t mean that it is incorrect to say: You want to play with your kid all day. It merely means that you don’t have the financial means to fund that, so you cannot do what you want. So it is incorrect so state: ‘lycotic is going to play with his kid all day,’ because one cannot know whether you will have the means to achieve your goal.

            I can say “I dream of a world with no war” while still believing that the world we actually live in requires us to have a military.

            This is not a logical rebuttal, since “I want a world with no war” is not inconsistent with “I want an army” (especially if one believes in MAD-like status quo). I have noticed that America seems chronically incapable of not using their army, so you may think that it is mandatory, but it is in fact possible to have an army and not use it.

            OTOH, it is pertinent information that Clinton dreams of a world with no borders as a final state, as many would never like to get there. Nonetheless, it is a very imprecise guide to what a Clinton presidency would have actually attempted to do.

            Trump never argued about what Clinton would do, he talked about her dreams and the consequences of those dreams. You are moving the goal posts from whether Trump’s statement is actually false to arguing that he can’t say certain things because they are not nice:

            There’s a tiresome strand of political discourse that talks about the dark motives of what a politician “really” wants.

            This is exactly how bias happens often in fact checking. People can’t really argue with a statement, so they start dragging in ethics that have nothing to do with the truthfulness, just to get the desired outcome.

            Frankly, it’s absurd to insinuate that Trump was projecting beliefs on Clinton when she actually said it. This is not Kremlin-watching.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            @ Lycotic:

            I think I can say “my dream is that I can spend all day playing with my kid” without anyone expecting me to go quit my job right now.

            The difference is that you (presumably) don’t have enough money to quit your job, whereas the US President does have the ability to open up America’s borders should he or she so want. Plus, since there are people who do actually want open borders and see it as a feasible policy objective, and since many of these people are in the same political tribe as Hillary, and since there already is an example of a common market with open trade and open borders (the EU), I don’t think it’s at all outlandish to read “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders” and come away with the conclusion that Hillary would try and set up such an arrangement should she come to power. At the very least, if she *wouldn’t* do such a thing, she’s phrased herself is a potentially misleading way, and putting the blame on Trump instead of on Hillary’s poor choice of words does seem rather tendentious.

          • lycotic says:

            @Aapje

            I have noticed that America seems chronically incapable of not using their army

            Is that peculiar to America? What features of America cause this?

            The only large army that hasn’t been used recently that I can think of is the Chinese PLA, and I’m not confident it won’t be within a generation.

          • Aapje says:

            Very few countries are actually pacifist (Japan is the one that I know of), but I think that the US has a way lower threshold to use violence than most other countries.

            I think this stems from (at least):
            – A lack of (semi-recent) experience with foreign armies on US soil, which makes it easier to pretend that war only harms the combatants.
            – Militarism is a key element of US culture (the adulation of the US military is quite extreme when compared to my culture). Silly dogmatic beliefs, like the assumption that everything that the US military does is to ‘protect our freedom,’ also leads to overconfidence in the ability of the military to achieve positive outcomes.
            – The US mostly dominates the current World Order and thus has a strong interest in knocking down threats to it’s hegemony and/or proving to other countries that they can trust in papa bear.

          • keranih says:

            Aajpe –

            I’m going to push back on this:

            America has a way lower threshhold to use violence as I disagree.

            I believe that for our capability and responsibilities we have a high threshold, and that Pax Americana would be far less impressive if we were as inclined to use force as other nations of less power and reach.

            For your particular points:

            – It’s hard to make the argument that the USA does not understand what it means to be conquered and occupied territory without disregarding the American CW. One could say that war didn’t count, but one would have to disregard the cultural history of Southern over-representation in the American military. As it is, most places that the US has put boots on the ground have been in the midst of active, violent turmoil. It’s not like we roll into peaceful places and start shit. (*)

            – Again, the trust the American public puts in its military is temporally dependent, and non-universal. It is also greater than most of the West, but then again, our military is better than most of the West, as well. Most places we get into fights with, also have strong “warrior ethos”.

            – Secondarily to the above – support for the American military is partly Tribal, in the USA. I suspect it is also so in other countries, but perhaps not in the same manner. Globalists of all stripes tend to down play both military virtues and military advantages, for reasons.

            Finally, a bunch of other countries have overtly outsourced their military might to the USA. It’s not accurate to make this into empire building when it’s more like “dude, please go knock down that asshole for us”.

            (*) Don’t say Iraq. No, seriously, don’t.

          • Aapje says:

            @keranih

            The US civil war was a more traditional ‘civil’ war where the combatants mostly stayed out of the way of civilians. Civilians even went to watch some battles as tourists. This is incomparable to more modern wars where civilians that minded their own business very often suffered greatly from combat action.

            I would also argue that the southern people who care about have lost are motivated by a desire for independence, not anger over the casualties.

            As it is, most places that the US has put boots on the ground have been in the midst of active, violent turmoil.

            That doesn’t mean that you can improve that by intervening or that doing so cannot be regarded as a low threshold to use violence.

            (*) Don’t say Iraq. No, seriously, don’t.

            Voldemort was actually relatively peaceful, in a ‘most people daren’t resist, sort of way.’ It clearly didn’t improve.

            Again, the trust the American public puts in its military is temporally dependent, and non-universal.

            My argument is not that the US people give infinite trust, just a lot more than in most other nations.

            It is also greater than most of the West, but then again, our military is better than most of the West, as well.

            More effective at killing people, sure. More effective at achieving good outcomes…not always.

            Finally, a bunch of other countries have overtly outsourced their military might to the USA. It’s not accurate to make this into empire building when it’s more like “dude, please go knock down that asshole for us”.

            That is true, but:
            – you don’t necessarily have to say yes
            – many of the military actions don’t seem to be of this kind, but were pretty clearly desired by the US leadership themselves.

          • Matt M says:

            I know I’m going back in the conversation a bit, but spinning it as “Hillary dreams of a world where borders are no longer necessary” is just a tad charitable, is it not?

            Imagine Trump said “I dream of a world with no black people”

            Would the media spin be, “Trump calls for the extermination of blacks – announces intention to nuke Africa” or would it be “Trump clearly is saying that he dreams of a future where racial harmony leads to such continuous intermixing of the races that all humanity coalesces into a pleasant shade of light brown.”

      • lycotic says:

        Curious:

        Given the ~300 judgements made on the major candidates, what do you think was the average skew due to a labelling bias, on their 0 – 5 truth scale?

        I mean it’s probably not 0, but is it really big enough to affect anything?

        *Far* more likely would be a skew due to selection bias. I mean, you’d expect all politicians to show up as less truthful than they normally are, since Politifact doesn’t grade their uncontroversial statements, but there’s ample grey area in what they actually choose to grade.

        • Wander says:

          I saw a pretty good post about it (on tumblr, so unfortunately I don’t have it to link) that showed something like a 2 or 3, with half-truths becoming pants-on-fire when said by a Republican. I think someone would have to be very naive to claim that Politifact wasn’t biased towards the left, the real question is just how extreme.

        • gbdub says:

          Somebody posted a few months back (I’m having trouble finding it) a chart of average politifact rating for most of the politicians in the presidential race plus a few prominent senators.

          Literally every Republican was rated as a bigger liar than literally every Democrat. The poster was using this to tout how Republicans are all liars. But the result just seems wildly unlikely without a significant bias in either the rating or selection of statements to check.

          EDIT: I’ll add that personally, I find the detailed descriptions Politifact puts out actually pretty useful summaries of the sources and sides of the argument. But the rating afterward seems really arbitrary.

          • Earthly Knight says:

            Literally every Republican was rated as a bigger liar than literally every Democrat.

            Here are polifact’s ratings for the GOP and democratic candidates.

            Politifact has fact-checked 79 statements by Jeb Bush. Of these, 7 (9%) were rated false or pants on fire.

            Politifact has fact-checked 293 statements by Hillary Clinton. Of these, 36 (12%) were rated false or pants on fire.

            You were saying?

          • Jiro says:

            If it is not true for literally every Republican, but it is true for the majority of Republicans, should you rate the statement “mostly true” or “pants on fire”?

          • gbdub says:

            I was saying my impressions from a chart I’m still pretty sure I saw, but I may have misremembered or the chart itself may have been cherry picked (it was second hand, not direct from Politifact). It’s possible Jeb was on there and ranked appropriately, but the whole thing was skewed pretty red.

            Anyway I’ll shut up about until / if I can find it.

      • Earthly Knight says:

        There was at least one case where they rated reasonably similar statements by Trump and Sanders about the black unemployment rate very differently on what seemed to me to be a technicality.

        This accusation has been repeated many times here. It was false the first time and remains so. Sanders referred to the U-6 measure of underemployment for black youths as the “real” unemployment rate for that demographic; because the U-6 measure at least arguably provides a more accurate picture of unemployment, politifact rated his claim mostly true. Trump just picked the highest number he could find, which was only very tenuously connected to unemployment, and called that the black youth unemployment rate. Politifact rated his claim mostly false. The “technicality” here is that Sanders had a principled basis for the claim he made while Trump was slinging bullshit.

        In general, if you think you’ve found a problem with one of politifact’s ratings, the odds are overwhelming that it’s your judgment that’s mistaken, not politifact. The only complaint against politifact I’ve heard here or anywhere else that has turned out to have any substance to it is the one Wander lodged above about open borders. The rest has just been partisan whinging.

        • rlms says:

          Eh, there is clearly a difference in charitability. Trump “exaggerates the issue” whereas Sanders’ “general point was correct”.

        • gbdub says:

          Actually I think this is a good example of why Politifact can be misleading even when it’s right. Both Sanders and Trump were making the same overall point: the low number for overall federal unemployment is misleading, as there is a much larger group of people who ought/want to be working but can’t and have given up looking. Black youths are particularly hard hit by his.

          Sanders chose a better fact to back up this point, Trump chose an exaggerated statistic. So in that sense scoring Sanders higher is justified.

          But the overall point being made wasn’t “mostly false”, just the factoid used to support it. The problem is it’s too easy to take “mostly false” as “Trump is a liar, unemployment is super low, yay Obama!” While seeing Bernie’s “mostly true” as “see Bernie had a point all along!” It ruins all the nuance. As I said earlier, the long form explanation on Politifact covered all this and seemed pretty fair. But the final rating is pretty subjective and trying to use it statistically to say who is the bigger liar is problematic.

          • Moon says:

            Everyone seems to use that one error in a politifact rating to prove that politifact is supposedly untrustworthy. But politifact very very seldom makes errors like that. But I guess Trump supporters need some way to “prove” that Trump isn’t the biggest liar ever to run for president in at least the last century.

            Politics is tribal. So you get to nitpick all criticisms of your tribe’s leader, until you find that 1 in 1000 places where the criticism is not valid. And you get to cherry pick your examples and justifications for your argument that your preferred tribe’s leader is the greatest thing since sliced bread. That’s also called “rationalism” around here, LOL.

            There’s another technique that is used around here. If someone links to an article in a publication, the substance of the article doesn’t need to be discussed, if one disagrees with it. One only needs to discuss one particular writer in the entire history of the magazine who had been once found to disregard some standard of journalism. That keeps one safe from the content of the article. The commenter probably won’t go back and link to the 20 other articles documenting the same events, because it gets too tiresome, doing that all the time. This technique is similar to dog piling, in that it wears down the opposition tribe, with little effort on the part of members of the other tribe.

          • cassander says:

            >Everyone seems to use that one error in a politifact rating to prove that politifact is supposedly untrustworthy

            People have brought up multiple errors.

            >ut politifact very very seldom makes errors like that.

            and your evidence for this is……..

            > That’s also called “rationalism” around here, LOL.

            And what do you call it when you do it, moon?

          • Earthly Knight says:

            People have brought up multiple errors.

            Rather, people have brought up multiple politifact rulings that they take to contain errors but which, in fact, do not.

    • Wrong Species says:

      I think all of those are true to a certain extent. Everyone is biased, even on “simple matters of fact” and Politifact selectively interpreted statements to suit their ideology. However, Trump certainly told more non-truths than any other candidate but his supporters didn’t care if he was always factually correct. However, this doesn’t mean fact checking is hopeless. It does mean that it’s an uphill battle and that we need more fact checkers to temper the bias of other fact checkers. Hopefully, groups that are less biased should gain status and become more prominent. Of course, they can’t resolve questions such as “is global warming something caused by humans” or “will a minimum wage raise increase unemployment” but I think we can get to a point where we agree on questions of “did he say that” or “did this event happen” for the most part.

      Some may roll their eyes and dismiss this as a hopeless fantasy but there is a precedent. 538 has become the go to source for many when it comes to tracking polls and they were one of the few groups of people not dismissing Trumps chances. They still gave him a thirty percent chance of winning the election and correctly predicted that if he won, he would still lose the popular vote.

      • lycotic says:

        Fact checking aggregators?

        Will we get into arguments about whether this aggregator or that aggregator is inserting to much uncertainty in their models of fact-checker correlation?

        • Wrong Species says:

          The problem with a fact checking aggregater is that we don’t have an independent way to verify their accuracy. But I can certainly imagine something like that. In fact, there could be a “bias index”. Imagine that we have two fact checkers R and D. Whenever R disagrees from other fact checkers, it is biased towards Republicans. So they get a score of one. D is biased towards Democrats so it gets a score of -1. And there is a third group, I, which doesn’t have a consistent group that it leans towards so it gets a score of zero. So maybe people decide that I is the most trustworthy, or at least relatively non-ideological.

      • Earthly Knight says:

        They still gave him a thirty percent chance of winning the election and correctly predicted that if he won, he would still lose the popular vote.

        The second part of this sentence is false. In their final forecast, 538 gave Trump a 10.5% chance of winning the electoral college without the popular vote, and an 18% chance of winning both.

    • Skivverus says:

      I’d go with C’, though B may also be the case: no sufficiently large institution is immune to lying if they think they can get away with it.
      This is because the reputational incentive for a person or institution to tell the truth is proportional to how much their audience can and does verify what they say; at an individual level, honesty may be a terminal value, but for sufficiently large organizations the Anthropological Law of Large Numbers (which I may or may not have just made up, but you get the idea) kicks in.

      • Wander says:

        One of my biggest issues with many fact checking sites is that they only barely/don’t at all actually explain how they came to the conclusion that they present. They are very frequently quite hand-wavy about why something is true or false. I would trust them a lot more if they actually showed me their own sources, because they’re not actually arbiters of fact themselves, that’s what the research is for. Additionally, I don’t think any fact checking site so far has given a good justification on why they should count as an “official” source, what qualifications their staff have and why this makes their judgment better than the average person.

    • The original Mr. X says:

      B: Bias: PolitiFact, despite its claims of nonpartisanship, is left-leaning, and its rankings are bogus, so they should just go home and do something productive with their lives.

      Sed quis corriget ipsos correctores?

    • BBA says:

      It’s always been (A). Facts have never mattered. We should all just go home and stock up on canned goods.

      • shakeddown says:

        I suspect facts probably matter more in less partisan/emotional elections. This election got incredibly ugly and I don’t think facts could affect it much either way, but if we look at elections in less partisan periods (where a better candidate could win over 60% of the vote), they would probably mean more.
        And if nothing else, the belief that facts matter is important, in that it may push candidates to try having more honest policy stances. If future politicians will look back on this election and just go “nope, don’t care about facts”, that’s worrying.

    • suntzuanime says:

      What about E: Hubris? PolitiFact has arrogated themselves authority over true and false, how can you possibly expect that to go well? I’m sure they’re trying, but they don’t seem to have the proper respect for the enormity of their task.

      • lycotic says:

        Wouldn’t that fall under (C) — It can’t be done?

        I think an important question is whether Politifact failed because they suck, or because it’s impossible.

        • suntzuanime says:

          I took (C) to mean that no organization could succeed at getting trust, not at deserving trust, and specifically that people would fail to trust them because they would assume they were explicitly biased, rather than because they would assume that they were not up to the task of divining truth.

    • paulmbrinkley says:

      One problem I have with fact checking, that I’ve not seen addressed in this thread yet, is that a fact checker tells you nothing about the importance of those facts, and that threatens to make the whole operation worthless.

      Suppose a checker finds one candidate says 90% true facts and another says 60%, and reports that. Everyone thinks the first candidate is superior. But then someone deep-dives and finds that most of the first candidate’s 90% was a panoply of obscure details about sub-Saharan foreign policy that affects no one in the electorate, while the second candidate’s 60% were on domestic agriculture, at a time when everyone is especially worried about it. Seen that way, the second candidate is much more relevant.

      I’m strawmanning this deliberately to illustrate how skewed a picture fact checking can give a voter if they don’t have time to look at anything beyond “truth percentage”. In practice, I don’t know how big a problem this actually is, and that’s another problem I have: it seems very hard to tell, without relying on the authority of the very fact checkers I suspect of doing this.

      Related to this is the problem of one candidate who makes fewer checkable claims than the other, or facts you can’t check because they’re really predictions you can’t check until after an election, or that are impossible to check without perfect knowledge of the entire system, etc.

      • Mark says:

        This is definitely true of Trump vs. Clinton – some of the statements that they rated 100% true for Clinton were just facts that absolutely nobody was contesting.

        I mean – they fact checked Clinton on whether there was a law suit against Trump (which Trump admitted to).
        The equivalent would have been to fact check Trump on whether Bill Clinton signed NAFTA, which they didn’t (as far as I’m aware) do.

        So, I think they need to get rid of the overall truthfulness rating – it’s meaningless – and just stick to providing evidence for specific statements.

    • cassander says:

      The washington post’s fact checker consistently does a good, even handed job, far better than politifact, so I lean towards B. That said, there’s definitely some truth to C, but not so much that the whole effort is useless.

    • Matt M says:

      How about something like “Facts matter sometimes and sometimes they don’t” combined with “Politifact can provide useful analysis about a particular claim but their ratings are meaningless and useless.”

      I think part of the problem is that people don’t actually read politifact articles, and as such, they use it for something it was never originally intended to be. Adding up all of the Trump statements they evaluate and coming up with an “average” to prove he’s a “bigger liar” than Hillary is simply not sound reasoning whatsoever – given that there is no objective standard of what statements get rated and what ones don’t.

      I treat politifact the way I treat video game reviews. I read the article for informational purposes, completely ignore the pointless and arbitrary numerical score at the end, and then do my own follow-on research as necessary. It still works reasonably well for that.

    • What if someone organized a pair of fact checking organizations, one of them clearly biased to the right, one to the left, and they only published conclusions when they agreed with each other?

      • Skivverus says:

        Well, that at least mitigates one sort of bias. I’m not confident on what percentage of all bias that one sort is, though.

      • The Nybbler says:

        In the fullness of time…. no, who am I kidding, from Day 1… both organizations would be biased to the same side, only with one of them lying about it.

    • nyccine says:

      It’s absolutely B. Politifact, like virtually all such “fact-checking” sites, are creatures of newspapers, and it’s no coincidence that this type of site came about after consumer’s trust of the press as an unbiased reporter of news had completely cratered. The “fact checking” is invariably just another means of editorializing the news; it’s just a shell-game to avert criticism of bias.

      Sadly, it seemed to have worked; I’ve lost count of the number of arguments I’ve had with people who literally refuse to believe a “fact-checker” can be biased; “it’s definitionally impossible” has been used more than once.

  81. Wrong Species says:

    Let’s say I wanted to genetically alter myself to get a higher Dunbar number. Assuming we had genetic engineering technology and understood it, what kind of limit would I likely face? Is 1000 too large, assuming that I keep brain size relatively close to what it is now? Or is it more likely that it’s all hardware and I would need a bigger brain?

    • StellaAthena says:

      Setting aside biological limits, temporal limitations matter a lot. There’s a pretty hard cap on the number of people you can spend time with that you don’t see “routinely” (whatever we take that to mean). Yes technically you might be able to process being friends with a million people, but how many of those people are you going to find time to see at least once a month.

      • StellaAthena says:

        Following up with some numbers pulled out of my ass:

        On average one hour of socializing per weekday and 5 per weekend day sounds pretty respnable for an adult who has a job and other responsibilities. That’s 15 hours a week, or 75 hours a month. If we only count in-person time, it seems reasonable to say that you probably don’t want to stretch it out more thinly than 10 people per hour (doing all your socializing in groups) and requiring you to spend 5 hours per month with someone for them to count. This actually puts you at 150 friends outside of your daily life circle which puts you at maybe 400 total people.

        You can make this more efficient through internet communication if you wish. Long emails is probably the most efficient there. I write a life update email every two months that I send to over 100 people, mostly college friends. Allowing for mass mailings like that, it seems like you could probably just read a lot of them, maybe one every 30 minutes? This also puts you at 150 friends whose emails you read every month, interestingly enough.

        Feel free to tear my numbers apart, but an order of magnetude increase in your friend circle seems logisticaly imposssible, even if it were cognitively possible.

        • Wrong Species says:

          I’m imaging a race of people who’s gimmick is they have a far higher Dunbar number than us. It affects the way their entire society operates. So they have a much stronger and larger community but they are also far more insular than we are. So yes, it would be difficult in our society for something like that to work but I’d think it would be different in a society structured differently.

          • StellaAthena says:

            Structured differently how exactly? I don’t see any particular connection between Dunbar’s number and the average hours worked per day.

            The above assumptions allow you to have 2 friends per hour spent socializing per month. Let’s say you do nothing but sleep for 8 hours and socialize every day. That still only gets you to 960, which isn’t even an increase in the order of magnitude. But I think a far better objection to my numbers is “maybe they have different societal conceptions of friendship” which is totally fair. So let’s say that you have 1,000,000 friends that you interact with outside your day-to-day activities and let’s say you work 8 hours a day, sleep 8 hours a day, and need to spend 1 hour per ______ to count someone as a friend and solve for the blank.

            You have 16 hours over the weekend that aren’t accounted for too. So every week you spend 9*8 hours socializing, which is 9*8*5 friends that you can interact with per month. So how many months does it take to interact with all 1 million friends? 2777.77… months, or just over 230 years. If we say you spend all your time socializing, you could spare 1 hour per friend per 114 years. It would take nearly half a year if you spent 1 minute per friend

          • Skivverus says:

            A slightly different metaphor on the numbers to add to Stella’s analysis.
            We’ve got two sliders: (A) percentage of time an individual spends socializing (after factoring out all necessary non-social time usage), and (B) percentage of time spent socializing required to count another individual as a friend.
            (A) obviously cannot exceed 100%, and for humans is probably higher than 20% (at least, for those who need to worry about Dunbar’s number), so increasing Dunbar’s number mostly requires pushing down (B).

            (B), in turn, I suspect is bounded by the rate(s) at which different individuals change: that is, the faster two individuals change, the more time they’ll have to spend socializing to remain friends.

  82. SUT says:

    There have been these competing claims for which side is perp and which side is victim to more political violence. In the spirit of rationality could I propose an experiment:

    Hillary voters wear a red hat and walk through the hood. Or put a Trump bumper stickers on their car and park it for the week in the hood.

    Trump voters wear an ImWithHer shirt and go to a sports bar in Fishtown.

    Do you think people would do this? Would it change minds? Or is this completely infantile point, which “everyone already knows what would happen”

  83. onyomi says:

    HIT or more frequent, less intense workouts?

    • psmith says:

      Depends on goals, modality, logistics, where you are right now, specific programming, and do you mean HIT like Mike Mentzer/Dorian Yates or HIIT like Tabata sprints?

    • moridinamael says:

      Unless you are much unlike me, you will find HIT is so unpleasant that you just won’t do it for long.

    • Tyrant Overlord Killidia says:

      I read here that the only thing that really matters is doing compound exercises to (near) failure.

      I haven’t actually tried this out, but I’ll probably start experimenting with it in the next few weeks to see if I make or lose any gains.

    • onyomi says:

      To elaborate a bit:

      I’ve kind of alternated in my thinking and practice between these two over the years. Recently started a new round of super-slow HIT using mostly machines but doing a very full range of motion. I’ve definitely had some good results, though there also tends to be some initial improvement due simply to changing. I guess I always have mixed feelings about the two because they both have a logic which makes some sense, but which are somewhat contradictory:

      High frequency, low intensity: your body adapts to what you do frequently. Workout every day or almost every day. Make it a habit. Spend a lot of time under tension. But make it fun so you want to do it every day.

      HIT: your body only adapts when it perceives it necessary. The way to make it seem necessary is to massively overload its current capacity. This requires basically reducing your muscles to jelly, but you don’t have to do it that often. Intense soreness is a good sign. The workout should be short and infrequent but kind of like a battle. Grunting and trembling mean you’re doing it right.

      Both make a certain amount of sense. Seemingly against HIT: the highest performers in the world: Olympians, bodybuilders, powerlifters spend hours a day working out. You can’t be in Olympian or Mr. Universe shape doing two 30 min workouts a week. Yet these people also workout very intensely much of the time, I think, so it’s not like just spending a long time in the weight room without intensity will produce those results. Also, it may be that they are self-selecting: the type of people with the genes and/or sufficient dosage of steroids to allow them to recover from daily, hours-long, intense workouts. Most of us cannot effectively recover from such workouts and so must either reduce intensity or frequency. Lately I think I’m having better results with more intensity.

      My general sense of the pros and cons of the two styles, based purely on my personal experience:

      HIT:
      Better muscle building results (for me, at least)
      Better for strengthening muscles as a kind of PT
      May ironically be safer if done super slow and with machines that create even force curve
      More workout in less time
      Can be fun if viewed as a kind of challenge
      But, as Moridinamael says, can start to feel like a real ordeal, making it hard to keep up in the long run. You don’t really look forward to your workout and it’s hard to make it into a regular habit like “hit the gym on the way to work.”
      Probably not great for cardio or calorie burn, though increased muscle size and oxidative capacity might help you burn more calories even when not working out

      More frequent, less intense:
      kind of the opposite of all the above; better for cardio, mood boosting benefits of exercise; more pleasant; may be more suitable to some body types; may, however increase chances of injury due to potential for overuse, acceleration, etc.

      • the anonymouse says:

        I am enjoying good results from Rippetoe’s Starting Strength method, and it’s cheap.* I’m currently at 3x per week, having had a headstrong period where I ignored competent advice and tried to do a 6x/week regimen alternating days between basic lifts and a program of rando ancillary lifts that seemed cool. (Muscle confusion! Hahaha!) Turns out, competent advice was right, and all I was doing was wasting time and exhausting myself such that I couldn’t put up enough weight to make any gains.

        My priors: I dislike running, and unless the US Army is going to resume paying me to do so, I won’t. I also dislike going to commercial gyms, because of the expense, the other people, and the time involved in going back and forth.

        Cheap: I bought a pillar-style squat rack for a hundred-something dollars new and shipped to my door; my bar and weight pile have been either scavenged or found at Goodwill (which, oddly, actually tends to price plates higher than the price-per-pound at used sporting-good stores, but also rotates through half-price days). I buy more plates as my numbers go up.

        * Rippetoe himself is an acquired taste, but I enjoy his bluntness.

    • TheBearsHaveArrived says:

      I prefer simply hitting whatever major and minor body parts are not tired, as a way to maximize total recovery rates.

      I guess I do some version of HIT. I prefer two 15 minute workouts a day.

      A lot of top bodybuilders just kindof wing it each day on how they feel, with some more attention paid to what bodyparts they need to hit more.

    • Brad says:

      Something like sprinting as fast as I can for a short period of time makes me feel really really awful. That’s always been true for me even when I was in the best shape of my life (though at that time as fast as I can was faster).

      Yes, finding time and motivation to do an hour of moderate exercise is difficult, but while I’m doing it don’t feel like I’d rather be dead.

      I don’t otherwise have a particularly low pain threshold. I’m not sure exactly what determines this sort of thing.

  84. John Schilling says:

    News of the truly weird: Someone has managed to steal three Dutch warships from the Java sea. From the bottom of the Java sea, these particular ships having been sunk early in World War II.

    Authorities suspect outlaw but otherwise boring salvage operators looking for scrap metal by the kiloton. I really, really want to believe that somewhere is a supervillain in his (necessarily gigantic) lair, gloating “Count Scarlioni has his Mona Lisa, and Doctor Impossible fondles the Spear of Longinus every night, but I have HNLMS De Ruyter mounted on my living-room wall!”.

    If the three have instead been re-equipped with Wave Motion Engines and are enroute to Gamilon to defeat said alien menace, that would be OK too.

    • bean says:

      I hope they catch whoever did it, and string them up. While the defense of Java was horribly managed, the men and ships who fought there deserved better than to have this happen.
      Although I do agree that the supervillain would be a more exciting option. Maybe we can persuade him to steal Texas next, and fix her up.

      • Spookykou says:

        I don’t really agree, but I love the idea of the ships deserving respect.

        • Eltargrim says:

          Whether or not they deserve particular respect for their status as warships, they deserve proper handling for being a good source of low-background steel. Given that there is a limited supply of low-background steel sources, pre-atomic naval wrecks should be protected until needed.

          • bean says:

            They’re war graves. I happen to really like WWII-era warships, and think that they should be protected as such (hence my comments), but even if they weren’t, those three ships were the grave of 2,200 men. Maybe it’s OK to rob graves if we have enough need of low-radiation steel, but that’s not the primary reason we should protect them right now.

          • sflicht says:

            @bean,

            I know it might be impossible (I don’t know enough about the Law of the Sea), but would you be in favor of an international treaty granting wartime shipwrecks protected status, along the lines of national monuments, in analogy with major Civil War battlefields?

            I don’t know how I’d feel about such a treaty. I do think this is sort of a victory for the free market. I suspect part of the reason why naval veterans have never pushed for this sort of thing is that it seemed outlandish to imagine the scrap would be economically recoverable. That assumption has clearly been proven wrong.

          • bean says:

            I know it might be impossible (I don’t know enough about the Law of the Sea), but would you be in favor of an international treaty granting wartime shipwrecks protected status, along the lines of national monuments, in analogy with major Civil War battlefields?

            This should already have been illegal, as the vessels were still property of the Netherlands. Wrecks don’t suddenly stop belonging to their owners, and salvage isn’t ‘finders keepers’, nor does it have an apparent time-out. The Spanish have laid claim to treasure from a ship which sank over 200 years ago and gotten away with it.
            The only thing a treaty could do would be to mandate extra protection for said vessels.

            I don’t know how I’d feel about such a treaty. I do think this is sort of a victory for the free market. I suspect part of the reason why naval veterans have never pushed for this sort of thing is that it seemed outlandish to imagine the scrap would be economically recoverable. That assumption has clearly been proven wrong.

            They didn’t need to. The Dutch wouldn’t give permission to salvage the ships without good reason (and a good plan for respectfully dealing with the bodies), and there’s no legal way to get the ships without that.
            I should point out that many war wrecks in shallower water have been salvaged, despite the bodies aboard. Notable cases are Tirpitz and Oklahoma. In fact, the only case I’m aware of of an easily-salvaged wreck remaining is Arizona, and I can only speculate that they just never got around to cutting her up before someone got the bright idea of preserving her. (Some salvage work was done, removing all of the above-water wreckage and two of the turrets.)

    • John Schilling says:

      Looking into this some more, and the supervillain hypothesis just won’t go away.

      The Dutch MoD report says that two of the ships are “geheel vermist”, which seems to translate to “completely missing”. I’d like more details, and I assume that allows for small bits to have been shaken lose and left on the sea floor as the ships were salvaged, but nonetheless a fairly comprehensive salvage operation. Of ships in almost 70 meters of water.

      That’s technical-diving depth; you need either lots of helium or saturation and decompression chambers, or really both if you want to get serious work done. Not something that can be done by local fishermen moonlighting as salvage operators with second-hand scuba gear. I can’t imagine the logistical footprint would go unnoticed, unless it were hidden in some other large technical-diving operation, but is it really worthwhile for e.g. an offshore oil drilling company to get into literal grave-robbing at scrap-metal prices?

      Remotely-operated vehicles might do it, but they seem to be too slow and expensive for this sort of salvage even when operated openly.

      There has been, AFIK, exactly one ship built capable of lifting something that size off the sea bed without sending down divers to cut it into smaller chunks. If scrap metal is what you are after, you’d get more by simply scrapping that ship than by sending it out to salvage every warship the Dutch navy lost in WWII. Same goes for probably any other deepwater salvage ship I don’t know about.

      There are certainly ways to tear up the hulk of a warship into readily-salvageable chunks without sending down divers – some news reports suggest local salvage operators are using explosives, and purely mechanical means are not out of the question. But these ships, the light cruisers at least, are almost literally made out of, well, this stuff. Short of divers or ROVs with cutting torches, I don’t see how you break up a ship like that without either leaving an ungodly mess or leaving a huge section of the hull intact and settling for what bits of superstructure you can dredge up. Neither of which is consistent with the reporting.

      I’m not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens. Or supervillains. One of the two.

      • beleester says:

        If scrap metal is what you are after, you’d get more by simply scrapping that ship than by sending it out to salvage every warship the Dutch navy lost in WWII. Same goes for probably any other deepwater salvage ship I don’t know about.

        Actually, there’s a specific reason for salvaging sunken pre-end-of-WWII warships: Low-background steel. Basically, any steel made after we started doing atmospheric nuclear tests has tiny, tiny amounts of radioactive material in it. Some scientific instruments are really sensitive to radiation – Geiger counters and so on – so they need to be made with low-background steel to be accurate.

        And the best way to find low-background steel is to find steel that has been sitting underwater for the past 70 years, like sunken battleships.

        • Randy M says:

          That’s fascinating, and I’m not sure why exactly, but kind of disquieting.

        • Aapje says:

          Thx, that was very interesting.

        • bean says:

          My understanding is that the market for low-radiation steel is relatively small, and can be satisfied by salvage of the remains of the High Seas Fleet in Scapa Flow. If someone had dumped 10,000 tons of low-radiation steel onto the market all at once, I’m pretty sure that questions would have been asked.

          • John Schilling says:

            Hence, the supervillain hypothesis. Professor Midnight needs lots of low-radiation steel to fabricate the Omega Device, but if he tries to buy it openly people will wonder what he is up to. That way leads to the inevitable humiliating pummeling by some low-rent superhero. Instead, it looks like he may have as much as a four-year head start on his nefarious scheme.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            Is refining steel to make it non-radoiactive impossible, impossible with current tech, or so expensive as to not be worthwhile?

          • bean says:

            More or less impossible. AIUI, even remelting low-radiation steel is enough to contaminate it, which leaves sunken warships as basically the only source. Even if you took apart an old building, the steel would be in the wrong shape and thickness to use.

          • lhn says:

            The Straight Dope claims that as background radiation has dropped, the need for prewar low-background steel has likewise– that many applications can get by with new steel and more sophisticated instruments that can identify and filter background count. (Though Wikipedia says cobalt-60 remains a problem.)

            http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2971/is-steel-from-scuttled-german-warships-valuable-because-it-isn-t-contaminated-with-radioactivity

          • John Schilling says:

            Low-radiation steel can be made by ensuring that your furnace is continuously purged with, e.g., helium. Any decent university laboratory ought to be able to whip up a few hundred grams on demand that way.

            Unfortunately, the market for low-radiation steel has traditionally been too small for anyone to hermetically seal and purge an industrial blast or electrorefining furnace, but too large for laboratory-scale operations. And anything that involves exposing molten steel or iron to the Earth’s natural (well, sort of…) atmosphere, now means making it a little bit radioactive. So, as long as we’ve got a reasonable supply of old sunken warships and the like, that’s cheaper.

            Though probably not if you need to conceal the entire operation in a generally piratical fashion.

          • dndnrsn says:

            This all sounds like the kind of stuff people would post if they were covering for supervillains who had stolen WWII-era wrecks.

            Not that I’m making any accusations or anything. Just throwing that out there.

          • Artificirius says:

            That sounds awfully close to accusing him of…

            :sunglasses:

            Schilling.

          • dndnrsn says:

            You win this time!

  85. Mark says:

    In Britain, there is a form of welfare called “Working Tax Credits”.

    Basically, up to a certain level of income, the government pays you a fixed amount to top up your income. The payments can be pretty high if you have children. After a certain level of income, the benefits are gradually withdrawn, though many normal working families receive some payment.

    Anyway, the government is changing the system to ‘Universal Credit’ combining the myriad benefits into one.
    Problem – benefits which are intended as stop-gap support for those without the means to support themselves (jobseekers allowance, housing benefit…) are means tested against your savings. Working tax credits (intended for working people on low pay) are not.

    So many people (myself included) are going to lose all of these benefit payments because our savings are too high. I think this is a bit scandalous, in that if someone has a massive pension, owns a house, they will continue to receive the higher benefits, but if you’ve saved into an ISA, you’ll lose it all.

    Most people don’t have any sympathy though – they think benefits should only be for people in need, and you *need* a house so that shouldn’t be taken into account.

    Anyway, it is a step away from a citizen’s basic income, away from the normalisation of receiving benefits, which is bad in my opinion.

    • suntzuanime says:

      Means-testing against savings is awful, awful. Just the worst kind of incentives for people. We means-test against savings and then we write these horrified articles about how half the population has no savings. Of course they don’t have savings when you’re actively paying them not to!

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        And even when you get rid of the penalty for savings, most people expect it to come back at some point.

        Saving up for college? Thanks, sucker!

    • Salem says:

      Wait, what? You want to normalise receiving benefits?

      The great thing about benefits is that they get the government’s scale and leverage to help loads of people in need. The terrible thing about benefits is that the scale the government is operating on means they are poorly targeted. Obviously, these are two sides of the same coin.

      So if there’s a strong stigma against mooching off the public purse, only people who really need benefits will take them. That way, the government can be generous with benefits, without the cost exploding or having to engage in expensive and counter-productive means testing.

      Unfortunately, in recent years the stigma against taking benefits has eroded, so people who don’t really need the benefits end up taking them. So the government has to crack down with expensive and counter-productive means-testing. And so you’re going to lose your benefits.

      • jaimeastorga2000 says:

        The argument in favor of normalizing benefits is that we are rapidly approaching a point in which an increasingly non-trivial fraction of the population is economically useless and will starve without benefits. See Gwern on neo-Luddism or Scott’s “Burdens” and “Basic Income Guarantees”.

        (I’m not sure to what extent I believe this; both James Donald and Eliezer Yudkowsky have made a pretty good argument that modern first world unemployment is artificially caused by government regulation, and the existence of e.g. Uber seems to bear them out)

        • dndnrsn says:

          I was under the impression that that particular argument was a fairly “weirdo techno-libertarian” thing. The older, more mainstream arguments I have seen are usually some combination of:

          1. Means-tested social programs (welfare, health care, whatever) create bad incentives: if going from no job to a minimum wage job or a minimum wage job to a job paying above minimum wage means losing cash payments, health care, food stamps, school lunches for your kids, etc, it is actually the smart and rational decision to not get a job, to not get a better-paying job, etc. if the gain from the increased income is less than the loss from not getting that stuff anymore. If you just give everyone a cheque in the mail, public health insurance, x dollars a month for groceries, school lunches, etc, the problem no longer exists.

          2. Means-testing involves adding a layer of government bureaucracy, when the money would be better spent if put towards giving everyone xyz. One would be better off spending public money on health care, school lunches, etc than on the pay (and benefits, and pensions) of civil servants whose job it is to determine whether people deserve those school lunches.

          3. Means-testing makes the middle classes, especially the lower middle class, resentful towards those who receive the benefits, towards the government, towards paying their taxes, etc. Someone who is above the cutoff line for all benefits, but not that far above, may feel ripped off that here they are, maybe not doing so great themselves, working hard to pay taxes, and people are getting money for nothing.

          In countries with public health care systems of one sort or another, the common gripe by people who are affluent (so, not the lower middle or middle middle class) is that if they were allowed to pay out of pocket they could get better, faster service. Some people will go to other places to pay for health care. However, because everybody gets the same health care, there’s no gripe that poor people are getting something nobody else is. People who are in one way or another self-employed or contractors, and who don’t make a ton of money – so, a lot of the LMC and MMC – tend to like public health care because they don’t have employer insurance and they could be ruined by major out-of-pocket expenses.

          Compared to these, “people are being replaced by robots and one day there will be even more robots and AIs will replace the professional class and so we need to cut everyone a cheque” is a minority position.

          • jaimeastorga2000 says:

            My comment was about the normalization of receiving government benefits, not means-testing those benefits.

          • The problem with the demogrant approach is that if you give everyone what supporters consider a basic minimum, it ends up very expensive.

            Suppose, for instance, the basic income is $20,000 per capita. Applied to 300 million people, that comes to six trillion dollars year. The total federal budget is a bit under four trillion.

            Even if you take it down to $10,000, it would still amount to more than two thirds of the present budget.

          • rlms says:

            “In countries with public health care systems of one sort or another, the common gripe by people who are affluent (so, not the lower middle or middle middle class) is that if they were allowed to pay out of pocket they could get better, faster service.”
            Which countries are those? As far as I know, the only country with restrictions on private healthcare is Canada, and even there they are only in a few provinces. Everywhere else (i.e. Europe) it is perfectly possible to pay for faster service.

          • Virbie says:

            @DavidFriedman

            > Even if you take it down to $10,000, it would still amount to more than two thirds of the present budget.

            This complaint never resonated too much with me, largely because it ignores the fact that a little over 30% of spending already goes towards Social Security and Unemployment, and a little less than 30% to Medicare and other health spending. At the very least, it seems like all or most of the former would be obviated, making a pretty significant dent in the cost. Also, your formulation for some reason assumes that every income level would have a net gain in transfers in the process of instituting the grant. I can’t imagine why this would be the case: even if we committed to no new net taxation, making the top 50% (or whatever) of the income distribution have their transfers unaffected would again cut a massive chunk out of the cost.

            It’s possible that I’m missing something, but it’s weird that I’ve never seem someone make the prohibitive-cost and even acknowledge these points, let alone address them.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @jaimeastorga2000:

            Somehow I interpreted “normalization” in the cultural sense as “normalization” in the practical sense, then. In my defence, the “most people will be useless so let’s give them enough to live on” people are usually arguing for the latter, as I understand it.

            @DavidFriedman:

            What is the total federal + state budget for everything that a grant would (supposedly) replace, though?

            @rlms:

            My relevant experience is with Canada. I was under the impression that several European countries had restrictions, but that impression might have been mistaken.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            @Virbie: if the US replaced all of SS and Medicare/Medicaid with a $10k UBI, then given David Friedman’s numbers, yes, this would be a net neutral effect on government revenue.

            I see two problems with doing it this way, however. One is that a $10k UBI would likely result in the elderly and poor getting less than they do now (“likely” is doing work – a true UBI might save a lot of wasted money, so they might come out ahead anyway). Two is that I suspect advocates of such a demogrant are arguing for it as a supplement to SS and Medicare/Medicaid, not as a replacement.

        • ” Also, your formulation for some reason assumes that every income level would have a net gain in transfers in the process of instituting the grant.”

          I’m not sure I understand your argument. If you institute a demogrant and simultaneously abolish all existing welfare programs, you then have a way of paying for part of the three or six trillion dollar cost. To make the demogrant plausible without a tax increase, you have to find a list of cuts that add up to three trillion dollars.

          Do you have such a list? Looking at a webbed list of expenditures, military+interest on the debt+veterans benefits add up to about a trillion, so if you do it at the federal level you have to eliminate all other expenditures.

          Are you assuming that present social security recipients will consider it an acceptable deal if you cancel what they regard as the return on the money they paid to social security while reassuring them that they are now part of a national welfare scheme paying them, and everyone else, ten thousand dollars a year? That’s less than the average Social Security recipients receives, less than half the maximum recipient payment.

          And the demogrant is also supposed to compensate the same recipient for the abolition of medicare?

  86. Alex Zavoluk says:

    I hope this is allowed:

    In case anyone in the Austin, TX area is unaware, there is a regular and reasonably active LW-sphere meetup that any and all readers of SSC are welcome to join. We meet at Spider House at around 1:30 on Saturday afternoons. We also sometimes have extra activities (Petrov Day, climbing, board game nights, etc.) sometimes.

    Mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/austin-less-wrong

    • dank says:

      Thanks, I just joined. I’ve been searching for other rationalists in Austin. I’m going to be out of town for Thanksgiving but I’ll try to come once I get back. We should all make a coordinated effort to convince Scott to move here.

    • Incurian says:

      I am moving nearby in a few months and will drop by when able. I pledge to be less obnoxious in person.

  87. Dr Dealgood says:

    So I’m about to start up an OSR game for a group of entirely new players (one has some experience with 3.5, but otherwise nothing). But I’m having some second thoughts about the retroclone I was planning to run and I was hoping some of the grognards here could help me through the dilemma.

    I had originally planned to run Adventurer Conqueror King, which is basically a set of extremely detailed houserules for B/X. I really like a lot of the elements in it, such as reorganizing THAC0 in a way that humans can understand it, but the rules are just way too damn fiddly. I simply refuse to roll for the price of grain in every city in the world.

    So right now I’m debating between the following:
    a. Just run Rules Cyclopedia, maybe with ACKS-esque Attack Throws and hireling tables.
    b. Embrace the spreadsheet side of the force and run ACKS.
    c. Go hunting for another retroclone entirely.
    d. Dust off the Prince Valiant RPG.

    Anyone have any suggestions?

    • dndnrsn says:

      Was THAC0 that hard to understand? I never had a hard time understanding it. For bad rules, it’s got nothing on the old D&D saving throw progression table. Or the (as I understand it, recently killed) Call of Cthulhu Resistance Table.

      EDIT: Honestly, I don’t understand OSR in the slightest. If somebody wants to go back to the glory days of playing D&D in a dorm room eating Cheetos with their buddies, used D&D books are easy to get a hold of, Cheetos are still available, and the missing part of the experience is being young and in university.

      “It’s like the olden days, but with rules that don’t suck” ignores that, well, the rules sucking was part of it (“rulings, not rules” is just another way of saying “they didn’t design this game very well so there isn’t a workable skill system”) and you can never have the olden days back.

      • Dr Dealgood says:

        I never had trouble with THAC0, but everyone I ever tried to explain it to reacted like a vampire confronted with a crucifix.

        The saving throws come in oddly specific categories but I don’t see anything inherently wrong with them. Plus there’s a kitch appeal to rolling for Save vs Poison rather than a Fortitude or Constitution save.

        The thing that is really inexplicable to me is alignment languages. It’s just such a “huh?” moment when you get to that section of the rules. I have no idea what the point of that is supposed to be.

        • dndnrsn says:

          The saving throws were really weird because they meant that you’d roll differently versus an actual spell cast then and there vs. a spell cast from a wand, as I recall.

          I didn’t play D&D earlier than 2nd ed AD&D, but I remember that the saving throws were located in a completely different part of the book from all character creation stuff.

      • Dr Dealgood says:

        Responding to the edit:

        I wasn’t alive during the old school era, and my first game was D&D 3.5 followed by Pathfinder. Nostalgia for me would be going back over old Tippyverse threads on GiantITP.

        The thing I like about OSR is that it’s a totally different set of assumptions for how the game is played and what the goal is. XP for GP, stronghold and domain rules, reaction and morale rolls for monsters, 3d6 in order ability scores: it all makes for a very different set of incentives.

        I feel like the newer editions are very much like the Star Wars VII. They nail the aesthetic, and the effects are a definite improvement over the original. But the heart is gone and even though it’s “bigger” in every way it feels smaller.

        • dndnrsn says:

          I started playing D&D shortly before the 2nd/3rd switch.

          3rd ed struck me as an attempt to “regularize” everything (have a “sneak” skill instead of giving rogues a “sneak” ability, and just give rogues more skill points, for instance), and an attempt to make everything covered by skills (I am pretty sure that 2nd ed never really covered how to handle “I try to fast talk the city guard into letting me through the gates after curfew”).

          It succeeded, partially, but also faced the problem that the more rules you add the weirder unintended consequences you get.

          I personally dislike the “rulings, not rules” attitude because it creates a disjunction between, say, STR and CHA. Nobody would say “you’re a puny weakling, so your character can’t wield a greatsword” but “you are not a good talker, so your character can’t be” is common. I remember making characters with low CHA but then fast-talking NPCs because I was able to fast-talk the GM.

          • Randy M says:

            Have you seen Angry DM’s article on social interaction? I love that site and don’t think I’ve plugged it here before.

          • dndnrsn says:

            This is great.

          • beleester says:

            That’s a very good article, I wish I had it read it back when I GM’d for my friends.

            Also, one thing that jumped out at me: “Rewarding good acting with a bonus is no different than giving someone a bonus for describing their axe swing particularly well.”

            Exalted does exactly this – you can get bonus dice on any roll by “Stunting” – describing what you’re doing in a brief and flashy way. Talking in character is a stunt, describing how you’re swinging on a chandelier to kick a bad guy in the face is also a stunt. It’s a nifty way to encourage the players to help out with descriptions.

          • Randy M says:

            7th Sea does with Drama Dice, given out by the GM for anything that makes the table laugh or cheer, usually things like swinging from chandeliers but by no means excluding witty banter.

            He’s right though that it goes against the game elements of accomplishing adventure goals through the player’s clever use of their characters resources and so rewarding such with in game bonuses is as disconnected as rewarding careful penmanship. But as a GM, you’ve got to work with what you have, and unless you want to hand out snacks as incentives, a modifier or reroll may be the next best choice–if you are okay with socially awkward or shy players being at a disadvantage at times.

          • bean says:

            Also, one thing that jumped out at me: “Rewarding good acting with a bonus is no different than giving someone a bonus for describing their axe swing particularly well.”

            That was the one section that I disagreed with. I think bonuses for good play should definitely be a thing, precisely to promote good play. In combat, this is tempered by the need to keep things moving. But if one of my players gave a particularly engaging description of his actions at the critical moment of a battle, I’d give him a bonus. If he started doing it every time he made an attack, I’d tell him to stop it. Don’t let the players farm the bonuses.
            Another thing would be to at least somewhat normalize the bonuses by player. It’s entirely possible that one player’s worst performance as a character is better than another player’s best as their character. If so, it would be unfair to always reward the first player and never the second, as the article quite rightly points out. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use rewards to encourage the second player when he does a particularly good job. And I’d even consider giving the first player more rewards justified, so long as it doesn’t get totally out of wack. You’re giving them out for making the game better.
            (Of course, better players should be held to a higher standard, within reason. I recently had my GM tell me that I could do better in describing a device my mad scientist was building. He was right, too, and I built one of the most amazingly impractical steam-powered walking thrones ever. It worked, too.)

          • Spookykou says:

            This article does not seem to address my biggest area of concern with Social Skills, and why I think there is so much ‘baggage’ around social skill checks.

            That’s all it is. Of course dice should be rolled if dice need to be rolled. And of course what the PC says and how they say it should have an impact. But it is no different than swinging on a chandelier or leaping onto a horse and riding it away or swinging a battle axe into an orc’s skull. Mostly.

            One of the big difference between types of actions is expectations. A fight is heavily abstracted, and I have no idea how to actually fight with swords, so a roll of the dice deciding if I hit or not does not play with my expectations. Most skill checks are kind of abstracted, and again, I don’t actually know how to pick a lock, and even if I did, I am probably not familiar with the kind of lock my character is trying to pick. There is almost no abstraction around most social interaction in game, and I am, compared to the other actions, an expert in how social interactions should play out. The fact that the system that is most likely to break my expectations by being resolved like other actions is the system I am least satisfied with having resolved like other actions, does not strike me as particularly stupid.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Spookykyou:

            However, handling social situations without skills means that you get a situation where a personable player can have CHA as their dump stat and still succeed in social situations, and a player who just isn’t a good talker can’t do anything to have a character who is a good talker. Which kind of destroys the “escapism” aspect of it.

          • bean says:

            The fact that the system that is most likely to break my expectations by being resolved like other actions is the system I am least satisfied with having resolved like other actions, does not strike me as particularly stupid.

            I think it’s good advice some of the time. Particularly if you have players with no social skills, whose characters thus also have no social skills (despite what it says on the sheet), “treat social interaction just like you would any other interaction with the game world” is really good advice. Likewise, if you have someone who has excellent social skills playing the half-orc barbarian, you need to remember that the character does not get the player’s social skills.
            That said, the converse is sometimes true. “I’m aware that your reality-altering level of Fast-Talk just showed that you talked your way into the formal ball half-naked and covered in blood. I’m not letting you get away with it unless you (the player) can come up with a story for how.” (It’s harder to scale social encounters in a lot of cases than it is to scale other challenges.)
            There are also some times when it’s just better to pitch the problem to the player’s level and let them reason it out. Depends on the group and setting.

          • Randy M says:

            There is almost no abstraction around most social interaction in game

            I think examples will be needed to bear this out. Say I, a middle aged male nerd, am playing a dashing duelist attempting to seduce a noble and secure her recommendation to see the queen. I gaze soulfully into the GM’s eyes and compliment him on the latest fashions being so aptly displayed.

            Nonetheless, I think there are a variety of levels of remove from my portrayal of the characters actions, and what those actions would be.
            -knowledge of what is likely to flatter a person of this station, ethnicity, personality, race, etc.
            -ability to pick up on non-verbal cues showing the effectiveness of my posture, tone, diction, etc., and to modify based on this feedback
            -the disconnect between the ability to make a seduction attempt around a table of fellow gamers and the effort that would be expended in the actual situation.

            “I’m aware that your reality-altering level of Fast-Talk just showed that you talked your way into the formal ball half-naked and covered in blood. I’m not letting you get away with it unless you (the player) can come up with a story for how.”

            What is happening in this example is the player and the DM negotiating whether an attempted action is at all possible. If you have a lot of time on your hands you can read his prior articles on resolving actions, the gist being that the DM decides if an action can succeed or fail, if there are consequences for failure, and only if so then are dice involved. “I don’t believe any level of fast-talk will get you away from the blood soaked corpse” is a perfectly reasonable GM response to a player attempting to talk their way out of murder. The player may well counter “I’ll point out the increase in goblin activity” and perhaps the GM would then deem the attempt plausible and ask for a roll.

          • Spookykou says:

            @dndnrsn

            I agree totally, the player skill versus character skill is a major contributor to the problems with social skills, and it is not something the article address particularly well either, at least in my experiences.

            Eventually, a player is going to accidentally present both an intention and an approach.

            The solution in the article for this problem does not fix the player vs character skill problem, and at least from my games, ‘Eventually’ should be replaced with, ‘Most of the time’.

            If I lead with my intention and approach, and I am good at arguing, then you will be heavily biased to assume that the NPC does not have a good reason to not help me, rewarding me for my player skill.

            Also, player skill versus character skill is really just a different form of the expectations problem. It is because some players actually have, and understand social skill that they are able to have differences in player skill around it, that they do not have in other skills

            In general the article seems to, wrongly, equivocate between social skill checks and other checks. Ignore the reasons why skill checks are actually very different from other checks, and assumes that just treating skill checks like other checks will solve everything. It does throw in some generally good DM advice like, call for fewer checks, but that is orthogonal to social skills.

          • Spookykou says:

            @Randy M

            I am talking about the amount of system abstraction.

            In a combat I go on my ‘turn’.

            I take a number of ‘actions’ as limited by my character sheet.

            I roll to hit with my attack, and assuming I hit, I roll damage, but what any of that actually means is not clear.

            Everyone has hit points, what even are those?

            The system has many built in abstractions.

            In a social interaction, you say what your character says(no abstraction), or what they try to say (some abstraction) and the DM responds in kind.

          • Randy M says:

            If I lead with my intention and approach, and I am good at arguing, then you will be heavily biased to assume that the NPC does not have a good reason to not help me, rewarding me for my player skill.

            In a social game with a human arbiter, arguing is always going to be an advantage (see lawyers). But a GM following this advice is not going to give preference to flowery prose over a bare description, provided the description is well reasoned and fitting to situation; that is, shows an approach likely to succeed.

            If the player is not able to articulate their goal or their approach in an interaction, the GM should just flat out ask them. “Are you trying to get the jewel from the wizard by playing on his sympathies, or just making small talk?”
            The GM will have an understanding of the NPC’s motivations and be able to determine the level of resistance they will put up–which may well be none.

          • Spookykou says:

            Randy M

            I play with a lawyer, when I was talking player skill I was actually talking about the ability to clearly articular reasons why the NPC would want to help you, not acting ability.

          • Randy M says:

            Sorry for the leap-frogging comment replies, but I’m interested in seeing where we disagree.

            It sounds like you aren’t talking about the level of abstraction, but the amount of rule mechanisms. Most of these are in place because A) timing is crucial in combat, less so in social situations, and B)combat is lethal, so players need/want to know how close they are to dying.

            Other places he has good examples of non-combat structures used to resolving encounter success or failure. I linked this one because I felt it dealt with the player vs character skill question dndnrsn raised.

          • Spookykou says:

            Randy M

            I view it as Abstraction based on the art definition of abstraction, the extent to which they look like reality.

            Social interactions in table top games mostly look like real social interactions in the real world, I have a social interaction in a table top game in almost exactly the same way that I have normal social interactions in the real world. The only key differences is that both people are acting, but the model is still very close to reality.

            Fighting in a table top game looks nothing like fighting in the real world, the things I do while fighting in a table top game are nothing like the ways I would fight in a real world situations.

            So the fighting system is heavily abstracted, in terms of the actions that I am taking relative to the actions that are happening in the story. In the event that I am speaking in character, then the actions I am taking are literally the same actions my character is taking.

          • Randy M says:

            I play with a lawyer, when I was talking player skill I was actually talking about the ability to clearly articular reasons why the NPC would want to help you, not acting ability.

            Right, I know, that’s why I said lawyer not actor. Basically, in a game about creatively solving problems, people good at solving problems are going to be advantaged. But they are advantaged because they are skilled at what they game sets out to test–problem solving, empathy, etc. Just like someone with good spatial awareness might excel at the tactical nature of combat, or someone with a good memory will be able to remember obscure feat that they took 6 months ago 😉

            In the event that I am speaking in character, then the actions I am taking are literally the same actions my character is taking.

            Except that they probably aren’t, because saying what you think the character would say and saying what you think the character would do both are missing a lot of the nuance of the action, which is what I tried to argue above. It’s not an identical level of abstraction, but I don’t think it is anywhere near as true to life as you imply. There is room in between for skill and chance, which is what the dice are for.

          • Dr Dealgood says:

            I respect Angry GM a lot, and he gives very good advice most of the time.

            Which is why I choose to follow his older advice about adjudicating actions over his (slightly) newer advice about social skill rolls.

            If my narration for a dungeon room includes a line about one wall being full of small holes and the players decide to break the wooden door off its hinges and use it as an improvised mantlet as they walk across, what DC do they have to hit to avoid the poison arrow trap? None, they succeed without a roll. Because they thought their way around the trap.

            If my narration for the throne room includes a mustachioed vizier whispering in the king’s ear and the players discretely offer him a suitable reward for his “great wisdom and mercy,” what DC do they have to hit to avoid being cast in chains? None, they succeed without a roll. Because they thought their way around the argument.

            A lot of the time, “good roleplaying” / thespianism involves taking actions in a social setting which can’t or are very unlikely to fail. Just as we reward the player’s ability to solve puzzles in the dungeon even if the character’s low intelligence might make the insight suspect, we can reward the player’s acting ability in town even if the character has a low charisma.

          • Spookykou says:

            Randy M

            Well, I know that sometime around 3e the game was intentionally designed to test system mastery, but I think that is a horrible design decision, so I don’t really support any aspects of DnD that reinforce that design idea, more generally just because a game wants to do something doesn’t mean it should.

            As to Table tops more generally as ‘creative problem solving’ games, I had never really thought of them that way, and it seems that many games range pretty wildly in the amount of creative problem solving involved in play. I would not have a problem with a game designed around that idea, in the same way that I do with system mastery. Still thinking of the game that way does not exactly deal with the player versus character skill problems of problem solving.

            Consider mage the awakening, which at least in the addition that I played, would allow for a mage who was, per the rules, smarter than any human person could ever be. My character is better than I could ever be at creative problem solving, how to we adjudicate that without breaking expectations?

          • Randy M says:

            I’m going to pointlessly prolong the argument with nigh-meaningless pedantry here, Dr, but that’s not thespianism, that’s role-playing. What you have is the players describing an approach, an intention, and the GM deciding that it can succeed, can’t fail, and so not asking them for a roll.

            Rewarding thespianism would be if you disallow the bribery attempt unless the players actually say the bit about “great wisdom and mercy” in the character’s voice, rather than saying they want to discretely offer the Vizier a benefit for putting in a good word.

          • Spookykou says:

            It’s not an identical level of abstraction

            My original point about abstraction was that combat was considerably more abstract, action skills are some what abstracted, and social skills have ‘almost no’ abstraction. Which plays with our expectations of outcomes, and makes social skills fundamentally different from other skills. While you might be correct in your assessment of the distance from reality to social checks. I still don’t really see a problem with my point, which is that the actions my character takes in combat are considerably more abstracted than the actions my character takes in social checks.

          • bean says:

            Just as we reward the player’s ability to solve puzzles in the dungeon even if the character’s low intelligence might make the insight suspect, we can reward the player’s acting ability in town even if the character has a low charisma.

            There are still ways around that. Let’s assume that the player of the barbarian is the one who tries to give the gift for the Vizer’s consideration. I’d have them make a roll of some sort to avoid calling the Vizer ‘your honor’ instead of ‘your grace’ or messing up the bribe in some other way. During our game yesterday, the GM made me roll to communicate my plan to the other players. (Not because my character wasn’t smart enough to solve the problem, but because he wasn’t good at communicating and I think the GM wanted to take my awesome chainsaw boat away.)

            @Spookykou

            My character is better than I could ever be at creative problem solving, how to we adjudicate that without breaking expectations?

            “Roll IQ to see if you get any insight into this.” I’ll often allow players to use skills/abilities to gain hints about the world that the character would see, but the player can’t.

          • Spookykou says:

            @Bean

            Yes that or something similar is how I would solve it also, but if Randy M is correct and the point of table top games is creative problem solving, then letting people roll to creative problem solve is defeating the ‘purpose’ of the game.

            I don’t actually think the purpose of table top games is creative problem solving, which makes player problem solving skill a problem, similar to acting skill (although considerably more useful).

          • Randy M says:

            Still thinking of the game that way does not exactly deal with the player versus character skill problems of problem solving.

            This is why when I described gaming above, I said “accomplishing adventure goals through the player’s clever use of their characters resources.”

            The guard won’t let you in to see the King. How do you proceed? There’s a myriad of responses; what sets them apart? Some are more likely to fit the DM’s idea of a response that leads to entry than others. This makes it sound very subjective, and it certainly is to an extent, but part of the game is establishing through play what reasonable expectations are for the various characters, p & non-p. An inconsistent DM is a bad DM for this very reason.

            Based on the problem the DM presents–either proactively or reactively–some of the responses the players give will be more likely to get them what they want than others. Clever players–players who recall the precedence of the game better, mentally simulate the game world better, are better able to discern the motivations of NPC’s and choose their approach–they will have an advantage here. It is inevitable in the same way that more athletic people have an advantage in sports.

            (None of this is to say that “solving problems” is the only way to have fun in RPG’s! Some people just like to try crazy stuff or hang-out or what have you.)

            The bit I said about remembering the feat you took was tongue-in-cheek, but will always be true in any detailed game, even if not designed for it.

          • Spookykou says:

            Randy M

            These are ‘features’ of table top games for sure, but I am not sure to what extent they are desirable.

            My friend is currently writing a table top game with a core design axiom to minimize the extent to which the GM adjudicates things in that way, because they think combat (where the GM does almost no adjudicating of this kind, you don’t ask if you can swing your axe in most grid games, more evidence that social actions=\=other actions) is the best part of the game, and want to design a skill and social system to match.

            We have also discussed at length ways to try and minimize the most egregious player skill disparities, and generally consider them to be problems of systems.

            I think this is getting back to what I first said,

            This article does not seem to address my biggest area of concern with Social Skills,

            As I see it a lot of the issues people have with social skills grow out of these deeper fundamental game design elements of the social system compared to other systems. They are very real problems that have potential answers. The article seems to say ‘the problems people have with social actions are stupid, just run them like other actions’. Which to me, mostly looks like bad advice from somebody who just does not understand the problems. A physicist solution to the problems of a different discipline. That being said Bean is right about it being good advice for shy players, and as I said before, some of the advice is just general good DMing advice.

          • bean says:

            @Spookykou
            I don’t agree that problem-solving is the whole point of tabletop RPGs either, although it might depend on how we define problem-solving. Obviously, it would be a boring game where all challenges were just straight-up dice rolls, and you got very few choices. But on the other hand, it would be annoying if you couldn’t use your character’s skills to help you out, and boring if all plans went perfectly, except for acts of GM. Some of my fondest memories are of times when the dice rolled weirdly, and we (pardon the pun) rolled with it.
            And to some extent, social interaction is a problem to be solved, too. The point is to not disadvantage players who have poor skills too badly, just as you’d allow someone with poor non-social problem solving skills to use the character’s skills to compensate for their own lack.

          • Randy M says:

            That sounds interesting. Just know that eliminating the DM’s adjudication will not necessarily eliminate the impact of player skill–chess has no DM, and skill is of course brought the fore.

            Also, there are plenty of times in combat, especially with earlier editions, where the DM might well provide ‘common-sense’ restrictions on your actions–for instance, if you are fighting in a tunnel, or on horseback, he may call for a different weapon or skill to be used or apply modifiers.

            The DM is the filter through which the workings of the world are presented to the players. Psychology is less refined than physics; in the same way, NPC interactions are more subjective than jumping a chasm.
            (although RPGs may owe more to narrative conventions than human psychology!)

            The article seems to say ‘the problems people have with social actions are stupid, just run them like other actions’. Which to me, mostly looks like bad advice

            I find the advice reasonable and useful. Maybe that is because I still don’t really see what you are objecting to–that is, what about the action resolution do you find does not translate to social encounters? I must have glossed over the rationale. I will try to reread later.

            @bean

            I don’t agree that problem-solving is the whole point of tabletop RPGs either, although it might depend on how we define problem-solving.

            I am using the term broadly; to the extent the characters are trying to accomplish anything, there is problem solving. Sometimes many paths will work, some times there are very few or only one path. But unless anything they say will get them to the next and only possible scene, they are solving problems, ranging from “Find the dungeon exit” to “figure out where the theives guild is in the city” to “figure out what changes we can make in the past to prevent the apocalypse” to, of course, “what combat tactics will let us survive the giant spiders with the most HP left?

          • bean says:

            My friend is currently writing a table top game with a core design axiom to minimize the extent to which the GM adjudicates things in that way, because they think combat (where the GM does almost no adjudicating of this kind, you don’t ask if you can swing your axe in most grid games, more evidence that social actions=\=other actions) is the best part of the game, and want to design a skill and social system to match.

            I’m not sure that will work. Combat is a case where the GM has largely pre-adjucated a lot of the stuff like ‘can I hit him with an axe’ by how the map is set up. I’m sure there have been times every GM has to step in and say ‘the rules are being stupid here, and we’re not going to use them’. Randy made the rest of the points I would have made.

          • Spookykou says:

            @Bean

            I don’t particularly enjoy his game and I think that some amount of negotiated story telling is important to the fun of table top games. I brought him up primarily to illustrate that, while negotiating with the DM is currently a product of the system as it is designed, I don’t think that fact alone means that we can’t try and improve or change the nature of those negotiations.

            The method of control he uses is pretty simple though, you just have the DM call for all checks. Between combat encounter you will have N out of combat ‘encounters’ where dice will be needed to resolve issues to move the story along, the checks that can be used to overcome those encounters are predetermined by the DM. Other things you do will fall into the ‘trying to find a black smith’ category of non-checks.

            There are several guiding principles behind this idea, first that if a player is picking up the dice it should be a meaningful choice with rewards and consequences, second it tries to help reduce the improv burden on the DM(The game is designed to be what he would want from an ideal game, both as a player and as a DM) while keeping in line with the first goal, third it tries to deal with the general mother may I/pixel bitching problems that often seem to crop up in out of combat interactions.

            This creates a few obvious problems that make his game different from DnD, primarily that stories can’t branch and grow in response to the players, which I view as a serious loss. But I can appreciate all of his complaints about out of combat stuff, and if as he says, he only has fun in combat then I can understand the design goals, at least from that perspective.

            Randy M

            To try and put a finer point on my critique.

            I normally think of table top games as being made of three systems for adjudicating player actions. The combat system, the ‘action skills’ system(skills that perform action, like lock picking), and the social system. I started playing DnD in 3, and have played a pretty wide range of other table tops since then, and most of them can be modeled this way.

            Now lets think about the social system in DnD. Consider that a very large number of people were confronted with a combat system, an action skills system, and a social system, when they first picked up DnD. That all these various groups of players all turned out slightly differently, they mostly didn’t understand how grapple worked, but they otherwise kept with the combat system as written. They mostly kept with the action skill system as written even if they called for too many stealth checks. Then they all got to the Social system, and a lot of those players jumped ship, stopped using the rules altogether and just tried to figure it out for themselves.

            Why?

            The Social System in DnD is ‘bad’, for a number of reasons, and for a lot of players I imagine the advice ‘Just use the system that every other player of the game independently stopped using’ is not terribly helpful, to then compound this with not even trying to understand why everyone stopped using it makes me very skeptical of the authors understanding of the issue.

            The primary problems that I see with the social system all revolve around player expectations, DM negotiations, and player versus character skill, all of these issues also play into each other.

            I went over expectations in my first comment, but basically of the three systems the Social System is most likely to break our expectations.

            The social system is more variable on DM negotiation than any other system. (I think no negotiation and all negotiation are both bad, I think all players probably have slightly different levels of DM negotiation that is ideal to them, and the social system is most susceptible to wild shifts in the amount of DM negotiation, from action to action.)

            The social system is where player versus character competency is most noticeable (Or maybe tied with ‘planning’ but I don’t think that comes up as often)

            To be clear, I am not saying that I know how to fix these problems. I have spent a lot of time thinking about them and I have a few tweaks and house rules but no clear solution. My point from the beginning was that I was not a fan of the article because it does not seem to address any of these issues particularly well, in advice or acknowledgment. I do admit that it has some generally good DM advice like calling for fewer checks, but that is orthogonal to social interactions, and has a lot more to do with the importance of picking up the dice, and just plain old probability, if you make the rogue take ten stealth checks to get across the room, even if they are amazing at stealth they will probably fail, bad DM bad!

          • dndnrsn says:

            Whoa, I step away for one minute, and…

            Some games have tried to make more involved social systems, making them more like combat. The Game of Thrones RPG did. I think it failed, because the system was badly designed in a lot of ways (it devolved to several people shouting at one person to destroy their “social HP”, “wounds” from social combat didn’t harm you physically but physical wounds did harm you socially, etc). Also, it was easily broken – you could make a character who, by the mechanics, could get anyone to be completely devoted to them in a few rolls.

            The issue of player problem-solving was brought above. In a game I’m playing I bought my character up from average to above-average intelligence using XP, mostly because I felt that I was playing him out-of-character for someone of average intelligence. Likewise, I prefer when running a game that PCs be of above-average intelligence, because my players are, and I honestly don’t think they’re going to consistently roleplay as someone significantly dumber than themselves.

            Of course, some people define roleplaying as “acting” whereas I define it based on decision-making. I’m going to give zero bonuses for roleplaying to someone who’s supposed to be a brave warrior who always ensures they’re in the safest location in combat.

          • bean says:

            Then they all got to the Social system, and a lot of those players jumped ship, stopped using the rules altogether and just tried to figure it out for themselves.

            Why?

            I can think of two reasons why, neither of which is particularly good. First, a lot of people didn’t pick up 3/3.5 (or later editions) ex nihlo. AIUI, 1e/2e didn’t really have the social skills system at all, leaving it all down to players playing it out directly. This pattern carried over when they started with games that did have decent social systems, and got passed on to new players joining those groups. I did start on my own, and basically everyone I played with in my first 8 or so years of gaming started with 3.5 rulebooks, and nothing else, and I still game with a couple of them. We do tend to run social stuff broadly like it is written. Make the player talk a bit, then roll.
            Second, players with good social skills will tend to want to use in-person skills instead of in-character skills. These people are the ones who are best able to convince the rest of the group to go along with them, even if the result isn’t actually optimal from an abstract perspective.

          • Spookykou says:

            @dndnrsn

            Yes I played a few games of that, I have tried other games that do that as well, the edition of exalted I played also had social combat. You also have the other direction, WoD games combat is normally just a skill system, the same as their social systems.

            These attempts to modulate the amount of mechanics around the various systems does not seem to do much to solve the ‘problem’ with social systems in table top games, and I don’t think they do much to address my three stated ‘problems’ either.

        • Spookykou says:

          I doubt this is what you intended, but a major problem I had with VII was Abrams inability or unwillingness to address distance. Everyone is just instantly anywhere they want to be with no travel time, or in other words, the galaxy feels too small.

          • Dr Dealgood says:

            Actually that was a big part of my issue with the film.

            The scene that best summed up my feeling was when Rey looked up from Takodana(?) and saw all the planets Starkiller Base’s lasers destroyed hanging in the sky. Each one was bigger than Earth’s moon and we know for a fact that Coruscant at least was the better part of half a galaxy away. I would have forgiven it as a force-vision except that we watch the beams flying through space.

          • lhn says:

            While this wasn’t made especially clear in the movie, apparently the capital world destroyed by Starkiller Base wasn’t supposed to be Coruscant.

        • bean says:

          It succeeded, partially, but also faced the problem that the more rules you add the weirder unintended consequences you get.

          I don’t think that was because of how they did skills. I find it difficult to conceive of a system that doesn’t have some generic mechanism for doing mundane things, usually called ‘skills’. (Disclaimer: Started with 3.5/D20 Star Wars, have looked at lots of different systems, seriously played GURPS and FATE, haven’t touched a 1e/2e rulebook in 10+ years and never played either).
          The problem, best illustrated by Pun-Pun is that they had too many different rules for special things. Some of this was a result of the need to print lots of sourcebooks. Some of it was the lack of general-purpose tools for dealing with problems (GURPS is an example of having these tools) which lead to a fair bit of reinventing the wheel, usually with hilarious gaps.
          I’ve come to the conclusion that any specific task in an RPG should almost always be able to be done well with 4 or fewer sourcebooks. Not always the same books, depending on the task, but you shouldn’t have to hunt through every sourcebook to do a thing you want to do, either. Well would be defined as ‘90% as good as the solution found by the min-maxer who does go through every book in 90% of the cases’ or something of that nature. Star Wars Saga and D&D were both horrible about this, Star Wars D20 pre-Saga and GURPS are pretty good.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Most of the weirdness had more to do with feats than with skills, now that I think of it.

            The “modular” nature of the d20 system as a whole meant things could be combined in ways they didn’t predict.

          • bean says:

            Most of the weirdness had more to do with feats than with skills, now that I think of it.

            It was almost always a combination of feats and special abilities. Usually from about 4 books published over 7 years and at least one special campaign setting.

            The “modular” nature of the d20 system as a whole meant things could be combined in ways they didn’t predict.

            Most definitely. That’s why I tend to favor systems which focus on effects instead of causes. GURPS is one of the better-known examples of this. It’s very rare that you find an ability you can’t model using the core books, which means that introducing new things can be done without adding rules. That in turn means that the ruleset stays compact and the number of possible combinations stays small and reasonably testable.

          • dndnrsn says:

            I really like Call of Cthulhu because, as crummy as its system is, it’s relatively closed to such nonsense.

    • Wency says:

      Doesn’t every OSR system rework THACO?

      And yes, THACO isn’t rocket science, but it’s arbitrary and unintuitive to a greater degree than later systems. Some people take pride in saying “This unintuitive thing is totally intuitive to me, possibly because my brain is better.” Other people are intellectually lazy or just like to criticize, so they exaggerate the difficulty of understanding unintuitive things. That’s all there is to THACO arguments. THACO is usable, easily improved upon, and has little effect on fun either way.

      I personally borrowed a lot of AKCS and bolted it onto D&D 5e, to good effect. I would say it’s a good system for people who value internal consistency in their fantasy. If I encounter an economy that doesn’t make sense at even a cursory level, or NPCs have resources that are wildly inconsistent, it hurts my own suspension of disbelief and fun. Other people couldn’t give two licks about these things and will sacrifice all logic to Rule of Cool. AKCS is very much for the first group. You don’t need to model everything out though — just crunch a few numbers when trying to figure out if something makes sense.

      • dndnrsn says:

        Yeah, this is a better way of saying what I was trying to say. THAC0 was a weird system, and I can’t decide how they decided to make AC a lower-is-better system, then deal with it using THAC0, but it wasn’t that hard to actually deal with.

    • Robert Liguori says:

      I vote A. Rules are about aesthetic and shared understanding as much as resolution, and it’s easier to patch overcomplicated mechanics than rediscover or reinvent it from scratch if you’ve found a bit you like.

      Besides, kitbashing is exactly what the OS in OSR is all about.

      • Dr Dealgood says:

        Thanks, actually I think I’m going for A in the end.

        Rules Cyclopedia’s out-of-the-box econ rules are elegantly simply and not desperately crying out for improvement, although I still have ACKS’ tables to fall back on if I desperately need them.

        I’m planning on using the Weapon Feats system from Dark Dungeons, plus ACKS’ Attack Throws in place of THAC0 (THAC0-9 if you’re curious). I’ll either use a modified version of Dark Dungeons’ Skills (roll over 20-Ability, +1 on the roll per rank) or ACKS’ Profciencies (11+, -4 per rank), but in either case I’m stripping out the lists and associated fiddly rules. Also going to let Thieves actually do something, with an automatic success on Thief Skills if they put in a full 10min Turn for the attempt (1/3rd movement speed) and had a nonzero chance of success.

    • hellahexi says:

      A little late to the party (heh), but I vote “C.” It seems to make little sense to discard THAC0 for being fiddly and unintuitive, then turn around and implement a fiddly world-building system.

      I grew up with 1E, went through to 3.5, then into Pathfinder, because at the time I liked the rules-dense roll-for-every-consequence approach. It felt like verisimilitude. But what it was really doing was driving off players for whom exhaustive system-mastery was not a draw to the game, and promoted a fundamental distrust of the GM.

      I like “rulings, not rules” because it seems that what a lot of the rules-intense systems are designed to do is provide a faux-objective way of allowing certain types of system-proficient players to force the game in their preferred direction: “Hey, it says I can do this, and I have this maxed stat, so that’s what going to happen.” If someone is going to direct where the game is going to go, I want that person to be the GM; that’s literally the job description. If you don’t like where the GM is taking your game, your problem is with the person, not the system.

      That being said, there is a special place in my heart (still) for fiddly little tables and randomness. No, I don’t want to constantly update the commodities prices in each city of my game (if I had the patience for that, I’d be selling actual commodity futures, rather than figuring out a realistic price for barley in pre-Cataclysm Ergoth). But where I come from, random tables are less for slavish adherence than they are spurs for creativity. Even the most creative among us occasionally draw a blank when put on the spot, and sometimes a little jumpstart helps. “Hmm. *rolls* ‘The lich-king is awakening’ and ‘it has been unusually rainy in the Silt Barrens.’ What’s the connection?” gets you a lot closer to an emergent, interesting world than trying to gazetteer every detail of a campaign before you’ve played the first session.

      Also, shamelessly, my own OSR-adjacent blog. I’m still giving away copies of the first issue of the absconder, until my stamps run out.

      • Dr Dealgood says:

        Thanks for the links. I’ve always loved “rumor tables” and the like, so just on the front page I’m already happy.

        And yeah, I love the bottom-up detail in ACKS but it becomes a headache sometimes. If anyone wants to do arbitrage trading I can bust out the economy tables but I don’t want to have to think about them when players are bringing wagonfulls of miscellaneous treasure back from a dungeon or when I’m drawing my hexmaps.

        • hellahexi says:

          Thank you! Happy to be useful.

          I understand the joy of building a detailed, fully-consistent setting. I love(d) doing so, until I gradually realized that players don’t care. It’s like the guy who shows up to roll a character in your game, and brings along his 10-page typewritten background for the character. Good on ya, but no one’s going to read it. Now I just skip most of the work unless I know the players are going to directly interact with it.

          • Randy M says:

            I made a really in depth hex crawl setting a couple years back, and despite getting some playtime very little of it was ever actually used.

            My players like me just straight up presenting them plots to ignore, rather than making them search in the wilderness for plots to ignore.

          • hellahexi says:

            My players like me just straight up presenting them plots to ignore, rather than making them search in the wilderness for plots to ignore.

            And they wonder why quantum ogres are endemic to these parts.

          • dndnrsn says:

            How do you predict what they’re going to interact with, though? Maybe my players are just horrible people, as am I, but the default “this NPC is stonewalling me!” reaction is “let’s burgle his house!”

          • andrewflicker says:

            I’m not hellahexi, but I “solve” that by A) Getting good at improve, and B) pre-designing a few layouts, character concepts, small piles of wealth, etc., that can be used or inserted ad-hoc when the narrative needs material.

            For instance, I’ve got a butler I designed in my head a while ago squirelled away in case they ever break into an opulent manor I’m unprepared for.

          • Dr Dealgood says:

            @Randy M,

            I’m going to recommend hellahexl’s quantum ogres.

            One of the best DMing tricks I ever learned was to recycle my unused dungeons and encounters. If the players don’t see a gimmick room, there’s no reason that room can’t show up again in the next dungeon they enter. Sometimes you can reuse entire adventures if the original was derailed early enough.

            You have to get something back for prep time, there’s too little of it to waste by throwing out unused content.

          • hellahexi says:

            Note, the quantum ogres do get a bad rap when used as a tool for “railroading”* players. However, they are tremendously useful for keeping a game going in a moderately well-prepared manner.

            * Scare-quotes because, from the player side of things, I don’t mind a bit of railroading. I’ll take it over everyone sitting around all session trying to figure out what to do, only to settle on a plan the GM hasn’t prepared and ends up slapdash.

          • dndnrsn says:

            As I understand it, the “quantum ogres” is a reference to a game with a rather … strange … way of generating random encounters based on player actions?

            I’ve found one way to deal with improvised stuff (beyond what has already been described – reuse stuff, when in doubt throw them some red meat, etc) is to blatantly pander to your group whenever you need to fill space.

            It’s not hard to figure out what individual players are looking for, and giving them something that fulfills that (without actually being important in any way) is a great way to keep them happy. Does one player love running idiot noblemen and another sleazy con men, and they have the according characters? The market scene that you spitball as you compensate for them almost breaking your campaign should include a way for the nobleman to show off his excellent taste in wine and ermine robes as he tosses money around like a fool, and let the con man run a game of three-card monte.

            Of course, “know what your players want and give it to them, but make them work for it” is fairly basic stuff but one a lot of people seem to miss.

          • hellahexi says:

            The quantum ogre refers to a technique wherein a GM attempts to disguise a railroad-style adventure with a veneer of player choice.

            For example, say the overarching conceit of your dungeon requires that the PCs run into a certain ogre at a specific time. But you want to hide this fact to give the illusion of player agency. So you present three doorways; however, no matter which one the players choose, they’re going to face your ogre on the other side.

            As expected, players catch wise to this pretty quickly. What we’re talking about upthread is a little different in (what I think is) a material way: keeping a file of unused rooms/locations/delves/scenes/NPCs that for whatever reason haven’t been used yet, and using this file to fill in blank spots in your adventures when your players catch you unprepared with their unexpected decisions.

          • Randy M says:

            So you present three doorways

            As an aside, can I point out that choices devoid of context are meaningless? The three doorways should always have some kind of distinguishing characteristic; some sound in the distance, or smell, or sign, or variations in lighting, etc. Otherwise they don’t really have any sense of having figured anything out or even had any meaningful impact on the choice that ensues beyond being a random number generator.

            If down the corridor smelling of cooked meat were three ogres around a campfire, and down the corridor with sounds of battle were three ogres hitting a practice dummy, and down the corridor with the growling sound were three snoring ogres, it seems much less egregious.

          • bean says:

            As I understand it, the “quantum ogres” is a reference to a game with a rather … strange … way of generating random encounters based on player actions?

            Quantum Ogre is the idea that when the player comes to a fork in the road, and whichever way they go, they find an ogre waiting for them. The idea is that you’re denying the players agency because the same thing will happen no matter which side they pick.
            Obviously, if the players have no agency, then you’re doing something wrong. The weak version is standard GM technique. There are two different paths across the desert. The initial random encounter will be the same regardless of which path the players take. If they go north, they find that they’re short of water. If they go south, they run into slavers. The first encounter is ‘quantum’, but I don’t think most people would find it objectionable. It’s just cutting down on how much flavor you have to write.

          • dndnrsn says:

            I was thinking of “Quantum Bears”, which is a derogatory term on the internet for a phenomenon in the game Apocalypse World. Never played it, but the descriptions of its rules system sound fairly odd.

          • Spookykou says:

            In my early days as a DM I would often design ‘rooms’ with monsters, traps, or important NPCs written up and then have the players run into them, the paths they took through an ephemeral dungeon would change the order they ran into these ‘rooms’, but they still always ran into all of them eventually. My players would call it Schrodinger’s dungeon, and it seems to kind of blur the lines between quantum ogres and reusing old material.

            One of my players in particular felt that any reusing of skipped material wasn’t ‘fair play’ because the choices the players made, resulted in them passing that encounter. They admit that its obviously not easy to know when somebody is reusing skipped material, but they didn’t like knowing about it when it happened.

            I wonder, since reading this thread I think most people here feel that reusing skipped stuff is ok, but quantum ogre is, less ok, is there some number of encounters, or some period of time that has to pass, before it is ok to reuse content that your players skipped?

          • bean says:

            I wonder, since reading this thread I think most people here feel that reusing skipped stuff is ok, but quantum ogre is, less ok, is there some number of encounters, or some period of time that has to pass, before it is ok to reuse content that your players skipped?

            Depends. I know that’s not helpful, but I can’t think of hard and fast rules.
            The thing I would find most annoying as a player in those situations is the knowledge that I ran into all of your prepared rooms every time. “You’re forcing me to sit through everything you prepared!” (Actually, most annoying would be forcing in rooms where they didn’t belong, and knowing that I hit all of them would be second.) If you used 75% or so on a typical crawl, that seems like it would be OK.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ bean
            is there some number of encounters, or some period of time that has to pass, before it is ok to reuse content that your players skipped?

            First, I’d consider –

            – How do they know it was skipped? …. Maybe the DM acted guilty, they caught zim shuffling notes.

            – Did they get some clue or information that made them choose to avoid it? …. Okay, on first peek into the cavern chamber, they smell ogre and see an ogre fighting a pig. After adventures elsewhere, they wander back to a different view of the same chamber and the ogre smell is even worse; peeking in, they see a campfire where the pig is roasting the ogre on a spit. Something has changed, the situation they skipped has progressed without them. Or, they refuse to rescue a cute puppy; then later elsewhere when they approach the Archvillain’s lair, the puppy attacks them and summons the Archvillain, whose watchdog he is. The puppy is not as helpless as they thought. There’s a surprise between the two chances to encounter the same pig or puppy that the DM wants.

      • dndnrsn says:

        I like “rulings, not rules” because it seems that what a lot of the rules-intense systems are designed to do is provide a faux-objective way of allowing certain types of system-proficient players to force the game in their preferred direction: “Hey, it says I can do this, and I have this maxed stat, so that’s what going to happen.” If someone is going to direct where the game is going to go, I want that person to be the GM; that’s literally the job description. If you don’t like where the GM is taking your game, your problem is with the person, not the system.

        But this encourages lazy adventure design. I have mostly been running published Call of Cthulhu campaigns lately, so I’ve been reading through a lot of adventures and campaigns. Beyond realizing that the reputation that Cthulhu has for a high standard of published material is kind of undeserved (a lot of the stuff is pure crap or simply uninspired; I would guess that the reputation comes largely from a handful of really good products), one thing that has struck me is that a lot of adventures assume that players are really predictable. They’re not. When I run published adventures, the #1 thing I find myself changing (beyond NPC stats, etc) is I have to add a lot of stuff that I know my players will go looking for that is just glossed over in the adventure (eg, the bad guy has a house in the city – but there’s no floor plan, no idea of what’s there, or it’s just assumed the PCs aren’t going to try and ambush the bad guy and firebomb his limo or whatever), and cut out a lot of red herrings that I know will waste sessions. I also remove pretty much anything where NPCs succeed without rolling, where “this happens and the PCs just watch” occurs, etc.

        If a player has a great Climb skill, and wants to use it to climb up a mountain face and approach the Fortress of Evil from a direction other than the one the adventure has planned out, “design an adventure that bends instead of breaking” is the right solution, not “well, you have climbed similar cliffs before, but you can’t climb this one, rulings, not rules!” or “play a game without a proper Climb skill.” This is one reason I dislike running D&D and high-powered stuff in general – it makes it a lot harder to predict what the PCs do, and there’s a lot more they can do. It also means that the bad guys are harder to run – usually, a GM is not going to run NPCs as to-the-hilt using every power available to them, and the more power they have, the more suspension of disbelief is required.

        It’s the job of the GM to direct what happens, but “direct” is different from “dictate”. Stuff like this annoys me in video games, but in tabletop games, where part of the advantage is that a competent GM should be able to improvise in response to the players being unpredictable, it infuriates me when I’m playing, so I avoid it when I’m running a game.

        Masks of Nyarlathotep is usually at the top of “best published adventure/campaign” lists, and one of the reasons for that is it is really good at bending without breaking. There are multiple major villains, and the campaign does not break if the players get lucky or come up with a clever plan and kill one unexpectedly.

        As a player, what I love is coming up with a plan that lets the party succeed against all odds by “picking a third option” or whatever. As a GM, I can’t just say “sorry guys can’t do that nope”.

        • hellahexi says:

          I think we’re arguing in the same direction. “Bend, not break” is something that I think the retroclones and the OSR do well, and is something we should encourage.

          To use your example: say the PCs are breaking into the mountain fortress, and you’ve lovingly mapped it out, with a fortified entrance and a secret sally port, and your PCs want to do something else. With rules that lay out, in multipage splatbook-level detail, the mechanics of rock climbing, you run into the situation where, if none of the PCs have “Climb” skill, the GM is forced strongly incentivized to say “Nope, can’t do it.” But with a “rulings, not rules” approach, the appropriate response to the idea is, “Huh. Okay. Tell me how you do it,” and if it makes sense, it happens.

          Sure, sometimes you have to say “no.” But those times are surprisingly infrequent. “Yes, and . . . ” usually works. I think we all want, faced with our hypothetical adventure, players to think “climb up the cliff . . . bribe the gatewatch . . . poison the well . . . fire the rooftops . . . hide in the haywagon . . . anything but attack the gate!” And this creativity can spring from any rules system. But when you don’t have explicit rules governing every option, it’s a lot easier to think outside of the (rules) box.

          • dndnrsn says:

            I find the opposite. Knowing exactly what my players can do – this guy can sneak and climb, she is great at dealing with mechanical stuff and lockpicking, third PC is good at talking and has some medical abilities, and here are their combat abilities – lets me have some prediction of what they might do.

            Of course, I tend to be a fairly controlling GM – premade PCs, guidelines on what characters you can build, “no you can’t nerf the skills relative to your character’s actual job to put more points in Shotgun”, etc – and when I’m a player I am prone to “OK group huddle people let’s all put points in Stealth so I’m not the only one who can do that sort of thing”.

            Ruling to a given situation means the rules aren’t predictable for the players. As the game PARANOIA notes, more rules give more power to players. I personally like having more power for players, even when running the game. Just means I have to keep it in mind.

            I think where 3rd ed went wrong is that it simply got higher and higher power. Not just with splatbook power creep – out of the box PCs were more powerful than they were in 2nd ed. With something lower-power it’s pretty easy to predict most of the things they might do.

          • hellahexi says:

            Premade PCs? Now that’s interesting.

          • bean says:

            I’m really not getting this. It’s a rare system indeed that doesn’t allow untrained climbing. As the GM, you always have the option of looking at those pages, thinking for a few moments, then saying ‘well, you’re probably going to die because that cliff is really steep’ or ‘yes, this seems like something you can probably do without serious technical climbing, roll at +4’. I can’t count the number of times during my GURPS games (a system famous for having rules for nearly everything) that I glanced at the relevant rules and then said ‘roll at +2’, even if that wasn’t quite right.
            One of the advantages of having rules for everything is that it’s reasonably predictable for the players. Even if the GM isn’t consulting all of the rules all of the time, you don’t have wild swings in ability based on how he is feeling that day.

          • dndnrsn says:

            I usually ask a player “hey, what kind of character do you want to be?” Then once I’ve figured that out for everyone in the party, I make the characters, being sure to provide a broad range of skills across the party, with enough overlap that there’s never only one character with a vital skill, and rarely only one with a useful but optional skill.
            This is what I did for the current campaign I’m running – let everyone decide “this is what I want to be”, wrote up the stats, skills, equipment, and a character description, let them come up with a name, and let them shuffle some skill points around. Or I’ll allocate most of a character’s skill points, but not all of them, so there’s a general character outline but they can customize a bit.

            It is probably relevant that it has been a long time since I played or ran a game with character classes or anything like that. I prefer systems where characters are mostly made by selecting skills and distributing points among them. Want to be a medic? Take medical skills – but probably everyone will be able to have a 1/4 to 1/3 shot at stopping bleeding. Your character is a Professor of Classics at old MU? You won’t be the only one with Archaeology, History, Library Use, and some dead languages, but that will be your wheelhouse.

            The GM making the characters lets them tailor them to the adventure – the last time I played a class-based game (Pathfinder) I made an illusionist I really liked … only to find that the adventure was mostly fighting undead, meaning I was next to useless in combat. Fun!

            I dislike class-based systems in general, because they tend to punish players for wanting to make idiosyncratic characters: in Call of Cthulhu you can play an MU classics professor who boxed and wrestled back in high school and university (Punch, Grapple, Martial Arts) or is an avid deer hunter (Listen, Navigate, Sneak, Spot Hidden, Track, Rifle) without getting punished for taking cross-class skills or whatever.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @bean:

            You know, I stand corrected. I had remembered climbing as a Rogue special ability in 2nd ed, but later on in the book there’s a system for climbing.

            A better example would be the rules for finding traps, where nobody except Rogues could actually get better at the skill, as far as I can tell.

          • hellahexi says:

            That’s interesting. A long way back I adminned on a D&D MUSH, and we had a system where you could chargen a character, or you could choose a premade from a variety we had. I can’t recall anyone ever having opted for a premade. That (long-ago, likely inapplicable) example has stuck with me, and I haven’t tried premades since.

            I can see the appeal, it just wouldn’t occur to me. I always assume the work will be on the GM’s side of the table: if I wind up with a party of a fighter, two rangers, and a paladin, I take it as a strong clue as to what my players are looking for in a game, and adjust adventures accordingly.

          • Randy M says:

            I used pre-made characters for a one shot of 7th Sea I ran couple years back. It was neat in that I could intertwine all the backgrounds and have a variety of archetypes represented, and since it wasn’t going to be a long campaign it wouldn’t have been worth the time to guide everyone through the chargen process.

          • bean says:

            @dndnrsn
            I’ll be the first to admit a strong preference for point-buy over classed systems. The characters are so much more interesting. My favorite was a GURPS character who was supposed to be a Bard/mastermind, but when I ran out of points, the Bard bit got dropped. Never would have happened in D&D, but I really liked the character.

            That said, classed systems are better for new players, as they often aren’t very good at character concepts.
            Premades can help deal with this, particularly if you go the template route and give them some freedom to play with the edges of the character.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @hellahexi:

            I guess part of the reason I dislike D&D is the requirement to have party balance, and strong roles in combat. Again, I like low-power stuff, where “50 points in combat skills” is good enough to not instantly die or sit there bored as everyone else has all the fun.

            I like premades because it means a lot less worrying about “oh jeez, the players are going to be in Vietnam for a few sessions, and none speak Vietnamese – are they going to drag some poor tour guide into the Cavern of Unspeakable Horrors underneath the old French rubber plantation?” – I just hand the player who said “I want to be an academic” Professor Suzanne Nguyen, Assistant Professor in the Literature department at Miskatonic, expert on Southeast Asian postcolonial literature with a special interest in postwar Vietnamese-American memoir. Her general academic skills are going to be useful throughout the campaign, she’s fluent in Vietnamese, can get by in French, and she was a nationally-ranked fencer back in undergrad so she’s got the Sword skill. Boom, done. A lot better than “hey, make any characters you like, but somebody should probably be able to speak Vietnamese”.

            @bean:

            Yeah, it makes more interesting characters. The Warhammer 40k RPGs are even more egregious than D&D – diverting from the most basic character archetype is heavily punished, meaning that your RPG characters end up being about as interesting as a HQ selection who is one miniature out of dozens or more in the wargame.

          • hellahexi says:

            @dndnrsn

            You’re making me want to play at your table!

          • dndnrsn says:

            Ha, thanks.

            More than “this is how you run a game”the biggest lesson I’ve learned is that consistency beats everything else. Between me and the other guy who runs something, a 4 hour weekly session is almost always guaranteed. The first thing I did with this group was say “you can only be a part of this if you’re available at such-and-such a time every week”. So far the group has been going for about three years, meeting almost every week … far better than my previous experience, where it usually came down to me (even if I wasn’t running the game) having to coordinate 4-6 people meeting at irregular times.

          • bean says:

            You’re making me want to play at your table!

            Hmmm.
            Now I’m starting to speculate on doing an online game with people from here, although probably a short one. Anyone else interested, at least in the abstract?

            More than “this is how you run a game”the biggest lesson I’ve learned is that consistency beats everything else.

            I’ll second this strongly. The times when the game has gone downhill have usually been those when we got irregular in our sessions.

          • Randy M says:

            …having to coordinate 4-6 people meeting at irregular times.

            Man, ain’t it the truth. My friends suggested starting another campaign (rather than our usual MtG/boardgame night). I host & DM for one session, then we can’t manage to get more than 2/5 at the same time for like 3 months.
            (Had a pretty awesome time traveling campaign sketched out, too.)

          • Skivverus says:

            Now I’m starting to speculate on doing an online game with people from here, although probably a short one. Anyone else interested, at least in the abstract?

            Hell yes.

            Granted, most of my gaming hasn’t been the tabletop variety, but I’ve been working on that.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @bean:

            In theory, I’d be down, but it would depend on scheduling and so forth.

            In my past experience, the #1 campaign killer was having more than one person involved in running a campaign. #2 being “Hey, I’ve got this cool idea for another campaign, let’s run both” from someone already involved in running the ongoing campaign. #3 being player interaction problems. Or maybe swap 2 and 3. Irregularity comes from those factors.

            Eventually I decided I was going to lay down the law, recruit a new group, and settle on a set time every week. There are two of us running two separate games, and we play to different strengths: I’m good at dealing with published adventures and intensive preparation, while he’s good at having something original on the table every week. It works out.

            @Randy M:

            This is one thing I really like about systems where players are jack-of-all-trades. 2 players can handle an adventure scaled to them. Whereas if you need that meat shield/sneaky/glass cannon/healer combination…

          • bean says:

            I’m going to do a new post on the possibility of a group from here doing a game, to make threading and such easier.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Randy M:

            Aha, that’s a problem, then.

            The rule my group has essentially adopted is that if you have a majority of players, you can play, but it’s polite to check with the missing people, and put it to the vote if it’s less than 2/3. For what I’m running I prefer to have everyone – but we’ve got the other guy running the other campaign, so he just runs that week’s game.

          • Randy M says:

            Sorry, I deleted my post, since I wasn’t sure if my memory was entirely accurate. Bottom line, really spotty attendance killed all momentum, and thanks for the sympathy.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Randy M:

            An admirable dedication to accuracy. My experience has been that it’s easier to get someone who’s reliable but not a great gamer to become a good gamer than to get a good gamer who’s unreliable to become reliable.

          • Randy M says:

            I’m just bummed I didn’t get into gaming in high school or college. It isn’t easy arranging schedules of adults with jobs and families and all that.
            But when we’re playing ‘game of the week’ it doesn’t matter so much and they seem just as happy that way, so I’m not complaining. Er, any more, after this.

          • Spookykou says:

            @dndnrsn

            I have a lot of mixed feelings about the DM knowing all the players competency while designing encounters. I agree with all your points about the pros, but worry about the ‘a job for aquaman’ con. Has your group ever expressed this concern, do you think it even is a problem?

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Randy M:

            My group has a few jobs between us, but zero families. It’s actually easier than it was through most of university – but that’s mostly because the group I played with was very flaky.

            @Spookykyou:

            Given that pretty much everything I run is low-power and skill rather than class-based, it’s not really a problem. All I have to do is avoid putting them in situations where there’s only one way through, and it’s a skill only one PC has.

        • Randy M says:

          Improvisation, of plot, setting, & rules, is a skill DMs will pick up over time, and is essential because players are unpredictable.

          You’re absolutely right that much of the appeal of RPG’s is being able to think outside the box. DM’s have to accommodate this, but players also have to realize this comes with a cost; improved scenes or encounters are rarely going to be as coherent and detailed as those with more time and thought put into them, and sometimes the DM might just have to say “Okay, you decided to tunnel under the fort instead of a frontal assault or a covert entrance. Um, let’s pick it up there next week so I can figure out what will happen.”

          • dndnrsn says:

            I find that taking a half-hour break is usually enough, although I have begged off for another week. Another, quicker, favourite of mine is “hey everyone, so, what exactly are you gonna do? Come up with a plan, and write it down because I’m going to hold you to it” and then figure out what I’m doing while they argue.

            It’s absolutely terrible though that some published adventures and campaigns are so bad for this. I recently reread one and was absolutely shocked at the degree of assuming the PCs would take a given choice, things that would happen regardless of what PCs did, badass NPCs who can kill an enemy a turn in combat (except it’s impossible if you look at their stats), etc. It’s like every “don’t do this, GMs, don’t do this!” thing rolled into one.

    • Dr Dealgood says:

      Ok, so thanks to everyone who helped out. I just ran my first session last night and although not much actually happened it was a pretty fun three-to-four hours.

      First Session Report
      I decided to start off in a traditional way, with the classic module B2 Keep on the Borderlands. It’s one I was already familiar with and a trivial conversion from B/X to RC.

      My players were five girls from my PhD program, only one of whom had played D&D before. I’ve decided to name them Absent, Girlfriend the Thief, Huh? the Fighter, Team Mom the Halfling and Thirsty the Cleric.

      Character creation and explaining the basic rules took a while, but actually went pretty smoothly. Since I provided plenty of tables and everyone there was pretty smart to begin with there was none of the usual “arithmetic is hard!” whining I expect from new players. Rolling abilities and hit points also went surprisingly well: everyone got a playable character, and despite some initial grumbling the girls really like their characters so far. We’ll see if that holds once they get some actual combat later on.

      The four girls who had actually showed up entered the Keep on the Borderlands, and immediately made a beeline for the tavern where they spent most of the rest of the session. Highlights included:
      > Team Mom used her halfling unobtrusiveness to hide in the corner and listen for rumors about the Caves of Chaos, while Girlfriend acted like a regular person and just asked the tavern keeper if he knew anything. They collectively learned the (false) rumor that all of the entrances to the caves are trapped, as well as the very useful fact that they should avoid the murderous Mad Hermit to the north.
      > Huh? had rolled a 17 for Strength during character creation and so decided to put it to work arm-wrestling peasants. This didn’t accomplish much but it was fun and gives me something to work with later now that she’s the “arm-wrestling champion.”
      > Thirsty, as per her idiom, decided to seduce the (secretly evil) Priest after failing to identify his Holy Symbol of Utgard-Loki. Supposedly for the purpose of information gathering but also because she wanted to roleplay the flirting. Girlfriend was not thrilled with that development but I made it up to her later on. At least this will make the Priest’s betrayal later on a lot more interesting.

      For the next session, I want to tighten up some of my houserules and finish writing the quick-and-dirty “how to play” guide I meant to hand my players last night. I should also deal with Thirsty out of game before that turns into drama, and pick a time when Absent isn’t too busy for the next session. Not to mention that I want to actually get them all out of the keep and into the hexmap.

      • John Schilling says:

        Glad it went well, and looking forward to the followup. But:

        The Secretly Evil Priest is publicly displaying the Holy Symbol of Utgard-Loki, or at least flashing it to random seductive tavern wenches? I thought it was Evil that was supposed to always triumph because Good is Dumb.

        • Dr Dealgood says:

          In the past I’ve made the mistake of playing the Priest as too subtle. Having a party wipe because the mid-level DMPC chaperone turns on you out in the woods is really really shitty.

          Anyway, I figure that out in the sticks people are a lot less knowledgeable about obscure bits of theology. The only other non-Chaotic Cleric in the module is the Curate who is explicitly suspicious of the Priest. If Utgard-Loki’s symbol is as confusingly close to Loki’s as his name, I could see laymen mixing them up.

      • dndnrsn says:

        How long did character creation take, out of the session?

        Also:

        Thirsty, as per her idiom, decided to seduce the (secretly evil) Priest after failing to identify his Holy Symbol of Utgard-Loki. Supposedly for the purpose of information gathering but also because she wanted to roleplay the flirting. Girlfriend was not thrilled with that development but I made it up to her later on.

        I should also deal with Thirsty out of game before that turns into drama

        This sounds like a setup for a niche-market porno, it really does. Stay genre-savvy.

        • Dr Dealgood says:

          Maybe an hour? It took longer than it should have since I had to explain a lot of basic stuff like dice terminology and ability scores, but it was still faster than making a character properly in 3.5 would have.

          I lol’d at the “niche-market porno” comment. But no, I’m trying to be a good boyfriend so aiming to keep it PG.

          • dndnrsn says:

            An hour is pretty good for new players. 3.5, no way, no how, for new players. Even for people who have made characters before doing everything including equipment could take longer than that.

  88. Jiro says:

    Experience here shows that the “true, kind, necessary” rule is easily used as a weapon against other commentors. (Especially since failing one of those three can easily be interpreted as failing another. “Your comment isn’t true, so it obviously can’t be necessary”. )

    • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

      That seems strange, since the “Tree gates” have been officially replaced with “whatever Scott feels like” like a thousand years ago.

      • Evan Þ says:

        As Scott said at the top of this thread, they’re now back.

        • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

          Oh, I should probably read things sometimes.

          Also, this should probably be repeated later, since it’s not going to get a lot of exposure in a hidden open thread.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Do you think I’m doing this, or do you think random other commenters are? If the latter, doesn’t matter too much since I make final decisions.

      • Douglas Knight says:

        I think that discussion of the commenting rules has been corrosive and I encourage people to just report the comment and move on.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          this.

          • rlms says:

            I don’t think that comment was necessary, and its truthfulness is debatable.

          • Dahlen says:

            @rlms

            On a more serious note, necessity seems to be the most easy to fail out of the three criteria. Nobody’s chiming-in is actually necessary, it’s easier to just shut up when in doubt.

            Second easiest is truth, when it comes to affective expression and such.

          • aaarboretum says:

            I agree with Dahlen, especially in the open threads, where none of the top level comments are really ‘necessary’ since the point of them is to be a free-for-all.

            Also Scott, I imagine you’ll repeat this rule change again the main-site open thread in a week? Not everyone checks the hidden open threads.

          • John Colanduoni says:

            @aaarboretum

            But the open threads need at least one top level comment to fulfill their purpose. And since we don’t have a coordination mechanism, multiple comments are necessary.

            (Rule lawyering can be used for good too!)

      • Jiro says:

        Do you think I’m doing this, or do you think random other commenters are? If the latter, doesn’t matter too much since I make final decisions.

        I think it’s poisonous to useful discussion when commenters begin intimidating posters by taking advantage of the fact that pretty much post they disagree with can be fit into the box. “This post violates two of true, kind, and necessary” has become a local superweapon.. Even if you personally aren’t doing it, I think it still causes damage.

        Also, superweapons in general are bad news.

      • suntzuanime says:

        It’s really annoying to listen to. I mind the comment policy less than people being smarmy at each other about it.

        • drethelin says:

          This is why I support up/downvoting in general. It replaces a less noisy but more loud signal with a noiser but quieter one. If you see what I mean.

    • JulieK says:

      I haven’t noticed that. What I have seen is one person objects to a comment, someone else says “How come you don’t object when your own side makes mean comments,” and it devolves into partisan bickering.
      In fact, that happens too often on any sort of discussion. Instead of discussing issues, we discuss which tribe is worse.

      I recommend Thomas Jefferson’s rule from his “Manual of Parliamentary Practice”:

      No person in speaking is to digress from the matter to fall upon the person, by speaking reviling, nipping, or unmannerly words against a particular member. The consequences of a measure may be reprobated in strong terms; but to arraign the motives of those who propose or advocate it, is a personality, and against order.

  89. Tekhno says:

    Typically, you need enough money to start with before you can invest properly, but what’s the best way to get good returns on a few thousand dollars/pounds?

    • Brad says:

      Depends on what you mean by best.

      *Probably* the answer you are looking for is a broad based low cost equity index fund.

    • andrewflicker says:

      Depends on your risk-appetite and your timeline. I’ll echo Brad and say that for most purposes, a super-low-fee index fund is best. (see Vanguard et al)

    • dndnrsn says:

      Another vote for index funds. In a tax-advantaged account if that’s possible.

    • Mark says:

      Sign up for gambling sites, take advantage of the bonuses on offer and cycle the real money into your account by betting on sure things/ boring poker play.

      Edit: Even better if you can leverage your earnings by funding it through an initially interest free credit card.

    • Randy M says:

      Keep it liquid to make sure you aren’t getting hit with late fees, overdraft fees, or credit card interest.
      (edit: Probably not actually the best, just something to keep in mind.)

      • Eric Rall says:

        This also has follow-on benefits from letting you save on insurance by switching to higher-deductible polices: you save money on average, but have to be prepared for the risk that you’ll have a claim and need to pay the deductible.

      • dndnrsn says:

        Maybe not the best but “no credit card debt” is generally better than “money invested but also credit card debt”.

    • Robert Liguori says:

      You’ll want a mutual fund. Vanguard’s mostly have a $3000 minimum, but a few have $1000; you can buy into a very distant target retirement fund and have a very diversified set of stocks in your portfolio. This will also handle auto-balancing for you and such.

      If this is your last (or first) few thousand, however, you might want to consider keeping it liquid as advised above, just in case.

      (I am not an investment professional. You are heartily encouraged to do your own reasearch, not trust any specific numbers, etc. Advice based on U.S. financial experience only.)

      • Matt M says:

        You can also buy ETFs that mirror most of the same indexes the mutual funds do. Their fees on a percentage basis are a bit higher, but you don’t have to worry about minimums and can buy or sell in any increment you want at any time.

        • Brad says:

          I don’t think that’s right. In my experience ETFs have a lower fee than their mutual fund equivalents (except perhaps for the very high minimum purchase variants). And as you note, no minimums.

          SPY is the most popular ETF by AUM. It has an expense ratio of 0.10%. The equivalent mutual fund from the same company is SSSVX. Class A shares of that have a front end load (yuck) of 5.25% plus an expense ratio of 0.47%.

          Even for mutual funds that aren’t an outright scam, ETFs can be better. VTI is the third most popular ETF by AUM. It has an expense ratio of 0.05%. The equivalent mutual funds are VTSMX which has a an expense ratio of 0.16% and a minimum purchase of $3000 and VTSAX which has an expense ratio of 0.05% and a minimum purchase of $10,000.

          Where ETFs hit you is in trading costs — both directly in the form of fees and indirectly in the form of bid-ask spread.

          • Matt M says:

            Yes, I’m sorry, I should have clarified. ETFs will end up being more expensive, particularly if you buy in small increments, mostly because of commissions. I’m not sure the distinction is that relevant for a new investor though.

          • dndnrsn says:

            This is how it seems to me – I’m using an index ETF. There’s a flat trading fee that’s considerably less than a single share, though, so the cost of trading is negligible when done in large increments.

          • Anon. says:

            >mostly because of commissions.

            These days you can use Robin Hood.

    • Eric Rall says:

      1. Pay down high-interest debt, if you have any. Not paying interest on a credit card balance is a guaranteed return of 10-25%, which is way better than you’re likely to get elsewhere short of insider trading.

      2. Standard advice about keeping at least a few hundred dollars in a bank account or similar for emergencies.

      3. Look for low-hanging fruit in terms of household capital.

      Food prep is a big opportunity area for most people: if you eat out or buy pre-prepared food for most of your meals, you can save a lot of money by cooking for yourself instead. Buying a few hundred dollars worth of good-quality kitchen tools and gadgets can give you an excellent return-on-investment by improving the quality of what you cook for yourself and reducing the trivial inconveniences of cooking. Megan McArdle has a good list of suggested options. If you don’t already know how to cook, your local community center probably offers classes fairly cheaply, or you can buy books or videos to learn from. I recommend anything by America’s Test Kitchen or Cook’s Illustrated (different brands run by the same people) for the former, and Alton Brown’s “Good Eats” series for the latter.

      Other potential areas to look into: switching to a more fuel-efficient car (or buying a bike, if you live close enough to work to commute by bike), catching up on deferred maintenance on your car (and your house, if you own it), buying stuff to work out at home to save on gym membership (don’t do this if you need the routine of “going to the gym” to stick to a workout plan), buying basic tools and how-to guides to do your own minor repairs/improvements instead of hiring a handyman.

      4. If you have all of the above covered, the index funds everyone else are recommending are a good start. That’s where I’ve got most of my money apart from the equity in my house. I’ve got quite a bit now (the product of 17 years of prudent living on a programmer’s salary), but I started out with about a thousand dollars. I tried picking individual stocks at first, and that was useful in terms of engaging my interest, getting in the habit of saving and investing, and learning about finance; but I didn’t do as well as I would have with index funds, and it took more time and effort than I cared to sustain in the long run.

      • Randy M says:

        Where does one go to start investing?
        If I have retirement funds through work, would it be best to just increase that (assuming I’m not getting any additional matched funds), or walk into a Fidelity office and say “I’ve got $2,000, help me get a bit more”?

        • Evan Þ says:

          Depends on (a) whether you’re investing for retirement or something earlier, and (b) what sort of funds your workplace lets you access.

        • Brad says:

          That would be kind of like walking into a used car dealership and saying “I’ve got $2,000, which car can I get”?

          The general rule of thumb:
          1) 401k till matching limit
          2) HSA if possible
          3) IRA if possible
          4) back to 401k to max limit
          5) taxable investments

          That’s assuming retirement savings as a goal. If you need / want access before that some of those aren’t good options. It also leaves out things like paying down debt and emergency funds.

          bogleheads is the go to source for this kind of thing. (It’s not inerrant in every detail, or perfect for every circumstance, but it is a place to learn reasonably solid conventional wisdom.)

          • Randy M says:

            Okay, that helps.

            I took a hard look at our finances a few years ago, tightened the belts and paid down two student loans, car payment, & credit cards, plus saved up a few thousand. Recently went back into debt for a new car; even expecting to get it paid off pretty quick I’m a bit uncomfortable about it, but it was a good deal and maintenance was starting to creep up on the previous one.

        • gbdub says:

          Not sure about you, but for me our work 401k (managed by Morgan Stanley currently) has the option of allocating your investments among a number of funds (including Vanguard). The downside is that these funds / management may have higher fees.

          If you’re not already maxing out your 401k contributions and are saving primarily for retirement, do that first to get maximum benefit from the tax deferred status. Also, some people don’t even give enough to their 401k to max out their employer-matching – that’s free money, don’t throw it away.

        • Eric Rall says:

          I walked into a TD Waterhouse office (now TD Ameritrade) with a check and asked to open an account. I’ve still got most of my money that isn’t in my 401k or my regular account there, and for a long time, I used my brokerage account as my main checking account: Ameritrade gives at least a good an interest rate on your cash position as most banks, and they give you a debit card and a checkbook and you can set up direct deposit to go there. I think Fidelity lets you do this, too. I’m not sure about the other major brokerages.

          If you ask for advice when you go in to set up your account, make sure you research it independently before you act on it, and be very skeptical of anything that’s not the kind of boilerplate advice you’d get online. Unless they’re a professional financial adviser whom you’re paying by the hour, their incentives are not aligned with yours. Regard them as salespeople calling your attention to potential options.

          Ameritrade, Fidelity, and Schwab all have good account management websites, so once you have an account set up, you can buy and sell stocks and funds through that without having to go back to the office.

          Whether you’re better off opening a brokerage account or adding to your employer’s retirement account depends on your situation, as there are advantages to each.

          A brokerage account is going to be more liquid and flexible. There’s a big tax penalty for withdrawing from a retirement account early, so prefer the brokerage account if you’re saving for a non-retirement expense (down payment on a house, long-term emergency fund, childrens’ educations, etc).

          Your retirement account (assuming it’s a 401(k) or similar) will probably also have a limited menu of investment options, so you might be able to get a better return with lower fees with your own account. This is only really an issue if your employer has crappy options (high fees, no index funds, etc) or if you want to experiment with investing in individual stocks.

          The two big advantages of topping off your retirement fund beyond what your employer matches are:
          1. You’ll probably get a better after-tax return on your investment. Assuming you’re American and in a middle-class income bracket: in a brokerage account you’ll earn the money, pay about 25-40% taxes on the last few dollars of it (federal and state income taxes and payroll tax), invest it, hopefully earn a profit, and then pay 10-20% taxes (federal capital gains and state income tax) on the profit when you sell it. Assuming 30% and 15% marginal tax rates and a 50% profit (over the course of several years) to make the math easy: you earn $2000, pay $600 in taxes and invest $1400, make a $700 profit on which you owe $105 in taxes, leaving you with $1995 total (your initial investment plus $595 in after-tax profits).

          For your 401(k), you’ll pay only payroll tax up front, at 6.25% (your employer pays another 6.25%, but that doesn’t affect the calculation), and then pay ordinary income taxes on the entire amount you withdraw. In this case, you earn $2000, pay $12.50 in taxes and invest $1987.50, make a $993.75 profit for a total withdrawable amount of $2981.25. You’ll owe $894.38 in taxes, leaving you with $2086.87 total.

          2. Raising your contribution to your employer retirement account is a lot easier than creating a brokerage account, setting up regular contributions, and investing them. This saves you a trivial inconvenience and makes it more likely you’ll actually invest the money in a timely fashion.

          • Eric Rall says:

            You can set up special accounts (IRAs) with a broker that have similar tax benefits to a 401(k), but the maximum contribution is a lot smaller ($5500/year vs $18,000/year).

        • Tyrant Overlord Killidia says:

          I am by far not the most qualified about investing, but I’ve got a Betterment.com account that I’ve been depositing money in for a few years. It was really easy to set up, and I can just do an automatic deposit once a month and forget about it.

        • chroMa says:

          (Disclosure: Used to work for Fidelity Investments, had Series 7, 66, passed CFP exam, but no longer work in finance).

          That being said, especially for people who aren’t ultra wealthy, Fidelity is the way to go for a low cost brokerage. People often talk about Vanguard (and you can get Vanguard funds at Fidelity, but theres extra commission), but Fidelity Index funds tie Vanguard for fees or beat them. I don’t know how exactly, but especially in Bond funds (I was bored at work once and spent an hour comparing Fidelity v. Vanguard index funds) the funds tend to have lower minimum investments, the same fees, but the returns are… higher? This was all as of like… February 2016.

          But, in addition to having we’ll say ‘comparable index funds’, you also get really cheap trading, really good trade execution, and also if you do decide you want to go ETFs, Fidelity has a list of 70 something ‘iShares ETFs’ (they’re made by Blackrock I think), that are commission free as long as you don’t sell them within 30 days of buying them.

          People have been saying ‘buy Index funds’, but I think something else important is 70/30 split of Domestic/International. Historically this mix has higher returns and lower risk than All domestic or All international.

          For example: FSTMX (Total Market Index Fund) 70% and FSGUX (Global ex. US Fund) 30%. Respectively the Net Expense Ratio on these two funds is .09% and .18%

          To do this with ETF’s: ITOT (Total Market ETF) 70% and IXUS (All Country World Index ex US). Respectively the Net Expense Ratio on these two funds is .03% and .11%. Both of these are iShares so they’re commission free.

          (P.s. Fidelity index funds used to be called ‘Spartan Funds’ which was such a good name for an Index fund. I’m really mad they renamed them.)

      • bean says:

        I’ll second the recommendation for Cook’s Illustrated. I’m not an enthusiastic cook, but every time I look at their stuff (my mom gets the magazine, and I think has most of the books) I’m impressed with how scientific it is. Lots of “why did we do it this way? Well, we tried the traditional way, and seven others, and this worked the best.” And they’re usually right, as evidenced by the fact that the aforementioned mother, who is a pretty serious amateur cook, has had her cooking improved by it, even on fairly basic items.

        • gbdub says:

          The Serious Eats blog also has some great stuff with a lot of food prep science and experiments in a fun format.

          • bean says:

            It’s not quite ‘food science’ in the ‘cooking for geeks’ sense. They don’t tie it into chemistry or physics or anything. It’s just that they clearly show their work in writing recipes, and I can’t describe how they go about it as anything other than ‘scientific’.

          • gbdub says:

            I was thinking of the “Food Lab” section, which does a lot of practical experimenting and touches on some science.

        • dndnrsn says:

          Cook’s Illustrated is great. While their target is the short-on-time-long-on-money serious amateur cook, they contain a lot of tips that are useful even if you can’t afford a coffee machine costing several hundred dollars or a top-of-the-line knife set or whatever.

          That they give some insight into how cooking works in a way that at least references science is useful, because it helps you carry ideas over to other recipes.

      • houseboatonstyxb says:

        Food prep is a big opportunity area for most people: if you eat out or buy pre-prepared food for most of your meals, you can save a lot of money by cooking for yourself instead.

        • Paul Brinkley says:

          I sometimes wonder about the TCO of cooking one’s own food. If you could spend that time doing something else that earns money, might it be worth it to order out instead? Suppose, for instance, that you would take an hour to prepare a meal. If you could earn $10 in that hour, then a prepped version of that dish is worth up to $10 plus the cost of the materials.

          Obviously, your expected wage during that time, and the time it would normally require, are key factors. As is whether you’d just consider it fun (a prime reason for my choosing to cook my own food).

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ Paul Brinkley

            That paragraph came from Eric Rall above. I was quoting it to agree with him, but WordPress ate the rest of my comment (I’ve reposted it below).

            Paul, you say: Obviously, your expected wage during that time, and the time it would normally require, are key factors.

            Another key factor is what kind of chore-work the cooking is, and what kind of mood it sends you back to work in. Chopping vegetables can be a soothing chore while thinking about work; or juggling hot skillets to get everything ready at the same time can be exciting with various effects.

      • houseboatonstyxb says:

        I apologize for the first version of my comment going out unfinished and somehow lacking an ‘edit’ button. This has happened before, and seems to be linked to a “You have already said this” message.

        @ Eric Rall
        Food prep is a big opportunity area for most people: if you eat out or buy pre-prepared food for most of your meals, you can save a lot of money by cooking for yourself instead.

        Yep. My own yeast bread has been the easiest thing to learn to cook.* It makes for direct and indirect saving. Ingredient costs are tiny. No part of the loaf goes stale or moldy, since I bake it as needed. Having bread on hand supports sandwiches, dips, cheap stuff on toast or in soup with big croutons, etc. Less frequent trips to the grocery save gasoline.

        * I’m still on the easiest recipes: ‘no-knead bread’, ‘refrigerator bread’.

    • mmontoriblog says:

      I would recommend the book “You Can Be a Stock Market Genius” by Joel Greenblatt. Try to get past the incredibly bad title. Joel Greenblatt outperformed the market for a long time by investing in intricate but ultimately understandable situations that most analysts simply aren’t willing to research long and hard enough to uncover, and in the book he walks you through some examples. Those opportunities are still out there if you have the patience to look for them.

      If you’re looking for a passive approach, I think an index fund is a good bet as well, but there is an additional bit of information that is pretty crucial – you have to actively keep yourself from trying to time the market. Otherwise you’ll buy and sell at the wrong times, and you’ll end up underperforming like anyone else. I’d recommend putting some sort of rule in place (for example, every month you deposit 10% of your income into a particular basket of vanguard equity index funds) and don’t change it when things get worse.

    • John Schilling says:

      If this is the first few thousand dollars you have available to save, it’s your emergency fund. The most important thing is not the rate of return you can get for it, but that you have it immediately and reliably available on demand. Even a small chance of being stuck with, e.g., $3000 in a six-month CD and a $1000 payday loan because you can’t wait six months to get a new alternator for your car, should outweigh the extra percent or two of return you could get on the longer-term but illiquid investment.

      Index funds might be adequately liquid, but check with whomever is trying to sell you one to be sure. Money-market accounts and even boring old-fashioned savings accounts are worth considering in this context.

      • Tekhno says:

        No, I’m not super poor. I’m just super super stingy and I’ve decided to risk just a few thousand.

        • dndnrsn says:

          The thinking I have is that broad-based index funds are distributed across the whole market, so any situation where my investments are destroyed and don’t recover is one where the whole market is destroyed and doesn’t recover, in which case I’ll probably have bigger worries than my investments. The argument for investing is that compound interest can be a big deal.

          • baconbacon says:

            The thinking I have is that broad-based index funds are distributed across the whole market, so any situation where my investments are destroyed and don’t recover is one where the whole market is destroyed and doesn’t recover, in which case I’ll probably have bigger worries than my investments

            This is such a bizarre position to me, you know that time when I am most going to need something to fall back on, periods of fear and anxiety where good decision making is at its most challenging and marginal returns are at their highest? Yeah, I’m not making any contingency plans for those, I’m just going to ride them out so I can ensure that I have $83,000 a year to spend in retirement and not $79,000. One of those would be a real disaster.

          • dndnrsn says:

            I do have an emergency fund, I probably should have mentioned. I’m not plowing everything into the market.

          • baconbacon says:

            What is the emergency fund in (if you don’t mind my asking)

          • dndnrsn says:

            I always keep some money in my chequing account in case my credit card gets denied or I’m somewhere debit-only or cash only. I also have a savings account I park money in while saving up a chunk large enough to be worth investing (due to a flat trading fee) so I will generally have some money there.

            The basic goal, as I understand it, is that even if friends and family could be fallen back upon (I am lucky enough that this is the case), it’s a good idea to have a few hundred available immediately, and enough to deal with rent, food, etc for a month or two accessible as well – the latter will of course be greater for someone with a family or other major obligations.

          • baconbacon says:

            The basic goal, as I understand it, is that even if friends and family could be fallen back upon (I am lucky enough that this is the case), it’s a good idea to have a few hundred available immediately, and enough to deal with rent, food, etc for a month or two accessible as well – the latter will of course be greater for someone with a family or other major obligations.

            While this is a sound strategy for 95%+ of events, these things won’t functionally protect you in a near worst case financial meltdown. 2008 can pretty close to crushing money market funds, which (probably) would have caused massive bank failures and an inability to access funds for between a few days and a few months.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Definitely true. There’s always something that can go wrong.

          • baconbacon says:

            @ dndnrsn (or anyone lee who wants to reply)

            I’m currently working on a project that is basically attempting to help people shift their risk away from this type of scenario. Would you mind answering a few questions that might help me?

            1. Would you ever consider using options/do you know anything about options?
            2. What is your opinion on gold in terms of the association you have with the types of people who buy gold?

          • dndnrsn says:

            1. I’m vaguely aware of options, but have basically decided to limit the complexity of what I’m doing. I don’t want to delude myself into thinking I can beat the market, because all the evidence suggests being able to do so consistently is a rare ability. I like the “set it and forget it” nature of what I’m doing.

            2. If we’re talking the actual economic reality of gold, I have no idea. If we’re talking about the stereotype of “goldbugs”, the mental image I have is of somebody who is low-key crazy. Ron Paul, not Alex Jones.

        • Tekhno says:

          Is a broad based index fund the same thing as a mutual fund?

          • dndnrsn says:

            Index funds are basically a type of mutual fund that seeks to follow the market (or some segment of it). The advantage is that, compared to an “actively managed” mutual fund it’s a lot cheaper to run. Given that most traders – and thus must mutual funds – fail to outperform the market in the long run, index funds appear to be the better buy.

          • Brad says:

            A mutual fund is a legal structure that defines a collective investment vehicle. A broad based index fund is a type of mutual fund with a particular class of investment strategies (it can also be embodied in other legal structures such as an exchange-traded fund).

        • Fossegrimen says:

          This kind of implies that you’d like to have more fun with the investment than just stashing it in an index fund? Since it’s money you can afford to lose so to speak?

          If so, you might enjoy the following algorithm:

          – Buy stock only in established firms / mature industries
          – Buy only stock that pays dividends
          – Buy stock when P/E ratio is low ( under 15 )
          – Sell stock when P/E ratio is high ( over 20 )

          This has given me an average 14% return since the early nineties and if you go back and check the numbers, it seems to fit what Warren Buffet has been doing all along. (This is the reason I did it, I only have a very vague understanding of how this works, but if the Oracle from Omaha thinks it’s good, I’ll be happy to copy the idea.)

          edit: anyone know why “open parenthesis ~ < number close parenthesis" seems to delete the follwing line? Some wordpress macro stuff?

    • StellaAthena says:

      The answer to the question that you think you’re asking is “index funds” as people keep saying.

      The answer to the question that you’re actually asking is to build a computer that has a built-in generator to recharge its batteries, load it with the complete history of the stock market, go back in time, and make perfect investments

      Oh, and don’t forget to carefully incrypt the data so that when you’re invariably audited by the IRS in 1880 it’s harder for them to figure out what the hell is going on with your magic box that spits out investment recommendations.

    • janrandom says:

      LW:
      http://lesswrong.com/lw/kzh/a_guide_to_rational_investing/

      Also:
      “How to Invest $50-$5,000: The Small Investor’s Step-By-Step Plan for Low-Risk, High-Value Investing”
      http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1154797.How_to_Invest_50_5_000

    • eh6 says:

      Spend it on professional development books and courses, exercise equipment, finding a wife [1], and anything else that is statistically likely to increase your salary.

      If you’re not very wealthy [2], keep a budget, and make regular deposits to your savings, you’ll probably have noticed that returns on your investments are dwarfed by that regular deposit. Assume you can earn $5k more per year if you are better at e.g. LaTeX, MIG welding, copywriting, synergetic agile scrums, public speaking, etc.[3] If it costs $2k to take a welding course or to join toastmasters, then you should consider doing it.

      [1] A husband may also work, but I haven’t looked at the data.
      [2] Probably due to youth.
      [3] These examples are made up, and are probably really stupid.

    • Moon says:

      Just get an online broker and buy some SPY.

  90. andrewflicker says:

    In the process of reminding myself of the old comment policy, I went down the link-hole to https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/17/lies-damned-lies-and-social-media-part-5-of-%E2%88%9E/ and saw the first post was by an Andrew, bitching about statistics. I don’t think it was me, since the writing style is a bit off, but I’m glad to know that I’m one of a cadre of Andrews fighting the mis-use of statistics!

    • The Nybbler says:

      Reported.

      • andrewflicker says:

        Dare I ask why? Tongue-in-cheek: It was a truthful reporting of my experience, it’s a top-level comment on an open thread, so it’s as necessary as any other, and if the other Andrew isn’t me, I’m being kind to them (and if they were me, then I’m being kind to past-me!).