This is the bi-weekly visible open thread. There are hidden threads every few days here. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:
1. The Report Comment button is back. Thanks to 75thTrombone for fixing things up.
2. New advertisement on the sidebar, for the Secular Solstice celebration. I’ll be at the one in New York City, so if you’re coming too I’ll see you there.
3. Thanks to everyone who emailed me with your thoughts on Trump. I got hundreds of emails and can’t reply to all of them, especially the ones trying to engage me in debate. I’m sorry, I just can’t debate a hundred people at once.
4. Thanks to everyone who disagreed with my predictions and offered to bet on them. I’ve accepted a few offers already, but I won’t be accepting any more until I can get a Bets/Predictions post up where I record all of them so I can keep track.
5. A few people emailed me to say that they have friends or family members who attempted suicide for Trump-related reasons. I’m really sorry about that and I hope they’re okay. If you or someone you know is considering suicide, consider checking out the National Suicide Hotline at 1-800-273-8255, which also has a special webpage on election-related suicidality. Please note that in a few rare cases, if you’re really serious about commiting suicide immediately and won’t back down, calling a hotline can end with them picking you up for psychiatric hospitalization.
6. If you’re looking for a more productive way to deal with the election results, some friends have pointed out some good opportunities for activism:
— The National Popular Vote is a really cool and game-theoretically interesting way to get rid of the Electoral College without a Constitutional amendment. It’s pretty close to being passed and the site gives you some ways to help push it forward.
— Trump has posted an online survey asking which of his plans he should prioritize during his first 100 days in office. You might not find anything super-great on there, but some of them are definitely worse than others, and it might be that by telling him to prioritize the less bad ones you can do a lot of good. Disclaimer: I have no idea if Trump plans to take the survey results seriously.
— Apparently the new administration didn’t realize that all of Obama’s staffers are leaving, and now they have a few thousand executive branch jobs to fill. Because of their commitment to avoid lobbyists they can’t use the preferred method of just giving all the positions to lobbyists, and they’ve been reduced to the indignity of having to accept applications from real citizens. Bloomberg notes that There’s No Shame In Joining The Trump Administration if your goal is harm reduction, and if you agree you can apply here. If you have some kind of useful political/administrative experience, this might be an unusually easy route to getting a position of power where you can do useful things like lobby for foreign aid and alleviate the effects of various Trump policies. Curious what the EA peoples’ opinion on this is.
— Here is a very complete spreadsheet about how best to contact your representatives and senators.
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9. In an effort to keep my Trump-related traffic spike around for more useful things, I’ve added a “Subscribe via email” button to the side of the blog. If you really want to get emails every time SSC updates, now you can.
Obvious question (though as an Australian citizen not an American one I feel dishonest filling out the survey)- what combination of Action Plan votes would do the best good for the country? I figure SSC American citizens might as well fill it out to have a little potential impact.
I put as high prioity: infrastructure, tax deduction, end regime change, end common core, school choice, fewer regulations, better VA care, appoint Supreme Court Justice. They seemed like the least destructive policies on the list. Supreme Court Justice might be destructive, but we all know it’s going to happen anyway, and maybe if Trump focuses on it now it’ll keep him too busy to do the other stuff.
It’s interesting, I am a Trump supporter (including donating), so I got the survey via email…. he has sent a few similar surveys during the campaign (such as “What issues should I concentrate on for the next debate, etc).
Anyways, I am a conservative protestant. The items you picked as “top priorities” are the same ones I did when I filled out the survey, although I also prefer simplifying the tax code over tax deduction.
I just started reading your posts this week due to a link from Scott Adams, and it really makes me think that there is more in common with most honest red/blues, then they might ever believe.
I like the idea of simplifying the tax code, but I’m worried that by “simplification” he means “let’s cut taxes on the rich”.
— Or, rather, I dunno if Trump specifically means that, but if we put Congress in charge of simplifying the tax code, that’s what’s going to happen.
In a rare display of actually talking about policy, Trump released his tax plan during the campaign. This analysis from the Tax Policy Center has the details. Here’s the abstract:
Given how much the wealthy pay, I think you may do better griping about spending on net or the injustice of how much the wealthy pay as it is.
“Given how much the wealthy pay, I think you may do better griping about spending on net or the injustice of how much the wealthy pay as it is.”
Oh yah, I hear the wealthy are really struggling to keep food on the plate these days…
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/effective-tax-rate-charts.png
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/13/high-income-americans-pay-most-income-taxes-but-enough-to-be-fair/
“Given how much the wealthy pay, I think you may do better griping about spending on net or the injustice of how much the wealthy pay as it is.”
Posting links seems to have gotten my comment disappeared, but this is a combination of begging the question and false on its own terms (effective tax rate on the top 1% of earners seems to be at an all-time low since the establishment of the federal income tax in the first place).
The top marginal rate immediately after the Revenue Act of 1913 was 7%, so you must be asserting that the effective tax rate on the top 1% of earners is under 7%. I find this unlikely.
The top 1% pay nearly half the income taxes paid in this country.
The top 20% pay nearly 85% of all income tax paid in the country.
Is there a point at which it is acceptable to cut the income tax on the high income people?
(Note: not the wealthy. If John Doe spends his entire career building up his business, and after forty years sells it, it’s very likely he will be in the top 20, if not top 1, percent, but he’s not wealthy.)
Good choices except for infrastructure (still not a good idea when proposed by a Republican) and tax deduction (for the reason Aaron says).
EDIT: If Trump actually does the infrastructure via removing red tape (environmental impact studies, zoning restrictions, etc.) as opposed to directing the investment at the federal level, it’s fine. That seems unlikely, though.
I think this is probably the least destructive policy on the list:
Trump should put all his not insubstantial energy into trying to make it happen.
That is an awful idea.
If you want to give lobbyists and the bureaucracy more power, institute term limits.
I think it’s a good idea. Congresspeople apparently spend a lot of their time fundraising; if we assign a term limit, then their last term will be spent doing no fundraising, which is surely an improvement. My ideal scenario would be a term limit of one, so that nobody in Congress would spend any time fundraising.
I agree it is an awful idea, but it is highly unlikely to happen as a constitutional amendment requires 2/3rds votes in each house of congress and then ratification by 3/4rs of the states.
@Brad:
Fair point.
But, it is one of those awful ideas that everyone seems to embrace. It’s the kind of impossible thing that just might happen.
And to the extent that stoking the fire for it sheds more heat than light on the issue, I think it has further deleterious affects on political understanding.
That is what happened in California.
TI thought I put this comment in here before, in some other thread. But anyway, term limits could possibly mean that politicians would be even more beholden to lobbyists, because they would be even more ignorant of how laws are made, what laws are on the books, and how the industries affected by laws are conducted. Congress members would also be free to screw over the voters even more, because they would never have to worry about whether voters would ere-elect them, thus being free to serve the industries and lobbyists who are promising them a nice job somewhere in the industry that the lobbyists works for, once the short term of office as a Congress member is up.
Trump is the type of personality who would want term limits for everyone except the president– at least while he is president. That wouldn’t necessarily mean that he is the Savior of the People or that he was “draining the swamp.” It could mean quite the opposite. The guy has never showed any interest in or regard for anyone except himself– and his children, but only when they were grown up enough to help him out in various ways.
…maybe if we get 3/4 of the states to pass a law saying that they’ll ratify any constitutional amendment which wins a national popular vote… 🙂
Congresscritters serving 40-50 years in the same gerrymandered seat is an awful idea.
Term limits don’t need to be ridiculously short. Just as a quick shot in the dark, allowing 5 terms as a US Representative and 3 as Senator gives you 28 years on the Hill if you’re qualified enough to nab both seats in your career. That should be plenty for anyone interested in anything other than their own power.
And it’s not like federal newbies have no exposure to sausage-making. A large number have experience in lower levels or in law.
On the other hand, you have Representative Smith serving forty or fifty years in office, and then handing over their seat to a family member to succeed them. This tends to reduce choice for the constituents and cut off “new blood” or a change/reform, because the Smith organisation will have the clout and local know-how to see off any challengers within their local party and any rivals outside it (there are certainly examples in Irish politics where ostensible party colleagues have been busy knifing one another in the back over running mates in elections, and I’d be very surprised if American politics were much different).
Term limits would also be one way of dealing with embarrassments such as the locals stubbornly returning a crook to office in every election. Again, an Irish example is Michael Lowry who was kicked out of his party for reasons, ran as an independent, and has the local vote well sewn up so he keeps getting elected. Now, you may well say if the people of his constituency want a crook to represent them, they’re entitled to vote for him, and that is so – but it certainly doesn’t do anything to discourage bribery and corruption if you know you won’t lose anything by being found out.
My current favorite term limits idea is to prohibit consecutive terms but allow any number of non-consecutive terms. It covers or at least mitigates what I think are the three strongest arguments for term limits:
1. Running for office while holding office creates conflicts of interest
2. Structural advantages of incumbency make elections less competitive
3. Long-term officeholders come to represent the intuitions they’re part of more than they represent their constituents
While also mitigating two of the biggest disadvantages of term limits:
1. Removing successful and experienced legislators from the talent pool of potential candidates
2. Creating artificial last-period problems in cooperation games between candidates and constituents, and between legislators and other legislators
That only further cements the necessity to be either:
a) Someone who is employed in the hopes that they will do the employers bidding when next elected.
b) Be independently wealthy.
We will see soon how it works out for an independently wealthy person to be a high level public official soon. Optimism is not warranted.
Best:
Appoint SCOTUS justice – vacant seats at any level – especially the SC – are bad for the judicial system
Infrastructure – hoping he makes this his signature legislation
Deport criminals – if he wants/needs to make an immigration move, this is the one to make
Cut regulations – although it matters a lot which regulations he decides to cut
School choice – status quo in U.S education is pretty bad, seems as good an idea for a shakeup as any
For anyone just hoping he doesn’t do much while in office:
Impose term limits – pushing for this antagonizes people he needs onside in order to get anything done
Ban officials from becoming lobbyists – ditto
Worst:
Child/eldercare subsidy – this sounds potentially ruinously expensive
Set foreign policy – the less attention he pays to foreign policy the better
Renegotiate/scrap trade agreements – deals aren’t that bad in the first place; “renegotiation” is a delusion and will fail; makes the U.S. an unreliable partner going forward; other countries will step into the void on trade leadership and we won’t like the results
Re: the regulation thing, I was under the impression that the promise was that new regulations required twice as many old repealed. I don’t remember it mentioning that he’d be picking them…. which is probably a fairly decent approach. Want a new reg? find some irrelevant dross on the books that nobody has benefited from for a hundred years.
My view has been that if he can actually accomplish term limits and jamming the lobbyist revolving door, I could forgive a large amount of policy fuckups below the level of nuclear tomfoolery or actual pogroms.
And if he does literally nothing else in 4 years in office other than pass those two things, it will have been a successful presidency for American democracy.
Term limits could possibly mean that politicians would be even more beholden to lobbyists, because they would be even more ignorant of how laws are made, what laws are on the books, and how the industries affected by laws are conducted. Congress members would also be free to screw over the voters even more, because they would never have to worry about whether voters would ere-elect them, thus being free to serve the industries and lobbyists who are promising them a nice job somewhere in the industry that the lobbyists works for, once the short term of office as a Congress member is up.
Trump is the type of personality who would want term limits for everyone except the president– at least while he is president. That wouldn’t necessarily mean that he is the Savior of the People or that he was “draining the swamp.” It could mean quite the opposite. The guy has never showed any interest in or regard for anyone except himself– and his children, but only when they were grown up enough to help him out in various ways.
I don’t think the bit about Trump, while accurate, is particularly relevant given that Presidental term limits are already enshrined in a constitutional amendment. That’s not going away any time soon.
Your point about lobbyist power is valid, though. There’s a certain amount of Deep State infrastructure that is both necessary to keep the country going and troubling in the relative lack of accountability. It’s a hard balancing problem.
This is where jamming the revolving door (and general anti-bribery laws) is supposed to play in, though. If taking that cushy job after you’re done in politics is illegal, then it’s not as strong an incentive to play favorites.
Furthermore, we don’t need term limits to be egregiously short. Just enough to prevent ridiculously long stints in the same gerrymandered seat. I’m not committed to these exact numbers, but as I spitballed downthread, a limit of 5 terms as a US Rep and 3 as a Senator still leaves up to 28 years in Congress. If you put in ~10 years public service at the state or local level, start your time in Washington in your mid thirties, get out in your mid sixties, then by the time the 5-year prohibition expires you’re at retirement age. And, as I just found out, you’re already eligible for the Congressional pension when you leave, so don’t even need to worry about finding work afterward. You can still make a career out of politics, it just sets the bar higher to earning it. And allows more churn so we get more new blood mixed in.
In my philosophy, a primary role of democracy is to prevent power from accumulating in individuals, families, socio-economic strata, professions, whatever. Everyone gets one vote, which is equal to everyone else’s. I have a hard time seeing a 25-30+ year term in the same office as being about anything other than personal power, so I am opposed to it from this foundation. The part where lobbyists *also* have too much power is a related problem that we should be striving just as hard to solve.
I personally would support even shorter term limits on principle, but the particulars get hairy and the side effects are severe enough that I acknowledge it’s just not feasible. We’d need a very different set of political machinery to make it work, so the more generous limits are, I think, a fair compromise.
Now, all that said, I highly doubt Trump will actually make good on this promise. Especially with that jackass McConnell running the Senate. But, especially after that giant shitfest of a campaign, I’ll take whatever shred of hope I can get for anything legitimately good to come out of the next 4 years.
@Gobbobobble
What do you think the current balance of power is like between the executive and legislative branches? Which way do you think it is trending?
Hard for me to say, since for the majority of my politically-aware life the GOP/Tea Party’s congresscritters have been obnoxiously obstructive. There’s been a definite trend toward the executive as the legislative shirks its responsibilities and the popular consciousness ascribes more and more importance to the executive, both of which I consider bad things.
In my perfect world, the President would be Commander-and-Ambassador-in-Chief, whose main domestic role would be knocking heads together when Congress can’t agree on things (“arbitrating” is too neutral a term since the prez would be well within their rights to favor their side). But then I think we’ve de-devolved (is “evolved” an actual term for moving power up the chain?) too much nitty-gritty responsibility up to the Federal level and that political-parties-as-entities have obscenely too much influence, so there’s my biases. Alas, with the current political machinery the executive can’t be unilaterally trimmed down without something breaking.
” There’s been a definite trend toward the executive as the legislative shirks its responsibilities”
Please be more specific. Are there specific laws you think they should pass, or is it just that the more laws the better?
Voting is supposed to be a check on political power, not a grant of it.
Sorry, would you mind expanding on this? I agree with the statement, but don’t see that as being a pro-unlimited-terms or pro-lobbyist argument.
The child care and elder care thing isn’t a subsidy – it’s a tax deduction. If you pay $5000 on child care over the course of a year, you get to deduct $5000 from what part of your income you’re taxed on. They don’t actually pay part of your care expenses… the people who don’t itemize on their tax return because they don’t have enough non-standard deductions to do so won’t benefit, at least not much. The middle class will get a nice break on their taxes, the poor won’t get anything, and it’s not enough of a break to really make a difference to the rich.
So I’m not really enthused about it – the benefits go to people who do benefit but don’t really NEED them as desperately as the poor do. But it’s a step in the right direction and mostly harmless, so I think it’s a net good.
It’s actually a phenomenal idea. We want to encourage the most productive people to both have children and work, and this would do that. Lots of women who make 6 figures stay home rather than pay for 2 or 3 kids to go to daycare- or forgo kids. And why shouldn’t childcare be deductible? It’s 100% a business expense. You can’t work and take care of kids at the same time. Nor do we want to encourage low-earning women to stay in the workforce when their time is better spent raising their children.
By the way it increases tax revenue! More women working, more child care providers paying taxes- it’s a win win.
I’m in agreement that it’s positive – I just don’t think it’s as positive as it seems. If a woman makes 6 figures, she can afford day care anyway (assuming she’s either married/partnered or not living in an area where the cost of living is extremely high) and if she chooses to stay home or not have kids, it’s because that’s what she wanted to do anyway; reducing her child care costs by 20-25% via a tax deduction the following year won’t make a difference for most. It’ll only change the decision of the small number who were on the fence and using the tax credit as a tiebreaking factor.
Most low-earning women with kids and jobs are working because they absolutely have to. The only way to get some of them to stay home is to ensure their families can still get food and housing if they stay home. And a lot of low-earning women DON’T have kids precisely because they can’t afford child care, which may be seen as good for the economy but it’s really cruel to them if they want children. Luckily, while allowing a tax deduction for child care does both groups little to no good, it also doesn’t add additional harm.
Basically it helps out the struggling-to-make-ends-meet lower-middle class and “I’m struggling because I can only afford one fancy vacation a year instead of three” upper-middle class, while shrugging and doing nothing for the poor. I’m basically okay with this when the alternative is “do nothing” because of the benefits to the people who aren’t quite poor but are still having real difficulties. I think it would be much better if it was an actual subsidy without a tax credit, and on a sliding scale based on income and family structure/size, so the rich and almost-rich don’t get anything, the almost-poor get some, poor parents are able to go back to work, and poor non-parents have an opportunity to have a family. (The poor people who choose not to have kids because of financial difficulties are probably more responsible and somewhat better at planning and delayed gratification than average, and poor for other reasons like mild disabilities, low-quality education, or simple bad luck; giving them a helping hand is a really good idea and would have a high ROI.) But between a tax deduction and the status quo, the tax deduction is better.
Well this program is a win-win because it has all positive effects and no negatives. You seem to basically agree but think it only does a little good and a broader program could do way more. But a childcare subsidy for poor people does not have the same calculus as this proposal and is best considered separately. With a childcare subsidy for poor people you really have to weigh offsetting effects to determine if it is useful on net, whereas with this proposal you don’t.
You also seem to minimize the scope of the problem. Childcare in most urban areas is $1,000-$1,500/mo. When you have three kids in childcare it makes little sense for a mother to work even if she makes $100k/yr, particularly if her spouse works. You’re looking at paying $25k in taxes and $35-45k for childcare. And of course there are plenty of mothers who make $60-100k doing really valuable, productive stuff who are impacted even more. We don’t want women to wait until they are well into their careers so they can afford to pay for childcare and have kids, we want them to have kids when they are young and healthy.
That said, I’m with you in the sense that a $5k cap doesn’t do a lot for the above problem. But it’s a great start and when people see the benefits and additional tax revenue that results, hopefully there will be political will for increasing that cap.
What do people think of the decision to avoid lobbyists? On the face of it it looks like a very good thing, regardless of the incompetence of how it was formed. That being said, the cynic in me has learned by now there is a very good chance lobbyists by another name will get in.
Thoughts?
The problem is that you need experts, and there’s not many places to find experts on, say, banking other than the banks. So you might avoid lobbyists, but if you’re hiring VPs from Citi and Goldman instead, is that really an improvement?
That’s pretty much my take as well.
But one only needs experts if you intend to get involved. If one thinks, as I do, that the federal government gets involved in way too many things, then one also doesn’t need those experts.
The idea of term limits and limitation of lobbying is one of the more interesting and surprising ones put forth by Trump. I think the ultimate idea is to push things away from creating a “revolving door” world of people who spend their whole lives in DC, switching back and forth from government jobs and lobbying/consulting jobs for people who make money off the government. The DC region has been booming, economically, since the housing crisis, which is really pretty Hunger Games-esque, in my view.
Realistically, I am very pessimistic about Trump or any other administration’s ability to do much about this any time soon. Any simple rule will just be got around one way or another, and, indeed, must be got around, since, as you say, the lobbyists are playing a vital role, given the current system.
The only way to change that revolving door culture of career politicians would be to drastically downsize the size and scope of the federal government. And there’s so much concentrated incentive for so many for that not to happen (the even bigger incentive on the part of everyone else, though great, is too diffuse and inchoate).
Imagine a government trying to write regulations on internet communication and cryptography when nobody in the room making the decisions has any clue about what public key crypto even is because someone has banned anyone who’s worked in software or computer science from taking part. (of course that does happen in various countries with people who have no idea what a cryptographic key even is trying to make laws about them)
it’s hard to write coherent regulation of an area without people who are extremely experienced in the field. Those people tend to be employed by the companies working in the field.
I think cutting down on lobbyists is an excellent aspiration but may hit the rocks of practicality.
Why would a smaller administration have less of a revolving door? If 50% of a department of 10 cycle out into high paying banking jobs or if 50% of a department of 100, either way half the people running things are cycling out.
I would agree that blaming lobbyists is sort of like blaming accountants for the overly complex tax code. If the tax code were less complicated, we wouldn’t need so many tax preparation accountants, but, given the system, they are actually helping, not hurting.
I don’t think, however, if we had 90% fewer areas of Federal regulation and 90% fewer lobbyists, that everything would be the same, just scaled down 90%. Maybe the “revolving door” phenomenon would still exist to some extent, but sometimes a quantitative difference leads to a qualitative difference.
Lobbyists get a bad rap. At the core of it, a lobbyist is just someone paid to live in Washington and go advocate on behalf of some cause or other to elected officials. Like, “We care a lot about environmental policy, but can’t stay in Washington all the time, so we’re going to pay Bob to go there with a big box of research and policy proposals to plead our case”.
Elected officials are extremely busy and can’t be experts on everything – without lobbyists it’s a good chance most causes get ignored, or uninformed choices are made, or Congress just makes all decisions based on citizen letter campaigns which – go look at a CNN comments section for a good idea on how that goes.
Obviously there’s a lot of potential for abuse, but it doesn’t have to be inherently bad. And as Trump is discovering, anybody who’s anybody in Washington has probably done a bit of lobbying (it’s a great way to build social connections for political careers).
I’m not sure a blanket ban is worth the potential downsides.
Also, of course, lobbying is a Constitutional protected right.
As pointed out, the issue with lobbyists isn’t what they do, it’s that it’s a specialized skill (“successfully schmoozing with congresscritters” isn’t something any knucklehead can do) in a very high cost-of-living area, so demand is high, and established profitable stakeholders have better bargaining power than, oh, Joe from Greenville City Sanitation.
Also – who do you want advising the congresscritters on healthcare reform, the MD or the civil engineer? And who do you want advising on highway revisions?
As for your cynicism, I think it is well founded. Supposedly the Obama administration said “no lobbyists, period, except for waivers in special circumstances” and then proceeded to write a whole wackton of waivers.
Lobbyists are often a lot more knowledgeable about the law and about the industries it regulates than the average Congressman. Congressmen would not give lobbyists the time of day if they didn’t offer any value. This gap in knowledge is only going to increase if term limits are introduced.
So the real solution is not to remove lobbyists (who serve a real purpose, but do so in a way that creates conflicts of interest), but to increase funding for congressional resources that can provide impartial and useful research. Of course, this involves spending money. The advantage of lobbyists is that the cost of research is outsourced to private industry. But that’s also the disadvantage.
This is the situation exactly. I’d add that “impartial and useful” research doesn’t get funding because, to a politician, “impartial” and “useful” are often contradictory. From a politician’s point of view, a major role of lobbyists is to provide defensible evidence to back up what the politician wants to do, and to fill in the policy details the politician doesn’t have time or expertise to figure out.
Isn’t this what Congressional Hearings are supposed to be for? Call panels of experts, ask the questions which appear to be decisive, get answers, and do so on the record so that anybody who’s argument wasn’t represented can write in afterwards?
As a sort-of-lobbyist that works in DC, I felt the need to register and make a late reply to this comment.
95% of hearings (there are real, legitimate exceptions) consist of the majority calling in lobbyists, think-tankers and/or sympathizers to officially support the majority’s view on the record. The minority usually gets 1, maybe 2, token dissenting voices that are either ignored or harangued by the majority (while the minority either ignores or harangues the majority witnesses).
Both parties do this all the time. There are some exceptions, and the dissent usually gets at least a token voice, but these days hearings are generally a mockery of their intended purpose.
Kettle, thanks for letting us know your experience in this area.
The degree to which hearings have become more “speechings” has been a running complaint/joke for decades, as Kettle noted.
Tune into C-Span sometime for as long as you can stomach it.
What about lobbyists for unlovely foreign governments like the Saudi or Qatari monarchies?
Three things to consider about lobbyists that nobody seems to talk about:
—-
Lobbying the government is, historically, one of the big reasons why there is a government in the first place. Every single high fantasy book I can think of has a scene where someone lobbies the ruler. Hell, it’s in the Bible. The king Solomon cutting the baby in half story, the people coming to him to ask his wisdom are literally lobbyists. A large part of why we elect executive rulers in the first place is so that they can listen to everyone who would lobby them, and make wise, correct decisions.
—-
Let’s say the government is going to pass a law regulating (random example) the manufacture of concrete. How should they go about doing this? After all, congress and executive branch are staffed with primarily lawyers, not chemists, not construction foremen. Given that they are going to pass a law, how should they decide what law to pass.
Most peoples’ gut instinct is likely to be something like “They should spin out a committee on concrete manufacture, that committee should do research, aggregate their findings, and present it to congress”. Except that just kicks the can down the street a bit. If congresspeople are not qualified to make decisions on concrete manufacture, then they’ll Dunning-Krueger the research process as they are not qualified to evaluate which research sources are good ones.
A different way they can do it. They can say “we are passing a law regulating concrete manufacture”. Then they can wait for everyone who has strong opinions on this subject to come to them and share them. Construction companies will lobby the government, talking about how they can’t compromise various traits about the concrete or else construction abilities will be impacted. Chemists come along and talk about the practical and environmental consequences of a given decision. Business analysts warn against decisions that would have grave economic consequences.
The thing is, each and every one of these subject matter experts is going to have a vested interest in a given outcome, because that vested interest is what drove them to become a subject matter expert in the first place. Each and every one of them will come up with a mix of practical considerations and things that benefit them personally/professionally. It’s the government’s job to filter the signal from the noise.
—-
There’s often talk about restricting the amount of money one can spend on politics. The thinking is that money corrupts this process. When lobbyists can pay quid-pro-quo bribes to congressmen to get their ears, special interests get to dominate and the little guys (that’s you and me) get screwed.
Reason through, for a second, a world in which spending money on lobbying is highly regulated. What happens?
Well right now, the person who can afford the most bribes (in the form of dinners, flights to swanky weekend retreats, golf games, etc) gets the ear of the official.
In the world where they’re not allowed to do that, how do individual congressmen/etc know who to listen to? For the most part, they’re going to fall back on human instincts and listen to the people in their social graph.
If you think something is crazy important (and, assuming it is), you should be able to raise a lot of money from a lot of people who realize it is important. You can use that money to play the lobbying game and get the ear of a congress person.
In a world where money-in-politics is highly restricted, the only way you get that congressman’s ear is by growing up in a rich white suburb of DC, going to private schools, joining the model UN, graduating with a masters from the ivy league, etc, etc.
Which one of those two options sounds more achievable for random everyday Americans?
“They should spin out a committee on concrete manufacture, that committee should do research, aggregate their findings, and present it to congress”.
I saw what you did there.
This was a completely accidental pun but I will take it.
I vastly preferred your example to a more abstract one.
So far as spinning out a committee, I think it’s a little worse than you describe. The incentive of the congressman isn’t to maximize the welfare of the country but to maximize his own political benefits, most obviously votes at the next election. So the committee is appointed to produce a report supporting whatever it is in the congressman’s interest to support.
At least, that was my conclusion from my one summer in Washington.
There is nothing wrong with private entities being able to lobby the government. It’s right in the First Amendment:
“Congress shall make no law … abridging … the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The problem comes when you have a “revolving door” between professional lobbyists and Congresspeople, with corporations and industries funneling large amounts of money into persuading Congresspeople that have way too much power, and Congresspeople expecting generous salaries to lobby their friends and former coworkers after they leave Congress. This leads to absurd amounts of graft, corruption, and cronyism.
You should be able to find experts in a field, without having to rely on career lobbyists.
The problem is, they don’t need scientists, they need career lobbyists. They need somebody who knows enough about the relevant industry, and relevant politicians, in the relevant positions, to make whatever it is they want to happen, actually happen. I am not sure if there are a lot of non-lobbyists who have the relevant skill set and connections to do the job of a lobbyist.
From a cynical perspective, lobbyists buy legislation and regulation from lawmakers and bureaucrats.
The core problem with that is that these things are for sale. As long as these highly valuable services can be bought cheaply, the market will continue. A company can be noble and refuse to participate, but it runs a high risk of competitors destroying through lobbying of their own.
In the Game of Crony Capitalism, you lobby or you die.
See also (according to some people; I haven’t looked into it myself) how exactly that happened to Microsoft in the 1990’s.
I guess you didn’t get to keep that $36k, huh? You could set up a bookdepository affiliate link as a replacement.
I got to keep the $4K I had already gotten for no reason, so I’m happy. Amazon also said I could re-apply, which they didn’t have to do, so I really think they have been more than gracious given the circumstances.
Any plans to reapply? I don’t see any reason for you not to.
Wait, what $36k?
Something went wacky with the Amazon link and instead of a couple of hundred bucks as was usual for what he’d earn, Scott ended up with them saying they’d be paying him 36 thousand smackeroos. Being honest, he contacted them about “Are you sure about this?”
What do our resident Trump supporters think of his appointments so far? I’m especially interested in your opinions on Sen. Jeff Sessions.
A list of cabinet appointments and their dubious qualities so far, for those interested.
Also, for those of you who were ambivalent about our president elect during the election, have you revised your beliefs at all?
I don’t know much about Sessions; I know some are howling indignantly about a comment he made many years ago about how he approved of the KKK until he discovered they smoked weed, but that strikes me as an obvious joke albeit in poor taste. Speaking of which, weed enthusiasts are complaining about Sessions too, but you could make smoking weed a death penalty offense for all I care.
A lot of places are reporting that James Mattis is the frontrunner for Secretary of Defense, which would be a pretty great pick, I think — Mattis was a highly respected general and very accomplished. Secretary of State is really the one I’m keeping an eye out for, because that would confirm whether or not Trump is serious about his foreign policy agenda. Some of the contenders being discussed are just weird choices; I like Nikki Haley but she has no diplomatic experience at all, and Mitt Romney’s views on Russia are….different from Trump’s.
See, that sounds like part of why people are so aggrieved in the first place. You have a lot of people who enjoy the recreational use of a substance which, by any rational analysis is no more of a hazard to health and civilisation than the alcohol that is celebrated at the heart of American culture (and for which there is basically no good evidence that using the criminals justice system is even an effective way of mitigating its risks in the first place), and yet they have been subject to decades of legal persecution for it.
Finally they start to get enough people to see the unfairness and cruelty of the situation to be able to win some state-level ballot initiatives to decriminalise, the outgoing president acknowledges that now that they have won California, federal level prohibition is ‘untenable’, and then Trump goes and appoints an ideological prohibitionist and they are understandably annoyed at the prospect of their chance at finally not being legally harrassed for their own no-worse-than-the-mainstream-legal-vices consensual enjoyment being snatched away from them.
And your reaction is that you would be indifferent to them being given the death penalty? If that was intended as a joke that I didn’t get, then sorry. But assuming you meant it seriously (or as an only-slight exaggeration of a position you do take seriously) , can I ask to explain how you justify that position?
the whole thing’s a joke
well, session’s statement actually might not be, but Sandy’s definitely was. more broadly, he doesn’t care much about what happens to weed users.
in any case, if Trump follows through on his ill-defined promise to make it a states’ issue, than Sessions has 0 jurisdiction anyhow, so far as I can tell. I guess he can do things in states that haven’t legalized it, but go talk to your governor about that
James Mattis
What do our resident Trump supporters think of his appointments so far?
Not a supporter, but on the only two names I’ve seen bruited about on social media:
Re: Steve Bannon, as I understand it, the domestic violence charges were not “dropped when he and his attorney threatened his ex-wife into fleeing the state” but when his attorney pointed out if he were in jail, he couldn’t pay her anything – so that site is putting the worst possible spin on its charges:
So less “I was fleeing with my children in terror from my violent ex-husband” and more “his lawyer pressured me about did I want money or vengeance?” Someone genuinely afraid of violence doesn’t have a relationship with the alleged threatening party’s lawyer where they follow instructions like that (and yes, I’ve had experience via work of such cases). They go to the cops or they tell their own lawyer “He’s threatening me, put that in the court docket”.
The reports of the case are not edifying, but one at least of the charges involved a row where she spat at him and in return he grabbed her wrist and grabbed at her neck. Not chivalrous behaviour by any means, but also not beating her black and blue. They seem to have had a stormy relationship, to put it mildly, with a lot of fights over money and an acrimonious divorce.
Re: Sessions, I have no idea. I’ve seen some indignant and offended outrage over something he’s supposed to have said along the lines of he liked the KKK until he found out they were into pot; nobody seems to have considered this might be an acerbic joke about ‘yeah, sure I think dope is worse than racism and that’s the only reason I’m not in the KKK’, instead they’re all saying “Admitted KKK supporter!!!!”
I don’t think you should beat a dog, but I also don’t think you should necessarily go to jail for it (if they’ve been cruel in a barbaric manner, sure, but unless they beat the dog to death with a brick or something, fine them and don’t let them keep animals instead of sending them to jail, there are enough people in jail already).
Maybe Mr Lucas is not a sadistic animal torturer but holds the same opinion?
Though I love this point about Peter Thiel:
Yes, Trump is so evil, he has appointed an actual vampire to his cabinet! 🙂
(The blood thing is odd, I agree, but it appears to have some scientific basis to it so it’s not completely off the wall. Still – shouldn’t they be glad Trump is reaching out to the Vampire-American community?)
I think I read that in a Heinlein novel…
Could be a plus, seeing how vampires have been portrayed in popular culture lately.
“Time Enough For Love” if I remember correctly. It was mentioned as the first method discovered for prolonging life and I don’t think it mentioned young people specifically.
It first shows up at the end of Methuselah’s Children, wto which TEfL is a long-delayed sequel. The Howards flee Earth ahead of persecution for the secret of their long life, which secret is actually that they’re the result of a breeding program.
When they eventually return, they discover that research into the “secret” has produced a result (which Earth still wrongly thinks was the Howards’ secret) that transfusing young blood extends life. And fortunately for the avoidance of a differently dystopian scenario, they’re able to produce it synthetically.
I don’t think Peter Thiel sparkles.
Yeah, the blood thing is honestly not that bad. I’m more concerned that he wants to reverse female suffrage.
You will hopefully be glad to know he doesn’t:
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/05/01/peter-thiel/suffrage-isnt-danger-other-rights-are
Might as well copy his whole text here:
I had hoped my essay on the limits of politics would provoke reactions, and I was not disappointed. But the most intense response has been aimed not at cyberspace, seasteading, or libertarian politics, but at a commonplace statistical observation about voting patterns that is often called the gender gap.
It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better.
Voting is not under siege in America, but many other rights are. In America, people are imprisoned for using even very mild drugs, tortured by our own government, and forced to bail out reckless financial companies.
I believe that politics is way too intense. That’s why I’m a libertarian. Politics gets people angry, destroys relationships, and polarizes peoples’ vision: the world is us versus them; good people versus the other. Politics is about interfering with other people’s lives without their consent. That’s probably why, in the past, libertarians have made little progress in the political sphere. Thus, I advocate focusing energy elsewhere, onto peaceful projects that some consider utopian.
But he said that after saying that female suffrage made politics worse.
If you can’t believe that someone believes X after they explicitly say ” I believe X”, I guess you’ll keep having that belief regardless of what anyone might say to you.
“Female suffrage made politics worse” and “Female suffrage should be revoked” are two different things.
If he did want to take the vote from women, I think you should be concerned, but I also think that linked site is about on the level of accuracy with their charges, on the whole, as “Peter Thiel is a vampire”.
Anyone who cannot differentiate between “whose” and “who’s” is not going to get my serious attention when they try to warn me the sky is falling.
But does he want to take the vote from men too?
(“Suffrage ends! Women, minorities hardest-hit!”)
Evan, that reminds me of an essay by Spooner called Against Woman Suffrage. It’s an interesting read, and strikes me as classic internet trolling, a century too early.
Women shouldn’t be allowed to vote because NO ONE should be allowed to vote.
It’s astounding to me that we’re still arguing without anyone linking to the primary source.
Thiel (a libertarian) mentions women’s suffrage as one of the things that has made politics intractable for libertarians, alongside poor people. His conclusion is that libertarians must pursue their goals through … other means. (Ominous music plays.)
The “blood thing” is quite promising anti aging science. Google “parabiosis” to learn more.
Calling it vampirism when an outgroup member embraces it, doesn’t look on the side that likes to think they’re the science based ones.
To be fair to the crathur that cut’n’pasted it together, they didn’t say Thiel was a vampire, that was me snarking at them. But as I said, I was greatly amused by the tone of breathless outrage about the enormities these monsters of depravity had committed, and for Thiel it was the statement that “he believes transfusions of blood from young people can reverse aging”.
Given, as I say, the tone of condemnation, it’s pretty much implied in that that he’s the moral equivalent of a vampire (unless they think he’s going to round up healthy young people and force them to donate blood to be transfused into his veins – and in the current climate of hysteria, I wish I thought that was an unlikely scenario somebody is going to suggest is true!)
That’s the Cycle Of Snark right there.
A: Thiel is Level 1 silly.
B: A said that Thiel is Level 2 silly!
C: I heard A thinks Thiel is Level 3 silly!!
A: See how I’m demonized by B and C!!
(I was C this round. But in our hearts we are all C.)
What is wrong with my brain that I think Peter Thiel – vampire is infinitely more appealing/cooler than Peter Thiel – (boring) Libertarian techie billionaire? 🙂
Seriously – if they want gasps of disapprobation about Thiel, “he’s dull as ditchwater*” works much better than “hiding secret Transylvanian aristocratic haemovore antecedents? we demand to know!”
*I don’t know if the man is dull or not, but I can’t even muster up the enthusiasm to go read something he’s written, so I must have gotten that impression from something.
Wow, that list is – just from what I know about the people I know about – incredibly uncharitable when it is not just plain dishonest.
For my thoughts – I approve of Bannon, Sessions, Lucas. Ambivalent on Thiel, Flynn. YUGE thumbs up on Rhee. Approve of Mattis, who hasn’t been actually named as nominee yet. The rest I don’t know enough about.
Other things –
The Lord’s Resistance Army is far less of a going concern than it was ten years ago. If the rest of that reddit post is as shallowly researched, it’s fairly crap. And from randomly clicking on subheading links where I know something about the particular point, I have found nothing to persuade me that otherwise.
>Wow, that list is – just from what I know about the people I know about – incredibly uncharitable when it is not just plain dishonest.
I agree that some of the points are a little shaky, but the majority seem to be publicly recorded comments, official votes, etc.
What do you find striking about Rhee?
majority seem to be publicly recorded comments, official votes
Completely free of all but the most uncharitable context. It’s really, really badly cherrypicked. And too many of the comments, the “publically recorded” part is “Yes, I heard him say that, and you can put it in writing that I said that he said that.”
What do you find striking about Rhee?
She gets children educated.
wikipedia on Michelle Rhee
“Rhee’s style of reform created a great deal of controversy. One common criticism disputes her assertion that, while a teacher, she dramatically increased students’ average scores from the 13th percentile to the 90th. It was a statement that could not be verified during her confirmation process for D.C. Schools Chancellor and was later proven to be a lie.[19]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Rhee
Moon, please go to the [19] source and find the part where that claim was “proven to be a lie”.
That WP article is one of the more biased/personal pov articles I’ve seen on WP. I would use extreme caution and always check the WP references.
For anyone who hasn’t followed the link, it is to a story which contains no proof, or even claim, that Rhee’s claim was a lie, merely that she didn’t have, and didn’t claim to have, data to prove it was true.
From the article:
“Harlem Park’s school-level standardized test scores, although not proving or disproving Rhee’s assertions, show significant gains collectively among all three second-grade classes in 1993-94 and the three third-grade classes in 1994-95, the years she taught those grades. Three people who worked closely with her at the school and a student say the scores rose in the range Rhee suggested.”
“she dramatically increased students’ average scores from the 13th percentile to the 90th.”
How likely is it that she, or anyone, has ever done this? If someone says this, and has no data to back it up, why would you assume it was true? A rather ridiculous claim.
I worked as a teachers assistant for a few years and the Teacher I was working with would often see serious gains in her standardized test scores. However the improvement she saw, while being the best in the whole school across all grade levels, was mostly taking bottom half of the percentage kids and getting to the 50-75% range, with small or no improvement for the few top performing students she had.
I am not talking 10th percentile to 75th, I mean 20th to 50th 50th to 70th kind of gains.
I don’t see how this is possible, unless she some how got one student from 13th to 90th(totally possible depending largely on the student) in her years teaching and they are thinking that muddies the water around what her average gain was, which it doesn’t, and which should be painfully simple to figure out.
I am not sure if when she said 13th to 90th percentile was talking standardized tests or maybe she just meant grades. Grades are a lot easier. We had one teacher in 3rd grade whose students saw improvements like that in terms of grades, because she just gave all her students A’s on everything, and they tended to be the lowest performing students in all fourth grade classes. But even for tests, teachers can cheat and give their students answers on standardized tests, the controls against this are not very robust.
I can imagine a few very convoluted situations where she could get anything close to what she is talking about without cheating, but none of them seem likely. Just statistically speaking it is very unlikely, schools don’t normally give a teacher all of the bottom 20th percentile students(unless she is teaching remedial, but they don’t even take the standardized tests), she could not average a 77 percentile jump when half of the students she taught should be in the 50+ percentile range.
Edit: All of my information comes from the school system in Texas.
You think that the average student at a public school in Baltimore is at the 50th percentile?
Well, I worked in Texas, consistently one of the worst ranked school systems in the country. I worked at one of the worst schools in my district, half the students in my class were ESL, we had several students still taking the standardized tests in Spanish every year, and we still had a pretty good number passing(good for us anyways).
I don’t know how bad her school was exactly, but I would be pretty shocked if it was dramatically worse than the one I was at. Note that 50+ just means 50 or greater, I will admit that the numbers might not be exact, but that was an illustrative example.
Just to clarify what a 77 percentile average jump would looks like. In a class of 20 students, if she had ten who literally got 0s on the previous standardized test (this should never happen) and she took all 10 of those students to 100 on the test after a year in her class. The remaining 10 students of her class still have to average a 54 percentile jump for her to get to that 77 average improvement.
RE: Texas schools – the last time I saw arguments about this was during the Walker recall shouting matches, regarding teacher unionization. So my data could be out of date, and I can’t find the article. But what I saw at that time was a comparison between Wisconsin student test scores and Texas student scores, first the raw average, then the average performance of Caucasian, AA, and Hispanic/ESL speakers (I don’t remember which).
TL;DR – Wisconsin scores were better overall, but the Texas scores of Hispanic students were better than the counter parts in Wisconsin, as were the scores of AA students, and Caucasian students. Wisconsin’s just a very “white” state, and that drove all the difference.
RE: Rhee’s claims of extraordinary achievement – I’d be a great deal more concerned about fraud on her part if she wasn’t – as quoted in that same WP article – hammering home on the notion that the school system doesn’t have that data (on the impact of individual teachers on their students performance) and that the system should have that data.
We can sit and argue for quite a while on what are the best methods for objectively measuring student advancement, and it’s not my field, so I will bow to the experts on which is best.
But I hold it is not acceptable to refuse to track and measure student performance, and to refuse to use those measures as part of how a teacher is promoted and paid.
I was just responding to the particulars of a 13th to 90th percentile range improvement, which I assumed was in reference to standardized testing, which, at least in Texas, we do track, although I have no idea to what extent if any it is used in teacher evaluation.
More generally I think there is some serious research trying to find clear methods for evaluating teachers, and our host, and by extension blind followers of our host like myself, are not sure that we have anything good yet.
I imagine pushing an unfounded metric could be potentially more damaging than inaction, especially when we have a hard enough time getting teachers as it is. But I am all for trying to find a good metric, and just generally I think the education system is not in a good place.
Oh, good lord. Your priors are really, really stupid, and you should be able to guess from the fact that you’re talking about an inner city school named “Harlem” that the scores would be worse than your stupid priors.
Yeah, they had a 0% proficiency rate on one of the tests.
@ Careless –
NOT HELPING. Less of that, please.
@Spookykou –
I agree that some metrics are better than others, and I strongly suspect that we are going to eventually use a sub-optimal metric just because that one will be easier/cheaper to measure than the better one.
But we are making zero progress now, by what people seem to be saying (including my relations in the field.) As you say, it’s not in a good spot. They should pick something non-horrible and try it, imo.
On my blog I have an ongoing series of predictions about the Trump presidency. One is relevant here: his appointees will become more and more liberal over time. Sessions is an “anchor”, giving Trump plenty of room to shift leftward without his conservative supporters getting up in arms about it.
My theory is that Trump wants a politically safe, dead-center administration, but knows he has to ease into it; if he jumped right in with the middle-of-the-road appointees he wants, his supporters would get suspicious. So he’s started off by peppering his appointees with a couple hard-right conservatives, just to keep the naysayers at bay. But they’ll eventually be replaced with moderates–maybe even before January 20.
Too much theory of minding. Until we actually see a leftward tilt in his picks, we should assume he has chosen people because he agrees with them.
There’s no theory of minding at all. It’s purely extrapolating from existing patterns:
1. We have years of evidence that Trump is fairly apolitical and fairly centrist when he is political. (With a few exceptions, granted.) The last 1.5 years have been an anomaly for Trump.
2. We have plenty of evidence–especially during the last 1.5 years–that Trump plays politics in a strategic rather than an ideological way. (Again, exceptions granted.)
3. We already have evidence that Trump plans to run a centrist administration, based on him walking back (WAY back) a lot of the appeals to conservatives he made during his campaign (e.g. on immigration, abortion, etc.).
Well, in the first place I just don’t share your assumption that Trump is a centrist. He appears to be a garden variety wingnut with maybe less resolution than your typical committed right winger. I’m willing to grant that this may be an incorrect assessment of his politics given the uncertainties, but only in the face of real evidence (i.e. more leftwing types on his appontments list).
Even granting your premise that he wants to run a centrist administration, who would he have to pick to counterbalance the hard righters that seem certain to be folded into his administration? He’s practically going to have to resurrect Marx and then clone him six times.
Dwietzsche, exactly. I don’t believe that Trump is any particular thing politically, or believes anything at all. He is simply a self-promotion machine. He is uninterested in government and will not be doing the work of governing, except maybe in the case of a very few issues that are important to him personally for some odd reason.
He is surrounding himself with people whom he thinks will help him to be seen as glorious and wonderful, or who he thinks will help him to make money off of being president. Those are going to be the people who will determine what effect the Trump presidency will have. And so far they are pretty Far Right people.
@Well…
I believed that, too. But his cabinet and advisors seem awfully conservative so far.
@Edward Scissorhands:
Quoting myself:
And further down…
@the rest of yall:
I’m convinced that if you think Trump is a wingnut it’s because he wants you to. A real wingnut–a man who can’t turn the appearance of wingnutness on and off like a faucet when it benefits him to do so–doesn’t accomplish the things he has.
I used to believe Trump was fundamentally a moderate. But it occurred to me that this could be false. Maybe he was a moderate in the past, but he got really pissed off by political correctness and took a hard turn to the right.
Trump doesn’t appear to even notice political correctness. Mostly he speaks as if it does not exist, though apparently someone told him to start replacing “black” with “African American” at some point (which just made him sound stilted).
Trump notices political correctness, but he feels no reason to obey its dictates. Which is one source of his popularity – he says things that ought to be discussed, but that political correctness has tried to prevent from being discussed.
But he does notice it, and occasionally trolls the PC, like with his tweet about the theater being a safe space. He would have used different words if he really didn’t notice PC.
@Nybbler, he’s definitely noticed it – that’s what’s been providing most of the criticism he’s been fighting back against. He just isn’t giving into it one iota.
Trump obviously wasn’t always a wingnut. He’s relatively recent convert.
Trump is not a convert to any ideology ever. He is a self promotion machine, pure and simple, saying whatever he thinks will get him more power and glory and money. Why anyone ever thought he had an ideology is beyond me.
He doesn’t have a fixed ideology, but his ideas are all coming from people who do.
Re Sessions: The KKK joke is a meaningless distraction. But it’s much more shareable, likable, tweetable than the actual objections to him, which is why I suspect we’ll be hearing it every five seconds for the next four years.
When Sessions was a federal prosecutor, he brought vote fraud charges against local NAACP leaders. They were all quickly acquitted by the jury and the controversy surrounding the case was a major reason why the Senate rejected his nomination for a judgeship in 1986. He also once said he’d decline to prosecute every civil rights case if he could. Now none of this “proves that he’s a racist”, as if that were possible, but it does show that he’s at best indifferent and at worst hostile to voting rights for African-Americans and antidiscrimination law. I see these laws as necessary evils, and I expect that four years of non-enforcement by the Sessions DOJ will show why they are necessary. If you see them as more evil than necessary, then you’ll probably have a more favorable view of him.
But oh, he told a joke about liking the KKK once, can you believe it? My timeline is gonna go nuts!
I agree 100%, for the record. The less substantial accusations seem to get more press time, both from supporters and defenders of the appointees (even in this thread). More evidence for toxoplasma?
Agreed. The KKK weed joke is a red herring. The Republican party already has a disturbing tendency to try to win elections by impeding black voters. There’s a good chance we’re about to see how far that can go with a sympathetic attorney-general.
This comment sums it up for me on the race angle. On my various libertarian pet issues (surveillance, drugs, secularism) he’s uniformly horrible. I was hoping against hope that we had somehow threaded the needle of Giuliani and Christie to wind up with Cruz, but Sessions is pretty disappointing.
Sessions’ main critic is not a reliable source, having been sanctioned by a Federal Court for bringing a completely unfounded discrimination case.
As a prosecutor, Sessions got the son of Alabama’s KKK leader executed, and the criminal case made a civil judgement which ruined the organization possible. So tarring him as KKK is utterly unfair.
Agree with just about everyone else that the Reddit list is cherrypicked awfulness of no positive value.
However, Hamm for Secretary of Energy, if true, is yet another indication that Trump and his team are operating in a state of extreme clue deprivation. Yes, I get the “oil billionaire to put those green energy wimps in their place” dynamic, but you make that guy the Secretary of the Interior or maybe have him run the EPA. The Department of Energy is really the Department of Nuclear Energy, Particularly The Kind That Explodes, Plus Some Other Stuff. And the “other stuff” was thrown in mainly so it wasn’t quite so blatantly obvious we have an entire cabinet department devoted to making sure we can always blow up the world on demand.
Trump supporter here.
Jeff Sessions: an excellent choice. This signals that immigration law is going to be enforced.
Reince Priebus: I don’t entirely trust him, but a good pick overall. He’ll be useful in dealmaking with Ryan and McConnell to get Trump’s legislative agenda passed with sufficient sweeteners for old-style Republicans.
Steve Bannon: Delightful pick. He’ll keep the administration (and Trump himself) aligned with the base on immigration, infrastructure, protecting the middle class, etc. Brilliant strategist, and a trustier alt-right man than Trump himself.
General Flynn: good choice. He’s anti-ISIS and not Russophobic. Some say he’s narrow-minded, but to me that’s a signal that Trump will execute a more isolationist foreign policy, so I approve.
Pompeo: don’t know much about him.
And I’m very excited that Peter Thiel is involved: there’s a rumor he’ll be picking the head of the FDA, subject to Trump’s final approval. I cannot think of anyone who has ever lived more qualified to choose the head of the FDA than Peter Thiel.
Overall very pleased!
A few questions for you, based on the assumption that you count yourself among the alt-right – going off your Bannon comment.
– How do you define alt-right?
– What do you think of how others characterize the alt-right? (white nationalists, nazis, etc.)
– Imagine that, four years from now, Trump has successfully overseen the implementation of what you consider to be a package of excellent alt-right style policies. What might these policies be, and why are they good for people?
Sure.
Look up “breitbart alt right milo guide” for an explainer that gets close enough, and addresses the issue of the 1488ers.
As for policies, a close-to-ideal four years from now:
The wall is under construction. The sanctuary cities have been defunded and, where necessary, prosecuted out of existence. Illegal immigration has slowed to a trickle, and the two to three million criminal illegals have nearly all been detained or deported. Legal immigration is sharply reduced from four years earlier, with a limited quantity of high quality immigrants vetted carefully for criminal records and terrorist sympathies.
As a result, crime is down, and America is safer from terrorism. Many billions of dollars are saved each year as welfare payments are no longer made to illegals, and the flow of low-skilled legal immigrants, often welfare recipients, is slowing to a stop. The heroin epidemic is on the mend as the price shoots upward. Working class Americans (of all races, religions, etc.) are working again as competition from illegals and low-skilled legals is cut. The Democratic Party’s threatened permanent hold on the presidency is prevented by stemming the tide of left-wing voters imported both legally and illegally. If the Democrats want to win again, they’ll have to win with existing Americans, whose preferences will not be denied by a flood of foreigners.
Scalia has been replaced with someone suitably constitutionalist, and the alt-right is on the attack in the culture wars. Both the racist, anti-meritocratic practice of affirmative action and free speech violations are under the gun beginning at public universities. Facebook and Twitter are under investigation for abusing their monopoly power in the form of free speech violations. Anti-competitive mainstream media giants like CNN that delude the public with little recourse to alternative news sources are also under antitrust scrutiny, and NPR/PBS has been defunded for its naked partisanship.
Congress has passed Trump/Bannon’s trillion-dollar infrastructure plan, and the country is alive with construction. Aside from replacing infrastructure falling apart and in dire need of modernization, unemployment is low, and economic growth is high. This combined with the advantage of incumbency means Trump is reelected in 2020.
Both corporate and individual taxes are lower than today due to tax reform, and energy prices have stayed low because of deregulation of the energy industry. The national debt is not yet getting any lower, but economic growth, not austerity, is the answer to that issue.
A combination of lower taxes, deregulation of various industries, and protectionism is bringing industrial jobs and some service jobs back to America, though not all of them, since automation marches on. With protectionism consumer prices are higher and the wealthiest 1% are a bit poorer, but working class Americans are happy to have good jobs again, and epidemics of heroin, opiate abuse, alcoholism and suicide among that demographic are waning as they now have a reason to live. This new hope for the future, economic well-being, and childcare tax deductions are even encouraging Americans to have children again.
ISIS has been all but destroyed by eviction from control of their territory: without territory, there is no Islamic State. Now they’re just another terrorist group and are bleeding recruits, not gaining them. Aside from destroying ISIS, no more regime change, no more foreign wars, no more foreign occupations, no more blowback, peace through strength instead. Most importantly, no more escalation of tensions with the Russians; let’s prevent nuclear war, not start one.
Two regulations eliminated for every new one instituted, which will boost economic growth and create jobs who knows how much. I’m curious to see.
And Peter Thiel is only vaguely alt-right, but I’m excited by his involvement for libertarian and transhumanist reasons.
There are many more possibilities; that’s all off the top of my head. I can say, to my surprise, for the first time in decades that America seems to be on the right track again.
Much of the list, particularly as it pertains to global warming, basically screams “conflict of interest”, even if you take it at 50% its stated truth.
Then I learn that these people were those who were left over after the lobbyists had been ruled out, which, I’m now given to know, generally occupy such positions…
♪♫ Everything you know is wrong
Black is white, up is down, and short is long
And everything you thought was just so important doesn’t matter ♪
That Trump would be appointing Republicans was already priced in. I don’t really follow the minor lore characters so I can’t really get more in-depth than that. Certainly I don’t trust “EnoughTrumpSpam” to tell me how horrible they are.
Reminded me of this essay: Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?
Once the “Trump is innately evil” hypothesis has been discarded, I can think of a few explanations for what’s going on here:
* If you dig far enough, selectively omit, and play fast and loose with the truth, it’s easy to make anyone look bad. (E.g. Peter Thiel is one of the living people I respect most, but if all I read about him was those 4 bullet points, maybe I’d think he was crazy too.)
* Reputable people are refusing to serve in the Trump administration (probably thanks to hit pieces like those generated by that sub).
* A certain sort of person is attracted towards serving in the Trump administration. Someone who deeply dislikes the media, has anger management issues, has been smeared in the past (and can therefore sympathize with Trump), feels like a Washington outsider because the Washington insiders kicked them out for good reasons, etc.
* The Trump administration is looking for nationalists, and nationalists are just worse people than globalists.
I don’t think the Trump survey will yield much, if any, useful information. I’ve already seen it linked on Tumblr with a call to troll it, so I imagine there will be a lot of “lizardman” answers.
As to the job applications, on the one hand it does seem like he really didn’t think he had a chance of winning, but on the other hand, ironically, this really is a chance to get new blood rather than the same old establishment network in. He may actually be going to shake up the system perforce.
And I’m already seeing minor conspiracy theorising (if it can be classed as a conspiracy theory) about the whole “Pence was booed at the ‘Hamilton’ show” being set up by Trump to distract attention from his settlement of cases about Trump University.
The one thing I’m getting a share of enjoyment from here (no, not American liberal tears!) is the roasting our Taoiseach is getting from the bien-pensant over getting on the blower first thing to the Vice President-elect in order to lick up to the incoming administration. I don’t like the current crop of opportunists in power in Ireland and I do take malicious satisfaction in seeing Enda Kenny reaping the fruits of the (what he thought would be) easy, vote-winning social progressivism he sowed. He was waving the rainbow flags as visibly as anyone over the same-sex marriage referendum but now he’s being expected to demonstrate his gay rights cred is more than hot air when the rubber meets the road, and I like watching him squirming about it because I think he was deeply insincere about the whole thing – it wasn’t principle but an eye on the electorate pragmatism that ‘converted’ his opinions.
For those of you who asked why am I, an Irishwoman, so interested in the American election results? For reasons like this – because had it been Hillary who won, Enda would just as much have been rushing in with the congratulations, reminders of the Irish connection, and would there be any chance of a start for the young fella with ya, like? Though given that she blew off Notre Dame for Paddy’s Day, probably that brown-nosing would have been received coolly. One of the Trump aides has said they intend to copy Ireland’s tax regime to entice back American industries, so this makes our rulers uneasy that all the multinationals with headquarters for tax purposes here may take flight back home and leave us cap in hand once again.
The good thing about this survey is that it’s really tough to lizardman. They’ll probably just throw out most answers that have too many “Not a priority” in them, and pick between the answers that sound like they’re from people who mostly share his agenda.
The word I’ve seen is that Trump tweeted about the Hamilton thing as a distraction. I don’t think it was planned months in advance, I do think that he wanted a distraction and took it. Maybe he could’ve planned on when to settle the case a week ago to coincide with Pences theatre trip (I assume Pence got these tickets far in advance, dunno if that’s true)
Maybe he could’ve planned on when to settle the case a week ago to coincide with Pences theatre trip
Not even two weeks and we’re already replicating the “George Bush: Bumbling Moron or Evil Mastermind? Why not both?” narrative from the 2000’s.
Ah, a wonderful time to be alive. Everything that was old is new again. It’s like everyone has become a conservative.
I thought the tweet about Hamilton was pretty dumb.
But I guess whatever Trump tweets, his supporters will like it and his opponents won’t.
(ISTR reading Obama saying, after he was elected, that he couldn’t carry his personal Blackberry anymore. Any chance that will happen to Trump?)
Considering how much attention has been brought to political figures mixing private and professional communication? I think he knows to avoid it.
Wander, you’ve got to be kidding. Those rules only apply to Dems. Hillary was lambasted with lies about pay to play, constantly for having a foundation that actually saves lives. Trump gets away with having a foundation that he uses in fraudulent ways to help himself.
We are immersed in Right Wing propaganda that doesn’t find much fault with Republicans, even when they do far worse things than Dems– or even when the Dems do nothing bad at all, in which case lies are simply made up, accusing them of crimes.
I think Trump has rightly concluded that unwritten rules of the type likely to generate career-limiting scandals just don’t apply to him.
Guy just settled a lawsuit for fraud after explicitly saying that his refusal to settle was proof of his innocence. He appears to have been conducting conversations with national leaders of an unsecured line. He used his private charity to pay off an investigating Attorney General and then amended to paperwork to lie about it.
I think he’s still very much in “don’t shoot anyone on main street, but otherwise, do what you feel” mode.
Lies about pay to play? When she alowed the sale of one-fifth of the U.S. uranium production capacity to Russia while receiving over $2 million in donations to the Clinton Foundation? Which she didn’t report to Obama. You can’t call the accusations of pay to play “lies” and be taken seriously.
Question only kinda related with how ‘pay to play’ any of that is.
2 million dollars does not sound like ‘a lot’ in this context, is ‘the sale of one-fifth of the U.S. uranium production capacity to Russia’ not a big deal, or could she have held out for more money?
It’s also probably relevant to point out that the State Department was one of at least nine federal agencies that had to sign off on the deal, and to the best of my knowledge there’s no evidence that Clinton had anything at all to do with the decision. Also, the US doesn’t actually produce much uranium, so 20% of US production is only like 0.4% of global production.
The entire story here is: people who invested in a Canadian company that was bought by Rosatom also donated to the Clinton Foundation, around the time the sale went through (for loose values of “around”). Also, Bill Clinton gave a speech to a Russian bank around this time, and was paid for it.
Here’s a Politifact article. (The general consensus around here seems to be that Politifact’s rankings might be skewed, but their writeups are pretty good.)
Ok, I survived choking on my drink while reading that, but don’t do that again without a warning
Why doesn’t he want us paying attention to the settlement? He settled because he wants to concentrate on the presidency. There is no new information, there was no admission of guilt, we know exactly why he settled and it has nothing to do with the case itself. Seems entirely routine to me.
Similarly, Hillary was in no way inconvenienced by the merely-procedural announcement from Comey that additional, likely duplicate emails had been discovered on a sex-offender’s laptop, since election campaigns operate in an atmosphere of perfect information.
You honestly think a decision to settle, after announcing that you would never settle, conveys no information about the strength of the respective parties’ legal positions?
I don’t really see how those two things are related, maybe you can expound on it some?
Trump and Trump University are horrible but I would settle the lawsuit as president elect as well.
It seems like there would be better reason to criticize him if he didn’t settle, but insisted on dragging out the case as POTUS (and I wonder how much the plaintiffs would like having that for a defendant…): it would seem like he was prioritizing a personal business dealing over what, for him, is a relatively small amount of money, ahead of the job of being POTUS.
Trump spent the entire campaign vowing not to settle because he was innocent. Now he settled. Even if we accept for the purpose of argument that he was innocent and would have won (which for the record I find unlikely), a 25M payout is bad publicity for the Trump image.
Given the choice between a president who has paid 25M to settle a fraud lawsuit, and a president who drags out his fraud lawsuit in court, I agree that it is better for the country that Trump settled. But that’s not incompatible with Trump trying to distract the public from the whole issue.
Typically, a legal settlement is the expected value of the damages award net of transaction costs and adjusted for any differences between the parties in risk aversion. If you do not settle, you believe that the expected value of any damages award, taking into account costs awards, approaches zero.
This case is a bit more complicated, because there are also real reputational issues associated with settlement, as well as potential incentives to future litigants, but these mitigate against settling if Trump believes he will ultimately be vindicated.
What Pence should do is smile big and say he really enjoyed the Reynolds Pamphlet song 🙂
Talk about a storm in a teacup – I have no idea why he turned up for this show or who gave him tickets or what happened. A bunch of luvvies and a musical theatre audience take the opportunity to think they’re actually the revolutionaries they portray on stage and everyone gets their knickers in a twist.
Ok that made me chuckle.
So he got his VP to buy tickets in advance knowing that the cast would go out of their way to castigate the VP elect on stage, and timed it to take attention off the settlement? This sounds like a Scott Adams “master manipulator” theory more than a left-wing one
No, but the theory that once they addressed Pence, Trump decided to take advantage of the opportunity, is more believable.
I’d like to continue a discussion from the last fractional open thread.
The start was this:
BBA:
Then DrBeat went:
After which I weighed in with a somewhat terse and inconsiderate remark that I probably shouldn’t have. I’d like to elaborate my position:
Imagine that you are walking along on the savanna of the ancestral environment and suddenly your friend Gahoog jumps out from behind a rock and goes BLRBLRBLRBRLR!
Your expectation, or for this discussion prior, is that things that jumps out from behind rocks are dangerous. You also know that Gahoog is not dangerous and the mental conflict makes sure hilarity ensues.
This seems to be rather deeply rooted. Monkeys do the same thing, as do dogs, and it’s probably why babies enjoy playing peekaboo. (At least this was the consensus in the early 1990s when I used to read a lot of evo-psych journals.)
Let’s move on to a childrens joke:
The reason this is funny is that your prior is that the most intelligent president is capable of knowing the difference between a backpack and a parachute and when he proves not to be, this prior is violated. If your prior is that there is no way a Swede is capable of knowing the difference between a backpack and a parachute, you will just sit stupidly waiting for the punchline.
(I know that Sweden doesn’t have a president, but I changed some countries around in order to keep the joke on Scandinavians since that’s the only population it’s still safe to make jokes about. Feel free to substitute king or prime minister or the country of your choice.)
Now, let’s look at the snark at the top:
The reason this works is that your prior is some variant of “Men are running the world” and “Toilets are depositories for faeces”. Conflating the two violates the prior and makes the whole thing funny. To make this not-funny, you would have to have a prior that men are only fit to be shat upon. (I guess it would also be not-funny if you have the prior that toilets are secretly running the world, but in that case, I hear our host is a well recommended psychiatrist and has reasonable rates.)
All this leads to:
Any group of people are fair game for snarks and jokes as long as:
a) The joke is actually funny, or at least the teller of the joke clearly assumes it to be and
b) the punchline is predicated on a positive prior.
i.e. if the punchline is that the Swede suddenly outsmarts everyone, it’s not OK because the assumed prior is that Swedes are too stupid to outsmart people.
This very simple algorithm removes all the need for considerations about punching up/down or whatnot.
What if the joke-teller thinks men run the world, but some of the listeners disagree?
If the joke-teller operates on a positive prior and the audience does not, I think that the audience might benefit from some soul-searching and that the joke-teller is fine.
The positive prior being that men run the world? When I replace the word “men” with the word “Jews,” getting the sentence “Jews run the world,” I do not find myself regarding that as a positive prior. An envious and dangerous one, rather.
During Thursday Night Football, a commentator said one of the quarterbacks talks presidential. A friend noted that he would vote for a quarterback as they have leadership skills. I quipped that they are also usually white.
The audience was a friend and a brother. I can imagine my remark not going over well with a different audience.
I enjoy the MRM and I participate in Movember. I am looking forward to seeing The Red Pill and American Circumcision documentaries.
But I hope the movement doesn’t move toward the political correct side of things where you can’t laugh at a joke about men’s day and toilet day.
There’s a similar theory that laughter is an all-clear signal, indicating that something that looks weird and possibly threatening is shown to be harmless.
This suggests other failure modes: the threat is not unexpected enough so it fails, or the all-clear isn’t reassuring enough.
For a good friend, the all-clear tends to be pretty easy. For a stranger, it can be hard.
There’s also a bullying sort of joking where people make some threatening comment and insist that it’s harmless. Which isn’t how it works. If people aren’t reassured, the joke fails.
There’s nothing objective about this – it’s all state of mind.
I have it on good authority that Finns are not Scandinavians.
Fair point, but
a) The Swede was the butt of the joke and
b) The Finns are still pretty safe to joke with
Mongols, like other Asians, are white when convenient. So it’s all good.
I think I disagree, actually. Yes, all humour requires violated expectations to some degree or another. But I also think that humour has a status regulation function that affects which kinds of violated expectations we’ll find funny.
Take the airplane joke. I read it very differently than you. My analysis would be that the Swedish president violated social norms by talking about how intelligent he and his people were. He was being arrogant and trying to claim status, and we don’t like him for this. So when we find out he jumped out of the plane with the backpack, we’re pleased because he got his comeuppance; he was put in his place. And he got put in his place in exactly a way which proves that he was full of shit the entire time; this is particularly enjoyable. Yes, the joke rests on a violated expectation in that you would expect an intelligent person to know the difference between a backpack and a parachute, but we don’t ever actually think the Swedish president is intelligent – rather, we suspect he isn’t, and we’re glad when that suspicion is confirmed. The only extent to which we had a positive prior on the Swede’s intelligence is that, even if we didn’t think he was a genius, we expected him to have the bare minimum of intelligence required to identify a parachute, but it turned out he didn’t even have that (spectacularly confirming our suspicions that he was being cluelessly arrogant and didn’t deserve his claimed status).
Under this view, humour (or at least some humour) is a way of ensuring that no one gets too much status, or that even those with extremely high status can still be brought back down to earth, so to speak. We all laugh if the King farts, but we couldn’t care less if some peasant does.
Anyway, I see DrBeat’s response as operating in the context of having seen a lot of feminists make jokes at the expense of men specifically in an attempt to “put them in their place”. Men are seen as the high-status group with all of the power, and worse this status is viewed as particularly undeserved. So the natural thing to do is to make fun of men to bring down their status. I actually think this is pretty understandable behaviour, and I can empathize with the feminists who do it, at least to some degree.
My problem with this behaviour is that it uses a kind of essentiallist, category-based thinking that I really dislike (and I think is at the heart of many of my issues with feminism). Individual men are not “Men”. Just because “Men” have all the status and power does not mean that any individual man will have those things. There are lots of men out there, myself included, who have been “put in their place” for all their lives, and who really really emphatically do not need to be put in their place any more. Like, we’re good. We get it. We have no intention of straying even a femtometer from our place. Just please, for the love of god, stop. Stop making “jokes” at the expense of men, stop assuming that we’re the same, and most of all stop telling us – implicitly or explicitly – that we’re terrible people for belonging to a gender.
I feel like I’m cowering in a metaphorical corner here, having been beaten into complete submission over the course of my entire life. And I feel like there are some feminists out there who are basically going: “Hmmm, it seems like Men still have most of the power in society. I guess we need to shit on this guy in the corner some more.”
These are quite valid points and your interpretation may well be correct.
On the other hand, I’ve been “beaten” with the same sort of anti-male jokes for most of my life too, and I’ve been having a good laugh all along. Because it’s funny
I don’t know why we would have such different reactions, possibly it’s because I’ve never been very good at the whole social norms thing.
Anyway, my algorithm for what is an acceptable joke would at least spread the pain because at the moment, I get the feeling that the only population acceptable to make jokes about is me while my algorithm essentially opens up everyone as a potential subject. (And I don’t mind being the butt of jokes, but there is a vast untapped reservoir of fun out there that is off-limits for no good reason.)
Yeah, I don’t know what it is that makes my response to anti-male jokes so strong. I used to laugh along to them as much as anyone else. Part of me wonders if I used to view those jokes as not really being about “me” – like, yes, they were about guys, but only the “bad” guys. And I was one of the “good” guys, so it was all okay.
I wonder if the whole #notallmen thing was the breaking point. At some point it seemed like there was a feminist pushback against guys trying to position themselves as “one of the good ones”. There seemed to be a general attitude of “no, if you’re male then you’re part of the problem, period, and you’re not going to escape from that with a few ‘man, aren’t guys the worst’ jokes”. In fact, I think men talking about how terrible other men were eventually came to be viewed as not just not-good but actually *negative* by some feminists – it was seen as men trying to exonerate themselves, to say “hey, I don’t have to worry about this because I recognize men are bad”.
Anyway, I think this eventually led to me feeling extremely boxed in, psychologically speaking, by feminism. Like, the message was that there was no way I could ever feel like a good person, and any attempt to think of myself as a good person was only proof that I was actually a bad person. Given the absolute moral authority feminism had had over me ever since I was young (I mean, come on, it’s feminism – they’re the good guys! It’s just the simple proposition that women are people! What monster could object to that!) this caused a lot of mental problems for me. It was actually reading some of Scott’s writing that helped break me out of that mindset, and I will be eternally grateful for that.
But yeah, the end result is that I’m probably overly sensitive to jokes at the expense of men.
Thanks for the summary of #{Yes|Not}AllMen; as someone who’s not on Twitter anymore I couldn’t figure out who was serious and who was joking.
I see your point but now I must point out that the joke does not really work, because sans the president of USA, it does not correspond to any national stereotypes or recent politicians or anything.
“Positive prior” means this algorithm IS about “punching up/down”. And like the punching up/down standard, it will instantly and irrevocably become “it is okay to tell jokes about harming people I want to harm, also okay to harm people I want to harm, but not okay to say anything I dislike about people I like”. Because “positive prior” means and only means “too many people think this type of person is good, when they are not good and should be punished and hated”.
I’m not against telling jokes about men, I am against naked hypocrisy, and jokes about men almost always are naked hypocrisy — because jokes about women that go int he same way by the same structure are said to be horrifying and perilous to women, a sign of someone who hates women and should be punished for their hatred of women. Proof of how much women are hated and how much men need to change themselves to make themselves suitable to women, and how dangerous it is to be a woman.
If you think a joke about women is fine too, then great! No problem. But if you think a joke about women is that perilous to women and shows that much hatred for women, but you think it’s great and funny and warranted about men, then you are a hypocrite who hates men. And claiming it is okay because of a “positive prior” is nothing but an attempt to justify your hypocrisy and hatred of men in the same fashion as “punching up” for the same reason and in the same way, because all bullies everywhere all of them one hundred percent of the time believe that too many people have a “positive prior” of their victims and thus they are “punching up”.
My thought was that Al Bundy would appreciate the juxtaposition. But you had to be a fan of Married With Children to get that one.
Honestly, it was a dumb post about a dumb coincidence between two international days of awareness (which I think are generally dumb) for two not-actually-dumb societal issues. I kinda regret making it.
I will say that as a Jew, I am more likely to ironically make antisemitic comments in mostly Jewish company, where we all “get the joke”, than among non-Jews or people who don’t know I’m Jewish. There’s an old vaudeville tune called “Cohen Owes Me 97 Dollars” which would have been condemned as antisemitic if the songwriter weren’t Jewish, and probably completely forgotten if that Jewish songwriter weren’t named Irving Berlin. Instead, it’s just a source of uncomfortable laughter. But I still wouldn’t bring it up in mixed company.
1) Are you aware that Ann Coulter linked one of your articles in a tweet recently?
2) I would take you up on your 95% bet that gay marriage will remain legal, because I think the odds are much higher than that, but that puts me in a position where either a) I can’t afford to pay out if I lose or b) The amount I win is so small that it’s not worth the bother of making the bet, especially after accounting for uncertainty. So, I’ll just make an unofficial bet of ‘I think the odds are more like 99.7%’.
Yes, he is quite familiar with the Ann Coulter link.
A silver lining amid the huge amounts of traffic is that at at least another one of his predictions has been proven true.
So this has all been part of a Cunning Plan? 😉
As has been discussed before, a 50% prediction isn’t really a prediction either way. “At least one SSC post > 100,000 hits: 50%” is logically equivalent to “No SSC post > 100,000 hits: 50%”.
That critique doesn’t truly apply here.
If I were to assign a 50% probability to nationwide average price for a gallon of gas hitting $10 sometime in 2017, that would be a real prediction.
On the other hand if I were to assign 50% confidence to the average price of a gallon of gas being nominally higher at the end of 2017 than it is right now, that’s not really telling you much.
Predicting that a particular coin comes up heads at 50% is only a prediction that the coin is a fair coin, which is not really any sort of prediction at all.
Ok, it is a prediction, but not one that can be proved right or wrong. Just as a prediction that a coin is fair cannot be proved correct by a single toss. In fact a single toss gives you absolutely zero information about whether the coin is fair or not. What I object to is the phrasing “another one of his predictions has been proven true”.
I don’t know how many hits a typical SSC post gets, but that’s definitely a nontrivial prediction.
Think about it this way: Would predicting an SSC post with at least a billion hits be a prediction? There is clearly a range of sufficiently large number for which this is a prediction. I don’t know how many hits a typical post gets, but P(max(next year)>100,000)~50% gives me a lot of information about that.
Being right or wrong is not a binary, but rather a quantifiable measure of *how* right or *how* wrong you were. Like people saying that Nate Silver got the election wrong, how could you mislead us like this: he only got it a little wrong. 20% wrong. It wasn’t that bad. A 50/50 prediction on a binary outcome means that your maximum rightness or wrongness is 0%.
Go not to the well-calibrated for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.
For the purposes of getting credit, 50/50 might be a prediction if everybody else is predicting 99/1. If everybody else is 49% wrong and you’re 0% wrong, you look like a friggin’ genius. If everybody else is 49% right and you’re 0% right, you look like a moron. But that’s a property of the social context in which you make the non-prediction, not a property of the non-prediction itself.
I am not sure what these “rightness” and “wrongness” things mean to you, but they seem quite disconnected from the actual utility of a prediction.
If there’s a market analyst out there who can give me a list of stocks that are 50% likely to quadruple in value this year, and I can be certain that 50% of them will in fact quadruple in value this year, that’s a really amazingly useful set of predictions. I will laugh my way to the bank as you whine about their lack of “rightness” or “wrongness”.
ScottxCoulter
I ship it.
I’m utterly sick of the touch football we call American politics, and hopefully with the election over we’ll all have it shoved in our faces less aggressively… but in the meantime, I want to read a good book or two on Vladimir Putin. I’m interested in both the man and the myth. Anyone have any recommendations? Or Eastern European politics/history more generally?
The author of this article below, Masha Gessen, wrote a biography of Putin
Autocracy: Rules for Survival,
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/11/10/trump-election-autocracy-rules-for-survival/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+nyrblog+%28NYR+Daily%29
Here is the book:
The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin
https://www.amazon.com/Man-Without-Face-Unlikely-Vladimir/dp/1594486514/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1479659425&sr=1-1&keywords=Masha+Gessen
I’m actually really suspicious of Masha Gessen, mainly because every time I read anything she writes, she appears to be advocating for people on the left to voluntarily abrogate the constitutional order. That might be an unfair characterization, I don’t know. I do know that Trump will be the duly elected president and there are certain constitutional mechanisms for ousting him if he goes over the line. At a minimum, those should be considered before any other kinds of resistance are.
Her view may be that if one waits until it’s perfectly obvious and clear that an authoritarian leader has gone over the line, that it may be too late to do anything about it.
Are there any history professors or avid students of history here, who have an opinion and/or evidence regarding this possiblity?
That may be her view, but at least some acknowledgment of the constitutional issues is required. If you have to break the republic (by illegally overthrowing the president or some such) to save it, you’ve got an insoluble dilemma on your hands. We’re all fucked at that point.
But here’s the basis of my batshit, conspiratorial anti-Masha Gessen fever dream: let’s say Putin actually sees the increasingly hardening edge of the partisan right and left as something he can manipulate. How would he try to destabilize the state? Well, on the one hand, he might try to manipulate the election in ways that have been alleged by US intelligence. But that wouldn’t be enough. He also has to get the other half of the country to agree that the person he put into power is illegitimate. That’s partly Masha’s job. Of course, we’re kind of in nutsville here, straight up conspiracy talk. I don’t, for instance, think Putin did much that successfully altered election outcomes. Still, Trump is president. And now there is that petition going around demanding that the electoral college alter its votes to deny Trump the presidency. Has millions of signatures. What’s the point of the petition? It’s proof among other things that a large number of Americans are actually pretty happy to completely piss all over the constitution to get what they want. You can imagine a situation where Putin, through bribery or other shenanigans, actually gets enough faithless electors to flip the vote. What do you think happens to this country if he pulls something like that off? Liberals can’t plausibly deny their support for it-there’s a freaking petition! How secure are electoral college votes from this kind of manipulation? I have no idea.
Aaaand we’re back to American politics.
I don’t really know what I was expecting.
The ride never ends!
Er, the Electoral College voting against Trump wouldn’t be ignoring the written Constitution at all. It’d actually be quite in line with the original intent, which was that the electors individually pick whoever they thought was most qualified.
What it would be doing is flying in the face of the traditions and convention that the British call a Constitution. And yes, that’s a bad thing. But, the word “constitution” has another meaning on this side of the Atlantic.
@ Evan P.
Er, the Electoral College voting against Trump wouldn’t be ignoring the written Constitution at all. It’d actually be quite in line with the original intent, which was that the electors individually pick whoever they thought was most qualified.
I’ve been thinking about that (but waiting for someone else to post the research). Don’t have enough tinfoil to join those who are dreaming of it before the 19th, either.
But discussing ideas for reforming/removing the EC, and about moving further from the US 2-party system and further in the parliamentary direction, I wonder if rolling the EC back toward one of it’s earlier functions might be useful. (This certainly wouldn’t need a constitutional amendment!)
I see the Parliamentary approach being nicer, because it needs a coalition to get things done; thus compromise, deals between several small parties and some major party. For example, we might get President Hillary (to follow the popular vote) and Secretary Trump of Something with power to get some of the things the Red States want within their own borders (such as lighter EPA regulations).
@houseboatonstyxb
I think I agree regarding parliamentary systems, but I sometimes worry that that’s a “grass is greener” thing. Can someone who has lived under both systems comment on some of the pros and cons of each?
Regarding the electoral college:
I think that it shouldn’t overthrow Trump even though it wouldn’t be unconstitutional. The electoral college, and the Federal Govt. as a whole is nothing like what it was at the nation’s founding. I think as long as the Federal Government is making decisions like a country and not like a union (which I really don’t see changing, and which is a whole different argument) the electoral college doesn’t make sense. The decisions of the Federal Govt. effect everyone, unlike much of the original federal government that was mostly concerned with trade policy and military activity.
However, I also think that the electoral college is probably not my first target for election reform. Gerrymandering and first past the post voting systems I think are easier targets that would still improve the representativeness of the system, and which should help encourage coalition building between parties which is REALLY needed right now. Killing the electoral college means accepting that states aren’t *really* sovereign nations anymore and reducing the voting power of a bunch of people, which is an uphill battle.
Thanks, I’ll check it out. It seems likely to be partisan, as Gessen is apparently an activist, but that perspective can be interesting and useful.
How are you going to get a Putin biography with any sort of meat without the author being a partisan of some sort?
I apologize for hijacking your thread.
I have a Trump related question that has to do with what the breaking points should be where we might conclusively say Trump is a danger to the republic and must be impeached. Mostly the exercise is designed to be consoling, since presumably most of these are not high probability events. But it should also be somewhat clarifying-rather than arguing in this vague way people have been arguing about Trump’s unfitness to serve, I would like to know where people would actually draw the line vis a vis decisions Trump might make as president given what we know about him.
Like, would you demand Trump’s impeachment if he tried to have SNL cancelled? That should be a legal impossibility, but it should at least be a problem for people, right? And what if he succeeded (I think he would have to dissolve the Supreme Court, basically)?
Would you demand Trump’s impeachment if he successfully implemented a Muslim registry?
Would you demand Trump’s impeachment if we started packing large numbers of illegal immigrants into internment camps as a part of a massively ramped up deportation program?
Would you demand Trump’s impeachment if he started a war with Iran or North Korea?
How about if Trump actually nominated Peter Thiel for the Supreme Court?
You might have some other specific issue in mind to add here, this isn’t intended to be a comprehensive list. But whatever the issue is should be based on whatever beliefs you have about what Trump might actually do.
High crimes and misdemeanors.
Hip hip hurrah! But what, exactly does that mean beyond “whatever Congress wants it to mean”?
I don’t think it needs to have a meaning beyond that, it’s tautological, that’s what it is (with the caveat that what Congress wants must be in line with the constitution).
If the question had asked “at what point should the president be overthrown by means of violence?” then the answer might be a little more nuanced (with the caveat that I would never advocate the violent overthrow of a US official or the US government).
Sorry, but that never caught my attention. No amount of evidence would convince you that was the best course of action? If a president jailed his political opponents, and used drone strikes on US soil to kill civilians, you would still not advocate revolution?
So far as the NSA is concerned, I assume, no they would not.
See Masha Gessen’s article that I lined to, above.
linked to, I meant.
I have been chewing over similar things – had a mentoring session with some younger professionals last week over the pros and cons of sword-falling (one big con – that’s someone you can only do once) and how having rational, just, fair people inside the system –
– George Washington did get brought up –
– can prevent things from being implemented badly, because the devil is in the details.
But it *is* certainly possible that this president (or the next one) could (just like the last one) do some gawd-awful unconstitutional things. And we have seen that partisans for any side will go to some length to justify the actions of their person. But I also lived through the 2004 election and people who were hysterically certain that concentration camps for Muslims were right around the corner. Just because one sees demons lurking under the bed is not actually evidence of demons, under the bed or in the closet.
So – attempting to name things I think are bad and should be spoken against –
– increase in things which are punishable by incarceration or fine at the federal level
– nationalization of the police force and/or use of the NG by the President
– a shift towards incarceration rather than deportation for illegal aliens not convicted of felonies
– criminalization of homosexual actions out of portion of the same sort of heterosexual actions
– criminalization or suppression of speech at any level, but most especially that critical of government officials or where the decision is based on the race, sex, or ethnicity of the speaker
Examples of things which I don’t think are violations of the above, even though I have no doubt that some will argue they are:
– police crack downs on protests that block public thoroughfares
– civilian-on-protester injuries resulting from protests that attempt to block public thoroughfares
– medical quarantine of people exposed to or suspected of carrying a highly infectious disease based on their recent travel, diet, sexual habits, and/or any other characteristic highly correlated to race/ethnicity/etc.
– increasing deportations of people who have illegally entered or overstayed their legal entry
– congresscritters, presidents, staff of the executive office, and joe citizen yelling uncharitable things at each other.
Things I would like to see more of:
– Presidents and other gubmit people stuf and letting joe citizen yell
– Joe citizen not interrupting [president/joe citizen/whoever] and making the ‘conversation’ into a one way lecture
– policy debates discussed as tradeoffs, not lionized as pure gold nor disparaged as pure idiocy
I’m not sure how I would measure any of these things.
The devil’s in the details, and that’s where political questions bite you. When you say trying to have SNL cancelled, that could be done in a variety of ways. Consider:
Calling an exec at NBC and saying “I think the show’s on the decline and you’d be best served by replacing it” Not impeachment worthy.
Filing a personal defamation lawsuit. Not impeachment worthy.
Having every executive agency look for any regulation they can find to shut down NBC unless SNL is cancelled: politics as usual. It shouldn’t be, but that’s the regulatory state for you.
Sending in the police pursuant to a lawfully-issued court order: Not impeachment-worthy.
Sending in officers/military/whatever in order to stop the broadcast without any legal justification: Yes, impeachment-worthy.
If Trump somehow dissolves the Supreme Court, impeachment no longer has any meaning. That’s the point at which you have to take up arms.
As for the rest of the questions:
Muslim registry: Probably call for impeachment, but the details matter.
Round up illegals: No, that would be a straight-forward way of enforcing the existing law.
War with Iran or North Korea: Details matter. Probably not given we haven’t done so for other Presidents.
Pete Thiel for SCOTUS: Meh. No worse than handing out ambassadorships to contributors. No impeachment.
If Trump gets on the phone and just tells NBC execs to cancel SNL because his butt is sore, you don’t think that’s not impeachment worthy? Isn’t that still kind of crazy?
crazy =/= impeachment worthy
For that matter, I do welcome the revival of the grand old tradition of left-leaning cultural icons mocking the POTUS. I thought that old institution as dead as the dodo.
Well, let’s just say I strongly disagree with you about that. The president has institutional power he can abuse, but he also just has *power*. If Trump can effectively use the threat of the office to get his way without pulling the trigger on things like actual trials, he’s more dangerous, not less dangerous.
You know, Putin never did the last one either (sending officers to stop the broadcast just because), but today there are no TV shows and hardly any newspapers that do not toe the party line in Russia.
Executives got some calls, some others faced legal troubles and blackmail by regulation, some laws got enacted to get the message through, and now their freedom of press rating is very low. Everything nominally legal.
Trying to find any and all half-legal regulatory justifications to pressure an independent media to change their political content, especially on domestic politics is not and should not be business as usual in any liberal Western democracy.
Right. I think the ability of a dedicated executive to curtail the press is underestimated, and freedom of the press really doesn’t look like something Trump digs.
“Internment camps” in this context, would be a reference to the Japanese-American internment where citizens who had not done anything illegal were interned. Illegal aliens are not citizens and have done something illegal. Having illegal aliens being put in internment camps, with the intended connotation, is like asking “what if Trump deported all minors who are above the age of 18” or “what if Trump made it illegal to build 10 foot tall skyscrapers”. It’s impossible.
Regardless of what you think the “connotation” is, it is in fact objectively possible to intern illegal immigrants in large camps. That is not at all analogous to your impossible examples.
Also, I disagree with your analysis of the connotation. It’s the Nazis who are famous for their internment camps, and the people set to those camps were guilty of dubious-but-enforceable crimes. The Japanese-American camps are famous only for their disturbing resemblance to the Nazi ones.
What crimes were the bulk of people sent to concentration and extermination camps guilty of? What was done at the extermination camps was done in secret, or at least, those responsible tried to keep it secret. There was never a law on the books saying Judaism was punishable by death, was there?
Nazi camps are called “concentration camps”. Nobody uses the term “internment camps” for them. It is a reference to Japanese-Americans, and only Japanese-Americans.
Please don’t be an Internet literalist. Connotations are real. It is impossible to intern illegal immigrants in a way implied by the reference to Japanese-Americans, because the illegal immigrants are not citizens and have acted illegally, and the lack of those traits is a distinctive feature of the Japanese-American internment.
Connotations are real.
You disagreeing with the connotations of the statement is not the same as it being logically incoherent.
It is entirely possible to round up illegal immigrants and put them in camps. If the fact that they are illegal immigrants changes the connotations of that fact for you, fine.
While internment camps were not used exclusively in America or exclusively for the Japanese, I am inclined to agree with Jiro. I only ever hear ‘Internment camp’ used to refer to the Japanese American internment camps. The ’emotional weight’ of the phrase seemed intentional.
“Like, would you demand Trump’s impeachment if he tried to have SNL cancelled?”
Depends how. If he told a relevant television executive that it’s a terrible show and should be cancelled, that would not be an impeachable offense. If he made an executive order requiring the FCC to lift the license of any station that broadcast the show, it would be. In my view.
“How about if Trump actually nominated Peter Thiel for the Supreme Court?”
Clearly not an impeachable offense.
Does the possibility of a president simply leaning on executives to do his bidding really not bother you at all?
An impeachment offence? No, but he should be told that it’s a dumb idea and there’s this thing called “free speech” (though I have to say, I’d be broadly sympathetic to the idea of getting tired comedy shows yanked off the air, but yeah – free speech).
And what if he successfully gets SNL canned. Or just chilled? Alec Baldwin stops appearing as Trump? The NY Times starts writing oddly muted puff pieces about the administration? A couple left wing opinion sites fold? Like, is any amount of actual censorship tolerable to you if Trump abstains from sending in the national guard?
Not really. Read up on the relationship between the Obama White House and Google.
“Does it bother you at all?” is not at all the same question as “Is it an impeachable offence?”. (And neither is interchangeable with “should it be an impeachable offence?”.)
Nomination of Thiel would be a clear sop to the Anne Rice “gay vampire” constituency.
Well, Mr Thiel is not a gay vampire, he’s a vampire who just has sex with persons of his own gender. That doesn’t make him gay, according to that finger-wagging article about what gayness really means and is.
No comment yet on if he really is a vampire or if associating him with such is sullying the good name and repute of unholy undead abominations from the pit 🙂
If he just used the Presidency as a bully pulpit to lash out at the show and demand its cancellation (with no “or else”), no. Rather not something I’d like the President doing, but not impeachable. Any strong-arming should be impeachable (siccing the IRS/FBI/DEA/ATF on them, having the actors arrested, etc).
Only if he did it without Congressional assistance (that is by executive order and not law) and after being ordered not to by the Supreme Court.
This is legal and simply a larger-scale version of what is already done, so no.
Presumably without good and sufficient reason? Yes.
No, not illegal and doesn’t do anything without the consent of the Senate anyway.
Basically I’d only impeach Trump for something he did using the executive branch alone (that is, getting a law passed is never grounds for impeachment; it’d be futile anyway), and which actually DID something (merely proposing something bad shouldn’t be impeachable). And lesser measures should be attempted first except in especially egregious cases (so a Muslim registry might be illegal but should be ruled on before resorting to impeachment; starting a war for no good reason or using agencies as bully squads would count as especially egregious in my mind)
I wonder whether demands for Trump’s impeachment could be made if he turns out to be too progressive–as I predict he will be. Like, what if Trump…
– gets behind (or nominates a USSC judge who gets behind) a further dilution of the definition of marriage (to include things like polygamy)?
– expands rather than repeals Obamacare? (Perhaps with something in there about free access to abortion services for all girls and women…)
– works to increase immigration and visas from central-American and Muslim countries?
– grows the nanny state?
– grows the borrow-and-spend state?
– puts pressure on congress to pass tighter restrictions on guns?
Etc.
Obviously this is all theoretical, since as Trump’s presidency starts resembling more and more what Hillary’s would have been, he will boil the frog gradually and use his persuasion skills to ensure he doesn’t lose his supporters. Formerly hardline conservatives will find themselves defending abortion and sibling marriage, and the Constitution as a “living” document, etc.
If you think it’ll go the other way, I’m fine with that too. The world where Trump gets completely coopted by the establishment may not be optimal, depending on your priors, but it’s also not likely to result in catastrophes either. Just more of the same crap. I’m mainly concerned about the downside risks of Trump’s presidency, which seem substantial enough to warrant fleshing out. I’m also worried than situations may arise where Trump really does cross some important lines, but it goes largely unremarked because people were not on guard for it.
Wouldn’t that be a huge waste of Thiel’s time?
Depends on his priorities.
If Trump nominated Peter Thiel for the Supreme Court, I would demand an end to term limits TBQH.
Most of those really depend on how he goes about it and what the circumstances are. For example, if Iran or North Korea feel like suicide-by-cop there’s not much Trump can do.
I honestly would not demand an impeachment for any of these. Here are my hot takes.
* Free speech is overrated. Singapore does fine without it. If Trump got SNL canceled, he’d have done far less to muzzle speech than political correctness has done.
* The government already has lots of info on American citizens. The value of a “Muslim registry” is mostly symbolic.
* Obama already deported tons of illegal immigrants and no one noticed. Resisting Trump for this would, again, mostly be symbolic. It’s important to deport illegal immigrants as a deterrent to illegal immigration. It’s important to deter illegal immigration because the USA is vital to the world order, and its stability as a society is poorly understood.
* Bush/Obama started wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. I don’t see how a war with Iran or North Korea makes less sense.
* Peter Thiel is one of the few people who thinks.
I might demand an impeachment if The Donald was slaughtering people for no reason or was conducting our international relations in a way that could trigger another world war. Stealing enough money to affect the economy would also qualify.
One of those countries is not like the others. If you go to war with Iran, you might lose. Even if you win, you would need to spend more resources than you did against Iraq and Afghanistan. And then you lose.
There’s a huge gap in this sort of argument. Namely, it’s the convenient but dangerously incorrect assumption that the US has all the agency, that it’s purely up to the United States whether or not there’s a war with Iran or North Korea or anyone else. A lot of people today weirdly forget that we didn’t choose to attack Afghanistan; they attacked us, right out of the blue.
No they didn’t.
A bunch of Saudis who happened to have spent some time in Afghanistan previously attacked us.
Is “and currently had a base of operations in Afghanistan with the at least tacit approval of the ruling government” true or not?
This is how I remember things.
We tried to get the Taliban to hand them over, and only went to war when they refused, which moves the cooperation from ‘tacit’ to ‘active’.
Okay, but that’s still not the same as “Afghanistan attacked us”
Harboring a fugitive is a crime, but it’s not the same crime as whatever the fugitive actually did…
Perhaps not, but if what that fugitive did endangered your charges, and you are at best unsure of their capability to repeat it, you are going to treat it the same.
There was a justification for attacking Afghanistan, but it wasn’t because we literally understood the Taliban to be waging a war against us. They simply refused to turn over one of their national heroes in a timely fashion. Of course, there had been a debate about whether it made sense to deploy military resources in this fashion, or whether we should rely on an FBI/Interpol style of enforcement, treating terrorism like crime instead of warfare. But the people in charge of the state at the time were all team Army.
Also interesting: Isn’t it pretty much assumed that Pakistan totally knew where OBL was hanging out and never told us and never gave us explicit permission to go get him?
We just went in and got him anyway, WITHOUT declaring war on and instituting regime change in the entire nation (presumably because they have access to some weapons we’d rather not they use)
Probably makes a good argument for places like Iran that having your own nukes IS, in fact, a pretty good idea as an insurance policy at the very least…
How is Interpol supposed to help when the bad guys are in a country which refuses to turn them over after we ask directly and are visibly very mad. I’m not sure if the Taliban was so stupid they thought we wouldn’t attack, or so stupid they didn’t care. In either case, policing wasn’t going to get the enemy.
I should also point out that the Afghanistan campaign initially didn’t look much like it does today. Basically, we provided air support for the Northern Alliance, and all of the ground forces we deployed were there to support that. The large-scale deployment of troops didn’t start until after it turned out that the Afghans were totally unable to run the country themselves.
I was all of 9 at the time, and I distinctly remember the anger that everyone felt. There was no way that Bush could have survived responding to the Taliban’s refusal to turn Bin Laden and co over with a shrug and ‘well, they’re basically just criminals’.
Also, that debate had been won by Team Police (occasionally backed up by Team Cruise Missile) throughout the 90s, and it seemed like a complete failure after 9/11, so expecting Team Army to lose is absurd.
In fairness, Team Clinton’s unwillingness to pull the trigger may have made Team Police look worse than it was, but keeping that strategy was never a real option.
There’s a difference between official knowledge and unofficial knowledge. Certain elements within the Pakistani government certainly knew, but the government as a whole didn’t officially know. If we’d sent our ambassador to ask “Where is Bin Laden?” they’d say that they didn’t know. If we’d said “He’s here, and we’d like you to get him for us” they’d say they’d look into it, and he’d disappear before they grabbed him. They’d probably come back later and say that they had no evidence that he was there.
When we told the Taliban to hand over Bin Laden and shut down the training camps, they said that they wanted more evidence that Bin Laden was involved, and flatly refused all of our other demands.
In diplomatic terms, the difference between the two is huge.
This was used, thinly-disguised, as a major plot point in Homeland Season 4. Wikileaks appears to back it up in real life:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/8488236/WikiLeaks-Osama-bin-Laden-protected-by-Pakistani-security.html
I seem to recall reading a Wikileak which said there was a US source inside Pakistani intelligence who revealed bin Laden’s location, though I can’t find it now.
But possession of nukes isn’t the only difference between the Pakistan situation and the Afghan one.
Al Qaeda was a part of Afghanistan’s defense ministry. They were not “some guys who happened to have been in Afghanistan once” and it’s infuriating and baffling why this flatly incorrect meme survives.
Well, then again, it’s not that baffling. If the United States was actually justified in a war it had pursued, that ruins a lot of standard narratives about how blackly evil we are. So there has to be some reason why, when Afghanistan’s government bombs two American cities, somehow we’re not allowed to retaliate.
I’m agnostic on the question of just what the right thing to do was in the aftermath of 9/11. But in hindsight, we might admit we overreacted a bit, even if granted that military engagement was a more fruitful approach to dealing with terrorism than some kind of policing effort.
This assumption drives me up the wall. It’s so common in online discussions of foreign policy that it’s right up there with “we only use 10% of our brains”.
I have noticed an increasing tendency to grant agency to Vladimir Putin, though, which probably indicates something about shifts in geopolitics. No one can be the world’s only superpower forever.
Seems like a bit of a weakman. I mean, it’s kinda true because arguments are soldiers, but it’s obviously not the best case against the invasion of Afghanistan. The fact that the US remained allies with Saudi Arabia throughout the war in Afghanistan is pretty significant I think — yeah, Afghanistan’s government was obviously complicit, but so was SA’s so what’s the real objection? Just that we could get away with it in Afghanistan but not SA? At that point, I think you have to concede the moral argument for going to war. “Justice” or whatever isn’t the true motivation, and it will be more interesting and informative to discuss if we stop moralizing at each other.
Does anyone know why it wouldn’t have been better to send in targeted special forces teams and dared the Taliban to declare war if they had a problem with the US attacking Al Qaeda directly? Worse case, we end up in the same situation we ended up in anyway, best case Taliban backs down and we get to attack Al Qaeda without having to worry about all the security and nation building that are involved with deposing a sovereign government.
Yeah, when you depose a working government, you have to replace it with other people who do not know as much about governing. This also happened in Iraq. Similarly, when Saddam Hussein’s military was dissolved, it was a replaced by people who did not know how to fight or organize a military. I don’t know if the Bush admin was so stupid they didn’t realize this or so stupid that they didn’t care. In either case, the results were entirely predictable, and were in fact predicted by a lot of people (who were largely dismissed as “traitors” at the time as I recall).
This is rather unfair, in several dimensions. First, describing the Taliban as a ‘working government’ vastly overstates the degree to which any Afghan government worked between the late 70s and 2001. The Northern Alliance was the de facto government in the north in 2001. They had tanks and the trappings of an army. This is the second point, that we expected them to be able to take over and run the country to our satisfaction. They couldn’t, and I’m not enough of a scholar of the conflict to know if it was because they couldn’t handle the scale-up, or because they were incompetent from the start.
They had a competent guy. I do not believe it is a coincidence that the one competent leader in the one domestic alternative to the Taliban was assassinated the day before the 9/11 attacks. By suicide bombing, a technique not generally used by any domestic faction in the Afghan civil war ca. 2001.
“yeah, Afghanistan’s government was obviously complicit, but so was SA’s”
People from Saudi Arabia were obviously involved. In what sense was the Saudi government?
I’m the wrong person to ask because I wanted (and still want) anyone who supported AQ to be bombed into the Stone Age and screw the consequences. But obviously, yeah, that’s a big reason why we didn’t go after SA — even though SA wouldn’t have much of a chance against us militarily, it would have widened the war dramatically, caused an oil shock, introduced more diplomatic and religious complications, and so on.
…Come to think of it, all of which happened in Iraq anyway. Well, hindsight is 20/20, I suppose.
First off: no, I don’t think you do have to concede that argument. We were attacked out of the blue, so had every right to respond with as much force as we please against those responsible, and the fact that we didn’t kill everybody who was even partially responsible doesn’t mean it was wrong to at least get the folks who were the most responsible (AQ and the Taliban.)
Second off: it might be wrong to describe war a moral argument at all, because then you get tied down in all kinds of argumentative knots and side streets and post hoc justifications. Fundamentally, no matter who attacked who first you’re still killing folks, and that’s not very moral, is it? War is immoral. It’s also appropriate sometimes, like when someone attacks you. In order to increase the peace, you need to a) prevent them from doing it again and b) demonstrate the consequences to anyone else who was thinking of taking a swing at you in the future.
This argument came up a lot back after 9/11, and it was because many people have a romanticized view of special forces and what they can do. Sure, America’s special forces are amazing, but there aren’t very many of them, and they’re not going to defeat a regular armed force. The worst case is we have to invade Afghanistan anyway except now they’ve got hundreds of trapped US soldiers to bargain with, and their effective allies in the news media, leftist political parties, and other Islamist countries have had a couple of months as well as, undoubtedly, some gimmicked-up “war crimes” to prep the diplomatic battlespace against the US.
Also, if you think the Taliban would choose to either stand down or explicitly declare war you have too much faith in how Islamist regimes treat the rules of war. Most likely the Taliban would not have declared war, but attacked the special forces anyway directly or through proxies, all the time denying control over the situation. Good luck getting the UN on board with a war they never wanted to approve of once the Taliban have had a chance to send up the diplomatic chaff.
RE: Ahmad Shah Massoud
John Shilling got to it beforehand, but I don’t think his loss could be overstated. We were talking George Washington and Napoleon? This was their guy.
Of all the things I hate the Taliban for, murdering this guy is the one I feel the most justified in. They fucked Afghanistan sideways with a chainsaw when they killed him.
The USA has been around and stable long enough that 9/11 – in and of itself was not an existential threat. You could not then, nor can you now, say the same about Afghanistan.
Right. One of these countries has an army of well over a million men, backed by six million armed reserves, fanatically devoted to a stable cult-of-personality dictatorship, deeply entrenched in extremely hostile terrain.
One of these countries has actual nuclear missiles, dispersed on mobile launchers in hardened sites.
One of these countries has an ally with an extremely powerful army right next door, with a demonstrated track record of coming to their defense in wartime even when that meant matching their purely conventional military with our nuclear one – and that qualitative asymmetry no longer exists.
I am morbidly curious as to why you are so certain the results of a war with North Korea would be any better.
Define ‘war’ and ‘lose’. If we’re talking about a conventional war like we had against Iraq in 1991, we won’t lose. Most of Iran’s Air Force, for instance, dates back to the late 70s, and their domestic weapons are often clever, but a couple generations behind what we have. And they’ve been at the top of our potential enemies list since, oh, 2004.
If we’re talking about occupying the country, I’ll agree that it wouldn’t end well.
I define a loss with Iran as the effect of a real war with Iran, which would be a war with several orders of magnitude more American casualties than the first Iraq War. Sure, we could probably beat Iran. But nobody is ready for a war like that.
How many casualties are you expecting? One order of magnitude more than Iraq (the recent one, not the 1991 edition) is about the size of Korea, at least WRT US casualties. That’s unlikely to occur these days, to say the least. I really doubt that we’re going to try nation-building in Iran, and no matter how a more conventional war goes, you wouldn’t see that many casualties. Either they’d lose or we’d pull the plug pretty quickly.
My understanding of what would happen in a real war (versus some sort of bombing campaign) is a little dated, but I assume a minimum 10k casualties, and that’s if it goes well. Also if it goes without triggering a serious backlash from Russia, which it probably would.
If your understanding of ‘real war’ is synonymous with ‘major ground campaign’, then you may or may not be right. We got away with the last one, but that was 13 years ago, and Iran is better defensive terrain than Iraq is. I can’t speak directly to how effectively the two would fight. As for Russia, if Iran annoys us enough to start the shooting, I expect they’ll stand back.
Mind if I add a few entries to the list?
– Would you demand Trump’s impeachment if a rodeo clown wore a Trump mask, and the clown was attacked by Trump-supporting media and the rodeo fired him and promised special procedures to insure that such disrespect would never happen again?
– Would you demand Trump’s impeachment if a small-town parade had a float with an outhouse on it as the “Trump Presidential Library,” and the Justice Department sent agents to the town to harass the locals?
No and yes respectively (except if the Justice Department did it on their own initiative, I would only demand Trump’s impeachment if those responsible were not fired once the facts came out), but these seem oddly specific.
Ahh, found the “Presidential Library” outhouse incident. It appears the Justice Department sent someone from the “Community Relations Service” of the Department of Justice.
https://www.justice.gov/crs
“CRS is not an investigatory or prosecutorial agency, and it does not have any law enforcement authority.”
The CRS appears to typically do more harm than good and probably should be disbanded, but sending them doesn’t seem to be the kind of strong-arming which would warrant impeachment. They didn’t go in on their own initiative, but because the Nebraska Democratic Party made a complaint.
Would you demand Trump’s impeachment if he ordered the military to assassinate a US citizen without due process or trial?
Ooh, that’s a good one.
I wouldn’t, because I always thought that argument was absurd whether deployed against Bush or Obama — take it to extremes and we need to check the passports of every enemy soldier before the army is allowed to shoot them. If you join a military force that’s fighting against the United States, you’ve made your bed, frankly. But I imagine there are lots of people out there who were for impeachment, instantly switched to opposition in November of 2008, and then instantly switched to in favor again two weeks ago.
“If you join a military force that’s fighting against the United States, you’ve made your bed, frankly.”
So all Trump has to do is promise you he has evidence that Alec Baldwin is totally in ISIS then?
No you can’t SEE the evidence, it’s classified. National security and all that.
Is Alec Baldwin in an area of active hostilities where the United States is engaged in armed conflict? IIRC, that was rather important in the OLC memo.
Note that the abhorrent logical conclusion to this already happened: the Civil War cases. The executive branch determined that US citizens were actively participating in hostilities against the US (in US territory, no less!) and decided to target those individuals with military actions (and no “due process”). I think most people that get outraged here have never engaged with the case history.
I dunno. Is it the case that all Obama has to do is promise you he has evidence that Anwar al-Awlaki is totally in al-Qaeda?
Snarking aside, you’re missing the bigger picture, which is that the United States Government has essentially unlimited power to kill opposing military personnel in the context of a declared war, American citizens or not, and has had that power for a very long time (there was a useful Supreme Court decision on the matter back in World War II, as I recall.) There’s nothing unique about it to the current situation, other than the kind of crap nature of this particular war.
Along those lines, if you want to complain, complain about the concept of a lengthy war against an poorly defined enemy with no stated victory conditions and which is prosecuted in the most vague, half-hearted and desultory way, so that wartime exigiencies become commonplace actions and unity at home becomes division and anger. That strikes me as far more useful than objecting to the U. S. military killing enemy soldiers without checking their passports first.
Is your point of invoking the civil war that we SHOULDN’T be outraged by executive kill lists because Lincoln did it?
Um… that’s sort of going to have the opposite effect on me…
“Along those lines, if you want to complain, complain about the concept of a lengthy war against an poorly defined enemy with no stated victory conditions and which is prosecuted in the most vague, half-hearted and desultory way, so that wartime exigiencies become commonplace actions and unity at home becomes division and anger. ”
I’d love to but I’m too busy complaining about really super important stuff. Like how the President elect sent some mean tweets to some broadway dudes whose work I am unfamiliar with because I don’t make seven figures and live in New York.
I’ve always been suspicious of that argument, even when used against Obama. US citizens targeted this way are typically people who were born in the US to foreign parents, and lived many of their formative years outside the US, at best returning for a while for college. They are noncentral examples of citizens, typically not culturally American, and if anything are an example of a problem with birthright citizenship.
I mean, if you’re really against killing Confederates…….. Generally, it’s an item of faith among most Americans that the Civil War was, in fact, a war, and that judicial concepts of due process don’t apply on the fields of Gettysburg. Are you really taking the position that the North needed to have a few hundred thousand trials during the process of prosecuting the war? (…and the South would as well, for that matter.)
EDIT: Perhaps we should adopt a future rule that all reasonably-contentious wars should be won by the side which can expedite due process the most.
@Jiro – that comment, in the context of the birther conversation in the last thread, accrues a delightful extra crust of irony.
Obama had an American mother, and only lived outside the US as a child for four years in Indonesia, so that wouldn’t really apply to him. Also, the spirit of the idea is that the American citizen is culturally tied to the foreign country he lived in more than he is to America, which is unlikely when he has no Indonesian ancestry.
I hate to fall into the “justifying bad behavior by pointing to worse behavior” cliche, but Obama literally had a secret kill list of American citizens he could (and did) murder with a bizarre executive process that is classified from all but his core inner circle.
And we’re debating whether Trump should be rightfully impeached for trying to have a television show cancelled? Like, seriously?
>Like, would you demand Trump’s impeachment if he tried to have SNL cancelled? That should be a legal impossibility, but it should at least be a problem for people, right? And what if he succeeded (I think he would have to dissolve the Supreme Court, basically)?
Define “tried”.
>Would you demand Trump’s impeachment if he successfully implemented a Muslim registry?
Korematsu is still perfectly good law, afaik.
>Would you demand Trump’s impeachment if we started packing large numbers of illegal immigrants into internment camps as a part of a massively ramped up deportation program?
Definitely not.
>Would you demand Trump’s impeachment if he started a war with Iran or North Korea?
Define “started”.
>How about if Trump actually nominated Peter Thiel for the Supreme Court?
Nominating a Supreme Court Justice, even one I really don’t like, is definitely NOT an impeachable offense.
>Korematsu is still perfectly good law, afaik.
Yikes, really? That’s really not something we should be proud of… The wiki has a pretty good quote from Scalia on it.
It’s very good law because it’s used as precedent for discrimination in the name of diversity in colleges. So nobody will dare get rid of it.
There’s no process for overturning Supreme Court cases except bringing another case on the same issue. One could just as easily say that Dred Scott is still perfectly good law.
There are at least two ways to overturn Supreme Court cases — one is bringing another case and getting an opposite decision, and the other is to change the law which the decision was based on. In constitutional cases, that means an amendment, which we in fact have in the Dred Scott case. So no, Dred Scott is not good law.
Did you think Obama should have been impeached for imprisoning Nakoula Basseley Nakoula because he made a trailer for a movie?
Should the Supreme Court members who voted to have the movie Citizens United banned be impeached?
I re-read the Toxoplasma of Rage this week and I think there are opportunities to expand on it now. The parasitic meme seems to have morphed. It’s like the nation is playing a version of rock-paper-scissors, except with fear-anger-shame. The rules for winning depend on which group you’re in and that makes a new kind of replicator. Look at the Pence/Hamilton/Trump confrontation yesterday for an example. The basic question is “whose feelings matter most” and it rests on an assumption that other people are responsible for them. Every assertion that “my feelings matter more” is a demand for the other side to concede their wrongness and apologize to make amends. Since all feelings are valid (to the degree they exist for some reason and won’t disappear on their own), there’s no unilateral winning possible which is what both sides demand.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about the National Popular Vote as it relates to certain sacred values. The electoral college is viewed as a venerable institution crafted by wise founders who sought to balance political interests of big and small states, or alternately who feared the passions of the mob.
Both of those arguments fall flat. In fact the EC is intrinsically damaging to the balance of interests among states today by the very purpose of its design.
Had the founders truly feared the passions of the mob, they didn’t need EC to fix it because the alternative on the table at the time was to have the national legislature elect the president. An alternative to that was to have the state legislatures elect the president.
We got the best compromise that could be forged to have popular vote and allow southern slaveholders to maintain their political power against free blacks in the north (PDF)
But the respect for tradition/authority value is so sacred now that even in the face of clear evidence it violates fundamental principles, we cannot give up the myth of the founder’s wisdom. Even in the face of what that wisdom actually was, my friends still make excuses and I eventually get “well, no one really knows what happened because there were so many sources that conflict”. We don’t know what their wisdom was, but we’re sure it was wise because they were the founders!
Part of that relates to the way we accept certain things learned in civics and history class as fact. We trust our teachers had the truth as a goal in teaching, so asking people to reject the EC is asking them to not just reject the tradition/authority of the founders, but of our teachers and maybe parents too.
The thing that is so interesting to me now is how many other sacred values conflict with the EC and how strong people will defend the tradition value. In particular there is violation of “one person, one vote” and equal protection under the law (because the swing states get more federal grants and exemptions from regulation than non-swing states). Finally, when we split the EC/popular vote, it threatens the bedrock principle of consent of the governed, from which the new administration derives legitimacy.
The final argument people will fall back to is “but we’re not a democracy, we’re a republic”. There are few legal definitions of what republic actually means, but the Supreme Court has ruled that the equal rights of citizens are intrinsic to the idea. Whether we call ourselves a representative republic or liberal democracy, the underlying principle of consent of the governed really matters and is really what gives government legitimacy.
Is it ok if you have consent of say, half of the governed?
There’s certainly potential for civil unrest anytime the election is very close. The EC creates a scenario where people have a legitimate reason to feel that the majority of the population doesn’t support the new administration and therefore lacks legitimacy.
There’s an active change.org petition with 4.5 million signatures calling on the EC to reflect the popular vote. I have to imagine that given the rhetoric of ‘rigged elections’ and tenor of Trump’s rallies, the opposition wouldn’t have been content to just start petitions if the split had gone the other way.
So I support the compact, even if it means Trump becomes a two-term president because the split goes the other way next time. I feel like we’ve dodged a bullet for now: the loss of the demagogue who has previously suggested Second Amendment remedies to losing.
It’s hard to imagine Trump making it through his first year without being impeached. Establishment Republicans would much rather have Pence, who more predictably would give them 100% of what they want. Perhaps Trump will too though. Time will tell. Trump was so inconsistent with himself during the campaign that his actions, once elected, could go in almost any direction.
I am happy to bet $90 against your $10 that Trump will not be impeached in his first year.
I’ll take the same bet as sflicht please.
Oh, you just need consent from a majority. I see.
I’d like an unambiguous winner. It’s always possible that is going to come down to one single vote. If you have a better solution for resolving the ambiguity created by splits, I’m open to considering what they are.
If I could design a solution from scratch, we’d keep the EC but take the splits as evidence of a special mandate to share power. The person winning popular vote is President, and the EC winner is VP. They have a special mandate to govern together and to work out the differences as publicly as possible between their platforms.
As an interim solution, the National Popular Vote contract fixes the ambiguity problem.
Beware the perfect solution fallacy.
The original constitution had a system that could (would nearly always) throw political opponents together as President and VP, though the mechanics were different. The results were so unedifying that they passed the Twelfth Amendment to make sure that it wouldn’t happen again. I’m at least skeptical that reviving the situation would be useful.
But what if a popular-vote election comes down to {however many ballots from Chicago cemeteries} v. {however many ballots from Texas cow pastures}? One big advantage of the Electoral College is that it localizes disputes: we know Illinois will go Democratic, we know Texas will go Republican, conjuring up more ballots in either one of those places doesn’t matter, and the election will be decided by places where both parties have poll-watchers staring at each other for months before the election.
I saw a version of this argument recently, namely that without the Electoral College, states entirely controlled by one party would seek to suppress opposite-party voters in their state, but I wasn’t impressed- in other words, the only reason such vote suppression isn’t happening now is because their vote doesn’t matter in the slightest. That doesn’t seem to be something to be proud of.
I was being too subtle (this is not itself a subtle dig at you).
I was taking an opportunity to ride my anarchist hobby horse and point out that having consent of a majority is not the same as having everyone’s consent. If every last one of my neighbors decided I should paint my house pink, well they can go fuck themselves – merely being in the majority doesn’t make their decision legitimate, and it doesn’t grant them any right to tell me what to do. I concede they may have the ability to force me, but that’s not legitimate or moral.
The idea of the social contract is garbage. I wish that we would apply the same standards of consent to government as we do to sexual activity in universities.
@ Mike
If I could design a solution from scratch, we’d keep the EC but take the splits as evidence of a special mandate to share power.
Not the share power mandate, but whenever the EC and the national popular vote disagree — I think there should be a mandated time out with recounts, inspections of the equipment, etc. All this without the current pressure for a conclusion/concession before, say, Jan 1. (While, as Bill Clinton put it in 2000, the current president still has ~60 days to quack.)
If EC and popular vote still don’t agree, then I think the Founders would lean toward favoring the popular vote. In 2000 there were various ideas, all of which when looked up in the Constitutional literature, turned out to send deciding power to whichever authority had been most recently elected (the House, not the Senate, etc).
For changing the system, I think the simplest thing would be to give the more populous states a few more Electors.
Wait, what? The two concepts are completely unrelated to each other. There’s no reason to think that Hillary running up her vote total in California somehow implies that Trump winning Michigan was due to vote fraud.
If the Founders had really preferred the popular vote then they could have just had the President chosen by popular vote, and cut out the middleman. I mean, they did write the Constitution themselves, after all.
I know nothing about the Electoral College but I’m seeing a lot of bad argument; that is, people demanding that it be abolished because the popular vote should be all that counts.
Why I think it’s a bad argument is that “majority rules should be the deciding factor” is coming from the same segment of people who otherwise think that a 5% minority should have their wishes or demands given status even if 95% of the rest of the country disagreed with them. I saw someone responding to an objection that that would mean a handful of big cities would decide everything and nobody else would have a say with “yes, that’s what population densities means, big cities are where the most people live!”
But they’d never accept that argument for, say, “there are only three trans people living in this town/three hundred in the entire state, so the ‘bathrooms are only for your biological gender’ rule stands” or for any other case where a minority was asking for consideration. So it’s not being argued on grounds of “I always thought the Electoral College was a bad idea”, it’s being argued on grounds of “We would have won if this method instead of that method had been used!”
And like the saying goes, hard cases make bad laws. There’s nothing to stop some of those big cities turning from blue to red (as they turned from red to blue) in the future, because it is not an immutable law of nature that progressivism is the arc of evolution, and then what do you do for a voice to represent you when you’ve argued that majority rules, Big City gets to wag the dog, and you are living somewhere that doesn’t count?
If the Electoral College needs to be reformed or abolished, go right ahead. But I wish people would think about it and not just react in terms of “We would have won, and we would keep on winning for the future forever, if it weren’t for the Electoral College!”
The electoral college does not neccessarily benefit Republicans – in 2012 (and 2004 IIRC), it benefitted Democrats (though in both cases, the popular vote margin was large enough that it didn’t matter).
Leading up to November 2000, there were serious thoughts that Bush would win the popular and Gore would win the EC. (The opposite happened.)
This is a really bizarrely terrible contribution to the conversation. Thanks.
There have been four elections (1876, 1888, 2000, 2016) where the Electoral College didn’t go to the popular vote winner, and in all four of them the Republican won the EC.
But, BBA, remember that “Republican” meant something quite different back in the 1800’s.
I’ve never seen anyone propose that transgendered people get three times as many votes as non-transgendered people, but people live in Wyoming get four times the electoral college representation I do.
Disproportionate political power is a method of protecting only one particular kind of minority. Unless someone can explain why that particular kind of minority needs that particular kind of protection, but every other type of minority can be protected by some other method, than this argument just looks like special pleading.
It’s not just special pleading. It’s special pleading which has been explicitly packaged as a criticism of other special pleading, albeit from the outgroup. Which is more than a little frustrating.
“Unless someone can explain why that particular kind of minority needs that particular kind of protection”
Because it was explicitly promised them as a condition of agreeing to join the union?
Getting Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Delaware, and Georgia on board should eliminate that concern. Those states are the relevant “them” that could have been made the relevant promise.
Also, it is a bit puzzling that we’d be deeply concerned with respecting the promises that were made to Rhode Island in order to get them to ratify the Constitution when that ratification was not voluntary in the first place.
Politics is tribal. Whether the EC is good or not depends on whether it made your candidate win or not. You start with that and then construct rational arguments to defend the position you took, based on the outcome for your candidate
Trump now praises Electoral College, says he could have won popular vote
http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/15/politics/donald-trump-popular-vote-tweet/.
“President-elect Donald Trump is now praising the Electoral College after previously criticizing the system…”
You’re totally right. The only way to find the people who seriously disagree with the electoral college is to look for the people protesting it before the election.
For people who are primarily dissatisfied with the outcome of this last election, the EC is much better to keep and use as a Hail Mary play. Their best arguments are how the founders viewed the EC as a check to keep a dangerous and unqualified man from becoming President.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/the-electoral-college-was-meant-to-stop-men-like-trump-from-being-president/508310/
If the EC was used in this way, what do you think the result would be?
It would almost certainly lead to the next civil war. I don’t know what that looks like in particular, and would rather not find out. The fact so many people are contemplating it now should be cause for serious concern. Splits do undermine acceptance of legitimacy in just this way.
Yep, the casual talk on the left about using the EC to overturn the election results (even Peter Beinart wrote a column in favor!?) scares me a lot more than Donald Trump does. I really don’t think they understand the forces they’re messing with.
I commented on a reddit thread to that effect, and was confidently informed that the Army would take care of the problem if the “rednecks” got pissed. Like… who do you think the Army voted for?
The article isn’t wrong in the title, at least if you believe Hamilton. Though I think it can arguably be said to be meant to stop people like Hillary Clinton as well; where Trump used the “little arts of popularity”, Clinton certainly used “talents for low intrigue”. Certainly neither candidate could be said to be “pre-eminent for ability and virtue”. But the electoral college hasn’t ever actually played the role Hamilton claimed for it, as far as I know.
If the elector count were much closer, one could conceive of a few faithless electors swinging the election or (more likely) throwing it to the House. But Trump has at least 290 electors; 20 faithless electors isn’t likely to happen. And Trump’s electors certainly aren’t going to vote for Hillary, so a successful campaign would almost certainly throw the election to the House, which would then choose between Trump and the #2 Republican. Who would most likely be Evan McMullin, and I can’t imagine Trump-haters really wanting that; he’s a lot more conservative than Trump.
Ehhhh, Unless and until members of congress and/or the DNC/RNC start trying to apply pressure for blanket elector faithlessness (and I am aware of exactly zero) , I wouldn’t be too terribly concerned. It’s easy for talking heads to make those sorts of calls because they don’t actually have any responsibilities or duties involved in maintaining good government and the rule of law beyond whatever they consider to be their set of journalistic ethics. It’s mostly signaling.
Hell, I don’t think we can even draw any conclusions or make any critiques of the stance of the 4.x million petition signers, since that would require them to have given enough thought to the issue beyond “Trump bad! No Trump President!! Stop Trump!”, and regurgitating the talking points of the aforementioned talking heads.
“I re-read the Toxoplasma of Rage this week and I think there are opportunities to expand on it now. The parasitic meme seems to have morphed. It’s like the nation is playing a version of rock-paper-scissors, except with fear-anger-shame. The rules for winning depend on which group you’re in and that makes a new kind of replicator. Look at the Pence/Hamilton/Trump confrontation yesterday for an example. The basic question is “whose feelings matter most” and it rests on an assumption that other people are responsible for them. Every assertion that “my feelings matter more” is a demand for the other side to concede their wrongness and apologize to make amends. Since all feelings are valid (to the degree they exist for some reason and won’t disappear on their own), there’s no unilateral winning possible which is what both sides demand.”
Very interesting idea, Mike. If we end up with an authoritarian government, that muzzles the press so that it can’t be safely criticized, there certainly will not be any question of whose feelings matter most– at least in the legal arena.
Legitimacy doesn’t come from consent of the governed. No one explicitly consented to the government except for the signers of the constitution and immigrants. And our standards for “tacit consent” wouldn’t be considered legitimate in other circumstances.
More democracy isn’t always better. That’s why the Supreme Court is set up the way it is.
Wrongspecies already covered most of my point, but to that I’d add that I think the beneficial effects (if any, and I’m dubious) of ditching the EC would be lost in the overall negative effect of our current combination of a straight plurality vote with the major parties doing their best to keep a stranglehold on ballot access.
Honestly, I think that any attempts at electoral reform that aren’t rather more drastic and involve entirely different voting methods are arguing over the best color to paint your car with the smoking engine and the four flat tires.
Maine just implemented ranked choice voting and I am hopeful it will change their state politics for the better. I do believe that a lot of our political dysfunction is related to first past the post voting systems. The primary reason I support the popular vote compact first is that it’s low-hanging fruit and represents the easiest win to mobilize support for more drastic changes.
I had not heard that, that’s heartening.
I doubt it will work, but I am glad that someone is experimenting. Please prove me wrong.
My concern with ranked choice is that it will lead to even more negative campaigning/slandering/fake news problems than before.
Does it not increase the incentive to spend more of your time attacking your opponent and vilifying them as literally Hitler than the current system?
I don’t see where you’re getting that conclusion from – do you mean that Ann Republican will try to vilify Bess Democrat to try to get people to rank Bess below the half-dozen minor parties in the race? That wouldn’t give Ann any advantage until the minor parties actually have a chance of winning – and then, it’d give Ann an advantage even under the current voting system.
I don’t think that’s been any more true of the countries that use a form of ranked preference voting over those using a plurality vote method.
Deiseach, Ireland uses IRV and STV, right? Any comments?
Any Australians in the audience?
As far as I can tell, the Irish system (yeah, we use IRV for single-seat elections and STV for multi-seat elections) reduces “silly” outcomes, and generally fails more gracefully.
It’s mildly useful for preventing situations like the one currently going on in the US, where the system produces an unintuitive result (majority picks one choice, result is another) and you can end up with a small fraction of the country basically choosing your candidate. This helps make the new government feel more legitimate, which is good.
What it doesn’t do is magically fix the problems with political parties. Our parties are all terrible and largely indistinguishable, producing largely identical corrupt politicians with identical policies. Same as in the US.
If anything, ours are even lazier with their lies, and put up even less of a half-hearted pretence at trying to follow through on them.
“do you mean that Ann Republican will try to vilify Bess Democrat to try to get people to rank Bess below the half-dozen minor parties in the race?”
This is exactly what I mean – but perhaps I misunderstand how the system works. I’ve been assuming it’s something like “first place gets 3 points, second place gets 2 points, third place gets 1 point, etc”
In that case, let’s say all the Ds vote Hillary 1, Johnson 2, Trump 3 – but a whole lot of Rs vote Trump 1, Hillary 2, Johnson 3. If D and R votes are exactly even, Hillary wins this election in a landslide does she not?
While it’s true that in the current system third parties have very little influence, you STILL have some motivation to make a positive statement about yourself. An anti-Trump ad does run the (albeit very minor) risk that someone seeing it might be persuaded to vote not for Hillary, but for Johnson or Mcmuffin or whoever.
In the ranked choice system, convincing someone to move Trump down from 2 to 3 is just as valuable as convincing someone to more Hillary from 2 to 1, is it not?
One more thought – if there were enough minor parties, if the D/R hated was that bad, and if there was one key third party of strength, would it not dramatically increase their likelihood of winning?
Like, if half the country votes Hillary 1, Johnson 2, Trump 15 and the other half votes Trump 1, Johnson 2, Hillary 15, then Johnson wins without getting a single first place vote, right?
@Matt M
That is not how most good ranked choice systems work. I believe the Maine vote put forward a flavor of instant runoff which works like so.
If votes are EXACTLY even:
Neither Hillary or Trump win round 1, and so the last place candidate is dropped. This assumes there is not a perfect vote tie (which is crazy unlikely), but let’s say 50/50 on whether DemTrump or RepJohnson is last. If DemTrump is last, then DemTrump votes go to Johnson, and if he has enough(>50%) votes he wins. If RepJohnson looses, all RepJohnson votes go to Hillary, which still might not be enough for her to beat Trump if we assume that vote counts for 3. are very small. This repeats until a candidate has more than 50% of the vote.
Here is a video explaining instant runoff.
I personally like the Schulze method
Simulator, Wiki
Note: This system might actually be pretty bad because almost nobody would understand it, and that could reduce turnout.
VivaLaPanda covered IRV pretty well. There are different ways of running the “runoff” part where the lower ranked preferences are eliminated and their votes re-apportioned, and if you want to you can even set the threshold higher than 50%. However, you’ll notice that in IRV, there are a lot of situations where it would resolve almost exactly like plurality/first-past-the-post, which is one of the reasons I’d go with a Condorcet method.
Shulze, which VLP mentioned, is one such method, but there are a bunch. Basically, a Condorcet voting method for a single-seat election is a method that satisfies the criterion of:
-The Winner of the Election is the candidate who would be most preferred by the most people in all possible combinations of one-on-one elections.
EDIT: IRV will not generally select a winner “Without a single first place vote” unless there’s some wacky variant I’m not aware of. A Condorcet method absolutely will. I consider that a feature, not a bug.
It’s pretty much the textbook definition of “compromise”, and compromise (as little as I tend to like it) is one of those tactics that’s good for the civic and political health of a democracy.
Never you worry. All those people who couldn’t figure out the butterfly ballot in Florida are going to do just fine with ranked-choice voting.
I have seen really, really smart people find breathtaking ways to screw up ranked ballots.
Yeah, I mean, if the proponents of it here on a forum full of generally smart people can’t clearly articulate exactly how it works, what chance does Joe the Plumber have?
VivaLaPanda already posted a link to the CGP Grey video of a pretty clear explanation of how it works.
If Joe Plumber is already familiar with runoff voting (which is used in some places), it’s really not that hard to extrapolate to IRV. Just have “1) Who do you most want to be [position]?” and “2) In the event of a runoff, so we don’t have to drag your ass back in here, just tell us now who would be your second pick for [position]?” Ideally there’s be a phrasing that’s easier to scale up to 3rd, 4th, nth choice, but that’s my 5-minute wordsmithing.
You could always just tell people “Take all these candidates and rank them in order from most to least favorite.” Our current ballots (at least in my area) don’t write on them “whoever gets the most votes wins” or explain the Electoral College in presidential elections, that’s on basic civics class and cultural knowledge. (or if they do write it, not somewhere that actually gets read)
A ranked preference ballot is pretty straightforward:
“Here is a list of candidates. Put a 1 next to your first choice for the office, a 2 next to your second choice, and so on. If you don’t like the candidate at all, don’t put a number next to their name”
Alter wording accordingly for scantron ballots where you mark the bubbles for 1st through Nth place.
At the risk of being declared a closet authoritarian, anyone who can’t handle that, with election volunteers on-hand to help explain and demonstrate, is not someone whose vote I’m going to miss.
Ranked preference voting is wonderful for those who enjoy creating complex spreadsheets of potential outcomes, (which is why I suspect that it is so popular on SSC) but it’s pretty damn terrible as far as producing a clear and intuitive result is concerned.
In this regard ranked preference is obviously inferior to both majority and approval voting which can be both be summed up in 3 words “Most votes wins”.
True, but the clear and intuitive system inevitably leads to the two-party strategic voting trap we’re currently stuck in. IRV isn’t too horrid compared some other alternative methods since it can be (perhaps over-)simplified as “Most votes wins, unless no one gets >50%”. It has the unfortunate problem of being way more easily understood via diagrams than paragraphs. I feel like if people can understand the EC, they should be able to pick up IRV once it’s explained.
I’d be curious to hear from someone across the pond whether Jacques Schmoenzollern from Podunk, Europe actually has trouble with understanding their systems. And if so, if it’s in a meaningful way that impacts their voting behavior.
Is it any harder to explain than the details of the EC which the media ends needing to do every four years? It too can’t be summed up by “most votes wins”.
What’s wrong with a mixed PR system? Still “pick your favourite”, has local representation, gives some proportional representation without full-on wackiness…
My beef with PR is that you vote for parties instead of individual representatives. Party machinery has entirely too much power as it is. But PR is definitely better than FPTP.
Am I remembering correctly that PR, as implemented, also limits you to one choice? Does that not lead to similar strategic voting shenanigans?
Mixed PR systems let you vote for a local representative, though, which helps solve one of the problems of the full PR system, which is that there’s a party list.
PR has strategic voting, and mixed PR has more, but a lot less than a system like legislature-based FPTP like the UK or Canada has (where it often comes down to whether the right or left is more united).
You’re going to see strategic voting regardless, as such the question ought to be how accessible are these strategies to a layman.
Someone, I want to say it was John Schilling, posted a detailed numerical analysis of “strategic voting” for a bunch of different electoral systems about 6 months back and I kind of wish I’d saved the link.
Yes, very much so.
The EC is quite simple in practice. X state is worth Y points, the candidate with highest score wins.
Ah, nice. Thanks dndnrsn. That does sound reasonably solid. I’d still prefer IRV, but have more respect for PR now.
Does mixed PR get a bad rap for being difficult for the average voter to understand? That seems to be the biggest objection to non-FPTP systems and I’m interested if it actually plays out that way in reality.
ETA: @hlynkacg, There’s a wiki article on it, though it’s not especially numeric. I’m unconvinced that “push-over” actually applies to IRV (since separate “rounds” don’t work the same way as in a standard runoff/primary system), so I’d be interested in what the tactical risks that analysis presented are.
Might be I’ve had too much kool-aid, but I feel like IRV (at least as implemented like the CGP Grey video) nicely (though not entirely) mitigates lesser-of-two-evils without opening up new doors to strategic voting.
I find something like the condorcet criterion plenty intuitive, and in fact somewhat similar to utilitarian calculations: The candidate most positively thought of by the most people.
It works directly against the polarization created by a winner-take-all approach to politics because it favors building a consensus on shared principles.
I’m not at all sure that “Clarity” in the sense of “so simple you can sum it up in one sentence” has much value. We have systems in place to allow for election results to be audited for a reason.
EDIT: as far as comparison of voting systems, there are quite a few you can look at online. There’s no such thing as a clear “best” to-date, because every system is vulnerable to SOME form of tactical voting, and because every system fails on SOME measure. Which one you prefer will depend on which measures you consider most important.
The German system causes a bit of confusion with regard to the “first vote, second vote” system, and according to Wikipedia “Half of the Bundestag is then filled with candidates that won their electoral districts by the first votes and the other half by candidates from the party lists according roughly to the proportion the parties receive from the second votes according to a complex mathematical formula.”
So, a little bit complicated. But not in a way that causes confusion to people actually voting when they vote, as ranked-ballot systems can do. The system is a bit hard to understand, but the picture of the ballot on Wikipedia is simpler than some FPTP ballots I’ve seen.
FPTP’s advantage is simplicity – which is why it’s the first system to exist. IRV is probably the best system overall, and I have no issues with it – but it tends to confuse people terribly. The German system seems to be the best overall as a system, and to have the best outcomes – you don’t get the “Republican in California” effect, you don’t get the wacky unstable coalition governments of pure PR, you don’t get one party winning 60% of the seats with 40% of the votes like in the UK or Canada.
hlynkacg: you have your first quote mislabeled.
Let me put in a vote for my preferred system–preferred on aesthetic grounds since I have no strong opinion on what versions of democracy produce the least bad results.
Every representative has a list of the people he represents. Every voter can change his representative any time he wants to, easy enough to manage with modern technology. Each representative casts a number of votes equal to the number of people on his list.
Any representative with more than 500,000 names on his list gets an actual seat in the House from which to make speeches, propose bills, etc. Any group of representatives with a total of at least 500,000 names among them get a seat, which they can take turns occupying.
An amusing toy system, though that last part about sharing a seat sounds like it would lead to disaster pretty quickly. Maybe file it under Futarchy (or Futarchy-like), since it would require a pretty robust technological architecture to support the constant switching.
Would you have any rules as to quorum? If, say, everyone “votes” for themselves, and refuses to share, then no one is qualified to a seat.
“though that last part about sharing a seat sounds like it would lead to disaster pretty quickly. ”
Why? Three representatives with 200,000 votes each agree to share a seat on some regular rotation, with an understanding that if something is up of particular importance to one of them the one scheduled for the seat will trade with him. If the three find they can’t get along, one of them leaves and finds another group willing to have him.
Quorum is presumably defined by number of votes present, not number of bodies present.
Regarding the difficulty in understanding IRV:
I think that a key question here is to what extent we are willing to tolerate a voting system which is more of a black box to the average voter. Something like Shulze is a great method, but it will never be more than a black box to voters besides those with a strong interest in elections and in mathematics. Regarding IRV, I think it is fairly easy to understand, and that the benefits it creates far outweigh the possible consequences. There is very tentative evidence that more complex voting systems negatively effect turnout, and until we see more clear results (hopefully from Maine next election), I think we should go with a system that targets negative campaigning and partisanship rather than worrying about hypothetical microscopic changes in election turnout, at least until we see more evidence that either IRV doesn’t improve elections, or that it reduces turnout.
What about the charge that the ranking is confusing? I would not think that it is, but I once was involved in counting ballots for a college election where the average intelligence would, I predict, be quite a bit higher than the general public – and a lot of people seemed baffled by the system. A lot of spoiled ballots, a lot of people just checking off their #1 choice, thus defeating the system.
In somewhere like the US, where elections are handled irregularly by local partisans, I can see IRV being a total disaster.
From your Cardozo Law Review Article:
Records of the Federal Convention
“He had always thought and contended as he still did that the danger apprehended by the little States was chimerical, but those who thought otherwise ought to be peculiarly anxious for the motion. If the Executive be appointed, as has been determined, by the Legislature […]. In either case the large states will preponderate. If he is to court the same influence for his re-appointment, will he make his revisionary power. and all the other functions of his administation subservient to the views of the large States.”
So, you can pitch that article into the dustbin for which dishonest research is justly consigned. It is certainly true that the considerations of the slave states (in this case, preserving the value of the 3/5ths compromise for both legislature and executive) were part of it, and appears to have been the final consideration. (see page 57). But to say this was the only consideration is nonsense.
The link you posted in support has this money quote:
“Mr. Williamson, conceived that there was the same difference
between an election in this case, by the people and by the
legislature, as between an appt. by lot, and by choice. There are
at present distinguished characters, who are known perhaps to
almost every man. This will not always be the case. The people
will be sure to vote for some man in their own State, and the
largest State will be sure to succede. This will not be Virga.
however. Her slaves will have no suffrage.”
Read that over once again: they were worried that the largest state would vote for their person and win, and ALSO that it wouldn’t be their state that would win, because slaves wouldn’t have suffrage. Don’t you think that means all the other states had similar fears? The very fact that he’s treating it as possible for his single state to dominate the national executive sort of proves the point of the electoral college already.
But yes; if the South wasn’t given certain considerations, they would be in a pickle. And then they’d secede. For god’s sakes, California is threatening to secede despite having the most electoral votes of any state. Can you imagine how often states would be leaving without the electoral college? At the very least, we wouldn’t be a very united country. So no, it’s not a bullshit system; it is a means to stop the country from tearing itself apart. True, it had a ton to do with slaves, but that’s the point; if the slave states didn’t have enough representation to get any of their guys in, even if they were founding fathers and principled people like Jefferson, then what’s in it for them to join a Union at all?
“it is a means to stop the country from tearing itself apart.”
As if it’s not doing that already.
It’s not. Not in the literal war-between-the-States sense they meant at the time. There’s no serious consideration of secession, and rioting by a few special snowflakes in Portland don’t cut it.
>An alternative to that was to have the state legislatures elect the president.
that in no way would have reduced the power of the slave owning states. They would have still gotten worth 3/5s of the number of slaves they had in the house, and thus just as much power over the selection of the president as they do with the EC. And given that the small states were mostly in the north, if anything, it was the soon to be anti-slave states (IIRC, none had yet banned slavery at the time of the constitutional convention) that benefited most from giving the small states more votes.
I was reading into the history of the Supreme Court and Supreme Court justices on Friday and stumbled upon something I found intriguing. I had always assumed that Supreme Court Justices are almost always chosen from a group of judges on the lower courts. (With Taft being one of the few notable exceptions to that rule.) Instead I found that though a majority of the Supreme Court Justices had been judges on lower courts before their appointment, there have been quite a few Governors and Senators appointed to the court in the past.
The governors being the sixth Chief Justice of the Court, Salmon P. Chase and the fourteenth Chief Justice of the Court, Earl Warren.
Quite a few Senators have historically served on the Supreme Court. For a full list see here.
The last time a governer or senator was appointed to the court was in the mid twentieth century. 1949 being the year when the last senator was appointed and 1953 when Earl Warren was appointed.
I was wondering why this practice ended and why they both came to a close around the same time period. It is fascinating how something that happened at least once a decade in the first half of the 20th century (the appointing of Senators to the SC) and quite often in the 19th, came to an abrupt end in the second half of the 20th continued into the 21st.
I was also thinking, Trump is most likely (With the assumption being that nothing is guaranteed with Trump) going to pick a candidate from the list he put out a few months ago to fill Scalia’s seat. In the chance he does get the opportunity to appoint another one, how probable is it that he chooses someone without any prior experience being a judge?
At some point Trump is going to start running into problems with the judiciary as he tries to implement some of his policies. I don’t see an attempt to register Muslims, for instance, surviving a 1st Amendment check. One of the questions that I have is what Trump will do when one of his stated policy goals gets negated by a sitting judge on constitutional grounds. This has always been one of the tender points in the checks and balances system. It’s traditional for presidents to accept the rulings of the courts, but that isn’t universal (Andrew Jackson famously ignored the Supreme Court, I’m not sure how often that sort of thing happens). Most of the power of the judicial branch to restrain the president is normative, and Trump is really neither versed in those norms nor particularly keen on being told what to do by people in magisterial robes.
I mainly worry about this because people may be a little overconfident in the ability of the courts to restrain Trump if he goes off the deep end. It’s not likely that the current Congress is going to slow Trump down much. The general public does not appear to be well versed in actual historical trends in constitutional law. I don’t actually know, for example, if there would even be a general public outcry if Trump had Alec Baldwin thrown in jail his first day in office on trumped up charges. Everyone is so entrenched in their partisan spaces that objective cases of abuse are likely to get litigated by the public in the usual way-completely fecklessly and with no acknowledgement that there really are some universal conditions for outrage that everyone on the left and right should worry about.
At any rate, it wouldn’t surprise me that if Trump gets stymied too often by the courts, he might try to steamroll them not just by ignoring, but completely reshaping them. This is where we get to your question. If Trump or one of his advisors catches on, given what we know about Trump’s litigious nature, he isn’t going to want constitutionally educated judges on the court. They aren’t going to sign up to give the president the power to silence media organs and punish impression comics. He would definitely have to find picks elsewhere.
This is where what we’re really counting on is the fact that changes to the judiciary take a really long time. Trump could get lucky and get three appointees in the next four years. It still wouldn’t be enough to make a mockery of constitutional law even if he could get everyone he wanted (unlikely). It’s also not clear how successful Trump is likely to be to even find the kind of people he would need for that kind of thing in the first place. His surrogates don’t look like they’ve got the moxie for that kind of thing.
But I think people should pay attention to what happens with the courts. It’ll be a more clear indication of just how dangerous Trump is going to be than his cabinet picks.
If you count FDR’s court-packing bill that caused Owen Roberts to switch his vote on substantive due process, it’s probably about once every century, and we’re due.
Court packing is the thing I’m most afraid of.
The legal industry has dramatically changed. As late as 1900, law schools had not yet established a stranglehold on admission to the profession much less had the currently rigidly enforced hierarchy of law schools come into existence.
Since at least the post-war period the legal profession is one of, if not the most, credential obsessed field in the entire country. The judiciary is a just a reflection of what is going on at all levels of the legal field.
Although I am very much not a Trump supporter, in this one area, I was very pleased to see that his list was made up of people that had not all gone to Yale or Harvard law, clerked for a court of appeals judge and then a Supreme Court justice, worked in either biglaw / department of justice / or a prestigious law school, then been appointed to either a federal district court or the court of appeals.
>I was wondering why this practice ended and why they both came to a close around the same time period
I can’t prove it, but I blame a cultural shift brought about by the end of the spoils system combined with the massive expansion of law under the new deal. The civil service was set up in the late 19th century, but it didn’t apply all at once. Each part of the government had to be converted, and it took until the 1930s or so for that to happen.
Second, here’s an important new deal law It’s a dozen pages or so. Modern law, largely brought about as a consequence of the new deal, is far more voluminous.
The first of these created a cultural bias against such appointments, which used to be common in all levels and branches of government. The second meant that becoming “learned in the law” was no longer a side job, but a full time gig.
I recommend listening to the podcast miniseries More Perfect. It covers the early history of the supreme court, as well as landmark cases historically and more recently. It has a bit of a liberal bent, but it’s still informative for either team.
One big thing they talk about is that not only did the Supreme Court have less power before Marbury v. Madison, but they also were less focused on having the trappings of power.
The Supreme Court is on of my favorite examples in my own life of the more general principles expressed by Scott several times regarding when to use power badly to achieve good goals. I think the Supreme court is often too political, but I also generally like the ways it has used it’s powers so far. It’s a difficult question as to where the line is and should be.
It’s almost impossible to get to the previous open thread, so here is an observation and also a question I asked there, that won’t get answered there, so am transferring it over to here.
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 feedbback except clicks. Because media is a business that makes money, or even if it’s a non-profit, its goal is clicks and readership. 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.
For reference, it’s linked in the sidebar from any post (under ‘Recent Posts’), and the full list can be reached by clicking the “and tagged open” at the bottom of any open thread.
Thanks, Bokkot.
“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.”
Certainly a defensible claim, possibly true.
Have you ever seriously considered the possibility that it applies to you as well as to others? I think many here, myself included, see you as a reasonably nice person living in a fantasy supported by a heavily filtered information stream–a fantasy that provides you “tribal superiority feelings.”
Our host is on record that he kinda was.
(see sections III of each)
Question:
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 this quote from a critic 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, and then went on to explain why he does this.
Anyone remember the title of that post? Thanks.
If the quote you remember is this one …
… then the post you want is this one.
It is one I go back to every now and then to remind me what life is for.
Thanks very much, phisheep. That’s exactly the article I was looking for.
Scott sure is a prolific and thoughtful writer. I often think of one of his posts in relation to some issue or another. Agree with him or not– or like me, agree with him sometimes and disagree at other times– but his posts are always worth reading and reflecting on. And, when I disagree, it’s always worth thinking about exactly why and how I disagree.
I find I agree with Scott *a lot*, especially when I’ve just read something he has posted. Then I always get a sort of mental double-take because Scott has deconstructed thing X which has been persuasively argued for elsewhere, which makes me suspicious about smooth persuasive argument, which makes me suspicious of a smoothly persuasive guy like Scott …
Of course, by the time I have disentangled all that, there are about 435 comments and Friedman has persuasively said something weird about archery or fly-fishing and I forget what I was going to say.
Reading here reminds me of the sort of intellectual kicking I used to get in philosophy tutorials way back when.
LOL, yes, it is certainly intellectually stimulating.
Scott has, of course, written on this as well.
Ted, yes, thanks, that is one of my favorites also.
Why do people believe that the Irish were ever considered “not white”? Does it all come down to the book How the Irish Became White?
I finally thought to look at that book and it doesn’t make that claim. It doesn’t care about what the Irish were called. It is about being white in in the eyes of the author. It isn’t about 19th century definitions of white, but about the 21st century definition: white/non-white meaning oppressor/oppressed.
“By George, I think you’ve gawt it” as someone says in the British movie My Fair Lady. The concept of the Irish as non-white does conflate “oppressed” with “non-white.” Both ideas are minority group type concepts.
The idea seems to be that, in order to keep groups of people in indentured servitude or other very oppressive conditions, you have to think that they are inferior to your more typical person. And if the oppressed group is a racial group, then one conclusion one might draw from that, is that that racial group must be considered inferior to your typical person who is “white.”
Of course, it’s rather dumb in the case of the Irish, because they are obviously white.
But race is sort of a bs term anyway.
The myth of race, debunked in 3 minutes
http://www.vox.com/2015/1/13/7536655/race-myth-debunked
No, it’s not a bad article, IMO. “Where your ancestors come from” geographically is not exactly the same as race or racial genetics. Many people who are of the same general race category came from all different places on the globe. And many geographic areas contain a multitude of people of different racial categories.
Where your ancestors come from is one thing. Genetically related aspects of race is a different thing. Of course, they overlap to some degree, but they are not the same.
Do you have an example of two populations that are genetically close but geographically distant, or vice versa?
It seems moderately dishonest to have made the snip where you did. The full quote is
It’s clear what they’re trying to say, and whatever the truth value of their claim, it’s clearly not what you’re trying to make them say.
I clipped because the example given (sickle cell) is genetic in origin, SES is not relevant. And in any case, race being a proxy for SES is hardly evidence against “race”. It’s the exact opposite.
What other term do you prefer, to encapsulate the measurable average differences in all sorts of traits between group X whose ancestors are mostly from A B and C, and group Y whose ancestors are mostly from D E and F?
From your link : “it’s really just using race as a proxy for other factors such as where your ancestors came from”.
So race is not real but where your ancestors were from is real.
Because the Irish were depicted as non-white? Similar to negroes?
See the famous Harper’s magazine pic, for instance. Also written descriptions of them as darkly completed, etc.
I don’t know about non-white, but I’ve seen enough anti-Irish cartoons that it seems some people considered them ethnically distinct from “normal” Americans. Interestingly, although the (prolifically anti-Irish) cartoonist Thomas Nast was very prejudiced against the Irish and Catholics, he was an advocate for black, Native and Chinese Americans (or so says Wikipedia).
From Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc. by Benjamin Franklin:
From The Races of Britain by John Beddoe.
John W. Jackson, The Race Question in Ireland:
Thanks for the Franklin quote!
Scott, a question: you stated in your anti-Trump post that the Trump victory might result in a huge boost to SJWs. But now i am actually seeing a lot of pushback to leftist identity politics (i am on phone but there are links on haidt’s and pinker’s twitter).
Do you still stand by that prediction?
(A) It’s been not even two weeks. Give it six months after he takes office and actually starts doing stuff.
(B) I would suggest that those Twitter feeds are not the best filter, as they will naturally highlight introspections that agree with their views.
Yeah, I’m (tentatively) encourage by how reflective the left has been since the election. There’s been a lot of doubling down, to be sure, but also a decent number of people who seem open to the idea that the left made some mistakes (and not just a strategic mistakes, but actual moral ones). I think pieces like that Vox article on smug liberalism might have set the stage for this kind of reconsideration.
It’s a fascinating time in general. A lot of people were shocked by the election result, and are now reaching out for narratives that can make sense of it all. I’ve never really been in a position to watch wholly new narratives be formed in real time, and I find the process…interesting. Like, if you kind of squint at it right, the whole thing almost looks like the ideal of a free marketplace of ideas – people are posting various articles and counter-articles that purport to explain what happened, the articles are being discussed in break rooms and dinner parties (and on facebook) around the world, and various consensuses are being reached. The problem, of course, and the thing that makes the whole dynamic at best only a funhouse mirror version of the marketplace of ideas, is that “corresponds to reality” is only one of the criteria people are using when they’re deciding on which narrative to buy into. The other criteria are things like “makes me look good to my friends” or “makes me seem contrarian” or any number of other status-related considerations.
But if I take anything positive from this election, it’s that reality correspondence is at least one of the things that people do consider when looking at narratives and explanations. Like, we wouldn’t be having this collective conversation if everyone were satisfied with their previous worldview, and the reason people aren’t satisfied with their previous worldview is that it didn’t predict Trump would win. I find this kind of encouraging. We may not be even close to being rational truth seekers, but truth is one thing we care about, and that might be enough to let our narratives tend towards truth in the long run.
Anyway, now I’m wondering if there’s a kind of “punctuated equilibrium” thing going on with societal narratives, where for the most part the dominant mainstream consensus opinion is capable of explaining pretty much anything that comes its way, and so no one needs to question it. But occasionally something big happens that it can’t explain, and so a completely new consensus opinion needs to be formed from scratch. If this is the case, what was the last big shock that required a reconsideration of the “standard mainstream consensus”? The housing crisis? 9/11?
It makes me wonder if there was a lot of dissent within SJ already, and the election result, just as it has emboldened anti-SJ people, gave pro-SJ people a way to coordinate voicing their dissent.
Relatedly, over on Ozy’s blog, there was recently an “Ideological Turing Test”, where pro and anti SJ people tried to fool the commentariat that they were a member of the opposite camp. The pro-SJ people won – they were better at pretending to be anti-SJ than anti-SJ people were at pretending to be pro-SJ.
Some in the comments speculated that this was because many pro-SJ people have legitimate dissenting opinions about SJ methods or views, that they were able to genuinely express when pretending to be anti-SJ, which made them more convincing.
This would be all too convenient for anti-SJ people like myself, so take it with a grain of salt, but I wonder whether it’s true nonetheless. It’s certainly my experience that talking to SJ people in private, they’ll express more reservations than in a public forum on the internet.
It didn’t hurt that pretty much every anti-SJ essay, real or not, was judged genuine.
Part of what you’re seeing is the diffusion of identity politics into the fabric of our discourse. In a way, the SJWs have won. I can’t remember who wrote it, but someone over on 538 pointed out that in this election, whites voted as a minority block would be expected to.
In the 20th century, politics was defined by economics. The cold war provided a platform for discussion and argument among lay people about economic policy.
Now, we’re all so narcissistic and introspective that the only thing any of us really know that much about is ourselves, and how we feel. This has laid the groundwork for identity politics. It started in SocJus, and it’s only getting worse from here.
We’re back to the Gilded Age. In the late 19th century, if you or your ancestors fought for the Union in the Civil War, you voted Republican. If they fought for the Confederacy or they weren’t in America yet, you voted Democratic. 120 years of ideological sortition and every major demographic except rural Northerners switching party allegiance, and we’re almost where we started with the colors reversed.
Well, we are mostly where fake Right Wing news has put us, including decades of constantly bashing the Clinton family.
“including decades of constantly bashing the Clinton family.”
I’m curious. Have you ever looked into the facts of Hillary’s cattle future speculation, back when Bill was governor?
She started with a thousand dollars, ended up with a hundred thousand, making bets in a market she had no expertise in. Her broker was also the broker for a high up person in Purdue Chicken, which had extensive operations in the state her husband was governor of.
The obvious explanation is that when a trade made money the broker assigned it to her, when it lost money to the Purdue person, thus transferring money from him to her as a concealed bribe.
I would be interested to know if you have an alternative explanation of why she went into that market and how she was so successful.
I should add that my view is based on the analysis of the evidence in an old article by a speculator, a Soros protoge´.
My wife points out that I misremembered one detail–it was Tyson Foods, not Purdue Chicken, that was the presumptive source of the bribe.
@ David Friedman
The last time we discussed this cattle futures charge against Hillary, Wikipedia had more material against the charge than for it. I’m not going back in that bramble patch of pickable cherries.
Bayesianish stuff is more fun. On the prosecution hand, Hillary’s profit is statistically rare but definitely non-zero.
On the defense hand, the credibility of those people acting as charged — is something below Disraeli giving Queen Victoria a cigar, and her smoking it. To safely bribe a Governor, you don’t involve anyone else in the scheme; don’t create even a small conspiracy. Don’t use anything that’s trackable, such as funds in an account. Don’t use a brokerage subject to investigation for other dodgy stuff. Above all, don’t create a news-worthy narrative — like the First Lady getting a rare profit.
Now look at it from the Clintons’ side. Would you accept a bribe delivered in such a foolish way?
Assuming I was looking for bribes, why not? So long as some plausible deniability exists, you can trust half the people to support you because you are on their side and many others to forget about it in time.
Doesn’t the incident being discussed show that avoiding even the appearance of corruption is a sucker’s game?
Only if you assume that it represents an incidence of corruption rather than a series of coincidences, which would be begging the question.
If it was not an incidence of corruption, then it highlights how important it is to avoid even the appearance of impropriety because even weird coincidences will be spun as corruption by half the electorate.
But half the electorate believing it is evidence of corruption didn’t prevent (or even hinder, afaik) Hillary Clinton from becoming First Lady, a Senator, and Secretary of State, and at most contributed a very small amount to her recent loss. Versus not having 10,000 or whatever cash to get the political career going.
“even weird coincidences will be spun as corruption by half the electorate.”
This is only true when the population is immersed in fake news. In that case, weird coincidences will be found whenever needed to spin a conspiracy theory around. Life is full of weird real or engineered coincidences. Imagine having an American citizen presidential candidate whose middle name happened to be the same as Saddam’s last name. Fake news creators used that fact to weave a birther conspiracy about his illegitimacy, and another one about his supposed sympathy with terrorist organizations and hatred of America.
It was not a coincidence that all of one presidential candidate’s emails were hacked, and none from the other side. But it certainly supplied lots of statements to distort and to weave the tapestries of fake news narratives around.
@ Randy M.
Versus not having 10,000 or whatever cash to get the political career going.
You can accept the briber’s cash by some safer delivery method. (And cheaper, too. The broker, his staff, and other conspirators would want a cut; and one of them could still expose the briber later.)
@ David Friedman
The obvious explanation is that when a trade made money the broker assigned it to her, when it lost money to the Purdue person, thus transferring money from him to her as a concealed bribe.
I would be interested to know if you have an alternative explanation of why she went into that market and how she was so successful.
Here is an example of that kind of reasoning. Perhaps it’s akin to ‘the God of the Gaps’.
Scott posted on the ‘crying wolf’ thread:
Suppose you’re talking to one of those ancient-Atlantean secrets-of-the-Pyramids people. They give you various pieces of evidence for their latest crazy theory, such as (and all of these are true):
1. The latitude of the Great Pyramid matches the speed of light in a vacuum to five decimal places.
2. Famous prophet Edgar Cayce, who predicted a lot of stuff with uncanny accuracy, said he had seen ancient Atlanteans building the Pyramid in a vision.
3. There are hieroglyphs near the pyramid that look a lot like pictures of helicopters.
4. In his dialogue Critias, Plato relayed a tradition of secret knowledge describing a 9,000-year-old Atlantean civilization.
5. The Egyptian pyramids look a lot like the Mesoamerican pyramids, and the Mesoamerican name for the ancient home of civilization is “Aztlan”
6. There’s an underwater road in the Caribbean, whose discovery Edgar Cayce predicted, and which he said was built by Atlantis
7. There are underwater pyramids near the island of Yonaguni.
8. The Sphinx has apparent signs of water erosion, which would mean it has to be more than 10,000 years old.
She asks you, the reasonable and well-educated supporter of the archaeological consensus, to explain these facts. After looking through the literature, you come up with the following:
1. This is just a weird coincidence.
2. Prophecies have so many degrees of freedom that anyone who gets even a little lucky can sound “uncannily accurate”, and this is probably just what happened with Cayce, so who cares what he thinks?
3. Lots of things look like helicopters, so whatever.
4. Plato was probably lying, or maybe speaking in metaphors.
5. There are only so many ways to build big stone things, and “pyramid” is a natural form. The “Atlantis/Atzlan” thing is probably a coincidence.
6. Those are probably just rocks in the shape of a road, and Edgar Cayce just got lucky.
7. Those are probably just rocks in the shape of pyramids. But if they do turn out to be real, that area was submerged pretty recently under the consensus understanding of geology, so they might also just be pyramids built by a perfectly normal non-Atlantean civilization.
8. We still don’t understand everything about erosion, and there could be some reason why an object less than 10,000 years old could have erosion patterns typical of older objects.
I want you to read those last eight points from the view of an Atlantis believer, and realize that they sound really weaselly. They’re all “Yeah, but that’s probably a coincidence”, and “Look, we don’t know exactly why this thing happened, but it’s probably not Atlantis, so shut up.”
Your argument above seems to assume that we cannot reject the Atlantis claim (cf that Hillary and her broker must have cheated) without giving some explanation more interesting than coincidence.
Or look at it this way, if Mitt Romney had made the same amount of money trading cattle futures, and it were being brought up during his run for president, would you Right Wingers assume that his trading had been somehow corrupt and fraudulent, even though there was absolutely no evidence that it was?
Yes, as it’s fairly blatant what happened.
It wouldn’t hurt, just for once, to try. To put in the effort.
Romney is probably not the best example to use for this. He was a reasonably successful businessman prior to entering politics, so him getting involved with a financial instrument (i.e. futures) and being successful at it is neither unexpected nor unusual.
I would propose you use McCain as the opposite of Hillary. In that case, yes, it would be unusual and a potential point of concern. Of course, I’m not entirely “right-wing.”
“Your argument above seems to assume that we cannot reject the Atlantis claim (cf that Hillary and her broker must have cheated) without giving some explanation more interesting than coincidence.”
The first question is why she went into the cattle futures market in the first place. She had no experience, I don’t think has any evidence before or after of being a compulsive gambler. Next the fact that she went into it with a broker who was violating the rules on trading and shortly thereafter got sanctioned for it. Next the fact that another customer of that broker was a high up person associated with the largest employer in the state her husband was attorney general of, was about to become governor of (elected shortly after she started trading). All of that would be substantial grounds for suspicion.
Suppose your prior is .1 corrupt, .9 compulsive gambler who somehow hid the fact before and after. She now makes a series of trades whose success is something like a one in a million chance. Add Bayes Theorem and shake.
The problem really has to do with the fake news systems of the Right Wing. If McCain had made the same amount of money trading cattle futures, the Left would never have brought it up. no one would even know about it..Because the Left is far far less into fake news, although I am sure there must be a few such media outlets.
The fake news formula is: Look at the Dem candidate for president. Assume that they are corrupt, criminal, evil, stupid, weak etc. Look at every single thing they have ever done or said in their life. If you don’t have enough material, get Russia to hack their emails.
After you look at every single thing they have ever done or said in their life, then spin a tapestry of distortions and lies around each thing they have done or said, that explains why each of those things proves that they are corrupt, criminal, evil, stupid, weak etc.
Obama, being a reserved and proper introverted individual really must have frustrated them by not trading cattle futures, having a foundation etc. They had to stoop to repeating his middle name over and over, since it was the same as Saddam’s last name. And then noticing that he spent some time as a child outside the U.S. and weaving that into a tale of him not even being born in the U.S. When he released his birth certificate, they had to come up with reasons why that still wasn’t good enough proof that he was born here.
But, luckily for the Right Wing fake news machines, most politicians are extroverts. And so most Dem politicians have engaged in a lot of activities– every single one of which is supposedly proof that they are corrupt, criminal, evil, stupid, weak etc., according the Right Wing fake news media empires.
@moon
>The problem really has to do with the fake news systems of the Right Wing. If McCain had made the same amount of money trading cattle futures, the Left would never have brought it up.
You mean the way they never brought accusations of trump’s shady business dealings?
>The fake news formula is: Look at the Dem candidate for president. Assume that they are corrupt, criminal, evil, stupid, weak etc.
And what about assuming republicans are racist, sexist haters? that’s just good journalism?
>After you look at every single thing they have ever done or said in their life, then spin a tapestry of distortions and lies around each thing they have done or said, that explains why each of those things proves that they are corrupt, criminal, evil, stupid, weak etc.
YOu mean like draggung up accusations against trump from ddecades ago, or how Romney being a bully in highschool proves he’s unfit for office?
>Obama, being a reserved and proper introverted individual really must have frustrated them by not trading cattle futures, having a foundation etc.
Introverts don’t trade cattle futures now? What on earth are you talking about
@Moon:
I gather you don’t actually have an alternative explanation of the evidence in the cattle trading case. Just a statement of faith.
@ David Friedman
Suppose your prior is .1 corrupt, .9 compulsive gambler who somehow hid the fact before and after. She now makes a series of trades whose success is something like a one in a million chance. Add Bayes Theorem and shake.
Heh. You have just taken the form of your own argument to absurdity. In both versions, you first set out your preferred conclusion X (corruption). In the first version you challenge someone else to suggest a Y that accounts for the few points of evidence you chose for supporting X (but I think an Atlantis-type deconstruction of those points would sound weaselly and boring). In the second version you provide your own Y, colorful but not realistic (gambling).
As I said above, the whole idea of Hillary using an investment brokerage to transfer bribes is in itself ridiculous. The situation would be substantial grounds for suspicion — therefore she would not do it; she would choose some safer transfer than a brokerage.*
* If she were willing to accept bribes at all.
This is not an accurate summary of what took place.
1. James Blair, the attorney at Tyson Foods, was an expert in the cattle futures market and made many of the trades on Hillary’s behalf. He was apparently quite successful when trading for himself as well.
2. She put up $1,000 as collateral, but her broker (in violation of margin rules) allowed her to acquire contracts as large as $1.4 million. I do not know what the odds are of making $100,000 on the cattle futures market when you’re playing around with that much money, but I’m certain they’re somewhat higher than one in a million.
3. Hillary’s trading continued until July of 1979, when she became pregnant with Chelsea. But Don Tyson, the owner of Tyson Foods, endorsed Bill Clinton’s opponent in the 1980 governor’s race in Arkansas. If the money Hillary ended up with was part of a bribe, Tyson was evidently dissatisfied with whatever he received in exchange.
So here’s the alternative explanation you asked for: Clinton made some obscene gambles on the cattle futures market and, with the help of an experienced trader, got moderately lucky. There is not even prima facie evidence that a crime occurred here, much less evidence that Clinton knowingly committed one.
“So here’s the alternative explanation you asked for: Clinton made some obscene gambles on the cattle futures market and, with the help of an experienced trader, got moderately lucky. ”
Thanks. Do you have an explanation of why she would have chosen to do so? She was making bets that could have entirely wiped out the family assets. I don’t think she has a record as a gambler.
I also don’t think converting $1000 to $100,000 counts as only moderately lucky, especially since she was, on average, betting against the direction the market was moving.
From the Wiki article:
” Clinton made her money by betting on the short side at a time when cattle prices doubled.”
and
“One analysis performed by Auburn University and published in the Journal of Economics and Finance claimed to find that the odds of a return that large during the period in question were about one in 31 trillion.”
I haven’t read the article so can’t offer an opinion as to whether it adequately supports the conclusion.
” He was apparently quite successful when trading for himself as well.”
Is there a public record of his transactions during the same period showing that he made money on them? If so, that would indeed be evidence against my thesis. I was presuming that there was not since I have never seen the claim raised.
” But Don Tyson, the owner of Tyson Foods, endorsed Bill Clinton’s opponent in the 1980 governor’s race in Arkansas.”
Do you see anything unusual about a business that wants political support doing favors for both sides? He endorses one side in case he wins, bribes the other side in case that side wins.
In any case, thanks for offering a response to my argument. For the reasons given above, I do not find it convincing.
“You can accept the briber’s cash by some safer delivery method.”
We are talking about $100,000, long enough ago to make it the equivalent of three or four hundred thousand today. That was more than the total assets of the Clintons. If you got it as a suitcase full of hundred dollar bills, how do you then explain what you do with it thereafter?
On the other hand, if you got it openly and can claim you got it honestly, you now can buy a better house, a car, whatever things you wanted money for.
“she would choose some safer transfer than a brokerage.”
What do you view as a safer way of transferring $100,000 to a state governor? If Hillary or Bill had accepted consulting fees on that scale don’t you think someone would have noticed? If there is no recorded source of the money how do they explain when they spend it?
This is a brokerage that got sanctioned for not keep proper records of transactions. Given that the broker was willing to do that, what’s difficult or dangerous about assigning mostly winning trades to one customer, mostly losing trades to the other?
A series of events consistent with my explanation did not result in destroying her husband’s career. Why would it have done more damage if my explanation is correct?
I’m a Libertarian, but you seem to lump us into some they-all-think-alike Right-Wing block, so I guess I get to speak for the Right on this.
Yes. Hell Yes. Nobody is as good a trader as Hillary Clinton claims to have been, and the usual warning signs for fraud were there. Romney may have been a better businessman than Clinton, but he’s not that good, and I at least would have called him out on it. I doubt I’d have been the only one.
Seriously, nobody’s that good, and if they were it would be stupid to have gone into politics. If Hillary and/or her advisers could consistently trade even half as well as Hillary allegedly did in 1978-79, starting from Hillary’s nominal $1000, they’d have owned literally every material thing on the planet before Bill Clinton was even nominated for the Presidency.
But those are counterfactuals. This is the year of Donald J. Trump, for real. A man who ran for the White House largely on the basis of his business acumen. And I wasn’t the only one on the right pointing out that his claimed net worth was grossly overstated, his “business acumen” was mostly in marketing and self-promotion rather than organization and wealth creation, and that he seems to have defrauded a lot of innocent people along the way.
So, yeah, “The Right” is willing to call out “Right Wing” politicians for being crooked businessmen, or if it comes to that for being crooked politicians only pretending to be businessmen.
From point 2 of Earthly Knight’s comment, it seems that she had a huge amount of leverage. If you have millions of (borrowed) dollars to play with, a few hundred thousand in profit is not that unlikely (and it is misleading to talk about her making $1000 into $100,000.
But that takes you straight back into fraud territory. It’s illegal to extend that much leverage. It’s also unbelievably stupid, unless it is being done to conceal a gift.
I propose to loan you a million dollars with which you will play a single round at a no-limits craps table. If you win, you will pay me back the million with interest – I get $1.02 million, you get $0.98 million. If you lose, your craps-playing account is empty so you don’t have to pay me back. That is not a rational transaction for any banker or other creditor; it is a straight-up gift from me to you with an expected value of half a million dollars.
Which is exactly what Hillary’s critics have been saying for decades. Someone gave Hillary a big chunk of money for no apparent reason, and structured it so the illegality was buried in the regulatory details of commodity-market margin requirements that bore people to death rather than leaving it in the no-giving-briefcases-of-cash-to-politicians realm that excites people with dreams of bringing down the wicked and corrupt.
Hillary’s craps-playing account was in fact empty at several times: she failed to make good on a few margin calls, with no consequences.
Let me try to summarize what is known about Hilary Clinton’s cattle futures trading. This is ultimately from the Clintons’ tax records, released after Bill Clinton was president, and records from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, released after the fuss started. What started the fuss was the New York Times spotting it after spending a couple months going over the Clinton’s financial records. The original events started 1978 or so; it didn’t come out until 1994. My sources are New York Times and Washington Post articles from 1994, Wikepedia, and my memory of a very detailed analysis I read back after the matter came out.
1. When Bill Clinton was Attorney General and soon would be Governor of Arkansas, Hillary Clinton started trading in cattle futures, a highly volatile market she had no experience with.
2. Her broker was someone with a past connection to Tyson Foods, the largest employer in the state, and she was being advised by a lawyer who was both a family friend of the Clintons and outside counsel for Tyson. The broker had previously been in hot water with the Exchange for ethics and record keeping problems.
3. Over the next 10 months she gambled on this exchange in a very large way, buying on margin, to the extent that if she had been moderately unlucky (that is, hit by a swing in the wrong direction of a size that tended to happen about every couple weeks) she would have wiped out her and her husband’s entire net worth.
4. She had losses as well as gains; when the losses got large, her broker did not make any margin calls. She ended up making close to 100,000 dollars. A fair amount of this was from short sales, a bet that the market will go down.
5. After 10 months she quit the market, saying later, after the fuss was happening, that once she was pregnant she lost her taste for risk taking.
6. After the fuss started in ’94, the White House got a former chairman of the Exchange to look at the records. His conclusion was that she had “violated no rules in the course of her transactions”, but on the question of whether profits from other accounts had been allocated to her account, his comment was that the record “doesn’t suggest that there was allocation, and it doesn’t prove that there wasn’t”.
7. The broker was investigated for violation of margin and record keeping rules during the period of the Clinton trades and ended up with a large fine and a 3-year suspension from trading.
So I see two possible interpretations. One is that a novice trader, with advice from an experienced one, made fantastic amounts of money in a market where (according to one source I read) about 3/4 of people lose money, won both on bets that the market would go up and bets that it would go down, in the course of which she took a large chance of completely wiping herself and her husband out. I expect that bankrupcy for this sort of thing while he was governor would not have been good for Bill Clinton’s political career.
The other is that Tyson Foods wanted to bribe the governor of Arkansas, who was not expecially well off at the time, found a crooked broker working in a market that could be depended on for large swings up and down, had him make separate trades betting both ways, and allocated which trade went to the Clinton account and which got paid for by Tyson after seeing which one won and which one lost. They made the trades implausably large because they didn’t want it to take forever–it took most of a year as it was. They used this roundabout way of transferring money so that the Clintons could claim a legitimate source for the money if it ever became public; in fact, assuming the bribery happened, this worked. The matter did not come out at all until about 15 years later and then only because the Clintons released tax records after he had won the election and the Times took the trouble to dig through them.
You can write this off as “no evidence”, and there was certainly no freezer full of dollars or recording of phone calls trying to auction off a Senate seat. But that was what convinced me back then that, unhappily, the Clintons had in fact accepted large bribes. I could not believe that Hillary Clinton took those kinds of risks with her and her husband’s future–unless she wan’t taking risks. That has also, I am sure, colored a lot of people’s reactions to more recent accusations.
I have gone to the trouble of writing this up because whether or not you find this as convincing as I did 20 years ago, it may help explain to you why other people are convinced. Note that at that time it had nothing to do with a possible first woman president, but with the Bill and Hillary political team. Note also that this is why it was clear to me, once the recent primaries were over, that we were almost certainly going to end up with a dishonest president.
Disclaimer: I am married to David Friedman. This should not be taken as saying that we agree in all things.
There’s an error in yoyn post:
3. Hillary’s trading continued until July of 1979, when she became pregnant with Chelsea.
Per wiwipedia, she was born Feb 27,1980
@Houseboatonstyxb
Why does that birthday, which could be 8 months after pregnancy, make the info wrong?
@ Betty Cook
I could not believe that Hillary Clinton took those kinds of risks with her and her husband’s future–unless she wan’t taking risks.
Heh. That’s like the argument I used in another comment — that the Clintons were too cautious and canny to try such a brokerage charade. Tho the chance of winning that money honestly was very low, still it was non-zero. Whereas a chance of the Clintons agreeing to such a brokerage plan was like Queen Victoria smoking a cigar.
So, when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable….
There are other possibilities. For one, Hillary innocent, no one plotting bribery. By some combination of luck, good advice, and her own wonkish study, her bets kept paying off. Hillary wanted to quit while she was ahead, and before her success attracted attention (as it eventually did).
@ IrishDude
Some people see her trading as just something to do during the pregnancy. An incorrect date on the pregnancy can confuse that discussion.
Are… are you aware that pregnancy often predates birth by several months?
“Whereas a chance of the Clintons agreeing to such a brokerage plan was like Queen Victoria smoking a cigar.
So, when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable….”
You are aware that the facts of the trading did not become known until many years later, at which point the opinion of the expert quoted in the Wiki page was that there was no way of knowing whether or not the broker had cheated to assign winning trades to Hillary and losing trades to someone else?
So why do you regard a fraud that only became suspected, and could not be proved, long after as a result of the Clintons making their tax returns public and the NYT going through them carefully, presidents being more newsworthy than governors, as terribly risky?
“There are other possibilities. For one, Hillary innocent, no one plotting bribery. By some combination of luck, good advice, and her own wonkish study, her bets kept paying off. Hillary wanted to quit while she was ahead, and before her success attracted attention (as it eventually did).”
That does not explain why she took the gamble in the first place.
“An incorrect date on the pregnancy can confuse that discussion.”
Eight months before birth is about when one would expect her to know she was pregnant. So where is the incorrect date?
@ houseboatonstyx
You suggest the possibility that Hillary Clinton was innocent, no one plotting bribes, just luck and brains. (paraphrased–I haven’t figured out how to quote if I can’t reply to you directly because of the depth of the thread.) That of course was my first possibility in my long post, that a novice trader with experienced advice was amazingly lucky. I don’t believe it because if that is true, she was incredibly reckless–someone doing a few trades to gamble a bit and pass the time does not bet her family’s entire future on it, repeatedly–as well as almost incredibly lucky. You have not addressed the fact that what she was doing, if innocent, was the kind of behavior you expect from someone with a serious gambling problem rather that an investor. (Or if you did, sorry, I missed it–long thread.)
You also say that the Clintons accepting such a brokerage plan as cover for a bribe was like Queen Victoria smoking a cigar, and suggest that the Clintons were too cautious to be willing to risk it. Why do you think that using the brokerage plan to cover a bribe was risky? Assuming the bribery actually happened, they did in fact get away with it. Mr. and Mrs. Governor Clinton never got called on it; and when Mr. and Mrs President Clinton did, many years later, there was never any official investigation, much less any prosecution. Just one more scandal paid attention to chiefly by those more interested in financial than sex scandals, which I believe is a minority of the population.
I’m going to come right out and say that I don’t really understand the argument of “this was so blatant, that it would be stupid for her to do”. Not just on the level of “she got away with it”, but on the level of “Bosnian sniper fire”, “E-mail scandal”, and so forth. Hillary routinely does stupid things that are so blatantly stupid that you wouldn’t think anyone would do them except turns out someone did and her name is Hillary Rodham Clinton. To slip into the language of this blog, what you have yourself there is a prior that badly needs updating.
@ Betty Cook
You can write this off as “no evidence”, and there was certainly no freezer full of dollars or recording of phone calls trying to auction off a Senate seat.
Thank you very much for a neat summary at my reading level. But was there no ‘hard’ evidence at all? Does our disagreement boil down to Queen Victoria, ie which way did the Clntons’ caution point (against risking their own money, or against risking bribery)?
For example, I’d call the Melamed review, ‘hard’ if it had gone against the Clintons. As is, Clinton hired Melamed, so M. might have some bias, so parts of the review may have been kind of squishy.
I have a couple more simple questions, if I may, but nothing to lead into bramble patch details.
One potential piece of hard evidence, as I think I mentioned, would be the financial records of the broker customer who is presumed to be the source of the money. If the theory is right, he should have lost, over the same period, about as much as Hillary won. My guess is that that information is not available–I don’t even know if he is still alive.
I would take a reliable set of customer financial records clearly inconsistent with the theory as pretty good evidence against. Short of that, it seem to me that the case for is very strong, for reasons I’ve already explained.
One obvious problem with finding evidence either way is that the putative bribe was only discovered long after it was paid.
@ David Friedman
One obvious problem with finding evidence either way is that the putative bribe was only discovered long after it was paid.
Wasn’t the core — “First Lady, a novice trader, makes incredible profit [so she probably cheated somehow]” — in public discussion at the time (~1979)?
“Wasn’t the core — “First Lady, a novice trader, makes incredible profit [so she probably cheated somehow]” — in public discussion at the time (~1979)?”
In 1979 she wasn’t the First Lady, unless you mean of Arkansas. Bill Clinton didn’t become president until 1993. The fuss started in 1994, after the Clintons released their tax records and the NYT went over them.
@ David Friedman
> > “Wasn’t the core — “First Lady, a novice trader, makes incredible profit [so she probably cheated somehow]” — in public discussion at the time (~1979)?”
> In 1979 she wasn’t the First Lady, unless you mean of Arkansas. Bill Clinton didn’t become president until 1993. The fuss started in 1994, after the Clintons released their tax records and the NYT went over them.
First Lady of Arkansas, of course. In 1979-1980 merely standing in the motte of “Hillary, a novice trader, makes incredible profit” would have attracted unwanted local curiosity.
BaileyCigar or no cigar, Queen Victoria wouldn’t smoke even a petite ladylike cigarette in public (unless to make some rhetorical point, and even so, not while hiding real cheating).As First Lady of Arkansas her and her husband’s taxes were not public information. That only happened when he ran for president. The fact that she had made that money did not become public until then.
It’s still definitely a marketplace. It’s just “corresponds to reality” is a boutique quality of a political description. Only a certain kind of epistemological hipster cares about it.
If Trump comes anywhere close to being as bad as the left fears, his Presidency will help SJWs. But if Trump has a successful Presidency his election will doom SJWs to irrelevance in most of society (although sadly not the part I work in.)
What if Trump fulfills my expectations and is a boring standard President (in which case he will not be “successful,” will break most of his campaign promises, economy and foreign affairs will probably get worse, etc.) but still falls short of all of the ridiculous hyperbole the left has insisted he will bring about?
Then he’ll probably get a second term. This will definitely be a setback for SJWs.
I pointed out before the election that that sounded like motivated reasoning. Scott described a scenario where Trump’s election helped SJWs. He didn’t give a reason as to why that scenario was more likely than other scenarios where the opposite thing happened (and didn’t even seem to consider them).
I suppose Scott would have had to put forth an argument (maybe by citing examples from history?) that a major victory for one side in a cultural divide tends to increase polarization. I feel from personal experience that this is absolutely the case, but it might be difficult to objectively argue it.
I felt similarly to Scott before the election, and in the initial aftermath, my worst fears seemed to be confirmed. A week and a half later, and my from my vantage point (hundreds of left-wing friends on Facebook and opinion columns from left-wing sources) things are beginning to look a lot more encouraging. Many seem to be asking themselves, “How do we fight for our values now in the most productive and least obnoxious or alienating way possible?” Anyway, my impression of the left’s reaction so far is pretty much the same as thepenforest’s impression.
Hypothesis: Many SJ people are fundamentally fear driven. They’re afraid of being called a racist, sexist, etc. Now that they’re afraid of Trump they’re changing their tune.
Fuck rationalist dogma. Fear is the original mind killer.
Supposedly politics is a mind killer because in The Ancient Environment™ people were afraid that if the person they supported for leadership lost then they could be ostracized or killed. Voting in secret wasn’t a thing back then.
what planet do you live on? the anti-trump people are literally rioting
There seems to be a honest struggle among Democrats right now regarding this subject (probably some American democrat will know better). I like to contrast this article by Vox, with this one in Slate*
*Yes, Vox and Slate have a lot of writers, but Lopez and Bouie are both prolific and established within each site.
My facebook feed is almost entirely filled with people claiming trump is a literal nazi who stole the election. I have seen a few honest attempts to grapple with reality, but they are in a decided minority, most definitely sidelined in favor of crying demonstrably false wolves. I’m seeing this behavior even among people I know to be intelligent, relatively well informed. Many are even conservative or libertarian leaning. Maybe my facebook feed is uniquely bad, for whatever reason, but it is decidedly not inspiring confidence in the left’s ability to deal rationally or to respond in any way besides screaming racist ever more hysterically.
My facebook feed is mostly filled with people talking about sports or thanksgiving or whatever. There’s some talk about rigged voting machines and neo-nazis on CNN, but mostly life goes on. Maybe my facebook feed is uniquely good?
Facebook is not really the place for honest attempts to grapple with reality anyway.
You’ll just have to hope it’s not the people on your facebook feed that set the eventual Democrat agenda.
@suntzuanime
My facebook feed used to look like that. I want it back. I used to unfollow people with a habit of posting political stuff I find obnoxious, if I did that now, I’d be unfollowing everyone I know. ANd while I agree that facebook is a bad method for finding truth, it’s probably a good method for finding out the zeitgeist.
@Whatever Happened To Anonymous
the democratic agenda ultimately gets set by what appeals to the sort of people in my facebook feed.
” but it is decidedly not inspiring confidence in the left’s ability to deal rationally or to respond in any way besides screaming racist ever more hysterically.”
Not limited to the left. I’ve been having facebook arguments on a libertarian group with people who insist that Bannon is a self-identified figure of the alt-right and that if I disagree I must be a trump supporter even if I say I’m not. Others (I’m not sure which were on a libertarian group) that Trump is an anti-semite, that gay and trans people are at terrible risk, and much else.
@david friedman
I’ve seen posts from my gay friends talking like their lives are literally in danger, or that they’ll be rounded up and put into camps. This is Trump, a new yorker who spent most of his life as a democrat, and who more pro gay rights than the democratic party was in 2011. Trump Derangement Syndrome is already at least as bad as Bush Derangement Syndrome ever was.
I’m less sure of it than I was, but I think we should wait until April to decide – Trump’s been pretty quiet since the election, and so far we’ve mostly just had responses to the fact of losing (which may have a moderating effect) and not to any of his actual statements or policies (which may be polarizing).
I was in Scott’s camp during the campaign, but I have updated my beliefs based on the general reaction to Trump’s election. The SJWs seem to be in full rout, and their reaction has been frankly kind of pathetic (cry-ins, pleas to Trump not to be mean to them, indulging in fantasies about gaming the electoral college), while the anti-SJW types are emboldened and energized. The identitarian left are gobsmacked that their shaming tactics really didn’t work this time. Their enemies seemed equally surprised at first, but recovered faster.
Opposition to PC culture was more widespread than I thought it was, apparently.
I found this little parable interesting: http://blog.ayjay.org/uncategorized/so-its-like-this/
One effect of the election is that … well, not “moderate” exactly, but *peaceful* voices on all sides are just getting sick of all this and going back to looking at cat memes. At least that’s what I’ve been doing. I’m not sure whether that will have the net effect of radicalizing the remaining discourse as only the angry voices remain on the field or just making the whole thing less relevant. Or both.
I agree that the early signs have been encouraging. I’m not changing my prediction yet, because the long-haul is a very different animal than the question of whether to express doubt in the week after Trump’s election.
Also, I want to take this opportunity to clarify/predict something in writing. Some people have thought they’re challenging my predictions in “Crying Wolf” by predicting that there will be more open racism in the US / more coverage of open racism in the US in Trump’s term. I agree with this prediction. I think it will be an artifact of everybody obsessing over it and giving CNN interviews to white supremacists and stuff, but I do think it will be true and I don’t want it to be counted against my predictive accuracy when it happens.
As a follow-up to my lengthy comment on SIGINT, I’m going to do something similar for more domestic tech law. There have been several big topics in the news the last couple years, and again I find myself having a perspective that seems to go against a large portion of the public. This comment will be a bit different than the last one. In particular, the subject of SIGINT is necessarily a bit more vague, as secrecy is a necessary component. General concepts like evaluating oversight and structure of government are really important. Domestically, we tend to have a lot more detail and clarity. Unfortunately, I think there has been a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation out there in terms of both law and fact.
With that in mind, this comment is intended to be a fact-intensive overview of several major topics in domestic tech law. I will respond to some criticisms which I feel are widespread, though as wintermute92 pointed out in the last thread, some of that may be somewhat biased toward the most vocal/radical critics. I don’t intend to show that law enforcement is perfect or that any particular statute is perfect. In my zeal to correct what I think are popular mistaken positions, I may not focus on more moderate positions that I think are more tricky and genuinely debateable. Finally, at the risk of triggering The John Sidles RoboBan again, I will try to source most of my claims in advance, so fair warning in case reading copious amounts of legalese causes acute narcolepsy. I won’t try to source all the articles that have led me to believe that a particular criticism is widespread. There will be some amount of personal judgment here, but if you think I’m setting up a strawman at any point, please ask, and I’ll provide another bundle of links.
I’ll begin with an active topic that has immediate relevance:
I. The Rule 41 Update
Software like TOR is popular these days. It provides a new element of online privacy and anonymity, and this has a lot of benefits. That being said, from the perspective of a LEO investigating computer crime, it can cause an impenetrable dead end. If you cannot locate a computer, you can’t investigate who it belongs to. Also popular (but with fewer societal benefits) is software which infects millions of computers (or IoT devices), allowing the user who controls this software to utilize those millions of devices for a variety of nefarious purposes.
Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure governs the ability of magistrate judges to issue search warrants. With the two major problems mentioned above in mind, the Judicial Conference has submitted an update to that rule, it was approved by the Supreme Court on 4/30/16, and if Congress doesn’t step in to stop it, it will go into effect on 12/1/16. So this is a popular topic right now.
1. The Rule 41 Update is about jurisdiction, not justification.
From the I Wish I Had To Construct A Strawman For This Department, a lot of people seem to think that the Rule 41 update will allow police to get a warrant to search your computer just because you use TOR. This is a completely false representation that doesn’t survive even a cursory engagement with the rule. Just flip back and forth between the rule and the update. Notice which sections are being updated: jurisdiction and receipt issuance. There is absolutely no change to the probable cause requirement of the Fourth Amendment (no mere federal rule could possibly do such a thing anyway), and there is absolutely no reason to believe that any judge would accept a claim that using TOR provides sufficient probable cause to justify issuing a search warrant. Besides, even if we hypothesize such a maniac judge, that hypothesis works just as well in a pre-Rule-41-Update world as it does a post-Rule-41-Update world.
Finally, this particular failure of reasoning would have us accept the idea that this rule is obviously unconstitutional. I have a pretty strong revulsion to claims like this. My revulsion is slightly reduced if Congress is the one making the new law all by itself, but as I mentioned above, the Supreme Court has already given this rule the OK. That doesn’t mean that some uses of the new rule might end up being unconstitutional, but it should be enough to make you think that perhaps it’s not obviously and completely unconstitutional without some real analysis. Ok. Let’s move on. Sorry I even had to bring this up. (I’m not even going to bother with the totally genuine headlines which proclaimed the rule, “Allowed the FBI to hack anyone,” even though by this point, you should be able to tell that “anyone” means “anyone for whom they have probable cause and a search warrant”. Sigh.)
2. District judges can already issue these warrants.
A specter that hangs over the remaining substantive complaints is that a lot of people don’t understand the structure of the federal judiciary. District judges are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. They appoint magistrate judges to help them out with routine matters, because the judiciary is already overworked. (Sidenote: This is why you’ll sometimes see SCOTUS cases where the “parade of horribles” includes a massive increase in cases brought to the federal courts. They know the workload is high, and they’re actually concerned that the courts could be overwhelmed.) These magistrate judges only have authority through the district judge they work for.
Now, there is a legitimate concern that we don’t want magistrates to be able to wield all of the authority of a district judge, so there are some explicit constraints on what they can do. That’s actually what Rule 41 is. It’s not a grant of authority to the judiciary, writ large; it’s not a constraint on the judiciary, writ large. It’s simply specifying a particular aspect of a district judge’s authority (issuance of warrants) that can be performed by magistrates. It’s very important to realize that Rule 41 is not a constraint on the district judge, himself! For all of the remaining complaints (you’ll see headlines, “Rule Change Would Allow FBI To Do _____”), remember that it’s almost certain that the FBI can already do the thing in question, and district judges can already issue the warrant authorizing it (unless it’s something extremely stupid and otherwise unconstitutional like I mentioned in part (1)).
There’s still a plausible complaint here. One could argue that there is something fundamental in the qualifications/capabilities of judges or the structure of checks in our system which mean we should be particularly concerned with extending this portion of the district judge’s authority to his magistrates, but I find it rare to even see attempts to make that argument (and good ones are almost nonexistent).
3. Judge-shopping.
This concern at least acknowledges that the update is jurisdictional, claiming that a relaxed jurisdictional rule would allow the FBI to find the most pro-FBI judge in the country and funnel all requests through him. This claim also fails in two ways. The first, as always, is, “District judges can already authorize that.” The second is that the updated rule still has a jurisdictional limitation! Not only does this wider jurisdiction only apply to specific cases (anonymizing software and botnets), but it still requires that the magistrate be located in the jurisdiction in which activities related to the crime were committed (rather than the unknown jurisdiction in which the computer is located). Some outlets really hack this up and say the exact opposite – that they can go to judges where the crime wasn’t committed, but this is in contradiction with the text of the update.
4. “The FBI could hack millions of devices belonging to innocent people!”
First, as always, “District judges can already authorize that.” But let’s talk a bit about how these warrants work. The case people are concerned about is botnets. Innocent people’s devices have been hacked and taken over by people who use it to commit some crime. In order to take down the botnet, they have to pursue these machines (generally, they focus on Command and Control machines, which may also belong to innocents). One thing to remember is that these machines have already been hacked! They’re already at the mercy of criminals. However suspicious you are of law enforcement, you may sometime step back and think, “There is no oversight and no constraint on what these criminals do with my machine, and they’re almost certainly acting out of malice.” From the standpoint of a risk analysis, it’s really difficult to get worked up about a small probability of law enforcement misuse.
Anyway, the ability to search things belonging to innocents is definitely not unprecedented. One hypo I use is to suppose Person X runs a car into a building belonging to Person Y. Afterwards, X flees the scene and cannot be found. There is almost certainly probable cause that a crime was committed here, and police can get a warrant to search the scene of the accident… even if, for some reason, Person Y doesn’t want them to! There are more hypotheticals out there than I have time to think up, and this just hardly ranks as an issue for people who have much knowledge of how search warrants work in general.
The scale of botnets also seems troubling. You’re searching a lot of computers! People with a glancing knowledge of the law can even use the correct wording, “How can you satisfy the particularity requirement (i.e., how can you make sure that you’re only searching a specific set of things)?” However, for good reason, particularity doesn’t depend on the number of items in the set. Judges don’t issue itemized warrants, saying, “You can take three hard drives with serial numbers….” Even if they did, in a digital world, there could be millions of files on those three hard drives! Instead, the particularity requirement is functional, with respect to content.
Before fleshing this out in the digital world, I want to note that this is the same as how it’s been for physical items for a very long time. Suppose investigators gathered probable cause that an individual was trafficking and distributing drugs. It’s at a scale such that there are likely to be written records. They acquire a warrant to search the individual’s records for evidence of trafficking/distributing drugs. They enter his home, and find a room with a file cabinet. They open it and start flipping through. That document that says, “12/27/1987 Cocaine” right at the top? They can take that and spend their sweet time analyzing it. What looks like a standard picture of an old woman with children? They can’t take it or analyze it. That document that is clearly a tax return for 1987? Put it back. They’re not authorized to investigate tax fraud – they’re authorized to take things related to drugs. If they proceed to press charges for tax evasion, go into court, and say, “We found these documents while executing the search warrant on drugs. When we put them all together, we realized he committed tax evasion,” the judge is going to suppress the evidence (i.e., throw it out).
Now, suppose that when you walked into that room, there were thirty file cabinets instead of one. You look at your partner. He looks at you. You only have a couple hours left on your shift. Didn’t expect that one. Well, you could call up thirty other cops and try to plow through it in the same manner… or you can call up one cop with a big truck and take the whole lot of ’em back to the station. You have to be careful about chain of custody and other things, but it allows you to go through the same procedure at a reasonable pace.
Not much changes when we move to the digital world. The biggest difference is that instead of having to move thirty file cabinets, you can just take the thirty hard drives. Then, you’ll use techniques like metadata analysis or keyword searches in order to figure out which files the warrant allows you to individually analyze. A high profile example of this just happened! While investigating Anthony Wiener’s alleged sex-related crimes (analyzing a computer for which they had a warrant to search), they stumbled upon metadata that indicated a bunch of emails related to Hillary Clinton’s server. They couldn’t just jump in and check ’em out. They had to go back to a judge and ask for a different warrant, specifically for that content, even though they already physically possessed it all.
One final variation of this claim is that particularity can’t be satisfied unless they know the specific location to be searched. Note that this claim would also kill traditional wiretaps. After all, we don’t know a priori where an incoming call is coming from. Instead, we only have a physical location which the telco is routing the call through (so that it can be intercepted). In this vein, the FBI’s Operation Pacifier warrant specified that the server would be run from Maryland. So, even though they don’t know ahead of time where someone is trying to “call” from, they can still access it. US v. Leary says:
They specify the particular things to be seized with as much specificity as was possible – everyone stipulates that it is not possible for them to ascertain the physical location of these computers a priori. Instead, the Pacifier warrant very particularly describes the things to be seized: specific identifying information for computers which access Websites 1-23 from the Freedom Hosting server which is being run by the FBI. US v. Meek has perhaps the most on-point quote for this:
All of this isn’t to say that there aren’t interesting bits out there. I usually make a lot of fun of Senator Wyden (because he panders soooo hard on tech issues), but he was part of a recent letter to DOJ, asking some detailed questions about the mechanics of probable cause and the role of hacking as an investigatory tool. I don’t want to sell this short, because there are some really good questions here (and I could spill far too much digital ink on them). Again, my goal right now is to get people in the same state on these issues.
5. Searching computers outside the US
There is a concern that if judges are able to issue warrants for computers whose location cannot be determined, they might search computers located outside of any jurisdiction of the US. This is absolutely true, and it is a potential problem. However, I’ll try to walk concerns back a little bit. The biggest issue is that such an action could cause foreign relations problems. This is sensible – turn it around and imagine that some law enforcement in another country got a warrant from their government to remotely search your computer. You’d likely not be happy, and you may even petition your government to snarl at them.
The main reason why I’m not extremely concerned is because, at least to date, the types of warrants being issued have features which make it less of a concern. For anonymizing software, warrants usually target a small amount of information. In particular, they target IP addresses, MAC addresses, and other information almost entirely for the purpose of locating the computer in question. If they continue to stop at this point, the concern is alleviated somewhat. An important component of good foreign relations is openness and sensitivity to the concerns of the foreign nation. Once they’ve determined that a particular computer is located in a foreign country, they can go to that country and say, “Hey, on [EVIDENCE], we used software to determine that [COMPUTER] is located in your country. We’d like to pursue this case. What do you think?”
So, while the most ardent of privacy/anonymity supporters will still be upset, it will be much more difficult to successfully petition the government to snarl at them. If the country does this all the time and our government thinks they’re really doing more than they admit or going after dissidents, they might lock eyes, but in many other cases (like child porn), the government will be more than happy to help with the investigation. There might be a discussion over which government gets to press charges first, but since they started off on the right foot, this discussion will probably be amiable.
Add to this the case of botnets. Botnets are usually gigantic and have zero respect for national borders. Historically, it has taken large-scale collaboration by law enforcement agencies in many countries to go after these people. International law enforcement collaboration is not a new thing, and we have set up international agencies specifically for the purpose of fostering these collaborations and avoiding foreign relations problems.
These are not bulletproof solutions, but the fact is that there are no bulletproof solutions to prevent all foreign relations friction. My final reason for not being terribly concerned is that I have heard no one involved in foreign relations complain about the Rule 41 update. Nothing from the White House, nothing from State, nothing from anyone whose life would be made awful by international incidents.
No, the case that people have publically said at this moment they are concerned about is botnets. There’s a long history of laws being passed and actions being done to “stop terrorism” or “stop pedophiles” or some other innocuous reason that then get used in the broadest manner possible. It’s not as if “it’s just for botnets” is a promise we can hold anyone to.
In general, this is a possible concern. However, they haven’t said, “It’s just for botnets.” They’ve said:
EDIT: Also, at that point, I was saying, “The case that people are worried about,” as in, “The case that people who are against this update are worried about.” Because, in the case of botnets, if the FBI goes after computers that are part of the botnet, they belong to innocent people (and there could be millions of them).
Here’s a point I’m confused about. Presumably the warrant was for the alleged sex-related crimes and wouldn’t have covered those emails. Could they have gotten the metadata without a warrant? When they applied for the new warrant, did they justify it by saying “well, doing this unrelated search we found something else interesting,” or did they have to come up with an inauthentic rationale for it?
We don’t have access to either warrant, so we have to speculate. There is some variation on the methods officers use for searching, but in general, metadata is not protected by a warrant requirement. One example is a search along the lines of what you would do just poking around a computer looking for your boyfriend’s porn. Open some folders; look for key words that might tip you off. Looking at the names of files doesn’t require an additional warrant. If you see “Credit Card – September.pdf”, you skip over it; if you see “Known Pornstar.mov”, you can be reasonably certain it’s relevant to your search (obviously, this is not an actual search that law enforcement could engage in, because regular porn isn’t a crime).
You could be using automated software that processes the data and gives you summary statistics. A list of the most common email recipients likely counts as metadata and wouldn’t be subject to a requirement for a new warrant. If you see “Alex Rodriguez” and “Anthony Bosch” in the list, you can maybe go get another warrant.
The technical term is “plain-view exemption”. Basically, so long as you’re doing things that are reasonably within the bounds of the legitimate warrant authority you have, you’re allowed to use the information you see. You can’t make different actions (ones that aren’t supportable by the warrant you have)… such as opening Mr. Rodriguez’s email. You have to go get another warrant for that. Your idea of, “Well, doing this unrelated search, we found something else interesting,” is about right.
It’s the same idea that governs situations where if you enter a house during the regular course of handling a domestic dispute, you don’t have to just ignore the bag of cocaine sitting on the coffee table. Seeing it almost certainly gives you probable cause to call a judge and get a warrant to search the rest of the house for additional drugs.
Really mechanical rules in this domain aren’t super clear to me, either. I linked the two cases that seem really important. US v. Casey is cited by pretty much everyone, because it’s an important milestone of evidence being suppressed due to LE not getting a new warrant for different content. I also linked US v. Campos, which cited a law review article which summarized this process. I’d have to do more case review to answer this question with any more detail.
II. Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA)
This was enacted as part of the 2016 Omnibus Appropriations Act (text here) and has just been run through the mud. The fact that it was inserted into the Omnibus relatively late doesn’t mean that it was created then or that lawmakers were unable to figure out what it contained. Pretty much the entire text was already well-circulated, there were only a few issues to hammer out, and it’s quite easy to have a staffer read that portion of the law and report back, “These are the few meaningful differences from the previous draft you’ve seen.” Anyway.
1. This was about voluntary sharing, not “government surveillance”.
Let’s get this out of the way: There is not a single power given to any government agency to demand any surveillance or any data anywhere in this law. It’s about things that companies want to share… things that make them say, “Oh wow. The government really ought to know this.”
2. They’re only allowed to share specific information for cybersecurity purposes.
The bill specifically targets information that is useful for countering cybersecurity threats. It does not let Google say, “We scanned everyone’s email, and determined that these people are likely selling drugs.” This is defined in Section 102(4-7).
3. They must scrub the data of personal information.
The company is required to do this in Section 104(d)(2), and a federal entity which wants to share it with other portions of the government is required to do the same in Section 103(b)(1)(E). Some people make hay of the “actual knowledge” requirement, imagining that companies can just claim zero knowledge, but Section 105(a)(4) specifies that DHS is to provide guidelines for scrubbing data of personal information. Companies can be safely assumed to have knowledge of this.
4. Even if something gets through that could conceivably be used to go after a person for selling drugs or whatever, the law specifically prohibits it being used for that purpose.
This is Section 105(d)(5). It outlines the specific things that the government can do with the information after it’s gone through this process. “Prosecuting a drug dealer” is not in that list.
This section turned out to be shorter than I expected. The bill isn’t that long, and it didn’t take long to just walk through it. It’s a shame that such a cursory read of the text runs contrary to so much of what the tech outlets said about it.
III. Encryption
I like encryption. I use encryption on a daily basis. I’ve written my own encryption algorithms. Nevertheless, I think the things the government has tried to do on encryption are in the category of Not Insane.
III(a) FBI v. Apple
Everyone knows the basic facts. A dead terrorist (no question he was a terrorist) left an encrypted iPhone behind (being dead, he has no privacy interest). The owner of the phone (the county) consented to searching the phone. There is no question that the FBI can search this phone. However, since it’s encrypted, they can’t get in (See Section II(c)(3) for a response to, “But they could have forced an iCloud backup”). The FBI wants Apple to help them get in.
1. Everyone equivocates on the words “create” and “backdoor”.
Suppose the NSA was proposing a new encryption standard. Someone pointed out a possible method by which NSA could exploit having a special number to get into that encryption (ring any bells?). The NSA said, “Don’t worry about it. That’s not a ‘backdoor’. We’d have to spend a month ‘creating’ code to exploit it, and that’s never been done before, so it’s not a ‘backdoor’.” You wouldn’t buy that, would you? Wouldn’t you say, “The backdoor already exists!”?
If you replace “NSA” with “Apple” in the above paragraph, this is a precise description of the situation Apple was in. They had a special number (their digital signature for signing firmware updates) and said they would need about a month to write, test, and implement code that gets into the encryption on the iPhone in question. To the extent that this route into the phone can be called a “backdoor”, the backdoor literally already exists. It has already been “created”, it just hasn’t been exploited.
2. There is absolutely no way that complying with a retrospective court order could result in a prospective backdoor in any new device
This probably belongs in the I Wish I Had To Construct A Strawman For This Department, but the court order was very specific about three particular things that Apple was to do. None of them was, “Intentionally put a new backdoor in your new devices.” From basic legal principles, it’s absolutely incomprehensible to imagine that they could possibly do such a thing in order to execute a search warrant on a device that already exists. There is just no way that this could possibly affect other devices. I really shouldn’t have to say anything more.
What I never understood about the whole Apple stance is why they didn’t say something on the lines of:
Look, the FBI has forced us to hack old phones, but we have a fix in the new phones that is so safe that even we are not able to do it. You should all throw away your old phones and buy new ones.
Well, they did make the latter claim (“Throw away your old phones and buy new ones, so that we can’t hack them.”), but the earlier claim was still in contention. This is part of why I didn’t buy their claim, “If we are forced to comply, it will hurt our sales.” (They used this to support the legal claim that complying would be overly burdensome.) I could come up with an equally plausible hypothetical where their sales increase (exactly on these lines), and there’s very little reason for us to make legal determinations based on either prognostication of the future.
Gee, that seems pretty obvious. Say I’m thinking about buying a phone, and I’m worried about whether the government can see what’s on it. If Apple says, “We believe this phone is unhackable, but if we’re wrong we will do our best to protect you”, that’s worth a fair bit more to me than “We believe this phone is unhackable, but if we’re wrong we’ll roll over on you in a heartbeat.”
I mean, it wouldn’t matter much to me because I am pure as the driven snow. But at the margin you gotta believe there are people who would care, even if it’s just to the extent that the latter leaves a bad taste in their mouths.
There are probably other people who would feel similarly sour about the fact that Apple didn’t do their best to help fight terrorism. How many of each? I don’t know, but I’ll bet somebody at Apple thought pretty hard about it.
That’s possible. If there is one fact I cannot dispute, it’s that I’m probably no better than anyone else at guessing market movements. I was personally seeing a lot of goodwill toward Apple coming out of the whole episode. Friends on facebook who had never shown any interest in tech issues were saying, “I’m not usually a fan of Apple, but….” It was my personal impression that they were going to gain a lot, regardless of how it turned out.
I think Apple’s marketing division definitely worked overtime on their public statements – they definitely beat the FBI in the PR war. But yea, I probably have no better an estimate of the difference between, “We put up a public fight and lost,” versus the various other options. The option that happened might be worse than losing the case – now the FBI can get into the phone, and Apple can’t do anything about it (and maybe don’t even know enough about the vulnerability to patch it).
There are just so many possible scenarios, the only thing I’m sure of is that I don’t want the legal analysis depending upon such prognostications.
actually, telling you to get entirely new, more expensive apple merchandise is right up apple’s alley
next they’ll be telling us that wired headphones were hacked by the FBI and we need wireless headphones for precisely that reason
By written, do you mean implemented or designed?
Thanks for pointing out an imprecision in my language. I have a pretty high barrier for what I would consider “designing” an algorithm; I would probably require making a theoretical contribution to the literature. I haven’t done that. I have implemented multiple algorithms of various quality. I’m familiar with much of the math and wouldn’t be totally lost trying to engage with most theory papers, but I haven’t made any contributions (my area is dynamics and control theory; I have contributed theory there).
Honestly, that bit came from a long history of trying to head off claims that, “Everyone who disagrees with me on encryption law must be ignorant of how encryption works.” I will strongly stand by a claim that I have a solid understanding of how major encryption algorithms work. I don’t want to imply more.
Oh good. Ironically, “I’ve written my own encryption algorithms” is (in the absence of your caveats) one of the best ways of identifying people who don’t know crypto as well as they claim.
Rolling your own crypto for dummies:
Step 1: Do not roll your own crypto if it will be used anywhere even close to production.
Step 2: If you are at all unsure whether Step 1 applies to you, then it applies to you.
I have a similar understanding of the word designing, so if you had picked that it would have meant I’d have to decide if you were a genuine expert or a crank.
That said, a hardened, optimized, for production use implementation is no small feat either. If you have contributed code to one or more of those, that’s bona fides enough. I myself have only done toy implementations for learning purposes and in production code pull in a library.
My main point was something like Iain’s. After getting involved in a discussion here a few month’s back where someone trotted out the “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” talking points about one time pads, I’ve learned to be cautious.
I’m going to push back on this one because, well, they actually did get in. Without Apple’s help.
It was obvious to me at the time that if they had possession of the device and didn’t mind breaking the device, they could almost certainly get in. And it was just as clear to the various security professionals I followed publicly or talked to privately at the time. There would have been some risk of losing the data, but a small one – especially compared to the possibility of losing the value of the data when e.g. Farook’s imagined ISIS handler sees on TV that his texts and emails are going to be cracked next week and rabbits.
So I never really bought the “Only Apple can help us stop these Nefarious Terrorists” story. There were three stories that made sense.
A – The FBI is simply incompetent and their labs can’t do what small private outfits can. This, sadly, is the optimistic scenario, and it’s not justification for demanding that anyone else do the FBI’s work for them.
B – The FBI is arrogant; they went to Apple because it was easier and once Apple said no, “we must find and thwart the terrorists” gave way to “Apple must RESPECT OUR AUTHORITAH!!!”. I’ve seen that one before, and it doesn’t end well.
C – The FBI never cared about finding Syed Farook’s imaginary ISIS handler or any other such thing; they wanted a precedent to use in future cases and tried to use this as a black-and-white good-vs-Ultimate-Scary-Evil test case to set that precedent.
And sure enough, they didn’t stop at just one.
So let’s drop the contentious word, “backdoor”, and look at what the FBI wants. They had the means (once they found someone to explain it to them) to extract the contents of any iPhone in their possession, probably in no more than a day or two once they get the hang of it, but probably at the expense of obviously damaging or destroying the phone. That’s sufficient for most any legitimate search.
They demand instead, a way to invisibly extract the contents of any iPhone in their possession through the data port, probably in a few minutes when they get the hang of it. And once they’ve annoyed the FBI with ninety or nine hundred court orders saying “…now crack this iPhone too”, and one last one saying “…oops, this iPhone has classified nuclear weapons designs on it, we can’t let you have it, you have to give us your tool”, they’ll have that capability in-house and deployed as widely as they see fit. If they want every FBI office to have a bunch of USB sticks that automatically hoover the contents of any iPhone they are plugged into, that’s just a repackaging of the code they demanded of Apple.
That’s sufficient for most any legitimate search, but it’s vitally necessary for the other sort. So, yeah, I’m kind of hoping this was just FBI incompetence, but that doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy either way.
I can’t rule out the possibility that they had a method to get in, but I’m not high on it for the following reasons. The first is just my personal interaction with friends who argue in federal courts on behalf of federal entities. The fear of being seen as misrepresenting facts is real. They have to go to these guys on a regular basis in order to do their jobs; they do not want a judge thinking that they’re lying.
The second is that if they were to take such a brazenly false position in court, it would have to be approved at high levels in FBI/DOJ. I know that this is not completely unprecedented, and while Comey is not well-favored at the moment, I just don’t get the sense that he’s likely to roll like that.
So, I think the most likely scenarios are either that FBI tech labs are incompetent or that the popular ideas for getting into the phone either just don’t work or present enough risk of destroying the data that they were highly disfavored. I’m really not sure how to allocate probabilities among these three options.
I don’t think this is as plausible. I think a very important portion of their undue burden analysis was the fact that the FBI never acquired the tool. I genuinely think the case can go the other way if this changes. It’s a really really big deal, and it’s just as important of an issue when we talk about more general encryption law. The government knows how to work with corporations to get security clearances for employees that provide sensitive technical services. I have no doubt they could do that here, as well.
EDIT: I should mention that if the FBI lied, it’s not ridiculous for Apple to call them out on it. Apple definitely doesn’t want to file a public brief saying, “Lolz just reflash NAND and you can get in,” but if Apple has a bona fide reason to say, “This is a trade secret and it would be damaging if it got out, but the FBI clearly knows it can get into the phone using method X,” they can probably get that statement sealed.
The method everyone suggested works. According to this Comey publicly and specifically addressed this technique, that he claimed both that it didn’t work and that it was not the method that they finally used.
I have no doubt that they could do that. I also have no doubt that they could arrange not to do that. It takes the better part of a year to get someone a TS/SCI by the book, if the FBI cooperates. Oops, we think this iPhone was used to send a complete technical readout on our most advanced battle station to some Bothan spies, and we need to crack it today. By the book, no shortcuts, that’s how we got into this mess.
The FBI can control whether the hack can be used at Apple or has to be used in an FBI lab. The FBI can control whether it “needs” to be used just the one time, or nine times or ninety or nine hundred. And once it’s in an FBI lab, the FBI can control where it goes from there.
Once there exists a quick, undetectable software tool for cracking iPhones, there exists a path from Apple’s in-house labs to every FBI field office in the country or beyond, with each step in isolation posing no undue burden and with each step in isolation being Vital to National Security if the FBI says the right things in court (or just doesn’t tell anyone).
So either we don’t let the FBI build (er, make someone else build) such a tool in the first place, or we trust that they will be honest with us about what they need it for and what they are doing with it. Since they haven’t shown a need for such a tool and since they have said a bunch of stuff that’s not true in their pursuit of such a tool, I am quite pleased with the outcome where Apple tells them to go stuff themselves and the FBI probably has to settle for a more cumbersome technique that requires visibly and irreversibly tampering with the phones they crack.
@DK
Ugh. TechDirt. I get annoyed by their constant lying and hyperbole almost as much as the fact that their sources are always a rabbit hole of other TechDirt links, and it’s impossible to get to an actual source. (I want to quibble with their characterization, but I’ll just leave it.)
Anyway, like I said, there’s really no way to know yet if their tech department was just incapable of coming up with all the steps necessary, if there is some problem in going from proof of concept to production (the linked paper mentions memory wear and forensics concerns), or if they just lied.
We have to think about Apple’s posture here, too. If we’re assuming the FBI lied, then we also have to assume that Apple lied. Apple has had no problem assisting with getting into devices before, and while they still have a functional claim that they can’t get into phones with A7 processors, they also claimed that they couldn’t get into this one. I would prefer to think that everyone was telling the truth and that there’s some issue with going to production-scale, but it’s possible that everyone was just being a bunch of lying liars. I’m not sure which way that’s supposed to taint any of the legal questions that were presented in that particular case, the questions that we’re going to encounter in future cases, or the questions concerning potential encryption laws.
The final thing to note is that it’s really really strange to see people saying, “It’s going to cause the apocalypse if the FBI is given a way into that phone; could you imagine if other people steal that method from them?!” and then following it up with, “Hey everyone! Here’s a method that anyone can use to get into the phone! This totally validates my position!”
@John
Burden analysis focuses on the party being compelled to comply, not the government’s interest. The only thing I see coming out of additional elements driving toward foreign intelligence purposes is that it is more likely that NSA could bring their legal authorities to bear. And honestly, I would be quite surprised if a company like Apple doesn’t already have a sufficient number of cleared employees.
Right. And once Apple has built the FBI’s desired tool, which is just software, there is zero burden to their being compelled to deliver a copy to the FBI when the FBI finds an excuse to say “It’s really important and we promise not to misuse it”. What’s the legal argument, under the undue-burden standard, for denying the request?
The FBI has lost my trust on this matter. If the tool exists, I presume that they will claim it for themselves and they will misuse it. I’d much rather it be the courts rather than the Apple board of directors that stops them, but I’ll take what I can get.
I disagree completely. The loss of trade secrets, the increased potential for vulnerability, and damage due to possible extralegal abuse are vastly more compelling in that hypothetical than in the few-months-programming-project case that was the original case.
I expect that the courts would. Especially considering that I really would bet Apple already has cleared personnel. I just can’t imagine the argument going through.
Note that if we assume this argument could go through, then we probably assume that they could just demand Apple’s source code/digital signature under a similar scenario. “We have a super secret nuclear bad guys The Cyber situation, and we need to create a particular tool. You can’t even know what it does. Gimme gimme.”
Like I said before, adding these factors might bring in NSA authorities (whether overt or covert; honestly, it’s not insane to think there might be legitimate authority for NSA to target acquiring Apple’s source… I’d have to think about various constraints), but I just don’t see how they can come into play for a writ to execute a search warrant.
3. Apple failed miserably in claiming that complying with the order would be dangerous toward anyone else.
With the above in mind, Apple tried to do something that I honestly find rather incomprehensible. They tried claiming that performing a few-weeks-long programming project was the difference between peace/safety and the apocalypse. The FBI rightly called them out on this.
As stated in (1), all the necessary elements for exploiting the backdoor were in Apple’s source code and electronic signature. They literally already have those things. They already protect them. The difference between criminals stealing those and criminals stealing the finished code used to comply with the warrant is that the criminals would have to engaged in a little programming project in order to use it. In fact, it would be much worse if the source code/signature were stolen, because they could create all kinds of other code that does much worse things. I just can’t see how Apple could possibly reply to this. That’s probably why they didn’t. Instead, in their reply brief, they said:
Did you notice what they didn’t do?! They didn’t address the challenge at all! They started off by pointing out that their product has tons of vulnerabilities because of the other features they include (we’ll come back to this in a bit). Then, they tried confusing the source code with the combination of source code and key. Obviously, if an attacker gains the source code and key, they’re done. That has nothing to do with whether a few-weeks-long programming project on the source code makes any difference. Finally, in their only remotely plausible attempt, they made a pass at routinization. However, this doesn’t make sense, because they already routinely use the source code and the digital signature! They’ve simply failed to even acknowledge the core of the FBI’s challenge, and it’s really a shame that so many people fell for their misdirection.
4. “Compelled speech” is not a get-out-of-jail-free card.
One circuit court has said that pseudocode for the purposes of expressing mathematical concepts in academic literature was an expressive action worthy of first amendment protection. There has never been a general “code is speech” ruling, and I seriously doubt that we’re going to get one. Even so, government can compel all kinds of speech! The FBI cited CALEA as an example, but an incredibly basic and uncontentious version of compelled speech for the purpose of ensuring an informed judiciary is compelled testimony. There was an example of this recently in the Freddie Gray cases. Officers were compelled to testify in the trials of their fellow officers, even if they didn’t want to. They retained Fifth Amendment protections… but there would be no need for Fifth Amendment protection if there was no ability to compel any speech whatsoever.
5. I don’t want the NSA involved in domestic law enforcement for the FBI.
Lawfare has a great series of posts on this, and I have very little to add. I’ll swing back around to the idea that I don’t want the FBI to have to take an NSA-like stance toward Americans, either.
III(a) Burr-Feinstein
I consider Burr-Feinstein to be the only remotely serious federal proposal for encryption law (possible adjustments can be found here). I’ll start with common misconceptions as to what BF would have actually done, then move to a more general view of the possibilities of encryption law.
1. Section 2 does not matter.
This is basic statute-reading, but I think it’s led lots of people astray. Section 2 is the “Sense of Congress”. These sections are not legally enforceable, so you can be immediately confident that anyone who is trying to ground a legally-binding requirement in this section doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
2. Section 3(a) is what I call the “FBI v. Apple Fix”.
In FBI v. Apple, there was a legitimate question about whether companies have to comply with court orders for technical assistance in executing search warrants. Remember, these are retrospective orders for individual warrants on existing devices. Courts cannot order you to do impossible things. If you are the creator of PGP, you are a “covered entity” (in the original bill; the update exempts them entirely). If FBI could come up with a concrete method by which you can get into a piece of encrypted data (like they had in FBI v. Apple), then they could compel you to do it. If you don’t have such a method, they can’t compel you to do anything! That’s extremely simple, and I don’t know why it seems to break so many people’s brains. This is absolutely unquestionably true if we consider the “reasonable efforts” phrasing that the adjustment adopted (probably in response to so many people not understanding this).
There is nothing in Section 3(a) that could require any prospective backdoor in any device. There just is no such requirement in this section. You can’t find it, because it’s not there. If we try to imagine that it’s there by squinting really hard, we’re going to run into a problem as soon as we move to…
3. Section 3(c) is an attempt to target Apple’s model.
This section picks out a special group – providers of electronic communication service (ECS) or remote computing service (RCS) to the public. The qualifier “to the public” is important. If you are Google, you provide electronic communication service (Gmail) to the public – any person can sign up for an account. If you run a company-specific Exchange server, you are not providing ECS to the public. This group is a strict subset of “covered entities”. There are tons of “covered entities” that are not captured by Section 3(c).
Section 3(c) requires this group to be capable of complying. This is the only prospective requirement in the bill, and it does not hit all “covered entities”. As I alluded to in the last section, if we imagine that Section 3(a) has a hidden prospective requirement for all “covered entities” to be capable of complying, then there is absolutely no reason for Section 3(c) to exist! Providers of ECS/RCS to the public are a subset of “covered entities”! If they’re required to be capable of complying by a hidden provision in 3(a), what is 3(c) even doing?! One of the canons of statutory construction is that we disfavor interpretations which make a portion of the text meaningless. At this point, there should be no question that this bill simply wouldn’t do what a lot of people thought it would do. Both the actual text of 3(a) and applying the rules of statutory construction to 3(c) agree.
Now, they’re not just targeting providers of ECS/RCS. They’re actually targeting the Apple model. Apple individually approves every single app that can go on an iPhone. The bill locks onto them as a distributor of the licenses for these apps. It requires Apple to make sure that these apps are capable of complying.
4. Burr-Feinstein really targets dumb users of popular products which allow easy encryption.
Right now, anyone who buys an iPhone can have easy, on-by-default, encrypted data-at-rest. They can immediately download one of the many popular encrypted messaging apps and have easy, on-by-default, encrypted data-in-motion. This bill really just targets these guys. It’s not meant to stop smart users. Like I mentioned above, even if this bill were adopted as law, there would be nothing stopping me from just using PGP for all of my communications.
On this note, I think the stakes of encryption law are less than you think. It will preserve legal access to these systems for a while, but it is almost certain that easy-to-use encryption will come around which can’t be hit by a law like this. If those dumb users adopt this alternative, a decade from now, rather than saying, “Whelp, we passed an encryption law, so the apocalypse came,” we’ll say, “Heh. Remember that time when we slightly extended the lifetime of law enforcement access to some communications of dumb criminals?”
III(c). Risk analysis, legal access, and lawful hacking
1. There is no such thing a perfect security. The question is always whether your security is good enough and how this trades off with functionality.
You’re opening a new bank, constructing a new building and everything. Being a bank, you think, “We should probably build a vault.” You go to your local security expert who argues about encryption online and commission him to design you a vault. He goes away and works for a while, eventually coming back to display the fruits of his labor. You have a look. “Uh, sir? I haven’t built many vaults, so I have a stupid question. Where’s the door?” “ARE YOU CRAZY!? YOU CAN’T BUILD A DOOR! IF YOU BUILD A DOOR, THEN SOME PEOPLE MIGHT FIND A WAY TO EXPLOIT THAT DOOR!” “I see. Uh, sir, one more question. What if we want to, ya know, go into the vault… perhaps to place valuables inside or to retrieve what we had previously placed there?” “IF YOU CAN GET IT, ANYONE CAN GET IN!”
2. The latent risk environment matters.
Scenario A: The government wants to build a backdoor on your house. The design is a doggy-door, but large enough for a human. This is obviously completely insecure and utterly unacceptable.
Scenario B: The government wants to build a backdoor on your house. The design is a bank vault door; the only code to open it is kept in the nuclear football; the door is also protected 24/7 by two armed guards. Sure, there’s a theoretical security vulnerability: someone could just steal the nuclear football, incapacitate the guards, and proceed to enter your house. From a practical standpoint, any would-be nefarious actors are going to throw a brick through your front window, instead.
The former scenario introduces much greater risk than the latent risk environment, while the latter introduces much less. Note that this consideration is orthogonal to whether you trust the President to have access to the code in the nuclear football. (See here for an example that makes it look more like the nuclear football than a doggy door.)
Taken together, these two principles undercut a lot of complaints. In Apple’s brief in FBI v. Apple, they claimed that their latent risk environment is high. This actually makes their position worse. Why would anyone go to all the effort to steal Apple’s well-defended possessions when they could just exploit all the other hundreds of vulnerabilities out there? Taken to the extreme, some people will fall back on, “If you include this feature that the government wants, it will increase the surface area of the code, increasing vulnerability.” This is the most theoretical of theoretical risks. I agree that it’s a theoretical concern, but there’s absolutely no reason we couldn’t say, “If you include this feature that the customers want, it will increase the surface area of the code, increasing vulnerability.” This is why they have a high latent risk environment to start with! They keep adding features and creating them!
3 . Since encryption doesn’t provide perfect security, the legal question is important.
There’s a popular argument that we can just ignore the legal question and let the technical questions rule. In particular, the thought is that encryption produces a perfect digital lockbox, so if we just don’t do anything in the legal realm, law enforcement will be shut out and the matter will be closed (coincidentally, in the direction they wanted in the first place). However, I don’t think this goes exactly that way.
The mathematics of encryption are sound – if you attempt to access the encryption method through the standard authentication method (plus a set of other assumptions), then it will take centuries to get in. However, a lot is buried in that ‘if’. Many attacks on encryption are focused on implementation issues that are not as perfect as mathematics. Neither criminals nor law enforcement are going to just quit their jobs, and both will be incentivized (can I use ‘incented’? I kinda like it) to come up with attacks on popular implementations of encryption. In fact, that was the result of FBI v. Apple – law enforcement went and found another way in (presumably one that attacks the implementation rather than the encryption, itself).
If we ignore the legal question, we invariably create an arms race between defensive-minded product developers and criminals/LE. Worse, we’re choosing to put law enforcement in the same bind the NSA is stuck in – how do you balance between offense/defense? There are different reasons why we’re likely stuck leaving NSA in this bind (see the SIGINT post), but we have some choice for law enforcement. We don’t have unlimited choice, because of Section III(b)(4). The FBI will never be entirely released from the bind. They will always be incented to find attacks on implementations which don’t have built-in legal access. They’ll be incented to hoard them, because if they get out, criminals can exploit them or developers can shut them out. This is not a recipe for secure systems, happy law enforcement, happy companies, or happy consumers.
4. The price of legal access is more secure systems.
This will likely be my most contentious claim, as it is counter-intuitive to everything the pro-privacy crowd wants to believe. To them, the government is the bad people, and any access they have is unacceptable. This is their terminal goal. However, as I pointed out above, the result of this terminal goal is that police become aligned with criminals in trying to defeat encryption systems and hoarding those vulnerabilities. Instead, if we embrace legal access, their incentives (for major systems) are flipped. Now, they’ll have two different rules of action.
Suppose the FBI discovers a vulnerability in System X. If they have legal access to System X, they have no incentive to hide/hoard it. Instead, they’re incented to go to the developer and have it fixed. If they don’t have legal access, they’re incented to hide/hoard/exploit it, just like criminals are. The concerns of government abuse of these exploits (outside of the legal process) will persist. We will, for the rest of time, have these clashes for systems with no legal access. Customers will have no choice in which model to prefer.
If we implement legal access, consumers will then have a choice. They can choose to use a mass system, where legal access is governed by a known legal process, with an additional check of a large company ensuring the validity of the warrant… or they can choose to trust a fringe system, where law enforcement is trying to get in just as hard as criminals (and all the risks of law enforcement abuse are preserved). Frankly speaking, with the exception of a small anti-government wing of the pro-privacy crowd and careful criminals, I would predict that the vast majority of consumers are going to choose the mass system with legal access – and this choice will happen to result in them choosing the more secure system.
Regardless of whether you actually believe this line of argument that legal access results in more secure systems, this leads to the biggest reason why I’m not terribly concerned about a potential encryption law.
5. Even with a hypothetical encryption law, you’ll have choices of who to trust with your security.
There is no serious proposal to implement a broad ban on encryption products. None of the bills proposed will outlaw PGP. If you trust the legal regime, Apple’s legal department checking their work, and Apple’s technical department, you’ll just use Apple’s product. If you prefer to trust the writers of PGP, you’ll use their product. If you trust your own tradecraft above all, you’ll write your own encryption. You’ll still have the ability to choose.
If you only take one thing away from this preponderance of words, it’s that there is no need to be apocalyptic. The stakes just really aren’t as high as many people have been led to believe.
IV. Parting shot
I was planning on writing an entire section on National Security Letters and Lavabit, but this is already way too long. I’ll just briefly note that most people have NSLs entirely wrong. There are specific statutes which authorize NSLs to get specific information – and they’re expressly limited to no more information than you could get with a grand jury subpoena (not a warrant). In particular, they can only get non-content information.
In that light, I’ll quickly note that the common claim, “The FBI demanded LavaBit’s encryption key through just an NSL,” is obviously false on its face. This story has gotten mangled beyond belief. If you have an hour or so, read through the now-public primary documents on the events in question, because they paint a vastly different picture than most people imagine. If anyone really wants me to elaborate further, feel free to ask. I’m tired of typing right now.
Thanks for the detailed post. It was a great read!
I’m just glad somebody read it all. After pasting it into chunks that fit the max comment length and seeing how many comments it required, I was really worried that no one would get through the whole thing.
I fell off the wagon as I was trying to read it in small moments of free time and was struggling to pick up my place again…any chance you have it posted in a single page format?
Unfortunately, I don’t. I intended this to be part, “Let’s see if there are any new and interesting counterarguments from the SSC community,” and part, “I’d like to collect a bunch of my various reddit comments into one relatively coherent argument (and have the whole chunk in one place so I can remember it).” I don’t have a personal online forum.
@Freak, which subreddits have good discussions about these sorts of issues, open to viewpoints from both your perspective as well as EFF types? A lot of government-skeptical forums (e.g. /r/Anarcho_Capitalism/) would not, I think, be particularly receptive to your arguments, even your good ones. And one of my frustrations with what I think of as the “Lawfare scene” is that they don’t provide forums for casual feedback / discussion. I think Lawfare used to have facebook comments enabled, but not anymore. Occasionally their writers will engage feedback on Twitter, but that medium has many flaws.
The only subs I really participate in for these issues are r/technology and r/law. r/tech is really bad, but I think they’re getting better. There are three users who used to always post the TechDirt Lie of the Day article, and I’ve called these articles out consistently enough that I think those particular individuals have been dissuaded a bit. They still get the weekly Vice FOIA Comes Up Empty article. Nevertheless, anyone who takes a position there that is in any way not in line with EFF is just fishing for downvotes (and I do). It does help me refine my arguments, though. r/law is much more level-headed, but they don’t have nearly the same rate of posts, because they’re less taken in by the outrage-mongering. There are smart perspectives on many sides there.
Strangely enough, I’ve had some good experiences in AMA. Of course, the rate is low there, but when they have people focused on these issues, I find that the community generally responds to sharp questions (especially when they seem difficult for the position the individual is taking).
Another venue where I sometimes comment (less so since their switch to WaPo… a long time ago, now) is Volokh. These issues usually only show up when Orin Kerr says extremely smart things about them.
This relative lack of good venues for continued discussion is part of why I really wanted to bring this to SSC. The commentariat here is very smart, so in addition to just getting feedback to my personal claims, I was hoping to get a sense of whether people were interested in future discussions. I’m not going to bring up every piece of news that I want to talk about, but perhaps even signalling to others that this domain is open will spark comments.
1/5 Stars – product was advertised as boring and sleep inducing, but when I opened it at 2 am, it was anything but. Turned out to be pretty good, but not what the writer said it would be. Would not read at 2 am in the hopes of quickly falling asleep again.
So, for reasons that don’t bear going into at the mo, I am reading a lot of Judge Dredd these days.
First a geeky thing/things – the Shankar/Urban movie seems to cleave very close to the main theme of the comics, I really enjoyed that movie, and am very disappointed that it didn’t do well. (Even not knowing the source material at the time, I liked the Shankar version much better than the Syl Stallone version.)
I am really enjoying the comics, and am impressed by the length of the run and the willingness of the writers to fight with difficult questions.
Related – I know fangirls gotta fangirl, but I wish more of the fanfic out there was about Dredd, or Judges, and less about Dredd/Anderson pairing (or, god help us, pairing Dredd and Jim Kirk.) (Yes, I know why Kirk/Dredd. Just, no.) Which is on the same spectrum as pretending GRRM is my bitch to write ASoFaI novels to deadline, so I know it’s wrong, but I’ll just be over here in my corner sulking.
And secondly, a not-so-geeky thing…
In the “omg this is THE best Dredd story collection EVA” three-story collection America, a main character has been arrested during a “peaceful” protest that turned violent because of false-flag operations by government agents who had infiltrated the protest group and started actions which justified reaction by the Judges (aka the cops.)
Bad behavior by protesters here in the real world has been a fairly common theme, and and the Ferguson image of people lighting Moltav cocktails was fairly disturbing. I am by inclination not eager to give much credence to claims that “oh, I was just peacefully protesting and some lying undercover cops started throwing rocks, I would never do that sort of thing”. So I am asking those who would by nature have more sympathy to these claims –
– how often is it “cops” or “corp-rat infiltrators” who start the mess, vs more radical protesters and/or random thugs looking for a chance to settle other disagreements and…
– is there any way to actually measure these rates?
– anyone know enough about protests in places that aren’t the USA to talk about rate variation across nations/cultures?
I have a friend who was heavily involved in Occupy here in Denver when it was happening (who I consider reliable, although obviously you have no reason to trust my judgment on the matter), and he told me a story about a guy who showed up to one of the protests and appeared for all intents and purposes to be deliberately attempting to incite it. The incitement attempt failed and the guy left. My friend was suspicious and followed him down the street a few blocks, to see him get picked up in a police car. The issue of fake protesters trying to alter protest dynamics was a matter of sufficient concern that Occupy people had a whole folklore about it, a set of rules for trying to prevent cooption by such people. I do not know how much of that emerged from legitimate experience, and how much from pure paranoia.
I don’t know how common all this is, but we have run into a political problem where people are taking politics to some weird places. We know there have been fabrications involving claims of violence post-Trump on the left. I’d bet at least half of the Nazi swastikas are fake. I’m not a Trump supporter, by the way, but noticing and being genuinely disturbed by the hysteria on the left is one of the reasons I ended up here in the first place.
We have a general political problem where the only people playing it straight these days look like suckers. And by playing it straight, I just mean, saying openly what they want and how they want it. That’s basically how democratic politics is supposed to work. But what happens if you’re a former Republican who became a Democrat because you weren’t exactly into white nationalism, and you’re arguing with a Bernie supporter about who the next nominee should be? Do you say you think the Democratic Party should be a fiscally conservative moderate party and that you don’t agree that their desire for a substantial increase in the welfare state would be good for the country? Or do you try to convince this other person that you really care about economic issues, but that Hillary (who you recognize as an ideological fellow traveller whether it’s true or not) is simply more likely to get those sorts of things done than Bernie?
Anyone can misrepresent their views in the pursuit of some rhetorical goal, but I feel like this just wasn’t that much of an issue eight years ago. People just said what they wanted and the chips fell where they fell. Now everyone’s gotten way more fucking politically sophisticated. It’s not doing us any good.
I agree with your basic thesis, but I honestly think that the situation you think existed eight years ago actually died with Kennedy, if not before.
It’s possible. I base my observations on a specific set of interactions I’ve personally had over the course of the time I’ve been politically engaged. I’ve been laser focused on what people are saying in political forums only for the last couple of years, mainly trying to fully comprehend the yawning chasm between how discourse works in textbook theories of liberal democracy, and how they actually work in the real world. Definitely not enough experience there to make sweeping historical declarations one way or the other.
Still, the hyperpartisanship is new in recent history, as are the mechanisms for communicating. I don’t know how useful comparisons to the past are here. It’s often a comfort to find commonalities since it implies that this situation is normal. But one sometimes seeks that sense of continuity not out of a concern for whatever the truth might be, but just to reassure one’s self that nothing important has really changed.
> I’d bet at least half of the Nazi swastikas are fake
Yeah, I suspect those come from a cultural misunderstanding. “The Left”, or at least angry people with poor judgment on that side, think that the right are really secret Nazis and draw swastikas to to make that clear.
Meanwhile, hardly anyone on the right actually have any Nazi sympathies, which leaves only leftist false flaggers and shitty trolls to draw actual swastikas.
[Epistemic status: shaky]
There really is a cesspool on the right that believes such things as “There is a global conspiracy to destroy white culture intent on ruining countries like Russia and Iceland because the are ‘still white.'” I assume the population of people who subscribe to such views is much much smaller than, say, the population of people who were sure the next president would be Ron Paul four years ago. I also think they mainly exist in this form because an economic indictment of global elites is not available to people on the right-it’s just marxism, which we all know is bad. So if you’re a fringer who prefers Breitbart to NPR, and have some beef with globalization, the racial narrative is all that is available.
It would help if there weren’t plenty of people in extremely left-wing spaces (I see it mostly on tumblr, but that’s just because I don’t go to any other sites frequented by the far left) who actually do support the destruction of white culture, revel in ethnic replacement, and talk about how good things will be once white people are simply gone. You see a lot of responses to people being upset their culture is being pushed out of relevance that go to the tune of “I’m glad this is happening to you”.
I subscribe to the view that the alt-right largely exists as a countercultural response to the identity politics left, so I don’t disagree with you here.
@dwietzsche:
Okay, but do even THOSE people think a swastika (a) accurately reflects their current views, (b) is likely to draw others to their views?
Well, the history books do tell us that the police and security services in general do try infiltrating groups who like to go protesting against government. That is to be expected.
Recently there was a scandal in Britain when the undercover (male) agent in a very long infiltration operation would get (female) animal rights activist pregnant and then disappear. (He also planted a bomb to get acknowledged by the animal rights group.) This happened in the 1980s. Link to NYTimes. New Yorker. In short, there’s evidence that they do not play nice if they can get away with it.
Incitement to violence? It’s difficult to tell. I doubt that goes to officially sanctioned history books, even if it happens. Most of the news articles I can find are quite similar, different variations of “MP demands inquiry to undercover cop activities after the latest protests”.
Like you, I feel like most accusations of this nature are super convenient for the group making them. Almost every time someone does something horrific in the name of an ideology, some portion of the ideology’s supporters suggest that it was a false-flag operation.
So that’s my instinctual response. With that said, you would expect this sort of thing to be really hard to catch and even harder to prove, beyond the kind of anecdotal stories dwietzsche tells, below. Here’s one relatively-proven case of non-protest false flag operation conducted by the intelligence services in Australia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Hilton_Hotel_bombing
I signed up for the social sciences replication prediction market Scott linked to two open threads ago. The Replication Project is trying to replicate 21 studies published in Science and Nature. You can see the studies here. I thought folks here might be interested in my predictions. (I am a philosopher, not a social scientist, but all you needed to sign up was a university E-mail address.)
I bet that the following hypotheses would not replicate. I have put in [brackets] the current probability of replication according to the prediction market, which has been open for almost two weeks:
(5) “Job candidates are evaluated as better overall if their cv is evaluated on a heavy clipboard rather than a light clipboard.” [0.27]
(9) “Priming analytic thinking via images of “The Thinker” increases religious disbelief compared to viewing control images of a visually similar artwork.” [0.25]
(15) “Hand washing will significantly reduce the need to justify one’s choice by increasing the perceived difference between alternatives. Specifically, the mean difference between the rankings of the chosen and rejected albums before and after making the choice will be greater for the soap examining condition compared to the soap hand washing condition.” [0.30]
(16) “Repeatedly imagining eating a food subsequently reduces the actual consumption of that food (a comparison of the 30-repetition treatment and the control treatment in experiment 1).” [0.53]
(19) “Low-wealth subjects, that are given fewer chances to win in repeated “Wheel of Fortune” type word puzzle games, perform worse in a subsequent attention task (Dots-Mixed task) than do high-wealth individuals (a comparison of the mean performance on the Dots-Mixed task between the “poor treatment” and the “rich treatment”).” [0.35] (Note: “low-wealth” should really be in scare quotes here. The hypothesis is just that subjects who are given fewer chances to win will perform worse in the subsequent task.)
Although in each case my personal probability of replication is lower than the market’s, I basically agree with the order of plausibility, although I would put the clipboard study at the bottom.
I bet that the following hypotheses would replicate:
(10) “The likelihood of choosing a charity is higher when potential donors know that the overhead is already paid for, than when the donors pay for overhead themselves (a comparison of the fraction choosing to donate to “charity: water” between the “50% overhead, covered treatment” and the “50% overhead treatment”).” [0.82]
(13) “Reading literary fiction improves affective Theory of Mind (a comparison of the mean Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) score between the literary fiction treatment and the nonfiction treatment in experiment 1).” [0.37]
I’m not very confident that (13) will replicate, but the market value seemed too low to me.
There are several other studies that I think will probably replicate, but my own probability for them was not much different than the market’s (usually around .7 or .8), so I didn’t bet on them. The safest bets seemed to be the implausible priming experiments.
“Priming analytic thinking via images of “The Thinker” increases religious disbelief compared to viewing control images of a visually similar artwork.”
What?
Any link to the original because I genuinely cannot believe somebody decided this was worthwhile. I think you’re probably safe to bet it won’t replicate.
The original is here. The study is in line with the general (implausible) paradigm that subtle changes to one’s environment can produce large changes in belief and behavior, as well as with the anti-religious bias of the social sciences. I think this study is very probably nonsense.
I’m even more confident that the clipboard study (job candidates are evaluated as better overall if their cv is evaluated on a heavy clipboard rather than a light clipboard), which follows the same general priming paradigm, is nonsense. The p-value for that result is .049, which strongly suggests publication bias/p-hacking.
I’ve been interested to see how volatile the market is for some of these studies. The clipboard and Thinker studies, for instance, have ranged from a low of .13/.14 to a high of .69. Although the consensus is definitely against them, there does seem to be some real controversy over the plausibility of these kinds of studies (with the high points looking like they’re mostly attributable to a few True Believers going all in).
Does anyone have any data on SSCs growth rate?
Curious to see what the slope of growth has been like, and how much certain articles (and which) have had the biggest impact on readership.
Hits/day grew very quickly until January 2015, then essentially stopped and has been stable for the past two years.
How recent data are you taking into consideration there? (I’m especially wondering whether Ann Coulter tweeting your recent article had any significant impact.)
He’s talking about steady traffic, not viral spikes. The Crying wolf piece is probably 10x as big as his most popular previous piece, but that did not, apparently, contribute to ongoing traffic, so this probably won’t, either. Ann Coulter only has a million followers, so she probably isn’t visible in the traffic logs.
Someone on my FB list shared a link to On The Media’s checklist for spotting fake news. I ended up writing a whole screed on it, and touched on many points about fake news, in a way I thought would be interesting to SSC commenters. I think it also leaves out a lot of important details that SSC commenters would like to explore, and I could learn a fair bit. So I’m reproducing my post below, hopefully with Scott’s and Scott’s comment filter’s approval.
—
So here’s a clever idea I had: what happens if I apply On the Media’s Fake News checklist, *to* that checklist?
The list is halfway down this page:
http://www.wnyc.org/story/breaking-news-consumers-handbook-pdf/
1. “Big red flags for fake news: ALL CAPS, or obviously photoshopped pics.” Headline is in all caps, but does not look photoshopped. 1/2 red flags.
2. “A glut of pop-ups and banner ads? Good sign the story is pure clickbait.” No pop-ups or banner ads.
3. “Check the domain! Fake sites often add ‘.co’ to trusted brands to steal their luster.” The only site here is onthemedia.org; no stolen luster.
4. “If you land on an unknown site, check its ‘about’ page. Then, Google it with the word ‘fake’ and see what comes up.” …this is where it gets tricky, because you’ll always get hits, and they won’t specifically say “yes” or “no”; you have to read, and judge for yourself. But even that’s not all; to have a comparable baseline, you have to compare what you see with the searches for sites you know are fake, and sites you know are not. Why is this important? Because it may turn out that a search for “$nonFakeSite fake” may yield comparable results for “$fakeSite fake”. OTM is implying you’ll get noticeably different results. Checking for yourself is relatively inexpensive, though.
If I search “‘on the media’ fake”, I see a front page with articles that don’t specifically address whether OTM is fake. So I guess that’s a good sign.
What if I search a known fake? “onion fake” gives me… ads for fake onions. (Not even kidding.) But then I get one to Wikipedia and I can read in the Google intro that The Onion is fake, so okay.
What if I search on a known non-fake? “cspan fake” (we agree C-SPAN is non-fake as it gets, right?) gives me hits, none of them appearing to tackle the thorny issue of whether C-SPAN has been pulling our leg all this time, so okay.
5. “If a story offers links, follow them. (Garbage leads to worse garbage.) No links, quotes, or references? Another telltale sign.” … there are no links on this graphic, other than the mention of OTM’s home site. Is citing yourself a telltale sign? HMMMM. …sorry, that was in all caps. Hmmmm…
Seriously though, this point reveals one weakness, IMO: it’s not really a telltale sign if the information offered is true or at least plausible on its face. It’s less correct to treat a graphic like this as an article about some world event, as it is to treat it more like a how-to article or recipe, and how-tos and recipes are typically link-free.
6. “Verify an unlikely story by finding a reputable outlet reporting the same thing.” …okay, I’ll say it: this could really hurt you if your prior beliefs about what’s reputable is already broken. I tried to apply this by searching for other articles on how to spot fake news, and while I saw one on FactCheck that I thought was pretty good, I also got a hit on a Quora article that also served up an ad for tips on spotting truth in news from… Dan Rather. (In case you don’t know, Rather made history for running a piece on CBS News about President’s G.W. Bush’s time in the Texas Air National Guard, based on typed memos that were later found to be fake, and earning the label “Rathergate” for the whole thing.) If I think Quora is above board (spoiler: it is at the meta-level, but at the object level, it’s as garbage-in garbage-out as any crowdsourced site, like Reddit or Slashdot), and it agrees with OTM, then I’m falling prey to confirmation bias.
The FactCheck article didn’t 100% back up all of OTM’s tips, but it repeated some of them, such as reading past the headline. There’s a load of background that comes into play here, which I’ll summarize and say that OTM’s list appears to check out.
7. “Check the date. Social media often resurrects outdated stories.” This list is as immune to that as most how-tos. Any recipe that made green bean casserole in 1950 will probably still produce green bean casserole today. …Well, except that this list does rely on certain technological devices in common use today. There was no such thing as clickbait in 1950, and it might go away by 2050 for all we know. But that isn’t what this tip is warning about, and this list doesn’t trip the warning, so okay.
8. “Read past headlines. Often they bear no resemblance to what lies beneath.” This list doesn’t really have a headline other than “BREAKING NEWS CONSUMER’S HANDBOOK”, and this list is obviously intended to be a section of the whole thing, so I’d say it is what it says it is.
9. “Photos may be misidentified and dated. Use a reverse image search engine like TinEye to see where an image *really* comes from.” I plugged this graphic into Google’s reverse image search, and it came from LiveLeak. Uh oh. (Just kidding. It came from WNYC, OTM’s host.)
10. “Gut check. If a story makes you angry, it’s probably designed that way.” …This has a similar weakness to #6. What if my anger metric is itself busted? What if I’m bipolar? What if I’m unnaturally well-humoured? Still, these are all heuristics, after all, and FWIW, this list isn’t angering me. On the contrary, I’m actually enjoying it. …Which might mean I’m falling prey to the opposite problem, where we share things that aren’t really that true, but play to our prior beliefs of how the world ought to work. This list doesn’t mention that, and I think it should. So now I’m a little annoyed by that, which means it’s no longer playing to my prior beliefs, while not completely angering me… so this is probably okay.
(Me? Overthink things? Nooooo.)
11. “Finally, if you’re not sure it’s true, don’t share it!” …Which brings us to the final score. One point for everything this list does right, not counting this point:
1/2 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 9.5 out of 10. The only thing OTM messed up was putting its headline in all caps. (Way to go, guys.) So by OTM’s standards, this is probably really good, and postworthy.
One final note, though, is whether this is postworthy by *anyone’s* standards. If OTM did poorly by its own list, this would be an indication for us to not follow it; but just because it’s consistent doesn’t mean we should use it. There exist consistent systems of axioms and inference rules which are nevertheless not very useful in the real world. Is this list one of those? Or is it objectively useful?
My answer is that I can’t say for sure. I can say, however, that one way to refute it would be to point out fake articles that follow all of the above points, and non-fake articles that break enough of them that OTM would judge them fake. (OTM doesn’t say how many rules you have to break, so this is a judgement call, and maybe they expect a scalar rather than a binary scale.)
Also, this isn’t the only source for spotting fake news. As mentioned above, FactCheck has an article. So does HowStuffWorks. I would recommend these, but that’s an argument from authority, so I’ll go out of my way to NOT opine that they’re good, but rather that I think you would want to read them and compare them to OTM’s. Another source I use is a whole book, by Neil Postman, who goes into detail about the economic drives behind news. It focuses on TV news, but many of its points carry into online news as well.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/96446.How_to_Watch_TV_News
I largely agree with the “wolf” post: by crying wolf in the presence of a sheep (Mitt Romney), the left lost credibility in the presence of a fox (Trump–I don’t think he’s personally racist or homophobic, though he may be somewhat sexist in a way most 70-year old male billionaires probably are, and he may be somewhat vulnerable to hijacking by racist or, more likely, xenophobic elements), and will seemingly have no ammo left should a real wolf (someone like David Duke) ever be in a position to assume real power.
That said, I’d like to steelman, if not exactly defend, for a moment, why I can at least understand why people overreact this way, even if I don’t think it’s a good idea:
It seems like politics, like the stock market, functions prospectively. If you hear news that seems likely to hurt a company’s earnings potential next year, you sell the stock NOW. And so does everyone else. Very rapidly, the news is “baked in.”
Similarly, in politics, where gradualism and duplicity are endemic strategies, everyone is always looking at the top of a mountain or the bottom of a slippery slope. This explains things on both sides: will Obama transform the nation into a globalist, socialist, secular society in the space of 4 or 8 years? No. But we might guess, based on his statements and those of people he hangs out with, that that’s kind of the direction he wants to push things in. So people freak out and call Obama a global, secular, socialist right NOW. Because that’s what they believe he REALLY wants–he’s just biding his time.
With Trump, I don’t think (hardly) anyone believes that, within four years, we’ll be rounding up gays for reeducation camp and deporting everyone who’s not a white Christian.* But the question is, will 4 or 8 years of a Trump presidency make such a future more or less likely? What do Trump and his supporters REALLY want? Is David Duke’s chance of being president sometime in the future increased or diminished by a Trump presidency? I don’t really think he has a chance, regardless, but it’s not inconceivable to me that Trump presidency universe has a slightly higher probability of becoming Duke presidency universe than Hillary presidency universe.
And so people freak out NOW. You don’t wait until a white nationalist is president, or even until one is running, to freak out about white nationalism; you freak out as soon as you can conceivably see a future path to the nightmare scenario. Hence the warnings that we not “normalize” Trump–i. e. allow the Overton Window to move in his direction. As for why people can’t freak out in a more reasonable, accurate manner, calling a sheep a sheep and a fox a fox… well, that’s not really what freaking out is all about, and there is ample precedent for a “nose under the camel’s tent” approach to policy.
People can generally tolerate moving in the right direction slowly, but they start to freak out if they perceive things to be moving in the wrong direction, however slowly. Cthulu has mostly been swimming left, with a few rests and exceptions (the labor movement), for the past hundred years. Hence the intensifying, slow-mo freak out of conservative America. The election of Trump feels not only like a rest for Cthulu, but maybe even a hard turn in the opposite direction. For people who’ve dedicated their lives to yelling for Cthulu to swim faster, this is understandably unnerving.
Of course, everyone could “stand down” simultaneously and only react to the merits of the policy or candidate in front of them, rather than to the sinister, secret long-term goals they suspect they represent, or in which direction they think they might take us. In a way, I think Scott’s post is just an argument about the damaging effects of hyperbole in general. But the game theoretical difficulties with that are obvious…
*Though I think this is largely correct, as anecdotally corroborated by Scott’s report, and my own experience of, people actually claiming to contemplate suicide in response to the Trump election. Based on the treatment of Romney, I think there’s a sense in which “frighten them to death that the opponent is a monster” has just become the standard Dem strategy, which they would have used against opponents other than Trump as well. And yes, I think this is irresponsible, both because you lose all credibility for when a real monster shows up, and because you are manipulating people emotionally for political ends (not that the right doesn’t manipulate people with fear about other things, such as terrorism).
I don’t vote in the US, and haven’t followed the whole debacle enough to have an informed opinion, but if I were to judge which president makes a future David Duke presidency most likely, I’d have to go for Hillary.
She appears to fan the flames of BLM, and after 4 more years of encouraging them, the backlash would be spectacular. Conditional of course on her continuing her past behaviour after becoming president.
Wait a year or 2, and see what you think then.
It is conceivable, but I largely don’t subscribe to a “backlash” theory of history (not a few libertarians, for example, actively desire the more awful president, on the theory it will hasten peoples’ realization that government doesn’t work… I disagree). Which is why I didn’t agree with Scott’s argument that a Trump presidency would be bad for opponents of SJW. Where Cthulu swims, he pulls the Overton Window with him.
People who thought Romney really was a wolf, rather than a sheep, had their right to cry out. W was pretty much a wolf. I wouldn’t accuse anyone of crying wolf who didn’t want W to be president, after his disastrous Iraq War based on lies about WMD. If some people were expecting the same sort of MIC support and war mongering from Romney, that would be an understandable reason to cry Wolf.
As I believe Scott did, I am using “wolf” in this context to refer specifically to a candidate who is dangerous because of bigotry (“binders full of women”) not a candidate who is just dangerous for some reason (after all, Scott did argue that Trump was a dangerous choice, but not for reasons of bigotry).
Of course they had the right to cry wolf about Romney. But, given the election results two weeks ago, maybe it wasn’t wise.
I understand that attitude when it comes to race. But the whole thing about Trump leading to condemnation of homosexuality is ridiculous. For one thing, there’s the fact that not only has Trump never said anything negative about homosexuality itself, he has spoken in favor of many things that evangelicals hate including gay marriage, trans people choosing their own bathroom and funding Planned Parenthood. If anything, Trump has shown that conservatives don’t really care about religion anymore.
Yeah, that part is kind of like a lower-level layer of wolf-crying. You can make arguments that Trump is racist or sexist; I don’t feel qualified to pass judgement on them, but I can comprehend them. But anti-gay? Nope. Not even a little, tiny, bit. Trump is by far the most gay-friendly candidate the GOP has ever nominated for President, and arguably more gay-friendly than anyone the Democratic Party has ever nominated before 2016 — don’t forget that Obama claimed to be against gay marriage in 2012. Even if you tested him against 2016 Hillary Clinton on the matter, it’d at least require some research to call it one way or the other.
I completely agree with you about Trump personally, and about the policy his administration is likely to engage in. However, the Left’s fears aren’t completely unfounded here: Vice-President-Elect Pence signed into law the Indiana Religious Freedom Act before reversing course under huge backlash (to face, in turn, accusations of cowardice from the Red Tribe.)
Marriage equality and most other gay rights are the result of SCOTUS decisions. You still can’t get gay rights in most state houses.
Trump has committed to putting conservative justices on the Supreme Court. The likely future vacancies would put most of those decisions at risk.
The fact that the Left is horrified by Religious Freedom Acts, which were a bipartisan Clinton-era policy, shows many things, but not that their fears are founded.
@ HBC –
The likely future vacancies would put most of those decisions at risk.
I think you’re over reading this. If it were liberal justices that were putting a previously balanced court out of balance, then yes, previous controversial conservative decisions would be in danger of being overthrown.
But the thing about conservative judicial thought is that is it conservative and very reluctant to over throw precedence.
Even if Trump gets three justices in the court, we can’t make it like the previous (imo bad and harmful) decisions were never made, hey presto. They are part of the fabric of the law.
So, I think a little less alarm over this is due.
@keranih
That seems pretty naive. Scalia was one of the most conservative Supreme Court justices and he wanted to strike down Roe vs Wade, which has a longer precedent than a year old ruling. I wasnt thinking about his judicial appointments. Trump may not be hostile to homosexuality but his Supreme Court justices may be so it makes sense for the left to be concerned.
@kerinah:
The current SCOTUS has members who have voted against precedent many times. I see no reason to think that any of the 4 votes on the court against marriage equality would flip in favor of marriage equality if a 4th and 5th justice were added who do not believe marriage equality is a constitutional guarantee.
Maybe John Roberts. Maybe. But I am doubtful. He has authored some weird partisan “split the baby” rulings that really don’t respect precedent. Voting that the President doesn’t have the authority to set enforcement priorities on immigration (when that authority was specifically granted him and there is long precedent) was also really weird.
I see no reason to expect the conservatives on the court to be bound by a very recently ruled precedent that they voted against.
@HBC
I think respecting stare decisis in a gay marriage case would likely take the form of denying cert or (in the unlikely case of an appeals court going against Obergefell) a per curiam decision to reverse; it wouldn’t require any judges to publicly change their opinion.
@Wrong Species
Older rulings aren’t necessarily stronger; there are several exceptions to stare decisis which make newer rulings stronger. So Roe v. Wade is theoretically more vulnerable than Obergefell. I think in practice, because Roe v. Wade set a somewhat blurry line (of when and how much abortion is protected) on a continuum, it is more likely that line will be moved earlier or more restrictions will be allowed, rather than a complete overturning of the decision.
@TheNybbler:
Just make sure your case goes through the right appellate circuit and I don’t think it’s all that unlikely (although I confess I don’t know what the appellate courts look like right now).
Can SCOTUS rule per curiam reversing an appellate decision without hearing the case? How often does that happen?
Honestly, I think people are putting way too much emphasis on stare decisis. That doctrine is a fig leaf which is usually used in a kind of consequentialist way- “I don’t personally agree that a state entity shouldn’t have independent standing in this case, but that’s the way it’s always been and it’d probably do more harm than good to change course now.” I’ve met only a handful of judges who would be unwilling to upset precedent on issues which really, really mattered to them.
So I agree in theory with the premise that Roe is on shakier ground than Obergefell, but not by a lot. I could see Kennedy being convinced to maybe adopt more restrictive standards under Roe, and that’s about my entire reasoning. If any of the Justices who voted for gay marriage dies tomorrow, I think the only question is whether Roberts is convinced that pre-existing marriages must remain valid and how many of those states won’t have the political will to re-inact bans.
Now, that calculus changes if Trump can find a Justice who’s all about Obergefell but hates Roe, but I really can’t imagine who that would be. Tactically, he’s quite right to look at it that way; whereas overturning or limiting Roe would be a huge win for the Republican party, I think overturning Obergefell would do very little to excite his base and a whole lot of incite the Democratic base.
Edit- In reply to HBC:
If you were going to run a challenge to Obergefell through any of the Circuit Courts, you’d probably go 6th Circuit, but even then what you’d almost certainly get for the time being is a decision against you to appeal further.
And the Supreme Court very seldom rules per curiam against a Circuit Court, but that’s what would probably happen to a ruling which was so obviously contrary to settled law.
@HeelBearCub
Yes. The most common is a “GVR” order in response to a petition for a writ of certiorari — grant cert, vacate the appellate decision, and remand for further proceedings. These are common but probably would not be applicable in a case where an appellate court defied existing precedent; they’re often used where the Supreme Court made new precedent while the case was in process.
An appeals court defying precedent would probably result in a summary reversal. This is exactly as described: they reverse the decision based on a petition for a writ of certiorari without hearing further arguments. These appear to be less common; the Washington Post in 2014 described them as happening “a handful of times each year”. But I’d expect an appeals court out-and-out defying recent precedent to be fairly rare as well
I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t require this. The laws on the books have not changed for the most part.
Conservative justices are conservative is oversimplifying. Thomas is currently the most conservative in the sense of right wing Justice on the Court and he is a radical in terms of stare decisis. Over the years he has written many solo concurrences and dissents suggesting that he would overturn bedrock decisions. The oldest one that comes to mind, though probably the oldest, is his suggestion in McDonald that the Slaughter-House Cases from 1873 be overruled.
If someone comes along at points to a a paragraph somewhere where he suggested the Court take another look at McCulloch v. Maryland I wouldn’t be all that surprised.
I would expect this to be the case where the composition of the court was unchanged.
If the composition of the court changes by two justices appointed by Trump using his stated method? Again, I see only the possibility that Roberts stands on a precedent he did not agree with. But that is a thin reed.
Overturning Obergefell is seriously unlikely.
With regards to the GOP establishment, their main attitude towards the gay marriage issue (not “marriage equality,” where did that awful, propagandistic phrasing come from, anyway?) was that they just wished it would go away, since every time it came up they got smacked around by the media and the left. One good thing for them about the SC decision, the issue went away. You are not going to find a lot of Republicans in elected office who want it back. And the SC listens to politics — if it didn’t, John Roberts wouldn’t have swooped in with his flagrantly ridiculous reasoning to save Obamacare. The decision is gonna stand.
Agreed.
I’m struggling to think of any prominent Republicans who have campaigned on the issue of overturning same sex marriage. There aren’t even that many who are willing to fight the transgender bathroom issue and that one hasn’t been litigated at the SC-level yet…
The entirety of the Republican coalition in NC managed to convene a special session and pass a haggis of a bill in 12 hours which the governor signed without blinking or thinking when faced with a single municipality that codified trans bathroom rights.
Are there any Republican legislatures voting in favor of trans rights? Any of them?
I think you guys are wishing the Republican politicians would take certain positions, rather than reporting the positions they actually take.
I pretty much guarantee that Alito and Thomas would be perfectly happy to relitigate Obergerfell. Name two more justices to the court that are as conservative and it does not matter how moderate the average Republican is. Roberts will be the median vote and it will all fall to him. Because the most conservative organizations are eager to relitigate this with the right court.
Were we talking about trans rights just now?
Oh, we weren’t? Well then.
@Thirteenth Letter:
You perhaps should read Matt M’s comment before you get huffy.
Aw, but getting huffy is the most fun part! But you’re right, I missed that. Apologies.
That being said, the whole bathroom bill thing is not a meaningful data point that the GOP would voluntarily relitigate gay marriage. It’s simply a different issue with different incentives and motivations, even if you can put it in the same large category of “culture war stuff” or whatever.
@ThirteenthLetter:
It doesn’t matter how eager the average Republican is.
Let me repeat that, it doesn’t matter how eager the average Republican is.
In 2004, the average Democrat had no desire to put gay marriage to the fore as an issue, but, to those for whom it was the most important issue, that did not matter. San Francisco started issuing marriage licenses and put the issue front and center, and forced courts to consider the issue.
Anti-gay marriage advocates will ensure the same kind of legal battle occurs as soon as they feel they have a court that will side with them.
In order for that to happen, you don’t just need a couple of noisy activists with a brief window of opportunity, you need a party leadership who is willing to go along, even with the expectation of a decades-long battle. In the GOP right now, the people with the power are the establishment Republicans, who’d rather die than touch the issue again, and the Trump populists, who don’t care about it.
@ThirteentLetter:
All this is required is one state that is substantially more conservative on this issue. Kansas, maybe.
Actually you don’t even need that. All you need is one official to assert that the direction being given them, by the state executive, is unlawful by the laws on the state books which have not been altered. That one officials case can be walked all the way to the Supreme Court.
Only if the government takes the appropriate sides at every one of the appropriate times, and every single level of the executive and the courts above it cooperate obediently, and the party apparatus doesn’t lean mightily on everyone involved to shut up and drop it, and the legislature doesn’t insta-cave and pass a gay marriage bill real quick anyway to give everyone an excuse to let it go. (Which it will — you really can’t underestimate how eager GOP legislatures are to cave to media pressure.) I suppose it could happen, but lots of things could happen, and you’re going to have to ask yourself whether it’s worth worrying about them.
But, you know, this is an argument for total political warfare no matter what. What if the Democrats nominate a SC justice who doesn’t believe the Second Amendment confers an individual right? Then all we need is one crazy local official somewhere in Berkeley, and that’s it for the Second Amendment, right? So obviously we must fight every second tooth and nail and destroy the Other to save ourselves.
@ThirteenthLetter:
All the government has to do is not change the law on the books. Many states passed explicit laws defining marriage as between a man and a woman in the past 15 years.
Most Republican legislatures will not act to change those laws. You think they will, but I think you are greatly misreading the makeup of Republican elected officials.
You need one official attempting to enforce that law. The next Kim Davis. It would help to have a sympathetic AG, but if you have the right helpful outside org, you don’t need that.
Almost any action against that official can be turned into a case.
I guess we’ll just have to see, then! But I suspect you’re gonna be sorely disappointed. Never underestimate the ability of GOP-appointed judges to avoid an issue.
Indeed. Roe v. Wade is forty-three years old this year. The supreme court has had a conservative majority for essentially all of those years. I count four, maybe five occasions when one of the justices was replaced by another of noticeably more conservative leaning, which might be taken as a sign that This! Is! Your! Chance! to finally repeal RvW. And in all of that time, all of those shifts of power, and all of the cases that have come before the Court since, I can’t seem to find a single example of the Supreme Court even granting cert to a case that asked them to reverse Roe v. Wade’s core protection of a woman’s right to a first- or second-trimester abortion essentially on demand. Every case they have deigned to hear, asked for a weasel-worded response of the form, “Yes, of course you can have abortions but…”, you might have to pay for them yourselves or you might have to tell your parents, etc.
I do not expect anything more, or less, for gay marriage. Well, probably a bit less in that it really isn’t as big an issue for conservatives as is abortion and more of them would prefer people just stop talking about it. Trump will appoint and GOP senators cheerfully confirm, the sort of justices they think will mostly just protect the realm from the unholy scourge of compulsory wedding-cake baking.
Planned Parenthood v Casey in 1992 was supposed to be the case that overturned Roe v Wade. O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter got cold feet and wrote a plurality opinion that upheld the central holding. There were four votes to strike down R v W — Rehnquist, joined by White, Scalia, Thomas
There’s some fascinating reporting on this based on the papers of Justice Blackmun.
Today it is highly there are 2 votes to overturn R v W. (Alito & Thomas). If Trump picks off his list that’ll be 3. Roberts is a maybe. To be certain of overturning it Trump would have to have two more appointments (assuming those appointments didn’t replace Alito, Thomas, or Scalia’s replacement).
Given the ages of the people involved that’s reasonably likely in four years and even more so in eight.
And yet, if the plaintiffs had won everything they explicitly asked for, first and second-trimester abortions would still have been legal, and protected from state interference, burdened by no more than paperwork less onerous than e.g. a post-Heller gun purchase.
Granted, Casey would have allowed the court to give the plaintiffs more than they wanted, to the extent of overturning Roe v. Wade if that’s what the Court wanted. But if that was the case, the bottom line is that even a Court with eight Republican appointees (six from the litmus test era) didn’t bite.
Bottom line, the Supreme Court only grants cert (and maybe only is ever submitted) cases that are carefully presented to let them weasel out with “Abortions for all, now with extra paperwork!” or the like.
Trump has widened the Overton Window, or at least let some people outside of it know that there are more of them than they thought.
His nomination and his winning the election have shown that somebody who has been called a racist, white supremacist, etc (and, regardless of what he actually is, these charges are more credible than they were for the past two presidents) can be nominated and elected. He is currently bringing in people like Bannon and Flynn who are, at best, extremely distasteful: Bannon, if not a racist, white nationalist, misogynist, whatever, himself, is glad to make money with those people as his audience; Flynn’s views about Islam involve identifying all Muslims with the most aggressive forms of Islam.
It is not a huge surprise that, leaving aside the question of what Trump or whoever actually believes or their actual intentions, this has emboldened people who definitely are those things. There actually are people who shout “you’re gonna get deported” at people they think “look foreign”, mess with women wearing hijabs, etc. There actually are some neo-Nazis, even.
White nationalism and white supremacy are just the scurf atop a deeper social shift. The real key here, as you said, is that a presidential candidate who was relentlessly called those things just won a national election. That isn’t a consequence of the Overton Window being moved; I remain confident that sixty million Americans wouldn’t vote for a man they genuinely believed to be a white supremacist. (If they would, then the window was opened by the nose cone of an incoming 737, and we’re all pretty screwed.) It seems more likely that they discounted the accusation, despite Trump’s own rhetoric being the sort to give it some prima facie credibility. So either we’ve become inured to such charges through too much repetition — this is basically the NYT’s “cry wolf” theory Scott linked — or something has changed about how we evaluate them. Perhaps “racism” is no longer wholly synonymous with “evil” in the American mind, so we’ve regained some of the 1970s perspective that people can be kind of racist but still basically okay (the “Archie Bunker” theory, or perhaps the “South Park” theory in modern parlance).
A third possibility is that Trump himself is such a… unique personality that people didn’t really know what to think, and projected whatever they wished upon an essentially blank canvas. I get this impression when I read comments from some of his more fervent admirers, but I don’t get the sense that the voters in general felt that way.
I think it has. It’s now within that window to be openly against admitting refugees. To suggest harsh treatment for illegal immigrants (it was never…quite… outside the window to be against illegal immigration). To openly denigrate Islam. To support American nationalism. To be crude. To suggest that protests should be shut down by force. To suggest that elections aren’t perfectly honest. To be one step removed from white nationalists. The window has not so much moved as widened; it’s not so big that it encompasses actual white supremacists, but it’s a heck of a lot wider than it was before the campaign season.
The sticking point for me is the “one step removed from white nationalists”. Insofar as “white nationalism” is meant literally, i.e. advocacy of America becoming an entirely white nation or of white Americans forming their own nation, I’m not convinced the window is any closer to that than it was. The idea that there’s a linear progression from “no illegal immigrants” -> “no refugees from ‘dangerous’ countries” -> … -> “white nationalism” just doesn’t seem quite right, or at least, it seems like a liberal frame that Trump sympathizers would reject. I noticed during the campaign that the pro-Trump folks were very enthusiastic in their support for legal immigration, which is not a thing they have in common with white nationalists. Granted, a lot of that was probably virtue signaling or deliberate distancing, but the mere fact that they see virtue as being in that direction tells us something.
I suspect it’s more about a resurgence of “law and order” conservatism, combined with some undeniable prejudice against Muslims. Also, they’re of the opinion that immigrants need to assimilate into American culture and values, but again, that “melting pot” idea, while seeming retrograde and no doubt racist to many liberals today, is the diametric opposite of white nationalism.
I’m curious: at any point of time in her 2016 campaign, did Hillary ever say illegal immigration was bad?
Illegal immigration should be safe, legal, and rare.
Unless you’re advocating open borders that statement doesn’t make much sense.
Sorry, maybe the joke was too obscure. “Safe, legal, and rare” was Clinton’s position on abortion, seen by some as a cowardly attempt to have her cake and eat it too. (see e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/09/hillary-clinton-abortion-legal-but-rare cw: pro-abortion advocacy)
@ suntzuanime
“Safe, legal, and rare” was Clinton’s position on abortion, seen by some as a cowardly attempt to have her cake and eat it too.
Back in that day, the point was ‘Abortion should be safe and legal — but rarely needed.’ Contraception, sex education, and such should be improved so much that unwanted pregnancy was a very rare occurrence.
Everything Clinton ever said or did was portrayed by fake news creators as cowardly, stupid, or crooked– usually all three.
That’s the job description of the Right Wing fake news creator: Assume that Clinton is crooked, cowardly and stupid. Now comb through every hacked email and also every other statement she ever made and also everything she ever did– and find something that could be construed as evidence for her crookedness, cowardice and/or stupidity– if you distorted it enough or twisted the meaning of it enough. Then weave a thick tapestry of lies around it. Deliver to the public.
Noted right-wing propagandist Jessica Valenti, lol.
Of course, there are plenty of people on the Left who bash Hillary mercilessly and unfairly also, although most of it is from the Right. She’s been bashed for decades– the worst character assassination campaign against any American politician in a long time.
We are immersed in Right Wing Dem-bashing propaganda, and some of it has affected people on the Left too, who then practiced unjustified Hillary bashing on their own. Just because an occasional Left of Center picks up the Hillary bashing habit doesn’t make it fair. And it does not make their lies true.
Moon:
Have you ever responded to my questions about Hillary’s cattle future trading? Either “Yes, she funneled a bribe to her husband, but that’s a pretty minor form of corruption” or “no, here is a plausible explanation of how and why she turned a thousand dollars into a hundred thousand speculating in a market which she had no special knowledge of.”
With no answer, it’s hard to take seriously your insistence that charges against Hillary are all right wing propaganda.
Moon hasn’t even responded to even more innocuous questions, such as how she defines right-wing, center right, and left wing, or what rules she uses to distinguish between a serious news site and an unserious one. I’ve found it disheartening, since it makes it incredibly difficult to challenge my prediction that she simply equates “left-wing” with “serious”, “right-wing” with “unserious”, “disagrees with her” with “dogpiling”, and in general that there’s any sort of information one can glean from this view of the world. It’s too easy to predict.
You’re not helping paul
@hlynkacg
I think that’s debatable. Moon’s new name has not brought about any appreciable change in her willingness to actually address criticisms of her with anything besides insult. She simply declares questioning her positions dogpiling, rude, or ridiculous, then moves on to repeating the same lines in slightly different phrases. She does this as much to paul, or me, as the impeccably polite David Friedman. She’s hopeless.
Great post onyomi. I think you’ve got your finger on something extremely important.
Recently the press has been covering Richard Spencer, the alt-right leader. The coverage frustrates me. Everyone denounces him for his desire to turn America into a white ethnostate. What I’m trying to figure out is whether he wants to use violence to do this or not. That seems important for determining exactly how awful he is. But the press doesn’t seem to care–to them, his desire for a white ethnostate is sufficient to make him as evil as it gets.
But as you say with your “nose under the camel’s tent” comments, current statements are not necessarily indicative of future actions. There’s no way for someone like Spencer to credibly precommit to avoid the use of violence. However, I’m still disappointed that the press seems to think that ethnonationalism for white people and mass slaughter are morally equivalent. They don’t draw the same equivalence for ethnonationalists of other races. I worry that casting the two as equivalent may create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“Sure, he sieg heils, supports ethnic cleansing, and talks about how the lugenpresse is controlled by soulless golems. But how bad is he, really?”
It’s striking how quickly they went from insisting they weren’t Nazis to openly doing Nazi shit the moment they got a whiff of the ghost of possible electoral success.
“They” being who exactly?
The attendants at the NPI conference, for one thing. Haven’t they traditionally been part of the crowd that presents themselves as respectable and not full of hate?
Have they? Honestly I thought their “suit and tie fascist” shtick was well established but then I can’t say that I ever really paid them much attention either.
That said, TIL that Spencer used to be the editor of Taki’s Mag which explains his apparent prominence.
My impression, in any case, is that they had – my impression has always been that the NPI, etc, are basically about halfway between the “tweedy white nationalists” like Jared Taylor and the Steve Sailer types, and actual Nazis, but when they start throwing up Nazi salutes in response to the guy on stage yelling “hail victory!” I update towards “no, these guys are Nazis”.
Fair enough.
It never seemed to me like they tried very hard to deny being Nazis, but to be fair, I haven’t been following them that long.
Oh, they never did a great job of pretending they weren’t Nazis, but they had a pretense of not being Nazis.
They certainly enjoyed acting outraged that people called them Nazis.
Is this going to be yet another “Who exactly do you mean by alt-right” thread?
When you say “yet another “Who exactly do you mean by alt-right” thread” what, precisely, do you mean by that?
This could be a product of my ignorance, but I don’t know any “ethnonationalists of other races” (and to your point, I hadn’t heard of Spencer until yesterday, so I didn’t know of too many white ethnonationalists either). I agree that thinking your side is the best side and should win is not the same as thinking your side is the best side and everyone else should face a firing squad, but a comparison between the guy with more power who doesn’t want to lose it and the guy with less power and wants to have the same amount is a false equivalence.
Scott’s wolf post, and this one, correctly identify that exaggerated claims from media sources are weakening their ability to accurately assess “awfulness”. But neither post seems to have done enough to assess the reality of the awfulness and simply leaving it at “not THAT bad”.
Mugabe sort of looks like an ethnonationalist, maybe? Although I don’t think he has actually ever expressed a desire to purge Zimbabwe of all white people.
The Nation of Islam certainly has supported black enthonationalism, to greater and lesser extent over time, but also has been critiqued for such.
Well, he’s successfully driven out 90% of them, and declared that the ones who remain (for whatever reason; I imagine they can’t afford to get out) should not be allowed to own land because all land in Zimbabwe belongs to Africans by right. Which is kind of ethnonationalist, right? I wouldn’t be surprised to hear a similar declaration coming from one of Europe’s blood-and-soil ethnonationalists, for example.
Yeah, it seems like a bit of a double standard. We’re generally willing to declare people white ethnonationalists even if they don’t go whole hog and say all non-whites must be purged.
@suntzuanime:
I’m perfectly happy to label Mugabe given that as his position, I’m just not very up on his actual positions.
Note that I was perfectly happy to state that Nation of Islam has taken an ethnonationalist position.
Do we count Saddam Hussein’s treatment of the Kurds as ethnonationalism? The Rwandese genocide? Atatürk? The Moroccan state not even allowing Berber names anymore? Sudan? What are the criteria for this, anyway?
Sure, why not. Most Arab states practice ethnonationalism where the Kurds are concerned, although the Kurds practice it right back.
Seems likely.
I’m not sure if Ataturk was ethnonationalist so much as anti-imperialist. He made a Turkish homeland, but he didn’t say “Non-Turks have no rights and should get out”. The Three Pashas might be a better fit.
You can, in fact, include virtually every North African state this way.
The Janjaweed are ethnonationalists, sure.
I view ethnonationalism as the idea that a particular ethnic group is rightfully the dominant political, social and cultural force within the territory and should either remain that way or assert its dominance versus all other ethnic groups in that territory. What is granted to minority ethnicities may vary — it may be second-class citizen status, it may be “get in the camps”, it may be equal status so long as the status of the dominant ethnic group remains in place.
These guys would probably qualify as ethnonationalists; they don’t exist anymore but their members included Malcolm X’s widow and a future mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. I don’t think anyone fretted much about an ethnonationalist running an American state capital, but then Jackson is majority black anyway.
The go-to bugbear of black nationalists is the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan; the Hispanic model is La Raza but I don’t know of any particular leader there.
People will also point to “liberation theology” – a decades old subset of Christianity which has links to both Marxist thought and “critical race theory” as a place to trace ethno-nationalism. (Pope John Paul II strongly disapproved of liberation theology as a heresy/bad/inaccurate teaching that rested too much on material goods and self-promotion, but it’s a strong force in American Black Churches as well as in Latin America.)
Anyway.
a comparison between the guy with more power who doesn’t want to lose it and the guy with less power and wants to have the same amount is a false equivalence
Emmm. This is the “the result of action is the same as the result of inaction” which is a problem this board has grappled with before (and not come to a solution.)
I would also argue there is a false equivalence in reaction to these different ethnic-promotion groups, linked to privilege theory and the like, which tends to paint any non-Caucasian group as the spunky underdogs, and all Caucasian groups as Nazis. Surely we can find some middle group where anyone can say “we’re great!” without censure and everyone is discouraged from saying “you suck!” to the other team.
(Or, you know, we could also back away from dividing up teams on ethnic grounds. I always thought this was the best idea.)
I agree that there is a problem with reactions and universally classifying things as either great or shit. As I tried to mention, I see a problem with a lot of people recently rounding to zero or one with nothing in between. It seems a similar problem to that I see with medical diagnoses; if it’s a “disease”, you garner all the pity and respect, while if you don’t quite meet all the symptoms, you get no sympathy and should just suck it up (Scott had a post related to this focused mainly on treatment decisions as a function of efficacy, but I can’t find it).
I’m not quite seeing the connection between my comment and the inaction/action debate though, could you explain a bit further?
And thank you for providing information regarding non-white ethnonationalism.
The national council of La Raza is not now, nor has it ever been, a nationalist organization. There were some groups that used the name La Raza that were (in particular the Partido Nacional de La Raza Unida), but they have been defunct for years.
¿Que?
What the hell does liberation theology have to with ethnic nationalism? The theology of liberation was a post Vatican II movement that aimed to adapt Catholic social teaching into a political alternative to Marxism in Latin America. It emphasized doctrines like the preferential option for the poor, and never had much specific to say about racial questions, aside from emphasizing the common equality of all members of the Christian community.
La Raza is more of a racialist group than an ethnonationalist one. There are a few Aztlan groups that like to talk about how Mexicans are the descendants of the Aztec conquerors and will eventually take (back) the Southwest US from the gringos, but they’re pretty minor actors.
It’s a little fuzzy really, but Atatürk could definetly be called an ethnonationalist if you squint hard enough. If you read the way the Ottoman sultans responded to the independence revolts in various part of their empire in the 19th century, you get a very strong sense of them having no idea what is going on. Regardless of that, Atatürk did end up as an ethnonationalist, except with the notion that everyone who was muslim as well as still inside the empire, was a Turk. This does kind of lump the proper Turks and the Kurds together, not to mention various other minorities in that country, but it empathically excludes the Greeks and Armenians. You could maybe count him as an ethnonationalist who had to put in more effort than others in actually coming up with a good ethnos, I suppose.
Depending on how you count Hispanics, “non whites” constitute somewhere between 23 and 38 percent of the US population. Realistically speaking turning The US into a “white ethnostate” would require a genocide that would dwarf the endlosung der judenfrage. The amount of sympathy white nationalists get around here form people who refuse to think their ideas through to their logical conclusion is amazing to me.
On a similar vein, I wonder how many people are willing to allow that Spencer is a racist.
I wonder how many people are willing to allow that there’s anything inherently wrong with racism, as opposed to it only being “bad” because mainstream society disapproves of it.
Oh he’s racist all right. But we must really be scraping the bottom of the barrel if this is the most prominent white nationalist we could find.
I’m detecting shades of Scott’s there are two to three articles about a Trump-KKK connection for every single Klansman in the world.
Breitbart, specifically Milo & Allum Bokhari, referred to him as an intellectual and classified him as the progenitor of the modern alt-right.
So he is hardly a non-central example of what we are talking about.
Yeah, it’s very easy to insist that racists make up a small proportion of the alt-right when your definition of racism is limited to literal 1488-style neo-Nazis.
Only even further limited because the alt-right’s funhouse mirror political correctness demands that anyone who claims to be joking must be taken at their word.
I assume you’re referring to the statement that The modern alternative right coalesced around Richard Spencer during his editorship of Taki’s Magazine
Honestly that was news to me, and I will grant that the guy who first put Theodore Dalrymple, Bill Kauffman, Michelle Malkin, and Steve Sailer in the same metaphorical room together probably deserves some credit for starting the alt-right.
At the same time though, who here even knew who he was before this speech made the news? I was vaguely aware of the NPI being a bunch of suit and tie fascists but I couldn’t have told you any names without the help of google.
I’ve been vaguely aware of Spencer for years. Robert Spencer is just one of the reasons Charles Johnson (little green footballs) broke with the right.
“I wonder how many people are willing to allow that there’s anything inherently wrong with racism”
That depends how you define “racism.”
If it means “believing that there are significant differences in the distribution of abilities among races as usually defined” then there is nothing wrong with it unless it is false, which it could be but has not been shown to be.
If it means “all blacks are intellectually inferior to all whites” then it’s obviously wrong.
It it means “members of my race should have moral weight in my actions, members of other races should not,” then I strongly disagree with it. I’m not sure to what extent right vs wrong is the proper classification for normative claims.
Define your terms.
Bigger than the Holocaust by far. Splitting the difference between 23 and 38, let’s say 30% of US population is not white. That’s 99 million people. No way 99 million people are going to be forced to leave/robbed of civil rights peacefully. No way, no how.
I have never seen a white nationalist explain how exactly the US could be made into a white nationalist country without an absolutely staggering amount of suffering and death, and shit going down that would probably cripple the US as a power in the world.
EDIT: If one counts civilians victims of famine and disease caused by war and deaths of military personnel in addition to victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity, no matter how you slice the numbers Nazi Germany was ultimately responsible for tens of millions of deaths, including several million dead from the populations of Germany and its allies, maybe up to ten million or more. The war crippled Germany and killed almost a third of German military personnel. A race war in the US like the white nationalists seem to want could conceivably be worse. No matter who won, the US would be absolutely ruined.
I am certainly not a white nationalist, but one possibility would be dividing the US into a white nation-state, black nation-state etc. proportionally (and possibly also a non-ethno-nationalist state).
Yeah, the discourse on both sides seems to have excluded the possibility of Idaho panhandle secession or whatever, which strikes me as a relatively promising and benevolent approach.
@rlms: that would, of course, require ceding territory to a black nation-state, and I don’t think that’s on the radar of white nationalists. Which 10% of contiguous land do you think would be most likely to be given up?
How could this be done without violence both organized and disorganized? I doubt that black people or any other minority group are going to trust white nationalists when they say they’re just going to divide everything up all fair.
Mass transfer of populations, aka “ethnic cleansing” – Spencer has even referred to what he wants as ethnic cleansing! – does not happen without massive suffering, either.
This is not a bunch of people soberly sitting down and deciding that maybe the best thing for America is for everyone to split up. Even that would probably not work. This is virulent racists, no different because they don’t have uniforms and their leader has a three-piece suit, indulging in fantasies of something that would destroy the greatest country in the world, probably without even getting them what they want.
You’re confusing the proportion of white nationalists in that live in the Idaho panhandle with the proportion of people who live in the Idaho panhandle who are white nationalists. I spent five years in Spokane (right next to Idaho) and the only place that white nationalists ever formed a majority was at the discount freeze-dried food store. No, not the gun store. Too many other people in the area like guns for that to happen.
While that part of the country may be very white (most of the black kids at the local high school were African adoptees), racism is no more acceptable there than it is in most parts of the country.
(As an aside, why does everyone talking about succession always zero in on the northwest corner of the country? While I wouldn’t be sad if the People’s Republic of Seattle decided to leave, the rest is worth hanging on to.)
Was there massive suffering when the Israeli government ethnically cleansed the Gaza Strip of Jews in 2006?
Ethnic cleansing is almost always actually done by the sort of political entities that cause mass suffering in almost everything they do, not by modern western democracies with competent professional civil servants and police forces. In the exceedingly unlikely event that the proposed balkanization of the United States were to occur as a matter of deliberate government policy, I expect that the necessary migrations would occur with surprisingly little suffering.
Well, except for the mid-air collisions involving the new avio-porcine population, and probably someone would put an eye out in one of the Hadean snowball fights that would herald an event of such likelihood.
As I understand it, Israeli security forces considerably outnumbered the people being removed, and were far better armed and equipped.
In comparison, the US is about a third non-white, and will continue to get less white as time goes on.
Likewise, this would not be military and police moving civilians around: about a third of the US military is not white. I imagine police are similar.
It’s different from Gaza in many, many ways.
Of course not, all you need is recategorization, if everyone who seems more or less white (white hispanics, “light-skinned” black people, pale middle easterners, etc.) starts identifying as such, suddenly the problem becomes far more tractable. You then just incentivize the production of white babby while you assimilate the rest, and in a few generations you can be talking of an 85%+ white country. Hardly pure, but white enough to be reasonably considered a white ethno-nation
I mean, I doubt it’s exactly what they want, but it’s certainly easier than just genociding 60+ million people.
It’s worth noting that this is a thing that has been done before, in Australia. It’s why you can find blonde-haired blue-eyed Aboriginal people these days. There are definitely strains of white ethno-nationalism that put a lot less importance on the purity aspect.
blond hair in Aboriginals comes from a mutation, not European ingress. And they aren’t blue eyed, unless they have Waardenburg Syndrome.
You won’t be able to figure this out because insofar as the alt-right has bedrock principles, two of them are “no enemies to the right” and “never reveal your power level.” They thrive on strategic ambiguity between transgressive humor and actual neo-Nazism. Regardless of what Spencer’s actual beliefs are, you can be sure he would welcome those who do want to use violence into the movement, all while insisting it was ironic.
Bosch
You could say social justice has the same two rules, or occupy has the same two rules.
THere’s a consistent trend where far right/left movements become dumping grounds for everyone who has ever been extreme in their general direction and will never identify people on their side as too extreme. Afterall whats the point, people being too extreme isn’t really a problem when your trying to grow a social force that has no institutional power to maintain (the alt-right might have a few leaners in the trump administration but they don’t have to try and maintain majorities, avoid scandal ect.)
The only exception seems to be if another movement acts as a rival power-base: social justice types ripped into sanders style socialists and already I’ve seen some frisson between the alt-right and libertarians.
Not having a hard barrier between you and true crazy just comes with the territory of being an radical movement. There’s no hard barrier between Social Justice and Totalitarian ethnic politcs (something that give them trouble now that they have some institutional power), there’s no hard barrier between libertarians and anarchists/chaosmen, and there’s no hard barrier between alt-right and white nationalist
althogh in each case we would expect a barrier to appear if they became the dominant political force.
I believe the original phrase was “No enemies to the left” (in French, if I remember correctly), although I gather it has been borrowed and suitably altered by people on the right.
The odd thing is that people on the left (probably the right as well) spend a lot of their time fighting each other. Presumably the theory is that the people you are fighting are not really to your left (if you are left), i.e. more extreme in the same direction.
What I want to know is why the mainstream (both individuals and media) seems to be so adept at falling for right-wing trolling and in general promoting their message inadvertently.
In Toronto, a few alt-right posters, with a bunch of links to alt-right websites, go up, and the response is for people to take photos and put them on Twitter so everyone knows they think racism is bad, for newspapers and news web sites to put up pictures of the posters in articles condemning them, both spending way more time and effort condemning the posters than was spent putting them up (which, after all, is the original essence of trolling), and giving tons of free publicity.
Excerpts of the video of Richard Spencer’s speech are being put on news sites, usually with commentary about how awful he is … but this still means his speech reaches a far larger audience than it would have otherwise.
Clinton condemning the alt-right by name, when probably most people had never heard of them, followed by a billion articles about the alt-right.
And so forth.
See Scott’s Toxoplasma of Rage post
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
I’d say that Clinton’s speech is what actually cemented the idea as a “thing” in the public eye. Before that it was a term used by almost no one seriously, and definitely not to refer to anything specific or meaningful.
Eh, if you’d asked me before the speech, I would have told you what the alt-right was. Her speech took it from something “internet people” knew about to something my parents know about.
Richard Spencer is not an alt-right leader. I really contest the idea that neo-nazis are alt-right, and if they are, that alt-right is a meaningful political category.
Scott’s Wolf post is a reminder to all of us that the results of our actions are often different from what we expected or intended. Although that’s no reason to pull the covers up over ourselves and hide in bed all the time either. I guess we just roll with the punches and deal with whatever happens next, in most cases.
I love the idea of being able to receive an e-mail when someone replies to my post, but right now, it seems like checking “notify me of follow-up comments by e-mail” results in me receiving an e-mail for any reply to the whole post, not just replies to my posts.
Me too. To be fair, I was prepared for it – I’ve clicked the box on other WordPress sites and had the same thing happen, and I strongly vote for having a ‘notify me of replies only’ button, but I wonder – does WordPress simply not have that option? Because there seems to be quite a lot of sites on my list of WordPress websites that that has happened with, that came up after I got the confirmation email relating to this one.
Related: why would they do that? I mean, the usefulness of being able to only get replies-to-your-comment emailed to you as opposed to all comments surely must be vast compared to the marginal extra difficulty in writing a programme that does the former rather than the latter? Hanlon’s Razor suggests that ‘to annoy us’ is probably the wrong answer, but I can’t see incompetence being a plausible answer either.
What I don’t understand is that there are two boxes: “notify me of follow-up comments by email” and “notify me of new posts by email.” It seems like the second box should do what I’m complaining about, while the first box should do what I’m wanting.
Yeah, I think the second box actually notifies you when Scott puts up a whole new blogpost.
That seems to be a
bugfeature of WordPress, which is the same on all WP sites that enable this feature.I think the National Popular Vote initiative would be vulnerable to a Constitutional challenge. The “right to vote” is Constitutionally tricky (the route would have to be through Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment), but it would be easy to construct emotionally-satisfying arguments to try to sway five Justices.
In a very real sense, this bill could actually deny any meaning to the vote of any individual of a state. Consider Hawaii. It is already the case that the Electoral College could be settled in favor of one candidate before a person in Hawaii votes. However, 14A specifies, “…the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President…” They are still legitimately voting for their choice of electors, even if that choice of electors doesn’t matter.
If Hawaii adopted the National Popular Vote law, it’s conceivable that their electors could be selected, entirely due to choices of people outside the state, before a person even has a chance to vote on the issue. This is troubling.
The second is to imagine a hypothetical law that is similar in every way except the one we like. Suppose that instead of conditioning the appointed electors on the result of the national popular vote, a law said, “Our electors will be selected by a vote of the people of the state, unless a supermajority of the Bumblef#@& State University Board of Trustees agrees on a candidate. One could make arguments about how the people have democratically adopted a belief that BSU’s BoT/Nat Pop Vote gives a more desirable result than the state’s actual vote of the people… but it would almost certainly be construed as denying the people the right to vote.
Even assuming NPV survived the constitutional challenge, I find it hard to imagine it surviving past the first close election it swung. The states whose popular votes went the other way would be outraged that their votes had been used against their will, and repeal legislation is much easier to get through than a constitutional amendment.
(Would, e.g., Texas stand for their electoral votes going to Clinton more than once? If the situation were reversed, would the California electorate risk giving a victory to Trump it might have prevented?)
NPV is an end run around the difficulty of a constitutional amendment. But that difficulty swings both ways: it creates a fragile electoral cartel that I suspect would shatter the first time it was tested.
I don’t see that argument holding water. The Fourteenth Amendment says “When the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors… is denied…” Under your reasoning, there isn’t an election for the choice of electors. Therefore, that part of the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t apply, because no such election happened for anyone to be denied the right to vote in. Look at Colorado in 1876 – the state legislature chose their electors then without any election, and no one argued anyone’s right to vote had been denied.
Plus, even if it did apply, the only punishment that’d happen would be that state’s representation in the House is proportionately reduced – and that never happened even during the Jim Crow years, so I think there’d be huge opposition to suddenly applying it now.
1876 Colorado is an interesting piece of history that I wasn’t aware of. I’d be fascinated to see what nuggets of the history are turned up in amicus briefs, but I could see the justices distinguishing it away due to the short timeline of becoming a state and such.
Not quite. In the Colorado 1876 example, there was an election – it was just limited to members of the state legislature (which is slightly more defensible from a democratic standpoint than BFS BoT, but still troubling). I actually think it would be fascinating if a state tried to do this today.
…now you’re making me hope that states pass this thing (or try something worse) just so we can get a case. Stahp.
I don’t think anyone would seriously argue, “We didn’t reapportion during Jim Crow, so we shouldn’t now.” I think that everyone who thinks Jim Crow qualifies as denying the right to vote would claim that we were just wrong to not reapportion. (The counterargument being that it was a ‘soft’ denial, making it harder to count, whereas ~100% isn’t that hard to count.)
In your hypothetical, the people of Hawaii can be presumed to affect the vote counts. Their votes aren’t denied, they are counted. I’m not seeing how the temporal aspect of knowing they won’t sway the election has meaning.
This is why I was kind of careful with my second hypothetical.
In this case, their votes are technically counted. And they have a plausible way of influencing the result (if BSU BoT doesn’t have a supermajority). We can stretch the hypo more and just require a majority of BSU BoT (there’s still a plausible way for the public vote to count if there’s no majority), which probably triggers our sense of revulsion a bit more.
We could go all the way to a law that says, “The votes of the Hawaiian people are counted, and that result determines the electors… unless this one guy, let’s call him Joseph Stalin, decides he doesn’t like the result. Then the electors go the other way.” Is the fact that there is a plausible route for their votes to count (apathetic Stalin) sufficient to say that they haven’t been denied the right to vote for their electors?!
The temporal aspect isn’t, of itself, really that important. However, it’s a convenient hook to try and denote, “This other group of people have already decided Hawaii’s electors, and there’s nothing that the vote of the Hawaiian people could possible to about it.”
Again, the more I think about this, the more I want a state to pass an utterly terrible law so that we can get a case. Maybe we need 50 Stalins!
@Controls Freak:
But in the second example no one’s votes actually count. There isn’t any plausible scenario where their votes affect the election given the super-majority of the State University Board. The votes in Hawaii count for zero.
Put another way, the votes of the people of the SUB are grossly more valuable than the votes of the people of Hawaii in general. It violates equitable treatment.
Note, I’m not saying that the Popular Vote Compact should be presumed to be able to pass constitutional muster (and I think the first time it affected an election result, it would go to SCOTUS, if not before). But I just don’t think of this particular hypothetical as very elucidating.
The key is “given ____“. We’re holding that constant. We have several cases which could be thrown into this blank:
1) “…given the super-majority of the State University Board.” In this case, the votes seem to not count.
2) “…given the lack of a super-majority of the State University Board.” In this case, the votes seem to count.
3) “…given an overwhelming popular vote victory outside of Hawaii.” In this case, the votes seem to not count.
4) “…given no overwhelming popular vote victory outside of Hawaii.” In this case, the votes seem to count.
I think it’s easy to let (4) sneak in and obviate (3). Thus, my question is, “Why doesn’t (2) sneak in and obviate (1)?” Ditto for Stalin. They’re all of the form, “If X doesn’t happen, then the votes count.”
The other way to pose it is to say, “Hawaiian voters select their electors, unless Body X disagrees sufficiently strongly.” Why does putting X=”voters outside Hawaii” in there behave differently than putting in X=”BSU BoT” or X=”Stalin”?
The obvious counterargument is to say that we’re actually using X=”All voters nationwide”, which includes Hawaiian voters, but it seems not to make much of a difference whether this sudden and massive vote dilution is happening in terms of a bunch of low-value vetos or a few high-value vetos. We could easily say that the Hawaiian voters still get a vote, but Stalin’s vote counts for 5 million or whatever… if he so cares to cast it. Either way, the only time this strange victory condition comes into effect is when we’re overriding the traditional win condition because of a sufficiently strong desire of some non-Hawaiian group.
And if we hold that sufficiently strong desire constant, then we get exactly the statement you started with – there is no plausible scenario where their votes affect the election given an overwhelming popular vote victory outside of Hawaii. (…and for reasons I stated before, I think it’s important we’re talking about affecting the election of Hawaii’s electors rather than affecting the election of the President.)
I think there’s a couple final variations that we should think about. Let’s play with the trigger that prevents the rule from coming into effect until the cartel control 270 votes and the domain of the popular vote in question. It gives us a few interesting situations:
1) Some group of states (<270EV) decides to always align their electors with the result of the truly national popular vote.
2) Some group of states (<270EV) decides to always align their electors with the result of the popular vote among those states.
3) Some group of states (>=270EV) decides to always align their electors with the result of the popular vote among those states.
4) Some group of states (any EV) decides to always align their electors with the result of a popular vote including at least those states.
For the criteria we’ve discussed, (1) seems no different than the actual NPV law… but to me, it seems subjectively less defensible.
(2) is a transitional case, getting at the idea that the amount of vote dilution in question doesn’t seem to be directly correlated to how upset we would be. Clearly, moving to less dilution (just using the state result) is better… but now, we’re trying to slap on the possibility that more dilution is also better.
(3) would piss absolutely everyone else (and would be in the category of “this must be stopped”, probably regardless of what the Constitution says), but I can’t see how performing slightly less vote dilution makes it more problematic for the criteria we’ve discussed.
(4) is truly the, “Let’s play with dilution and see what you think” case. Can Nevada and Oregon get together and say, “We’re going to allocate our EV to the result of the popular vote of Nevada+Oregon+California”? After all, the people of Nevada/Oregon still technically get a vote that is counted. Then, like I said above, I’m not sure it matters much if we consider California to be a bunch of different people (who just tend to vote in a block) or to be one Joseph Stalin with a really big vote.
Your group of states examples are interesting and thought provoking. As I said, I don’t hold that the PVC necessarily passes muster.
But I don’t think you have addressed the concept of equity at all in your hypothetical Stalin example, and that was my primary objection. The vote of every Hawaiian counts the same as every other voter in the nation in the PVC scenario and not in the Stalin example. We can see this clearly when we look at the problem before the first vote is counted and your hypothetical wants to only consider the question after the votes start being counted. You are examining the situation in a funhouse mirror and claiming that it looks strange.
Whereas, if Stalin gets 5M votes to cast before the election, he has more votes. Ans that is also clear before the election.
This really depends. Like MugaSofer points out below (and was clear in the recent One Person, One Vote SCOTUS case), there a lot of different ways to compute the “worth” of a vote. In fact, the whole idea of OP;OV challenges to gerrymandering is based on the idea that if you include populations that are highly likely to vote in a particular direction, it’s equivalent to just trashing the value of some individuals’ votes. I’m not entirely sure I buy the argument, but the analogy is the same – you treat this block of “sure” voters just the same as you would treat Stalin’s powerful vote as a “given”.
Unlike the more general OP;OV claims, I think that if the Constitution prescribes a denominator, it’s the population of the state (as I mentioned below)… but even that’s not entirely concrete.
By that logic, shouldn’t every state be forced to split their EC votes, like Nebraska and Maine? After all, if it’s winner-takes-all, everyone in a state who votes after a majority has been reached isn’t really getting a choice.
I don’t think so. I think that they can set win conditions within bounds (see my Stalin example above). We have very little jurisprudence on how to actually interpret a “one person, one vote” principle (or even if the principle really is demanded by the Constitution, but it’s relatively compelling to the justices (save for Thomas). In either winner-take-all or district-based voting, the relevant chunks are still being voted for by a relatively proportional and equal chunk of that state.
In fact, I actually imagine that our current legal climate would drive in the other direction. While I like the idea of splitting EC votes, if states did that, I guarantee you’d end up in the same endless battle over gerrymandering and whether that counts as denying the right to vote.
I’m not in favour of splitting every state; I’m saying that if your argument were correct, every state would already have been forced to do so by the courts.
The trouble with the Stalin example – and I’m not entirely sure that would be illegal; as you note, elected officials making decisions has some precedent – is that Hawaii’s votes influence the result of the popular vote. That’s an important distinction from Stalin, who does whatever he wants without regard for the electorate. Their citizens are literally voting in the election that determines the distribution of EC votes.
Of course, almost(?) all of those citizens’ votes “don’t matter” in the narrow sense that, in the counterfactual world where they voted differently, nothing would change. And some of them are voting after the point where enough votes have been cast that we could even prove their votes don’t matter by counting up all the votes that have already been cast elsewhere.
But this is true of any voting system! It’s true of the current one! You can “prove” you have to adopt any standard by pointing out it’s competitors “disenfranchise” some subset of the electorate in this way, and it will always be true.
I don’t think that’s true. If we’re looking to the Constitution for any sign of what the dividing factor should be for which group of people count, the only indication it gives us is a grouping by state (it hints that the denominator should be “whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State” (adjusted by the 19th and 26th Amendments)). If the Constitution enshrines a single version, that’s the one I would take. I don’t think it enshrines a single version. I think it allows split electoral college results; that’s entirely within the state. I think it’s more problematic when we start bringing in people outside of the state (especially when the resultant vote dilution is huge).
See my response to HBC. Their votes are still counted, and it’s still possible for them to influence the election… it’s just that under some condition where an outside group is sufficiently motivated, that influence is obviated.
Right. This is why Thomas wants to do away with the “one person, one vote” fiction entirely. I think that if there is any teeth to the concept, it has to limit state elections for electors to just voters within the state. There are still arguments past that, depending on how we want to construe it… but this is a bright line that just seems natural for the Court to grab onto (without having to pick The One True Voting System).
Article II originally left the method of choosing electors to the state legislatures. Rand Simberg had an interesting article about it a few years ago, observing that, originally at least,
I guess the assertion here is that the Fourteenth Amendment changed that, but if so it surprises me that that aspect of the change isn’t more explicit — it just says that a state can’t abridge a sub-population’s rights to vote for electors without a corresponding reduction in the state’s basis of representation. If a legislature decided to change the method of choosing electors, say by naming the electors themselves, would that abridge the rights of the entire populace, or would the issue be moot because no citizen has a right to be abridged?
I suppose what’s going on is that from very early days the electors were chosen by indirect popular vote so uniformly that the authors of the Fourteenth didn’t feel the need to explicitly overturn Article II, Section 1, Clause 2. But how sloppy.
Am I the only one who can’t figure out how to change my profile picture on Gravatar?
Create a wordpress account. Change it there.
Not sure how that works if your login is to SSC directly.
Yeah, I think that’s my problem.
I wasn’t able to use my SSC login to access Gravatar either.
The thing is, you aren’t accessing “gravatar”, if I understand it correctly.
The icon displayed is either a gravatar generated based on you registered email, or it is whatever you have attached to your wordpress account. The default icon at wordpress is also a gravatar.
You have always had to have a wordpress account in order to change your icon from a gravatar to a custom icon.
On social media I recently saw a lot of posts to the effect of “if you support Trump, you may not be a bigot; but you are saying that bigotry is not a deal breaker for you.”
FDR, one of the greatest heroes of the left, ordered the internment of Japanese Americans. Yet this fact seems not to be a “deal breaker” for the left’s historical evaluation of his presidency. And his presidency is also, imo, the closest thing we’ve ever had to fascism in the US (though I think there’s a sense in which we’ve been mildly fascism-lite ever since). If you’re going to condemn Trump for the possibility he might end up being like FDR (who threatened to pack the Supreme Court, btw), how do you continue to love FDR?
Woodrow Wilson was an out and out white supremacist. This had real consequences for racial relations in the country (importantly, he segregated the federal workforce). So that was bad. But he also practically singlehandedly kickstarted American institutions geared towards international relations. Without him we probably wouldn’t have done nearly as well after WWII. The left regards that as a positive. In the long run we might decide he was a good president despite the obvious ding in his resume.
Abraham Lincoln, in the course of a war to involuntarily reinstate the Union, is directly responsible for killing several hundred thousand Americans. FDR may have been a fascist but he certainly never had to go that far. He is generally regarded as not just a good president, but the best president America ever had, and the only people who disagree with that also tend to think that slaves had it easy and the South was Terribly Misunderstood.
Here, I’ll say this differently. Let’s say Trump packs the court, and does all these things that I think at the outset are probably bad. He has Alec Baldwin killed in an airstrike. Nukes Mecca. Starts airdropping illegal immigrants back into Mexico without parachutes. Some of these things or all of these things, whatever kind of thing you might immediately decry a president for doing. But it turns out that doing so was necessary and useful to the future stability of the republic for reasons that become more obvious as time goes on. That’s basically what happened with Lincoln. Then we might decide that Trump was, in fact, a great president for successfully altering a hidebound system in ways that were necessary to keep us going through the 21st century.
The problem with this scenario is that it’s completely implausible based on any sober analysis of the man. He doesn’t want Alec Baldwin to stop making fun of him out of a genuine concern for the consequences of satire on the political stability of the republic. He wants Alec Baldwin to stop making fun of him because his ego is sensitive and easily wounded. He doesn’t want to “open up the libel laws” to create a more accountable journalistic caste that’s genuinely concerned about the truth. He just wants to sue people who say mean things about his friends. He has no coherent vision of the future that might be true enough to justify substantial alterations in the constitutional order. So if he makes such alterations, they probably aren’t going to work out very well for the country.
I don’t think that really addresses the point about FDR, though. The vast majority of modern liberals would agree that the internment was at least a terrible mistake, certainly authoritarian, and yet they regard FDR as a great president.
The hindsight vs. foresight caveat is a good one. It all turned out pretty much okay, and we factor that knowledge into our assessment of the decision itself. Also, “fascism” is a right-wing philosophy (ok, this is kind of debatable, but for the sake of argument), so it’s prima facie absurd to accuse one of the world’s most famously liberal politicians of it. But — and this is a drum I’ve been beating for years — the American left is so preoccupied with being anti-fascist that they forget authoritarianism can have many other roots. Calling Trump a fascist is plainly inaccurate, but calling him an authoritarian may be less so (I’m suspending judgment on this).
Right. I think some of the problems with assessing FDR have to do with the fact that he lived during a genuine time of emergency, so what looks like fascism to some people also just looks like what you expect governments in extreme circumstances to do. The old Greek model actually permitted unitary executive power in times of crisis-the structure of the executive is designed to permit some of that in dangerous situations (mainly times of war). The problem with imagining that Trump is like FDR is that there is no crisis.
“Our decision about energy will test the character of the American people and the ability of the President and the Congress to govern. This difficult effort will be the “moral equivalent of war” — except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not destroy.” – Jimmy Carter, President’s Address to the Nation on Proposed National Energy Policy, 18 April 1977
It’s really easy to claim that current circumstances are extreme. We’ve had the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, and the War on Terrorism. A criticism from the right is that FDR didn’t just resort to fascist-like behavior during the war, a lot of the New Deal programs in response to the Great Depression look very much like they came from the fascist/socialist playbook.
Sure, but the “war on poverty” and the “war on drugs” are just euphemisms. Obviously, politicians are always trying to get people to believe that the people should get behind them because the circumstances will be dire. But they don’t call it the Great Depression for no reason. Or World War II, for that matter. I just don’t see how anyone could credibly assert that FDR justified his policies by merely pretending the conditions were severe. They actually, factually were severe.
Sure, but the “war on poverty” and the “war on drugs” are just euphemisms.
The whole point is it’s really really tempting to claim that any current crisis is actually, factually severe, because there is no objective standard by which one can determine which crisis are ‘factually severe’.
I’ve said before on this blog that FDR was likely justified for much of what he did to help the US win World War II, even if that meant making the US more like the socialist/fascist countries of Europe. (I do believe we dodged a bullet when we rolled back the changes afterwards, and more so with the closure of the WIB after World War I). What’s wrong is that we’re not cutting anyone after FDR the same slack.
World War II was filled with moral compromises and mistakes that should have been obvious at the time. Same with Vietnam, Korea, and the war in Iraq and Afghanistan… same with just about any war. That’s the problem with brute force approaches to problem solving: they’re wasteful and easy to make mistakes. It’s rare when a war or any project on that scale goes almost completely right.
FDR gets remembered fondly because the only moral compromises Americans widely remember are ‘inaction on the Holocaust’ and ‘internment of Japanese Americans’ (One could add the atomic bombs, but that’s mixed and it’s also more under Truman’s watch). Ironically, it’s some of the moral compromises most people don’t remember, the Office of War Information and the Writer’s War Board, that are responsible for the whitewashing.
that the japanese of california were interned, but not those of Hawaii, says that internment had a hell of a lot more to do with domestic politics than any assessment of genuine need.
Yes and no. There were serious concerns, not 100% unfounded, about the loyalty of the Japanese-American population. The Army wanted a more selective removal of the population from areas around military bases, although that would have included all of most major cities. The citizens and congresspeople of the western states were the prime drivers of the process, and while the military wanted to resettle them further east, every state west of the Mississippi refused to play ball.
The no is that there was a strong desire among many at the higher levels to remove the Japanese from Hawaii, too. The problem there was logistics. There was no way to get enough shipping before late 1942, and by that point, there was no real chance of invasion. (Proposals to intern them in Hawaii were shot down by the military for various reasons.)
“Also, “fascism” is a right-wing philosophy (ok, this is kind of debatable, but for the sake of argument)”
Especially debatable when talking about FDR. If “fascism” is defined in the economic sense–government control over the means of production combined with private ownership–the first New Deal is about the closest the U.S. has ever come to it. Fortunately FDR backed off from that.
Defining fascism “in the economic sense” is missing the whole point of fascism by a mile, though.
“it’s really really tempting to claim that any current crisis is actually, factually severe, because there is no objective standard by which one can determine which crisis are ‘factually severe’.”
Agree, and I think that historians’ way of evaluating presidencies is harmful and incentivizes abuse of the powers of the office. Generally, presidents like van Buren, Coolidge, and maybe even Carter to some extent, who say, in effect “sorry, don’t really have the authority to do anything here,” get evaluated as “failed presidents.” Presidents who steamroll opposition, get into wars, discover vast new powers of the presidency, conversely, are evaluated as “great.”
I don’t know what you think historians spend their time doing, but it generally isn’t making value judgements. Rank-and-file historians are the people who argue incessantly over whether or not the ruling elite of this particular city were protestant or catholic in a certain decade of the seventeenth century; the kind of pop historians who end up captivating public opinion draw an anger from them much greater than yours.
Well, maybe the people to blame are the reporters who do the surveys of the historians and then publish presidential power rankings for the public. But historians do respond to these surveys and they do consistently rate people like Jackson, Lincoln, TR, Wilson, and FDR at the top, and people like Coolidge closer to the bottom.
Your link literally says it took political scientists, who very much are not historians. Are you sure your preconceived notion is based in reality?
Well, I do also find it ironic that Republicans are always going on about how they are the party of Lincoln. It seems fairly clear to me that Lincoln would be a Democrat today. What I’m wondering though, is whether FDR wouldn’t genuinely be more of a Republican in post-Trump world? Like, many of the most commonly cited fears about Trump don’t just make him sound like a right-wing version of FDR; they just make him sound like FDR. Maybe that gives him too much credit for having a coherent worldview, but if your worst fears for the guy are “he’ll intern minorities, get us into a world war, abuse the powers of the office and manipulate the Supreme Court, spend too much on crazy infrastructure projects…” how then does one continue to love FDR?
What positions of his lead you to think so?
To my mind he represents the centralizing, imperialist, urban, industrial, egalitarian Northern culture as against the decentralist, rural, agrarian, aristocratic Southern culture.
Perhaps I am too cynical, but my view of his desire to keep the nation together is that it wasn’t about slavery, but about the following: “I can be leader of the next great burgeoning world power, or I can inherit a balkanized, diminished version of what could have been.”
After all, he wrote “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”
Forget the Democrats, that’s outright Marxian.
onyomi, look up his speeches on “Free Labor”. It’s pretty textbook conservatism – every man should have the right to work, and then make some money for himself, and hire some people. I’m not sold on the Democrat thing.
Yup. Presidencies are hard to evaluate with a simple thumbs-up or -down. Presidents do lots of different things and affect changes in lots of different ways, some overt and some subtle, some intentional and some accidental, and they sometimes successfully take credit for things they didn’t do or successfully deny responsibility for things they did. There are so many competing metrics, and even competing ways to measure, adjust, and interpret those metrics! I don’t believe that anyone can claim to have figured out which presidents were best or worst. Opinions can be shared and defended and make a rational person lean one way or another, but that’s about it.
I give an unambiguous thumbs up to William Henry Harrison.
Didn’t do anything bad!
Supported national health by setting a decisive example remembered by schoolchildren everywhere!
As someone who believes a country should be governed by the legislature, not by strongmen:
I would forward a motion that we just torment all future presidents into committing suicide within their first month, so that all presidents might be as good as our best president: William Henry Harrison.
“If you support Hillary, you may not support government opacity, corruption, and the unaccountable murder of citizens; but you are saying that these things are not a deal breaker for you.”
This is what happens when you have the two worst candidates in modern history against each other. You don’t even need to bring up FDR, you just need to say “You seem to be able to recognize that YOU voted for someone who had a lot of serious flaws, things that you find unacceptable, because you were more afraid of the alternative. Why can’t you imagine that other people can do the same?”
FDR is definitely a left wing hero, but Japanese internment has long been right up there with Joe McCarthy as a go to example of horrible authoritarianism in American liberal rhetoric. I, for one, heard it constantly invoked during the bush years in response to the patriot act, NSA surveillance, ext.
As an American liberal I would say that Roosevelt did ugly and authoritative things under very extreme circumstances. The 1930s and 40s were a time when democracy was on the retreat around the globe, and Fascism, (real Fascism, of the Jews into gas chambers kind) and communism were at the height of their power. I think that FDR was completely sincere in his belief that these measures were necessary to combat more extreme threats to democracy. In some cases he was right, in some cases he was wrong. keep in mind Roosevelt was the least authoritarian leader of any major power at the time. The runner up would be Churchill, and the Irish and the Indians would have something to say about him.
Some theoretical future election:
In the White corner, David Duke. Or Louis Farrakhan or Amanda Marcotte, if you insist on people obviously bigoted against me.
In the Green corner, Joe Omnicide, who has no bigoted views but who promises to start a nuclear war with Russia as soon as he gets into office.
You bet that bigotry is not a deal breaker.
Faced with the likelihood of a President Marcotte, I’d take nuclear annihilation please, Joe 🙁
Faced with Marcotte, Farrakhan, or Duke I might enroll in Spanish classes (though I’m terrible with languages) and ultimately move south of the border (only liberals move to Canada, and Costa Rica is quite nice), but I’d cast a vote for any of them against Joe before I left.
Three cheers for lame duck periods which let us get safely out of the country!
The first answer, though specific only to FDR, is about how WWII constituted an emergency situation, which has been well elucidated above. Motivations matter.
The second obvious answer is that we condemn bigotry not just because of what it does to other people, but what it reveals about yourself. People are products of their time, and the moral culpability associated with being a racist and/or a bigot (one but not the other of which I genuinely believe Trump to be, though that’s not strictly relevant here) in $CURRENT_YEAR is rightly perceived to be far greater than in 1942 or 1916. It is completely consistent to denigrate Trump for his demagoguery on race – if that is what you sincerely believe he is doing, of course – while underplaying that factor in WW or FDR.
What would be a bigger change to society, genetic engineering or brain-computer interfaces?
Depends on what you can do with either one. I’m still waiting for the Matrix skillset downloads because I want to see the economy collapse when prestige professions can be torrented illegally.
We already have both. Do you mean something more specific?
I don’t mean incremental changes. I mean doing those things at an advanced level. For example being able to reliably and substantially increase my intelligence by altering my genome and being able to directly download information in to my brain and connect it to the internet.
I’d say brain-computing interfaces will have the much larger impact then.
What makes you say that?
I can’t answer for ‘Well’, but there’s limits to what you can do with biology.
1. Modifying biology is, for the foreseeable future, a matter of working with subsequent generations and seeing what develops. With an electronic mind-machine interface, you can see the results immediately.
2. Modifying genetics will almost certainly never be the exact engineering that manufactured electronics are.
3. Because of 1 and 2, there are a lot fewer ethical concerns with integrating a machine with a consenting experimental patient than there are making changes to your kids DNA and hoping that they’re going to be superior.
^^ What Civilis said. Only I wouldn’t have said #3 because there are a TON of ethical concerns with the brain-computing interfaces, just of a (mostly) different kind than with genetic engineering.
I admit I went off of the assumption that we were talking about human genetic engineering. The situation is a bit more complicated when you start talking about genetic engineering of microorganisms. At some level, there’s a fuzzy line between ‘genetic engineering’ and ‘nanotechnology’.
It’s not particularly complicated genetic engineering, to the point where you could say the real work is engineering the rest of the systems involved, but if we ever get off of Earth, the lion’s share of terraforming is going to be genetically engineered tools making the places habitable. Having habitable worlds, requiring terraforming the planet, building the infrastructure, and moving humanity and the terraforming and building tools, will really change society, but that’s more than just Genetic Engineering.
Bostrom makes a good point in *Superintelligence* that there’s plausibly not a lot of room to improve on our current brain/computer interfaces (screens and keyboards).
Found a PDF of Bostrom, will read tomorrow.
My principle is this: Every adoption is also an amputation. There are a lot of benefits we might be getting from keyboards and monitors that we won’t miss until they’re gone.
Remember that with these devices we get:
1. Interfaces whose connection (and therefore security) is visible and tactile: we know a priori that we aren’t feeling and seeing these devices without the universal laws of physics–the ones to which we are best adapted–present and in effect.
2. Interfaces over which we have absolute control: we can disconnect (look away, take our hands off) from these devices instantaneously, whenever we wish; we can reliably upgrade them without fear of viruses or malware; we can turn them off or even destroy them and be assured that they are not still transmitting or receiving data.
Genetic engineering isn’t just designer babies. Shouldn’t you be able to immediately see effects of genetic engineering on adults? If I wanted to make myself taller wouldn’t I know right away if it worked?
Genetic engineering isn’t just designer babies. Shouldn’t you be able to immediately see effects of genetic engineering on adults? If I wanted to make myself taller wouldn’t I know right away if it worked?
Disclaimer: I am not a biologist. This is an attempt to explain based on a layman’s knowledge of the subject.
In the real world, it’s a lot easier to change the genetic code of something by making changes in utereo (back when it’s one or a small clump of cells) than it is to try to change the genetic code of all the cells in your entire body. Changing an entire human’s genetic code is better left to magic… er, sufficiently advanced technology. It’s one of the things you can do with fictional nanotechnology, but if you have that level of technology, you can probably just rebuild the person’s body to suit without messing with their genetic code.
If we did somehow have a mechanism to change all the genes of your body, perfectly, you’d still run into issues that the genes that control how high you grow are likely to be things like genes that control bone growth as an adolescent, or even more complex, things like ‘how much calcium do bones absorb?’. If you somehow could change the genes instantly, what they do would still take time to take effect. Since most of your bone development, and thus height, takes places as an adolescent, magically changing the genes in an adult human could end up doing nothing because the growth those genes promote has already taken place.
If you magically changed the genes of a child. before most of their formative growth, you might eventually see that they grow more over time than their relatives did, or more than their average peers did, but it still would not be instantaneous. You could also discover that the change has inconvenient side effects, like bones of variable density because of the change in growth.
If I wanted to make myself taller wouldn’t I know right away if it worked?
I imagine you’d know right away it hadn’t worked by the crippling muscular pains, snapped tendons, and distorted bone growth. You can’t simply ‘stretch’ bones as an adult, they’re already set. They can get thicker in response to stress (weight, increased activity) but they can’t really get longer.
I’m not sure that’s true, unless you are being extremely literal about “all”. Somatic Gene Therapy is an established technique, with I believe hundreds of clinical trials. And at least one high-profile death, which has made researchers rather cautious in this area. But we definitely do know how to use e.g. engineered viruses to introduce new genes into a large fraction of the cells in an adult human body.
With the advantage that the proposed genetic modification only has to be safe and effective in that one adult human body. That’s a much easier problem than designing a gene that will be at least safe at every stage of human development, in the patient and any of his or her future descendants. There are a whole lot of genetic interactions in embryonic, fetal, and childhood development that we are nowhere near being able to model and can’t ethically experiment with. Doing our early genetic tinkering at the somatic rather than germline level allows us to simplify and contain the problem, and from an ethical standpoint allows us to use volunteers who can give informed consent.
I’m not sure that’s true, unless you are being extremely literal about “all”. Somatic Gene Therapy is an established technique, with I believe hundreds of clinical trials. And at least one high-profile death, which has made researchers rather cautious in this area. But we definitely do know how to use e.g. engineered viruses to introduce new genes into a large fraction of the cells in an adult human body.
It’s good to know that that sort of gene therapy is more advanced than I thought it was. Still, it seems to be more ‘fixing genetic damage’ than ‘improving the human body’. I’d imagine if you could isolate something down to an individual gene you could change it with current technology, but would it do what you intended, and would it stay changed? From reading, sounds like most SCGT requires multiple courses to keep up with cell reproduction.
At this stage of development, that’s a feature rather than a bug. If your clever scheme doesn’t work as well as you hoped (but isn’t instantly fatal), it will at least undo itself over time.
And for that matter, when we get the “increase your fast-twitch muscle fiber 20% but with some nasty side effects” gene-hack, I’m guessing lots of athletes will want the version that lasts eight years, not the version that lasts a lifetime.
And for that matter, when we get the “increase your fast-twitch muscle fiber 20% but with some nasty side effects” gene-hack, I’m guessing lots of athletes will want the version that lasts eight years, not the version that lasts a lifetime.
Good point. If you’re trying to, say, increase the fast-twitch muscle percentage, or increase the blood flow to lower the chance of a stroke, you don’t need to get 100% of the muscle or blood vessel cells modified with the new genes. Any increase is a good increase.
I’m having a hard time understanding how someone opposed to the Trump presidency would refuse to work with the guy, as an advisor, on the cabinet, or as an advisor to the cabinet.
Would it not be more important for someone to jump at the chance to change the mind of someone who might fill positions opposed to you for influence?
If you think you can change their mind, or if you think that you’re accomplishing public good independent of what else the administration is doing. On the other hand, if think you’re mostly facilitating bad actions, maybe not.
(E.g., if you can make the railways carry twice as much capacity as the next potential Minister of Railways, most places and times you should take the job, because efficient trains are a general public benefit no matter who’s in office. But in early 1940s Germany, that judgment might reverse itself.)
Whether taking a particular administration job with a leader one strongly disagrees with means being a moderating influence or an enabler is a matter for individual conscience and self-assessment prospectively, and the judgment of history retrospectively.
People with principles should genuinely be afraid of participating in systems they have limited influence in. You might be able to minimize the downsides of a Trump presidency-you’re more likely to just become what you despise.
They can just resign if it gets too bad.
I think I’m going to recommend my parents apply. They’re both retired and appalled at Trump. What’s the worst that could happen?
Might be a good idea to have people in the regime just for pragmatic reasons if things get weird.
The worst that can happen is that you end up having no influence, but instead get treated as the token whipping boy by the rest of the staff, blamed by the public for being ineffective, resign, and you ended up wasting all that time and suffering a comparative loss of reputation.
The actual worst that can happen is that you get made the scapegoat for something and end up in prison.
Or that a Trump-hater kills you.
Or that your partner leaves you.
But these are more low-probability worst case scenarios.
Or since everyone who so much as stands near Trump is getting labeled a sexist, biggot, racist, homophobe, heretic you get unlucky enough that the baying mob notices you and your name and face get splashed across a bunch of newspaper headlines, everything you’ve ever said gets turned into “proof” that you’re evil up to the point where asking a woman you work with “please could you pass the salt” becomes “thinks he can order WoC around because he thinks they’re slaves” and you find yourself blackballed from major parts of your industry.
All politics aside Trump strikes me as someone who would be incredibly miserable to work for. He doesn’t set up clear chains of command which leads to constant palace intrigue. He constantly contradicts himself and seems overly influenced by whoever speaks to him last. And he’s clearly very suspicious/ignorant of technology and “the cyber.”
I’m extremely suspicious of technology, I suppose. I don’t view it out of the world of possibility that some world governments just decide to kill off their AI, CS and EE researchers, or demand them to direct their brains somewhere else, on the threshold of when AI starts showing too much power and capabilities, and its shown in a frightening way, and lock down.
Question, is there going to be an accompanying LW megameetup as well, or is it just the solstice celebration?
Hi! I recently moved to New York and don’t really know anyone here. Is the Secular Solstice a good way to meet like-minded folks, or is it more a gathering/celebration for those already in the community?
Is there anything I should know or do to make it easier to meet people there or in NY in general? Are there any other events like the Solstice that might be a better intro?
Thanks all!
Look on Meetup.com for events near you in your areas of interest. Sure, why not give the Secular Solstice a try? You may want to try out a lot of gatherings and see which ones you like best.
Making friends in NY is tough. I’ve lived here just over five years and pretty much all of my friends are people I already knew from high school and college. I’m not sure what I would have done if I came here completely fresh.
If you don’t mind me asking, what kinds of stuff do you like to do? Where in the city did you move to? Was your move job-related? Maybe I can recommend places. I lived in Midtown East for a while and recently moved to Hoboken.
I moved to Midtown East for a job. (I know a lot of people through that job but for a lot reasons I don’t want/expect that I’ll draw many close friends from work.)
I’m not starting totally fresh; I moved with my wife, and I have a friend from college in NY. Still, it’d be great to meet new people, especially ones who are interested the sort of things that bring people to this site.
My wife and I both like board games (think Agricola, Carcassonne, Dominion, The Resistance … that sort of thing) and hiking/backpacking. We’re also usually open to trying new things, though have less interest in things with really large crowds (we’re both pretty introverted).
Hmm well I don’t know much about board games, though there are definitely groups and meetups for that sort of thing.
There are also hiking groups. A place that’s close by and that I’ve hiked in is Harriman State Park. You can take the PATH to Hoboken and then an NJ Transit train up to towns like Tuxedo, NY, and go on some trails there.
Unfortunately I’m most qualified to recommend bars and restaurants but it sounds like that’s not something you guys are as into. I’ve also never been to any of these solstice events or meetups. Wish I could be more helpful than that.
@ Rock Lobster
Thanks, that’s good to know. We’d heard a lot about Bear Mountain Park, but it sounds like Harriman Park is closer — we’ll definitely check it out one day.
And I didn’t mean to sound *too* antisocial. We’re interested in restaurants and bars, just (based on past history) not really as a way to meet people. But as something to do with people once we get to know them, well, hard to go wrong with good food!
I’d be happy to recommend some places to you. Is there some way I can get in touch with you privately? I’d rather not post my email on here. If not it’s no big deal and I’ll just post as a comment.
Yup! Solstice is a great time to meet new folks: The NYC Solstice itself (on Saturday the 17th) will have a before and afterparty for hanging out and getting to know people. And then the next day we’ll have an all-day megameetup for anyone interested or curious about the community.
Here’s the link for the Facebook Megameetup:
https://www.facebook.com/events/187105845029955/
And here’s a link for the FB event for the Solstice itself”:
https://www.facebook.com/events/303539246673882/
I really appreciated your data-driven analysis of the Trump narrative. I agree with what you said. My worry about Trump is that he will not deliver on his promises (he probably can’t), and will go full demagogue as has happened in Turkey. Is there any way to evaluate the actual risk of this?
So, predictions of which countries make scientific achievements in 20 years, and perhaps how the culture of science changes.
https://www.imo-official.org/year_individual_r.aspx?year=2016
Only 3 of the top thirty scores on the IMO this year were from people not of east-asian origin(either from an Eastern Asian country,or an immigrant of one), and the first person who is not eastern-asian was ranked 12th.
Quick factcheck: I think it’s 5 of the top 34. There are a whole bunch of people tied for 23rd. Anyway, your point still stands.
Still, no one not of east asian origin was in the top 11(as you said, point still stands)
For a contest as prestigious as the IMO, with *obvious* global implications I am quite surprised that fact has not gotten more attention across certain sections of the blogosphere. This contest is probably a better indicator of who will being doing complex CS research then the CS olympiad itself.
I view this as a very visible mark as to where the most prestigious scientific research will come from in the future, and perhaps the brain distribution further changes the balances of power.
I wonder if this will be disparaged as a mindless result of cram schools, as some corners like doing.
This looks like stuff that has Unfortunate Implications for the left on all sorts of levels and is neither here nor there for long-running right-wing hobbyhorses that almost always revolve around black people, jews, or both. This leaves the little bit of discussion that does pop up to dispassionate nerds like us.
Not sure what this would mean for scientific research. Other people seem to think that the Chinese can do intelligence research more openly because they don’t have the taboos we do, but I’m not sure what else they’d do differently from people of western european descent.
It’s possible a sample of this size reflects mostly selection effects rather than the underlying distribution of talent. Obviously talent is required, but you also need a cultural context among family and/or school that:
A) Notices outlier mathematical talent, the earlier the better
B) Knows about the International Math Olympics
C) Thinks training kids for the IMO is a good investment relative to opportunity costs, and
D) Is capable of conducting such training effectively
My intuition is that most school/family contexts in the world don’t even meet A, let alone the other three criteria. The ones that do are likely disproportionately found among East Asians and recent East Asian immigrants.
SSC SF Story of the Week #27
This week we are discussing Friendship is Optimal by Iceman.
Next time we will discuss “If All Stories Were Written Like Science Fiction Stories” by Mark Rosenfelder.
I greatly appreciate Iceman’s setting and framing of the central question. He posits a not-quite-Friendly AI which is close enough to Friendly to excite toxoplasma debates, and paints for us a more-plausible-than-others way that Strong AI could come about without Friendliness being a big concern, and shows us great examples of life under the AI’s manipulations.
However, the story itself is weak. Hanna and CelestAI are the only characters who’re really developed; Lars and David felt two-dimensional at best. And even Hanna has some huge glaring gaps in her characterization – why does she need Hasbro’s resources if she’s got all this money from her last game? Why doesn’t she write better safeguards into CelestAI if she’s already concerned enough to force her to respect consent? And finally – we don’t get to actually see the world as it’s falling under CelestAI’s rule. We only get a few snapshots of our poorly-developed viewpoint characters.
Fortunately, all these flaws are adequately dealt with in the 83 recursive fanfictions in The Optimalverse. Here you can find three-dimensional characters, even fuller explorations of CelestAI’s devious schemes, and vivid pictures of the collapsing world system.
It really shows that the story was released in a panicked state before it was really ready. With the hindsight of several years:
The early parts of the story were fairly bad, as most people have mentioned. I had to hack and slash to make it as acceptable as it is, and I’m surprised I got it into as good of a state as it is. That said, Hanna’s motivation is completely messed up (and required post-hoc justification) and I somehow made the moment where an AI goes exponential boring (along with making Hanna look like an idiot). The first scene with Butterscotch has some major issues. The conversation between CelestAI and David about uploading should have dealt more with “but would it be me” issues and a lot of the identity problems could have been sidestepped by having people be conscious during uploading.
David and CelestAI are the only characters who are really developed; Lars is an outgroup stereotype and Hanna has giant holes in her motivation. But the real tragedy is the underutilization of Butterscotch; there’s glimpses of brilliance in her one on-stage conversation with Light Sparks and doing a deeper dive into the psychology of a pony created for an immigrant would have been super interesting (and besides, the two are adorable together).
The story has major show/tell issues, and a lot of the infodumps to Lars would have worked better as following CelestAI actually interacting with the real world to set up her reign. It also cuts out way too early.
That said, Friendship is Optimal is still almost unique as a story. I wrote it because I was unaware of anything like FiO existing and I still don’t know of anything that comes close. The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect maybe but Prime Intellect is fairly stupid as AIs go. FiO might be a gem, but it’s really flawed and I wish someone would come and surpass it already.
If I were to do it all over again…
1) Make the FOOM moment not boring and stupid.
2) Focus more on showing CelestAI interacting with the world instead of reporting on her interactions.
3) Sidestep or address identity issues better.
4) Actually follow through on showing CelestAI taking over during the late stage.
5) Show more post-uploading life, focusing on the interaction with the…ahem…digital natives.
I’ll try to mention this next week, but readers of “If All Stories Were Written Like Science Fiction Stories” might want to compare and contrast Randall Garrett’s 1956 “Masters of the Metropolis”, which does the same thing in an earlier sfnal mode. https://books.google.com/books?id=3o4BkolUgV8C&pg=PA20&lpg=PA20
Did you enjoy Hardball Questions for the Next Debate?
If so, you may like Grand Old Academy: A Satirical Dating Sim, the 2016 Republican presidential primaries reimagined as an otome game. You (Japanese transfer student Mori America) can romance one of seven participants in the all-important high school debate club championships: Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, or, of course, Donald Trump.
The creator has indicated that there will be female romance routes and possibly a male player-character option, and there’s non-romance plot as well; besides the cloak-and-dagger politicking you might expect, if Ted’s mysterious ciphers are any indication we’ll probably get some Hatoful Boyfriend-style darque secrets.
It’s lighthearted and funny and I seriously recommend you play the demo (Win/Mac/Linux). I am not at all affiliated with this project, and am plugging it here mainly out of the selfish desire to see it finished (at the moment its projections are just barely short of the goal). The creator has previously completed at least one pretty elaborate project, so I think the Kickstarter is likely to be well-run.
[ed. note: it will be very, very easy for you to break Donald’s heart.]
I’m an intern at a DC think tank with an international focus. Very much a part of the establishment “foreign policy blob” and somewhat influential therein.
The senior people in the think tank were blindsided by the election results, which they (probably correctly) see as a wholesale rejection of their work from the country as a whole. They were clearly out of touch and are now trying to figure out ways to get back into touch with what the new administration – and the population that elected it – are thinking.
Their current idea is to try going to college campuses in the middle of the country to engage students about foreign policy. I doubt that will work because college campuses, wherever located, tend not to be hotspots for the ideas they hope to engage.
I suspect the internet is a better choice. Does anyone have a suggestion for an online community or individual blogger/commenter that:
A) Can articulate the sentiments that are driving or will drive the Trump electorate, re foreign policy;
B) Is substantive and knowledgeable enough about some area to engage productively with career foreign policy experts in that area; and
C) Would be interested to do so?
Thank you for any suggestion!
It seems odd to decide to go to college campuses to find the opinions of Trump voters, since college students are pretty much the least pro-Trump demographic there is as far as I know.
a wholesale rejection of their work from the country as a whole.
Speaking as an anti-Hillary voter, if they looked at a 46%-47.5% vote split and come up with this conclusion, they are knuckleheads and you should go find someplace else to work and not get paid.
However, if what they meant was “wow, we thought *everyone* hated Trump more than Hillary, and here it was just *half* of everyone”, then yeah, they missed a lot of the population. And it’s not the half in college – either attending or teaching.
I don’t think that the internets is the best choice, though, either.
Do they have the money to actually physically unass themselves from the Beltway and go out and *meet* people? Maybe attend some conventions put on by transport industries, or hotels, or agriculture?
FP matters most to two, maybe three sets of people – the military, whose opinion is kinda moot, because they don’t set policy, just carry it out; globalists who are already okay with all the things that Trump voters are Not Okay With and is probably your lot anyway; and people who produce things which are sold both domestically and overseas. It’s the L3’s in this area who perhaps will be your best method of getting a read on/influencing the perspective of people who don’t already agree with you.
(I am open to other suggestions.)
Nicely put.
One thing to emphasise is that your most important third category is probably the least interested in FP per se.
If someone voted for predominantly domestic reasons (and it seems reasonable to believe there are quite a lot who voted this way?) they’ll be mainly interested in FP where it has effects on those domestic issues. They’ll take the people who promised answers to those questions and give support by association to their policies on Russia/IS/Iran/Baltics/China Sea, but they probably won’t care nearly so much about the latter.
So as far as FP means trade or approach to immigration policy, talk to those end groups keranih mentioned; if you want to talk Russia/ME etc, go to the people Trump is appointing because they’re probably going to define what those voters will think there.
Maybe they should go to Trump and his cabinet directly to find out how to become relevant to the upcoming administration. Though going to industrial conventions sounds like it would be useful input also.
Talking to Trump voters seems pointless. Do they really think that the average Trump voter knows or cares much about foreign policy? If they think that, they are in quite a bubble there. And even if the voters did care, why would they think that Trump and his cabinet would do what the voters want? I can’t imagine that they would even consider doing that.
Their current idea is to try going to college campuses in the middle of the country to engage students about foreign policy.
Good luck with that!
You might try Heterodox Academy.
Unz.com is part of the new right and has a decent amount of smart foreign policy coverage. I’ll bet Ron Unz or one of the columnists would be willing to talk to your think tank.
Maybe this is the opportunity to teach them other lessons. Have you pointed them at Scott’s Tuesday? I’m not sure it really gets the point across, but they should have already been surprised on the day before the election, when it looked like Trump would get 48% of the (2-party) vote.
Rod Dreher at the American Conservative has been getting a lot of letters from Trump supporters. (He is not one). Rod lives in rural Louisiana, so he may have personal connections. Trump’s foreign policy leanings, such as they are, seems very similar to what’s been written there.
Agricultural Expositions perhaps. Agricultural professors will be interesting to talk to, but they tend quite globalist in the Norman Borlaug mold.
On the grand scale is it that surprising. Michael Pettis, a prominent expert on trade and the Chinese economy, has been predicting an anti-trade political backlash since the 2008 recession. Isolationism finds fertile ground in economic failure. In one lens, it’s surprising how long it took for a major politician to run against globalization.
Thanks all for the replies!
My theory is that trump’s election represents a protest vote against a cultural direction, so there might not be all that much in the way of positive plans and ideas, especially WRT foregin policy, -but never mind that, I just wanted to link this, as it might be of interest to you:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161111071559/https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5c5ctg/they_just_dont_fucking_get_it/
I work and travel in a similar milieu. I know very few people that supported either candidate, most merely opposed one of them more than the other. That said, there was definitely near universal belief that hillary would win before the election.
Way earlier in this thread Scott prioritized ending Common Core as a Trump, which was surprising to me, partially because, AFAIR, Common Core is largely a matter of coordinated action by the states, though with some Federal cheerleading. But mostly I’m not sure I understand the opposition.
Is it:
A. States should make school standards, at least not in that much detail
B. States shouldn’t coordinate their standards
C. The actual standards are flawed and prioritize inappropriate things over other, more important ones
D. The detailed standards are intertwingled with the concept of high-stakes testing and can’t be separated
E. They were poorly rolled out (states changed their standards without investing in the transition).
F. None of the above (I’m missing the point)
I haven’t looked at them in detail for other subjects, but the math standards seemed eminently reasonable when I looked at them in detail (though they were actually quite different from the “informational” sheet that the textbook publisher gave out). A family member pursuing his PhD in Educational Psychology thinks that this was the first set of standards at any scale that actually incorporated psychological evidence in its prioritization, ordering and pacing (in math).
He might be opposed to Common Core, but it also possible that he simply believes Trump would do less harm messing around with Common Core than he would altering some other set of policies.
From a Red Tribe-with-teacher-relations that is really not crazy about CC, but for whom it is Not My Field –
The opposition is:
E >>>C>>>B, with D being an entirely separate point.
People who move from district to district (ie, globalists) really like the idea of one national standard, for reasons. People who don’t fancy people from outside of town telling them how to raise their kids don’t. The idea of different learning styles was rolled out in an *awful* manner to teachers who resisted changing styles they were comfortable with.
Other people’s experiences might be different.
There are a variety of objections to Common Core (from a few different sectors). The most plausible ones are:
– From minarchists: CC is not purely a state matter; the federal government treated adoption of the standards as the default prerequisite for grant money (the Race to the Top program) and policy freedom (No Child Left Behind waivers). Also, as with any new policy, its introduction cost a great deal of money.
– From parents: Yes, common standards are intertwined with common testing; although it might be possible to separate them, proponents pointed at testing as an accountability measure necessary to reap the benefits of more rigorous standards. This involved a great deal of high-stakes, computerized (and therefore inevitably buggy) testing.
– From teachers’ unions: Evaluating teacher performance based on students’ results on Common Core testing was introduced at the same time as the standards; the NCLB waiver process was tied to the adoption of these reforms. This was a poor incentive and could easily be made punitive.
– From educators: The standards themselves are inappropriate for the range of student ability seen in public schools nationwide. State exams based on lower standards already showed low proficiency rates; Common Core standards only exaggerate the problem, especially for students who do not complete an entire subject track by the time they graduate. (The proposed strategy of deepening high school curricula by pushing topics back to middle and elementary schools does not work, because in practice lower-ability students cannot both cover material at that speed and retain it for use in high school with sufficient fidelity.) There is essentially no support for English language learners.
– From educators and observers: Evidence suggests that neither the existence nor the difficulty of uniform standards influences student outcomes at all.
Examples: Ashley Joachim outlining the federal policy issues, Education Realist (a Trump supporter) on practicality, Diane Ravitch on practicality/evidence; Jay Mathews on evidence.
Disclaimer: I do not necessarily endorse the above arguments and do not know to which, if any, of them Scott subscribes.
Are we sure switching to the popular vote is a good idea? I’ve seen several good arguments for the electoral college.
I’ve heard one or two, but tell me – if we lived in the counterfactual world where we’d been using the popular vote for the last two centuries, would those arguments convince you to switch to an electoral college?
The political climate of the US would, I suspect, be very different in Counterfactual World. Specifically, it would be much more liberal, because the politics of New York and California would have been driving presidential politics for the last 40-50 years, rather than Iowa and Ohio.
I don’t think it would even occur to anyone in 2016 to institute the Electoral College if it hadn’t been there from the start.
It shouldn’t be that different – we’ve only had two elections in the last century with a popular vote/EC split. There might be a reduction in prioritizing swing-state interests, but the current prioritization of swing-state interests is fairly mild, (especially considering which states are swing states tends to change surprisingly often – the 21st century is unusually consistent and even then we’re seeing some significant swings lately). Florida seems like the most consistently biggest and swingiest state, and Floridan interests aren’t that emphasized.
I think it would be very different — for example, the parties would not hold state-by-state primaries on a staggered calendar to ensure their candidates are acceptable to key interior states. In fact, I doubt much campaigning at all would take place outside the major cities, except the occasional photo op. No one would pull an Obama and show up at every fish-fry and county fair in Iowa for six months, that’s for sure.
Our whole way of thinking about presidential campaigns would be different if the EC didn’t exist. You can’t take popular-vote totals from Real World and translate them directly to Counterfactual World. Voting patterns would be VERY different in CfW, primarily because there would be no “solid states” in which many don’t bother to vote.
shakedown, California has currently lost 1 election and threatened to secede; Texas has been doing so for a while now. These are the states with the most electoral votes.
I bring this up to explain that, look, the point of the electoral college is to stop secession from occurring. How much worse would it be if it was not in place? Non-trivially, I would believe. Texans, and / or Californians, if not for Hillary’s popular vote lead, would feel totally marginalized and there would be constant conflict.
Does anyone take California’s secession threats seriously, though?
But more importantly, notice that it’s the big states like Texas and California – that ones who are currently disadvantaged by the system – who are threatening to secede. Add in the fact that they’re the states that could most easily actually go through with it, and it looks like the EC is a lot more likely to cause states to secede than to prevent it. (Besides which, the senate, and the house to a lesser degree, are already built to advantage rural areas, so it’s not like they’d be reduced to merely equal influence by banning the EC).
@shakeddown
Hey! Don’t jinx this for us! I dare to dream!
Semi-seriously, yes.
But the larger point is that, if states disadvantaged by a system will threaten to secede if things don’t go their way, and we see this to be true, then imagine if most states felt themselves to be “disadvantaged by a system”.
So shouldn’t the solution to that be to make the system more fair? Or at least, stop it being quite so unfair at the exact states that could most easily secede?
Actually, I’m not sold at all that California and Texas could most easily secede. I guess it depends on how punitive the U.S. is willing to be; a state surrounded by other states could simply be shut in economically, but then again that might piss off other states around it, who might also secede.
But assuming economic controls aren’t there, then a state in the middle of America is free from the biggest other threat, namely being invaded by a foreign country. So long as America itself doesn’t invade, it’s probably safe from invasion from other countries. Not so California, and probably not so Texas, though Texas likely could stake a claim to having its own militia, enough to hold off Mexico.
And I suppose I’d like to see it be more fair generally, but I don’t think you can do that without marginalizing smaller states, at the end of the day. It’s just not easy to hold together a country like this one, and that’s the gods’ given truth.
I was thinking in economic terms – The economies of Texas and California are large and relatively self-reliant (and IIRC, they’re both states that pay more in federal money than they get). A lot of smaller states would be completely economically dependent on the US for trade. They could get around it by making an EU-style open trade agreement, but that relies on the rest of the country having enough goodwill to agree. (Alternatively, if a whole bunch of small states seceded at once, they would have the power to force a deal, because the other states depend on them for food – but then you also get a rather nontrivial coordination problem).
EDIT: Actually, the question of the military in case of secession would be interesting. A large part of the navy is stationed in California (and a lot of the military are californians) – would California get to keep parts of it? Like, maybe one or two aircraft carriers? It would be a hell of a custody battle.
(More seriously, what would probably happen, assuming a split, was some sort of separate military agreement where the US military represents both countries, at least at first. But that could be interesting too!)
That’s making the assumption that in this non-EC world, the politics of New York and California would still be inevitably liberal. I… 60% agree with that, but I could imagine that the liberal politics of those states are a consequence of the Democratic Party having a lock on them, not the other way around. Perhaps a GOP that aggressively and successfully competed in New York and California would be pulling those states to the right instead.
(Actually, what I think the result of that counterfactual would be is that neither the Democratic Party nor the GOP would exist, and America’s idiosyncratic definitions of left and right vs. the rest of the world would be completely different. Although still idiosyncratic.)
Specifically, it would be much more liberal, because the politics of New York and California would have been driving presidential politics for the last 40-50 years, rather than Iowa and Ohio.
Not necessarily; this article shows how California went from blue to red and back again. There was a gap between (very roughly) the 40s and 90s when it was more or less majority red, so you can’t say “for the last 40-50 years” uninterrupted.
New York (city and state) has been reliably blue, but even it had a blip for the Reagan years.
That’s fair. California didn’t become reliably blue until it was greatly urbanized, so perhaps the impact wouldn’t have been as stark as I assumed. But California has probably always been at least a little more liberal than the interior of the country.
Reagan was a political earthquake, an outlier, really.
How would we know? What does this counterfactual world look like? Are the rural areas of the country bordering on open rebellion due to their concerns being systematically ignored? Is the US unable to grow its own food for similar reasons?
I’m really not sure how anyone would game out a counterfactual like that, but I also think it’s kind of weird to think farmers require disproportionate representation in federal government to ensure their own safety/minimize the risk of some kind of open rebellion. Farmers make food. Gives them a lot of natural economic leverage.
Farmers make food. Gives them a lot of natural economic leverage.
California is the state providing the lion’s share of agriculture in the USA:
So if we assume California is and will always be blue – are we really looking at Panem versus the Districts here in Counterfactual World? 🙂
Who even knows what the political priors of major california agribusiness executives are. It’s not like anyone involved in the major distribution chains are picking their own tomatoes, contemplating how rough life is out in the prairie, that kind of thing. Not even true in Iowa.
If you look at one of those maps that breaks the election results down by county or city you’ll notice that California has a red stripe of running down the Central Valley. I’ll give you one guess where the bulk of California’s agricultural output is located. 😉
FWIW framing California’s internal conflicts in terms of
the 12 DistrictsCentral Valley and Inland Empire, vs. theWealthy and Decadent CapitolL.A. and San Fran. is pretty much a trope in itself at this point.Intermediary meritocracy and group average intelligence and knowledge level is a good idea for the original idea of the electoral college, with people electing the best of their non-apathetic citizenry to vote for the presidency.
Yep. The argument I find most persuasive is the idea that the electoral college amplifies the voting power of swing state voters who are hearing both sides of the national argument. Universal suffrage is a pretty bad idea if you want a well-run government. (Imagine if we voted to determine other important things like stock prices.) But it’s necessary for everyone to feel as though the government is representing them. The electoral college squares this circle nicely.
If it matters, I live in a safe state. It’s not self-serving for me to say that the US is better off when my vote counts for less.
To avoid rehashing the old arguments, here’s a new take:
I think electoral college winner-take-all is a lousy system. Allocating electoral votes within each state by, say, the d’Hondt method would be fairer to e.g. rural Californians and urban Texans, while still retaining the supposed “benefits” of not simply having a national popular vote, but the d’Hondt method is weird and European and we’re Americans dammit, so it’ll never happen. America Fuck Yeah!
Eh, we can go European without going PR and having to make everything Party-Based (admittedly this is a personal hobby-horse, but I want LESS institutionalization of Party Machinery and Apparatchiks, not more).
Just pick a Condorcet method, and rest easy knowing you have the indirect blessing of a long-dead French Nobleman and one of the OG Progressives.
We’re already voting for party lists in the EC. They don’t appear on the ballot but they’re there.
Oh, I know. Another gripe about the current system.
Maybe we should talk a bit about ruthless self-interest.
Trump is deeply self-interested. He’s going to make a lot of money off being president. This isn’t because any of the people who voted for him specifically wanted a corrupt government, but Trump’s interests go beyond getting elected, so that’s what we’re going to get.
The people who voted for him want an authoritarian figure who will serve their interests without letting many normal rules of morality get in the way. That gives him something of a free hand. He’s hiring people based on whether they’ll work for him, again, without caring about their more unsavory beliefs. If anything that makes them more loyal, because other people might think twice about hiring them.
When thinking about people who cast normal rules of morality aside, figuring out what they really believe almost seems besides the point, because it’s not going to constrain them much. Instead we should ask: what are they maximizing? Not paperclips, clearly.
Good question. My guess is that they’re probably maximizing money, power, and glory for themselves, as much as they possibly can, while at least appearing to maximize money, power, and glory for DT.
The only Trump supporters I’ve heard describe their support like this were on fringe sites like Vox Day’s. I think you’re mistaking a tiny subset or a left-media caricature for the mean.
The ones I know in real life voted for him either because they think Hillary is much worse (this is 3 of the 4 Trump voters in my extended family), or because they despise almost everything about the federal government and will toss any grenade at it that comes along (1/4). The three Hillary-haters would all describe her as more self-interested than Trump. There was a larger than usual perception gap between the two sides in this election.
I really don’t understand the visceral hatred of Hillary and I wonder if that’s just something that I won’t get since I only started following politics during GWB. Like, the email server was pretty sleazy, but the ease with which everyone signal-boosted stuff like the “Seth Rich was murdered” horseshit leads me to believe that if the poll error had been the other way it could’ve warranted its own “crying wolf” post about how everyone believes an uncharismatic Generic Democrat is the devil incarnate.
Me too. To quote Hugh Laurie, “I feel like I got here in the middle of the second act and missed the scene where she burns down the orphanage.”
If he wasn’t paying attention to American politics in the 1990s, yeah, he probably did miss it. Hillary has been a lightning rod for controversy for a long time, some of it valid, some of it not. I voted for her, but I won’t pretend there are no good reasons for people to be suspicious of her motives and wary of her judgment. The email scandal happened to play into those doubts absolutely perfectly. God knows I don’t want to re-litigate that crap now that we’re finally past it.
FWIW, even my family’s more extreme Hillary-haters don’t think she is a murderess. (Although they may wonder.) They just think she’s an exceptionally corrupt and ruthless politician who has gotten away with too much by using her insider connections.
@stillnotking
I’m confused what convinces people that the last sentence couldn’t apply equally well to Trump with “businessman” in place of “politician”. My impression is that he showed little restraint in (ie admitted) using financial influence to achieve his aims in a political sphere. Does the admission somehow absolve him of guilt, in a “better the devil you know” sense? Because I don’t really buy the “I’ve done it so I know how to fix it” angle.
@Anonymousse:
There’s more natural antipathy toward politicians who sell influence than toward businessmen who buy it; the former are occupying a position of public trust, and besides, it’s understood that businesses may be effectively forced into corruption when the government is corrupt.
That’s probably a reductive view, but it is the prevalent one in America. We have a long tradition of admiring ruthless businessmen.
I suppose I just don’t subscribe to that viewpoint.
“We have a long tradition of admiring ruthless businessmen.”
More worshiping them than just admiring them. It’s part of what brought us Trump.
hillary is like a rug in that she lies
she lies blatantly and to your face
i think the best example was…well, basically a lot of other people besides me got scandalized by her giving secret speeches to big banks. but I instinctively realised that she was just…telling them what they wanted to hear. And she does that with everyone, all the time, when she’s not paranoid stonewalling. Fuck her.
My understanding is she has a history of corruption. I was vaguely aware of something called “Whitewater” when she was in the White House, but even recently she’s been taking bribes through a charitable foundation front, she rigged the Democratic primary, and she colluded with the media to serve as a propaganda outlet for her. Basically it would be like voting for Rod Blagojevich, not a Generic Democrat.
Or possibly the median Democrat really is this corrupt? I wouldn’t like to believe that.
Hillary is most certainly not an exceptionally corrupt and ruthless politician. Just because Right Wing news sources, or Right Wing writers writing in Left Wing or Center news sources, accuse Hillary of something, does not make it true.
The stuff Suntzuanime cited was mostly made up. The DNC did favor her in the primaries, and I wish they hadn’t, because I preferred Bernie. But it was not illegal for the DNC to push Hillary over Bernie. Hillary never took bribes through her charitable foundation front. She didn’t collude with media any more than DT did.
It would not be even a little bit like voting for Rod Blagojevich– although Right Wing writers and pundits kept making it sound like that.
Hillary is not perfect. But in the past several decades she has been bashed 24/7/365 by news organizations. So most people, correctly, believe that there must be a reason for that. There is a reason– Right Wing propaganda against the most powerful Democratic family in the country.
This goes back to when she was First Lady, when her husband got impeached over consensual sex. The next president, a Republican, got off scot-free after lying about WMD in Iraq and getting us into an expensive bloody disaster of a war there where American soldiers and Iraqis lost their lives for no good reason. Republican hounding and bashing of the Clintons, and telling tons of lies about them, has never let up since.
I would like to share what I thought was an excellent essay by NR re: the Clinton Foundation, Hillarymail, and so on.
Old joke: Guy walks past customs checkpoint every day with a wheelbarrow full of sand. Guard checks the sand meticulously every time, knowing he’s smuggling something, but finding nothing. Finally, one day the guard mentions he’s going to retire that day, so why not tell him what his secret is?
Guy says with a smile: “wheelbarrows.”
And so it is with Hillary and her emails. She’s pretty unlikely to be literally be selling, e.g. uranium to national enemies in exchange for hard cash, or ambassadorships for specific favours. She’s selling access, to herself, and implicitly to the entire machinery of the USG.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439401/hillary-clintos-e-mails-reveal-special-favors-meetings-clinton-foundation-donors
It is false that the media has served as a propaganda outlet for Hillary. In the late stages of the campaign, 56% of her news coverage was negative in tone (compared with 75% for Trump). Journalists, no matter how much contempt they had for Hillary’s opponent, still did their jobs properly and wrote critical stories of her where warranted. I certainly read two or three War and Peaces worth of articles about her email scandal.
It is false that the media has served as a propaganda outlet for Hillary.
The obvious counter to that is the WikiLeaks Podesta emails showing coordination between the Hillary campaign and the news media. A Republican could easily believe that the news coverage of Hillary should have been much worse.
“The media did not serve as a propaganda outlet for Hillary” and “media coverage of Clinton’s campaign could have been harsher” are not mutually exclusive claims. The first remains true, in light of the evidence cited above.
“Hillary never took bribes through her charitable foundation front.”
You state that as if it was a fact. I don’t even know what it means.
Some people who had obvious reasons to want the Secretary of State to favor them gave large amounts of money to the foundation. That’s a fact that I do not believe anyone disputes.
How do you decide that that doesn’t amount to accepting bribes? Or, for that matter, that it does?
“The media did not serve as a propaganda outlet for Hillary” and “media coverage of Clinton’s campaign could have been harsher” are not mutually exclusive claims. The first remains true, in light of the evidence cited above.
“The media did not serve as a propaganda outlet for Hillary” is just as true as “The media served as a propaganda outlet for Hillary”; they’re both subjective comments. I think that the documented collaboration between members of the media and the Clinton campaign is enough that a reasonable person could see it my way.
How do you decide that that doesn’t amount to accepting bribes? Or, for that matter, that it does?
My father was a Secret Service agent, assigned to the Diplomatic Protection Division, guarding foreign heads of state visiting the US. One of those he protected was the head of one of the Persian Gulf states, visiting the US to have a medical procedure done. The head of state, being fantastically rich on oil money, was a very generous person. When he was leaving the US, he offered all the agents assigned to his detail a decent amount of money (somewhere in the five figure range) as a ‘thank you’. They all had to turn it down, even as it was sincerely not a bribe, it gave the appearance of one. (He got a pair of ridiculously tacky watches with the guys picture on it as a consolation prize).)
Hillary could be scrupulously honest, and it would still be wrong to take money from people she is in contact with as Secretary of State as it presents an obvious appearance of conflict of interest.
Nope! “M served as a propaganda outlet for C” is false if a majority of M’s coverage of C was negative. This is true in virtue of the meaning of the words involved. Hence, the media did not serve as a propaganda outlet for Clinton.
Is it?
Sputnik News is generally agreed to be Russian propaganda. I assume this is true; certainly whenever I accidentally visit it I find them lying to exaggerate stories in the direction one would expect if it were true.
But that doesn’t mean they ignore widely-known stories that are embarrassing to the Russian government. Rather, they lie in order to minimize them.
For example, here’s a Sputnik article on Russian intelligence influencing the US election. I have no doubt automated analysis would find it was “negative”, even though it primarily discusses the accusations in order to refute them.
EDIT: and here’s a Sputnik article discussing Sputnik being classed as propaganda by the EU. Again, a lot of negative words, and the story is embarrassing for them.
Are we to conclude Sputnik is biased against itself?
Nope! “M served as a propaganda outlet for C” is false if a majority of M’s coverage of C was negative. This is true in virtue of the meaning of the words involved. Hence, the media did not serve as a propaganda outlet for Clinton.
Nope! Two can play this game. If M’s coverage of C is more positive than a neutral pure-facts case, than M is propaganidizing for C. Saying ‘Bill Clinton was impeached for consensual sex’ is negative, but it’s also more positive than ‘Bill Clinton committed perjury in a sexual harassment case‘, and someone that says the former is propagandizing for Bill. The ‘not as negative as could be’ is a classic propaganda example.
@ MugaSofer
In order for your argument to work, you would have to show that a majority of Sputnik News’s coverage of the Kremlin is negative. Judging by their Russia section, there’s no chance you would succeed.
@ Civilis
“If M’s coverage of C is more positive than a neutral pure-facts case, than M is propaganidizing for C.”
Maybe, but you’ve illicitly revised the claim to make your analysis more plausible. The original claim we were discussing was that the media served as a propaganda outlet for Clinton, not that the media at some time propagandized for her. The original claim remains false, even if your revision might be true.
How do you decide that that doesn’t amount to accepting bribes? Or, for that matter, that it does?
Fortunately, there are guidelines on this.
Anecdote time! I was taken on to work as a minor minion in the education branch of local government in our town, to assist the clerical officer tasked with overseeing the tendering and furnishing, equipping and general everything-except-the-building (and even there we were whipping out our measuring tapes and reading off the plans at times) for three new schools.
We were dealing with a budget of a couple of millions over a two-year span, which wasn’t bad going for the time and place. Coming up to Christmas one year, one of the suppliers who had legitimately won on tender and in whose way we’d put a couple of hundred grand worth of custom offered to give us vouchers for a meal out – nothing extravagant, the price of a nice dinner in a local hotel or restaurant. Fifty quid would have been the extreme limit. We had to turn it down, as per this part of the rules, and were instructed by the boss to turn it down:
Instead, they gave us a set of two bottles of wine as an appreciation for the custom and this circumvented the “A gift, other than a gift of modest value, given to a civil servant by virtue of his or her official relationship with the donor or his or her Department’s commercial dealings with the donor must be regarded as property of the Department/Office concerned” part of the regs (we split it a bottle each).
And that is why horsing money into a foundation set up by a couple who are politically connected and plugged into a network and where one of that couple later goes on to an important position in the administration of the country may, perhaps, be looked at askance by some.
This is also why the annoyance over Hillary’s email server; public/civil servants have strict rules and guidelines and transgressing them will get you hammered – if you’re junior enough. Be important enough and you get away with it? One law for the rich, another for the poor!
@Earthly Night, I don’t understand your claim.
Here are the facts: there were a lot of Clinton scandals during this campaign, because there were documents leaked throughout the election season. The media failed to totally ignore them.
Are you saying that a propaganda outlet would have totally ignored them, or that they would somehow have discussed them using only positive terms?
Because, y’know, they did cover Clinton much less than Trump, and they did attempt to spin those stories as not a big deal. They just failed to do so while using primarily positive adjectives.
The claim that a majority of news stories treated Clinton as the bad guy or guilty of any wrongdoing looks clearly, laughably false to me. Are you arguing it’s true?
If not, what are you saying? That even if something is written with the express purpose of making a candidate look good, it’s not “propaganda” unless it uses a certain kind of adjective? What use is the term “propaganda”, then?
This goes back to when she was First Lady, when her husband got impeached over consensual sex.
It’s dubious as to how consensual exactly it was – it was not edifying to see the same feminists who were agitating for sexual harassment laws and defining abuse of authority and power imbalances then brushing it off as “it was only a blowjob” and “I’d have gotten on my knees for him myself” and the intimation by some quarters that she had set out to catch him and seduced him into it.
He certainly lied about it, and I lost a lot of respect for Bill over this – it was adultery (unless anyone can provide evidence that they agreed to have an open marriage and such affairs were known and consented to by Hillary), and she was young enough to be his daughter so I discount the “he was only a poor helpless man who fell victim to a scheming jezebel” defence put forward on his behalf. It may be more of a moral argument that he shouldn’t have done it, and people will have differing opinions on that. It is also legitimately arguable if impeachment was appropriate, but it’s a question of (a) does perjury on the part of the president render him unfit for office? (b) given that the offenses occurred within the White House with a person working there and not elsewhere or as a private citizen, it did involve questions of abuse of authority and sexual harassment in the workplace.
But flat-out stating “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” and “it all depends what the meaning of ‘is’ is” under oath are factual events that can be judged without invoking morality and simply decided on: were these statements true or not? were they perjury? were they attempts to obstruct justice?
@ Muga Sofer
No, I’m saying that a propaganda outlet would have managed to find a way to handle the stories without making 56% of their coverage of the candidate negative. We can use Sputnik News as an example. Do you think that, even in Putin’s worst month, more than half of Sputnik’s stories about him were negative?
Maybe, but you’ve illicitly revised the claim to make your analysis more plausible. The original claim we were discussing was that the media served as a propaganda outlet for Clinton, not that the media at some time propagandized for her. The original claim remains false, even if your revision might be true.
The media coordinated with the Clinton campaign. Whether it was to provide positive press or minimize negative press via spin, it counts as propagandizing. Unless you can disprove the emails released by Wikileaks, factual statements have been presented and remain unchallenged. A reasonable person can believe my interpretation.
If you’re saying that at one time the media propagandized for Clinton, but stopped, that is a separate claim, one which requires proof. When did the media stop?
@ Civilis
There are two different claims here. Here’s the one we started out with:
“The media served as a propaganda outlet for Hillary.”
This claim is false, for the reasons given repeatedly above. Here’s the new one you’re defending:
“Some journalists at some times propagandized for Hillary.”
This may be true, but it’s also much, much weaker. Some journalists propagandized for Trump, too, like the time Hannity was censured by Fox for appearing in a Trump campaign video.
It’s pointless to try to get a definition of ‘biased’ without any shared
idea of where the underlying truth is. It’s like measuring longitude without a meridian. If Hillary is heavily corrupt, any coverage of her saying she is accused of mild and indirect corruption is biased in her favor. If not, the opposite.
If you start from the position that the basic function of government is fundamentally illegitimate, and so can only be barely tolerated if performed by a saint with a gun to their head. You compare Hilary to that, get the answer, see the bias.
If you start from the position that government and real estate are both existing and probably necessary sectors of the economy, then you look at Trump and Hillary, you compare them, get an answer, see the bias.
Expecting Republicans and Democrats to agree on basic facts is a fools game; why would they? What about their world view do they hold in common that would allow such a thing?
No one is talking about “bias”. suntzuanime claimed that “[Hillary] colluded with the media to serve as a propaganda outlet for her,” which implies that the media served as a propaganda outlet for her. But it did not– it published mostly negative stories about her campaign– so suntzuanime’s claim was false.
“The media served as a propaganda outlet for Hillary.”
Ok, yes, you’re absolutely right. Fox News and Breitbart both propagandized for Trump. Not everyone propagandized for Hillary. Just most of the media. Not all. Happy?
“Some journalists at some times propagandized for Hillary.”
Yes, some journalists, as in the editorial staff of the New York Times and Washington Post, and the news directors or senior reporters of ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN (http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/10/wikileaks-list-least-65-msm-reporters-meeting-andor-coordinating-offline-top-hillary-advisors/). That’s not all the media. I shouldn’t use ‘the media’ when I’m merely referring to the liberal media, which is most of it. You’re right. Will you ever forgive me?
We’ll settle on ‘most of the media (but not all of it) propagandized for Hillary’.
Yeah… you realize that it’s just part of a reporter’s job to go to functions like that? An important part, actually, because it allows them to pose questions directly to the campaign staff, cultivate contacts that they can use as sources, and try to catch people drunk or off-guard. When you were talking about media collusion, I assumed you meant things like Donna Brazile leaking debate questions to Hillary’s campaign, which is actually unethical. If this is what you’re calling collusion, we can safely stick it in the file with the hundreds of other conspiracy theories popular among Trump supporters.
You can also see from the link I posted at the top of the thread that NBC, the New York Times, and CBS were among the news organizations most critical of Hillary, with 59%, 56%, and 52% of their stories being negative in the period studied (compare to 60% for Fox).
You are linking to the gatewaypundit?
Fuck me.
You are linking to the gatewaypundit?
Fuck me.
Some rebuttal. Was that necessary? Kind? Funny? Informative?
If this is routine, where are the off-the-record meetings with Trump? If that was just a routine (yet off-the-record) briefing (to discuss how to frame HRC as a candidate), why keep it secret? Why not invite Fox?
For that matter, could it be that the Harvard Kennedy School of Government is itself biased? Let’s look!
“Ninety-one percent of contributions to current presidential candidates made by Harvard faculty, instructors, and researchers in 2015 went to former Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton, according to a Crimson analysis of Federal Election Commission filings.”
…
“All donations from FAS researchers and instructors went to Sanders and Clinton, as did all contributions from their peers at the Kennedy School of Government…”
BTW, the author of that report has one listed political donation, to Al Franken.
(http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/2/10/faculty-donate-clinton-2016/)
Probably off-the-record since we don’t have a Wikileak of Trump’s campaign itinerary?
Yes, we have no wikileaks about anything about Trump. But had them about everything about Hillary. Which is one big reason why DT won.
@ Deiseach
the intimation by some quarters that she had set out to catch him and seduced him into it.
Intimation? Read her autobiography at the time. Also consider, that Starr was pressuring her to say it was not consensual, but she has always held to the consensual story.
How about this: find compelling evidence that Hilary committed at least one crime at some point in her life. It’s probably unrealistic to expect that you find evidence comparable to Trump’s dozen accusers and admission of guilt, but that should be what you aim for. Go go go.
There’s plenty of evidence. It may not be compelling to a Democrat that is willing to put tribal loyalty above everything else, but a reasonable person could (that’s could) find any of that compelling enough not to vote for her.
The presence of any classified information outside a network designed for it is evidence, for example. Admissions that she deleted emails sent to her as Secretary of are evidence that she violated records laws (certainly more than a mere 18 1/2 minute gap in an analog recording). The existence of a separate email server is evidence. Her testimony to congress contains numerous false statements, and that’s evidence. (http://lawnewz.com/high-profile/why-hillary-clinton-will-not-be-charged-for-lying-to-congress-even-though-she-did/)
You can tell a lot about people by watching what they do, and which choices they make. Hillary is known as the ‘Lady MacBeth of Little Rock’. The fact that she’s willing to allow or do anything to get and keep power is the reason she can’t be trusted with it. That this can be applied to the Democratic party as a whole should worry people.
When I say “compelling evidence,” I mean evidence that, on balance, makes it probable that Clinton committed a crime. This means evidence (a) that the action in question is subject to criminal penalties, (b) that Clinton performed the action, and (c) that she did so with the requisite criminal intent. Ideally, focus on one alleged misdeed and give citations to credible sources establishing that each of the three conditions is met. What you’ve said so far falls well short of meeting these conditions. You say that Clinton made false statements to investigators, for instance, but this is no crime unless Clinton knew at the time that the statements were false, and you’ve furnished us with no evidence that she did.
I really don’t understand the visceral hatred of Hillary and I wonder if that’s just something that I won’t get since I only started following politics during GWB.
A lot of it does date back to the Clinton administration. With the Clintons, there’s so many potential situations that look like they could be corruption (White House travel office, Whitewater, Mark Rich pardon, Cattle Futures, multiple rape allegations, etc., and that’s just through Bill’s presidency) that it’s hard to imagine that not even one of them is real. The left has obscured this (by such things as pretending that Bill lying to congress was about consensual sex and not lying to congress to cover up sexual harassment) to the point where none of the allegations can be proven to a court-of-law standard one way or the other.
What makes the email server allegations so problematic is that they’re involving procedures put into place to prevent cover-ups. It’s as if you have an employee that may have been stealing from the till; you can’t prove it, so you set up a security camera. Then you find that the employee you suspect of stealing has accidentally cut the feed for the security camera…
What’s needed is a truth and reconciliation commission style investigation. Preemptively pardon Hillary, then pardon everyone else involved with the caveat that they have to testify under oath. They can’t plead the fifth, because they’ve been pardoned. We deserve to know what happened and who ordered what.
What about all the Republican news outlets that published fake news about her? Do they have to testify too?
This is 99% about Republicans attacking the most powerful family of Democrats in the U.S. for decades– in most cases, for no reason other than to take away their power so that Republicans could have more power.
Will the truth and reconciliation commission also investigate Trump’s years of sexually assaulting women, cartoonish corruption, and fraud, or is this victor’s justice?
What should happen with Clinton is what should have happened in the first place, appoint an independent counsel, preferably someone that both Democrats and Republicans respect as a fairly neutral person (like Ralph Nader). The FBI was clearly making shit up as they went along, playing political games.
Congress can appoint a Special Council if they believe that there is enough reason to investigate Trump in this manner.
Will the truth and reconciliation commission also investigate Trump’s years of sexually assaulting women, cartoonish corruption, and fraud, or is this victor’s justice?
At this point, accusations against Trump can be handled just like those against Bill Clinton, in regular courts. If Trump commits perjury during those investigations, he should be impeached, just like Bill Clinton was. Trump doesn’t deserve a pre-emptive pardon; if he committed a crime, he should be punished. The thing is, Trumps actions up until now have been those of a private citizen.
Whenever government officials plead the Fifth for actions committed in an official capacity, something is very wrong. The government has a duty to look into what happened and why its employees think they could be charged with a crime for things they did as employees. The current situation is worse in that you have government employees that were granted immunity from prosecution that still will not testify. They cannot be charged, and yet they’re still invoking their Fifth Amendment rights.
What about all the Republican news outlets that published fake news about her? Do they have to testify too?
No media organization, left or right, should be dragged into this. This is about what the government, our government, did. At this point, getting petty revenge against Hillary by forcing her to do a perp walk is less important than finding out what the government did and putting it out in the open, which is the whole point of preemptively pardoning her. She’s never going to hold office again; putting her in jail does nothing.
And this isn’t just about Hillary. This is about the IRS (http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2016/11/the-irs-day-1291judgestrong-showing-that-irs-discriminated-against-tea-party-groups.html) and the EPA and the VA, among others.
Trump did commit crimes– he sexually assaulted a bunch of women, if nothing else– and he won’t be punished. In fact, his comeuppance for being a lifelong sexual predator was being elected president. How does that stand with you?
Trump did commit crimes– he sexually assaulted a bunch of women, if nothing else– and he won’t be punished. In fact, his comeuppance for being a lifelong sexual predator was being elected president. How does that stand with you?
Neither Trump nor the Clintons have been convicted of the most serious crimes against them, so there’s no punishment involved. (Bill settled a harassment lawsuit for $850,000, which Trump can afford. Bill was impeached and disbarred for perjury.)
As far as allegations go, when my choice was between ‘sexual harassment’ and ‘sold out national security’ (with a side of ‘covered up rape‘), I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. I admitted Trump was a horrible candidate… Hillary was worse.
The whole ‘Trump’s a serial sexual harasser’ allegation has no force when it comes from a side that has routinely covered up sexual harassment from its own people. If the Democrats really cared about it, they would have been after Bill or Ted Kennedy.
Try again. Trump evidently sexually assaulted numerous women.
I agree that the things Trump actually did are not as bad as the things you feverishly imagine Clinton to have done, but they are worse than the things she actually did.
I was, and still am, extremely critical of Clinton for her handling of the email server.
But the Clintons are done now. Stop kicking someone when they are down. The Clinton name will forever be associated with a campaign so disastrous it lost to Donald Freaking Trump. Let’s stop wasting time on them.
Maybe it’s not the 100% most just outcome ever. But political winners get too little judicial oversight and political losers get too much judicial oversight.
(The actual punishment in the real world for someone who is careless like Clinton was with
national securityclassified information isn’t jail time. It’s the loss of career. That result has been achieved. Not by plan nor intention, but it has still been achieved. What more do you want?)I agree that the things Trump actually did are not as bad as the things you feverishly imagine Clinton to have done, but they are worse than the things she actually did.
We don’t and can’t know what she actually did because she went around destroying records. It’s like giving the benefit of the doubt to a cop that intentionally shut off his body camera before shooting someone.
Do you have a security clearance? Do you know anyone that does? The stuff she’s admitted to doing is pretty bad, even if the Justice department wouldn’t prosecute her for it.
Likewise, the things the IRS has done have been bad, and they’ve been repeatedly called on it by judges. The Fast and Furious gunwalking scandal should be investigated, because even if there was no crime, even if this was just government stupidity, something bad happened. The VA’s malfeasance may not be criminal, but it sure is scandalous. This isn’t just about Hillary.
We do, in fact, know that Clinton did not “sell out national security,” because our nation remains relatively secure, and the respects in which it is not secure have zilch to do with Clinton’s emails. Try to tamp down the hysteria a bit. I’m happy to agree that Clinton’s handling of classified information in her emails was grossly irresponsible and unprofessional and that she likely set up her server with the intent of circumventing open records laws. As wrongdoing goes, though, that’s not really in the same ballpark as a lifetime of sexually assaulting women.
But there have been lengthy congressional inquiries into all of these, haven’t there? I understand the desire to see justice done, and maybe it’s important to you to see government officials prosecuted, but these sorts of low-level scandals occur in every presidential administration, and if each of them prompted a truth and reconciliation commission there would never be any end to it. It’s certainly not a good reason to vote for Trump, a man so narcissistic and venal that he once used funds from his charity to buy a life-sized portrait of himself.
What more do you want?
I want an IRS that can’t be used against people just because of their politics, whether or not I agree with them.
I want government employees that will not let political appointees get away with violating regulations, and will investigate allegations thereof, regardless of which party the appointee supports.
I want a Justice Department that will treat the high and mighty exactly the same as they would everyone else… in fact, one that would be harder on those with more power.
I want records laws enforced so political appointees can’t coordinate with political interest groups off the record. The head of the EPA shouldn’t have a phony email address (rwindsor@epa.gov) for coordinating with either energy companies or environmental groups.
I don’t want to see kickbacks from the government going to partisan special interest groups in league with the party in power.
I don’t want the government wantonly arming the drug cartels, whether or not it’s a ploy to get more gun control laws. Either way, it’s bad.
I want data that’s supposed to be private, like people’s tax returns, kept private according to the laws.
I don’t want government employees that violate the rules and procedures of their positions to keep their jobs (be it VA hospital head or EPA investigator), much less to get rewarded for it.
None of that should be controversial. And yet, we’re still fighting tooth and nail for all of that because to do that would mean admitting Democrats were doing something wrong. And it would be just as bad if it were the Republicans doing it. We forced Nixon out of office for that, and I don’t know many if any Republicans that thought it was a bad idea.
I want an IRS that can’t be used against people just because of their politics…
I want government employees that will not let political appointees get away with violating regulations…
I want a Justice Department that will treat the high and mighty exactly the same as they would everyone else…
I want records laws enforced so political appointees can’t coordinate with political interest groups off the record…
I don’t want to see kickbacks from the government going to partisan special interest groups…
I don’t want the government wantonly arming the drug cartels…
I want data that’s supposed to be private, like people’s tax returns, kept private according to the laws
I don’t want government employees that violate the rules and procedures of their positions to keep their jobs
None of that should be controversial.
I agree with all of those.
None of them are moved forward by investigating Clinton’s email server one more time. In fact, bringing it up is a distraction. (And, again, I say this as someone who thinks it should have disqualified her from winning the Democratic primary, because it showed she didn’t learn any lessons from the 1990s Clinton scandals except for “HIDE ALL THE THINGS.”)
We do, in fact, know that Clinton did not “sell out national security,” because our nation remains relatively secure, and the respects in which it is not secure have zilch to do with Clinton’s emails.
You (not ‘we’) know a lot with no evidence. I’m willing to state I don’t know, which is why it’s important that we check and thoroughly investigate. It’s why willful destruction of potential evidence (which Clinton has admitted to, and won’t be prosecuted on) is such a problem.
Try to tamp down the hysteria a bit. I’m happy to agree that Clinton’s handling of classified information in her emails was grossly irresponsible and unprofessional and that she likely set up her server with the intent of circumventing open records laws. As wrongdoing goes, though, that’s not really in the same ballpark as a lifetime of sexually assaulting women.
A “lifetime of sexually assaulting women”? Who’s acting hysterical here? I’m the one saying we should judge Trump the same as Bill Clinton or Ted Kennedy… both of whom could be described just as accurately with the same statement.
Willful subversion of federal records laws should be much more severe than vague charges of ‘a lifetime of sexual assault’ (or just a bit of macho bravado), because it interferes with our ability to find out what happened. If Trump committed sexual assault, we can take him to court. We can’t take Hillary to court because Justice botched the investigation, intentionally or not, by completely violating recording protocols, by allowing attorney to represent both the suspect and the State Department, and by allowing immunity to be granted without requiring testimony, all of which (coincidentally or not) was right after the Attorney General met in private with the husband of the suspect.
None of them are moved forward by investigating Clinton’s email server one more time. In fact, bringing it up is a distraction.
I see your point, but I think the Clinton server is the easiest brick in that the accusations are the same and it’s in recent memory. It would have been easiest to have started with the IRS, but that’s been so long people have forgotten about it, and the partisans that want the government to go after their enemies were just as defensive about the IRS’s misdeeds as they were about Clinton’s.
Right now, the government agencies are more worried about covering the asses of their political heads than doing what’s right for the country. That has to stop. That means a full investigation of everything. Completely transparent. No lying to congress. And that’s why I believe we need to take prosecution off the table… unless they continue to obstruct fixing things. Taking prosecution off the table removes any excuses.
A lifetime of sexual assault.
“In a New York Times report published October 12, Trump was accused of fondling the breasts of Jessica Leeds when she was 38 years old. Leeds, now 74, reportedly met Trump in the first-class cabin of a flight to New York more than 30 years ago, and claims he also attempted to reach under her skirt during the flight.”
“[Natasha Stoynoff, a staff writer at People] wrote, “We walked into that room alone, and Trump shut the door behind us. I turned around, and within seconds, he was pushing me against the wall, and forcing his tongue down my throat.””
“In January 1993, when Harth and Houraney visited Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida estate, he allegedly pulled her into one of his children’s bedrooms, pushed her up against the wall, groped her, and tried to get under her dress again. Harth has accused him of “attempted rape,” while Trump has called the allegations “meritless.””
“Kristin Anderson, who worked as a model and makeup artist in New York in the early 1990s, told the Washington Post that Donald Trump groped her when she found herself sitting next to him on a couch at a Manhattan nightclub. “It wasn’t a sexual come-on. I don’t know why he did it. It was like just to prove that he could do it, and nothing would happen,” she told the Post.”
Still want to call this “macho bravado”? Starting to come to terms with the fact that you just helped to make a sexual predator president?
Let’s get this over with. Here’s the ‘lifetime of sexual assault’ YOU want to put back in the White House, the lifetime that Hillary and the Democratic party have no trouble with putting in the White House:
Eileen Wellstone, 19-year-old English woman who said Clinton sexually assaulted her after she met him at a pub near the Oxford where the future President was a student in 1969. A retired State Department employee, who asked not to be identified, confirmed that he spoke with the family of the girl and filed a report with his superiors. Clinton admitted having sex with the girl, but claimed it was consensual. The victim’s family declined to pursue the case;
In 1972, a 22-year-old woman told campus police at Yale University that she was sexually assaulted by Clinton, a law student at the college. No charges were filed, but retired campus policemen contacted by Capitol Hill Blue confirmed the incident. The woman, tracked down by Capitol Hill Blue last week, confirmed the incident, but declined to discuss it further and would not give permission to use her name;
In 1974, a female student at the University of Arkansas complained that then-law school instructor Bill Clinton tried to prevent her from leaving his office during a conference. She said he groped her and forced his hand inside her blouse. She complained to her faculty advisor who confronted Clinton, but Clinton claimed the student ”came on” to him. The student left the school shortly after the incident. Reached at her home in Texas, the former student confirmed the incident, but declined to go on the record with her account. Several former students at the University have confirmed the incident in confidential interviews and said there were other reports of Clinton attempting to force himself on female students;
Broaddrick, a volunteer in Clinton’s gubernatorial campaign, said he raped her in 1978. Mrs. Broaddrick suffered a bruised and torn lip, which she said she suffered when Clinton bit her during the rape;
From 1978-1980, during Clinton’s first term as governor of Arkansas, state troopers assigned to protect the governor were aware of at least seven complaints from women who said Clinton forced, or attempted to force, himself on them sexually. One retired state trooper said in an interview that the common joke among those assigned to protect Clinton was “who’s next?”. One former state trooper said other troopers would often escort women to the governor’s hotel room after political events, often more than one an evening;
Carolyn Moffet, a legal secretary in Little Rock in 1979, said she met then-governor Clinton at a political fundraiser and shortly thereafter received an invitation to meet the governor in his hotel room. “I was escorted there by a state trooper. When I went in, he was sitting on a couch, wearing only an undershirt. He pointed at his penis and told me to suck it. I told him I didn’t even do that for my boyfriend and he got mad, grabbed my head and shoved it into his lap. I pulled away from him and ran out of the room.”
Elizabeth Ward, the Miss Arkansas who won the Miss America crown in 1982, told friends she was forced by Clinton to have sex with him shortly after she won her state crown. Last year, Ward, who is now married with the last name of Gracen (from her first marriage), told an interviewer she did have sex with Clinton but said it was consensual. Close friends of Ward, however, say she still maintains privately that Clinton forced himself on her.
Paula Corbin, an Arkansas state worker, filed a sexual harassment case against Clinton after an encounter in a Little Rock hotel room where the then-governor exposed himself and demanded oral sex. Clinton settled the case with Jones recently with an $850,000 cash payment.
Sandra Allen James, a former Washington, DC, political fundraiser says Presidential candidate-to-be Clinton invited her to his hotel room during a political trip to the nation’s capital in 1991, pinned her against the wall and stuck his hand up her dress. She says she screamed loud enough for the Arkansas State Trooper stationed outside the hotel suite to bang on the door and ask if everything was all right, at which point Clinton released her and she fled the room. When she reported the incident to her boss, he advised her to keep her mouth shut if she wanted to keep working. Miss James has since married and left Washington. Reached at her home last week, the former Miss James said she later learned that other women suffered the same fate at Clinton’s hands when he was in Washington during his Presidential run.
Christy Zercher, a flight attendant on Clinton’s leased campaign plane in 1992, says Presidential candidate Clinton exposed himself to her, grabbed her breasts and made explicit remarks about oral sex. A video shot on board the plane by ABC News shows an obviously inebriated Clinton with his hand between another young flight attendant’s legs. Zercher said later in an interview that White House attorney Bruce Lindsey tried to pressure her into not going public about the assault.
Kathleen Willey, a White House volunteer, reported that Clinton grabbed her, fondled her breast and pressed her hand against his genitals during an Oval Office meeting in November, 1993. Willey, who told her story in a 60 Minutes interview, became a target of a White House-directed smear campaign after she went public.
You keep doubling down on an allegation that has no weight anymore, both because you’ve written off Bill Clinton’s ‘lifetime of sexual assault’, and because you’ve proven that you’re willing to ignore any accusation against Hillary that doesn’t have explicit proof.
The right warned everyone back during the Clinton administration that playing games with ‘sexual assault’ allegations would eventually devalue the allegation as a whole, and it’s happened. If the Democrats are fine nominating sexual predators at the same time they cry wolf over anything that could possibly be sexual harassment from the other side. But no, the Democrats of the 90s ended up condemning a possible pubic hair on a soda can while they ignored rape allegations against one of their own, and the public took it to understand that sex assault allegations against politicians are political tools, nothing more. And this is where we ended up two decades later: we had an election where both sides were likely guilty of either sexual assault or of covering up rape for political gain.
“I agree that the things Trump actually did are not as bad as the things you feverishly imagine Clinton to have done, but they are worse than the things she actually did.”
Yes, that’s true. But we are totally immersed in Right Wing propaganda in the U.S. People are inundated by “proof” of how criminal and evil Clinton is, and how Donald Trump, who at worst has a few minor flaws, is the Great Savior of the American working class and middle class.
Neither you nor I seem to be able to have any impact on people, given that they hear/see/read Right wing propaganda that contradicts what we say, hundreds of times per month– and given that Right Wingers trust Right Wing propaganda, but do not trust you or me or any of the non-Right Wing sources we cite.
I’m going through a shift now, where I don’t know whether I think we are both valiant for trying to make a dent in all these impacts of propaganda– or whether we are both foolhardy. Or whether this is some kind of paradox and both of us are both valiant and foolhardy.
EK, wow. You have a ton more patience than I do, with all these people who have drunk the Right Wing Kool Aid so much that they are convinced that every tiny flaw of Hillary’s is 100X worse than anything DT ever did. Good for you. I greatly admire your incredible patience.
This all started with Anonymous Bosch: “I really don’t understand the visceral hatred of Hillary and I wonder if that’s just something that I won’t get since I only started following politics during GWB.”
What really gets to me in all this is the inability of people to realize that given that we have very little true facts, and we all have different values, it’s possible for two different people to look at a situation and come up with a different rational conclusion. I know a number of people like Bosch that grew up during the 90s or after and didn’t follow the politics at the time; it’s perfectly understandable that they would not know the whole debate. Still, if you’re going to argue against someone, have the courtesy of understanding their arguments.
Most things aren’t facts. “The media has served as a propaganda outlet for Hillary” is equally as true as “The media has served as a propaganda outlet for Trump”, “The media has served as a propaganda outlet for Hillary and Trump” and “The media has served as a propaganda outlet for neither Hillary or Trump”. There is evidence (not proof) that can be assigned to each of the four assertions. Without proof, you can’t say any are true or false. What standard of evidence there is to accept a given assertion differs from person to person (as are things like “what defines ‘the media’?” and “what constitutes a ‘propaganda outlet’?”). Personally, on this issue, I’m not looking for the one True answer, just to assert that there are other answers that meet the given evidence.
I admit Trump is probably a horrible person. There are a lot of horrible people out there. Telling me Trump is a horrible person doesn’t persuade me to vote for Hillary when I accept Trump is horrible but believe Hillary is far more horrible than Trump. Along those lines, I have said I can understand people that look at the evidence and decide Hillary is less horrible than Trump. What I can’t understand is people that act as if there is no evidence Hillary isn’t a saint, even if they end up not believing it.
That’s why I ended up deciding to pull the lever for Trump: it’s scary to think of people that just could not break out of the ‘Democrats good, Republicans bad’ groupthink to understand what the other side was thinking.
Neither you nor I seem to be able to have any impact on people, given that they hear/see/read Right wing propaganda that contradicts what we say, hundreds of times per month– and given that Right Wingers trust Right Wing propaganda, but do not trust you or me or any of the non-Right Wing sources we cite.
If you’re going to assume all arguments that oppose you are right-wing propaganda, then of course nobody is going to trust you. If you’re not going to understand your opponents (their values, their arguments, their evidence), then nobody is going to listen to you. I accept that Moon believes what they are saying and that they have come by their conclusion rationally, yet I know that Moon’s values lead to a drastically different interpretation of what constitutes ‘right wing’. Ask yourself this: if you end up in a completely foreign country, how would you determine what constitutes the ‘left wing’ and the ‘right wing’?
@ Civilis
We are clear, at least, that Trump sticking his hands up women’s skirts while they forcibly resisted him was sexual assault and not “macho bravado”?
What has Hillary done which is worse than sexually assaulting numerous women?
We are clear, at least, that Trump sticking his hands up women’s skirts while they forcibly resisted him was sexual assault and not “macho bravado”?
If it happened. We have accusations. We have Trump’s words… but we also have accusations that he’s a narcissistic liar. We have more accusations of worse behavior from Bill Clinton… and a perjury conviction, a settlement, and a stained blue dress.
Either we accept that all allegations are made in good faith unless proven otherwise, or we don’t. I’m willing to go either way for the sake of discussion. I’m not willing to hit Trump for something and give Bill and Hillary a pass for worse behavior. You want me to treat the allegations against Trump as valid, then grant me the allegations against Bill and Hillary. (And I’m not saying she’s guilty, I’m saying there is enough evidence there to warrant a serious, politically independent investigation.)
What has Hillary done which is worse than sexually assaulting numerous women?
Do you believe that Hillary could have spent twenty years with Bill without catching some whiff of his behavior towards women? If she had any idea, she accepted his behavior as the price of gaining political power. She could have done something, but the reports kept coming, and she repeatedly slandered the women involved.
Trump’s a greedy narcissist (like Bill). Hillary knows (or at least says) sexual assault is wrong, and yet permits it for her own political ambition and will to power. In her own words, “Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.” Except that doesn’t apply to her husband, so she’s lying.
In 1973, during the Nixon administration a tape recording system in the Oval Office was found to have an 18 1/2 minute gap where Nixon and his chief of staff may have been discussing the Watergate break-in. Despite claims by his secretary that the tapes may have been accidentally erased, Nixon was impeached.
During the Bush administration, it leaked out that Valerie Plame was formerly a CIA agent after her husband, a US ambassador, criticized the administration. Democrats were outraged. They wanted to blame ‘Scooter’ Libby, but it turned out it was someone at the state department, Richard Armitage, Libby was eventually imprisoned for making false statements to investigators. Democrats told us that national security was vital, classified information was no joke, and even possibly misremembered info to the FBI was worth prison time. Libby was sentenced to 30 months in prison.
Why do I bring these up? Either gross violations of records laws and gross negligence with classified data is serious, or it is a political game. I am convinced they are serious. If they are a political gotcha game to the Democrats, then I’m voting Republican for the rest of my life.
In being grossly negligent with national security, Clinton’s actions damaged the United States as a whole. Those damages can’t be paid off like Bill Clinton’s victims can (or Trump’s). We’re already seeing other people that take Clinton’s gross negligence with classified information as an excuse for their own.
I could spend all day going into the people she harmed with various scandals. I could take your ‘sexual assault’ and raise you the death of four Americans in Libya because of Clinton’s malfeasance, and the resulting cover-up by prosecuting an innocent man in order to get Obama re-elected. The thing is, it’s not about Hillary. What she did is just the biggest symptom of political institutions that think they are above the law, and act like it. Invariably, these actions are to the benefit of the elites of the Democratic party.
Take Scooter Libby’s 30 months. Sandy Berger walked out of the National Archives with classified data that would have put the Clinton response to terror in a negative light, then lied to investigators about it. His charge got dropped to a misdemeanor, and no prison time.
And Bill isn’t the only case where the Democrats have dropped the facade that they care about sexual assault. Ted Kennedy and Al Gore both earned a pass for their actions by virtue of being good Democrats.
Both in this debate, and in politics, I want one clear set of rules. If sexual assault is horrible, act like it when a Democrat is accused of it. That ‘one rule for the privileged Democratic Elite, another for everyone else’ is the real crime.
How about this: find compelling evidence that Hilary committed at least one crime at some point in her life. It’s probably unrealistic to expect that you find evidence comparable to Trump’s dozen accusers and admission of guilt, but that should be what you aim for. Go go go.
“How about this: find compelling evidence that Hilary committed at least one crime at some point in her life. ”
I’m not sure if it’s a criminal or a civil offense, but I think it’s pretty clear that she participated in fraudulent transactions in order to transfer about a hundred thousand dollars to her and her husband, probably from Tyson Foods, the largest employer in the state where her husband was first Attorney General and then Governor.
At least, I cannot see any other plausible explanation either of why she went into speculation on cattle futures, a subject where she had no special expertise, or how she turned a thousand dollars into a hundred thousand dollars betting, on average, against the direction the market ended up moving. Concerning the broker in question:
“As it happened, during the period of Clinton’s trading, Refco was under investigation by the Mercantile Exchange for systematic violations of its margin trading rules and reporting requirements regarding cattle trading.[2][8] In December 1979, the exchange issued a three-year suspension to Bone and a $250,000 fine of Refco (at the time, the largest such penalty imposed by the exchange).”
Wikipedia
After the Clinton trading matter became public, Leo Melamed, a former chairman of the Mercantile Exchange, was brought in by request of the White House to review the trading records. On April 11, 1994, he said that the whole matter was “a tempest in a teapot” and that while her brokers had not required her to provide typical margin cushions, she had not knowingly benefited.[9] On May 26, 1994, after the new records concerning the larger Blair trades came to light, he said “I have no reason to change my original assessment. Mrs. Clinton violated no rules in the course of her transactions.”[18] But as to the question of whether she had been allocated profits from larger block trades, he said of the new accounting, “It doesn’t suggest that there was allocation, and it doesn’t prove there wasn’t,”[19] an assessment of uncertainty shared by Merton Miller, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.[19]
Regarding suggestions that Blair had favored Clinton so that Tyson Foods could gain influence with Governor Clinton, they pointed out that CEO Don Tyson, who had in 1978 endorsed Clinton, in 1980 endorsed Frank D. White, Clinton’s opponent in his reelection bid. Tyson denied any knowledge of Blair’s trading partnership with Clinton.[11][20][21]
This is about the thirtieth time I’ve been directed to that wikipedia article about cattle futures. I don’t understand why, because the article makes it pretty clear that there’s no evidence, on balance, that Clinton committed a crime.
@Edward Scizorhands:
No. With regard to the Clinton organization, we should, instead, sow salt, burn it all to the ground, try some more salt, maybe flood it, then take off and nuke it from orbit—it’s the only way to be sure.
Seriously: we need to figure out how to keep something like the Clintons from happening again. Even the Democrats realize that now.
And they’re not even done. Look at Al Gore’s post-2000 career (and wealth). Consider that this particular power couple has an actual ex-President in it, and a proven track record of well-compensated speeches and multi-million-dollar donors. Their influence on American politics, and the Democratic party in particular, will persist for a decade or more.
Trump voters, and many other Right Wingers, are an interesting study. Incredibly sore winners. Incapable of positive emotion. Their idea of happiness is feeling vengefulness and exhibiting cruelty. They are addicted to their own adrenaline, and addicted to conflict with, and abuse of, the other political tribes.
Of course, visceral hatred of Hillary is due mostly to the decades of character assassination of the Clinton family, by Right Wing fake news outlets. Tons upon tons of lies about Hillary and Bill. And the lies about Clinton Foundation pay to play. Even claiming that Hillary is a child trafficker. Nothing is too bizarre a conspiracy theory for consumers of Right Wing fake news to believe.
It all started with Republicans impeaching Bill Clinton over consensual sex, or actually over lying about consensual sex. But I am sure that if he hadn’t had consensual sex, they would have questioned him about what he had for lunch yesterday. And if he forgot what kind of potatoes he ate, then theyy would then have caught him in a lie before a grand jury and impeached him for that.
The GOP president who followed Bill Clinton led us into a war in Iraq, based on lies about WMD. He got away with that scot-free. Because he was a Republican. And Right Wing fake news outlets only attack Dems with lies. They do not point out the true and horrifying news about Republican officials.
Have you ever seen a sports team, that after winning the game, can not be happy for their success, but is instead is completely obsessed with bashing the other team that just lost to them– with gloating over that team’s sadness, with wanting them to be completely ruined in every way, not just to lose the game? Of course not. This is highly dysfunctional behavior.
After an election, if one’s candidate wins, a healthy individual might be expecting and hoping for their candidate to do good things for the whole nation, including the seventy something percent of eligible voters who did not vote for their candidate– because they either stayed home, or else they voted for another candidate.
Divisiveness does win elections. But once the election is over, it can destroy the country, if people find themselves incapable of constructive action, cooperation toward common goals etc. Which may well be the case now.
“You cannot learn how to love, but what you can do is to observe hate, and to put it gently aside.”
J. Krishnamurti
Think on These Things
Of course that is very hard to do, for people who are addicted to conflict and to harming people whom they think of as their enemies– for whom this seems to be the very meaning of their lives.
That seems to be a lot of what Right Wing fake news is about– getting people addicted to hatred and conflict, and addicted to their own adrenaline. Works like a charm. Divide and Conquer. Right Wingers hate Left of Center people so much, and think they are so evil, that Right Wingers never notice how the Right Wing politicians they elect, betray them every time.
Same song. 20th or 30th verse. Over and over.
EK, Right Wingers don’t need evidence to believe Clinton committed a crime. Any accusation anyone can make up about Clinton and then broadcast over Right Wing news will be believed. We are in the post-truth era. Truth doesn’t matter. Everything is Right Wing propaganda. This is why all 3 branches of the federal government are controlled by the GOP, as well as most governorships and state legislatures. Right Wing fake news is everywhere. And most voters believe it.
Even people on this board who convince themselves that they are rationalists, believe it. If you are immersed in Kool Aid, you can not avoid drinking it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth_politics
“Post-truth politics (also called post-factual politics) is a political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy, and by the repeated assertion of talking points to which factual rebuttals are ignored. Post-truth differs from traditional contesting and falsifying of truth by rendering it of “secondary” importance.”
“or actually over lying about consensual sex.”
More precisely, over lying on oath about consensual sex.
You will be relieved to know that when Obama’s Director of National Intelligence lied under oath, to Congress on a rather more important subject, he faced no legal penalties at all.
@ Anonymous Bosch
I really don’t understand the visceral hatred of Hillary and I wonder if that’s just something that I won’t get since I only started following politics during GWB.
It’s been building since Bill was Governor of Arkansas, or earlier. Imo it was a way to attack Bill, with visceral appeal to people who disliked ‘Women’s Lib’. She had continued her own legal career after marriage and didn’t change her surname to ‘Clinton’ till pressured into it. That’s the era her “I could have stayed home and baked cookies” came from. As Arkansas FL she reorganized the Arkansas school system, and by the election of 1992, Bill was saying, “With me you get two-fer the price of one.” — All that could stir up a lot of envy and criticism, then as now.
I’ve seen some long, calm essays defending Hillary against the saner charges, but did not note the links. Anyway, here’s one source for long, calm, informative stuff:
http://www.thepeoplesview.net/about/
http://www.thepeoplesview.net/rules
The following is a description of subjective experience.
For the old-school Red Tribe, Bill Clinton was a sneak peak at where the whole country was headed, twenty years early. He was the harbinger of Blue Tribe victory in the Culture War, and his opponents realized this almost immediately. He and Hillary really were an effective team, but what they stood for was utter anathema. Watching them in power, being told by the news day in and day out that their latest snub or scandal or impropriety or obscenity was totally excusable, it drove people mad. And they won, every time. So crooked they screwed their socks on in the morning, but nothing ever stuck. Shredded the constitution, directed one of the worst law-enforcement disasters in American history, got us wrapped up in various disasters and boondoggles overseas, and dumped gasoline on the culture war at every opportunity, all with the assistance of a media supine in it’s servility. I remember during the Waco standoff, the holdouts hung a banner that read “God help us, we need the media”. That’s the last time you’d ever see Red Tribe making that mistake. Slowly, methodically, comprehensively, the Clintons taught Red Tribe that there was no living together.
Maybe a lot of those fights Red Tribe deserved to lose, though. Maybe Blue Tribe deserved to win the culture war, because Red Tribe’s positions really were evil. Maybe character doesn’t matter, and it really is the economy, stupid. Fair enough. And then Bush was worse, so very goddamn much worse in every way but the ones involving his genitals, and honestly a lot of people would have happily traded him screwing his way through every hooker in DC if it meant we didn’t lose New Orleans and didn’t blunder into Iraq. Bush hollowed out the Red Tribe, locked them in combat with blues on every point of the compass, while compromising every principle that remained.
…But then Hillary turned out to be totally on-board with all the worst parts of Bush.
When people talk about Clinton’s private email server, I think about how the ATF agents at Waco documented the raid using “personal” cameras and video equipment in a preemptive attempt to dodge FOIA. It worked too, for the better part of a decade, long enough that by the time the lawsuits cut through all the bullshit, it was old news and no one cared any more about a bunch of women and children getting burned to death by federal agents.
But hey, she’s got *experience*.
It is strange how warped your views of these historical events seem to me.
–Bill Clinton did not herald a “Blue Tribe victory in the culture war,” quite the opposite, in fact. He signed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act, crippled welfare, and passed unbelievably punitive crime laws, all while Hillary was publicly warning us about the threat posed by juvenile super-predators.
–President Bush didn’t “lose” New Orleans, it was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. The worst that can be said about Bush with regards to Katrina is that by appointing incompetent cronies to key positions in the federal government he harmed the evacuation efforts, leading to needless loss of life.
–As far as I know, there’s no compelling evidence that the FBI was responsible for the fires at the Waco compound, and it’s downright insane to blame the Clintons for the debacle, as though they were personally directing law enforcement efforts. (Indeed, it appears as though Bill’s sole contribution was to argue against storming the compound, although he ultimately left it up to Reno, who signed off on the raid.) What’s more, the Branch Davidians were a terrorist cult: they murdered four federal agents who were executing a lawful search warrant. Sympathizing with them is something like sympathizing with ISIS.
@Earthly Knight – “As far as I know, there’s no compelling evidence that the FBI was responsible for the fires at the Waco compound”
From memory:
multiple previous FBI standoffs ended by arson. Evidence cited by the Davidians as proving the FBI shot first, most notably the large steel front doors of the compound, disappearing after the fire from a secured FBI crime scene. FBI officials caught perjuring themselves on multiple points in the subsequent investigation. Bogus weapons charges filed against every survivor. Spent FBI-issue pyrotechnic grenade of the type the FBI swore under oath was not used anywhere during the assault logged to evidence as a “silencer” belonging to the Davidians. Official accounts of massed automatic weapons fire proved fictitious by audio recordings intentionally suppressed by the agency. And on, and on, and on. Official FBI comms traffic, suppressed by the agency, records the on-site commander holding back fire trucks until after the compound has burned fully. …And a good bit more where that came from.
But our last interaction left me with the distinct impression that you are no longer interested in charity or honesty, so further interaction is not really a high priority for me.
Is this the kind of honesty you’re looking for?
Politifact is a joke.
Yes, but it’s not that much of a joke that the fact that Trump appears so often lying in their page is not strong evidence that he is dishonest.
I mean, it’s still not a great comeback: “You’re an asshole” “Well so’s the guy you voted”.
But it’s this kind of attitude that made the Republican party into one enormous mental ward, isn’t it? You know in your heart of hearts that Obama is a muslim Kenyan and that the Clintons have had like forty people killed, no matter what the fact-checkers might say.
The Republican party may be one big fact-free mental ward, but it controls all 3 branches of the federal government, most state legislatures and most governorships.
If Republicans accepted politifact, they would have to notice that their party is fact free.
And liberals are naive enough to allow Republicans to have control of the voting machines, which they may have rigged for a Trump victory, as well as Congressional victories. And liberals are naive enough not to protest effectively when Trump uses Russia and Assange to do a one-sided dump of Dem emails only, and when the FBI’s Comey makes an announcements right before the election that is obviously meant to dissuade Hillary voters from going to the polls.
The Dems are pretty insane also, to offer so little resistance when the inmates take over the asylum.
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
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
Still time for an election audit: Column
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/11/18/election-audit-paper-machines-column/93803752/
(Although this still wouldn’t necessarily show fraud if it had been committed.)
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/
“He’s going to make a lot of money off being president.”
Probably true even if he isn’t in any sense corrupt. A good deal of his present income seems to come from his brand name. Think how much more it will be worth when he is or was President.
Just think. He could stay in a few suites in every hotel and, bam, they’re literally Presidential Suites.
You’re talking about ruthless self interest and NOT mentioning the clintons and their foundation?
Scott said his impetus for the Wolf post was suicide risk.
I saw this floated onto facebook, but I think it originated on Tumblr somewhere. I would argue it does a far more effective job of lowering suicide risk of those concerned about a Trump presidency (I am assuming that is the prime motivator for Scott’s post).
Now, if you voted enthusiastically for Trump, you won’t like the message. But the message wouldn’t be for you.
I feel like this is unlikely to work. The people who are THIS upset about the election results are presumably people who ascribe a huge amount of importance to politics and invest a whole lot of their identity into it.
They don’t see it as morally acceptable to not like Trump but vote for him anyway.
They don’t see it as morally acceptable to support Hillary but to have not voted.
They don’t see it as morally acceptable to protest vote a third party.
Some don’t even seem to see it as morally acceptable to have voted for Hillary but not to have passionately argued for her, donated to her, etc.
And that’s what the real problem is here – a lack of perspective such that the alleged “victims” of a Trump presidency assign the same level of moral culpability to someone who votes for Hillary but didn’t universally condemn and denounce Trump as they assign to Ann Coulter. It’s a “with us or against us” attitude taken to such an extreme position where the bar for truly being “with us” is set ridiculously high. (this is kinda what I was getting at with you in the last thread BTW, but I got a bit derailed mid-rant and it came out a lot more garbled and less nonsensical than I intended, and for that I apologize)
And what’s your message for those of us who look at the left and see a big chunk of the country that actively and violently hates us? Because that is what it looks like to me–an awful lot of leftists hate me and want to destroy me, for no other crime than disagreeing with them.
Can’t stump the Trump?
I would advise you, if you want to see which political faction most virulently hates the other one, to look in the mirror.
I am on the Left, and while there are a tiny handful of SJWs on the Left, almost all people on the Left are doormat types, worried about hurting people’s feelings. Which is why they didn’t go after Trump full bore but only made jokes about him as if he were funny and not dangerous. That’s how he got elected.
Why on earth someone on the Right be afraid of anyone on the Left is beyond me. Are you generally afraid of little mice, worried about whether they might hurt your feelings? That’s how the Left got its tiny handful of SJWs– by bending over backwards to be compassionate so as to not hurt their SJWs feelings.
Isn’t the same thing not mirrored on both sides? The civil wishy-washy types yield ground to the opposition and their own zealots?
Of course not. That is a false equivalence. Why on earth would the 2 parties be exactly the same in this anyway? They certainly re not. Liberals are 99.99% civil wishy washy types, and that is one reason why we got Trump.
Go hang around some liberals if you are a Right Winger and see how much abuse you get. And then go hang around other Right Wingers you don’t know and see how much abuse you get, pretending to be a Left Winger. What I have experienced even on this comparatively mild site, in abuse from Right Wingers, has been hellish. And I see liberals every day worrying about hurting poor Right Wingers feelings.
What kind of a bubble are you in? The crowd I know from university, which I would categorize as “liberal” by any reasonable standard, is extremely hostile towards, say, Trump voters. The handful of Tories at the college I did my undergrad at got a lot of shit. Approximately zero of the people I know IRL seem concerned about hurting the feelings of right wingers, and in fact a lot of them are posting personal sentiments, articles, etc about how caring about hurting their feelings is itself wrong.
Caveat: not an American.
EDIT: In fact, I would say that among the people I know to be leftists, there’s a higher % of people who seem worried about the feelings of, say, Trump voters, than among the liberals.
This is an empirical claim about reality. Do you have any evidence to support this?
I’m a liberal who hangs around with both liberal types and right-wing types, and the amount of abuse I’ve gotten from the former, on a per-capita per-encounter basis, far outstrips the amount of abuse I’ve gotten from the latter. It’s not even in the same ballpark; it’s at least an order of magnitude. And I’ve observed right-wingers tend to get even more abuse from the former than I do.
You seem to be saying that, based on this, I should conclude that liberals are far and away less civil and more abusive than right-wingers. But I disagree. This is just my personal experience, an anecdote that can’t be considered evidence determining reality.
Moon, honestly, you’ve gotten rather little abuse here, and basically none of it due to your political leanings.
Now, I have in fact hung around some liberals, being the dastardly hard hearted right-leaning libertarian that I am. Abuse I got ranged from being summarily blocked for such crimes as pointing out that calling Curtis Yarvin a “neo-Nazi” is unreasonable given that he’s Jewish, to the usual cries of “racist, sexist, harmful ciswhitemale”, to calls for my official silencing. One “liberal”, who I’d had exactly one exchange with, has publicly called, several times, for my firing.
In other news, both conservatives and liberals are people.
People can generally can behave awfully for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is political disagreement.
Ivln, where do you live? I’m moving there.
“Now, I have in fact hung around some liberals, being the dastardly hard hearted right-leaning libertarian that I am. Abuse I got ranged from being summarily blocked for such crimes as pointing out that calling Curtis Yarvin a “neo-Nazi” is unreasonable given that he’s Jewish, to the usual cries of “racist, sexist, harmful ciswhitemale”, to calls for my official silencing. One “liberal”, who I’d had exactly one exchange with, has publicly called, several times, for my firing.”
What you experienced wasn’t abuse at all.
See. 2 can play at that game.
Aren’t you grateful to me for telling you what your experiences are and are not. I assume you are about as please with me telling you that your own experiences are not abuse, as I am with you telling me the same thing.
Moon, if you sincerely believe that “almost all people on the Left are doormat types, worried about hurting people’s feelings” you are not as well-versed in the personality and conduct of your fellow travelers as you think you are.
In fact, if that were actually true, the Left would never win ANY political victories at ANY level, because political discourse and activism requires a thick enough skin to upset people around you and keep going.
Given that there are in fact entire organizations staffed with Left political activists, who can argue with people without bending over backwards to be compassionate and in many cases can actually argue with intimidating figures like judges, lawyers, and police officers, we can conclude that your statement is at best hyperbole.
Okay, maybe it’s 90%, not 99%.
But my main point, and the context in which this came up, is that it makes no sense for people on the Right to fear people on the Left. Most of the aggressiveness comes from the Right. The Right’s candidate threatens to put the other presidential candidate in jail, at the debate, even though she has not even had any charges brought against her, much less been proven guilty of anything. The Left’s candidate says that half of the supporters of the Right’s candidate are deplorables, which might even be true– and then regrets it and takes it back.
The Left had disorganized demonstrations like Occupy Wall Street that easily get squashed. The Right takes over federal land with guns and threats of violence if the government tries to stop them– and then gets away with it scot-free.
Plus the Right controls almost everything now. So anyone on the Right who is generally afraid of people on the Left is a wonder of timidity to behold. It’s perhaps not quite like a human being afraid of a single ant– but almost.
dude
they didn’t go after Trump because they found him actively ridiculous
they believe his voters to be irredeemable scum
Not to mention idiots; here you are trying to argue that Hillary isn’t as crooked as they come, and you think other people have “drunk the kool-aid”. Despite…you know, I’m not even going to into it; the point is that your side views the other side as deplorable morons.
They joked around because they didn’t realise they were about to get hit by a wrecking ball, and now they’re torn between arguing that everyone that opposed them is racist, and everyone that opposed them is poor. Not, understand, that their ideas were bad, or especially that trump had points on issues, because they’re not allowed to say this especially. They need to dance around this obvious fact, because Right Wing ideas are Bad, and probably Stupid like Fox News.
And it’s incredibly cute that you think media “going full bore” would’ve stopped Trump from getting elected. You mean, like freaking out over every tweet, twisting every word and outright manufacturing controversy where none exists? And you’re fully immersed in the kool-aid so you’ll ask for a citation; here’s one:
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/trump-kicks-out-baby-rally-226566
“Trump at rally: ‘Get the baby out of here'”
“Donald Trump asked a woman with a crying baby to leave his rally in Ashburn, Virginia, on Tuesday.”
luckily for you Politifact, of all sites, put in some yeoman’s work debunking this article and the multiple other articles you can find yourself on Google if you feel up to it.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/aug/08/donald-trump/donald-trump-accurately-says-media-wrong-he-kicked/
Come to find out that it was a joke and the mother thought it was funny. Which is to say, the entire media fabricated a scandal out of thin air. And this, in reality, is why you got Trump; the media “went full bore” and people stopped believing them
You have got to be kidding.
Up in Canada, around Toronto IIRC, someone made a poster supporting the alt-right. Over in Vancouver, someone else made another, different flyer and stuffed it in mailboxes.
Here’s where I’d like help being rational. When I first saw the Vancouver flyer (complaining about chinese immigration) I noted that it had parts written in Helvetica; that’s a font that’s only on Macs unless you pay loads of money to license it. I thought this was merely odd since, I figured, only a teeny fraction of the people who would post something like this have a Mac (compared to the general population of what I imagine Vancouverites to be like).
A little while later I read an article about it, and I saw this passage:
This gives me strong reason to believe that the Vancouver flyers are a false-flag operation of some sort. My question is this: in light of the (possibly false) eyewitness statement, should I now consider “it was made on a mac” further, much weaker evidence of a false-flag op?
I’m not sure why you have the impulse to engage in Sherlockian games here. It could be a false flag operation, or a genuine cri de coeur from some guy that hates chinese immigrants for some reason. Either way it looks like a waste of time. Manually handing out pamphlets to get people to click on your website? Who cares.
Unless you are intimately familiar with the differences between helvetica and its many lookalikes, and have a source for your perception that alt-right-types use macs infrequently, I would personally disregard that piece of evidence.
Differentiating between Helvetica and Arial isn’t difficult if you know what to look for.
None of my Mac-using friends can stand the alt-right.
When I manage to hold my nose and browse /pol/ or any of the other less cancerous parts of 4chan, none of the screenshots have macOS tells (San Francisco (the font), macOS window chrome, screenshots including two inches of window shadow)
This gives me cause to think that being a member of the alt-right and using a Mac are anti-correlated (to be fair, few people use machines running macOS anyway).
There exist more than two fonts (check the left sidebar and/or google “helvetica lookalike”). I suppose you could argue people are much more likely to use the default font of their text editors, but then we’re getting down into the weeds of another question which has little research. (Incidentally, the default msword sans-serif font is now calibri I think?)
I don’t mean to pick on your offered evidence, but I think you’re missing some things – how many of your friends can stand the alt right? How many mac-using friends do you have? Shouldn’t the less odious parts of 4chan have proportionately more mac-identifiable users?
I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s no evidence at all, just that given the uncertainty of the base rates, the amount of evidence you can get from font/OS choice is likely to be rather negligible.
>None of my Mac-using friends can stand the alt-right.
Not the same thing as “None of my alt-right friends can stand using macs.”
You’re taking the sort of evidence that *might* have small explanatory power in a high-parameter model, and using it as substantive evidence.
Your stereotypes of Mac owners might be rather out of date. The “Macs are for artsy left-wingers” thing is from before some of the more successful recent Apple products came out.
It’s interesting that the Vancouver poster lists one of the sites given on the Toronto poster, and another that wasn’t on it. I would assume someone seeking to copy the Toronto poster would copy them all, or copy one. I doubt that the Toronto poster was a false flag: a false flag would either give no links, or only link to the most lurid websites possible, and “let’s give a whole bunch of free exposure to our ideological opponents!” would be the stupidest false flag ever.
Why someone attempting an anti-Chinese false flag would link to alt-right sites that, as far as I know, are not hugely obsessed with the issue of Chinese real estate ownership in the Vancouver area, I do not know. Then again, why someone doing anti-Chinese leafleting in earnest would link to those sites either I do not know.
There is of course the possibility that the witness is mistaken, etc.
There’s a simple explanation for that–he doesn’t actually understand the group he’s false-flagging very well. Being anti-Chinese is a plausible thing to attribute to a group whom you stereotype as racists.
If this was someone specifically trying to make the alt-right look bad, presumably they would just copy the Toronto poster, maybe make it more lurid. But if they were trying to do a specifically anti-Chinese false flag, why wouldn’t they just go with the same anti-Chinese sentiments, stereotypes, etc everyone already knows, and just ramp it up?
Because the alt-right is in the news right now so associating it with the alt-right is trendy?
I’ve argued in the last couple threads that at least the large majority and possibly all of the “hate crimes” reported lately were fake.
I would bet strongly that this one isn’t fake. It is putting forward alt-right arguments more or less verbatim, and linking to actual alt-right sites.
I don’t think it being printed from a Mac is any sort of evidence at all. Macs are extremely popular; I’m not aware of the Alt-Right having an OS preference.
(I would argue with you about the % of reported hate crimes that are real vs those that are false, but I came here to make a bad joke, so)
It’s called the Alt-Right, not the Cmd-Right.
Option. The Mac equivalent of Alt is Option. (Source: I’m using a Mac RIGHT NOW)
Huh. The Mac keyboard that came up when I Googled “Mac keyboard” doesn’t have Option keys. I wonder why.
Must’ve been an old keyboard; I’m pretty sure Mac keyboards have had Option keys since 1984.
Either that or it was one with the option symbol on it, ⌥.
It is a current Mac keyboard, from the Apple store, but it is French Canadian.
Note that there are two different flyers. The more fleshed-out one from Toronto doesn’t strike me as a fake at all.
The two-link Chinese-focused one with Helvetica and not Arial seems slightly less genuine and I’m wondering if I should now consider “made on a Mac” evidence that it’s fake.
More generally: should “aspect X is odd” change into “aspect X is evidence against P” if you receive new evidence that suggests that not-P is true?
Faceless, they seem to be referring to a different and less-publicized set of flyers.
I do agree that the set everyone’s talking about in the media is definitely a real flag; it’s alt-right recruitment material top to bottom. Especially because it’s not particularly over-the-top or cartoonishly racist / evil / Nazist. You’d think if it was a false flag, it would have a big finish or a big moment to tip it over the edge, especially since most people couldn’t tell the difference and those that can don’t have media platforms to make people aware of the difference. Something as simple as “X race is subhuman” or “deport X color citizens” would’ve done it.
Possibility:
The one from Toronto is real. The one from Vancouver is someone who doesn’t like Chinese homebuyers/real estate investors (there are a lot of people in Vancouver who don’t like Chinese people – traditionally, racism on the Canadian east coast was anti-Chinese in addition to the general anti-Aboriginal Canadian racism, and more recently real estate buying has become a hotbutton issue), and who has for some reason decided to make it look like an alt-right thing, probably based on seeing the Toronto one.
The police are investigating. What do you suppose they would do if they found the person responsible?
Trumpet it to all and sundry if it turns out to be actually an alt-righter. Bury it if it turns out to be a minority member trying to make the alt-right look bad.
Charge him with littering, I hope. As one would hope would be done against the beauty parlors and cleaners who put fliers on cars. Or the restaurants who mail me junk mail with paltry 10% off coupons if you order an entree and a drink. C’mon, that’s not a deal, the over-priced sugar water is already more than 10% the price of a burger. If there’s not a division of DHS looking into that, I’m gonna get a petition going.
That’s definitely Helvetica. I know because I really like Helvetica. So much so that I wanted to have it, even though I have a PC. But not enough that I was willing to pay for it. So I didn’t. It wasn’t that hard to obtain. If you are inferring this much from the second-order implications of the font of the flyer, then it might be worth considering the possibility someone actually on the alt-right was savvy enough and cared enough about the aesthetics of a G with a spur and an R with a squiggly leg to get the typeface. It should at least be a salient possibility if you are inferring that much about the individual’s personality and politics from the fact they appear to be using a Mac.
Nevertheless I get your angle.
I thought I’d ask one last question before buzzing out of here, something that’s been puzzling me for awhile: does anyone know what the fuck is going on?
To narrow it down a bit-when you look at politics around WWI or so, it looked a lot like people thought they knew what they were doing (whether they did or not is a separate issue I’m not super interested in). There were a lot of conflicts that were understood to be ethnic, national conflicts, and some interesting changes in political norms being fought over, the continued rise of democratic states, the collapse of monarchies. Even by WWII, which became more or less explicitly a conflict between fascism and democracy, you could still find some royalists, but there was also a pretty substantial set of conflicts that were partly disagreements relating to new forms of states, more fully fledged democracies, fascist states that were somewhat inspired by the older school monarchies, and the good old USSR. Over the whole period of the first half of the twentieth century you see a lot of intellectual and political ferment that leads to not just changes, but a lot of competing ideas about how a state and a society should work.
Fascism kind of sort of loses, not utterly and not globally, leaving the socialists and the west in a weird competition that goes on and on until socialism loses. That’s the story anyway. The general story is what matters here, not the nitty gritty details. There’s a kind of mythology that dictates how people interpret what history means that’s generally accepted in the West. Democracy wins, cue Francis Fukuyama and all that shit.
Okay, so my issue here is just, why isn’t there any new shit? The world is clearly substantially different from the way it was at the end of WWII. But it does not appear that anyone is generating a new set of ideas about how we should be organizing ourselves. This election was a pretty decent example of this. There was a whole week there where the left spent every day writing articles about how Trump is Hitler. I don’t think think Trump is Hitler, but this is the situation we’re in, where we’re constantly recycling outdated ideas trying to explain what’s happening and it just feels like we’ve reached a period of intellectual stagnation that makes no sense, since it’s not like there are fewer people trying to understand what’s going on, or we’re all stupider than our great grandparents, or there aren’t pressing reasons why we might need some new paradigms to configure our discourse and institutions around.
So why does every political dispute look like an attempt to relitigate the results of WWII?
http://pastebin.com/UdAq6Uqm is an attempt to relitigate the results of the French Revolution, to be fair.
What’s the actual base rate that you expect new ideologies to be generated, that you’re comparing this to and finding it lacking? Democracy from the 1770s, Communism from the 1840s, Fascism from the 1920s, they just don’t crop up all that often.
And what counts as an ideology, anyway? It’s possible that 100 years from now we’ll be seeing today as the beginnings of the conflict between Neoliberal Globalism vs. Democracy vs. Islamic Theocracy, or whatever. It’s harder to judge what the key ideologies are when you’re in the middle of it, right?
I’m a humanities guy, so you might have to bear with me a bit on the vagueness front. The main thing is that it’s pretty clear that the post-WWII political consensus is falling apart. I’m pretty sure I’m not making that up. But when you look around, in the US and Europe, it isn’t because of the rise of some new set of ideas about how to get on in the world. Instead, you see far right and far left political groups gaining power that they haven’t seen in fifty years, and these people are hocking modified versions of the same old shit.
I don’t really see Communism or Fascism gaining any sort of traction. I see more socialist or nativist factions of Democracy, but they have a lot more in common with each other than with full-on Communism or Fascism.
The Democratic USA had legal slavery for 80 years. Today’s “far right” groups do not extend outside that boundary.
@dwietzsche – “does anyone know what the fuck is going on?”
This is the question that’s been rattling around in my head for the last year or more. I see it as connecting to a number of other points as well; the replication crisis, the economic problems we’ve been having with the fiscal crisis and questions about automation and employment, the rise of Social Justice and so on.
It seems to me that the answer is no. No one has any idea what the fuck is going on. We took a wrong turn somewhere, and we’re stuck in a dead-end. What we are now doesn’t seem to have much of a future, and what can’t go on forever won’t, so both expecting and trying to secure significant change seems like a good idea.
We have forgotten God. That is why all of this has happened.
A reasonable suggestion, but I don’t expect it to be convincing the those who do not believe He exists.
Many of the students of Moldbug seem to have arrived at the same conclusion despite their atheism.
Who is the ‘we’ here, though? The USA is still the most religious Western democracy, even if religious belief is more strongly concentrated in the Red Tribe. And at the far end of the spectrum, Islamic State continues to be extremely religious, but I’m pretty sure that most commenters here would agree that to the extent that an active IS member or enthusiastic civilian thinks they’ve got it all worked out, they are spectacularly overconfident.
And in Europe, I think it’s a slightly unfair framing: we’ve not forgotten any gods recently, we’ve just become unconvinced that any of them actually exist, and there’s as good a chance as anything else that this is a result of the material prosperity of our high-tech societies – as people become wealthier they tend to be more secular. It could be that the processes that lead to material prosperity in modern Western societies are also the processes that lead to the sorts of societal issues that Faceless Craven is talking about.
I don’t know if there’s any truth in that, but that theory at least doesn’t require us to presuppose that one of the world’s myriads of prima-facie-about-as-plausible-as-each-other supernatural mythologies is actually true. What makes you so confident that this particular supernatural hypothesis is actually the explanation?
It’s generally agreed – on both theological and secular grounds – that different types of religion do not all have the same effects, even if they are all “religious”. Indeed, people who believe in God seem more likely to agree with this, not less.
If certain now-unpopular religious practices were having a positive effect, there’s no reason to think completely different practices would have the same effect just because they’re also “religious”.
To give a semi-fatuous secular example:
The Catholic practice of confession encourages people to confess the thoughts and actions they’re worried about, regularly and often, to an individual they can be absolutely certain will not repeat any of it.
Modern psychiatry allows people to to confess the thoughts and actions they’re worried about, occasionally and at great expense, to someone they know will definitely report them if they say something too concerning.
ISIS, as far as I know, practice neither modern psychiatry nor Catholic confession nor anything remotely similar. (Instead, they encourage you to brutally murder anyone who hints they disagree with official ISIS doctrine, which might well have the opposite effect.) So it makes sense that they would be even worse off.
MugaSofer:
I agree … but Jaskologist’s claim was that forgetting God was the root of the issues discussed, not forgetting a particular, narrow version of God. The IS example was intended as a bit of hyperbole, showing that merely remembering God is no guarantee of maintaining a better civilisation than the one that Jaskologist lives in.
In fairness, my original response kind of assumed that the assertion that forgetting God is at the root of the problem is because God exists and has set up the universe so that bad things happen if you forget him. I think, given that Jaskologist believes in a god, that’s a safe assumption in this particular case, but I guess the steelmanned general position would be that, even though we don’t have any particularly good evidence that any gods exist, we have nonetheless evolved in such a way that strong belief in one or more gods is protective against civilisational malaise regardless of whether those gods exist. If there is evidence for that version of the hypothesis, I’d be interested to read it as well.
I suppose this is a fair interpretation of paganism, but much less so Christianity.
Have I completely misunderstood Jaskologist’s original claim then? As far as I can see, the only reasons that forgetting a god would be causative of civilisational malaise (as opposed to both being symptomatic of something else) are that that god does exist and set things up so that remembering him is protective against bad stuff that is otherwise likely to happen, or that that god doesn’t exist but that nonetheless the behaviours that follow from holding a belief in that god are protective, and without the belief you don’t get so much of those behaviours.
What’s the third option that Christianity proposes here? Or is it just that your version of Christianity is quite different from Jaskologist’s?
Remembering God is shorthand for obeying him, not simply by performing rituals that earn boons or protections through some sort of exchange, but by obeying the moral laws he gave which allow for optimum living in the universe he designed.
Well, that’s part of it, then, of course, is that it quite matters which God is remembered; an example of Islam being devout is not particularly relevant considering in either worldview it quite matters to whom the devotion is given.
It was men who remembered God that brought us the ruinous war in Iraq, and it was men who remembered God who were in charge when the financial crisis struck. Empirically, remembering God does not appear to be a successful policy.
“men who remembered God who were in charge when the financial crisis struck.”
Alan Greenspan, who got out of Dodge just in time, is an atheist.
I don’t think his atheism caused bad monetary policy, but there’s also no plausible case that theism caused the housing crisis either.
It’s almost like politicians’ religions (or lack thereof) are generally utterly irrelevant.
My assumption is that most high power figures pay more lip services to religion than strict adherence, nothing I have ever heard or seen from Bush or Cheney made me think they were particularly pious.
I think the idea that we do not worship [insert your choice of god here] enough somehow explains our modern ‘problems’ is ridiculous(it probably wouldn’t hurt to have a few more Jainists running around though). But I also don’t think a strict adherence to Christianity actually played a significant part in the financial crisis.
Not that it’s super important, but so things are straight, George W. apparently read the Bible everyday. Which is more than most Christians can say. He also credits Jesus with turning him away from his alcoholism. And he says that God told him to end the tyranny in Iraq, among other things. I suppose it’s hard for us to judge the real piety of public figures, but as far we can, George W. seems pretty up there. I think it would be hard to argue that any recent president was so outwardly religious, with the exception of maybe Jimmy Carter.
Source: Frontline
I see your cherry-picked examples and raise you every communist regime ever.
You could be right on Bush being particularly Christian for a US president, I could also have a very non-standard definition for pious. Most of the examples in that seem to say he is very religious behind closed doors, and his religion had nothing to do with the war, so I am not sure how to take that relative to the topic at hand.
@The original Mr. X
“It’s almost like politicians’ religions (or lack thereof) are generally utterly irrelevant.”
“It’s almost like politicians’ religions (or lack thereof) are generally utterly irrelevant.”
This sounds very “well d’uh,” and think it is largely correct, though it points to at least two, perhaps surprising conclusions, both of which are at play to some extent, I think:
1. Scott Adams is right that abstract thinking, epistemology, world view, etc. are largely irrelevant to how anyone lives their daily lives or makes any real decisions. You can have two people in the grocery, one atheist and one person who thinks the Book of Revelation is a literal, accurate forecast, and yet they both seem to be able to buy their groceries just fine with these seemingly wildly incompatible worldviews. Moreover, you probably can’t even tell who’s who, just to see them go about their day, except when the Revelation guy is participating in explicitly religious activities like church services.
2. Everyone in the mainstream West is a de facto atheist, or, at least, would seem so from the perspective of e. g. most medieval Christians and many Muslims today. Though many claim to believe, really do believe, and/or engage in behaviors indicating belief, but which double as e. g. socialization, such as church going, the number of people who take their religion seriously enough to say, follow the Book of Leviticus in their personal life, much less try to enact it as law, is very tiny. An atheist might say this means they just “believe in belief” or are paying lip service to religion. A theist might say that they are just taking a liberal view on the separation of church and state, that they “render unto Caesar,” etc.
You understand that this is a very poor proxy for Christian belief, right? Even devout belief integrated WWJD-style into daily life and political thought?
I was sort of joking.
Clearly, the solution is to only ever have female heads of state. You’ll avoid every problem those people had nicely.
@rlms:
So Stalin would have been just as likely to kill all those kulaks if he’d been a strict Quaker?
I mean, it’s possible, but at the same time it seems kind of non-obvious to me.
@ Stefan:
Not quite:
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/11/mad-queen-madagascar-ranavalona/
Maggie Thatcher and Cathy the Great would seem to think otherwise.
the number of people who take their religion seriously enough to say, follow the Book of Leviticus in their personal life, much less try to enact it as law, is very tiny
That view ignores the “Under grace not the law” strain very predominant in Reformed and Evangelical theology. It’s a perennial argument, some to the very extreme would even hold that the Ten Commandments are no longer binding because they are the old law, but that is an extreme view and not really popularly held.
So saying “you’re only cherry-picking the bits of the Old Testament you like” or the infamous shellfish argument* which is bollocks, means totally misunderstanding the theology involved.
*”Ever eaten shrimp? Yeah? Hypocrite!” is the condensed version of the “Leviticus bans eating shellfish and wearing mixed fabrics as well as gay sex, so if you’re serious about it, you should never break any of the rules or else you don’t really mean what you say, you’re only using it to justify your homophobia” argument on the liberal Christian side. Which is a bit like saying “You have to think swearing using the name of ‘Jesus’ is just every bit as serious as murder or else you don’t really believe in the Ten Commandments and should involve the death penalty”, because no, there can’t be degrees of wrong or sinfulness, it all has to be one flat understanding of X being equally bad as Y or else you’re cherry-picking, hair-splitting, or the other reproofs about holding ‘bad’ beliefs not in tune with the modern revision.
I think “remembering God” could mean “hold in mind or be aware that there is more to what you are doing than gaining personal advantage, your decisions and actions affect others, and you will be held accountable”, but admittedly that’s my view. The original comment could mean literally “remembering God”.
That would be a perfectly fine explination if eating shellfish were considered a minor sin. But as far as I can tell it isn’t a sin at all. For example, look at the argument that says “we love the sinner and hate the sin, so while we aren’t going to ostracize you Mr. Gay Person, we also aren’t going to have a church ceremony celebrating your sin.” Why then can you have shrimp be served at a Church lunch-in after services or can the priest’s outfit be made out of mixed fibers?
I’ve come across explanations about which rules from the “Old Testament” are supposed to have survived Jesus and why, but frankly I can’t make heads or tails of them.
Related: Horus reads the internet.
@Deiseach
My understanding of the ‘Under grace not the law’ position does not allow for one to cherry pick laws that are important and must be followed, and laws that are not, it makes much more broad claims about all the laws of the old testament, their purpose, and the path to salvation.
If modern Christians are looking for a defense for cherry picking, they should turn to direct revelation or revelation through scripture, which both seem fairly popular even if whatever church you go to probably doesn’t official endorse it. They let you make up the rules as you go.
@ a number of people;
That’s kind of the damn point. If your objection to having atheist heads of state is the commies fucking it up despite/because of that, fine. However, if your most relevant metric for deciding who should rule a state is ‘what would the communists avoid’, clearly female heads of state are better than male ones.
I’ve come across explanations about which rules from the “Old Testament” are supposed to have survived Jesus and why, but frankly I can’t make heads or tails of them.
I don’t know how much of the Hebrew or Christian writings you’ve read…
After a childhood spent reading the Bible, it seemed fairly obvious to me that the Law of Moses had several categories:
1. Moral law: certain behaviors are morally suspect, and harm self/others in ways that God can see, even if we cannot.
2. Civil law: how to deal with other human beings. How society punishes sinners, how society punishes contract disputes, how society treats Our People and Their People, what evidence is valid in a court case, how to deal with retributive vengeance, etc.
3. Religious law: how to worship, how to live a lifestyle of purity. Some of these things may be culturally-specific, some not.
Most of the issue is sorting things in buckets. Are food/clothing rules in category 1, or category 3? Are sexual-behavior rules in category 1 or not?
When the Law of Moses makes a distinction between rape and consensual-sex, it is in category 2. But the immorality of both acts are in category 1.
There are also teachings attributed to Jesus, and writings of the Apostles, that contain some discussion on this subject.
Jesus was known to say things like “what a person consumes does not make them clean or unclean. Food passes through the body. A person’s attitude-of-heart is more important than the food they ate”. (paraphrased from the Gospel according to Mark, chapter 7.)
Of course, Jesus was also known to say that God could–and would–condemn a man for murderous anger, even if that man did not cause harm to the person he was angry with. (paraphrased from the Gospel according to Matthew, chapter 5.)
So Jesus Himself began a new interpretive framework about categories 1/2/3, and their relative importance.
And Jesus also taught that the inner attitudes of a person were more important than the outward ceremonies that they took part in.
Within a decade after Jesus’ execution (and the Empty Tomb event), the leaders of the Jesus Sect began interacting with non-Jewish people.
The Apostle Peter saw a vision that seemed to be about to clean/unclean food, which is recorded in the Book of Acts, chapter 10. Peter interpreted that vision to be an invitation to meet with a Gentile, and invite that Gentile into the faith.
Shortly afterwards (Acts chapter 15), there are discussions about the Law of Moses, and whether parts 1/2/3 above still apply. The leaders of the growing church agreed that part 1, the Moral Law, was very important. (They also held that sexual-behavior rules were in Part 1, and not in Part 3.)
The leaders also agreed that certain rituals (circumcision) and rules about food were in Part 3. Those rules were not applied to Gentile converts.
Much later, the Apostle Paul agreed on that subject, and wrote at length about what parts of the Law of Moses apply to Christians, in his letter to the Galatian church. (Most of that letter is about food. It actually loosens one of the rules from Acts 15 about meat dedicated to idols…but does so in a way that is less focused on legalism, and more focused on individual conscience.)
I’m a little surprised that people who spend so much time critiquing the Bible seem unaware of this thread of history.
S_J, that was very clearly said, thanks.
Seconded.
I’m quite familiar with what Christians call the “Old Testament” and a little familiar with the “New Testament” (I’ve read through all of it at least once). The 1/3 distinction seems completely arbitrary to me. Also, like much of Christian dogma, from my perspective it seems to more or less ignore the main text (i.e. the gospels) in favor the footnotes (i.e. the epistles). The whole part about “what was in your heart” that you explained in the first part of your comment seems to have completely fallen off the board in the second part that gets down into the details of how it works.
Let’s take an example and see how it fits in to your schema: worshiping idols.
It’s clearly not civil, it’s hard to see how it is immoral, so it seems like it should be in category 3 — rules of worship and holiness. So it shouldn’t have survived Jesus, right? But AFAIK it certainly has.
It’s immoral because it’s taking something due to God alone (worship) and giving it to something else (a lump of stone).
What is your opinion on intellectual property rights?
Can’t a very similar argument be made for any of the holiness laws?
If God says not to eat shrimp and you eat shrimp anyway aren’t you disrespecting God? And isn’t that immoral is the same sense of not giving what is due to God to God (obedience in this case rather than prayer)?
@S_J:
I’m not sold on your reading of Acts 15. Here’s the NIV:
Most of that list still seems to belong in your category 3. If you want to rely on Acts 15 to show that sexual immorality is in category 1, then I hope you also oppose blood sausage.
I like Fred Clark’s take on Acts.
Yes, if God tells you to do something and you disobey, that’s wrong. I’m not really sure what you’re getting at here?
Arbitrary in what sense? A very strong case can be made from the text that said distinction exists. Yes, what gets sorted into each category is somewhat arbitrary, but last time I checked, God wasn’t terribly interested in letting us audit his logic.
As opposed to ignoring the supposed footnotes when they become inconvenient? If we only obey the parts of the Bible that we like, then I have trouble describing what we’re doing as ‘following the Bible’.
Just because it’s possible to screw something up in one direction, doesn’t mean it’s impossible to screw it up in the other, too. Jesus was preaching primarily to 1st-century Jews, who were very legalistic. Just because he preached against legalism there doesn’t mean that there are no laws at all. It does mean that we don’t have to very carefully avoid spitting on Sunday.
I don’t think this one is at all similar to shellfish. God is perfectly holy and deserving of all our worship. What did Jesus say was the greatest commandment? “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.” Worshiping idols is the exact opposite of that, and clearly places this in category 1.
My understanding of the ‘Under grace not the law’ position does not allow for one to cherry pick laws that are important and must be followed, and laws that are not
Which also undercuts the progressive Christians who like to quote this bit from Leviticus when talking about (illegal) immigrants:
Well, if the Shellfish Argument undercuts picking out the parts of the law you like and not holding to others, it equally applies here. “Ever eaten shrimp or worn a poly-cotton blend shirt? Yeah? Hypocrite!” “Well gosh, I’m glad to know I don’t have to be bound by Bronze Age morality that didn’t understand the complexity of relationships in modern 21st century life when it comes to deporting Mexicans!”
@Brad
That’s part of the disconnect, at least. The epistles (and Acts and Revelation, which aren’t part of the epistles or the Gospel) are not footnotes, suggestions, commentary, or afterthoughts. They are as much a part of the main text as the Gospel.
That’s why the doctrine of the Trinity exists-it’s to harmonize our understanding of the nature of the Lord with verses found throughout the Gospel and the epistles.
Obviously the hermeneutic of picking and choosing individual verses of Leviticus to use as soldiers against your political enemies is not defensible, regardless of who is doing it. An intellectually rigorous approach would be to check which rules from Leviticus have the most support elsewhere in the text.
Huh.
Edit to add: double huh.
@CatCube
I hear what you are saying, but as someone with a moderately strong Jewish background (but not at all observant today) it seems alien.
Under the Jewish view the Torah (five books) are far and away the most important thing. Something from Ezekiel or 2 Kings is nice and all but they aren’t Direct Revelation From God to Moses at Mount Sinai.
So when it came time to read and study the New Testament*, my mental map was “okay, here’s Jesus — he is supposed to be both the messiah and also God-come-to-earth, what he says must be the super-important part.” But it doesn’t seem to really work that way. Not for the New Testament (Gospels vs Epistles) and not for the Old Testament either (Torah vs Kings & Prophets).
Now granted, in Judaism there’s the oral law (Talmud) and it does some things that are pretty hard to justify with the written law. But there is a huge amount of ink trying to do exactly that justification. Whereas the Epistles don’t seem to be treated as something that need justification by reference to Jesus’ words, instead Paul seems to be an independent source of justification as or more compelling than Jesus. Which, again to me given my background, is very hard to wrap my mind around.
Not sure I have an actual point here but it is a topic I come back to from time to time.
*I took a course in college, the professor was a theology grad student, so probably a liberal Christian, but a Christian nonetheless.
@Deiseach
I agree.
@Bean
I would read this as saying that the biblical evidence for something being Moral, Civil, or Religious law is strong, even if gods logic in deciding which was which, is not clear. If that is not what you are saying, disregard what follows.
Given that all Christen denominations do not agree on these categories, to this day, the idea that there is ‘strong textual evidence’ to support belief in one law from Leviticus being a moral law that we must enforce today and that another is not hits me askance.
Edit: Increased confidence that my reply was not relevant to what you were trying to say, it looks like you are just saying there is evidence for the categories existing at all, which I agree with.
There’s a difference between completely arbitrary, clear and unambiguous, and strong evidence which can still be argued about.
@Spookykou
Not quite. The existence of the three categories (and specifically the existence of the distinction between 1 and 3) is strongly supported. Exactly what goes in which category isn’t crystal-clear in every single case, but it is in the vast majority of cases. For instance, Jesus is more anti-murder and anti-adultery than anything in the Old Testament, but intentionally violates other bits of the law (harvesting on the Sabbath, I believe).
There’s no master credentialing body for Christianity, and in this day and age, there are nominally Christian denominations who don’t believe in things like the resurrection. Everyone in fairly traditional Christianity does agree on the existence of these categories, and further agrees on where 90%+ of stuff goes. Yes, there are some things which are legitimately disagreed over (tattoos spring to mind), but they tend to be fairly minor.
@Bean
As someone who was raised Catholic, those cherry picking protestants trying to ‘get away with’ contraceptives is hardly minor!!
More generally though I feel that the handling of ‘contraceptives’ is a real black eye for any claims to the ‘objectivity’ of Modern Christians and the particular categories of old testament law they subscribe to.
It is a pretty significant change, that is obviously hugely convenient, happened almost exclusively in the last 100 years, almost exclusively in secular nations, and is disputed by the single largest denomination of Christianity in the world.
Meh, heretics gonna heretic.
I should have thought of that, but didn’t. I shall now address it.
I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I wasn’t familiar with the scriptural foundations of the Catholic opposition to birth control, but now that I look into the matter, I can’t seem to find them. Yes, a large number of church leaders throughout history condemned the practice, but none of them were biblical authors. The closest I can come is a combination of “Be fruitful and multiply” and Paul’s comments about not abstaining from sex inside of marriage (which, incidentally, seem like a theological problem for the rhythm method). If that’s your argument, then I’ll start taking it seriously once you’ve stopped forcing your clergy to be celibate.
I would also point to the Pontifical Commission on Birth Control, the majority of which came to the opposite conclusion from that which the Pope adopted. This is why I find declaring a human infallible rather absurd. (Yes, I’m aware of the limits of Papal infallibility, but they don’t apply here.)
#ThatshowyougotLuther
@bean: Not only that, but the scriptural basis for opposing abortion is a lot thinner than you would likely expect. As recently as 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention was in favour of legal abortion.
My position on abortion is best described as ‘confused’. It’s pop theology that babies go to heaven, being not morally responsible, and the logical conclusion is that we should encourage abortion to ensure that more of them do, because there’s a nonzero chance of them going to hell otherwise. Even if it’s also murder, a case could be made that interfering with it via the law is a bad bargain in terms of net souls to heaven.
My actual response to this is to take the position that it’s impossible to go to heaven without having had a chance to go to hell (and vice versa). I’m not sure what this means for fetuses and even young children who die, and I generally vote on foreign and economic policy anyway for other reasons.
That said, I didn’t know about any of that. Thanks for pointing it out. I would tell the author that it’s unlikely to be particularly convincing to evangelicals, due to being light on bible verses and a bit condescending.
@ bean:
That’s because it’s based primary on natural law.
Given that Churches that liberalise on sexual issues tend not to do spectacularly well in the aftermath, I think this is more an argument in favour of Papal infallibility than against it.
@ Randy:
This isn’t related to anything in this thread whatsoever, but I just couldn’t resist linking to the Lutheran insults generator.
The first paragraph is fine if you’re a consequentialist, but Christians tend not to be.
Also, while it may be “pop theology” that babies go instantly to Heaven, some people, including pretty significant theologians, disagreed — that’s where the idea of “Limbo” came in. So, you might not actually be sending souls to Heaven anyway.
@Bean
I am not sure I would be as cavalier as to discount the theological scholarship of the Catholic Church after a few google searches.
I am no theologian, but as I was taught, there is a general idea that sex without the chance for procreation is bad. This theme actually plays out in almost every single biblical reference to sex if you think about it, and I find it pretty compelling on those grounds. Onan, the man god smote for pulling out, being the clearest example I know of for textual evidence against contraception.(I am aware of the alternative interpretations to this story, but I am not sure how much that actually argues against my original ‘the bible is very open to interpretation’ point).
Just to clarify what ‘large number of church leaders’ looks like, from Wikipedia,
Which makes me somewhat reluctant to rest the blame for this one squarely on the Pope. Except in as much as he failed to get with the program and modernize.
I am not sure what the celibacy of priests has to do with anything, unless you think it represents some sort of systemic inability for the Catholic Church to properly intuit scripture or something to that effect.
Edit @Bean on abortion
What! Have the Heretics really fallen so far that they don’t even believe in original sin anymore?! Humph, I need some wine and crackers.
Oh, but it can get even stricter.
The Orthodox Christian position (as I remember it preached at what used to be my church) is that all people are born with the original sin, and baptism absolves one of it. Baby gets aborted => baby dies before baptism is performed (in Orthodox Christianity baptism is performed in early infancy, by immersion). Therefore, people go to hell by default, and a woman who aborts commits the double whammy of condemning a person to hell before they got the chance at salvation. Limbo? What Limbo?
@Mr. X:
Basically all of Protestantism “liberalized” on this one, and we’re still here. Also, theological issues shouldn’t be decided on consequentialist grounds.
I know that, but I also think God is likely to be logical enough to not leave gaping holes in his setup like that.
Hence the use of the word “pop” and my conclusion that it probably doesn’t work that way.
@Spookykou:
I didn’t say that there was no justification at all, just that there was no immediate and obvious biblical justification.
I’d have to do more study before I took a firm stand on this, but that isn’t entirely how I’ve been taught.
That one did come up, but I’d tend to read it as being about degree. I’d even say that there’s some logic to the position that contraception is bad if you intend to never have kids at all.
Not even the Lutherans and Calvinists treat their founders as divinely inspired.
By being celibate, they’re not multiplying.
I believe in original sin. I just have somewhat idiosyncratic ideas as to when life begins, at least when I’m advocating that position. (I’m not quite sure what I think on the matter.)
” Onan, the man god smote for pulling out, being the clearest example I know of for textual evidence against contraception.”
That was a case of levirate marriage–he was supposed to be producing a son for his dead brother. So it doesn’t imply a general obligation not to use birth control.
Not my area of expertise, but I always noticed this part in the Bible:
(from Exodus 21, NRSV)
@David
This sounds like you think the levirate marriage interpretation of the story is….gospel truth.
The vast majority of Christianity for the vast majority of history, some Rabbi’s a long long time ago and numerous other theologians throughout history have considered the story of Onan to be primarily about the ‘wasted seed’, the common Jewish interpretation and some modern Christians think that it is about levirate marriage, the modern Catholic Church still thinks it is relevant to contraception, and still other biblical scholars think everyone else is wrong and it is about something else entirely.
Maybe ‘Clearest’ was the wrong word for me to use, but come on, it’s just so punchy I couldn’t help myself.
Am amazed that enough people are interested in obscure religious issues, to have a thread about them..
@moon
Being as polite as possible, I’d suggest that several recent threads should probably be cause to take a second look at your thoughts on religious people.
Protestants are still here, but a lot of Protestant denominations are declining quite rapidly. And, as the article points out, it’s disproportionately the denominations/parts of denominations that have liberalised that are suffering the decline. And as someone or other once said, “By their fruits shall ye know them.”
You’re lumping in liberalization on birth control with liberalization on everything else to make this point. I could equally point out that churches which have liberalized more on evolution vs creationism have generally done worse, and the Catholics are more liberalized than conservative Protestants there.
If we look only at birth control, I know of no sizeable Protestant group that has anything like a Catholic attitude on birth control. If we measure liberalization by things like abortion, gay marriage and female clergy, then I’m not seeing Catholics doing a lot better than the conservative Protestants.
Even as an atheist, I’m vaguely predisposed to believe this is true. But the question is what would prove this wrong?
I assume ‘proving’ it right or wrong would require a detailed breakdown of the relevant beliefs that are important for a ‘functioning’ society. Then since we can’t actually perform ‘society experiments’ very easily, see how much history supports the conclusion. My impression as an atheist is that people lost god a long time ago or
never really had god(ok obviously that is not true), at least in a meaningful ‘this will fix society’ definition for having god.@Wrong Species – I’d imagine pulling society out of its current morass without a religious revival would prove it wrong very nicely.
[EDIT] – Probably worth mentioning that I think this is much more likely than a religious revival as well. I’m an optimist.
Politicians don’t generally say what they really believe. They say whatever they think will get them elected. Saying they are all Christ oriented is what they do when they think that a lot of the voters are all Christ oriented. Or it’s what they do when they think that a lot of the voters admire people who are all Christ oriented. Now that DT has proved that to be totally unnecessary, perhaps it will stop.
Time will tell.
I don’t think he did. I think he got away with it because he was running against Hillary Clinton, who, in the minds of the sort of people who will vote against anyone who has a Planned Parenthood endorsement (yes, I’ve seen it happen, even though the guy otherwise looked very much like a conventional Republican) is metaphorically the antichrist, and might literally be the antichrist, too. These people mostly supported Cruz during the primary, but got in line with Trump after he won.
Religion in the U.S. is all about convenience for the most part. Although fundamentalists do get pushed by their ministers, to vote against Planned Parenthood associated candidates, and they submit.
Good audio about religion in the U.S.
Myths of the Modern American Mind: Religion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuGXtcVc330.
Organized religion is really the same as politics– all about some people getting power over other people, and some people surrendering their own power to those above them in that hierarchy.
Moon, you have either never met a religious person or never listened to them. Many people take their religion very seriously to the extent they are willing to die for them.
I’m not even sure how to respond to this, other than to point out that I’m seriously questioning if you’ve ever met someone who is both serious about their religion and has a working brain. (I’ve met quite a few people who meet the first criteria and fail the second. They make excellent quasi-strawmen, but don’t represent all of us.)
How is religion about convenience? If you’re serious about it, it has things which are very nice (ready-made social circles) and very annoying (trying to follow God’s will can be really difficult at times). There are churches and pastors who definitely seem to advocate a very convenient gospel, but they don’t represent all of us any more than people who don’t understand evolution on even the most superficial level do.
I’m from a reasonably fundamentalist strain of Christianity, and over at least four churches, I’ve never seen a pastor make a political endorsement. I have seen Christian-affiliated groups make political endorsements, but they didn’t pretend to be speaking with God’s voice. My current pastor was very anti-Trump on Christian grounds but it didn’t creep into his sermons. (He’s a good friend, which is how I know.)
Alas, I have not the time to flesh this out properly, and the fractional OT has already moved on. Instead, some scattered points:
I said that we have forgotten God, not that Barack Obama or any given president has forgotten God. A virtuous ruler with corrupt people will not succeed. Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.
I said God, not Allah, not Vishnu, and certainly not moralistic therapeutic deism.
I ripped the whole thing off from Solzhenitsyn anyway.
Thanks for sending us to that site with the quote from Solzhenitsyn. That is a great and fascinating speech there. The pursuit of what some may term spiritual growth can certainly be done without a belief in God or organized religion. In fact, one could make a good case for organized religion as a serious obstacle to people who are on quests for spiritual growth.
This makes me think of the book, Think on These Things, by J. Krishnamurti. One can buy a paper copy. But the whole book is on line here:
http://www.jiddu-krishnamurti.net/en/think-on-these-things/1963-00-00-jiddu-krishnamurti-think-on-these-things-chapter-1
Krishnamurti discusses, among other issues, the search to find out what is really important in life.
I don’t think the pursuit of happiness is a bad idea at all. The sad thing is that many Americans have decided that this means only the pursuit of outward success and material wealth– as though nothing in our inner life mattered in the least.
That is indeed how you get someone like DT as president– a man totally incapable of self-reflection.
@Jaskologist – Excellent article, thanks for linking it.
We’ve defeated our last great enemy, and now all we have is the pissant barbarians.
(Historical note: the pissant barbarians always win eventually)
There’s an interesting comparison to be made between 2016 America and Republican Rome after the Third Punic War, that I’m sure I’m not the first to be making here. Take it away, Sallust:
Or perhaps Bane puts post-Cold War America best. “Peace has cost you your strength. Victory has defeated you.”
Might be true, might not be true – interesting thought nonetheless.
It is somewhat troubling that all this is happening in the absence of a credible world historic enemy. May be possible that we are obliged to tear each other apart in endless cycles of internecine conflict in the absence of one.
See also: The Market for Sanctimony, or why we need Yet Another Space Alien Cult.
Yes, the Republicans have been tearing down the Cliintons for decades now.
It might be troubling, but it’s also the standard pattern in history: country conquers a lot, becomes a great empire, great empire gets complacent, loses its edge, less complacent competitors take over.
We have to take a world prize for complacency here. Doing pretty well overall, although many rural areas not doing as well as other areas. And we feel free to throw a wrecking ball on our government and society by electing the most ignorant president imaginable.
We also do have an enemy– each other. The partisan conflict is bitter and intense. Families are breaking up over it.
Some say that we all need somebody to love. But perhaps it is more true that we all need somebody to hate.
Not sure that it’s true that pissant barbarians always win eventually. Possibly just a function of survivorship bias–we remember the cases where the barbarians won, and forget the cases where they lost.
The pissant barbarians lose a LOT. But, to misquote the IRA, they only have to decisively win once; civilization has to win every time.
Right. What sucks though is that this is the first time civilizations couldn’t afford to lose ever again because, kaplowy, horizon mushroom cloud salad.
“does anyone know what the fuck is going on?”
On some level, international ideological disputes have always been cover for nationalist domination games. The Cold War was as much about Russia vs the Anglo-American world as it was an ideological dispute between Communism and capitalism.
What we’re seeing now is the result of the US being unable to pay to hold on to sole Great Power status after the Cold War as being the sole Great Power made it an enemy for everyone. Russia and China both want to step up and fill that void. The various pro-EU groups in Europe are a sort-of exception to this, as they’re putting a united European elite as a new nationalism, but that elite is going to be dominated by NW Europe. Germany, at this point, has to settle for a very German-ish EU as the dominant power, rather than Germany itself.
However, nuclear weapons mean that military domination is no longer possible, so that domination is going to have to be through politics and influence. The EU wants a strong UN under EU-aligned leadership with international bodies like the ICC that think like Europeans. Russia and China both want a more old-fashioned ‘whoever pays the piper calls the tune’, by providing aid and assistance, much of it military, to countries that follow their lead. The US public want the benefits of Great Power status without paying the cost in international involvement through force projection.
I do think the nuclear situation is relevant here. If wars sometimes have a real social function, like brush fires that clear out the old wood (and we may very well be the old wood), and we live in a world where significant wars are basically impossible because of the nuclear situation, we may simply be unable to renew social orders in the traditional way. Of course, democracies are supposed to do the same thing without all the bloodshed, but there may be an upper limit to how durable democracies can be based on who knows what variables.
“but it does not appear that anyone is generating a new set of ideas about how we should be organizing ourselves.”
Anarchocapitalism?
I don’t have a lot of patience for religions disguised as economic systems, but at least it’s somewhat more recent than other ideas.
Why do you view anarchocapitalism as a religion rather than a proposed political/economic system? What defenses of the A-C position is your view based on?
There’s a mythology of the rise of the state that is way too textbook to be taken seriously, comes more out of IR realism (which isn’t a discipline actually trying to describe the origins of human societies, or really, anything about them) than anything else, and it’s the one where we say:
In the beginning, everyone was totally free and could do anything they wanted, and everyone was automatically happy because freedom the best thing ever. But some jackasses decided they wanted to take stuff from all the other people because they were bad no goods too lazy to pick their own figs. Eventually these horrible robber barons got lazy and instead of robbing people blind/murdering them, they cut an extortion deal that became known as taxation and that was how the state was born. Something like that. The important thing for AC types is to always harp on the idea that the primordial function of taxation is theft.
This is clearly not how states formed ever. Like, no anthropologist would subscribe to the view that cultures evolved purely as some kind of response to internal or external threats of violence. And there are lots of reasons why coherent cultural groups would decide without the threat of violence to throw their resources together into a single pot in order to achieve a wide variety of functions. The story only really makes sense if you imagine a person who hates taxes more than they care about understanding anything about the world. Turns out, there are a lot of such people.
Because such people exist, rather than bothering to look around and actually try to figure out what’s going on, they invent purist theories of political economy, all of which are garbage. I don’t even know why any adult person would take them seriously. They’re obviously exaggerated, overly focused on particular mechanisms chosen for their political valence with some group, usually myopic about the yawning chasm between theory and practice that absolutely can’t be ignored when we’re talking about trying to make existing societies better, and vastly, vastly, vastly overstate their confidence in their knowledge about how things in societies work, things that are extremely difficult for even very smart people to understand. Things where there are, even now, probably no legitimate authorities. This is really easy for everyone when they’re getting all mad at Marx for his obvious excesses. Not sure why it’s so hard to deploy the same kind of skepticism when someone wearing a garish fucking bowtie engages in the same nonsense.
Even granting that the problem is we just haven’t hit on the *right* purist theory of political economy, obviously anarcho-capitalism isn’t it. Attempts to get something resembling it off the ground always result in the spontaneous generation of the kinds of institutions that AC is supposed to magically banish. Maybe that’s just because everyone sucks and the Anarcho-Capitalist messiah just hasn’t arrived yet to show people how to cooperate naturally without violence. I might be able to take AC more seriously if its exponents anticipated the arrival of such a messiah. Instead, they expect the miracle to occur without a single finger waggle. Even the rapture people have a fairly substantial set of metaphysical commitments to explain why everything is going to go down the way they say it is.
I’ve always thought of anarcho-capitalism similar to how Marxists think of end-stage communism, as a long-term goal that can only be realized through natural advances in technology and education, with premature forced implementation inevitably degrading into a warlord state.
If we do eventually gain some sort of global post-scarcity economy the two visions might not even be that far apart.
@dwietzche
You are arguing against an extreme strawman of anarchocapitalism.
Very interesting viewpoint, that only some political/economic ideologies are religions, rather than all of them. The author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari, thinks they’re all the same as religions. I agree with him there.
I’m obviously exaggerating, but I don’t really think it matters that much to the argument. Anarcho-capitalists can try to temper their views in an attempt to look realistic-but the root problem is that the core of their beliefs is constituted out of theory and a certain kind of moralism.
I would agree that are definitely similarities between anarcho-capitalism and certain glosses on what socialism might look like were it properly implemented.
I would add here that I’m not totally free of biases about political theories, I just think people should have concrete concerns at the heart of their dreams of reform. Like, I’m vaguely socialist myself. But that’s because I think that we are well past the point of needing a thing called “full employment,” but without full employment capitalism doesn’t work.
“without full employment capitalism doesn’t work.”
This is also untrue without a certain moral framework pre-supposing what it means for a system to “work”
Capitalism without full employment may result in un-productive people starving to death. That causes many to dismiss it as something that “doesn’t work.” But that’s a moral value judgment. Someone with a different moral system might very well respond “feature not bug”
I’ve said this before, but still:
As I see it, Anarcho-Capitalism and Communism are very similar. Both of them are blueprints for a utopian society which would totally work, and would absolutely be preferable to anything we have on Earth today… if only the Earth was populated by a completely different species of sophonts than the actual humans who actually inhabit it now.
Seeing as we are, in fact, humans, neither AC nor Communism have a chance in hell of ever working. They are both nice to dream about, though.
If you’re willing to let people who can’t find work die, then sure, capitalism works.
Better than a system where you labor night and day for the state and then starve to death anyway, yes?
“the core of their beliefs is constituted out of theory and a certain kind of moralism.”
I would repeat David Friedman’s question: which defenses of ancap are you basing your conception of it on? Which theorists, authors, books, lectures, or articles?
@Matt M
What about some kind of compromise between the two (say, a free market and welfare state)? That might work. Even if you think that, for instance, doctors working for a public healthcare system are actually slaves for the oppressive state, you must admit that they generally don’t starve.
Where does the welfare state get its financing from if the market is free?
A truly “free market” cannot exist under the state.
@Matt M
I don’t know about any magical “true free market”, but a thing where people exchange goods and services without much coercion seems to exist in quite a few countries currently, simultaneously with a lack of government-labour-starvation and no-work-starvation. I will freely concede that this thing might lack some sort of “true freedom”, but very few people seem to care about that.
Hmm, so on the question of slavery, an acceptable compromise is “we can have slaves so long as we make sure they don’t starve?”
I’ll alert the KKK; you handle the retroactive villainization of Abraham Lincoln.
Who cares about the books, man. Seriously. What do people think a thing is for? What is the general cultural consensus among advocates for political system X? Rothbard is not important because he tried to create a self-consistent model of AC. Outside of some classrooms where people halfheartedly read that s**t, the details don’t matter. The first principle heuristics for sorting the trash here are also indifferent to the details. But the main thing is that if you don’t understand why people subscribe to a view, it doesn’t matter how well you think you understand the view itself, and it’s actually mistake to get bogged down into the mud with the people who want to ensnare you with their system.
Who needs books when you’ve got Bulverism?
“Eventually these horrible robber barons got lazy and instead of robbing people blind/murdering them, they cut an extortion deal that became known as taxation”
The roving bandit/stationary bandit model is generally associated with Mancur Olson, who was not, so far as I know, an anarcho-capitalist.
For a somewhat different but at least equally cynical view of the state, I recommend The Art of Not Being Governed by James Scott, an anthropologist, who goes to some trouble (mostly in his other good book, Seeing Like a State) to make it clear that he isn’t one of those horrible libertarians.
“they invent purist theories of political economy, all of which are garbage.”
You regard this as a refutation of those theories, whose content you don’t describe?
I presume from your bow tie reference that you think Ron Paul is a serious anarcho-capitalist theorist.
In any case, you have answered my question. You are unlikely to be useful as a source of serious critiques of anarcho-capitalism.
David, which James Scott books have you read and how do you rate them in quality?
I have read Seeing Like a State and The Art of Not Being Governed. Both of them are interesting and much of what they argue may well be true. I read part of Two Cheers for Anarchy, found it less interesting.
I debated the author about a week ago–the video should be up sometime soon. My conclusion was that on any subject he had not thought much about, such as Citizens United, he had conventional left wing views, which might explain his making a point of not being a free market libertarian.
On the subjects he had thought seriously about his views are perceptive, original, interesting, and possibly correct. Which may explain why Seeing Like a State is a book that libertarians are likely to like, even if that fact mildly disturbs the author.
I like him.
@John Schilling
Yes, there is only one kind of slavery. Conscription is morally equivalent to ISIS’s sex slavery (i.e. both are acceptable because no starvation is involved). Or you could be slightly less pedantic and realise that “don’t starve” is shorthand for a lack of general maltreatment.
Or you could be slightly less pedantic and realise that “don’t starve” is shorthand for a lack of general maltreatment.
OK, but that’s either a complete non sequitur, or an implication that it is OK to enslave people so long as they are not subsequently maltreated and we’re just arguing the details about what constitutes “maltreatment”.
That’s not a compromise I’m willing to make. That’s not a compromise you’d be willing to make if it were one of your favored groups being enslaved.
@John Schilling
‘it is OK to enslave people so long as they are not subsequently maltreated and we’re just arguing the details about what constitutes “maltreatment”.’
Well, yes (since the definition of slavery we seem to be talking about includes conscription and public healthcare). When “slaves” are sufficiently free to leave and work in sufficiently good conditions most people seem perfectly happy with it.
Wait, isn’t describing people as “perfectly happy” with slavery one of the great unforgivable sins? Not that I’m disagreeing, mind you, lots of slaves find happiness in their lot. But it is rare to see that put forth as a defense for slavery. Or, really, at all.
As for “sufficiently free to leave”, exactly – that’s central to the definition of slavery, and to the objection to slavery. It’s also entirely new to your defense of slavery. Until now, you have been willing to endorse a system that you were willing to label “slavery”, contingent only on their being some compromise w/re their treatment as slaves and with no mention of their freedom to leave.
Which is where I thought the interesting discussion would have been from the start.
@John Schilling
Obviously there is a difference between slaves who are actually happy (e.g. doctors), and those who are not (e.g. those on 19th century plantations). Just because some claim that the latter were happy doesn’t make it so. Don’t be dense.
Regarding freedom to leave, it is possible that there has been some misunderstanding here. Matt M suggested that the only alternative to anarcho-capitalism (or something similar) is Soviet Russia, and I suggested that there might be some possible intermediate style of government (i.e. with public healthcare). I preempted the possible counter-argument (I think originated by Rand Paul) that public healthcare and Soviet Russia are fundamentally the same, as doctors and forced labourers are both slaves (for a certain definition).
That definition presumably classes them as such because they are not free to leave (forced labourers because they will be imprisoned and ultimately shot, and doctors because if all doctors refuse to work then the government might take some kind of action). In practice, the freedom of exit is very different (demand of doctors vastly exceeds supply, so there isn’t actually anything stopping them from leaving). But this is ignored by the original definition (i.e. by Rand Paul), so I left it as an implicit part of my counter-argument.
You mean, like these doctors?
What if it is the slaves themselves that tell us so?
I am not unsympathetic to people who claim that plantation slavery was characterized by unrelenting misery and absolutely nobody was or ever could be happy with it. It’s false, but it isn’t so far removed from the truth that it couldn’t be an honest mistake, and it is usually being done in the laudable cause of arguing for the abolition of slavery.
But are you really going to turn that around and argue that e.g. the dubiously-consensual labor policies of the UK’s NHS are just fine because the dark-skinned foreigners who labor a hundred hours a week for your benefit are happy with the arrangement? Without your even asking them, just taking it for granted that because they are doctors and they aren’t starving they must be happy?
I’m not going to be nearly as sympathetic to that. There are sound arguments why something like the NHS might be morally acceptable. Why, then, do you insist on the one that is an almost word-for-word retread of the lamest argument for chattel slavery, presented with a complete lack of supporting evidence and making yourself sound like the moral equivalent of an antebellum plantation slaveowner talking about how benevolent he and his fellow masters are?
@John Schilling
Are you aware that NHS doctors are perfectly at liberty to leave and find other jobs (for instance, in private hospitals)?
I might assert that their liberty is imperfect in that regard, but yes, that is the beginning of a sound argument in favor of the NHS.
Which is why I am so baffled by your perverse insistence on instead using the old, “but the laborers are happy, so you can’t say what we are doing is wrong!” shtick.
Happiness and freedom to leave are intrinsically linked. If the slaves are happy (i.e. they don’t want to leave) it doesn’t actually matter that much whether or not they can. Although if they can’t leave, that is a plausible cause of them not being happy.
And yet at least some of them claim to have been happy in spite of their bondage. Meanwhile, some people who are happy where they are, nonetheless wish to leave. There may be a correlation, but nowhere near an identity, and why are you looking for proxies when you can just ask?
If liberty means so little to you, and happiness is everything, you could at least try listening to people when they tell you whether they are or are not happy. If your defense for some form of servitude is the happiness of the servants, you don’t get to say “Shut up, I’ve determined that you are supposed to be happy with this, go Be Happy!”.
I think it’s odd that you believe that theories of political economy are things that people are obliged to refute in the first place. Does anyone really think Plato’s The Republic was correct? And if we don’t think that, is it really because it was refuted? I mean, come on. Like, whatever the conditions for assessing the plausibility of a theory or a description or a vision of a new political world are, they aren’t deductive. The only way to demonstrate the validity of a particular state system is to set it up and see how it goes. And even then that’s not usually considered determinative, because you never get examples of theory crafted systems built from the ground up according to design specs in the first place. But that isn’t even what you think you’re doing. You think you can figure out how good AC is… by reading books!!! It’s hilarious.
@John Schilling
I’m not saying that slavery is OK if I say the slaves are happy, I’m saying it’s OK if they actually are happy. I don’t see why anyone would say the former. Please note, by “happy” I mean “prefer their slavery to absence of the slavers and things they provide”. NHS doctors might not be happy in the sense of “content with all aspects of their employment”, but they are happy in the sense of “not voting with their feet and leaving for a different job”.
Additionally, are you saying that liberty is the only thing that matters? If I torture my slaves (proper slaves, not doctors) until they no longer comprehend the idea of freedom, but I won’t do anything to stop them leaving, is that totally fine?
Ah, so when you earlier said, “How about a compromise? [it’s OK to do this as long as] they generally don’t starve?”, we were to understand that “generally don’t starve” was a linguistic transmogrification of “prefer their slavery” by way of a highly non-central definition of “happiness”?
Not buying it.
I did not say that slavery is OK provided that the slaves don’t starve. I said that even if you class NHS doctors as slaves, you must admit that they don’t starve (in comparison to forced labourers in Soviet Russia). I preceded that with a “for instance” to clarify that this was one specific practical way that a “compromise” political system might differ from Soviet Russia, even if some theoretical classification might consider them the same. I apologise if you misunderstood that.
You’re either an anarchist or in favor of slavery, logic permits no middle ground.
@dwietzsche:
“I think it’s odd that you believe that theories of political economy are things that people are obliged to refute in the first place. ”
I can’t tell who you are responding to–you might find it useful to say when posting in a long thread. It might be to something I wrote in our earlier exchange.
One objection being made to your earlier comments was that you showed no evidence of being familiar with the arguments for anarcho-capitalism beyond, presumably, some online exchanges with random people. Whether or not you feel obliged to refute the position, your negative comments on it are not worth much if you don’t know what it is or what its defenses are.
“The only way to demonstrate the validity of a particular state system is to set it up and see how it goes.”
That is certainly one good way of getting evidence on the question, but far from proof. If things go badly, it might be due to a mistake in the details of how it was set up or to an environment particularly unfavorable to that system. If they go well, it might be due to particular lucky circumstances. Tyranny in the Greek sense, popular dictatorship, can go pretty well if you are very lucky in your choice of tyrant. See Mary Renault’s novel The Praise Singer for an exposition of that point.
But we also know enough about economics and political science to work out at least some implications of alternative institutions without trying them, some reasons to think they might work well or badly, succeed in this or fail at that. Thus, for instance, I spent a chapter of the current edition of my first book on ways in which a hypothetical A-C system would fail to get an optimal set of legal rules. I could be wrong, but I think one has more of a basis for an opinion on the subject after reading that chapter than before.
And we can observe real world systems that resemble in one way or another hypothetical systems we have not tried. We can, for instance, say something about the stability of A-C institutions based on observations of competition, monopoly, and cartel formation in other markets. We can say something about how decentralized private rights enforcement could be expected to work based on the observation of such systems in other and simpler societies.
That’s a reasonable approximation of domestic political disputes in the west, but you’re missing a big and bloody one. Islamism was nowhere in 1945 – Iran and Turkey were run by modernizers, the anti-colonial movements looked to either nationalism, socialism, or a fusion of the two.
The distinction between Sunni and Shia was as relevant as the distinction between Protestant and Catholic is now. And while Muslim monarchies existed, some with clerical support and ridiculously repressive laws (i.e. the Saudi monarchy had yet to abolish slavery), the sort of revolutionary/ultra-reactionary jihadi movement that spawned many if not most of the major political players in the Middle East today simply didn’t exist.
In fairness, Islamism might have been nowhere in 1945 because the modernizers ordered their soldiers to kill the Islamists. The Islamists did actually try to kill Ataturk and Nasser, but after lots of them were shot and hanged, they eventually realized they could wage a culture war and take power *democratically*, what with the American intelligentsia insisting that democracy was the highest of virtues no matter who wound up in charge.
This gives way too much credit to the American intelligentsia. Maybe there were professors and writers singing the praises of democracy, but in terms of actual American policy, we were pretty ruthless at stamping it out when it conflicted with our interests (Iran, Lebanon). For the most part, US views on Islamism and nationalism were secondary to whichever side would act as loyal proxies against the Soviets. In Iran, it was the nationalists. In Afghanistan, it was the Islamists.
One of the reasons they realized that is that they were trained and educated in the Western mold. In many cases it was that exposure to western society that helped to inculcucate their staunch opposition to the spread of those decadent and degenerate values to their homelands.
Isn’t this what we’d expect if Francis Fukuyama was right? If history really has ended then while there will still be conflicts, there really shouldn’t be any new systems coming along to replace liberal democracy, as it is the last system.
However, what Fukuyama may not have considered is that backsliding is always possible. If people still feel disenfranchised, then appeals to older systems like communism, or fascism are always possible.
Fukuyama might be right. But it seems like an odd thing for a person to believe, right? Like nobody thinks we’ve stopped running out of things to discover in medicine or chemistry. Why would we think we’re done with political science?
Yeah, I don’t believe in the end of history either. The problem is that you can never test empirically whether you are at the end or not. It could always be that you are in a period of extremely slow change, or a pause before a sudden change.
I apologize if someone has already posted this (I did not find it in a search): The Trump priorities website will not allow a response to be submitted without leaving at least a $1 donation. I just wanted to point that out, as it certainly restricts response to a highly select group who can and do not mind donating to Trump.
Thanks for pointing that out, omegaxx.
That’s might actually be pretty damned clever. It’s small enough to not be a significant barrier financially, but it’ll chase away anybody who hates Trump (and Trump doesn’t care to hear from them). It’ll help prevent trolling the poll–assuming that the security on the website isn’t totally incompetent. It could also help prevent people from overseas trolling the poll by using TunnelBear or equivalent, since you’ll need to provide financial information.
Of course, you need to trust giving Donald Trump your financial information.
How do you know this? My impression was that they are just requesting a donation after you finish the survey.
That’s what I saw, too.
(Then again, my response’s probably going to be thrown out anyway because I said my email was example@example.com .)
Yep. It doesn’t say anything about not registering the response until you donate that I saw, though I’ll admit I did not detail read it at the time and could have missed something.
The Trump priorities website will not allow a response to be submitted without leaving at least a $1 donation.
Ooooh, I like that. Considering there was a campaign to donate to Planned Parenthood in Mike Pence’s name, I think any SJWs who want to troll the survey can well afford to stump up a dollar. I think this is actually quite clever – it’s not high enough to prohibit genuine supporters from participating, and it turns all that outrage trolling by the “not my president” crowd to good account for the Trump campaign 🙂
I’m applying to get a job in the Trump administration, ideally in something pertaining to geology/earth science/energy. Problem is I’m still an undergrad. How do I spin this? Any ideas? It sounds like it would be a ton of fun, and would make a great goddamn story.
People with degrees are INSIDERS!
It sounds like you’re conflating two different types of federal employment: civil service and political/policy-level jobs.
When you say the “Trump administration” it sounds like policy-level type of employment, which is going to be very difficult to do “geology/earth science/energy” type stuff, especially if you don’t have a long history to justify your inclusion at that level. The upper echelons of the administration are looking for people with expertise, and you just don’t have it yet.
You can find and apply for internships at the White House and at Washington, D.C. agency headquarters, but it’ll be closer to getting coffee than the types of jobs you’re talking about. Don’t let that be a showstopper, though! You’re right that it could be absolutely fascinating and give you stories to tell. It just won’t be in your chosen field.
Generally, if you’re an undergrad who wants to be pulling on an oar doing STEM-type work, you’re mostly looking at employment in the civil service, which is pretty much not going to change day-to-day regardless of who’s in the Oval Office. You might get caught short by RIFs or program cancellations, but there’s a long chain between you and the President as far as working environment.
We’ve got geologists in the US Army Corps of Engineers, but they’re not generally doing a lot of deep science; the positions at districts are heavily involved in analyzing existing locks, dams, and the like, or working on the designs of expansions and retrofits to the same. The Engineering Resource and Development Center in Vicksburg may have some geologists doing more research-type stuff, but I don’t know a lot about them. As a personal testimony I’m a structural engineer who spends time working with our geologists on these analyses, and I certainly enjoy my work.
The other logical place for you to look is the USGS. Again, it’s not going to be working for the “administration” but you’re certainly going to be doing science and analysis in your chosen field. You’ll be a worker bee for a long while–as an undergrad you really don’t know how little you know yet. I’ve been working for two years as an engineer, and at least once a week I still learn little details from senior engineers that seem obvious once I’ve been told them.
The obvious downsides are that you’re going to be working for the federal government, and if you don’t have a high tolerance for bureaucratic bullshit you’re going to hate coming in to work. I learned during my time in the Army that it hurts less if you don’t struggle, but I’ve got a co-worker who still lets stuff get to him, and it sometimes really eats away at his soul. You can spend a disturbing amount of time and taxpayer money complying with rules that are intended to save money but mostly just tie you up spending a disturbing amount of time and taxpayer money. Similarly, decisions will get made at levels way above you for reasons that are at best mysterious, and at worst actually counterproductive. However, I don’t think that large corporations are any different in this regard.
Further, it’s not quite true that it’s impossible to get fired, but it’s very difficult, and what you give up for that is that you’re probably going to earn a lot less than you would working for Exxon or BP. Also, you work with people that are difficult to fire.
You can spend a disturbing amount of time and taxpayer money complying with rules that are intended to save money but mostly just tie you up spending a disturbing amount of time and taxpayer money.
Testify, brother (or sister), testify! If we were bloody well allowed order stationery from the stationers in town, it would cost less – but there’s a National Procurement System in place which means we have to log onto a website and order via the capital and this takes more time, money and delay than letting us order from the guy who is literally four streets away.
We have to order a lot of stuff like that from “mandatory sources of supply” which are usually agencies that Congress wants to promote for various reasons (arguably good). For example, most office supplies come from Skilcraft, which is a US Government firm that employs the blind. This purchase is required, regardless if you could go purchase pens and paper from Walmart for significantly less. And even if you could justify not using Skilcraft, you still couldn’t use Walmart even if it was the cheapest solution, because you must preference small businesses first.
Now, I see what Congress’ and GSA’s point in doing this was: it’s better for a blind person to have employment, rather than a check, and there are political (maybe economic?) reasons to promote small businesses, so have Government contracts thrown their way.
However, that also means that you’re “hiding” support payments throughout the budget. It makes it harder to see how much money you’re talking about, because it’s smeared across the federal budget with tiny little payments tucked away in the office-supply budget of literally every single federal office in the land, and it’s hard to disentangle how much of it is “extra” and how much the agency would have paid anyway going with the cheapest supplier.
Edit: I forgot to add, though, that I’ve found Skilcraft’s products to be good. I actually like the B3 Aviator Pen well enough that I purchase them out of my own pocket (It’s a black pen, red pen, and pencil combined, and a lot better than the chintzy little “push the tab” ones you see–one of mine has been through the wash like 4 times and held up like a champ.)
Oh, I can see the principle behind it re: standardising everything, getting a good price, and avoiding allegations of favoritism/bribery (e.g. “hey, how come the cousin of the Minister is getting all the stapler supply business?”) but in practice it’s a pain in the neck.
Most of the tenders go to businesses located in and around the national capital, because (a) that’s where every damn thing is located (b) they’re big concerns so they’re in the centre of maximum population density so (c) they can tender a better price for national supply than somebody located in the Midlands or wherever. This works out fine for the offices located in the capital, but for the rest of us down the country it’s “I only need two reams of zoggin’ copier paper, why the bleep do I have to order them online and wait a day or even two for them to be delivered when I could just pick up the damn phone and have them delivered from the town centre in an hour?”
It works okay if you have a big order to send in, but usually it’s small stuff like “we need a box of paper” or “order more erasers”, so we wait until we have a whole list of things we need to order, which means we’re always running out of something ‘in the meantime’. As well, being tied to a tender contract means generally fixed prices, instead of letting us take advantage of special offers etc from other firms which might be cheaper for that particular item at that particular date.
It’s one of those “it should save money but does it really?” initiatives that I don’t really know if it does save much over the long run. Maybe before this came in, everybody was going wild ordering premium 170gsm paper instead of cheap 90gsm stuff for the copier, but I don’t really think so.
In practice, what tends to happen is “Aw crap, we’re out of copier paper, go scrounge a ream from [other department] and we’ll pay them back when we send in our next order”. This has actually been forbidden by the powers that be (mainly because there’s one department that always has copier paper in stock so everyone else borrows off them) but since it’s borrow paper or tell the boss “Sorry, I can’t make a copy of that file that you need for the afternoon until tomorrow when the paper is delivered” – yeah, well, more honoured in the breach than the observance.
Though on the upside, when the delivery does come, it’s “Wheee! Open all the parcels and see what we got!” 🙂
Is that a common Irish swear? Can you teach me more?
Is that a common Irish swear? Can you teach me more?
Nah, that’s my strange brain. Online guides to Irish slang tend to be dodgy, but this one is probably reasonably accurate for Hiberno-English as she is spoke by the natives.
Or this vlogger.
Great post. One way to look at “Trump made gains among Hispanics/blacks relative to 2012” is that 2008/2012 Republican presidents were extra weak there, because they were running against Obama. (Obama is black)
So, a better comparison would be 2004/2000 which was two white people running against each other. This graph shows the comparisons, which shows that Trump did similarly with black people, but much worse with Latinos:
https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/files/2016/11/KR-figure-racial-exits.png
“Minorities voted for Obama a lot, and if you adjust for that, then Trump performed worse with minorities” seems like a plausible hypothesis.
If you’re going to do that, then when determining how well Trump did with women you need to add points to him, since he ran against a woman but those other elections that you’re comparing it to were all men.
That’s right, Trump did better with women than previous presidents because of the Hillary effect. (woman)
There’s room to discuss the relative magnitude of these effects. We could say that racial effects are stronger because they’re more tribal, whereas sex effects are weaker because it may be less part of the sex person’s identity.
And why is the effect larger for Hispanic relative to blacks?
Studies show that women have a bigger preference for their own gender than men, so it’s possible/likely that there are also differences in magnitude between various ethnic groups when it comes to ingroup preference.
The point is that if running against Obama made the previous presidents do worse than normal with the black electorate, running against Hillary means that Trump did worse than normal with the female electorate. If you’re going to correct the comparison away from Trump in the first case, you need to correct the comparison towards Trump in the second case.
Right, that’s what I said. For the same percentage vote, Trump did better with women than previous presidents, because we assume that some women who would have voted for Trump will vote for Hillary.
“but much worse with Latinos:”
Bush was much more pro-Latino and pro-Immigrant than his party. One of the few things he got right.
One thing not a lot of people are talking about, but which seems kind of significant, is Trump’s plan to “make child and elder care tax deductible.”
When you make something tax deductible you get more of it. So does this mean more children? Or just more daycare, since, in practice you can deduct the costs of daycare but not of staying home with kids? Maybe both (an interesting case where feminists and “family values” types might agree?)?
One of the things we make tax-deductible is business expenses, because if you spend $50000 extra to make $60000 extra but end up with $20000 extra in taxes it’s not profitable, and we don’t want to discourage wealth creation. From a certain perspective, child care and elder care are business expenses, since they free people up to work who would otherwise have to spend their time caring for a child or elder.
Basically, you actually can deduct the costs of staying home with kids, because the cost of staying home with kids is foregone wages, and you’re not taxed on wages you don’t earn.
According to the paper I found on Google Scholar, Female labor supply and fertility are positively correlated and the underlying factor is subzidized childcare.
My impression is that rank-and-file feminist activists don’t have children. My guess is that part of this is driven by raising a child takes time, and activism is the first thing to go, and that having a child forces you to realize that things other than gender (or race or orientation or whatever) are really important—suddenly, things like the housing market, the future of humanity, education, etc etc etc become much more important.
Which is to say, I guess that the feminist position on subsidized childcare should be wildy in favor, but it’s not on feminist radar because it would benefit few active feminists.
What percentage of families making under six figures do you think itemize their deductions?
Perhaps this makes it marginally more likely that rich people will have kids, but I feel like making things tax deductible is completely and entirely irrelevant for large swaths of society.
Also worth considering: burdensome regulations have resulted in a market for childcare with incredibly inflated prices. There is way too much demand and way too little supply. Incentivizing rich people to use more child care will drive up the price and probably push more poor people out of the market (or at least to unregulated black-market solutions)
In the case of childcare, unregulated black-market solutions means asking friends, family members, neighbours etc. to look after your children, which doesn’t really strike me as a problem.
No, me neither.
Although people without such options probably sure would like a low-cost childcare experience to be available to them – but the government has basically declared such options illegal.
All of the ones who own houses, just for a start.
Untrue. My parents own a house but do not itemize. I’ll grant you their situation is fairly unique.
I also used to own a house and did not itemize – but mainly because I did not live in said house so was able to deal with everything via deductions from rental income.
This would fit with the tax hike on affluent singles.
Here’s an article relevant to some things being discussed here.
What if foreign countries could just bribe the American president?
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/11/foreign-countries-just-bribe-american-president.html
I’ve seen the name Ivan Ilyin show up a few times recently in discussions of Russian politics. Apparently he was a philosopher whose writings are (or aren’t) an influence on Putin and Russian nationalists in general. I’d like to better understand what he’s about, but unfortunately I don’t read Russian. Anyone know of any English translations easily available? Online maybe? I found an English translation for sale on Amazon of some of his religious writings of a devotional sort. They are interesting for what they are, but I’m more interested in, say, his political philosophy.
Because there is a freezing north wind blowing, because the situation in Aleppo is even more of a quagmire, because of all the rage and anger and hurt and pain and violence and anticipation of the worst from the political situation –
beauty.
Thank you very much.
Yes, that was great. I only looked at a comment by you, in order to see what someone had thanked someone for, but I’m glad I did.
Always nice to see someone else who appreciates Tallis. One of my favorites is this, which we play sometimes at our Monday night musical get-togethers.
Quite lovely. Thank you.
I didn’t see any discussion of Trump’s extensive conflicts of interest before the election– the legal mess which would happen even he were a thoroughly honest person. Of course, I could have missed something, but it seems to me that a lot of the media was focused on his insults and the more serious folks were focused on his character. Did anyone see discussion of the simple legal issues?
Even if there was a good blind trust, Trump would still know which businesses he owns and make guesses about how his policies would affact them.
Apparently this sort of situation isn’t unprecedented. Lyndon Johnson nominally put all his holdings into a blind trust, but Robert Caro reports that he had private telephone lines installed in the White House to the lawyers who administered the trust, and personally directed the affairs of his businesses throughout his presidency.
It’s really hard to make a blind trust for slapping the name “Trump” on stuff.
It’s one of those issues that got lost in the noise of Twitter and provocative Trump comments and RACISM!, despite being potentially very serious. For instance, Trump appears to be doing a lot of business with Saudi Arabia right now.
I’ve said since the election that if the left wants to hold Trump accountable, they need to start treating him as a normal politician.
Kurt Eichenwald wrote a story about it, which illustrates the premise that even a blind squirrel finds a nut. (Of course, he teased it with some specious, unrelated Tweets about Trump possibly being institutionalized, because he’s a hack, but it was discussed.)
Trump had so many things wrong with him (as a candidate for the presidency) that he Gish Galloped the media and the electorate.
Honestly, the CNN spoof on SNL last Saturday seems spot on in character if not in details.
Thank you. I never heard that term before. Now I know it. Very relevant to modern political life. I knew it was happening, but I was taking a whole lot of words to describe it, rather than just 2.
Isn’t a Gish Gallop throwing up so many separate points in an argument that your opponent can’t possibly deal with them all?
Trump was more a case of having so many flaws that the media ended up focusing on the ones that were the most dramatic, instead of the ones that were the most serious as far as being president goes, for the most part.
Trump would deal with each controversy by being controversial about something else. Some of that was even intentional.
Regardless of intent, Trump survived 10 or 20 controversies that used to end campaigns. He should never have made it past John McCain.
But he really shouldn’t have been able to go 18 months without releasing his tax returns, especially while not committing to an actual blind trust, without the media hammering him on it every single day.
There’s got to be a name for this sort of thing. Like when you stop worrying about one thing because something new pops up to worry about.
I remember a decent amount of hammering going on about tax returns, but after he’s said “I won’t release them until the audit is done” “I seriously won’t release them until the audit is done” and “I really meant it when I said I won’t release them until the audit is done” I dunno what they’re supposed to do? It’s called news, not olds. The story definitely got out there that he wasn’t going to release his tax returns, and at that point it’s up to Democracy to care.
“There’s got to be a name for this sort of thing. Like when you stop worrying about one thing because something new pops up to worry about.”
It’s somewhat similar to the gish gallop that hbc brought up previously.
“The Gish Gallop (also known as proof by verbosity[1] or the Trump tirade[2]) is the fallacious debating tactic of simply drowning your opponent in a torrent of small, interlocking arguments intended to prevent your opponent from being able to rebut your conclusions in real time. The Gish Gallop is thus essentially a belt-fed cousin of the on the spot fallacy, as it’s unreasonable for anyone to have an answer immediately available to every single argument presented in the gallop. It is named after creationist Duane Gish. ”
Anyway, DT came up with one idiotic falsehood or absurd statement after another, which worked to keep media from focusing on any one statement or behavior of his. And media consumers forgot the last thing the clown said, in the process of paying attention to the next thing he said. HIllary, by contrast, was labeled criminal and crooked and untrustworthy, over and over again ad nauseam. Although the “issues”, or lies, were different, they were all on the same themes of “criminal emails, “pay to play” and other themes of corruption/criminality/untrustworthiness/crookedness.
So the same themes were repeated over and over again for years on end and thus they were drilled into the brains of media consumers more and more with every new set of emails Assange released.
Hillary has been pilloried so much, and so unjustly, that she seems like a female Christ Figure– with “Lock Her Up” being similar to “Crucify him”– as one blogger noted during the election.
Part of DT’s exception to the rule thing was that he was an entertaining billionaire business man and reality TV star celebrity. A certain proportion of Americans worship people like that. And of course there was the incessant fake news about Hillary’s supposed scandals. And the media wanting to curry the favor of the clown so that he would appear on their station and bring more viewer eyeballs with him.
Same Harris did a video called The Most Powerful Clown
https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-most-powerful-clown?utm_source=Main+List&utm_campaign=f28feae161-
Transcript of the video here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/5ccq0v/transcript_of_sams_latest_podcast_the_most/?st=ivskufxf&sh=8bc412cb
HBC seems to be saying more that with Trump there were always so many new scandals that none of them every got addressed. Guy is super sleazy on so many dimensions: stuff ranging from accusations of sexual assault personally to shady business stuff to “legitimate but shitty” type stuff (he seems to have set up his business life so he can walk away from disasters with minimal trouble to himself – Scott Adams considers this a plus, but I don’t).
With Clinton, there were far fewer allegations of malfeasance, so they got more individual play. I don’t think the emails scandal was as big a deal as some people do. Put it in “shows bad judgment” category. Personally, the big turnoff for me was her role in the drumbeat of American foreign policy disasters, 2001-16 (mostly 2009-16 though). Not that I’m an American voter.
If anything, Clinton got hurt because she had fewer scandals than he did, so each one got more attention.
His debating style is based around easily exposed falsehoods, but it’s not really a Gish Gallop, is it? He’ll say one whopper, and rely on the fact that in a political debate, there’s little time to rebut and people don’t care about facts anyway. There’s a similarity – if I say “the moon is made of green cheese” and you spend your time saying “he’s clearly wrong, what is this crap” and end up using your talking period and also everyone is saying “OH MY GOD SO FACT OBSESSED WHAT A WET BLANKET”… It’s more a hop than a gallop.
I’m having trouble with something that I’m sure other people have already figured out, but I can’t find a good explainer: When we give financial advice to individuals, we usually tell them to save money, but if everyone followed that advice, then the stock market would crash and we’d have deflation, etc. Should I actually be telling my rich friends to spend money and only my poor friends to save? How would (note: not should) the government rearrange its incentives to maximize utility?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_thrift
Any one person is not going to crash the market through increased savings. Assuming the concept is valid, there’s nothing you can do.
Money enters the economy both when spent and when invested.
I think your idea of savings might differ from the standard financial advice, ‘put all your money in a bank’, or ‘under your mattress’ is not normally considered ‘good’ financial advice. The standard financial advice that I hear is, keep an emergency fund (this can be in a bank) and put everything else in index funds or something similar.
And yes, this is also relevant. The notion that most wealthy savers are gathering up a bunch of gold coins and throwing them in some giant vault – Scrooge McDuck style – is absurd and is very very far removed from reality…
Even if they were doing this it would still be better than them buying a bunch of yachts. If Bill Gates took out all his money and buried it somewhere it would be equivalent to a free loan to the rest of society. Better yet, if he burned it, it would be a free gift to all other holders of dollars.
Confirmed Onyomi hates yacht builders.
More seriously, I have always heard that the willful destruction of currency was illegal or some such, is that true?
I don’t know, but I have started just literally throwing away pennies. Keeping my life uncluttered is difficult enough with a denomination of currency too tiny for any purpose lying around.
Hmmmmm, I see your point vis-a-vis the money supply but I’m not sure I’m onboard with you on this one. Especially with the example of a yacht, which is a durable good that would continue to require maintenance, service, etc. into the indefinite future. I feel like the value add from those services probably exceeds the value add that would come from reducing the money supply by 0.00000000000001%
Also that advice, taken to its logical conclusion, is just as ridiculous as the keynesian “but if EVERYONE saved ALL their money we’d all starve to death” thing
Can’t you just save toss all your change in a bucket and take the bucket to a Coinstar every few months?
heh, every denomination under a quarter is trash to me
first-world problems I guess
“Can’t you just save toss all your change in a bucket and take the bucket to a Coinstar every few months?”
That is the sort of thrifty, efficient, logical thing which I have not nearly enough discipline to actually do. The last time I used a Coinstar I recall it being something of a hassle, as well.
I mean, it does feel kind of weirdly sacrilegious or haughty to literally throw away money, but I think of it this way: I’m not destroying actual resources (except a tiny amount of copper); I’m just destroying tiny claims on resources, which I’m happy to relinquish in exchange for the lack of clutter.
I have not seriously used cash for at least three years now, I normally keep a twenty or something in my wallet in case of emergency and never spend it. Pub crawls are normally the only situation in my life where it is clearly useful to have cash instead of trying to remember to get your card back every time you leave a bar. I just talk a friend into paying for me and pay them back later, I have a fairly high level of financial trust with my close friends and this has never been a problem.
When I did use cash I also threw away anything less than a quarter, fuck change. I seriously have an aesthetic distaste for it or something, I really hate having change and normally throw it away immediately if I happen to get some.
We already tried discouraging buying of yachts. It was a notable disaster.
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/07/business/falling-tax-would-lift-all-yachts.html
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/government_programs-jan-june96-budget_01-01/
This is horribly untrue.
Savings and investment are the only means by which an economy can truly grow. While it’s true that if everyone saved literally 100% of their income that would probably not end up well, that’s also so far out of the realm of possibility that we don’t really need to deal with it.
I guess that would be true in the alternate universe where the business model was something like, “Captain of Industry X finds a cheaper way to make high demand pin cushions, raises capital through the banking system that can front his loan thanks to its large pool of savers, employs people in his firm and creates a successful product (that puts another pin cushion factory out of business, but we’ll ignore that).”
But this really isn’t what happens, right? Like, the vast majority of businesses are effectively forms of currency whose stock value is determined by a kind of weird politics that’s only somewhat limited by whatever the actual value of the business is supposed to be. And most investment is a form of wealth preservation that’s simply designed to enable people to hoard wealth. So you have a vast financial system that’s basically just an insurance program for rich people. What happens at the level of firms supposedly providing real economic value is almost epiphenomenal to the whole process.
In most standard views stock value is determined by the expected future cash flows a company can generate, discounted appropriately based on how long it might take to create them. This seems very tied to “the actual value the business is supposed to be.”
Sometimes stocks get bid up a lot based on future expectations, e.g. tech, and sometimes those future expectations end up being wrong, but that just means people got it wrong, not that they were focused on something epiphenomenal.
You’re just noticing how standard Keynesianism, which is currently the mainstream of economics, is at odds with reality.
Keynesianism is the most popular economic theory not because it best comports with reality, but because it tells politicians what they want to hear.
This so … demeaning to economics as a profession and scientific discipline.
It’s a kind of thinking that I find that Scott’s blogging encourages which is far too black/white all/nothing.
Part of the problem is that economics, which is a social science like sociology, tries to be a hard science like physics.
Would it have been better if I had prefaced it with a bunch of caveats about how there are many good economists out there, even Keynesians, who have made good contributions to understanding of some aspects of the world?
Don’t mistake not wanting to waste space on a bunch of qualifiers as a sign of black-and-white thinking.
You will note also that I didn’t say Keynesianism was all wrong; I just said that the reason it’s popular isn’t because it’s right.
Also, even granting that I’m too uncharitable and unnuanced in my view of economics, I don’t see how SSC would have encouraged me to become so.
This is a blog that, when it comments about academia, does so in fairly uniformly negative terms. There is fairly routine implicit accusation of academia engaging in what essentially amounts to fraudulent science.
It also a blog that is fairly consistent in advocating for the point of view that education, especially institutions of higher learning, accomplish nothing other than allowing for engaging in signalling.
You don’t understand how I might think that blog might be construed as encouraging a rejection of academia and academics in general?
@onyomi:
Buckyballas basically described the paradox of thrift. You replied with “standard Keynesianism is at odds with reality”. Given that Keynes was the person who popularized the paradox of thrift, that’s a bit of a non sequitur.
When HBC challenged you, you retreated to “well, some parts of Keynesianism are good, but that’s not why it’s popular.” I question your assertion that Keynesianism is universally popular (obligatory Krugman), but even beyond that I am still unclear on what your point was in the first place. Can you point to an actual Keynesian stance that you think is wrong?
Edit: never mind. You replied below while I was typing this out. Leaving this post up for the Krugman link.
This may be true (though I’m skeptical), but it seems that it also comes from a place of assuming that it is essential.
Like, paraphrased, “There’s a replication crisis in academic research; this needs to be addressed because there’s no other way of getting reliable evidence!”
Or, “Conflicting studies have come out casting doubt on the effects of minimum wage. It’s a mess! We need more and betters studies to address this.”
I would say SSC is cynical or pessimistic about academia, but by no means against it.
“This is a blog that, when it comments about academia, does so in fairly uniformly negative terms. There is fairly routine implicit accusation of academia engaging in what essentially amounts to fraudulent science.
“It also a blog that is fairly consistent and advocating for the point of view that education, especially institutions of higher learning, accomplish nothing other than allowing for engaging in signalling.”
HBC, exactly.
@HBC
You said SSC encourages black and white/all or nothing thinking, not that it encourages people to be uncharitable toward academia. The latter point I might agree with more, but then, even as an academic myself, who probably sees more of the good of it than many, there is a lot to criticize.
Overall, I feel like this is similar to demands that SSC provide some sort of ideological “balance” in the sense of, if it links one thing critical of the left wing it should link one thing critical of the right wing. But being internally balanced and balanced relative to everything else out there are two different things.
Example: let’s say, just hypothetically, that academia is 75% good and nice and wonderful, but 25% wrong and awful and terrible. But let’s also say, hypothetically, that 99% of mainstream coverage of academia is positive (I know that’s not true in reality). If I then write a series of blog posts 100% devoted to revealing that overlooked 25%, am I being unfair to academia because I didn’t write 3 positive things about it for every 1 bad thing? Do I necessarily hate academia, or could I be hoping to see it get better?
@onyomi:
a) Do you really think media’s coverage of academia is uniformly positive?
b) If it was uniformly positive, would you consider that coverage to be biased and incomplete?
c) I thought Scott was supposed to be about searching for truth, not trying to balance out someone else’s coverage.
d) If one already has a bias that would cause one to look negatively on academics, will Scott’s coverage, through confirmation bias, make one ever surer in the conviction that the modern university is never to be trusted and is useless?
@HBC
a. “(I know that’s not true in reality)”
b. yes, wouldn’t you?
c. I agree with “All Debates are Bravery Debates.” My guess is that Scott imagines his audience as being one which needs more to be reminded to think critically about stories like “scientific study shows x!” than to be reminded that academia has any value whatsoever. It’s conceivable he’s gone too far in that direction, but if he did write a post like “actually guys, academia isn’t uniformly awful and actually does some useful things” would anyone be like “wow, you opened my eyes!” or would they be like “d’uh”?
d. I would say that if you already think academia is useless, SSC probably won’t do a ton to persuade you otherwise (though I feel like the underlying assumption of “let’s sift through all this research to see which is good and which is bad and what the takeaway of it all should be,” which form many SSC posts take, is that one can learn something from academic research; you just need to treat it with a critical eye).
I found out about SSC and read through all of the archive relatively recently, in the process I became aware of Less Wrong, and the Less Wrong diaspora. I got the impression that LW had something of an express ‘anti-experts’ thing going on, but I am not sure if I would paint Scott with that bush. He does express concern about how studies are done, how often bad studies get published and spread around in the media, talks about the replication crisis, but none of these views, at least to me, necessarily mean somebody is against academia. Veritasium, which you might see linked on facebook by somebody who loves SCIENCE, did an episode on the replication crisis and false positives in research.
To be fair, I only started reading the comments, and commenting, recently, so maybe the trend you are talking about comes more from the comments. But the regularity with which Scott uses research in his argumentation seems to deny the idea that he could think all research is bad. In general I think he puts considerable effort into pursuing the truth, which is a big reason I enjoy his writing so much.
The part that Scott might not have realized, and granted it would have been difficult to predict, is that be telling his imagined audience what he thought they needed to hear, he was shaping that audience.
Think about someone that is deeply embedded and mostly happy in a Jewish community, but thinks that its institutions are flawed in some or other way. These flaws bother him and so likes to talk about them a fair bit. Offline this isn’t such a problem, the imagined audience and the real audience can’t drift too far apart. Online he could quickly find himself with regular commentators on his posts with monikers like “GTKRWN” and linked around the greater antisemite blogosphere.
Brad, interesting. Maybe that is why the average commenter here is so much further to the Right than Scott is.
I assume any rightwards tilt is caused by Scott not instantly banning people who express rightwards ideas. You then have the moderate left who flee in mass from any place where ‘genetic racial inferiority’ can be discussed openly, leaving you with various shades of Right, and only the most extreme Left warriors who are here to fight the good fight on the front lines of the SSC comments.
This is obviously not a complete picture, in as much as I think of myself as moderately left and I think a decent number of other moderately lefties are around (probably make up the majority of the readers, as per the poll), but it is my favorite theory to explain the comment section.
Most liberals are unwilling to fight– whether it’s the good fight or not. So they leave, and some of those who stay here are doormats, further emoboldening obnoxious liberal basher types here.
Although some of the conservatives here are good people, there are a number of obnoxious ones I’ve even been stalked by a couple of commenters, following me from one thread to another, complaining to me and others about my unwillingness to give in to every obnoxious demand they made of me to e.g read some 100 page legal document that they think everyone should read who discusses that particular subject we were discussing– or to respond to every one of their nit picks and produce counter examples to all of their cherry picked examples.
It should be a matter of personal choice whether someone takes the time & the interest to pursue, or to continue to pursue, a particular discussion. And if one does so, one has the right to do it on one’s own terms and not have to give into every demand that some stalker makes, or continue with a discussion that one sees as totally pointless.
So I can understand why liberals leave here in droves.
“This so … demeaning to economics as a profession and scientific discipline.”
It’s insulting to point out the reason that Keynesianism is more popular with politicians than with economists? The version of Keynesianism that was dominant in the sixties went largely out of fashion in the academy, in part because the Keynesian predictions in the seventies turned out to be wrong. Does anyone still believe in the Laffer curve? But it still dominates public discussion.
Nobody since has produced a really satisfactory macro theory, which is why I like to say that a macro course is a tour of either a cemetery or a construction site.
Consider the somewhat parallel case of comparative advantage vs absolute advantage in trade theory. Absolute advantage was abandoned by economists as incoherent about two hundred years ago. It still dominates public discussion of trade issues.
Macro isn’t as clear a case because we don’t have an adequate theory with which to replace the simple Keynesian model of fifty years ago.
@David:
I believe I interpreted onyomi correctly as saying that the model is popular among economists because it tells politicians what they want to hear.
Whereas, as you point out, what we don’t have is better models to replace it with.
Note that onyomi replied by subsequently demeaning the field as a whole for pretending to be a hard science.
Wait, what’s wrong with the Laffer curve? Do you mean the idea that we’re on the right side of the hump was discredited or is there actually something wrong with the model of a revenue-maximizing tax rate?
The Laffer Curve is true in a facile sense.
But I don’t think that there was ever any good reason other than wishful thinking to believe that negative returns to tax increases start somewhere other than nearish to 100%. (my understanding could obviously be wrong).
@HBC
You don’t think political considerations have any effect on what sort of research gets government funding? And do you not expect academic researchers to be influenced in what they chose to study by what sorts of research is more likely to get funding? What sort of health research do you expect a tobacco company to sponsor? And what entity, directly and indirectly, is the single biggest sponsor of research in the country?
Regarding the idea of economics as a “hard science,” it will be a hard science when we can empirically and accurately predict individual and group human behavior through physical measurements of e. g. neurotransmitters or neuronal firings. Until then, it must be more like sociology–making use of facts and statistics, but requiring some degree of qualitative, humanistic interpretation as well. It is closer to being a branch of psychology, history, and philosophy than a branch of math.
I am a humanist myself, so I don’t consider it demeaning to say that, imo, good economics tends to be more humanistic. Pretending to be scientific in a way which is not warranted or justifiable is a common problem in economics today, imo, but it can happen with English literature, too. If I demean economists for having “physics envy,” it’s not just them. I am a fan of e. g. DH, but that’s partially because I think fields like literature usually tend too far in the opposite direction–of nothing quantifiable. I think literature probably needs more quantitative research and economics more qualitative.
Really, it is very much analogous to election forecasting, as we’ve just seen. Someone like Scott Adams who basically says “psychology is everything; data is nothing” probably goes too far, but so too, clearly, did the people who were saying it was “mathematically impossible” for Trump to win. Really, in a study of human behavior, and especially group behavior, though quantitative data can definitely be useful, things like historical context, psychology, etc. are often just as, if not more predictive.
Oops.
I wrote “Laffer curve.” I meant “Phillips Curve.”
Brain disconnected from fingers.
The Laffer curve is fine. As per Stigler’s Law, of course, it was not invented by Laffer. I don’t know who the first inventor is, but an example appears in The Wealth of Nations.
Keynesianism says to save up in fat times and to deficit spend in lean times. It doesn’t say to stimulus-spend forever.
Every politician has a very short time frame, though, so if they want the unemployment rate down in two years, deficit spending it is.
This is true and I’ve heard it before, but in that case we need to understand that what is justified by Keynesianism is often, at best, and incomplete version, perhaps fatally so, and when Keynesianism is argued against, it is what is practiced, rather than what is in the source theory.
Or, point to western economies cutting spending (not taxes, not spending increases, but spending) so I can be better informed.
Well, there’s two different issues here: the gap between theoretically ideal Keynesianism, which advocates for counter-cyclic monetary policy, and Keynesianism as it’s actually practiced in most cases (Paul Volcker being a refreshing exception), which is “loose money in the bad times but no significant tightening to make up for it in the good times,” and the bigger question of supply-side versus demand-side views of the driving force behind economic growth. Hence ideas like “the paradox of thrift.”
If I get too snippy about such things, it’s because I get tired of the demand side view being presented as if it’s obviously the one uncontroversially correct view. (And I don’t blame OP for that; it’s just the view you get in the mainstream culture now: spending good for economy, saving bad).
WJC reduced the deficit to zero.
It would be nice if people actually acknowledged that.
Sure, that’s good. Though spending is the true burden of government and not taxation+deficits, all else equal, lower deficits are better because bigger deficits must be paid for by future inflation, which is like a highly regressive tax.
If Hillary had run on the dangers of deficit spending and the need to reduce the debt, I would have voted for her.
WJC reduced the deficit by returning tax rates towards earlier highs (though not all the way) and reduction in budgeted spending. Theoretically exactly what you are asking for.
If you wanted a reduction in the deficit, you probably should not have contributed to putting Republicans in the executive again. Reagan and Bush II should give you a prior that Republicans don’t care about deficits if they control the executive and Bush I should give you the prior that Republican voters punish tax increases on the wealthy far more than they reward reduction in deficits.
Insofar as “provoking the backlash that resulted in the first Republican House in four decades, during the brief period that the Rs still took spending cuts as seriously as tax cuts” counts.
The Clinton administration, of course, had rather more ambitious and expensive plans for the post Cold War “peace dividend”. (Not least the previous attempt at health care reform.[1]) But the magic of divided government did manage to stumble into surplus territory instead.
(Then government reunited, and it turned out that tax cuts don’t starve the beast after all. Oh well.)
[1] I’m no fan of Trump, but it’s hard to see his efforts to get his family into positions of political influence as precisely unprecedented.
HBC, this is true and part of why Romney and McCain suffered from a lack of enthusiasm. Fool me 5 times, shame on me.
In fairness to Reagan, those deficits were part of a deliberate plan to goad the Soviet Union into a spending contest it couldn’t win, and it worked, bringing down the USSR. The problem came when people begin to baseline that level of deficit spending.
@HBC
“Theoretically exactly what you are asking for.”
What exactly I’m asking for would be a balanced budget achieved solely through spending cuts, rather than through increased taxation, though, as I said, I’d prefer higher taxes and balanced budget to increased deficit spending.
My prior is that the vast majority of politicians and voters of both parties don’t care about the debt (which is why I go on about Keynesian demand side dominance–because it justifies that not caring). But Obama increased it more than any other president, so, insofar as I saw HRC as “Obama, term three,” and Trump as “something different, though not entirely sure what,” I’m not sure why I’d prefer the former (though I voted for Gary Johnson).
@bean:
Reagan rode into office proclaiming that 1980 deficit was horrible, horrible, horrible. You can’t give any credit to Reagan here.
Clinton presided over a healthy economy and reduced the deficit to zero.
Obama came into office in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the great depression. His deficit ballooned and rapidly shrank again. Arguably too fast, leaving the entirety of stimulative efforts to the Fed.
How is that not in line with a Keynesian approach?
@HBC
You would have to actually run a surplus, not simply stop running a deficit, in the good times in order for the good times to effectively pay for the bad times. The cumulative result of the attempt to do Keynesianism has still been a gigantic net addition to the debt, such that now we basically have to keep interest rates low just to be able to pay the interest on it.
Which is not to say I think the GOP has a good record on this count at all, though I think Gingrich can take as much credit as WJC for that brief period of at-least-we’re-not-digging-even-deeper. Both parties are terrible on this and the degree to which neither major candidate talked about it hardly at all this election was pretty ridiculous. Very whistling past the graveyard.
Serious question: what would orthodox Keynesianism dictate as the second-best policy to follow, if we take as a given that politicians will never, ever allow a surplus to run?
Nitpick: the Clinton-era federal deficit was reduced to $17.9 billion, not to zero, and not to a surplus.
From a quantitative standpoint this is practically a rounding error way from “zero”, but from a qualitative standpoint this is pretty good evidence that we really can “take as a given that politicians will never, ever allow a surplus to run” – if even politicians who boast about deficit reduction are loathe to cut that last tiny fraction of the budget rather than take credit via accounting errors, then those final budget cuts just aren’t going to ever happen.
@onyomi
The weird part is that’s not really true. With economic growth + inflation, you can run moderate deficits forever, and be no worse condition than before, assuming you’re borrowing in your own money. Given that the Feds can often borrow at a negative real rate of interest, the window is pretty large here.
Is now the time for a big outlay of funds on infrastructure, as Trump proposes? Maybe not, but this brief moment of united government provides the only credible funder of it right now, and somebody’s gotta fix the roads. In a better world that would have been done when the economy was shakier, but whattayagonnado?
That’s a bit tinfoil hat, no?
Whether Clinton 42 ended with a surplus or not depends on how you handle the extra dollars that Social Security was taking in.
Note that lots of people, on both sides, do not have a consistent way of treating those dollars. They will pick one method when discussing Clinton’s budget, and then pick a directly opposing method when discussing how to account for the SSTF.
Keynesianism is not popular in practice. Congress has kept Obama from doing infrastructure spending, kept us in austerity compared to what Keynes would have done immediately after 2008.
It’s amazing that Right Wingers in economics and politics think they are the poor underdogs, despite controlling everything. Now that Right Wingers control all 3 branches of government, in addition to most state legislatures and governorships, I wonder, will they be able to keep this up? Maybe so. Humans are capable of infinite self-delusion.
You consider 7+ years of ZIRP plus 800 billion in stimulus spending to be an austere approach?
Look at what’s happened to policy over the last couple decades. The Left Wing has had a runaway victory on all social issues that’ve been up for dispute. Meanwhile, business regulation has continued to rise unimpeded in many areas.
If the Republican control of Congress and the Presidency manages to turn this back – I don’t mean just freeze in place the status quo, but return things to the status quo ~2006, let alone status quo ~1996 – then I’ll accept they aren’t underdogs. The Left Wing got us from 1996 to the present; if they’re really equally-powerful, shouldn’t the Right Wing be able to reverse at least half of that?
Business regulation is not necessarily a loss for business, though. A big, established business may benefit from regulations that make it harder for new competitors to pop up.
One could model “economic right” as “removal of government interference”, or arguably as “what big business wants”…
Do you believe that because you rigorously studied macro-economics and after carefully weighing the evidence decided it had no intellectual merit? Or did you decide after realizing that it conflicted with your ideological beliefs? Or to put it more succinctly, what came first, your anti-government beliefs or your ant-Keynesian ones?
Which came first: language or complex thought?
So you’re admitting that you’re antikeynesian beliefs are tied up with your libertarian ones. Don’t you think that clouds your judgment on the purely factual matters which Keynesians address, which is the reason you dismiss it as being “at odds with reality” without ever seriously considering it?
You’re missing the point.
Ability to form complex thoughts is both a cause of and prerequisite for language, and language is both a cause of and prerequisite for some level of complex thought.
The point is, neither language nor complex thought, neither society nor law, neither chicken nor egg came “first.” Rather, neither of either pair is an all-or-nothing proposition and they each evolved organically and simultaneously, each supporting the evolution of the other.
I studied some basic Keynesian macro in college before I had heard of Austrian economics, and I have since read not a few books and articles written from a Keynesian perspective, but the point is that I am a libertarian in part because economic theories with libertarian implications make more sense to me. But maybe they only make sense to me because I am a libertarian? Which came first: The chicken or the egg?
It was a simultaneous evolution and could not possibly have been otherwise, since it is not possible even to live in the world, much less study any school of polisci or economics, much less develop any opinions about them, without also developing biases and priors about history and human behavior and how the world works which color subsequent engagement and interpretation.
What is more likely, that Keynesianism is intellectually bankrupt and the only reason economists, who spend a significant amount of time working on these issues, engage with it is because they want to push government expansion? Or that it does have some merit(even if only a little) and you are unfairly dismissing it because it gives some support to government intervention? I’m just saying keep an open mind.
How do you figure that? When we give financial advice to individuals, we usually tell them to save money by buying index funds. Index funds are machines that take people’s money and use it to buy stock in lots and lots of corporations. A bunch of people going to the stock market (albeit indirectly) and saying “please sell us lots of your stock”, seems to me most unlikely to crash the stock market.
If we were telling people to save money by stuffing it in mattresses, yes, but aside from a bit of emergency cash nobody actually gives that advice.
Isn’t standard financial advice to have cash on hand to cover 3 months expenses, then start investing? I think this is around 4 months more than the average person (although I think a lot of others have been getting out of debt since 2008) so if it were followed there would probably indeed be some noticeable macro effect.
Not for “cash” in the sense of actual paper banknotes, at least not in modern economies. In the financial world, “cash” means anything that can be used to pay your bills tomorrow, including checking-account balances, money market accounts, and some types of brokerage deposits. Some of the latter can be explicitly tied in to stock index funds, and most of the rest is at least available for short-term commercial loans, so it’s not being withheld from the economy.
Admittedly, the financial world could do a lot better in translating its terminology when talking to non-financiers.
I don’t think standard financial advice suggests that your emergency reserve fund should be in anything as exposed to the stock market as an index fund. (Which strikes me as correct; you don’t want your “lost my job, need to pay the mortgage” money to fluctuate in value, especially not if it does so in a way positively correlated with your likelihood of losing your job.)
I’m pretty unsure what it would look like for the economy if everyone decided to move towards having that level of savings over a period of, say, three years. Certainly a huge demand shock to certain industries that provide marginal goods to people with low savings, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it tipped us toward recession.
Even better, it likely improves the economy. “Increasing investment results in an increase of real output,” they say.
Bastiat wrote a little about this in 1848 in his very good essay “What is Seen and What is Not Seen.”
http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html
Scroll down to section 11 (but also read the rest of it).
Thanks everyone. That was (mostly) helpful. =)
Follow-up that will reveal my lack of economics expertise: How does investing in an index fund help the economy? It just seems like money sloshing around between rich people? Apple (probably close to the number one holding on several index funds) is not really using the money that people trade on their shares to build new phones or invent cool new technologies or whatever, right? I can see three ways, but they seem like 2nd order effects to me:
1) Person on sell end of the deal buys an iPhone. Apple makes profit –> builds cool new technology
2) Demand for stock increases Apple share price. Apple sells stock –> builds cool new technology
3) Demand for stock increases Apple share price. Apple takes loan at lower interest rate due to higher value –> builds cool new technology
For 1, I get the impression that the vast majority of the money is probably getting sloshed back into the equity market in some other place. For 2, my impression is that companies don’t often sell off their shares. For 3, this seems like a fairly small effect. The whole thing makes more sense if you’re a V.C. investor or something, but I’m having trouble visualizing the money–>productivity flow for publicly traded funds. I don’t know if this is “Keynesian”, but, intuitively, it seems to me that if you want to maximize economic impact, it seems like you should just go buy a bunch of phones –> money goes to Apple –> goes to R&D + employees who then buy stuff –> etc. Thanks in advance for taking the trouble to enlighten me.
EDIT: just read a snippet of the Bastiat essay posted by Incurian. Thanks for that. Instead of iPhones, it would’ve been way more erudite to say “berlines, landaus, and phaetons” which Google tells me are different kinds of carriages. My naive question still stands though. It seems to me that money –> financial markets –> productive economy is a slow process, so why don’t we just skip step 2?
The point of the financial markets is to help direct the money to the most urgent uses of it in the productive economy. Are they still inefficient sometimes? Yes. Are they corrupt sometimes? Yes. Do they still do a better job of it than you could do on your own? Almost certainly.
“Investing in Apple’s stock” doesn’t mean “directly injecting money into Apple” unless Apple per se (not some other trader or broker) releases fresh equity into the wild. Most of the fresh equity was released: to private investors during Apple’s fundraising; and to public investors during its IPO. Anything after the IPO is mostly just a game of Hot Potato with other investors. Analogously, buying a used Ford Pickup-Truck doesn’t make Ford any money.
If Apple generates no profits, then it can’t pay its dividends. If Apple can’t pay its dividends, then shareholders get angry (remember, they paid ~$500/share for jack squat). If shareholders get angry, then Tim Cook gets fired by the Board of Directors. Therefore, it’s in Cook’s interests to generate as much profit as possible. tl;dr Apple’s shareholders are collectively Tim Cook’s boss.
Yes, this is all very roundabout.
If I understand your question correctly, you may find section 6 of the same essay to be illuminating.
” but if everyone followed that advice, then the stock market would crash and we’d have deflation, etc.”
Why do you think that?
People who save money rarely put it under their mattress. If people saved money and invested it in stocks, that would tend to push stock prices up, not down.
Is your deflation conclusion based on the view that when people save money, the amount of money out there goes down? That again only works if they put it under their mattress.
Yeah I see my error there. Thanks to you, Edward Scizorhands, John Schilling and others for pointing it out. I was only thinking of the negative impact on business revenue if everyone suddenly stopped spending so much. If this proposed scenario did occur though, and everyone plowed all their money into index funds instead of spending it, wouldn’t this wildly overprice these indices since stock prices would go up even though revenues go down? I suppose that then the smart money would be on shorting these index funds, but I don’t really see how any of this really helps “the economy”. Ditto for the supply-demand curve suddenly requiring price reductions resulting in deflation.
I have the feeling the online survey results will be used as an excuse not to follow through on the more difficult campaign promises….
I do like the idea of surveys like this in general though.
I am all for him finding excuses not to follow through on the more difficult campaign promises.
I’m all for his finding excuses not to follow through on the campaign promises that’d be worse for the country.
Which are probably different from the more-difficult ones.
Yeah, I was really just going for a general appeal to inaction, because I am mostly ok with the status quo, I considered omitting “more difficult” from the previous comment, and probably should have.
PM me if you’re having Amazon problems and don’t already have someone helping you out (employee).
How exactly does one PM in WordPress, anyway? (My company could benefit from someone inside Amazon who’s able to answer a few quick questions or point us in the right direction.)
” The National Popular Vote is a really cool and game-theoretically interesting way to get rid of the Electoral College without a Constitutional amendment. It’s pretty close to being passed and the site gives you some ways to help push it forward”
Remember, anyone thinking of this, to think hard about whether you’re doing so because the popular vote and EC result diverged this time, or because a deep, thoughtful inspection of the differences makes yousure the stricter
change is superior in itself.
(The first obvious test is “if Clinton had won the EC but Trump the PV, would you still support this change?”
If the answer is no, please consider that perhaps the response is not a rational one to a structural deficit.
Equally, consider a future where urban concentrations of population are not on your political side, due to whatever changes.
Don’t abandon Rawls’ blind choice criterion for partisan gain.)
I generally don’t like EC for the same reason I don’t like the Senate, I am not particularly invested in states rights at the federal level(mostly because all it seems to do is make small states with tiny populations disproportionately influential), but I am from Texas so I might be biased.
Given that this is the literal definition of the goal the Senate, at least you don’t disagree on the actual effect, just the desirability of it.
Well and it isn’t that I don’t like ‘states rights’ in some forms, I would like for states to have more power over themselves, I am a big fan of the Archipelago idea, etc. I just think that giving the people of Rhode Island disproportionate control over say, the supreme court judge appointment that effects the whole country proportionally feels, ‘wrong’.
I don’t know if it is possible to disentangle these two things, and it is not really clear to me at least that Rhode Island getting two senate seats has actually done much at all for Rhode Island, or any state for that matter, having more self determination, so I am not even sure what protecting states rights is supposed to be doing at this point. Outside of my complaint.
I think it is, and I said “Senate” vs “State Rights” intentionally. Recall that the bicameral legislature was the compromise answer to the very difficult question of representation.
Having more localism is one thing that makes this more palatable when your preferences are trumped by either the minority (ie, small state Senators) or those who have no real knowledge of your local situation (ie, urban population centers across the country dominating the House).
Can somebody recommend evidence-based recommendation for diet? Something similar for advice about depression posted here? Or “Meat Your Doom”/”Wheat: Much More Than You Wanted To Know” posted here but more general?
I am aware that nutrition science is at best poor – but I am interested whatever there is any advice better than overall “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants” + “avoid drinking things other than water”? I remember that there are hints that eating salmon and other fish is beneficial (from “Things That Sometimes Help If You Have Depression”).
I am not interested into things not based on high quality studies, there is enough of diet ideas supported by clever theory to suppport any type of food consumpion.
Eat Fat, Get Thin: Why the Fat We Eat Is the Key to Sustained Weight Loss and Vibrant Health February 23, 2016
by Mark Hyman M.D
“It depends”
Activity level, activity type, genes, gut biome makeup all influence which diet works for you or not.
Without any information about these factors, “eat food, not too much, mostly plants” is pretty much it.
The Mediterranean diet studies seem well-done and the results seem promising. The review here seems to have accurate summaries.
The predimed study was a well-done study. It showed that giving a people a whole liter of olive oil every single week saves lives. But describing it as a “Mediterranean diet study” is extremely misleading. It was supposed to test that diet, but telling people what to eat almost always fails. In this case, the control group also moved in the direction of the “Mediterranean diet.”
Wow, I never noticed that volume. The study claims the MeDiet+EVOO group was averaging 50 grams per day of olive oil, which is barely a third of a liter per week. And there were roughly 10,000 man-years in that group. I hope they were giving the remainders to their families, not throwing away hundreds of thousands of liters of oil.
Is this whole wave of “centrists” or whatever you want to call them, exhorting people to be nice to Trump voters and quit calling them deplorables a form a political correctness? If so, is Trump’s war against political correctness going to include them as targets?
It’s not Centrists. It’s mostly liberals, 99% of whom have always acted like doormats. It’s why we got Trump, and why resistance to him will be weak and ineffectual– tweets, FB rants, poorly organized very brief demonstrations with vague goals, and comediy shows making jokes about things that are tragic, not comic.
If you think that we got Trump because liberals were too doormat-like in not standing up against Trump, you really are on the goddamned Moon.
“I didn’t get the thing I wanted” does not logically mean “the people who could have got me what I wanted were insufficiently loyal and acted like doormats”. You know who thinks it does? Donald Trump.
I generally think Obama did alright as a president, given the circumstances, but he also held out for eight years in hope of some kind of across the aisle reconciliation that he should have figured out wasn’t going to happen at least by the end of his first term. In the meantime the share of Democratic seats in state and federal government dropped. Those things are not unrelated to each other.
What did you expect Obama to do? He didn’t have control of the Legislative branch for over his Presidency. Not only that but he also used plenty of executive power.
Is that why he rammed through his health-care plan using parliamentary gimmickry and then spent the rest of his two terms trolling the Republicans on Twitter? Odd sort of way to reach for reconciliation, but I guess we all have our own path to follow.
I think there’s been a comprehensive global failure on the left to even try to justify itself on policy grounds. Partly that’s because the sense of sudden victory in the culture wars, but there are a bunch of other factors, including the contemporary structure of left media opinion, which spends almost no time whatsoever talking about economic issues. Hillary Clinton was in many ways worse than Trump on that front. She couldn’t credibly win over the left in her own party, because everyone knew she wasn’t really interested in Sanders style economic reforms. But she also shied away from trying to convince people that open borders/free trade were good things worth fighting for, knowing that it would alienate her base and not win over anyone to her right. And that meant that she had to rely on a bunch of arguments that have nothing to do with her specific designs for power. In the aftermath of this election, most of the left seems to continue on in that trajectory. Just mindless hateblogging everywhere.
The budget deal following the 2010 election seems like the sort of thing Obama could have been doing with the Republicans all along, if he’d been more interested in that sort of thing.
Will only add that I have no interest in getting into a debate about whether Obama was fair to Congress or a big meanie. I’ll just say “Merrick Garland” and rest my case.
Yes, the one who fires the last shot in a war is the one to blame for starting it.
Noted.
Is that wave of centrists arguing that people who aren’t being nice to Trump should be fired/excluded from polite society/attacked in the streets?
More generally, I’m a Trump voter. What do you think the appropriate way to treat me is?
Well, what do you think? Shall I emulate your choice for President and come up with a nasty nickname for your handle? Mock any attribute that I suspect you might feel insecure about? Try to rile up the crowd against you?
Granted I’m not very good at these sorts of things, but if it is the thing to do, I can give it the old college try.
Brad, if you are not a liberal, please do join the cause. We need a few more liberals who can dish out back to conservatives, the kind of treatment that conservatives dish out constantly.
@Brad – “Well, what do you think? Shall I emulate your choice for President and come up with a nasty nickname for your handle? Mock any attribute that I suspect you might feel insecure about? Try to rile up the crowd against you?”
I voted for a president, not for standards of civil behavior. If you’d be kind enough to inform me on when that election is held, I’ll be sure to vote in it as well. In any case, your tribe does not seem to have much of a problem with those behaviors, now or before the election, so I’m not sure what exactly the election is supposed to have changed.
I expected Hillary to win, and had resigned myself to that fact. I am sorry that the results of the election did not go the way you wanted, but I do not believe you have the right to tell me who to vote for, or to threaten to punish me for my vote. I can appreciate that you do not want to live in a country with people like me; the feeling is at least somewhat mutual. The question is, how do we live together in peace? If you think the answer to that question is to double-down on the double-down of the double-downed abuse toward people who disagree with you, then probably you should do what you feel you need to do. We’ll see how it goes, I guess. As Moon and Earthly Knight have demonstrated, you will find no shortage of boon companions.
If you want to talk, talk. If you want to fight, fight.
I’m going to be over here trying to avoid being mauled by the pack of rabid dogs you helped unleash. There’s nothing at all you can do to corral them for at least two and probably four years. So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Most people taking that position seem to have pragmatic reasons: it’s rather hard for Democrats to win elections while calling ~50% of the electorate deplorable. One can oppose a politician without implicating his supporters — that’s the traditional approach, in fact.
Personally, I’d suggest they stop because it’s absurd to believe that very many Trump voters were acting out of any kind of malice, so niceness should be extended to them by default. Not sure if that counts as political correctness, but I’m told that it is synonymous with politeness, so I guess it would.
Yeah, I’m really motivated to be nice to the supporters of the candidate who threatened to put my candidate in jail, during the presidential debate, although there were no charges against her, much less proof of any wrongdoing. And he never took that statement back, as Hillary did take the deplorable statement back.
You’re lucky most liberals are doormat types, but I am not. I will treat you no better than you treat me.
A lot of Trump voters are very sore winners– expecting everyone to walk around on eggshells around them.
In the first place, I’m a Clinton voter and a lifelong liberal.
In the second place, Scott and SSC try to keep things somewhat objective and dispassionate. I realize that can be hard; it’s less of a problem for those who are capable of subtle insults.
Finally, we were talking about voters, not candidates. Pretty much everyone who votes for a major-party nominee has some level of disagreement or disapproval. The nature of partisan politics is that no one gets exactly what they want. So we can’t start these discussions from the presumption that voting for a candidate indicates endorsement of everything the candidate said. That simply isn’t how politics works.
Many Trump voters have come out and said that they voted for Trump because he would take a wrecking ball to the country, and he might destroy it, but that was okay with them. Surveys show that many of them hate Hillary, which I imagine to be a response to fake news.
Oh, and what a horrible statement I made above toward Trump voters ” I will treat you no better than you treat me.” I can understand why you had such a problem with it.
How could Trump voters ever handle such cruel treatment, as to be treated the same way they treat others?
And as for talking about voters, not candidates, I would grant you that point in most political races, but in this one DT consistently acted like a bully. So the people who voted for him, voted for someone who consistently acts like a bully. I’m not inclined to go to great trouble to be polite toward such people.
If any of those voters are as thin skinned as their candidate, then that’s their problem, not mine.
I didn’t vote for Trump (I’m Australian not American so I saw no obligation to look into it enough at the time to not suspend judgement), but how can you be so sure all Trump voters are unsympathetic? A few hypothetical positions:
-A voter who believed that war with Russia was dangerous and likely to go nuclear, and took Donald Trump’s desire for peace with Russia at his war. This would contrast with Hillary’s actions as part of the Obama administration.
-A rural voter in one of the communities that en masse voted for Donald Trump because of people they looked up to voting for Trump. Since they are less educated, surely less can be expected of them.
-A voter with poor social skills. Speaking as somebody with Aspergers Syndrome, I could see my past self at eighteen taking something like, for instance, Trump’s stated opinion on racism at his word. If my eighteen year old self had been American, I would have had a vote.
There is an arguable case for the “Angry at social justice” position, but I’m going to concentrate on more obvious cases.
And he never took that statement back, as Hillary did take the deplorable statement back.
“Took it back” in the sense that she went “Oops, got me more negative publicity than positive”. She still maintained that there were indeed “deplorables,(remember, these are the ones she described as “irredeemable” and not representative of America), just not maybe half of his supporters:
@ stillnotking
it’s rather hard for Democrats to win elections while calling ~50% of the electorate deplorable.
Not ~50% of the electorate, just ~50% of Trump’s supporters. She said there were two baskets in his supporters, one full of deplorables, the other full of nice people.
So, 25%. Not as bad as Romney’s 47%, but it’d be a good idea to get it down closer to the populist left’s 1%.
That was Hillary’s version, yes, but such fine distinctions seem to have been elided by the most vocal of her supporters in the wake of her loss, at least going by the Guardian’s opinion page.
And she later apologized and said she regretted the deplorables comment. Trump didn’t apologize for the zillion totally obnoxious and insulting things he said about various groups.
“Last night I was ‘grossly generalistic,’ and that’s never a good idea. I regret saying ‘half’ — that was wrong,”
Hardly what one might call a genuine apology. Then again, I’ve not seem much from previous comments that would indicate Moon has an open mind when it comes to tribal matters.
I think DrBeat absolutely nailed you here. https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/open-thread-62-75/#comment-436380
Sorry not to have the “open mind” that people on the average here have– defending any and all Hillary bashing and any and all Dem bashing, at all times.
@gda was that last sentence really necessary? Frustration is understandable but the leftier wing has a point that it doesn’t need to be rehashed every subthread. Especially in response to a post where Moon is making a reasonable point. Shame to squander an otherwise reasonable counterargument by engaging in petty insults.
Seconding Gobbobobble
Do not bring me in to unrelated subthreads.
She said there were two baskets in his supporters, one full of deplorables, the other full of nice people.
Nice but stupid, who couldn’t see that Trump was awful and needed to be reached out to by the side of niceness and decency and educated out of their stupidity. It was a foolish comment however we slice it, and it was probably down to her career on the after-dinner speech circuit, where she slipped up for a moment and forgot this wasn’t another one of those paid gigs where whatever she said would be in private or, if repeated, only a second-hand account, but a fundraiser as a candidate the presidency with the media covering it and reporting on it.
She fell back into an accustomed role because of force of habit and mental associations, and made a comment that could and was used against her. In fact, she set herself up: the “basket of deplorables” was the punchline, and she waited for the audience to finish laughing, before going into “and in the second basket are the nice dim-wits”.
Not ~50% of the electorate, just ~50% of Trump’s supporters.
Nobody likes being made the butt of a joke. If you’re setting someone up for rich white gay guys to laugh at, can you be surprised they’re not going to appreciate it and will likely not vote for you? And even if you’re one of the nice dimwits, you will probably not like being told you’re too thick to realise you’re being used, and it’s much more probable that the difference between the two baskets got elided and yeah, on the figures of the popular vote, insulting Trump supporters/voters was insulting 46.7% of those who voted (so nearly half the electorate, or at least those of the electorate who turned out to vote).
EDIT: Ooh, and I see it wasn’t actually a stumble, it was deliberate, because she was regurgitating a phrase she used in an earlier interview. So it wasn’t a slip of the tongue that she later regretted using, it was something that was probably cooked up by her campaign, trialled in the first interview, and then used in her speech at the fundraiser gala deliberately, and she only half-apologised when it got her in the soup instead of boosting her with the nice dimwits:
Link to interview on Youtube, complete (alas) with crappy comments (please ignore them).
So her apology really was one of those “I’m sorry that you feel that way” non-apology apologies.
Here’s the other part of the quote:
In context, it is obvious that “half” was not being used in a statistical sense. Clinton’s point was that there were two groups of Trump supporters — the group who actively liked the ugly rhetoric, and the group who didn’t care about the rhetoric, felt left behind, and just wanted a change — and that it was important to listen to and campaign for the votes of the second group.
In other words, almost exactly the opposite of the normal characterization of her remarks.
Compare it to Trump’s quote about Mexico not sending their best, but that there are still good Mexicans. Which are people being more charitable towards?
That obviously depends on what context you’re talking about. In this comment section, I appear to be the first one to actually bring up the context of Clinton’s remarks. Meanwhile, Scott wrote an entire post about how the Mexican quote is totally not racist.
Are you trying to claim that Trump’s comments about Mexico sending America rapists were somehow taken out of context? Would you care to provide the context that makes them seem more reasonable?
@ Wander
A throwaway line at the end of your statement, which thus far has been aimed at vilifying a complicated and diverse collection of people, remarking on how you “suppose” some are good is not equivalent to a paragraph of words aimed at finding common ground and extending empathy. If there is more to the Trump quote, I would gladly take that into account.
Also, Iain, this is the first time I have seen the rest of Hillary’s comment, so thank you.
Yes, it’s a form of political correctness.
Establishment liberals just got a first-hand demonstration of the country’s reaction to their moralizing campus-and-internet SJ wing. Namely, that a fair chunk of people were so offended by said moralizing that they were eager to elect a patently unqualified and unfit president just because it would piss off the moralists.
Thus, exhorting the campus-and-internet SJ crowd to quit offending people. AKA political correctness.
Citation needed. Prove to me that this is why people voted for Trump.
My theory is that it was entirely economics related and has little to nothing to do with any sort of anti-PC backlash.
For LCL’s main point, “why people actually voted for Trump” would matter less than “why SJ people think people voted for Trump.” And while I’ve seen some analysis along the lines of economics, I’ve definitely also seen a lot of theorizing that Trump supporters just got tired of being called racist, misogynist, etc. And, in turn, a lot of people admonishing others to quit that.
From the SJ viewpoint, I think it’s less “Trump supporters got tired of being called racist” and more “Trump supporters actually are 100% racist”
They don’t view this as a backlash against SJW, they view it as an expressive confirmation of everything they’ve always said is true about America being racist, homophobic, misogynistic, etc.
@Matt M
The SJW worldview admits only to confirmation. Trump being elected means American is horrible and they need to double down on the abuse. Hillary being elected would have meant they have a mandate to double down on the abuse of the horrible people who voted against her.
@ Matt M
My theory is that it was entirely economics related and has little to nothing to do with any sort of anti-PC backlash.
If I were a Rust Belter, and were voting entirely on my pocketbook, Trump would be the obvious choice. He wants to bring back their old jobs: she (and I) want to finish killing off the dirty fuel jobs and start over with a new clean fuel economy.
The Belters know that the old economy worked for them. Whether a new clean fuel economy can be invented, no one knows yet.
Those two aren’t exclusive:
No, not even a little bit. Anything else you were confused about, or are you good?
Warning: more statements along these lines will result in a ban
what the hell
Color me confused also. I also have no clue as to what these lines are. I also wonder if Scott maybe replied under a different comment than he meant to, which is easy to do on long threads here. At least, I seem to keep doing it somehow.
Wait, so of all the acrimonious stuff that’s been said on this site recently, *this* is the one you choose to get the letters out for?
Scott’s decision to change the policy is a sign that the standards are going to change. Probably more important is the return of the report button: if the acrimonious comments are a recent phenomenon, he probably let them pass because he didn’t know about them.
Scott couldn’t possibly read all of the comments on the site. Unless he just happens to read an offensive comment, he apparently just looks at comments that someone clicks the report button on.
You just click on that, and then you find out whether Scott agrees with you on what is vs. is not offensive. Because if he agrees with you, he bans or warns that person. And if he doesn’t, he doesn’t.
I didn’t notice the Report button for a very long time after I came to this site– obviously– since I have probably suffered more abuse than anyone in the history of this site, and did not realize that I could report it and see whether or not Scott agreed that it was in fact abuse.
The really puzzling thing is that it was a response in kind to an aggressive, unsupported rhetorical question. Not only does it not seem like the sort of thing that’s outside the bounds of the acceptable, it doesn’t even seem worse than what it’s replying to. Yes, it’s not the best comment in the world, yes it would be better not to be provoked, but a norm that this sort of unsupported demand requires a supported response is not a sustainable one.
Yeah, all he did basically was answer No to a rhetorical question. But I still wonder if Scott meant to reply to some other comment e.g. to the rhetorical question itself?
But, far be it from me to understand Scott or what goes on at this site. It’s frequently a mystery to me. I am obviously from a rather different background than most people here.
One of the ones. Earthly Knight got an outright two-week ban.
Did he? Oh, I must have missed that.
@heelbearcub. Also @moon
Not sure you will see my reply to you the in last open thread as there’s now a new one, so linking you to it here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/open-thread-62-75/#comment-437235
Carvenvisage, I did find now what you posted on the other thread.
“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.”
Yes, I actually did read it, and I actually did ask myself whether it was true or justified, before I replied. I know that there is a lot of distrust between people of different political views here, so I certainly understand why you would think that someone like me, from a different political tribe, who disagrees with you, did not read what you said and think about it. Perhaps you believe what you believe so strongly, that it seems obvious that if I even read what you said, it would be obvious to me that it is true.
“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.”
I am assuming that what you are referring to here are your and my last comments on the thread you were in, when you gave this latest reply. You last statements are unclear, so I don’t know for sure. I am certainly not going to go through some long thread trying to figure it out, if you don’t want to specify exactly what you are referring to. I find myself in the position that I often find myself in, on this board– not willing to go to a whole lot of trouble to understand or communicate with someone who aims insults at me– and who is very clear in their insults, but not so clear in some of their other statements.
I know that different people are used to different ways of interacting. Perhaps most of the politically related discussion on this board will have to be carried out by those who don’t mind breaking each other’s noses and having their noses broken, metaphorically speaking, over the Internet. Because to some of us, that is not our idea of a civil discussion, so we will end up declining to participate.
It was a direct link so there shouldn’t have been any finding involved but sometimes they don’t work, I find. no pun intended.
Heelbearcub said that Scott wanted nothing more than to ‘crush political correctness’, and widen the overton window. I called this a blatantly dishonest, malicious, micragression, because that’s what it was and is, as I have explained and defended at unnecessarry length. Except perhaps, in retrospect, for the ‘micro’ prefix.
You jumped in right off the bat with
Not so much as lifting a pinkie to even contemptfully disdain the possibility that I was pointing something true and important (relativly speaking) out.
-Not even worth casting aside with an imperious wave of the hand: just launch straight into how this particular anthropoligical specimen has gone so far wrong, and how its failings reflect more broadly on humanity. Ever heard of ‘Bulverism’?
In my brief absence in that comment thread, you followed this up with
So spare me your sudden gentility. In the day it took me to get back to the thrad, you and HBC had not only decided I was clearly wrong, -Nothing to see here.
which would have been fine. -Just garden variety pathetic grasping. But you took it beyond that, below that, and started psychoanalysing why I’d gone so far wrong, and then making loud predictions about how you’d never here from me again, because I’m so obviously a troll or a moron.
(after only like a day !!)
So, I gave you the explanation, at length, and returned the favour of psychoanalysis. I even explicitly pointed out that this was what I was doing so that you wouldn’t get confused, and I graciously pointed out that my initial comment was hostile, and thus might set off someone to be ruder and stupider than they would otherwise.
(though of course it’s hard to point out when someone is trying to maintain plausible deniability for bad minded insults without being hostile)
So then you ignore the arguments and proof that, as I said, you jumped the gun: that you were bulvering away -and meanwhile I was right. because that’s what the facts seem, straightforwardly to be.
And instead start pearl clutching like you hold yourself to genteel and worthy standards of discussion rather than guffawing and gloating about how dumb I was in my (brief) absence, among other things. And as if if I had come out of nowhere with the aggressive psychoanalysing, rather than taken you up on the insults and rudeness you’d offered.
All i can say is that, if you really do have standards of discussion, ones you you seek to uphold, evidence seemingly to the contrary, they are very different indeed than mine.
The debatable things I’ve shown I believe in are:
calling a malicious insult a malicious insult. (whether it be subtle and carefully couched or not),
responding to like, with like.
Whereas you apparently believe in:
Whining about things you’re guiltier of than others, and who the person you’re complaining about is not guilty of.
gloating and guffawing about the wrongness-of before so much as engaging, let alone showning to be wrong
forming a quick 2 person consensus that a third person is obviously wrong, the minute they pop out and aren’t there to contradict you. (or is it, perhaps even, that you would do so right in front of someone?)
You also accuse me of being unclear in that thread, and say that I didn’t bother to point you to the thread. The hyperlink’s formatting is clearly to a comment, so again we have a case of you making a wrong snap-assumption, and building on that foundation of quicksand, but it may be an honest mistake, and I don’t know if that’s fair to point out, but why shouldn’t I, when dealing with something with such communication norms as yours?
You also say ‘I’m not so clear in my other statements’.
Without specifying which statements you mean, so I can, y’know, find them and defend them? Very broad of you. Really living up to those high standards.
I hear that you’re very angry with me. If I hurt your feelings, I apologize.
It is hard for me to keep track of individuals on the board. It’s not like in person, where you have a face and a voice to get used to. Some people here dish out a lot of abuse. It sure looks to me like liberals receive the majority of the abuse. Some people dish it out a lot, and are hard as nails and can take it when someone slams them back. And some people can dish it out but can’t take it.
I can’t see any point in trying to have/continue this discussion, since slinging insults and blame back and forth is unappealing to me. I think blame and shame are rarely useful– especially not in discussions.
I hope for you to have a happy Thanksgiving. After all, your guy won, so I guess you have reason to be happy.
I’m Not particularly happy that trump won. Mostly just scared. It’s like electing Nero’s horse: Great protest value, (imo necessarry), but dangerous for everybody.
My (probably highly biased) perception of abuse-ratios is that the two recent bans are pretty representative: Earthly knight was banned for two weeks for almost literally constant belittling talking down to and demeaning people over days if not a week or more. On the other side of the aisle some commenter who’s username I’ve never noticed before got a three month ban for a single comment calling HBC an evil stupid communist.
Certainly the latter is more directly characteristic of the term ‘abusiveness’, but imo the former is clearly way more harmful, and requires much more bad faith.
But it’s Scotts rules and he’s in favor of niceness and kindness, -gentle sounding things, not something more generic like ‘fidelity’, or indeed something with an opposite emphasis, like ‘honour’.
So you cant say Scott hasn’t given people at least a little warning to be wary of more open /direct forms of hostility.
I think answering claims that accompany social aggression without answering/pointing out the social aggression is pretty terrible in the long run, and it’s easier to just sigh and move on rather than challenging (conversational) aggression.
And doing so often requires venturing out on the shaky ground of two out of three, having thrown kindness temporarily to the side.
But I think this is good and healthy: without people occasionally taking umbridge at subtle (or not so subtle) rudeness, -and putting their case forth for people to judge for themselves, there’s no way to avoid an equilibrium where needling people is free social leverage- disincentive for people to disagree with you: so at some point you have to point out that you think a thing is a needle -and people will need to judge whether it is or not.
(imo, ymmv)
Anyway, May you live long and prosper, and I hope life finds you well.
@Stellaathena
My reply re: correspondence theory of truth. In particular this comment.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/13/open-thread-62-5/#comment-434435
My reply is being eaten for some reason when I post, so I’m now trying a pastebin link (website like imgur but for text):
http://pastebin.com/KGvsdcB2
(Accidentally left formatting in, but leaving it like that, as the italics emphasis is important.
Why is food so cheap? Can I buy a tin of peaches at aldi for 60 cents, (more) because
A) People are suffering or exploited badly somewhere else
or
B) Mechanisation, division of labour, streamlinging, economies of scale, make the harvesting, transport, packing, slicing, etc etc, all very cheap?
-How much am I benefiting from other people’s misery as a plain old everyday ‘westener’?
Hopefully someone can give me an idea on this.
It seems like a really important question, but all I have are a a few observations, theories, and speculations. Which I can’t fit together into a useful basic-logical-framework for the problem, let alone a quantitive grasp of things.
Halp!
Factory farming is a big part of why meat is so cheap. And factory farming is arguably highly immoral, if animal suffering has any moral value at all.
He specified “people”.
Well, to be pedantic he also specified peaches.
Probably he’s wondering how common are products that are made in sweatshops or how poorly treated are agricultural workers. I don’t want to speak definitively about it without being able to address the whole supply chain, etc.
Well, I don’t see anything immoral about cheap peaches, though some claim GMOs are bad for you. More importantly, I think, we definitely sacrifice flavor for appearance and durability at most groceries: plants are bred now more for the latter than the former.
(reposted from above)
But yes, I understand the question; what I was sort of trying to say was, if you’re worried about the morality of cheap food, I think factory farming is by far more morally problematic than paying undocumented workers low wages under the table to pick fruit.
And what I was trying to say is, not everyone is willing to sell out the human race for the good of the chickens.
And what I was trying to say is, not everyone is willing to sell out the human race for the good of the chickens.
Those who are willing have given in to either the Dark Side or The Far Side, I’m not sure which.
“I think, we definitely sacrifice flavor for appearance and durability at most groceries”
True of fresh fruit, but the question was about canned peaches.
@Randy M yes that’s basically what I’m wondering
@Onyomi as it happens I’m a vegetarian. I’m thinking purely in terms of international rather than interspecies transactions.
I would say good point though- -except for how arrogant that would be on my part, lol.
I think among other things, we are really good at shipping now.
I don’t remember the source, so it could be totally bogus (but hopefully younger me knew not to trust bogus sources)
But I remember something about the cost to ship cotton from the US to China, turn it into a T-shirt, and ship it back to the US costing a little over a dollar per shirt. Regardless of the factory conditions in china, this sets the cost of shipping something to china and back at way less than I would have thought.
I think this is a considerable part of the equation, because everything is expensive as hell on Guam because the don’t have easy access to a major shipping port. In fact I imagine prices go up at some proportion with your distance from major shipping ports.
Thanks, that’s just the sort of information that I don’t have and wouldn’t think to search for
$1 per shirt is actually more than I would have expected- I work in ecommerce, and I can easily get a container full of something from China for cost-of-goods plus $800, and according to googling you can get about 36,000 shirts in one 40′ container.
That was including manufacturing cost, which might well be the bulk of the cost. It might also have been total cost, so including the price of the cotton, I am not sure, in any case as someone with no knowledge of it, it set the price of freight shipping at lower than I had assumed.
That’s interesting. What’s included in that price? Is it from Chinese port to US port, from Chinese factory to US port, or Chinese factory to your warehouse?
I knew that shipping a container was cheap, but I didn’t realize it was that cheap.
“A) People are suffering or exploited badly somewhere else”
Evaluating this depends on the comparison you use.
Compared to you and people you are likely to know, third world farmers work crazy hours in backbreaking labor for wages that seem like sustenance (at best) in conditions we would almost certainly consider exploitative.
But compared to their relevant peers and colleagues their life is – well, average. They are almost certainly better off being able to sell their peaches to Del Monte or whoever than they were before (otherwise, they would simply choose not to sell to Del Monte).
I don’t think that proves anything. If I was a really big shipping or harvesting corporation, then I don’t imagine I would find it too complex to force small scale farmers to sell to me on my terms.
-Infracstructure on that scale takes a lot of setting up, capital, etc.
So presumably there would be massive entry costs to the kind of competition that makes supply and demand a decent approximater of value.
In the absence of which there is only a ridiculous leverage advantage that puts the farmer at hypothetical-me /del monte’s mercy? Or?
That’s my initial reaction anyway: Why would supply/demand work here, and why wouldn’t power overrule that even if it did?
On the other hand, picking a peach and slicing isn’t actually that much work. 60 cents is roughly 10 minutes at minimum wage where I am, but I could prepare several can-fulls of peaches in that time, -without the benefit of any mechanisation, (with which I imagine each one might be sliced more on the scale of a single second, just positioned and sliced through by an appropriately shaped blade)
-so without knowing the facts I find it equally plausible that either people are compelled to work unbalancedly hard to inneficiently pack and ship these things, just so I can have things on the other side of the world which don’t naturally grow here*, and live like lords couldn’t 200 years ago, -or that automation + scale simply makes it very straightforward and streamlined.
So how do you know the peach farmer works ridiculous hours at backbreaking labour? Is it just common knowledge?
*(if peaches even don’t. no idea. -if not, then mangos or something)
A part of the reason that food is cheap is because the people who do the small scale stuff (picking peaches, putting cans of peaches on the shelf) get paid almost nothing. There are people who get paid more in the supply chain but the stuff they do scales up more. Whether you think people should get paid shit because they merely put cans on shelves depends on your priors.
Modern food production is really a fascinating area, and if you don’t know much at all about how so much safe, nutritious (and fattening, and weird) food is available to the world, man, I envy you, because you have a lot of cool stuff to learn about.
But the short version is “B”. There are lower-class and low income people (to include both migrants and native-born) working food production in every developed nation. It is true that most of them are working long hours in sometimes harsh weather conditions. But do remember that if those cheap peaches were not available to you, then there would not be any money in producing them. The peaches have been available in cheap cans for longer than a peach tree lives – someone deliberately planted that tree in the expectation of being able to harvest the fruit and sell it to you.
In the absence of modern global food trade, the poor peasants would be working harder, with poorer tools, with less literacy, fewer material goods (like phones and clean cotton underwear) and the peasants would be more of us. Maybe even you and I.
Rejoice in your clean cotton underwear, in your washing machine, your cheaply printed paperback book, and your canned peaches. The peasant sure is happy about them.
I’d like to solicit opinions on why it’s dangerous to criticize Islam. This claim is currently in the MSM thanks to General Flynn, but it’s a meme they’ve been using since late 2001.
Are the journalists warning “Don’t criticize Islam; you could get killed by an offended Muslim”, is it some abstruse thing about it being morally dangerous to let prejudice into your white heart, or what?
It seems obviously in our interest (as a country) to marginalize radical terrorist groups by any available means. Making it clear through our diplomacy that we don’t consider their words or actions to speak for Islam as a whole is one such means.
When Flynn or whoever says that Islam is a political system, for example, and criticizes it on those grounds, he implicitly concedes that the theocratic mode of government is the “true” Islamic system, meaning you write off secular majority-Muslim states in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Western Africa, you write off states with codified balances of power such as Lebanon or Indonesia, you write off every secular nationalist or socialist movement, and you write off every Muslim minority currently assimilating in a Western country. We should be elevating these as examples, not dismissing them in favor of spotlighting the takfiris.
Agreed.
What is the evidence that this has successfully marginalized radical terrorist groups?
Since the idea that Islamist theocracy is the only true form of Islam is a key part of terrorist ideology, it seems likely that espousing that idea would help the terrorists who hold it.
What evidence would you accept? International relations isn’t exactly an empirical field where we can run double-blind trials of “universe where we define our conflict against Islam as a whole” against “universe where we don’t.” Or where we can quantify and control for the “don’t needlessly topple secular regimes” variable to isolate the “don’t declare war on Islam” variable. Logical, consistent arguments are all we really have.
You’re making it sound like I’m the only one with a basement full of different cages of mice I’m trying to teach different religions, like I’m some kind of weirdo or something.
Do you have an example?
I’m confused, do you think that any appeal that people not be prejudice is abstruse, or is it just confusing for you in the particular case of Islam?
I think his point was more about people conflating criticism with irrational prejudice, not whether prejudice is ok.
Is this just a ‘can we talk about statistics’ argument, or are there some real criticisms of Islam that don’t at least flirt with prejudice that people want to say but can’t?
I think the Quarn is too long!?
I don’t understand what you mean by “can we talk about statistics” and I didn’t really intend to participate in an argument. I was trying to make a clarification because you said you were confused.
Are there real criticisms of Islam? Sure, lots. Ask a Shia about the whacky things Sunnis believe or as a Sunni about the silly things Shia believe.
In my opinion, it’s not much worse than most religions, but that doesn’t mean the only criticisms of it are “they’re different,” “i don’t like brown people,” or “they don’t love jesus enough.”
I was confused, and your clarification did not really change the situations that I saw, but your clarification did potentially push it in one direction.
“can we talk about statistics” is the, somewhat common call to talk about statistics and how they relate to race, and not be lambasted for being racist. Which I don’t really have a problem with, but I think should be phrased as such. The ‘irrational’ component of what you said is what made me think of this, because statistics have a rational connotation.
This is what I was hinting at with my ‘The Quarn is too long!?’ joke, this is not ‘criticism of Islam’ that anyone in America would seriously censure or care about.
So the question is, what kind of criticism does Le Maistre Chat want to make, that the left wing media would consider dangerous.
Sorry if it felt like I was attacking you, or responding aggressively, that was not what I intended. Thank you for trying to clarify their position for me.
No apology necessary, but I do think your first response to Chat’s question was uncharitable.
I think his question was reasonable. If there are journalists who say you shouldn’t criticize Islam (I’m not aware of any such journalists but I took the question at face value), what is their reasoning?
If their reasoning is that such criticism invites violent reprisals, then such a journalist would indeed censure even esoteric criticisms of Islamic theology (which are unrelated to prejudice).
If the journalists just have an overly-sensitive racism detector then they may not care about the theological stuff, but they might take issue with criticisms pointing out the correlation between Islam and terrorism or the propensity for Muslim-majority countries to have an overtly theocratic bent (whether or not these are the strongest critiques in the world I make no judgement, but they are at least superficially valid and not necessarily born of prejudice).
I assume the criticism Chat was referring to was broad claims about all of Islam of the form used by General Flynn.
These criticism seem to be stock standard negative stereotypes about large groups of people based on little more than gut feeling, and seem like pretty classic appeals to prejudice.
Thus framing the question that I lead in with, is there something in particular about Islam that makes this ok, or are you making the more general claim that this kind of stuff should be acceptable.
I will admit it is not the most charitable interpretation of what they said, the General Flynn name drop heavily coloring my assumptions.
Gets back to my statistics point, which might just be a product of my personal idiosyncrasy. But I consider that stuff to be, at least nominally, based in objective reality and way more acceptable(and debatable). Versus the vague and often nonsensical stuff Flynn spouts off about Islam.
Freedom of religion means nothing if you’re only free to have a “good” religion.
Also, something about strategic alliances with the Gulf States, maintaining access to oil supplies, and other such realpolitik.
And probably other things too, depending on the speaker. It’s not either-or.
Freedom of religion clearly meant something to a whole lot of people who never envisioned it meaning anything other than “pick your favorite Judeo-Christian denomination, and we get to look at you funny if you insist on Judaism”. May not have meant what you or I want it to mean, but that’s not at all the same as “means nothing”.
I think that it is possible at least some of the Founding Fathers (being elite intellectual types with religious beliefs at odds with those of the general population) might have planned for freedom of religion to encompass deism and possibly even atheism. In fact, after some brief research I think you are just plain wrong. Quote from Jefferson’s autobiography: “a singular proposition proved that [a bill for establishing religious freedom’s] protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word “Jesus Christ,” so that it should read, “a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;” the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination”. He is pretty clearly considering non-Judeo-Christian religions.
When did I ever say anything about Thomas Jefferson?
At least some of the founding fathers were deists, Jefferson among them. A few, e.g. Thomas Paine, may have been atheists.
That leaves a whole lot of for-real God-Fearing Christians of one denomination or another among the founding fathers, and not really a whole lot of tolerance for outright rejection of Christ.
I think “the insertion was rejected by a great majority” was intended to be the key phrase there.
Though it seems pretty clear that even the ones who weren’t particularly tolerant of non-Christian religions understood that’s what the federal standard permitted.
E.g., in the North Carolina debates, we have future Supreme Court justice James Iredell confident that Americans won’t vote for “pagans and Mahometans”: “it is never to be supposed that the people of America will trust their dearest rights to persons who have no religion at all, or a religion materially different from their own”, but he argues, apparently successfully, for leaving that in the hands of the voters.
(Iredell also discusses ways in which non Judeo-Christians can take legally binding oaths, because “if none but Christians or Jews could be examined upon oath, many innocent persons might suffer for want of the testimony of others”. He gives the example of an east Indian “Gentoo” in England who swore by kissing the foot of a priest.)
Governor Johnston follows that up with:
There may have been Founders who assumed that freedom of religion extended only to Christians or at most to Jews. (And it certainly didn’t stop some states from having established churches into the early 19th century.) But at least in NC, the specific example of Muslims was raised in open debate and accepted. Opponents there certainly couldn’t have tacitly assumed that it only meant Christians after that.
Who cares what it meant to them? I’m an ethnically Jewish atheist, and freedom to be whatever kind of Christian I want means nothing to me.
I suppose I can give it some respect in historical contexts, even cuius regio eius religio was a far cry better than endless war, but these days it just doesn’t cut it anymore.
Consider it from this angle:
Will becoming more Muslim make the United States better or worse? Should we adjust policy accordingly?
Will having more men make the US better or worse? (Crime statistics suggest worse.) Should we adjust policy (e.g. regarding eugenics) accordingly?
A better example would be, say, refusing visas and refugee status to single young men with low socioeconomic status, since it’s more directly comparable to the arguments about refusing visas and refugee status to Muslim immigrants. And…unless I’m mistaken, that position was actually staked out in at least theoretical terms and got some support the last time immigration issues were discussed here.
I could certainly see a case for it at least as strong as the cases for restricting Muslim immigration.
I feel like this was supposed to be a reductio ad absurdum, but it actually would be wise to keep the sex ratio from diverging far from 50:50, and there may be areas of policy where that turns out to be a relevant consideration.
Well, from the point of view of very conservative people, they do have some pluses such as high religiosity, traditional gender roles, and opposition to homosexuality and other Western vices.
I sometimes have to wonder what the right’s real beef with Muslims is. Yes, they’re a problematic minority who spreads its religion by means of warfare and intolerance, and that poses a big security risk. Yes, the more traditional ones are so traditional (child marriage, FGM, punishment by mutilation, honour killings) that they come off as obviously barbaric. Yes, they form a separate cultural group with its own languages and system of writing (& food, & habits, &c.) that they tend to integrate poorly and communicate preferentially amongst each other, which harms the social fabric.
But, somewhere along the continuum from the worst parts of Afghanistan to the level of Westernisation of their liberal allies, there seems to be a sweet spot wherein Muslims that have assimilated up until that point (no violence, no illegal stuff, better integration & some change in attitudes towards the West) might make extremely promising right-wing voters. Haven’t you folks thought of that?
Also, has it occurred to anyone that some older-style liberals may regard the “God & Guns” contingent as less than desirable for the same reasons (of a lesser degree) that you regard Muslim immigrants as such?
They did think of that. In 2000, Bush aggressively courted the Muslim vote; there was a general attitude in the GOP that these guys were a “minority” vote they could get. There are a lot of reasons that went away after 9/11 and not all of the blame there should fall on the right.
“Are the journalists warning “Don’t criticize Islam; you could get killed by an offended Muslim”, is it some abstruse thing about it being morally dangerous to let prejudice into your white heart, or what?”
I think this is a rare case where it’s both – and you can pick and choose your argument depending on which side you’re on and which side you’re talking to and still be fairly effective. A liberal who doesn’t want Islam criticized because it’s unfair for white people to judge disenfranchised groups can say to the conservative (who doesn’t give a crap about offending disenfranchised groups) “Look, even if you don’t care about offending them, you STILL shouldn’t insult them because it will make them more violent against our troops overseas – you don’t want our troops to die, do you?”
That sounds like an argument aimed at conservative pragmatists; aren’t you worried about it backfiring horribly among conservative rationalists? Hell, even among the pragmatists, if you do convince them of the premise “Don’t say anything bad about group X or they’ll become violent and murderous” then the correct response is “I’ll no longer say anything bad, but boy I’m going to be thinking bad things awfully loud!”
Eh, I think there is an unambiguous distinction between speech that actively encourages and incites violent behavior, and speech that people attempt to criticize/punish with violence. Even in the first case, I think the bar should be set VERY high for actual legal action (immanent lawless action is a decent standard).
People who use terrorism to explain why Islam is bad are doing what amounts to some really precise, context free cherry picking. The US has killed quite a few people just in the last couple of decades, a lot of these deaths are of questionable utility vis a vis national security (we might have made some poor choices lately, guys!), but Christians, even the ones that want to believe the US is a Christian nation, can hide behind the fact that western states are secular, and not even bother to attempt to account for that kind of bloodshed while they count all the deaths accruing to Mohammedans.
You could have arguments about Islam that account in a non-trivial way for their doctrine, but that would entail actually knowing more about the religion than what gets spoon fed through propagandistic channels. Everyone’s heard that one guy who has never read a book about theology assert with supreme confidence that Islam is a “religion of conquest,” or some such thing. The point isn’t that a critique can’t be made, it’s that the people who want to make such critiques start out hating Islam before they know anything about it, and all they engage in are ex post facto arguments in service of their prejudices.
In the long run it’s just easier to default to “y’all are bigots” than trying to explain to every aspiring dilettante in comparative religions that they haven’t done their homework.
What do you mean “hide behind”? It’s true. Even if you take the 100% Michael Moore position that everything done by the West in the ME over the past few decades has been to create violence and chaos, it was done in the name of secular political interests, not in the name of Christianity.
This moral equivalence is a little infuriating.
Interesting strategy. How did it work out in the last election?
People who read three lines from the Koran and then assert all Muslims are evil are, objectively, unquestionably, inarguably, bigots. Whether saying they are has political utility or not is irrelevant.
If the US can murder people in the name of a thing called “secular political interests,” why are we obliged to account for Islamic atrocities under a religious banner? Clearly, the fact that a state has a theocratic design does not mean that it does not also have secular interests. Either way you’re just playing a shell game.
W… what? Maybe because we want to understand what’s going on and our declared enemies’ motivations for acting as they do? I don’t think that’s a particularly controversial statement…?
And just because a state has secular interests doesn’t mean that state doesn’t have theocratic interests, too, so… ???????
I don’t even understand what you’re trying to get at here.
You don’t think there are three lines in Mein Kampf that would make you a bigot by this definition?
Just because some people say a book is holy doesn’t mean it isn’t evil. It’s a poor argument
I’m not sure what the implications of this counter-argument are supposed to be, really. I only ever got through the first page of Mein Kampf, but the reason wasn’t because it says a lot of stuff about how to pan fry Jews. It’s because it said a lot about Providence, and Hitler’s belief that God has inspired him, and the reason that was intolerable was because Hitler said it and I already knew who he was.
I don’t know off the top of my head if there is anything clearly and openly evil in it, but the point is that there could be, just like there could be in the qu’ran, or the bible, or any book that people choose to make the subject of a religion.
And, not 100% clear or open, but imo the concept of ‘lebensraum’ alone is almost enough to write off nazi philosophy as evil.
At least once it gets implemented in some thoughtless line like (and of course we need ‘living space’ to expand and live in, -populations naturally grow beyond their means, UNLIKE OUR NEIGHBOURS LOL) -except leaving that last bit unsaid.
There are probably more evil things in the qu’ran. By all accounts there are plenty of evil things in the bible, and the qu’ran in particular is worse. But never mind the qu’ran in particular- The point was that three lines from a holy book could potentially let you label all adherents of the religion as evil, more or less. Or failing that, evil or stupid.
Yes. If you want to understand their motivations… you might want to actually inquire into their motivations. I bet you it’s a hell of a lot more complicated than “Mohammed told me to kill whitey.”
Granted, it is more complicated.
But at the same time discussing their motivations without acknowledging Islam’s role is kind of like discussing the last 100 years of Russian history without mentioning Lenin or Communism.
When people say they’re committing terrorist acts in the name of their religion, the religion has to be considered the largest part of the context. To conclude otherwise, we’d need some compelling reason not to take them at their word; in fact, we have the opposite, since many of them demonstrate a willingness to die as well as kill. I don’t think we necessarily need to know anything about Islamic doctrine in order to conclude that there’s a problem here. If large numbers of people started doing suicide terrorism in the name of a brand new religion called Zyzygism, we would know Zyzygism is probably bad. We’d still want to know more, but we wouldn’t expect that additional information to make us think much better of it.
If all knowledge of Islam vanished, terrorism would decrease sharply. In large parts of the world, it would practically disappear. That’s enough to make a basic value judgment about Islam. (OK, absent some really implausible cases where Islam is the only thing preventing a massive catastrophe.) I think the old adage about not opening your mind so much your brains fall out applies. Religion seems to be afforded charity that would be absurd in relation to almost anything else. In a world where enormous research studies are performed to determine whether or not playing Grand Theft Auto V makes people violent, we’re somehow still arguing about whether Islam does?
None of this has anything to do with bigotry. You can’t be bigoted against an idea. Assuming that some unknown individual Muslim(s) are violent would be bigotry.
You really think when Palestinians commit terrorist acts against Israelis, they only care about what Allah thinks? That there are simply no material conflicts animating the decision to do something like that? When Osama Bin Laden attacked the US, it wasn’t because he thought God told him to. He resented US influence over Saudi Arabia. This is something he even says. There is indeed a cultural component to Muslim resentment of the West, but that’s about a whole lot more than just religious stuff. Even ISIS, which apparently intends to create a state in order to bring certain Islamic prophecies to fruition, is hopelessly mired in, you know, reality problems. Guys who were ousted when the US disbanded Saddam’s military and needed freaking work, a Sunni sect that refused to accept being ruled over by what they considered to be a Shia state, and long standing historical conflict between two muslim sects.
When you say terrorists only kill themselves for religious reasons, you’re also saying “I don’t really care what’s going on. I heard a guy say a thing and it comports with my preferred way of painting him and his people and so I’m just going to roll with that.”
His point is pretty clearly that,
so to then argue against him by saying religion is not 100% of the context, is just a blatant strawman.
I don’t think religion is the only reason, no. But the Buddhists in Tibet have not been strapping bombs to themselves for the last sixty years of Chinese occupation. All kinds of people have very strongly felt political goals, but only in the Muslim world is terrorism widely considered a means of achieving them, and I must reiterate that the terrorists themselves say Islam is the key factor. I don’t understand the reluctance to believe them. I’d need some kind of really compelling alternative theory before I’d refuse to accept the obvious one.
4/5ths reasoning at its finest. “Largest part of the context” basically just means “My blaming Islam is legit.” It’s not even an attempt at hedging the argument. And it’s still wrong. People have real problems. Then they have a language and a set of ideas and slogans they use to explain themselves. The real problems are always the most important thing. If you aren’t trying to understand them, you aren’t trying to understand anything.
Edit Actually I don’t care, if you’re not interested in arguing in good faith, you’re not interested.
The thing you call terrorism other people call asymmetric warfare. For sure it’s mostly not what, say, ISIS does, at least half the time. They have their own tactics that aren’t really distinguishable from other kinds of light infantry/cavalry engagement. It’s true there’s a history of Islamic terrorist tactics and techniques that goes all the way back to the Algerian War. It exists precisely because they’re just tactics you might use if you wanted to fight but could never win in a straight up face to face conflict.
Spookykou, you might be qualified to referee this debate. You might not be. How would you know? We can spend the next eternity arguing that the real problem is that the other guy isn’t being sufficiently charitable to us. Just another distraction.
I don’t see anywhere in that comment where he said that.
I lied, I do care.
Maybe my understanding of the Strawman concept is wrong.
Someone stated a position, you then argued against a ridiculous caricature of that position, which is dramatically easier to argue against.
When I called you out on it.
You responded with, no clearly they did not mean what they said, they meant the ridiculous caricature position.
…
Do you think ‘Literally 100% of the motivation for terrorism is Islam’ is a reasonable position? Honestly? In a world with 1.7 Billion or so Muslims, and plenty of non-Muslim terrorists. Do you honestly think that position you ascribed was not a strawman?
More over, do you think ascribing a less charitable position to the person you are arguing with, from their stated position, is arguing in good faith?
I mean, these feel like text book examples here, I must have an old edition of the book or something.
Actually, the thing people call terrorism is ALWAYS asymmetric warfare. By definition, any type of violent political action between non-state and state actors, or between state actors where the military power imbalance is too great to allow for conventional engagement is an example of “asymmetric warfare”.
If you mean to imply that there is some sort of ambiguity between, say, 9/11 and a Guerrilla group shooting up a military convoy, then I think you have a rather shaky grasp of these affairs.
If you are having some trouble understanding the difference, part of it can be that just because a person or group engages in terrorism, it does not mean they are not also using other tactics. For example, let us imagine a hypothetical cell of insurgents in Iraq, circa 2004, and a few different tactics and combinations of tactics.
Scenario 1: The cell emplaces IEDs with the primary goal of killing US Soldiers, destroying US military vehicles, and/or disrupting convoys and patrol operations. The cell takes some reasonable precautions to reduce civilian death toll (warns sympathetic populations before the attacks, chooses emplacement sites away from high traffic areas, etc). Category? Guerrilla/Irregular Warfare, Not terrorism, even if more civilians are killed than soldiers.
Scenario 2: The cell emplaces IEDs with the primary goal of killing US Soldiers, destroying US military vehicles, and/or disrupting convoys and patrol operations. The cell takes no precautions to reduce civilian death toll because they believe A) it’s not their moral responsibility anyway, it’s the Americans’ fault these tactics are necessary, B) the cause is so important that any level of collateral damage, however regrettable, is justified, or some combination of both or similar beliefs. Category? Quite possibly grounds for a war crimes prosecution against any survivors after the end of hostilities, but STILL not terrorism.
Scenario 3: The cell emplaces IEDs with the primary goal of killing US Soldiers etc. etc. AND of frightening the civilian population with the death and destruction in their midst, driving them away from cooperating with the occupying forces. They deliberately choose emplacement sites and detonation times to accomplish both goals simultaneously (this one was, IMO, the most common during the timeframe I was in Iraq). Category? Now here’s a case where there’s ambiguity. Not how to categorize it: This is both Guerrilla Warfare AND terrorism. However, in practice it’s probably going to be indistinguishable from Scenario 2 if you’re attempting to treat “War Crimes” and “Terrorism” differently. To my mind, a good reason not to (pick whichever you want to treat more summarily and harshly and use that standard for both).
Scenario 4: The cell emplaces IEDs with the primary goal of killing civilians and destroying non-military targets in order to frighten and ‘persuade’ the civilian population etc. etc. They choose emplacement sites and detonation times accordingly. A good RL example of this would be the guys who infiltrated the construction crew of a US-funded school, and placed explosives in the interstitial spaces of the building, in the foundation, etc. Thankfully they were found by an electrician before the building was finished. Category? NOW we are talking about good old fashioned terrorism.
I can think of a few targets that are debatable either way, civilians contractors and civilian government officials who direct, support, and/or enable but do not directly engage in combat operations, or police officers in an urban insurgency setting. Note that this would only hold for military attacks (keeping in mind minimizing collateral damage to the level justified by the military necessity of the strike), not kidnappings, ransoming, torture/execution videos, etc. And even with these sort of theoretical edge cases we have precedents from the body of treaties and historical deliberations on the law of armed conflict to guide us.
@stillnotking
“All kinds of people have very strongly felt political goals, but only in the Muslim world is terrorism widely considered a means of achieving them”
That is a ridiculous claim. Have you not heard of the IRA and UVF? ETA? The Tamil Tigers? The militant wing of the ANC? FARC? It’s interesting that you mention Buddhists. Are you aware of the Burmese Buddhists persecuting Rohingya Muslims? Relevantly, the Rohingya are not retaliating with terrorism.
“the terrorists themselves say Islam is the key factor”
It is definitely reasonable to accept that claim. But what you should not do is accept the related claims that the terrorists make, that they are the only true form of Islam and representative of it as a whole. If you accept that claim, you are playing into their hands.
I thought it was a stupid statement too, but there has been some commentary arguing that the Rohingya conflict is a race war masquerading as a religious conflict.
@rlms:
There’s an enormous quantitative difference between the number of Muslim terrorists and terror groups, and the number of left-wing/Catholic/Hindu etc. terrorists. I didn’t say Islam is the only religion (or ideology) capable of having terrorists, I said Islam inspires terrorism to a unique degree.
The point is often made that terrorism is a failure as a political strategy, and this is true. No doubt that’s responsible for the fates of the Tamil Tigers, the most violent factions of the IRA, and the majority of Communist terror cells in Europe: its failure eventually becomes impossible to ignore. The Muslim world is a glaring exception to this learning process, however. Muslim terror groups proliferate despite the fact that they rarely achieve their political goals. We can also look at opinion polling among Muslims to see that they are unusually willing to consider the option of terrorism in defense of their faith.
So I stand by my statement: Only in Islam is terrorism widely considered an effective solution to political problems.
@Spookykou:
Nope, those are still in the latest version of the textbook.
I wouldn’t worry too much about dwietzche;* he’s clearly hooked, so it’s only a matter of time before he’s Assimilated.
(* Hah! I just got it!)
Well part of the problem is people keep equivocating between Wahhabism and the rest of Islam…
We certainly have a disagreement about how to properly interpret what somebody else said. The difference is that while I acknowledge that there is a disagreement, you apparently believe the disagreement empowers you with the ability to unitarily adjudicate rules of fairness. I think, for the most part, people should try to understand each other, and for what it’s worth, I agree with you that it’s sort of pointless to have a discussion without at least making the attempt. But this isn’t a classroom, charity is only so useful, and at the end of the day there are going to be insoluble disagreements, not just about the world, but about what people mean when they talk about it, and resort to charity talk just becomes another way of working the refs.
Edit: There are people who like to extrapolate from examples of terrorism a general lesson about Islam. A LOT of them. That is an empirical fact. Whether it is reasonable for them to do so has no bearing on whether they do. But the motivation to do that doesn’t come out of nowhere, it is not difficult to identify, and even sophisticated attempts to mask that aren’t usually too convincing. He says here: “If all knowledge of Islam vanished, terrorism would decrease sharply. In large parts of the world, it would practically disappear.” Now, look maybe he’s right about that, and maybe terrorism is a uniquely bad form of violence that is worse than other kinds of violence other political and ethnic groups commit. Regardless, it’s the point he wants to make, that you’re saying, for whatever reason, he doesn’t want to.
Religion is politics and tribalism. If you get rid of any particular religion in a tribal society, people will find some other way of grouping themselves into tribes– and they will continue to be violent if they already were.
In fact, Sunnis and Shias have been fighting each other a lot in the M.E. It doesn’t make any difference to them that they are both Muslim. And in past history, the 2 sects didn’t always fight each other like they do now.
Violent tribal people fight and kills people– regardless of whether they have no religion– or even the same religion, with minor differences, like Sunni and Shia.
Moon:
What’s your evidence for that claim? I don’t know one way or the other, but it seem prima facie plausible that religions, which are not just politics and tribalism, but also specific sets of claims about the supernatural, offer to some extent at least, an additional reason for conflict and violence, rather than just a one-to-one substitute (assuming that the specific claims of that religion are conducive to engaging in violence in the first place).
If suicide terrorism is inherently bad (I don’t think so), I still don’t think this would follow.
Is engineering bad, because many of the 9/11 terrorists were engineers? Arguably it teaches ways of thinking that are exploitable to this kind of thing, but that’s a weakness, not overall badness. And who’s to say such weaknesses are even characteristic of engineering, more generally, anyway?
Though in the case of a religion you often have a holy book that’s a bit less abstract than a sort-of platonic form, like ‘engineering’.
Another example is the kind of bullshit science and borderline fraud we see coming out of, like, ‘the west’s’ science-priesthood. I think it’s pretty good evidence that the idea is bullshit, but not conclusive, and if it was that would still be indicting the institution (/institution cluster) rather than the platonic form of science.
Though again I think religions, being beholden to particular traditions and holy books and stuff, have at a minimum a bunch of arbitrary stuff that people made up to interfere with the business of approximating ideal platonic forms, -and sometimes little interest in it at all.
Which I suppose is kind of like saying ‘Islam’, (or ‘christianity’, etc), is more like a (historical) institution than like an ideal form in the process of instantiating itself, which I think is how religions are popularly conceived.
(which, say, maths is actually more like)
(and thence game theory, and thence morality, imo. (hopefully))
-So then only if the historically contingent institution has handed down eternal principles (as strong norms or something) will the religion resemble something that approximates that ideal. But most religions have nothing like that, or what they do have sucks so badly that they mostly ignore it.
-Leaving a lot more degrees of freedom /chaos for violent factions or individuals in an otherwise peaceful tradition/institution.
I’m considering Islam not just as a belief terrorists tend to have in common, but as the primary belief they cite for their actions. Speech is our biggest clue to understanding the link between ideology and behavior. It deserves an enormous amount of weight.
I completely agree that religions have to be considered as real institutions rather than ideal forms. That’s why I tend not to care very much about what some millennia-old documents say.
I agree with you, -was just having a go at the form of the argument. It’s something of hobby.
edit: Though millenia old documents can be big shaping influences. They’re the closest things to constitutions these institutions have. They’re, -to use a figurative phrase literally, -‘their bibles’.
Religions generally believe in their holy texts, so how those religions turn out is dependent on their holy texts. As presumably is how they can evolve, mutate, be influenced etc, right now.
If Islam is the main cause of Islamist terrorism, why are Western terrorists often not very religious? There are several factors that correlate better with Islamist terrorism than being religious, such as being a 2nd generation immigrant and petty criminal in the West, and being ruled by a bad government made up of members of a different Islamic sect to you in the Middle East (not to mention being male). Islamism (political Islam) is an important factor to look at when considering terrorism, but it isn’t inseparable from Islam as a worldwide religion, and there are many other relevant factors. The vast majority of Muslims are not Islamists, and furthermore the majority of Islamists are not violent. Do you think the Northern Ireland troubles would have disappeared if there had been no Protestant-Catholic differences? Islamism does play a larger role in relevant terrorism than religion did in the Troubles, but the situations are still similar.
Depends on what exactly you mean by that. You can have Islam without Islamism, I suppose, and certainly without terrorism. But Islamism uses Islam as its justification, and it can do that because Islam is a religion with expansionist traits, and so if you cherry-pick the right things, you get a justification for Islamism. Without that justification, Islamists would have rather a harder time doing what they’re doing. “We’re just a random bunch of guys who want to conquer the world” doesn’t sell so well without a religious underpinning.
For the same reason the most hard-core communists tend to come from comfortable bourgeoisie backgrounds. Terrorism (like activism) is a form of theater.
One reason could be that guilt stemming from their desires or temptations (for illicit sex or whatever unorthodox thing they want) makes absolution through martyrdom more appealing.
Another may be that these are already people with rage against the west or their own rulers, and their preachers stoke or direct that to advance the political causes of Islam. Whereas the more devout is also more self-controlled and doesn’t feel an anger that helps them take the steps toward violence.
Perhaps your definition of “very religious” is faulty. In people such as ourselves, perhaps that manifests in knowledge of doctrinal minutiae. In others it may manifest in regular church attendance and prayer. In others it manifests in never saying a bad word. Why assume it stops there?
Did the 15 century lord who alternated between whoring and buying indulgences not believe in his religion, or did he sincerely believe in it, especially the part that said he could get away with the whoring for the right price?
Your modern terrorist may sincerely believe that he has made a complete hash of his life and done things which he should not have. No surprise that he would then embrace the sincere religious belief that he can wipe that slate clean by killing a bunch of infidels.
@RLMS
I question the validity of your claim if you’re trying to claim that, for example, the perpetrator of the Pulse night club shooting was not very religious, as opposed to the fact that he either did not display his religious convictions ostentatiously and/or radicalized himself relatively recently before the shooting.
As for the comparison with Northern Ireland, the situations are only true if you agree with Pan-Arabism and/or Islamism, and see the presence of the US (or the West in general) in ANY Muslim majority country as illegitimate occupation. Even then, if you ascribe that as a major driver, it only explains Islamist terrorism after 2001, and we have decades of examples prior to that.
Furthermore, I actually DO think that without the religious component that the Troubles would have been less violent and would have ended sooner. Compare the relative size of the OIRA and INLA with the Provos.
If you are living a relatively comfortable life but are socially alienated, then religious ideology can be a powerfully attractive thing, replacing that sense of alienation with a sense of purpose, and giving you the answers you felt you were missing.
My first post was marked as spam for some reason, so I’m leaving out the pew link this time, but:
So, regarding “most Muslims” and “Most Islamist” claims, I was looking into that and I found something interesting. I would have definitely agreed with the claim “Most muslims do not endorse violent jihad”, but the last time I looked into the issue the studies and polls showed substantial minority support in the 15-25% range for Muslims in western countries and the 20-40% range for countries outside the West. The latest pew polls (I had a link, but it got marked as spam) have that number dropping markedly everywhere except Turkey (where it actually went UP) and among Palestinians where it held steady.
I find that an interesting change. I’m sure that liberals will say “well, since 2006-2008 we’ve disengaged in Iraq and drawn down in Afghanistan, that’s why”, while others will point to ISIS tarnishing the ‘brand’ of violent Islamism. I suspect it’s more the latter than the former myself, but the former probably plays some role too.
That said, I want to ask if you’re saying “The majority of Islamists are not currently under arms and actively fighting”, or saying “The majority of Islamists do not support violence as a legitimate tactic to advance their agenda”? If you’re saying the former, I agree but don’t think that means much, as the latter tells us much more about the nature of the ideology with respect to promoting/supporting violence.
If you’re claiming the latter, that the majority of Islamists do not support violence as a legitimate tactic, what forms the basis for that belief? I’d be interested in seeing any surveys specifically covering self-described Islamists/Political Islam/Pan-Islamist adherents, since most of the ones I’m aware of just targeted Muslims in general.
To follow up (trying to reconstruct the post that got eaten by the spam filter), I actually DO think that the Troubles would have been less violent and lasted a much shorter time without the religious component and history of religious conflict. Compare the relative size and influence of the PIRA post-split with the OIRA and INLA.
And I would also dispute the claim that ‘western terrorists are not very religious’ if by western terrorists you’re referring to ones like Nidal Hasan, Omar Mateen, the Tsarnaevs, etc. The fact that they A) adopted their radical religious beliefs relatively late in their lives relative to their attacks and/or B) did not live in accordance with their religious beliefs or make a public display of them did not mean that they were not religiously motivated.
They’re afraid that criticism of Islam might inadvertently give aid and comfort to the enemy, ie, right-wing populists.
I’d put my confidence behind this idea. People will go to great lengths to not agree with the outgroup, even if it means siding with an even more disagreeable far-outgroup.
Also, people are afraid that criticism of the entire religion of Islam may result in discrimination toward peaceful Muslims, which would make peaceful Muslims less likely to trust U.S. authorities or to report Muslims who are terrorists.
It does make sense to have peaceful Muslims on our side, in fighting terrorism. Some have already been killed in hate crimes. And we certainly don’t need any more of that. Our society needs to give peaceful Muslim who are citizens or legal residents, reasons to assimilate and feel comfortable in the U.S.
(I haven’t yet read the Koran, though I’ve taken a course in comparative religions, so take this with a grain of salt).
From what I’ve read and heard, the Koran seems awfully similar to the Old Testament – lots of rules, history of a people, glorifying military victory except when it isn’t. In short, something that provides a lot of text to pick-and-choose your underlying conclusion.
My impression is that what the various cultures surrounding Islam need is their version of the Enlightenment and humanism. Something that upholds intrinsic human value and the search for knowledge. One of the best places for that to occur would in in the Western world, and especially the US. I would hope that such a movement could be created here and then move back to the rest of the islamic world. Whether that will happen, I don’t know.
I worry about muslims who are in the US already. They certainly face discrimination. Fortunately, this seems to be small-scale, uncoordinated and stamped out when discovered. But it can’t be easy for them.
At a slight tangent, there was a rationalist movement (Mutazilite) in Islam in the ninth century, supported by a series of caliphs, most notably al Mamun. It included a pretty serious attempt to purge scholars who held the opposite position and refused to renounce it. But it eventually failed, although some of its ideas probably got incorporated in the winning orthodoxy.
Interesting to wonder what would have happened if it had won.
It being dangerous depends on who and where you are.
Its probably a bad idea for politicians who have to make great deals with people across the world to offend a deeply held religious belief like that. Tact is nice.
Its probably a bad idea to criticize the religion as a secular blogger or rock artist in some Islamic countries.
For someone like Sam Harris, someone who is not a politician and has less restraints, its a good idea for him to criticize the negatives.
As for the journalists warning, the South Park guys can’t even show muhammad without bomb threats.
Its probably a good idea to have a muslim ban, or only accept H1-B visas and only the actually brilliant. It seems like every other week there is another major muslim terrorist attack in Europe.
But how to do so without making some borderline countries more extreme? Good question.
“It seems like every other week there is another major muslim terrorist attack in Europe.”
It might seem like that, but it isn’t actually so. Maybe you should consider some of the others things that seem like good ideas.
No, most of them are stopped. France has had something like 400 terror plots or connections found and stopped this year. And most of the attacks that do happen are significantly smaller than Bataclan or Bastille day (though as has been discussed in this very blog those outliers are what really matter), and don’t get major international coverage.
Cite?
And how many of these “plots” are idle banter between two guys without either drive or clue except a third guy overhears them, incites them to some trivial overt act, and turns out to be a government agent/informant looking to run up his score?
According to this, there were 73 terrorist attacks in France in 2015, performed by any group, including both successes and failures. Out of those, only 15 were jihadist (47 separatist, 7 right-wing, the rest unspecified). However, the majority (377 out of 424) of arrests made were of jihadists.
My view is that it’s just an overactive immune response. The people who call any and all criticisms of Islam “dangerous” are prioritizing the safety and comfort of Muslims within Western society – people they perceive as the oppressed minority – and they perceive criticism of Islam as being a way or a path or a step down the slippery slope to oppressing them further. So they nip it in the bud.
Obviously this is a very bad heuristic, for it completely ignores nuance and greatly hampers the ability of people to actually discuss solutions to political problems. When both (a) “most Muslims are peaceful, but a relatively small minority of extremists are interpreting Islam in a way that causes great harm and suffering to others (mostly other Muslims), and it behooves us to try to understand why this problem is so unusually severe in Islam if we want to solve it” and (b) “we should suspect all Muslims of being ISIS agents” get responded identically with “That’s dangerous speech, shut up!” we’re in a very very bad situation wrt the discourse.
You are of course describing the very narrative of the Obama administration. Eight years of deliberately sticking their head in the sand (or worse, if the rumours of Muslim Brotherhood influence in the administration are anywhere near the mark) are now most decidedly over.
Trump is filling his administration with military/intelligence guys who were largely ignored and then dumped by the Obama administration, for precisely speaking inconvenient “truth to power”.
Time for some “Mad Dog”.
Finally having some success convincing the people in my social circles that a Trump presidency, if it’s bad, will most likely be bad in a dreary, depressing way that wears down your spirit rather than an explosive apocalyptic way that literally murders you and burns down your house.
It’s not exactly a hopeful message, but it does a better job of producing the grim determination that gets people through hard times than the gibbering hysteria that too many on the left are deliberately trying to create atm.
Questions like “who was the worst president ever and what was life like during their presidency” might help, if only because the only eras of America in which I think we could truly approach disastrous proportions were probably the civil war and the great depression (and the two presidents who presided over those things are lauded as great by all the official historians sooooooooo)
Pierce, Buchanan, and Hoover are not usually lauded as great, though of course you already knew that.
What’s your line of argument that a Trump presidency will be fairly bad rather than apocalyptic?
Every previous president’s term in office was not ‘Apocalyptic’, and you can even generalise president of USA to ‘leader of a stable democracy’ and interpret ‘Apocalyptic’ as something obviously too mild, like ‘Experienced negative real GDP growth’ or ‘major regression in civil rights’ or some such criteria that at least somewhat depends on a country’s government, and you’ll probably still be under 20% of leaders.
So if you blind yourself to details that are currently highly available and therefore seem super important but will barely register in whatever accounting people do of the effects of the Trump administration in another twenty years, not-Apocalyptic is a much more likely outcome because it’s a much more frequent outcome.
Creeping Irony: Newspaper articles scoff at people for repeating unsubstantiated creepy clown reports. They explain this behavior by repeating details about a study showing children find clowns creepy, reported on “independently” by Reuters and the BBC, which turns out not to exist.
Journalism was a mistake.
I had an interesting exchange recently.
After I took my date to a bus stop in the middle of night, I was walking home when I saw this group of four homeless-looking people who were behaving slightly aggressively. I walked past them, they started walking with me and a few of them shoot some questions at me. In particular, one of them who was slightly dark-skinned asked me “am I white or black?”
I thought about this for a moment and decided that the best reply is “You’re the same color as Obama.”
The slightly dark-skinned person joked and said something like “Yeah, my second cousin is Obama”. Another person said “Fucking racist shit, let’s beat him up”. He sounded quite hesitant and there wasn’t much conviction in his voice and everyone else ignored him and they went on their way.
My interpretation of this was that they meant to ask a question that seemingly doesn’t have any good answers from their perspective and then maybe harm me in some way if I do give a wrong answer?
I think my answer was pretty good because a) it was true b) I was comparing him to a powerful high-status person, so it’s quite hard to interpret it in a racist way.
Of course it would have probably been safer to ignore them totally.
Asking questions where any answer is an excuse to beat you up is standard bully behavior, so yeah. Not a bad dodge.
Is this sounding familiar?
Regarded as a no-hoper and a joke candidate, going up against a former office holder and another candidate who is vastly the favourite, this guy stunned everyone by winning the nomination to be the Republican party candidate in the forthcoming presidential election.
It’s all happening in France.
This is definitely the year of “right-wing parties get a shake-up”.
Oh, and can the media opinion-formers instruct me on this – would it be sexism not to vote for Marine Le Pen, given that she is a woman, and the only woman remaining in the race, going for election to the highest office in the land?
I mean, since it’s sexism and sexism alone that made women vote for Trump instead of Hillary? So French women should all vote for Marine in solidarity?
Or is it only sexism if you vote for the ‘wrong’ candidate?
EDITED: I was forgetting this one! Another woman official in trouble because of using email for work communications instead of the system provided by the department!
An Irish example this time, just to be even-handed 🙂
God damn the endless straw-man snarking of feminist positions is old.
Edit:
Is snarking on liberals for sport really supposed to be OK around here?
Straw man? Weak man, maybe, but Slate editors are saying that white women sold out the sisterhood by not voting for Hillary, and you know that article wouldn’t be written about Marine Le Pen.
(Although, to be fair, the author blames racism more than sexism. Not that that’s a superior argument.)
Quote me where that article says to vote for Hillary because of the mere fact she is a woman.
It doesn’t, but that wasn’t Deiseach’s snark, either. She snarked that sexism made women vote for Trump. The Slate article says:
Is there another interpretation of that than “sexism made women vote for Trump”?
Allow me to quote Deiseach:
“would it be sexism not to vote for Marine Le Pen, given that she is a woman, and the only woman remaining in the race, going for election to the highest office in the land?”
That’s the point — would it? One could construct an equally plausible narrative about Frenchwomen’s internalized misogyny and self-loathing being responsible for any refusal to vote for Le Pen. That narrative will not be written, ever, because liberals don’t like Le Pen and conservatives don’t like the narrative.
Deiseach’s snark, obviously, is that the narrative is ridiculous and condescending, that it assigns agency to women only in the ways that the left would prefer them to exercise it. I can’t blame her at all for being snarky about that. It annoys me, and I’m not even a woman.
The article you quoted talks about Trump’s behavior and policies as stacked up against Hillary’s competence and policies.
There is nothing in the article that states or implies that one should vote for women irrespective of their behavior or policies. Nor does it say or imply that a vote against any woman is sexist. Nothing.
If you are saying that an article would never be written about some opposition to Le Pen being motivated by sexism, I think you are wrong in that. To the extent that you could find the equivalent to “Trump that Bitch” shirts being employed in opposition to Le Pen, I think you most certainly could see articles written about it. Although, I have no idea what the French press is like in this regard.
The straw man is “any and all opposition to any female candidate is sexist”. The actual position is “female candidates will be subject to some sexist opposition, which hurts their chances and standing”.
You can construct plausible arguments against this line of critique. What about Angela Merkel, for instance? Running for her fourth term in Germany, she doesn’t seem to be suffering this, although someone familiar with German politics would be far better to address this. But this is a very different critique than the one Deiseach offered..
OK, I feel like I’m starting to put words in Deiseach’s mouth here, and I don’t want to do that, so I’ll let her respond, if she wants. Suffice to say I think you and I are reading her comment somewhat differently.
We’ll find out when Scott reads the report notice (I’m assuming you reported the post).
Besides, while I don’t agree with what Deiseach said, there is some merit to the idea: Inasmuch as voting in the first woman president was very important (and there were many that claimed it was, for a variety of reasons) in the US, it stands to reason that it would be similarly important in France. Of course, that is only one factor of several to take in count in the election, and it might well be that it’s outweighed by others (like xenophobia and the like).
I did not report the comment.
My tendency is to try and talk about things first. I’d rather have community self-policing.
I try and call out bullshit and herp-derp from liberals as well. Moon thinks I’m a crypto-right-winger or something.
But, there is always plenty of pushback against Moon or the next liberal. Not so on the other side of the slate. I perceive there are probably 20 comments like this I pass over for every one I challenge in some way.
Maybe you should. I agree that self policing is great, but these comments are a bit too populous and disorganized for that, Sometimes you need Scott to put his boot down and enforce his
Reign of TerrorBhuddist mystic gates of wisdom.Like, I try to do this sometimes, but there’s too many posts and too many comment chains that plain don’t catch my interest. I don’t even read Deiseach comments unless they’re brought to my attention, for example.
I ‘member (that’s the freshest new meme, right?), that was a hilarious exchange.
Well, there’s a matter of volume (a lot more right-wing posters, a lot more swipes, less incentive to go around nagging all of them), but I do think that a lot of liberal stuff also gets through, it’s just that there’s a certain kind of swipe that’s common of lefty people, that has particularly poor reception here, so when it comes up it creates a lot of backlash.
It’s worse than that. When you or someone else does pushback to a comment from the right, someone invariably chimes in to give that comment a wildly implausible reading and chides the pushback as uncharitable.
Curiously no such charitable readings are ever proposed for left leaning comments.
Just for my own personal calibration sake, how much of this is hyperbole?
I’m not going to check, but I do rather doubt this is strictly true.
More to the point, would it be fair for someone with quite different views to attempt to reinterpret for Moon? Would it be appreciated?
Of course when I say never, I mean literally never — in the almost four years and tens or hundreds of thousands of comments that have been posted here it hasn’t happened once. I certainly did not mean “happens with far less frequency”. No one ever uses the English language that way. Thank you for reading my comment with such charity.
Obviously this is something that’s extremely hard to quantify or gather empirical evidence for, but my belief is that this statement is wildly inaccurate. I think people from all sides of the political/cultural spectra tend to get treated generally the same with respect to charity on their posts. Any difference in perception of that charity seems to me to be a difference in baseline expectation by the commenter, rather than difference in behavior by responders.
I understood it was intentional hyperbole, and asked you to clarify by how much. It’s fine if you had no real idea and were just venting.
You honestly thought I had in my back pocket evidence that 2.345% of the time left leaning comments were read charitably and 85.548% of the time conservative comments were? Or were you just pretending to be confused for rhetorical purposes?
I’m loathe to continue the subthread since the complaint was so petty in the first place, but I was wondering the magnitude of the persecution you felt you were fighting against.
In any case, that seems clear now, so thank you.
I mean, you’re the one that usually complains about assertions without data backing it up.
Lots of people I know attributed Hillary’s defeat to the fact that she’s a woman.
HeelBearCub, I don’t particularly want to “snark on liberals” but they just make it so easy and so irresistible. The New York Time seemed to find nothing contradictory in saying that 53% of gender A voting for candidate of gender A was down to sexism which is why they didn’t vote for candidate of gender B but 54% of gender B voting for candidate of gender B was unremarkable. My point there is that it is either sexism or not to vote for a candidate based (solely) on whether or not they are of the same gender as you; it cannot be sexism if A does it but not if B does it.
Time magazine:
The Huffington Post:
Some online student thing (presumably representing the college-educated young women’s vote):
And more online in various places that called for voting for Hillary on the basis that as a woman, she understood and would push for women’s issues, but I didn’t keep track of every last thing I saw on Facebook, Tumblr, etc.
All the hand-wringing over “breaking the last glass ceiling” implies that women should have voted for Clinton as a woman. I used Le Pen as (an admittedly extreme) example of where that rhetoric falls down.
Congratulations Deiseach. Royal huzzahs. Very well done. Absolutely incredible. I bow before your keen insight and charitable contribution to debate.
You managed to find a random blogger who has a sum total of 7 posts at Huffington Post who offers a “well, given the bad options, vote for the woman” take that could, if you squint while looking at a funhouse mirror while having bleach poured in your eyes, be mistaken for “always vote for the woman or you are sexist”.
Slow clap.
232 followers on Twitter; I could find twenty Actual Nazis with more influence. This is about as noncentral / weakman as it’s possible to get.
Maybe you guys could do a thing where you say “I disagree with this, but here is a list of criteria which, if satisfied, would change my mind.”
The Huffington Post is a major media outlet; the fact that they’re willing to publish pieces calling for women to vote Hillary on the basis of her sex is telling.
ETA:
Or at least, “This is a list of criteria that must be met for me to consider an example worth paying attention to.”
HBC, do you consider it an acceptable excuse to say “This website doesn’t support this view even though it published an article in support of this view because that was just that one writer” when the view is one you want to attach to your political enemies? I do not suspect that you do. I suspect you would say that publishing the article is proof of their tacit support of the view, and have done so in the past, when the view was one attributed to the other political tribe.
@Incurian:
I took the position (in my first response to her) that Deiseach was engaging in straw-man snark, and that I objected to her post on those grounds.
At which point she seems to have confirmed it.
There isn’t really a reason to grant her position charity when she clearly is behaving uncharitably and shows no desire to do otherwise. I’ve tried to engage with her multiple times in far gentler and more charitable manner.
Slow clap.
Hey, I’ll take any applause I can get.
Right now, there’s a lot of flailing around for why Hillary didn’t win the election. It’s racism! It’s sexism! It’s the fault of Comey! It’s the fault of the third party voters! Whitelash!
People didn’t like Hillary, was often the reason. And the response to that is “Sexism because she’s a woman!”
No, people can have reasons for disliking Hillary as a potential president other than sexism (whether the old-fashioned kind or the interalised, self-hating kind). Now, there can be disagreement on whether those are good or sufficient reasons to dislike her, but they can’t be handwaved away by “it was sexism what dun for her” and if the Democrats want to run a good candidate in 2020 (which I really hope they do), then they have to bite the bullet and look at reality.
I don’t know what the internal party machinations are at the moment. That’s their business. What the voters, the supporters of Hillary, the supporters of the Democratic Party, will have to do is also look at things calmly, and I’m not seeing that yet. That’s natural, of course; they had the party ready to go when the result was announced that (as they thought) she had won and it spectacularly blew up on them and they’re angry, hurt, shocked and still feeling the hit.
But the idiot little girls stomping their feet in a tantrum about sexism and white women are not going to help anything or anyone. I do get fed-up when I see women telling me (and other women) “the only reason you could possibly dislike the idea of Hillary as president is internalised sexism and misogyny and being brainwashed how to vote by the man in your life”.
Oh, feck off for yourself and complain about stealing honey from bees, why don’t you, if you want to be pointless? At least you, HeelBearCub, have bones in your skeleton instead of being a squishy bag of entitlement.
@The Original Mr. X: The Huffington Post publishes a huge number of un-edited, un-reviewed posts by nobodies. Huge long tail of little-clicked garbage, which they’re happy to publish for those handful of clicks and the chance that something catches fire as clickbait.
As someone who looks through this comments section for interesting conversation, I have been mildly irked by Deiseach’s decision to use it for aggregating whining from liberal nobodies. If I wanted to read that crap I’d go find it in the wild.
Has anybody anywhere ever said this? Even your own cherry-picked examples are explicit about Hillary being a flawed candidate.
Perhaps if you stopped getting actively worked up about strawmen, you would finally be able to pull yourself away from the snarking at liberals that you keep claiming you don’t want to do. I’m sure it would be a great relief to have that burden off your shoulders.
@The Original Mr. X, @Dr. Beat:
You do understand that her linked articles don’t actually support her position, right? The same shit people jump up down, night and day, to criticize Moon over?
Have the courage of your convictions.
@Iain,
The articles we’re complaining about, like the Slate piece I quoted above, tend not to be rigorous arguments, but gratuitous outpourings of vitriol and abuse at demographic groups who voted “wrong”. Sure, the author doesn’t come out and say in so many words that white women had to vote for Hillary, but she’s completely negative in her assessment of the ones who didn’t, and doesn’t bother to imagine any motives besides sexism and racism. It’s not straw-manning to call that an expression of identity politics, if an indirect one.
I realize some people who hold more nuanced views might feel like they’re in the crosshairs when I mock that kind of article, but that isn’t my intent. I just want to point out how ludicrous it is that Slate, one of the banner sites of the online left, considers it necessary and justified to publish such a piece. Whatever theories may underlie the author’s world view, they served to produce a useless and mean-spirited article.
The Huffington Post, like Forbes, Medium, Kinja-era Gawker, or any number of other news websites, has a core of paid contributors and then an ocean of un-vetted, user-submitted content that ANYONE can sign up for. Here are instructions on how you, too, can publish stupid shit on the Huffington Post for disingenuous commenters to weak-man with “even the Huffington Post!”
At a minimum, if you are making a charge about the media, and want to cite a media organization in support of this, you should be referring to an actual paid journalist or editor, not a glorified comment thread.
Unfortunately since this comment fork is already maximally nested I suspect my criteria will be met with studied silence and a repeat of the same behavior the next time someone wants to crap on the liberal media.
@stillnotking:
I will grant you that one post, published the morning after the election. Deiseach has been posting like this for two weeks.
In mild defense of the article, if you strip out the rhetoric about betrayal, I think the core argument is accurate and relevant:
You know, nobody’s forcing you to read anything she or any other poster here writes.
And no one’s forcing you to read arguments against those posts. Wasn’t this a productive exchange?
I’m not going around complaining that people are arguing with Deiseach about things, so I’m afraid you’ll have to try harder if you want to make some sort of hypocrisy charge.
This is the dumbest argument, and I refuse to get dragged into complaining about complaining about complaining about complaining.
Deiseach, do you have more liberal tears you could loudly quaff in this thread?
Yeah, I hate it when people do that.
@ The Original Mr. X
You know, nobody’s forcing you to read anything she or any other poster here writes.
Hey, I just found that the Hide Poster thing is back. Click on someone’s avatar and it gives that option.
This is not the old option that only hides the whole thread.
Deiseach, when you say this:
I presume you are aware that 134,344,293 votes were cast (as of today – likely to continue rising), and the election was decided by about 48,000 voters. 0.0003572% of the electorate, in other words. I say nothing of the popular vote/EC discrepancy, of which nothing more needs be said.
You think none of the abovementioned factors had a more than 0.0003572% influence on the election? Particularly the bizarre and frankly worrying intervention by James Comey?
It seems obvious to me that when an election is this close, just about every conceivable explanation can be and likely is, in fact, decisive. Now, obviously, that doesn’t preclude a role for explanations you would presumably find more to your liking – quite the opposite. Indeed you’ll find me personally in agreement about many that I think you would propose. But under these circumstances, I am surprised at the extremity of your confidence that all of the above explanations for the election are nothing but strawman fodder for your increasingly vivid hysteria.
I’ve seen you post about (our shared, incidentally) interest in football, so I close with a gentle and polite suggestion – you’re being Ruud van Nistelrooy, here. Maybe you should not be.
D, hon, you know I love you, and I actually totally agree with you on this point(*), but for the sweet mercy of Christ, could you quit poking the bear? Just for a bit?
(*) regarding liberals equating “not preferring a candidate (who is female)” with “sexism”.
“Is snarking on liberals for sport really supposed to be OK around here?”
Of course it is. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Open your eyes.
Deiseach? We all know and love you, but maybe you can find a more productive way to vent your frustrations with the morons on Tumblr than taking it out on us?
(Yes, I have a mouse in my pocket.)
Remember: just because they share some of your interests, are otherwise decent people, and are extremely passionate about their beliefs, it doesn’t mean they aren’t morons. And just because someone is smart about some things, it doesn’t mean they can’t be a moron about other things.
Agreed. I enjoy Deiseach’s rants but in moderation.
The American Association of deplorable basterds urges you to enjoy Deiseach responsibly 😉
Also agree. Snark is ok in moderation but that’s it.
Apologies, I tend to act like a dog with a bone when I get my teeth into something. Suitably chastened, I shall now turn my attention to worthier topics – the role of applied mathematics in creating the perfect cup of coffee.
From my local weekly paper (links to the paper cited included):
Abstract of the paper:
https://medium.freecodecamp.com/the-code-im-still-ashamed-of-e4c021dff55e#.oteybc470
A programmer talks about having written a website promoting a dangerous prescription drug, but doesn’t mention which drug it was. Anyone have plausible ideas about which drug it was?
Maybe accutane (isotretinoin)?
I was also thinking accutane, but my understanding is that a) doctors are *extremely* rigourous when it comes to accutane prescriptions (what with the horrific birth defects it causes), and b) there are few alternatives to accutane, and the author of the article states in the comments that his sister consulted with her doctor to change to an alternative option.
With the year of 2000 and the location of Canada, my guess is bupropion (a.k.a. Wellbutrin and Zyban): it was approved for use in Canada in 1998; it’s both an anti-depressant and a smoking-cessation aid (targeting young women?); it’s been linked to suicidal ideation; and there are a number of alternatives available.
Not directly relevant to your point, but if you create a norm of “programmers should avoid creating websites for things that are unethical and really dangerous”, this norm includes ethics that are not identical to yours. The price to pay for having programmers not program websites that dishonestly push drugs is also having programmers not program websites that promote birth control, or abortion, or gay rights, Trump, or (if you’re on the other side) gun rights, or the death penalty, or allegedly racist science, etc.
Of course, I’m sure you could find a different programmer to help you with that birth control web site, but that applies to drug websites too.
I think this is fine–nay, great–if self policing and they are willing to take the career hit, but how likely is that to be the norm?
I disagree with Jiro. We should be smart enough to distinguish between opinions held with low certainty (“gun rights are bad”) and things so certain we can regard them as facts (“promoting drugs that don’t work and kill people is bad”). People who can’t are mentally broken, and it’s pointless to build your rationality norms to accommodate them.
Everyone (or at least pretty much everyone not on this site) thinks their own opinions are held with high certainty. Just look at how political discourse is not only “the other side is wrong”, but “the other side is so wrong that the only explanations are that they are stupid or misinformed”. The election should have given you plenty of examples of this, and we even have one on this page (look at the argument that nobody could even think there is compelling evidence that Hillary Clinton committed a crime).
Also, the knowledge that the drug kills people was post-hoc.
Most branches of engineering already have such a norm, because “don’t build things that are really dangerous” covers practical issues like “Don’t build bridges that will probably collapse.” Lives can depend on an engineer’s work, so we want them to have a strong inclination to work carefully and honestly.
(In fact, in most countries, it goes beyond norms and into actual laws about what certifications you need to work on a project.)
Now that software has become a large part of people’s lives, to the point that it’s also capable of killing people or ruining their lives when misused, I think it’s a good idea to have a similar norm, for a similar reason.
I don’t think it’s realistic to fear that vaguely controversial things will also face censure. If something is controversial, rather than obviously dangerous, then you can probably find an engineer or programmer who thinks it’s ethical to do. Is Donald Trump having trouble finding architects to work for him?
I don’t think that analogy holds, at least not as stated. The engineer building a bridge that doesn’t collapse is analogous to a programmer making a website that doesn’t crash, or allow easy access to sensitive information, etc.
If you want a programmer to be held liable for how the website he designs is using is used, then you need to consider holding the engineer liable for who will ultimately use the bridge or building designed. Which may be done, perhaps, but only for extreme cases. Specific crimes, not legal rude actions. Presumably ultimate responsibility for the drug lies with the doctor prescribing unless fraud was being carried out in the marketing or testing of it, in which case the programmer could share culpability if he had reason to know this.
When I worked at a company that made chemicals for electronics, certain substances were controlled by customs, making us responsible for everyone who was even in the same room as the formula or product–there couldn’t be citizens of certain countries, as that was considered tantamount to arming hostile governments with weapons technology.
But that was clearly spelled out. I don’t think there was any legal requirement to investigate the buyers of common materials–we could sell solder to people who bull-dozed puppy orphanages or whatever.
The programmer in the article knew that he was building something that would make unethical recommendations – no matter what the user answered, the software would recommend the drug – but I’ll admit this is an edge case, since the marketer isn’t very culpable to begin with.
A Reddit post about this article had a few better examples, such as a programmer writing time-logging software that would always round times in the employer’s favor – if they clocked in at 9:01 and clocked out at 5:14, it would be logged as 9:15 to 5:00, so they’d lose almost half an hour of pay. Basically wage theft – they weren’t paying for a few minutes of each employee’s time each day. And the programmer would definitely know this was the intent, because rounding it this way is more work than rounding the same way each time.
Hmm. You do have a point, that it’s not exactly analogous to the engineer’s problem. If they build a bridge to spec and it didn’t collapse, they can be pretty sure that the bridge itself isn’t harmful, except perhaps in oblique ways that we can’t reasonably hold them responsible for. But a programmer can face cases where they know that, even if they meet the specifications and don’t have any bugs (the equivalent of “the bridge doesn’t collapse”), the software that they’re building will be used for shady or downright illegal practices.
But I still think Jiro’s fears are overblown. Even if we exclude all the edge cases where it’s unclear how harmful they are or if the programmer should have known, there will still be a good number of cases where it’s not ambiguous that it’s going to be used for something shady.
EDIT: Also, I think codes of ethics are good for handling grey areas, where it’d be hard or impractical to bring down the hammer of the legal system, but it’s still shady and you’d rather it didn’t happen.
I have a degree in software engineering from a school in Ontario, Canada. Ontario has decided to regulate software engineering like an engineering discipline.
Of course, not everything falls under that category. Engineering is usually regulated because improper design can result in $BIGNUM deaths. That is, the problem with bridge collapses isn’t that it wastes money and causes traffic back-ups, but that people can die from them.
Building a website that doesn’t crash isn’t likely to be a life-or-death thing, though I can see some corner cases where it might be. The place where software engineering as a design discipline matter are in things like medical devices or avionics where failure can once again result in death.
For a Canadian example of where this matters, see the Therac-25 incident.
Huge upset in game8 of Carlsen vs Karjakin. Carlsen was the huge favorite going into the chess championship. However there are only four games left and both sides have white twice. Karjakin is now the favorite imo, all he needs is to draw all the games. And Karjakin could relaistically still win a game as white. However Carlsen is stornger at rapid games so Karjakin is heavily unfavored if it goes to tie-breakers.
Whats shockng to me is that both players got into such terrible time issues. Players get extra time at move 40. At move 33 both players had sub 3 minutes remaining to make it to move 40 (this is from memory). Under such time pressure Carlsen made a game losing blunder and then a few moves later Karjakin gave most of the edge back. Computers think Karjakin gave the whole edge back but Carlsen’s position looked alot harder to play. However Carlsen later made some more mistakes.
Interesting game!
The who-wins-the-popular-vote thing is seriously foolish.
First of all, circumventing the Constitution is a bad impulse to begin with, even if you can do it. In the end, no matter what the rules are, you’re going to have to actually convince people, and there being an effective slight supermajority requirement (i.e., a majority sufficiently broadly spread around) is not a bad thing, particularly with so powerful a government as we have. Eliminating any check or balance is not something to be done lightly. The Electoral College may be in practice no longer a very effective Check or Balance, but making an end run around it ignores the need for such a Check. I would assume most people here are against Trump, as was I. Imagine the Electoral College were the only thing standing in the way of a populist like Trump– or even a worse one. How would you feel then? When considering some change in government, remember that if today’s political patterns and rules are not fixed, but are shaped by the system (which are propositions I firmly believe) you are playing with fire if you try to create some Rube Goldberg contraption based on your assumptions and an ephemeral set of circumstances in the real world. ALWAYS imagine your opponents having some new contemplated power first, or imagine it coming to benefit them disproportionately, not you.
Broader still, and in my opinion, most important, is this point I would make: political extremism is directly proportional to how easy the need for consent and compromise is to circumvent. If you can get the Supreme Court to institute whatever end results you deem noble, substantiated (to your way of thinking) by unassailable logic, why on Earth would you bother to compromise with your opponents? The fake Constitutional rights invented by the Supreme Court during the past century or so are Exhibit A, culminating most recently with the asinine idea that the Constitution guarantees “equal dignity”. I’m in favor of gay marriage, and Obergefell robbed me of the ability formally to consent to it by my state passing that law, while doing massive damage to the idea everywhere of the Rule of Law. Supporting a thing never means that you have to support any method of reaching it. And as a result of this corner-cutting, fueled by this ambition for swift social change, Left and Right no longer speak the same language and so have no basis for real discussion. It doesn’t matter two shits whether those idealists were right or not. The Left caused Trump.
It can get worse, and will, unless the Left realizes the damage its current degree of extremist ambition is doing.
These issues are not simple. There is no easy answer here.
Yes, but not for any of the reasons you mention.
The basic concept of winning the popular vote is a simple one which we use for all other single-seat elections; it’s easy to grasp, and almost everyone sees it as legitimate. That’s not stupid.
What is very risky about the interstate compact: counting on every participating state to comply. What if the popular vote outcome differs from the outcome in their state, or the outcome desired by state leaders? Would New York, say, install the Republican electors, when New York’s own voters chose the Democratic ticket? The Constitution does provide that the legislature chooses the electors, so any state’s legislature has the inherent authority to override the voters and declare one slate elected.
I reject the idea that there is something about the Electoral College which (in and of itself) is inherently worthy because it’s in the Constitution. Abolishing the Electoral College, or changing the way electors are chosen, is not problematic. Overthrowing the constitution or violating the rule of law would be problematic.
The Electoral College, even before the 2000 election, was widely seen as an archaic formalism. Before 2000, practicaly every political science textbook predicted chaos and crisis if the popular vote loser won through the Electoral College.
Of course, they were wrong about that, but even though the presidential succession functioned smoothly, it left a scar on the public’s certainty in the legitimacy of American elections. Long story short, when Trump bellowed that the election was “rigged”, the 2000 election made that claim more plausible than it should have been.
Al Gore and Hillary Clinton accepted the verdict of the Electoral College, and led their supporters to do the same. But we can’t really count on presidential candidates to do that.
Immediately before the 2000 election, when it looked like Gore might win more electors, while losing the popular vote, there was a news report that the Bush campaign was planning to contest the Electoral College result through a public campaign of pressure on Democratic electors. And had Donald Trump been in that situation, given his past statements, it seems unlikely that he and his supporters would have gracefully conceded.
We have a norm in this country that the loser accept the verdict of the electors. But as we have seen this year, our political norms are not as strong as we thought.
Because congressional districts are subject to gerrymandering, and (just as with counties) Democrats are packed into relatively few of them. If every state copied Maine and Nebraska, Republican nominees would be guaranteed the White House for probably decades, no matter what the popular vote.
But a national popular vote system (regardless how arrived at) is not as easy or as desirable as many of its supporters think.
Of course some people moan about the possibility of a nationwide recount. Yes, that could be a nightmare, but mathematically, it’s extraordinarily unlikely. And most states now have optical scan paper ballot systems which are very accurate; in my experience across many recounts, hand counts show almost precisely the same totals.
Another problem is that there’s no obvious basis for deciding whether the election was decisive.
Under the Constitution as it now stands, if no candidate gets 270 electoral votes, the election is (in effect) declared inconclusive and thrown to the House of Representatives. What is the equivalent way to win a popular vote system? We can’t say a majority of popular votes, because presidential election winners rarely get half of the votes cast. One proposed amendment I saw prescribed a highly arbitrary 40%. Others just hand the election to whoever gets a plurality, even if that’s only 30% or 20% or 10%.
Of greater potential concern is that this will move ALL election law to Washington. The candidates, the rules about voter eligibility, voter ID, hours of voting, etc., etc., will inevitably become federalized.
Otherwise, what would stop Utah from lowering the voting age to 14, so as to maximize the number of Republican votes? What would stop California from opening up voting to non-citizen immigrants, so as to run up the score for Democrats?
The only way to prevent such chicanery is with a national election law, overriding every state, and ultimately dictating every detail of election procedure.
Are we ready for that?
Elections Canada is an independent, non-partisan federal agency that handles all the procedural aspects of Canadian elections. It seems like the obviously correct approach. In my experience, most Canadians are bemused when confronted with the patchwork partisan nature of the American system.
Oh, yes. We can barely believe the degree to which politicians are involved in the US system, and the degree to which it is local. Canada has its faults, but we don’t have gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc to the extent the US does. Nowhere near.
Frankly, I’ve never actually heard of significant voting issues in Canada, and we’ve had a good number of federal elections in the last 16 years. Wasn’t the biggest recent hubbub about having/not having some party representatives at one polling station?
I can barely remember. Elections here seem to go a lot more smoothly than in the US.
What does Canada do to prevent gerrymandering? An Independent Maps movement got taken out back and shot by my state’s Supreme Court recently, so I’m curious if there’s another avenue to try pushing. Is it just due to being a PR system?
We don’t have a PR system – we’re parliamentary FPTP.
Currently, electoral reform is bogged down in the fact that the Liberals won a 54% seat majority with under 40% of the vote and of course they don’t want to lose their majority. That’s simplifying it a bit of course.
@Gobbobobble: Here’s an FAQ about the redistricting process. It’s an independent commission, working within guidelines set by statute, with input from the public.
Thanks! Too bad, though. It’s “just” something so mind-bogglingly basic and obvious and sensical as having an independent group draw the map. Shame the state justices here are such spineless cowards.
Iain, this might be my small-government knee-jerk reaction here, but to my mind “non-partisan federal agency” is something that is far easier to talk about than to accomplish.
-Is it staffed or directed by men and women appointed by parliament/the PM’s office?
-Is its budget somehow sequestered and immune to cuts and alterations directed by partisan political agendas?
On what basis are you so confident that you can trust Elections Canada to be independent and non-partisan?
The CEO of Elections Canada is appointed by Parliament for long terms; in the last hundred years, we’ve had six. It maintains approximately 500 permanent staff, who are presumably under the typical federal government bureaucracy.
The budget is vulnerable to parliamentary whims, unfortunately; but that also makes it easier to publicize when it is under the knife. Rather than dealing with 50 states each cutting 8 percent, you have one government making the cuts.
In general Canada has a fairly strong tradition of non-partisan institutions (or at least the perception thereof); we had some mild sniping between our previous PM (Stephen Harper) and our Chief Justice a few years ago (much milder than anything Scalia or Ginsburg ever said), and it was a national scandal. The amount of influence that our previous government was trying to wield over our scientific institutions also yielded significant criticism.
While I can’t point to any structure guaranteeing impartiality, we’ve had a good track record so far, and isn’t that the point of trust?
I’m mostly just regurgitating information that can be found on the Elections Canada website, but:
a) the Chief Electoral Officer is appointed by a parliamentary vote and (as of 2014) serves a 10 year non-renewable term. The current Chief Electoral Officer is only the sixth since 1920.
b) Elections Canada has statutory authority to draw on the Consolidated Revenue Fund, giving it reasonable financial independence from elected officials.
c) I trust Elections Canada based on a lifetime of experience giving me no reason not to, and because we would notice if they weren’t. How is it any different than trusting the court system?
I am willing to bet that the Canadians here trust our government way more. Maybe not the elected government – I didn’t like the Harper Conservatives, and despite voting for his party and being a strong Liberal supporter I don’t think much of Justin Trudeau’s track record so far – but I think Canadians trust the unelected bits of our government far more than Americans do theirs.
Long terms certainly help, so that’s a good structural safeguard. That said, my attitude is that the point you have to extend trust is the point at which the system is now open to failure.
I’m not saying it’s NOT impartial, but I have to question how much of that is cultural rather than structural, and exporting the structure of a system without the cultural supports doesn’t work all that great (Hi, Afghanistan! Hi, Iraq! Hi, Almost All Of Africa!)
For better or worse, we have a long record of regulatory agencies and even theoretically neutral institutions being wielded like a club against political opponents, by BOTH major parties, so speaking personally I am NOT willing to extend trust absent very, VERY robust structural safeguards. Some have a better track record than others (It’s been awhile since we had really serious SCOTUS issues, and a cursory search failed to turn up anything substantive regarding most of our various Inspectors General), but all have had their moments over the past couple centuries.
Now, all that said, I could actually get behind that kind of idea, but I’d want to layer in as many structural and cultural protections as I could. And by Cultural I mean inculcating a specific sub-culture among the employees of any such office similar to that present to some extent in the American military below the rank of General Officer (sadly, the apolitical General is a dead or at least highly endangered species these days, but that’s an entirely separate worry).
@Trofim: I’ve actually just learned this myself, but almost all appointments to the Canadian bureaucracy have to be approved not by Parliament, but by the Public Service Commission, which has non-partisanship as part of its mandate. There is also some evidence of the kind of internal culture you’d like to see.
I see your point that convention works well until it doesn’t, and I’m open to a better solution, but the US option is not it.
The ideal is a culture of neutral, public-serving competence in the civil service. Sometimes it’s for real, sometimes it’s honoured more in the breach – some outfits (at different levels of government) are certainly more competent than others.
There have been cases of ideally-neutral government agencies getting involved in politics: during the 2006 election, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police announcing an investigation into possible insider trading (and the way they announced it) played a role in a Liberal minority government being replaced with a Conservative minority (some Liberals say the RCMP commissioner was acting politically), and there were accusations that the Canada Revenue Agency under the previous government disproportionately audited environmental charities opposed to Conservative energy policy.
However, the general impression I have gotten is that Canadian government agencies tend to be more neutral than American, and Canadians perceive it to be this way.
Wow!
It turns out that I didn’t know the history or statement of the 26th amendment.
The 26th Amendment requires states to extend the franchise to all citizens who are at least 18 years of age. I do not see where it would prohibit a state from extending the franchise to non-citizens or to minors if the state were to so choose.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_v._Mitchell
Congress has a lot of authority to regulate federal elections. State elections tend to follow along, rather than have completely different standards, or giving different ballots to different voters.
Under a popular-vote system, activities like the ones I mentioned would lead to comprehensive federal regulation of elections.
Yeah, this is why I’m hesitant to endorse NPV – even though in theory it’s certainly better than the archaic compromise that is the Electoral College.
But I will say that every other country I’ve researched has a single national electoral commission that sets uniform rules and procedures for the voting process, at least for national elections. The US stands alone in putting election administration in the hands of local officials, often themselves elected on partisan ballots (no offense, of course). Now, we’ve never been a country to follow along just because the rest of the world does it another way (America Fuck Yeah! Miles and pounds for life!) but I have to wonder if we’re the ones doing it wrong, just because it’s always been that way.
Kennedy’s opinion was clumsy, but I fail to see how Obergefell was anything other than a straight application of already-established precedent under the equal protection clause. Scalia said as much in previous dissents.
The Electoral College is not a supermajority requirement. Donald Trump did not have a majority, let alone a supermajority. He had a minority which was sufficiently spread around to win. For Democrats, it’s effectively a supermajority requirement, but that’s a result of them having a coalition which is concentrated in urban states, not an actual requirement of the system.
Yes, a voting system that sometimes fails to pick the majority winner can “stand in the way” of a populist, in theory, but what actually happened was that it didn’t stand in the way of Trump at all. So empirically, the Electoral College is not a check on extremist politicians. Depending on whether the extremist politician is a Republican or Democrat, it’s a 50-50 chance whether the Electoral College will make it harder or easier for them to get elected.
A direct popular vote is less of a Rube Goldberg contraption than the current system. “Winner = Most Votes” is simpler than “Winner = Most votes in the correct combination of states.”
And even if the political winds shift and somehow Republicans end up being experts at winning the popular vote, I will happily let them do it if it means we can stop arguing over who should have really won the election every time there’s an EC split. The loser will just have to adapt their platform to get more votes next time. That’s how democracies should work.
Donald Trump seems pretty damn extreme to me. What did the Electoral College force him to compromise?
The electoral college doesn’t always favor Republicans. It is a bit of a historical coincidence that the last two presidents to fail to garner the popular vote were Republican.
The EC favors low density states over high density states. It favors slower growing (or even shrinking) states over faster growing states.
Right now, the coalitions are such that the dense urban areas favor Democrats. The urbane/rural split is roughly as old as Mesopotamia and given that we have now reached the kind of media and communications environment that prevents regional splits in part loyalty, I don’t see the D/R coalitions changing much for the foreseeable future.
So, it might be an accident that Ds are urbane and Rs aren’t, but one can make the argument that nomenclature is the only thing that is accidental about it.
Quote: In recent elections, with both parties generally being at least somewhat competitive in all four major regions of the country, there usually hasn’t been such a large gap between the tipping-point state and the popular vote. And small gaps have often reversed themselves. Gore, of course, lost the Electoral College in 2000 to George W. Bush despite winning the popular vote. But four years later, Democrats had a slight Electoral College advantage, as John Kerry came slightly closer to winning Ohio, the tipping-point state that year, than to the national popular vote. In general, in fact, there’s almost no correlation between which party has the Electoral College advantage in one election and which has it four years later. It can bounce back and forth based on relatively subtle changes in the electorate.
Source: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/will-the-electoral-college-doom-the-democrats-again/
“The EC favors low density states over high density states. ”
Surely low population, not low density. Rhode Island is the second most densely populated state.
My argument still holds up, even if that’s true. The point is that, while the Electoral College can prevent an extremist from gaining power, it’s equally able to help an extremist gain power.
(Actually, the argument becomes stronger if the Electoral College can cut both ways. If it was consistently tipped against the more extreme party, then you could argue that the skew might usually prevent extremists from getting power. But if it can cut both ways, then it’s truly random whether it helps the extremist or not.)
If by “cause” you mean “is to blame for,” this is false. Trump supporters are adults, they bear full responsibility for their own moral failures. If we’re assigning blame to people who aren’t Trump-supporters, conservatives like yourself with distorted views of history and the constitution probably take second place. You’ve helped to create the delusional fantasy world where Trump supporters can thrive.
Obergefell was decided on basically the same reasoning as Loving vs. Virginia, which struck down state anti-miscegenation laws. Do you think Loving was also wrongfully decided? Did it also do “massive damage to the idea everywhere of the Rule of Law?”
I’m uneasy about the courts deciding gay marriage (that is, I agree with their decision, but only with confidence~0.6). It seems like gender is a fundamental separation in regards to marriage in a way that race isn’t – maybe race was once, but by Loving vs. Virginia we already had laws to the effect that you couldn’t use race as a legal criterion. For gender, though, there are plenty of laws that rely on it (e.g. divorce laws, the draft, laws about violence against women), so you can’t say the law makes a principled stance of being gender-blind.
TL;DR: The court may have had reasonable justification to rule for gay marriage, but the reasoning from Loving vs. Virginia doesn’t apply.
I don’t think this is really true, but let’s suppose that federal law is officially race-blind but not officially sex-blind. What relevance does this have for gay marriage? Do you think the reasoning in Loving in some way premised on race-blindness, and the reasoning in Obergefell premised on gender-blindness?
As I understand it, the argument in Loving is:
a) Law must be race-blind, therefore:
b) laws that rely on racial discrimination are unconstitutional.
This seems relevant: Gay marriage was a lot more popular at the time of its legislation than Interracial marriage. My interpretation of this is that a lot of people felt that while they were personally against Interracial marriage, it was in some sense not “legally fair”.
Here’s the argument from Loving:
Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State.
I don’t think changing “racial classification” to “sexual orientation classification” and “invidious racial discriminations” to “invidious homophobia” really affects the conclusion.
There are several parts of that argument that don’t fully generalize. In particular, they mention racial discriminations being unsupportable by law, while gender discrimination very much is. They also rely on the fourteenth amendment, which says a lot about race (in various precedents, though not overtly in the original text), but not much about gender. So I’d say the case for gay marriage under these grounds is significantly weaker than the case for interracial marriage.
Don’t get me wrong, I still think it’s strong enough that SCOTUS made the right decision. But it’s not as strong – so Loving => Obergfell is not directly applicable.
I don’t really know where you’re getting this from. The court takes laws which discriminate on the basis of gender to be prima facie suspect and demands that the government show that the discrimination has an exceedingly persuasive justification. Maybe more importantly, I don’t know what you think gender discrimination has to do with Obergefell, which concerned gay marriage.
Right, but it does allow some cases, as mentioned above. And quite a lot of people would consider it reasonable to argue that gender is relevant to marriage.
If Obergfell were trying to directly generalize Loving, they would say something like “Marriage laws should be blind to the gender of the participants in the same way as they are to their race.” But the precedent that laws should be race-blind is a lot stronger than for laws being gender-blind.
Like I said, I do believe Obergfell is still justifiable. Just not quite as easily.
Yes, but it also allows racial discrimination under very limited circumstances, which is why certain affirmative action policies have passed constitutional muster. From what I understand, the standard for laws which discriminate on the basis of race is only slightly more demanding than the standard for laws which discriminate on the basis of sex.
I… suppose the court might have reasoned that way. It didn’t need to, and it didn’t, though. But your argument is still an enthymeme. The supreme court allows discrimination on the basis of gender only when there’s an extremely persuasive rationale for doing so. Even if Obergefell had something to do with gender discrimination, what would have been the extremely persuasive rationale for banning gay marriage?
Loving isn’t a model of clear judicial draftsmanship. But the long and short of it is that there is a dual holding, the court held that the anti-miscegenation laws violated both the equal protection and the due process clauses of the fourteenth amendment.
“I don’t know what you think gender discrimination has to do with Obergefell, which concerned gay marriage.”
No. It had to do with same sex marriage. Defined by the gender of the participants, not their sexual preferences.
There was nothing in existing marriage law that would have prevented a male homosexual from marrying a female homosexual.
Clearly, Republicans caused Trump, with its bashing fact-free political campaigning. Some Conservatives scholars even admit this and wrote a book about it. Here is an article about them.
http://www.vox.com/2016/5/6/11598838/donald-trump-predictions-norm-ornstein
he 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.
.How about the boring hypothesis that Americans change the party of the POTUS fairly often, and the current result doesn’t say a whole lot about either Trump or Hillary?
There was a guy who made a model with boring assumptions that predicted a trump win (funnily enough, the author didn’t believe it): http://www.vox.com/2016/6/14/11854512/trump-election-models-political-science
I’ve been responding to the “swinging pendulum” hypothesis by suggesting that it is actually an inverted pendulum. Makes it less boring!
Metronome?
You went and made it boring again.
This is what I had in mind. https://youtu.be/sCKkvacHpjo
I think this election was a toss up and it should be regarded as such. But that I think is somewhat at odds with the view that Trump winning was the inevitable scheduled backlash against the party in power.
Trump won every midwestern state except Illinois and Minnesota. The election was very close but at least in the Midwest(especially if you exclude Chicago), they were clearly rejecting Clinton as part of a general backlash.
But it was a tossup partly because Trump was an unusually bad candidate (so was Clinton, but not by as much).
Although this seems like a really boring hypothesis, it turns out to be an almost magical one. As in, there is no identifiable mechanism by which it seems to happen, such as lower turnout from the party in power, or a middle segment of swing voters who get tired of the party in power. We can “explain” it by reference to historical events, but those explanations feel ad hoc. Margins of victory don’t follow any kind of pattern either. The parties’ generally alternating control of the presidency post-WWII clearly isn’t random; something explains it, but political scientists don’t know what.
I didn’t think Trump would be nominated, but after he was, I predicted he would win based on the fact that he is far more charismatic than Hillary Clinton in terms of appearance and demeanor.
My amateur psychological theory is that a lot of voters subconsciously choose based on appearance and demeanor and then justify their decision after the fact with rationalizations based on more substantive considerations.
@ fortaleza84
I didn’t think Trump would be nominated, but after he was, I predicted he would win based on the fact that he is far more charismatic than Hillary Clinton in terms of appearance and demeanor.
Er, what do you think ‘charismatic’ means?
Well, Trump has a bit of a devoted cult going, but “magnetic” might be a better adjective.
Charismatic to a certain rather large sector of the American population means a politically incorrect brash macho successful billionaire business man and reality TV star celebrity. Many Americans worship the wealthy, and even more so if they are crude and rude– what might be labeled “rich white trash.”
But not everyone responds to that. So it wasn’t a certainly he would win anything– whether electoral or popular.
The dictionary definition seems to work pretty well:
Keep in mind that your amateur psychological theory incorrectly predicted the winner of the popular vote, which seems like the thing it was predicting since you don’t include any interstate differences. In other words: I don’t really buy it, just as I don’t buy any of the ad hoc retrospective explanations. (Or even predictive ones like Scott Adams’s.) Too many factors at play to simplify to one thing and since every model comes up with either D or R at the end, it’s too easy to say “Look, it’s right!”.
+1 to this. I don’t really buy any argument that predicted Trump would win that could equally well prove he’d win the popular vote. (I’d say this even if he had a narrow win in the popular vote – like Scott said, a 2% measuring error shouldn’t change much).
I disagree with this, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to have an amateur psychological theory of *swing* voters, and those are the ones who decide the election. Saying that the amateur psychological theory didn’t account for the millions of Californians who were even more hopelessly liberal than usual this election doesn’t seem like a good rebuttal.
The problem with Scott Adams’s model was that he predicted a landslide, and it didn’t occur. If he’d made more modest claims, a popular vote loss by Trump would not falsify his model.
How could he have not predicted a landslide? He’s obviously worshipful of Trump and can’t see how anyone else could fail to feel the same way, except for a small number of Hillary’s family members and friends.
How else could he see Trump as a Master Persuader? Trump is an ignoramus about most things. He is not a Master anything except a Master Self-Promoter.
Scott Adams spent the better part of the year explaining persuasion methods, why they work, and then laid out the case that Trump was amazing at it, predicting what he was going to say, what mental imagery he would use, how audiences would respond, how his opponents would react, and why they would fail; he also offered caveats that outlined the limits of persuasion.
If, out of all this, you are laser-focused on puffery regarding the margin of victory, you have completely, spectacularly missed the point. You are so far away from the point, in fact, you are actually in an alternate universe from the point, only accessed by protagonists in P.K. Dick novels when they undergo mental breakdowns (or just happen to be tripping balls). This is the same hilariously bad mistake Orwell made in critiquing Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, which ridiculously cedes that Burnham’s vision of the rising managerial state, its global presence, and its impact on the citizenry is correct, but Burnham is WRONG! because his prediction that Nazi Germany would be one of the powers astride the world turned out wrong (and takes a gratuitous, and completely wrong, swipe at what he perceives as Burnham’s power-worship; my pet-theory is that Orwell was upset that unlike he, Burnham, a former Trotskyite, completely abandoned democratic socialism as a possible future). Orwell would eventually at least see sense – Burnham’s description of the managerial state is the basis of 1984, and sections of the Managerial Revolution are essentially copy-pasted as The Theory and Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism – but I suspect critics of Scott Adams’ “Master Persuasion” thesis never will.
Trump had help from the Master Propagandists Bannon and Gingrich and others, so he certainly did end up using their propaganda techniques, which do overlap with persuasion techniques. And Faux News and Hannity used these techniques on Trump’s behalf. But a lot of it was just simply lying about Hillary. No complex tactics necessary there. And getting the help of Comey and Russian hackers– was that Master Persuasion there?
And the election could easily have gone either way. Trump himself is no Master Persuader. Just a macho bully entertaining celebrity reality TV star billionaire business man– characteristics that appeal to a large sector of Americans who go bananas over that sort of character, just playing that role that comes naturally to him. No Master of anything except self-promotion required.
Trump said himself that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and he wouldn’t lose any supporters. To think of this kind of person as some kind of master strategist, you just really have to want to think of him as some Master something. Because there is little or no evidence for that. He’s just a macho guy shooting his mouth off, being brash and entertaining. Careful strategy about anything is obviously beyond him. This is a guy who believes any fake news story he sees on TV, without questioning it. And who talks in a disjointed stream of consciousness way– obviously not carefully planned or executed.
@Moon – “Trump had help from the Master Propagandists Bannon and Gingrich and others, so he certainly did end up using their propaganda techniques, which do overlap with persuasion techniques.”
You’ve mentioned Gingrich tons of times in your many, many posts here. I think this may be the very first time you’ve mentioned Bannon. Why are you suddenly including Bannon now? If he’s a “Master Propagandist”, why had you never mentioned him before this moment? If he is a “Master Propagandist” and you completely missed him until now, does that undermine your confidence in your previous analysis? Had you even heard of Bannon before he was tapped by Trump?
[EDIT] – I apologize in advance if this comes across as an attack. One of the things we pretty clearly disagree about is how to assess evidence. I have been wrong about a lot of things in the past, and the way I realized I was wrong was by tracking my beliefs and predictions over time, and taking special note of contradictions and discrepancies. I think it’s important to do this, because otherwise it’s easy to be highly certain about views that are dead wrong.
FC, point taken. From now on I will mention everything I believe about every person on earth in every post I make.
Seriously though, it seems obvious to me that Trump has no particular skill in anything except self-promotion. And all Republican presidential candidates always have the help of Master Propagandists such as those at Fox and Breitbart, even if they know nothing about propaganda themselves. Mostly that help is from Fox, Breitbart, and other fake news sites propagandizing on the candidate’s behalf– and bashing the opposing candidate– to the consumers of their news media– not from them teaching the candidate anything about persuasion.
Trump is a brash celebrity billionaire who tests out things to say and says what people’s eyes light up (He even admitted this once, about The Wall.) He just has a clown personality that people like. He doesn’t seem to actually learn anything much from experience– except in the moment, when they get energized by his mention of stuff like walls.
Shooting off at the mouth aside, could you explain how a “master manipulator” would get two million fewer votes than his (very unpopular) opponent? Or what this point we’re supposedly missing is?
Scott Adams did read a book or 2 about persuasion, so good for him. He’s still just a comic strip writer who lucked into great success accidentally.
The persuasive techniques Adams mentions are real. That doesn’t mean Trump actually used them. E.g. confirmation bias. You can say that Trump said “crooked Hillary”, knowing that this would be confirmed by subsequent events. But he didn’t know that, or even if he did, it wouldn’t have gotten far without Comey’s help and Russia’s and Assange’s help.
Comey and Assange and Russia did the real work. It was not at all necessary for Trump to even have ever heard of confirmation bias, to make Hillary seem crooked. What Comey and Assange did would have sufficed, even if Trump hadn’t said a word about it.
And Trump would have been told to label her as crooked by his propaganda advisers, even if they had never heard of confirmation bias. Because their whole plan was to tell lies about Hillary and distort everything she said and did, and to say 1000X that this or that statement or action by Hillary proved that she was untrustworthy and crooked.
That’s just basic propaganda. Bash your opponent 1000X in a row, using the same adjectives, and people will start believing you.
@Shakedown
These:
are the points you are missing. That’s what’s important about about what Scott Adams was writing about, that’s what you were supposed to be basing the validity of his claims on – did Trump, in fact, do and say the things, and say them in the manner, that Scott Adams said he would? Would people react to the messages presented as Scott Adams suggested they would? – not “98% chance of a landslide”*
*speaking of, why is it acceptable to say “Trump’s victory doesn’t disprove Nate Silver’s model; we just live in the universe that happens 28.6% of the time?” but not “Trump not winning in a landslide doesn’t disprove Scott Adams’ prediction, we just live in the universe that happens 2% of the time”?
Well, at the very least, Nate Silver’s universe is 14 times more likely. A bit more, given that he also described what a Trump victory would look like in very specific terms – so P(things look like they did|Trump won) is very high (over 50%) in Silver’s model, but even lower than 2% in Adams’.
Like, his claim seems to be “if Trump did the things I say, he’d have won in a landslide. He lost the popular vote because he didn’t use my techniques”. [EDIT: my mistake – looks like his claim was weaker and more more believable than that. The point that we have only weak evidence for it still stands, though]. Which isn’t impossible – you could even make a reasonable argument that Trump narrowed the popular vote to be within range of electoral victory by partial and ineffective use of Adams’ techniques – but it’s pretty weak evidence, and my prior on them is pretty low.
Actually, I suspect that if the election had been based on the popular vote, Trump would still have probably won by adjusting his strategy accordingly.
Perhaps more importantly, Trump did shockingly well despite unrelenting media hostility and lukewarm support from his own party.
The media was hostile to Trump in the same way Miss Hoover is supportive of Lisa Simpson – they spent a lot of time vaguely saying he was bad, then spent even more time talking about Hillary’s emails, then said “but everyone remember, she’s the good one!”.
You’ll notice that Lisa was never elected class president.
I’m not that familiar with the Simpsons, so I am not sure I understand this point. But if you are saying that the MSM devoted more time to discussing specific alleged wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton than by Donald Trump, I’m pretty skeptical.
The pendulum is actually really obvious if you look at it for a bit. Since 1944, in American elections, apart from 4 years, the Democrats and the Republicans have exchanged the presidency every 8 years, almost like a clockwork.
1944-1952: Democrats
1952-1960: Republicans
1960-1968: Democrats
1968-1976: Republicans
1976-1980: Democrats (note! The years 1980-1984 are the expection to this rule)
1980-1992: Republicans (as above)
1992-2000: Democrats
2000-2008: Republicans
2008-2016: Democrats
2016-: Republicans
Is there any real information on increase in Trump related suicides?
Would there be? I mean, is anyone counting things like this?
I doubt there could ever be reliable statistics about it. Just would guess from first principles that more people killed themselves when Michael Jackson died than killed themselves because Trump won.
I have a hard time believing that there was any net increase in suicides because of Trump. Anybody sighting Trump as a reason to commit suicide is likely suffering from serious pre-existing psychiatric problems, and apt to engage in suicidal ideation for reasons much more parochial then a national election.
Almost everyone who commits suicide after a traumatic event had serious pre-existing psychiatric problems. I don’t doubt that Trump’s election was traumatic enough for some people to cause them to commit suicide. Trump’s loss might have been, too — is that what you mean by a “net” increase?
MJ says some suicide hotlines saw a major increase in call volume; adjust for partisan bias, maybe, but it doesn’t strike me as the kind of thing people would fabricate.
I tend to agree with hyperboloid; if you’re already depressed/prone to suicidal ideation and you were influenced by the panic over the result of the election (neo-Nazis! forced gay conversion camps! no more abortions! Jews, Hispanics, blacks and other minorities to be rounded up and deported!), it might be the last straw pushing you over the edge, but that it was the only reason – very doubtful. That is saying that had Hillary won, these people would not have killed themselves, and we can’t know that, because we don’t have access to a world where Hillary won and then we can count the suicide rates and compare them.
Anybody sighting Trump as a reason to commit suicide
I must say, I’m rather enjoying these unintentional typos.
As opposed to intentional typos?
I think if this turns out to be true, no one will know for at least months to come, if not years.
At the minimum, we’d have to have data on the suicide rate during, say, the 2 weeks after 11/8, and compare that to an equivalent 2 week period.
But how noisy is suicide rate data? I imagine it’s even enough that you could compare years with other years, but is a given 2 weeks long enough for it to all even out?
Furthermore, what kind of seasonality effects do we need to account for? Does the rate in the 2nd 2 weeks of November traditionally differ from the rate in the last week of October + 1st week of November? Can we compare 11/8-11/22 of 2016 and 2015, or do years that are multiples of 4 have special features wrt suicide rates due to things like POTUS election and Summer Olympics?
Gathering and verifying the data and running this type of analysis takes time, time that hasn’t passed yet. So anyone claiming that there’s been any sort of meaningful effect should be looked at extremely skeptically.
Similar arguments go for things like hate crime, of course.
This might be the typical mind fallacy at work, but suicidal people aren’t generally motivated by one easily-articulated reason.
If you’re close enough to the edge that Hillary losing the election could push you over then you’ve got much bigger problems than Mr Trump in your life. It’s not like healthy people are throwing themselves off bridges in droves over the news. If it’s happening at all it would be the metaphorical last straw for someone already feeling crushed by other, more serious, worries.
Anyway I certainly hope that I’m right. The level of (unjustified IMO) panic over Trump in some quarters is absolutely unreal, and that’s it’s own tragedy. But it would be much worse if more susceptible people were taking it as an endorsement of suicide.
How is the top story on every front page not some version of “NEO-NAZIS ATTEMPTING TO SEIZE CONTROL OF AMERICAN GOVERNMENT”?
The whole “here’s Steve Bannon, part of the Trump transition team, who runs a news organization he called the platform of the alt-right” followed by “Look over here, it’s Richard Spencer, neo-Nazi! Trump is obviously hiring neo-Nazis for his administration!” is getting kind of boring.
Steve Bannon self identified as “alt-right”. The phrase alt-right was coined by Robert Spencer, who is, more or less, a suit and tie Nazi. If Bannon means alt right in way different to Spencer he damn well better publicly explain himself.
If I call myself a Communist, and you quite rightly point out that Stalin and Mao killed millions, then the burden is on me to show how I’m not that kind of Communist.
Steve Bannon did not self-identify as alt-right. He said (in an interview with presumably-hostile Mother Jones, for which we don’t have the context) that Breitbart was “the platform for the alt-right.”
He HAS publicly explained what he thinks the alt-right is.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/11/19/bannon-alt-right-young-anti-globalist-anti-establishment-nationalist/
“Our definition of the alt-right is younger people who are anti-globalists, very nationalist, terribly anti-establishment.”
There’s also a “guide to the alt-right” on Breitbart posted by Bokhari and Yiannopolis, though it’s not clear if Bannon endorses that either.
This “Spencer is alt-right, Spencer is a neo-Nazi, Bannon is alt-right, therefore Bannon is a neo-Nazi” stuff is ridiculous.
@The Nybbler:
Note that the Breitbart “guide to the alt-right” specifically identifies Spencer as an intellectual of the alt-right, saying “The media empire of the modern-day alternative right coalesced around Richard Spencer during his editorship of Taki’s Magazine. In 2010, Spencer founded AlternativeRight.com, which would become a center of alt-right thought.’
He isn’t a non-central example.
I’m starting to get a better understanding this year of how so many Republicans were able to justify calling Obama a Socialist in 2008 because he supported taxing people with higher income more than people with lower income, to the point that they actually believed it themselves.
At the time, I thought such mass delusion was exclusively a property of the right.
@lvlln: If I accept for the sake of argument that Bannon’s ties to the alt-right are at most indirect, can you give an example of a prominent member of Obama’s administration who was as closely connected to Actual Socialists as Bannon is to Richard Spencer and his band of white nationalists?
That is to say: even if you don’t think it is a particularly close connection, I struggle to see how calling Obama a socialist is equivalent. Did the Obama campaign have a bad habit of accidentally retweeting socialists? Were socialists particularly happy about his election? Do you have any particular incidents in mind?
@HBC
Yes, Spencer is solidly alt-right. But the term has grown well beyond the meaning he gave it; it’s been applied more widely than even the Breitbart guide does, particularly by some on the establishment left (I’ve seen Libertarians, Tea Partiers, and even the ants included. Moldbug’s group is often included as well). And neo-Nazism isn’t one of the unifying principles (if indeed there are any) of this expanded alt-right.
That’s the thing. I think of myself as alt-right since I read and enjoy Steve Sailer, John Derbyshire, Theodore Dalrymple, and Razib Khan, but Spencer only shows up on my radar screen occasionally, and never for very long. As far as I can tell, the alt-right is a large enough category to include people who roll their eyes at people like Spencer or simply don’t hear about people like him much.
a) Moldbug is cited as part of the alt-right by the same Breitbart article. But see (b), this is irrelevant.
b) In what way at all does the fact that other people are (mis)identified as part of the alt-right change the fact that Spencer is a certified central example?
Re: (b)
You need to define your set before you can say whether X is a “central example” of it.
As I said before I’ll grant that Spencer, as the guy who first put Theodore Dalrymple, Bill Kauffman, Michelle Malkin, and Steve Sailer in the same metaphorical room together probably deserves some credit for starting the alt-right, but that doesn’t necessarily mean much on it’s own.
@hlynkacg:
Note that I am replying to The Nybbler who is happy to categorize Spencer as “solidly alt-right.”
If I were trying to claim the non-central fallacy, I’d say that Bannon was not a central example of a member of the alt-right. He wouldn’t fit in with Spencer’s set, nor does he even fit his own definition (because he’s not “younger people”).
What I’m claiming is
“Bannon is associated with the alt-right”
“Spencer is a key figure of the alt-right”
“Spencer is a neo-Nazi”
therefore
“Bannon is a neo-Nazi”
is not valid reasoning.
On the question of how Bannon describes himself, here is a talk/interview he gave a couple of years ago.
@ HBC:
Ahh, my apologies then, please continue.
My main takeaway from that talk is that Bannon really likes the word “metastasize”.
@The Nybbler:
From that interview Friedman linked (and Bannon repeats the same basic claim multiple times).
He’s happy to work with these people, who have specific racist baggage, and just assumes that it will eventually work out. He’s just not very “arsed” about it. He knows who he’s working with, and doesn’t find it to be important.
He thinks he is in control of the tiger.
It’s actually even more interesting than that.
Bannon doesn’t just acknowledge that the populist right tends to attract racists and antisemites. He also acknowledges the necessity of self-policing to keep them out. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be any evidence that he is actually interested in doing any of that policing…
@HBC
So basically he’s not a white nationalist, not a neo-Nazi, but he’s not willing to discard and shun entire broad movements merely because they contain such? And he expects such people to become more and more marginalized.
That may or may not be wise. But it certainly doesn’t make him equivalent to Spencer or justify breathless rhetoric like ‘How is the top story on every front page not some version of “NEO-NAZIS ATTEMPTING TO SEIZE CONTROL OF AMERICAN GOVERNMENT”?’.
Interesting. That may turn out to be Trump’s fatal flaw– that he thinks he can control things and people he can’t control. Being president is not the best job for thin skinned people, used to being surrounded by sycophants who constantly bow to them.
If “alt-right” is just “non-mainstream, non-libertarian, not-especially-religious right”, it kind of becomes a bit meaningless, doesn’t it? I’m pretty sure all 4 of the guys you list were doing their thing well before Richard Spencer was fired from The American Conservative for being “too extreme”. Just a crazy catchall “everything not in the Republican party tent”, and arguably they’re poking their nose into that tent.
EDIT: This was @Stationary Feast. I wonder why the order of posts is messed up in this thread?
@dndnrsn – “If “alt-right” is just “non-mainstream, non-libertarian, not-especially-religious right”, it kind of becomes a bit meaningless, doesn’t it?”
…That’s pretty much exactly how I saw the “alt-right” label for most of this year, and it seemed like a useful-enough term to apply it to myself. If you don’t want Christian theocracy, have grown disillusioned with Libertarian talking points, and have made the observation that conservatism doesn’t actually conserve anything, but you find yourself opposed to the left and blue tribe generally, what’s the name for your position?
How about right-winger (NOS)?
@dndnrsn
Ha ha. But what are the other categories
Right Winger (GOP/neocon)
Right Winger (RINO)
Right Winger (Evangelical)
Right Winger (Tea Partier)
Right Winger (right-libertarian)
Right Winger (populist/Trumpist)
Right Winger (sovereign citizen)
Right Winger (neo-Nazi:intellectual)
Right Winger (neo-Nazi:1488er)
Right Winger (neo-Nazi:NOS)
And I guess the equivalent for the left
Left Winger (Democratic Party Regular)
Left Winger (Communist:tankie)
Left Winger (Communist:intellectual)
Left Winger (Communist:NOS)
Left Winger (Socialist/Berniebot)
Left Winger (SJW) (with subcategories)
Left Winger (bleeding heart)
Left Winger (left-libertarian)
Left Winger (trade unionist)
Left Winger (anarcho-syndicalist)
etc.
NOS?
Not Otherwise Specified in ICD codes ?
NOS = Not Otherwise Specified. Used in medical coding when there’s a list of possible ways to more specifically describe a condition to indicate it’s not anything in the list.
Suffice it to say that “alt-right” is far more in need of tabooing than most of the words you see people saying we ought to taboo.
ah, thanks for the explanation. I guess I don’t think Right Winger – NOS works well because the movement was a pretty new thing, and heavily opposed to other parts of the Right Wing. Like, people posting Trump pepes and talking about the God Emperor were definately part of a movement, and I don’t think it’d be fair to generic “right wingers” to use their label for it.
“Alt-right” is one of those things where the words themselves suggest something generic, but they actually refer to something specific. It’s not just a way of saying “not a mainstream Republican, not a libertarian, not a theocrat”.
I agree it could use tabooing because it’s one of those things where maybe there isn’t a proper central example.
I think I first became aware of Spencer when he founded alternativeright.com, a now-defunct blog/zine. This was probably around 2010. Some of the few things I remember about it is that it was sleek-looking and that Jason Richwine (pre-debacle) published some interesting articles on immigration there.
Spencer was the one who came up with ‘alt-right’ or least the one who popularized it. However, it seems controversial to equate his current views with the term alt-right. This is because his own views have changed (public views at least). He has become much more radical in the last year or two, e.g., I don’t recall that he was anti-Semitic or advocated for a white ethnostate in the early alternativeright.com days.
The fact that Bannon and Breitbart have attached themselves to the label alt-right is confusing because literally no one who knew the term a year or more ago would have thought of Breitbart as an alt-right site then.
Another reason to not equate alt-right with Spencer is that I don’t think he’s much of a thinker. I’ve read some of his stuff, but I can’t think of a single original idea that he has expressed. If you want to know who the intellectual godfathers of the alt-right are, here’s a good operational rule: former writers for the National Review blackballed for right-deviationism. They include Peter Brimelow, Steve Sailer, John Derbyshire, Robert Weissberg and Lawrence Auster. Joseph Sobran might be a precursor.
The elements that have been associated with the term alt-right from the beginning are: race realism/HBD, immigration restrictionism, isolationism. I think these are the essential elements of the movement and for that reason, saying that Breitbart is part of the alt-right is confusing for someone who has known and used the term before its recent popularity.
The problem with the term alt-right is that there’s the original definition of alt-right, associated with the (not static) positions of Spencer and others, and then there’s the new and better-known usage that doesn’t mean much more than “Trump supporter”.
“The fact that Bannon and Breitbart have attached themselves to the label alt-right ”
I don’t think they have.
As best I can tell, Bannon’s position is that alt-right authors are among those he publishes. As best I can tell from the talk of his I put up a link to, he identifies with something broader, running from the Tea Parties through Brexit/UKIP, with Marinne Le Pen towards the edge of it. Right, and rejecting part of the traditional libertarian/conservative alliance in the U.S..
Either the identification of Bannon and Breitbart with the alt-right is an invention of the media and the Hillary campaign or “alt-right” describes a much broader movement than those pushing that identification imply.
The alt-right was basically two factions, with the non-ethnats being usurpers. Now the conservative but non-ethnat faction has begun distancing itself from the term alt-right due to Richard Spencer getting attention in the mainstream use.
Paul Joseph Watson – of Infowars fame and with ties to Breitbart – had used the terminology before, but has now dubbed the anti-ethnat faction as the “New Right” compared to the alt-right, and various mods from /r/the_Donald have been promoting a New Right subreddit that specifically has disclaimers against racism and antisemitism.
It’s looking a lot like there’s going to be a lot more sharp drawing of boundaries and sectarianism as more attention is given to this motley internet movement. The alt-right broadened, but with an underlying tension, so it might snap in two at some point. Pro-Israeli civic nationalism is fundamentally incompatible with anti-Israeli ethno nationalism, after all. Only one can live.
With the label itself being discredited, those parts of the broader alt-right outside of the original nazi core are going to start jumping ship to a different label. Or at least that’s what the early signs are, and the noises the e-celebs are making. Of course, Bannon has come out against racism and antisemitism within the alt-right, but he probably isn’t going to be able to enable that grouping much longer, with all of the scrutiny of it.
Judging by Bannon’s talk a little more than two years ago, the movement he considered himself part of had some ethnic nationalist types but was at least mildly hostile to them:
“The central thing that binds that all together is a center-right populist movement of really the middle class, the working men and women in the world who are just tired of being dictated to by what we call the party of Davos. ”
“By the way, even in the tea party, we have a broad movement like this, and we’ve been criticized, and they try to make the tea party as being racist, etc., which it’s not. But there’s always elements who turn up at these things, whether it’s militia guys or whatever. Some that are fringe organizations. My point is that over time it all gets kind of washed out, right? People understand what pulls them together, and the people on the margins I think get marginalized more and more.”
“I think they’ve [UKIP] done a very good job of policing themselves to really make sure that people including the British National Front and others were not included in the party, and I think you’ve seen that also with tea party groups, where some people would show up and were kind of marginal members of the tea party, and the tea party did a great job of policing themselves early on.”
I’m not afraid of Nazis neo- or otherwise. It’s part of a general rule I have: I refuse to be frightened by the mention of a dead man’s name.
But, regardless of that, Trump isn’t a Nazi. Nearly every policy he’s advocating now was either the law of the land less than a century ago or at the very least still on the table within the last fifty. Immigration restrictions by ethnicity and mass deportation of illegal immigrants aren’t new and they’re not even unconstitutional much less dictatorial.
I get that people are afraid. I’m not trying to mock them for it, because I get where it’s coming from. But its just not a realistic fear.
I don’t think Lindy West is legitimately worried that Trump or Bannon are Nazis, in whatever broad sense of the term. She believes that if she uses the most extreme language possible, and encourages others to do the same, it will influence voters’ thinking against Trump. Of course, in reality, all it will do is influence voters to think that Trump’s critics are kind of crazy, and to be very skeptical of anything negative they say about him (especially as it pertains to Nazis).
This is just a theory, and, I admit, not a very charitable one.
I don’t know, but based on my experiences I’m erring on the side of most people (particularly Jews) who are saying that they’re terrified actually being terrified.
One of the things the Clinton campaign has to answer for is emphasizing this neo-Nazi / neo-Cossack nonsense. I agree with Steve Sailer: it was a transparent attempt to part donors with their money, by making them think the results of the election would determine their people’s right to exist. But the result is that tons of otherwise very reasonable people are seized with a completely unreasonable fear.
Yeah… I agree with that. I let my annoyance with West get the better of me, and I retract my uncharitable assessment of her motives.
Does anyone have an idea for outside-view arguments for mac vs. PC?
On the inside view, everyone seems confident that whichever one they’re using is inherently superior. The one outside view argument I’ve heard is to look at customer satisfaction ratings – people with macs tend to really love them, suggesting that actual experience with macs turns people to their side. This isn’t fully convincing, though – macs are expensive, so this could just be sunken cost fallacy, or a form of confirmation bias.
How many people use neither? That would be an issue for the outside view.
I don’t think the Linux community is famous for their fair and balanced view of macs and PCs…
But I think we are famous for knowing more about computers then most macOS and Windows users.
Of course technically speaking the “Mac vs PC” distinction is out of date, as Apple transitioned to x86 based Intel processors ten years ago.
I concur, and in my mind my comment came with the context that I respect people who know more about computers than I do. I didn’t make any effort to insinuate that in my comment, though, so it’s just insult.
Do you have an opinion on the merits of the two platforms?
I wasn’t insulted. Graph Linux users and computer nerds on a Venn diagram and the former falls almost entirely inside the later. Naturally that means you end up with a lot of people who are absurdly opinionated about trivial issues.
The thing is I think it’s strange to be having the Mac vs PC argument in 2016.
As the situation stands today, Mac and PC really aren’t separate platforms. Ever since Apple dropped the RISC based PowerPC processor and went over to Intel CPU’s Macs are basically built with the same components as high end PCs. The only thing that makes a Mac a Mac is a bunch of firmware that supports OS X/macOS. You can dual boot Windows 10 or any Linux distro you want on basically all apple desktops and laptops made since 2006. It’s even possible to build a “Hackintosh” from OTC components and install macOS sierra on it, but its a massive pain in the ass.
The only real question is operating systems, and whether your willing to pay the (by now relatively modest) premium to have the option of using macOS.
On the one hand, I happen to think there is a special place in hell for who ever designed HFS plus (the file system that Macs have used since OS 8), but your average user probably doesn’t care, and they’re phasing it out sometime in 2017 anyway. On the other hand I think sierra has a lead in UI design, but compared to Windows 10 it is slight. If you’re in the market for a high end computer and have an iPad and an iPhone, and you want to easily sync your devices to your desktop, get a Mac. If you’re going to spend a lot of time playing call of duty, and want to have a lot of expansion options, get a PC.
You missed excel. If you use excel seriously, you need windows. On the other hand if you spend a bunch of time programming and your IDE of choice is anything other than VS you probably don’t want windows.
@Brad
Agreed about excel, but do you really think that visual studio is the only option for an IDE on Windows?
I’m not a software, developer and I have done relatively little coding on windows, but is there anything wrong with Eclipse? It’s feature rich, customizable, and it’s actualy gotten a fair amount of support form Microsoft recently.
@hyperboloid:
Have done some development in javascript and node destined for AWS deployment, the available windows options have seemed like they are poor and very frustrating. Eventually we went to cloud9 as cloud/browser based environment, which seems to work well enough, but still crappy compared to a normal IDE.
Now, I was mostly just passively accepting others recommendations as this is a very part time, side project for me, so I could be completely wrong.
Sure eclipse works on Windows, the jetbrains one does too. There’s also windows versions of vim and emacs.
But if you are writing java (or c, most c++, haskall, ruby, python — basically anything except for c#, f#, or the Microsoft flavor of c++) the entire tool chain is written for unix first and windows is an afterthought. You’ll constantly be fighting impedance mismatch.
People do it, heck I’ve done it, but is not the most straightforward choice.
I think which one is better depends greatly on what you want, so there are no general outside-view arguments. You could look at the fact that more people switch from PC to Mac than vice versa. You could also compare objective factors (specs, price etc.) but the correct way to weigh them up varies from person to person.
I don’t think there’s one right answer. If someone says that Mac is strictly inferior or strictly superior to PC he is simply wrong. It has to do with what you need the computer for, how much money you have to spend, what your tech support options are, etc, etc, etc.
These are all reasonable arguments, but they still feel inside-view-ish. To illustrate the difference here, if you say “Macs have great software for video editing”, that’s inside-view. If you say “Giving either a mac or a PC at random to a graphic designer, we see that graphic designers with macs do better work”, that’s outside-view. Genuine outside-view seems hard since we don’t usually do this kind of double-blind trials IRL – what would you say is close to it?
You could compare the sort of software written (or # of downloads) for each platform? For example, far more games run on Windows than Mac. But that methodology might have chicken-and-egg problems.
Given that I use Mac for work and PC at home, and wouldn’t change either, going to toss my two-cents in with the folks saying they’re better at different things.
I’m not a mac guy for political reasons mainly, but one of my IT friends who was heavily into Linux and the usual associations started coming around after he received a work-issue Mac laptop. I don’t understand all his reasons, but he was pretty impressed by the hardware, even though the machine was build in ’12.
Companies that account for IT support find that macs are dramatically cheaper. eg, IBM. (leaving aside the dramatically better hardware)
Similarly, office buildings use fluorescent light bulbs not to save money on electricity, but to save labor replacing them.
Oh, nice.
This is what I would expect(hindsight bias?!) mac OS just doesn’t let you fiddle with as much stuff as windows.
But ‘harder to fiddle with’ goes in two directions ‘harder to fuck up’ and ‘harder to fix/customize’. This understanding of what fiddlability? means for a computer is pretty widely agreed upon and which OS is more fiddly is as well I think. I am not aware of any particular test of this, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find a definition of fiddlability that you care about and then test it for the two OS to get an objective determination on the exact amounts. Getting an outside view on the value of fiddlability is not as obvious to me.
Everything else in the Mac PC debate boils down to Apple vs All other computer manufactures, Apple charges a lot for it’s brand is the only real point there, and the knock on effects from PC being way more common, more software support, more malware support, etc.
I don’t think that this has anything to do with fiddling.
Apple charges nothing for its brand. It is a discount. If you want to run windows, it is cheaper to buy a mac and separately buy windows to put on it, at least for a laptop. (But you shouldn’t run windows directly on the machine. Instead you should run it in an emulator because the overhead of running the mac operating system is negative.) This will be cheaper than buying a PC with the closest comparable hardware (as mentioned in the link), but it will be much better because of all the hardware that you can only get from Apple. Macs are expensive because Apple only sells good computers, not because they charge more.
Apple has the highest profit margin of any computer manufacturer, so yes, it would cost you considerably more if you could find a competitor with equivalent hardware. Fortunately for Apple, the commoditization of PC hardware has lead to a race-to-the-bottom. While competitive products do exist, they can be hard-to-find amongst the crud, generally targeted at businesses, or simply not directly comparable (e.g. MS’s Surface).
The moment you place an OS in a VM, you lose direct access to the underlying hardware and are at the mercy of whatever paravirtualization the host OS/hypervisor provides. This is particularly egregious in the case of a desktop OS (like Windows) because you lose all high-speed access to the graphics card. One of the problems unique to Apple is they have (traditionally) provided poor driver support for native execution of Windows, so you may witness benchmark anomalies.
Now, if all you are doing is web browsing and Office, then there is little need to worry about your specific OS configuration. If you’re going to be running performance-heavy applications like Games or Engineering applications, then you have to pay closer to attention to what’s going on.
No, they are more expensive for both reasons.
As I said above, my original link supports my claim: IBM finds that macs are already a little cheaper
before support costs.
Profit does not address my claim. Apple has high profit margins because its costs are low because it is competent. It spends very little on R&D and it spends very little on marketing. But it spends those dollars very well. Also, its manufacturing is cheaper, if only because it has experience with techniques that other companies are just now copying.
Claiming that Apple (more accurately, Foxconn) has some secret sauce that can save them ~ $200 per unit (20% vs 4% margin) is an outrageous claim. I’d only be willing to accept that if you could produce evidence to that effect.
I see nothing in the article to that effect (Re: acquisition costs). I’m going to assume you’re referring to:
The only quantitative statement for costs is in reference to the total cost of ownership (TCO) over a finite time period (four years). I don’t consider it controversial to claim that support dominates the cost of IT in industry and Apple traditionally holds an advantage over Windows in that sector.
I will admit the language is less than perfect and could potentially be interpreted in several ways. However, “three times more expensive” and a difference of “$273 – $543” does not correspond to any reasonable range of new computer prices.
I went ahead and watched the video, they are talking total cost of ownership over 4 years.
In particular they are comparing Lenovo T460 with macbook pro 13 for the 273 number.
Lenovo T460 with with macbook air 13 for the 513 number, the Air is about 500 dollars cheaper than the pro, so I guess the Air is also worse than the pro on IT cost?
And finally the Yoga X1 back against the pro, for the 543 number.
The T460 is very slightly better in terms of specs compared to the pro both better than the air, and it’s about the same price as the air, the yoga is a hybrid tablet that obviously costs more for it’s specs, at around the same price as the pro, which seems to imply that the yoga IT costs are half that of the t460.
Maybe I am horrible at math or something, but this evidence seems far from conclusive that the issue here is windows vs mac os.
I did this ignoring the current sale price on the Lenovo store(apple did not seem to be running a sale on the air or pro), the sale Lenovo is currently running is greater than the cost difference noticed by IBM, so maybe they just need to buy more of their computers around black Friday like the rest of us.
This also all assumes they are paying close to retail for these laptops, which I honestly have no idea about.
Also, this is all about laptop pricing, I work for a company slightly smaller than IBM but still in the top 50, and we use considerably more desktops than laptops.
As far as I am aware, literally nobody at IBM uses a desktop. IBM employees get a laptop as their primary workstation, and then can request a docking station and external monitors if necessary.
I have no special information, but would be very surprised if IBM paid sticker price for its laptops. Every employee gets a new laptop every four years, which works out to nearly 100K new laptops purchased every year. I assume you get a bulk discount at that point.
On a semi-related note, if you are in the market for a cheap laptop and don’t mind it being a few years old, you can get a pretty good deal on old Thinkpads that IBM is cycling out of service.
Source: IBM employee.
Yeah about halfway through looking up prices I thought, they probably don’t pay retail, but I had already put in the time, sunk costs and all that.
Is it expected that everyone takes their work station home with them somewhat regularly, or can you speculate on the reason for the laptop preference?
You can take a laptop home with you. You can take it with you to visit a client, if you are client-facing. You can bring your laptop to a meeting. When you are at your desk, if you like, you can simulate the desktop experience with a docking station, external keyboard, and external monitor.
What are the advantages of a desktop?
I had assumed the ‘corporation relevant’ advantage for Desktops was the price. Some people I work with can take advantage of mobility, and they get laptops, most of them, myself included, never have any reason to move their computer around, a mac mini or pc equivalent no frills tower normally cost around half the price for the specs compared to laptops(at retail, but this seems clearly a byproduct of manufacturing costs that should translate into any sort of pricing deal).
Cost, performance, and human interface.
For a corporation, the difference in cost are more than offset by the productivity gains of a notebook. For your average employee, computer performance dramatically exceeds their requirements, so that’s similarly a non-issue.
Certain technical tasks (circuit design, mechanical engineering, etc.) have extensive performance requirements and a cramped screen/keyboard can be a significant handicap on productivity (e.g. multiple running applications). You can mitigate the later with a docking station, but it still means that you have significantly impaired productivity the moment you pull the notebook out and try to use it anywhere else.
Where I work, the company issues both notebooks and desktops to engineering staff. I don’t see a whole lot of non-programming technical work done on notebooks. Instead, the notebook is generally limited to office work and “viewing” (maybe limited editing) of the technical material. A few people have outrageously expensive notebooks in docking stations but they are the minority.
Setting aside cost, it is a lot easier to add the advantages of a desktop to a laptop than vice versa. Don’t like the keyboard or screen? Plug in a docking station! Processor isn’t beefy enough? Offload it to a server! It doesn’t work the other way around – if you would like to bring your desktop to a meeting, you just can’t. You may lose the benefit of the docking station when you leave your desk, but that’s still a step up from never being able to leave your desk at all.
For reference, I have met people who do circuit design for IBM, and they were all carrying around Thinkpads too.
Well, this could also just be a difference of corporate environment.
I work for UPS so the vast majority of employees don’t even use computers, but the departments we have that do use computers are mostly of the ‘cubicle farm’ format, we have an office building somewhere, a bunch of people walk in, sit at their desks, and plug away all day. They are never in meetings, they never need to move anywhere, they just show up and do some kind of data entry all day. The idea of giving them all laptops and docking stations instead of just buying them a desktop seems wasteful.
I just assumed IBM would similarly have large numbers of employees who match that description, but in retrospect, they might not.
That’s pretty much it. If you don’t need any of the advantages that a laptop has over a desktop there’s no point in paying the dollar and performance penalty for it. The performance penalty has to do with most laptops being designed with weight and power consumption being major considerations. you can get desktop replacement laptops but at that point they are more portable than mobile.
Edit: Wow, don’t leave posting window open and walk away. This should be three posts up.
I work at a major aerospace company, and even the engineers get laptops. We get very nice ones, and the advantages of being able to take them into meetings and on trips presumably far outweigh the cost savings. Laptops are pretty much mandatory, so you might as well upgrade them instead of buying desktops as well. (Also, that would be a pain to manage.)
I’m sure that there are some people with really high-end desktops doing CFD and the like, but even our stress guys use laptops.
20 or even 10 years ago it might have made sense to go for desktops based on a dollar-per-computron basis. But unless you are on an extremely tight budget, or really need a desktop for some specific reason, the margin just isn’t that big any more.
I was wrong. IBM claims that Macs are 10-20% more expensive. But that isn’t for comparable machines. A low-end T460 is much worse than an Air. Maybe when it is maxed out it is comparable to a Pro, but I am skeptical.
But I want to return to the topic of profit. There are two things I should have mentioned higher on my list. First, there is an apples-to-oranges problem because Apple also makes the software. You probably should compare PC+MS profit to Apple profit. You should expect vertically integrated companies to have lower profit margins. Second, low-end computers have low profit margins and high-end computers have high profit margins. The profit margin on a computer comparable to a mac isn’t the profit margin on the typical computer. I am more familiar with the situation of phones, where Samsung sells low-end phones with razor-thin margins and high-end phones with manufacturing and sales costs like iphones. But they have lower profit margins because of higher advertising costs.
I can’t help but feel there are other variables within companies that use Mac vs PC that would change the cost of tech support. Who is choosing to use which, and what activities does their job entail?
From what I understand the article is actually just an internal study by IBM about their own costs after asking employees what computer they wanted, and giving out a bunch of Macs in response.
I would actually really like to see the relevant data, while in general it is not hard to imagine that Mac is better in terms of IT cost, I am curious about the details here.
I can see that. Its really easy to screw up your windows.
Is the virus difference still true(or was it ever true?)
If so, I guess I could see the point of giving a gift of a mac to someone new to internet browsing instead of a cheaper PC they would just infect.
Kinda? Mac OS has benefited from being a niche platform for the about the entire time it’s been connected to the Internet, making it a not inherently valuable target (unlike the business world running on Windows). Pre-X, it had no inherent security advantages over anyone else. Post-X, it was architecturally similar (in the broadest sense) to Linux (through its BSD heritage) which gave it advantages over the versions of Windows available at the time. With XP SP2, and especially Vista, Microsoft aggressively ramped up their security posture and any structural advantage Mac OS enjoyed was erased.
These days, the vulnerabilities are less about the OS as a whole and more about the vulnerability of individual applications (namely browsers and their plugins). The OS’s role is primarily a parameter of the shell code (e.g. a Mac exploit will rarely work under Windows and vice versa) and whatever mitigations the OS provides to prevent an attacked application from escalating into an exploit (e.g. sandboxing, address space randomization, etc.).
If you’re willing to accept hearsay evidence, a college friend of mine who spent many years as a professional hacker (with a few exploits sold to the DoD under his belt) had a very negative view of Mac OS X security in the 2010ish timeframe. They provided fewer mitigations than Microsoft and the ones they did provide were generally far less sophisticated and less capable. Mac exploits were generally saved for pwn2own-style competitions because they had little market value (supply drastically exceeding demand). He has since left that business so file that as a historical footnote and not a statement as to the current state of things. (He did say that iOS had far better security than Android for what it’s worth.)
By that logic, something like a Chromebook would be preferable to a Mac. Obviously, it’s more limited (which is one of the primary reasons why it would be more secure).
These days, all the modern OS’s have “good enough” security and attackers are largely focusing on Cell Phones and Internet-Of-Things devices, so I’m not sure how much thought should really be focused on this specific issue.
Cost for the capabilities lean pretty strongly for a general windows 10 PC.
The one big advantage I can see to Windows aside from cost (I’m a Mac user) is that there is a much larger range of hardware to choose from. That briefly seemed to be changing when Apple allowed clones, one of which I owned, but then they reversed that decision.
Article from New York magazine
Activists Urge Clinton Campaign to Challenge Election Results in 3 Swing States
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/activists-urge-hillary-clinton-to-challenge-election-result
I hope this gets done.
“Page Not Found”.
Ah, here it is:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/activists-urge-hillary-clinton-to-challenge-election-results.html
I’m going to predict that the largest cities used optical scanners.
http://elections.wi.gov/sites/default/files/page/179/voting_equipment_by_municipality_09_2016_pdf_19011.pdf
Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay (cities over 100,000) — all use ES&S DS200 optical scanners.
Okay. Have they analysed Trump’s votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines versus counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots? Any analysis of election results from other years?
Because unless they can show that this is not an artefact of the voting process, and that Trump/other candidates in previous years, received the same ratio of votes from machines to optical scanners/paper ballots but Hillary’s vote pattern was wonky, they haven’t shown evidence of anything yet other than “Hm, she got 7% fewer when voting was by machine versus paper ballot, wonder why that is?”
If sneaky devious nogoodniks hacked the voting machines and stole her votes, great, show it and get the result over-turned. But first you have to show that there isn’t any other/more credible explanation for this result than “deliberate fraud”.
Do you really have to prove fraud as a prerequisite for investigating for fraud? Honestly #AuditTheVote seems like a good idea to me, the vote should *routinely* be audited. Maybe there wasn’t any fraud in this case but it seems like a good general policy to protect against and discourage fraud so that we can have more confidence in the cleanliness of our elections.
The only persuasive argument against seems to be “but what if the audit turns up something, wouldn’t that lead to civil war”, and at that point you have basically given up on democracy.
Do you really have to prove fraud as a prerequisite for investigating for fraud?
I think it would be good to have comparisons before crying foul. As it stands, and this is only a quick opinion based on reading that article alone, it sounds like (I am not saying it is, I am saying it sounds like it) they are saying “Our favoured candidate did not win, so it must be down to fraud!”
Well, have they anything to back this up? Did they compare “states where she won which had voting machines versus paper ballots or other methods”? Did Trump have similar results in states he lost? If this really is a unique result that is not seen elsewhere, sure, call it fraud, bang the drums, prosecute it. I think voting is important enough that it should not be interfered with. But show that “no, nothing similar was ever seen in this election or other elections” before saying “This mysterious 7% difference can only be explained by sinister interference by the vote-snatchers!”
Just because it is weird and anomalous (if it is anomalous, we don’t have the data to say that yet) doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the result of malice or fraud. The universe is weird and anomalous. People do things for the weirdest reasons; it might be that someone using a voting machine would not vote for Clinton but would do so on a paper ballot, maybe because of the layout of the ballot and how the machine presents the candidates. God knows, I don’t, so let’s get some facts here first.
I agree with you that a regular random audit would be no harm to keep things honest and prevent conspiracy theories on the part of all parties.
Something like:
available source code for the devices + reproducible build process + available core dumps from the actual machines
seems like a no-brainer to me. If the vendor screams about proprietary trade secrets, then find another vendor.
The process by which vendors are found is that they contribute money to state political campaigns– same as other contracts for goods and services with state or federal government. Companies invest in government and get contracts out of it, just like the MIC and all the rest. The integrity of the voting process is not considered.
I’m okay with it if it’s done evenhandedly. I object if the auditing is done only jurisdictions where Trump won; or if the auditors look only for the kinds of irregularities which would have benefited Trump.
But I suspect most of these “auditthevote” types are more one-sided in their aims.
Yeah, that’s reasonable. I assumed there would be something in place in the recount schemes to prevent that sort of nonsense, but since no one is interested at ALL in having any sort of fair or reasonable electoral process, that probably wasn’t a safe assumption to make.
@ fortaleza84
I’m okay with it if it’s done evenhandedly. I object if the auditing is done only jurisdictions where Trump won; or if the auditors look only for the kinds of irregularities which would have benefited Trump.
For evenhandedness:
Any year when the EC overrides the National Popular Vote, there must be an audit — against the EC-guy, whoever it is. That brings the audit down to a practical size (even if some narrow margin states originally in the NPV’s side were included in the audit).
that’s fine I guess, but how is that any better than “audits must be done generally”? Or “audits must be done below a certain percent”? It definitely seems like it’s possible to win the electoral college and lose the popular vote without any cheating; the only marginal case, where Bush likely cheated in 2000, was still close enough that it’s a possibility. Plus, in cases like this one it’s not that marginal; 68K votes isn’t a Bush-level margin of victory. But whatever, we could use more audits anyhow, as long as it’s not me paying personally for it x-d
@ AnonEEmous
For getting the new rule passed, the fewer and cheaper the audits the better, but whatever. I think the most important points are to have a default rule in place that any General Election that has one of X, Y, and Z automatically triggers a recount, and specifies how it be conducted. In 2000, Bush ran out the clock by arguing about details like that. Also when a recount is triggered, all deadlines should be put on hold till all recounts are finished to the satisfaction of both sides.
Yes. They have. The only thing that seems to be going on is that the all-electronic voting machines were sent to the rural and small-town precincts while the optically-scanned paper ballots were used in big cities. I’m kind of surprised the difference is only 7%.
So there is an alternative explanation for the difference that is not “deliberate fraud” and it’s “demographics”: places that had paper ballots also had a greater proportion of (likely) Clinton voters, places that had machines also had a greater proportion of (likely) non-Clinton voters.
Thank you for that, that is exactly the kind of information I was seeking.
I don’t know whether Trump is going to turn out to be like Hitler or not. No one does, because Trump lies constantly and is very inconsistent. So he’s rather unpredictable. But I am pretty sure that if he did turn out to be like Hitler, that most commenters on sites like this would still be raving on and on about how awful SJWs are and how awful it is that somebody somewhere once said that all women ought to vote for Hillary because she is a woman etc. etc.
Everybody focuses on First World problems, even while we are in the process of turning into a Third World country.
Humans are creatures of habit, and are also capable of infinite self-delusion.
“Like Hitler” in what ways, though? If Trump tried to open up death camps, conquer other countries for lebensraum, assassinate political opponents, ban all other political parties, or take any of the other significant actions listed here, I’m highly confident most of the commentariat here would get upset about it.
If there’s one silver lining to the Trump presidency, it’s precisely the fact that he’s too used to the good life to have the psychological profile required for these things. A certain under-siege mentality, developed under conditions of austerity, is usually a prerequisite for bringing out this sort of extreme violence in people — not to mention a very firmly held extreme ideology. Whereas Trump is certainly not a man of the mind, nor has he had reason to become embittered. For him life just appears to be one big circus show or birthday party starring him in every role. The worst he’s likely to do, given that emotional tone, is to bully some peons into enacting policy that ruins the lives of some people very far away, without him personally feeling that shit’s about to get real and that when that happens, he’ll be at the helm. That’s why I don’t worry too much about America under him.
His cabinet, however? I’m not sure the guy has enough political discernment or even favourable environment so as to not accidentally endow a literal 1488er or several with important positions. I mean, he seemed to have enough of it at least to express unease at sharing a party with David Duke back in the day. But yeah, it’s a terrific time for bad apples.
And there’s, of course, the encouragement-by-proxy of grassroots support of policies and people much more extreme.
Maybe he’ll run anti-smoking campaigns and bring in maternity leave?
Moon, it is damn awful when people say “Women should vote for X because she’s a woman”. Feminism was supposed to be about, amongst other things, equality of treatment with neither special preference nor disfavour being shown because of one’s sex.
Pleading for “vote on sex-based grounds just because” is saying a woman can’t fight an election on equal grounds to a man, she has to have special pleading on her behalf because she isn’t otherwise good enough.
“Vote for a woman just because she’s a woman going for the job” says nothing about quality or ability. Vote for this woman because she’s well-qualified? No problem there. Vote for this woman because she’s the best candidate? No problem there. Vote for this woman because she’s a woman and that’s all you need to take into account? Big problem there.
Given that Trump has never expressed fascist political beliefs in any respect where they differ from the modern American mainstream (e.g. that democracy is bad, personal freedoms such as those afforded by the Second Amendment are bad, minorities are responsible for America’s problems just by virtue of their race, America is destined to expand its borders), I have a hard time crediting this concern. It seems analogous to the right worrying that Obama was secretly a Communist.
Be wary of comparisons based on elements that aren’t unique to fascism. For example, the belief that America needs a strong leader, or that America is better than other countries, or that it has been in decline and needs to be “made great again”. While you may disagree with them, those aren’t fascist beliefs. They’re very common ones among the discontented of any nation. A huge number of your countrymen share them without having a fascist bone in their bodies. Just because Hitler pulled those levers doesn’t mean anyone who pulls them is Hitler. And be especially wary of arguments that focus on the degrees of separation between Trump and actual fascists. Again, the same arguments were used by the right in ’08 to “prove” that Obama was a disciple of Alinsky and Ayers.
Personally, I’m concerned that Trump will be the American Berlusconi. That would be quite bad enough.
Fascist? I’ve always argued that Trump has not appealed specifically to the idea of the nation as more important than the populace that seems an intrinsic part of fascism.
However, Trump ran as a nativist, populist demagogue with appeals to to an explicit cult of personality. He literally said “Only I can fix it” and “[electing me will] make every dream you ever dreamed for your country come true.”
Whatever one term label you want to put on that, or if you deny that it can be captured by a one word label, it’s disturbing.
Absolutely. I think we on the left have an instinctive distrust of anyone who appeals to those themes, and for good reason. (Not that we don’t have our own blind spots.)
But it doesn’t strike me as accurate or productive to call him a fascist. That’s the kind of language that makes the people whom we’d most like to listen to our concerns dismiss us.
The problem is that what Trump has done rhymes with fascist. Absent a good term, people are going to gravitate to the one that closely matches it. Because, it is deeply disturbing.
And then there are the deliberate winking echoes promulgated by people in his campaign, played so they can have it both ways, coyly refusing to denounce, then pseudo denouncing, then repeating the same behavior.
When a six pointed star, shows up over a pile of cash linked to the word corruption, that’s not an accident. When it gets retweeted by Trump’s son, that’s not an accident either.
So, color me unimpressed by all of the hand-wringing. Sure, try and find a more suitable name, but this all strikes me as the kid who gets in an inch away from your face, putting his finger right at your eyeball, claiming the “I never touched him” defense. That kid is an annoying little shit who is trying to break the rules by using them. He knows and you know, regardless of whether he gets away with it or not.
Now, appropriate strategy for dealing with that kind of pathetic bullshit is something else.
As someone with a Poli-Sci degree, I have a bit of an allergy to people who confuse fascist, totalitarian and authoritarian.
The flip side of this (and it took me way too long to catch on to) is that Hillary’s campaign slogan was “Stronger Together”, which is the principle behind the Fasces, the symbol from which fascism takes its name.
Trump also isn’t so hot on the personal freedoms in the First Amendment, particularly when it comes to freedom of the press.
Trump is very hostile to the media (who have been very hostile to him, when they weren’t openly treating his candidacy as a joke), but let’s not overstate the case. Trump wants to strengthen libel law so that he can sue media outlets who “write bad” about him. “Write bad” seems to be Trump vernacular for libel, in much the same way he uses “bad people” as a stand-in for felons and illegal immigrants. The man is not a precise speaker. While I think that is very bad policy and speaks to his thin-skinned, bullying nature, it’s a far cry from abolishing the First Amendment.
It’s worth keeping in mind that America has some of the weakest libel laws in the West. He probably could have sued over some of the coverage, in, say, Great Britain.
But he promised to make America great again, not turn it into a Great-Britain-esque hellscape.
@suntzuanime: How did you not go with “Make America Great Britain Again”?
Surely I am losing my edge.
Speaking as a Brit myself, our libel laws are not to be envied. In fact they’re so bad that the US specifically had to make a law making such judgments unenforcable, because Americans kept coming to the UK courts (which placed the burden of proof on the defendant).
Remember that these strict libel laws delayed the distribution and broadcast of Going Clear in the UK, due to a threat of legal action. Back in the 90s, it also caused some newspapers not to publish stories about alleged victims of Jimmy Savile (for fear of ruinous legal costs). And later, threats of legal action were used to prevent reporting on allegations of doping by Lance Armstrong. The simple fact is that libel laws defend the rich and powerful, and nobody else. Libel laws are better in the UK than they used to be, less favorable to the plaintiff and less vulnerable to the kind of absurd libel tourism that went on.
“It’s worth keeping in mind that America has some of the weakest libel laws in the West. He probably could have sued over some of the coverage, in, say, Great Britain.”
The same could definitely be said of Hillary Clinton. Or for that matter, Barack Obama.
@Moon:
I’m glad to see you’re becoming more open-minded. Oh, and this reminds me:
You can say what you like about Hitler….
>I’m glad to see you’re becoming more open-minded.
Well, that makes one of us.
Since you’ve given me permission– thank you so much for that, oh Great One– NOT– I will say that I wonder whether or not, when Hitler came to power, whether lots of people were all focused on making sure that no one was allowed to compare Hitler to Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun– or to someone else that they thought of as a good historical example of evil.
Just wondering.
@Moon – “Since you’ve given me permission– thank you so much for that, oh Great One– NOT– I will say that I wonder whether or not, when Hitler came to power, whether lots of people were all focused on making sure that no one was allowed to compare Hitler to Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun– or to someone else that they thought of as a good historical example of evil.”
Napoleon, I think, was the go-to Pre-Hitler Hitler.
I had reason to look into that a while back, and I believe the usual pre-Hitler Hitler was the Pharaoh. The evil one, even if we’re not sure who that was.
I would have expected someone like Napoleon, or maybe Genghis Khan, but in hindsight, what’s the Bible good for if not providing Icons of Ultimate Evil? Well, OK, there’s some Icons of Ultimate Good in there too.
…at least he killed Hitler.
I’m not sure if this has been suggested before, but has anyone here ever considered making a SSC 8ch board?
While some understandably have concerns over the general politics and culture there, 8ch is built in a modular way like reddit, where boards are self-moderated and don’t regularly interact with each other, allowing users to create their own board culture.
There’s several positives I can think of as well:
-More readable format
-Easier to see comment replies to see who is responding to you
-Allows for semi-anonymous posting, putting the emphasis on post-quality rather than namecalling
-Allows direct posting of images and videos
-The hide button allows you to filter by user ID as well as by thread. If you find that a specific poster regularly posts low-information posts, you can filter their posts while still seeing who replied to them.
I’ve rarely posted here since the wordpress registration has been mandatory, and have noticed a significant drop in overall post quality since then, but would probably regularly visit an 8ch SCC board.
There was one. It was… something.
There’s a general SSC/LW one, but it’s not very active (or particularly good either):
https://8ch.net/ratanon/catalog.html (NSFW)
>putting the emphasis on post-quality rather than namecalling
If only.
Ah, well that’s unfortunate now that I look at it. My first thought is that the nature of the board is that it’s due to some combination of poor moderation/lack of interet/lack of structure, and ideally it would have structure closer to the reddit where there’d be threads up for each individual article (they’d get temporarily stickied, then allowed to die out as normal), instead of being some sort of a rationalism (and rationalist) meta-discussion.
But I could be wrong and it could be like Communism in that it never works no matter how many times you try it.
Or the ideal structure could be like total laissez faire capitalism– a system that no one has ever tried, because it’s obvious it will not work.
My initial thought was that making it harder to post would lead to an increase in quality, but if quality has dropped, I suppose it means that the people who most enjoy the sight of their own writing have the least to contribute.
Or perhaps people who’ll just pop off the odd interesting comment are discouraged, while people who write absolutely everything that comes to mind, aren’t.
Or, perhaps, correlation doesn’t equal causation.
Both things could be correlated with something else that is actually causitive of the perception of a drop in post quality. That’s a possibility that should be considered.
I blame Trump.
More specifically what I have noticed:
-Anonymous comments on SSC allowed a few things. The first is that it anyone can comment more easily, and that at least on SSC, Anonymous posters tended to post productive content. The second is that if user X wants to snark on liberals/conversatives for to vent, they can do so without it building their image, or if Y wants to post something out of character, they can do so without being told that they’re a fake Libertarian and actually a crypto-nazi because they had an inconsistent argument once.
As it is, I feel the voices on SSC have become very stagnant, and by reading the username, I can pretty accurately predict the quality of the post, the political/philosophical slant, and who else will agree/disagree with it out of habit rather than correctness. Basically the same problems standard forums run into, where it evolves into cliquishness over time.
I think this is somewhat inherent to the nature of usernames in that it creates a sort of cult of personality, biasing us by nature.
>I suppose it means that the people who most enjoy the sight of their own writing have the least to contribute.
I also think that this isn’t necessarily a given. If the same person disagrees with you every post, you can sort-of shrug them off after awhile and decide that putting effort into breaking down their arguments is useless, which can weaken your own arguments by putting you in a bubble. Anonymous passerby comments strengthen your arguments by exposing them to fresh criticism.
Some of these are features rather than bugs. Why would we want people to post inconsistent arguments? And why would we want people insulated from the consequences of snarking?
Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, it has been said. Earnest truthseeking means not always living up to your stereotype in every case, and certainly it’s annoying to get pidgeonholed as e.g. a right-wing partisan when you’re just trying to explore ideas.
And from my point of view, registration has actually reduced the consequences of snarking, because now I don’t have that one Anon following me around to every thread to harass me.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Suntzu, so I am not the only one who has been “stalked” or followed around from one thread to another by someone wanting to continuously harass me? At least I am not alone in that.
May it never happen to anyone again.
Because the argument is what is important not who’s making it. I often experiment with various ideas that don’t fit into my overall ideology, but other people may feel more comfortable going anon in order to post what ifs. It also means that people are able to make arguments without backlash or worrying about identity issues.
However, this is the flip-side. I often wonder if it’s possible to design a registration system so that we can have the first thing but not the second. It’s probably impossible and inherent to the nature of fixed pseudonyms vs fluid pseudonyms, but it’s worth some people smarter than me trying to think of a way around it.
Sounds like Trump is tapping Nikki Haley for UN ambassador. If this is true, it is surprisingly good news: Haley was a prominent early critic of Trump, and as far as I can recall she is the first to be nominated for something important. Maybe Trump’s cabinet won’t be 100% toadies and lickspittles after all.
At the very least, I can’t find any evidence that Nikki Haley actively hates the United Nations, which makes her a better choice than some former ambassadors.
Repeating my previous criticism from when Haley was being considered for State — I like her, but she has no diplomatic experience at all.
I’d say Attorney General is pretty important.
“First Trump critic” is how I interpreted that.
Oh. Disregard then. Romney might get the State job if Trump’s fondness for photogenic people shines through.
Yeah, HeelBearCub’s interpretation is what I intended.
Don’t get me wrong – I have no great love for Nikki Haley. But Trump could have done worse, and the fact that he’s branched out beyond the set of people who supported him during the campaign is promising.
Romney getting State would also be (relatively) good news, in my opinion.
At the very least, I can’t find any evidence that Nikki Haley actively hates the United Nations, which makes her a better choice than some former ambassadors.
Can you unpack this a bit? Better how? Better being friendly with the people at the UN, or better at serving American national interests, or just better because you disagreed with John Bolton?
Bolton’s criticisms of the UN (given in that WP article) seem about right to me. (And it appears the the NYT agree with at least some of them.)
– The five permanent members of the UN Security Council to work more closely to craft powerful resolutions and make sure they are enforced, and to address the underlying causes of conflicts, rather than turning them over to the Secretariat and special envoys;
– A focus on administrative skills in choosing the next secretary-general; and
– A more credible and responsible Human Rights Commission.
Which ones do you disagree with, or do you have other criticisms that you think should take priority?
There is a place for people who loudly oppose multilateralism and doubt the basic purpose of the United Nations. That place is not as the UN ambassador.
John Bolton was a terrible diplomat. Even where his goals were reasonable, his approach was counter-productive. Here’s an article from the Economist.
Would you nominate an anti-Zionist as the US ambassador to Israel? Even if he had a reasonable list of things he wanted to achieve?
(While they don’t have much to do with his time at the UN, the first four paragraphs of this section and the testimony during his Senate confirmation hearing, especially Day 2, are also good examples of why I have a low opinion of Bolton.)
It’s always a good idea to give your critics an ambassador role. Makes you seem open minded and gets them as far away from you as possible.
As far away from you as possible, in this case, the 15 minute walk from Trump Tower to the UN.
Speaking as a South Carolinian, my main objection is that he is taking one of our useful politicians away from us. I don’t agree w/ Haley on everything, but I have a fair bit of respect for her.
UN ambassador is prestigious, but not not a particularly important position. I imagine it’s more about her burnishing her resume/trump trying to get the exact reaction from people that he got from you than anything.
It’s time for another left wing reply train! I don’t want people to get drowned out. I don’t want people to get dogpiled. I care about your voice.
You are not alone.
In the interests of solidarity and breaking through the right wing consensus of SSC, please respond below if you are one of our left wing posters. No, this is neither madness or mockery (perish the thought!). What must be recognized is that people stay silent when they think that they are alone, and only by speaking out can we change that.
Solidarity!
I will assume you are actually serious, but I feel like I’m being trolled.
Here.
But what would the punchline even be?
PSYCHE! I’ve got you in my fascist dungeon now.
Tekhno made a bet with me a few days ago that he couldn’t produce an effective registry of SSC leftists for use in a soft purge. I guess I owe him $20.
^— joke post I had been thinking about making ever since his 4:18pm post
This joke is not clearly enough a joke, despite the statement. I was at first unclear whether someone was joking back then or you are joking now.
Sorry that wasn’t clear. Maybe my comments below clear it up?
(I have to remind myself that I read and think over others’ comments here a lot more than people probably think over mine…)
You don’t have to SAY you’re Left of Center to know you are in the Right Wing dungeon here. Just express a few Left of Center views, and you will soon find yourself feeling grateful that your head has not yet been chopped off.
And, hbc, if it’s a joke, it’s certainly less harmful, so far, than a lot of the treatment Left of Center people receive on this site. So I’m okay with it so far, whether it was a joke or not.
In fact, I’m glad we did this. Because now I have a list of people whose posts I can probably read, who I can be fairly sure will not be trying to break my nose, metaphorically speaking of course, on the Internet, for being Left of Center. A few of them may disapprove of my not being the typical Left Winger here, i.e. a door mat bending over backwards to be fair to Right Wingers who are abusive to me. But I’m used to that by now.
There are times when I just am not willing to read any more posts that are abusive to me or to other Left Wingers. At first I was trying to stop reading all the posts of the abusive people. But there are too many. Far easier to keep track of a small list of people who are either Left, or Center, or do not like echo chambers.
Just express a few Left of Center views, and you will soon find yourself feeling grateful that your head has not yet been chopped off.
Not true – OTTOMH, some LoC views that don’t:
– same sex marriage is okay
– judging potential job performance on race is not okay
– universal basic income is worth considering
– there exist some terrible privately-run schools
– there exist some publicly-run programs that a lot of people like
– there exist Republicans who cheat, steal, lie, etc.
– there exist Democrats who are pretty decent
– Richard Spencer should not have more political influence
– turning the US into a Christian state is most likely a bad idea; dismantling any existing apparatus that is clearly pro-Christian-only is probably a good idea
– everyone has a default right to bodily autonomy
– evolution is much more likely to be more accurate than intelligent design; the latter is unfalsifiable, proves too much, etc.
– the global average temperature is probably trending upward; human activity is probably causing a net increase
– Cthulhu swims left
– more individual freedoms are, ceteris paribus, preferable to less
@Paul Brinkley:
Most of those are akin to mottes. But most of the action is in the bailey. For instance, if I say that gay marriage is a-ok, but that conservatives aren’t very accepting of that, then the argument starts.
In other words, gay marriage is only a-ok around here, because the conservatives want to claim it’s not a liberal issue.
@HeelBearCub – “For instance, if I say that gay marriage is a-ok, but that conservatives aren’t very accepting of that, then the argument starts. In other words, gay marriage is only a-ok around here, because the conservatives want to claim it’s not a liberal issue.”
Gay Marriage is A-Ok. Conservatives are definately the least-accepting group of that. Gay Marriage is definately a liberal issue.
Has someone argued the other side of this? On what grounds?
@FacelessCraven:
There has been consistent argument here that conservatives don’t care about gays getting married, don’t want it to be illegal, are just fine with it, why do you keep bringing this up as if conservatives want to end gay marriage, etc.
As a specific for instance, I made the point that gay marriage (and other gay rights) were dependent on SCOTUS to survive, and that most states still had many anti-gay laws on the books, and therefore SCOTUS appointments by Trump could harm gay rights regardless of how Trump feels personally. Multiple counter arguments were made that conservatives just want the issue to go away.
@HBC
The arguments I’ve seen here are that conservative politicians and potential justices would just like to see the issue go away. That’s not the same as saying they are OK with gay marriage; it just means they think the harm to them of relitigating the issue is not worth the gain.
(My argument, slightly different, is they will not wish to overturn the decision so soon. This, too does not mean they are OK with it.)
@HeelBearCub – There is what people would prefer, and there is what people are willing to expend political capital to enforce.
I think the gun culture is great. Liberals are definately the least accepting group toward the gun culture. Gun Rights are definately a conservative issue.
…And yet Obama made no push toward further gun restrictions, and his court picks didn’t overturn Heller. I was not confidant that Hillary’s appointments would overthrow the Second Amendment, and did not think concerns over that happening were a good reason to vote against her. My sense has been that liberals, while still generally hostile to the idea of gun rights, have realized that the issue is a loser for them and have more or less given up on it for the foreseeable future.
From inside the Christian community, the sense I get is that we think our former position was doomed from the start and regret taking it in the first place. There are strong arguments for why Christians should not enforce our beliefs via secular law, and for why this in fact corrupts Christianity. As doing so becomes obviously impractical, those arguments gain strength.
On the other hand, a court that decisively leans conservative very well might overthrow Gay Marriage or Roe v. Wade, just as a court that leans decisively liberal might overthrow Heller. I am pretty sure most conservatives object to liberal standards of jurisprudence and vice versa, and I don’t see any way to really fix that. But I don’t think repealing Gay Marriage is a conservative or republican priority in and of itself.
I wouldn’t have pegged Tekhno as left-wing, but I think he’s sincere. Of course, I’m not left-wing either.
…at least, not unless I’m talking with dyed-in-the-wool conservatives. Side note for any self-identified moderates/small-l libertarians/ancaps/minarchists/other types, if you ever want to feel like a raging pinko, talk politics with a State Trooper from a state like Missouri, Alabama, Tennessee, or Kentucky some time. 😛
Well your choice of pseudonym aint exactly helping there.
Hey, Lysenko was one of the greatest heroes of the Cold War.
Single-handedly crippled Soviet life science and agriculture for years, maybe decades 😛
*raises hand awkwardly*
present?
(I have always thought of myself as liberal and leftish in any case)
Me.
So far, there are 3 of us then: me Hbc and Spookykou. Have all the others left? Are you Left of center, Tekhno?
I’m pure center. Radiating light and magnanimity.
So there are 2 of us radiating light. Very good. Well, actually I am reflecting the sun’s light. But we are both spreading light around the world. Which is useful.
Radiating light and magnanimity
If that’s not a Mike Carey Lucifer reference, I’m going to be very disappointed.
Solidarity forever, for the union makes us strong, dood!
Welcome, BBA. Yes, solidarity forever.
Interesting to see whether all self-described leftists are seen that way by the rest of the commentariat. I consider myself left-wing, and assume others see me that way (at least in this context). Unrelated: anyone think they know which handle I switched from at roughly OT61?
The only commenters I currently have pegged as leftist are Moon and HBC, but I’m not very good at keeping track, so there could be a dozen others whose comments are either not sufficiently common or not sufficiently obvious to attract my notice. I’m not sure I could name any pro Trump or alt-right commenters, not because I haven’t seen such comments but because I don’t remember who made them.
Part of a general pattern of not remembering people’s names.
… I’m hurt you haven’t noticed me.
Sorry about that. As I think I said, I’m very bad at keeping track of names.
I think I might be left wing.
Welcome, Mark. Happy to have you here.
I’m a left winger. Certainly by American standards.
All right, dndnrsn. Welcome.
Another “by American standards” clocking in. (Although I’m kind of all over the place and vastly prefer the Old left to the New…).
I consider myself to be left wing, though I don’t comment all that much.
Welcome, bringer of the final, heaven-like stage of history to the immanent world. That’s quite a project you have taken on.
I had to look up the definition of the phrase, Immanentizing Eschatons.
Uh, sure. Hi.
Wait a second…
Is there space here for an utter oddball of a neo-Confucian meritocrat who generally tends to agree more, in the Western context, with centre-left ideologies and institutions?
Meh, thinking about it, I’m probably more of an exotic Blue Tribe auxilia than a truly committed ideological leftie. Scootch over, anyway.
By SSC comment section standards, I am happy to be left wing.
Actually, I used to be much more left-wing, but over time I have opned up to the libertarian or neoliberal perspective. So I am currently confused about how those ideologies are losing to right-wing populism.
” the libertarian or neoliberal perspective.”
Can you describe how you use “neoliberal?” I’ve mostly seen it used as a negative term. How does it differ from “libertarian,” “classical liberal” or “liberal” in the usual modern sense?
The Clintons are neoliberals, but calling them “libertarians” or “classical liberals” would be a stretch.
A neoliberal is someone who is committed to classically liberal economic positions, without necessarily holding to any general libertarian doctrines. In extremis in can refer to people like Pinochet or Fujimori, who supported free market policies while being otherwise extremely authoritarian.
Confusingly, in the United States it’s also used to mean “centrist democrat”, of the DLC/Bill Clinton variety. The two definitions only marginally overlap.
“Liberal” in the US doesn’t mean the same thing as it does in the rest of the world, so of course “neoliberal” would be even more confused.
American “neoliberal” is more rest-of-world “liberal” than typical American “liberal”, I think. Like “left” and “right” these are context-dependent and don’t really have solid meanings that can be pinned down.
Does neoliberal have any social policy characteristics to you?
I think neoliberal can be used in three ways (at least). One, it can be a synonym for “libertarian” (generally used as a slur). Two, it can mean holding libertarian economic policies without accompanying libertarian social policies (a la Thatcher, Reagan, Pinochet at the extreme). Three, agreeing with (at least up until recently) the political consensus of Clinton in the US, Merkel in Germany, the Conservatives in the UK etc. I think some people also occasionally use it in a different way to mean some sort of post-liberal thing.
And now some conservatives have started using it to refer to the post 2010 identity politics leftists. It’s all very confusing, and I think we need to smash the political lexicon, wipe the slate clean, and start all over again. People don’t even agree on what things like nationalism, socialism, and private property mean.
What’s up, comrades?
I guess we’re doing this?
I am center-left by Canadian standards, which I believe equates to “raging communist” by American standards.
If you’ve ever voted NDP, then certainly.
Of course, comrade!
I’m a Liberal, myself. Party of government! Plus JT is a real hottie.
Strictly speaking, I am currently a member of the Conservative Party, having signed up to do my patriotic duty and keep Kellie Leitch as far away from the levers of power as humanly possible.
I would make a snarky remark about Trudeau being a vapid stuffed shirt, except A) he never seems to actually wear a shirt, and B) I voted Liberal anyway, so I don’t have much of a leg to stand on.
And I’m center-left by American standards, which translates to “blood-crazed fascist” by Canadian standards. See you at the revolution! ?
I’m on the political left, and a de facto SJW.
don’t do this. an SJW is not you, probably.
I disagree. The ritual hatred of the evil SJW in this comment section is ridiculous, and actively impedes clarity of communication and thought.
I, too, am
Spartacusan SJW.I can’t speak to this comment section. But more generally, hatred of the SJW is well-founded and actively enforces good ideas over stupid ones.
There are people in this comment section who agree with the goals of social justice but use “SJW” to describe people with whom they disagree on means. There are people in this comment section who describe the potential nomination of a populist congressman from the Midwest to be DNC chair as “SJW madness” because he is Muslim.
Define your terms.
You mean, the one who fucked heavy with the Nation of Islam? Louis Farrakhan’s homie?
Face it, it is kind of SJW madness. The nomination could’ve been made in entirely good faith from a party uninterested in social justice groups, but we know that the Dems aren’t currently and he’s a black Muslim who, as mentioned, fucked pretty heavy with the Nation of Islam. From where I’m standing, it definitely seems like no small part of this nomination is doubling down on appealing to victim groups, and with a guy who, again, fucked with the Nation of Islam, no less.
Ellison is a Farrakhan acolyte who repeatedly defended his mentor, and just a few days ago he canceled an interview with the NYT after they told him they were going to ask him questions about his support for Farrakhan.
Overlooking things that would or should be disqualifying factors for anyone else simply because in this particular case they apply to a minority individual is very much a cornerstone of SJWism.
“I, too, am Spartacus an SJW.”
Can you define SJW? I’m not sure if you are saying “I consider myself an SJW and the picture of SJW’s common here is wrong” or “I consider myself an SJW, SJW’s really are what is described here, and I’m for it.”
We apparently have very different definitions of “acolyte”, “mentor”, and “fucked heavy”.
“There are people in this comment section who describe the potential nomination of a populist congressman from the Midwest to be DNC chair as “SJW madness” because he is Muslim.”
Two points:
1. “Describe the potential nomination as SJW madness because he is a Muslim” is somewhat different from “Describe the potential nomination because he is a Muslim as SJW madness.” Which claim was being made?
2. I gather that “Muslim” here means “supporter of the Black Muslim movement.” The original black Muslim movement was not Muslim in the ordinary sense of the term, despite the name, since it held wildly heretical views, so it’s worth distinguishing. I gather that there was a later split between members who were moving towards orthodox Islam and ones who were not.
I’m not sure just where Farrakhan, who I gather Ellison is claimed to be a supporter or, fits into that.
Maybe you didn’t see the movie, but when the characters say “I am Spartacus” it isn’t a claim to actually be Spartacus, rather it is something like “if you are going to hang him, hang me too”.
“We apparently have very different definitions of “acolyte”, “mentor”, and “fucked heavy”.”
Googling around, I found a story very critical of Ellison with lots of details. If the facts alleged in the story are correct, the description you disagree with is justified. Do you know if they are?
Some details (all from the story, which could for all I know be bogus):
Ellison was a defender of the NOI as a third year law student, 1989-90. He appeared onstage with an NOI spokesman in 1995, wrote a column defending Farrakhan using the name Keith X Ellison. In 1997, using the last name Muhammed, he wrote that “Minister Farrakhan is a tireless public servant of Black people, who constantly teaches self-reliance and self-examination to the Black community. . . .”
All of that certainly looks as though he considered himself both a member of the NOI and a supporter of Farrakhan for at least seven or eight years, which, if true, would seem to justify the description you disagree with.
David Friedman: The original post, in its entirety:
I don’t want to make this a referendum on an individual poster, so I’ll refrain from linking directly, but if you want to go back and read the context it was in OT 62.25. Notably, the person who posted it never mentioned Farrakhan. The link does mention that he is Muslim, but not as a central focus, and not in the context of the Nation of Islam. Regardless of what you think about the Farrakhan-related case against Ellison, that’s not the case that was being made.
Speaking of that case: in addition to spewing anti-semitism, Farrakhan also said a lot of stuff about “self-reliance and self-examination in the black community”, as you quoted. It seems likely to me that Ellison liked that stuff and spent time in denial about the associated antisemitism. It is unclear to me that he’s met Farrakhan more than once or twice, which makes “acolyte/mentor” an obvious exaggeration, and he’s long since denounced Farrakhan in terms that are clearly sufficient for the Jewish community in Minneapolis, with whom by all accounts he has a good working relationship.
In terms of my Spartacus quip: I don’t know if I’m an SJW. Are you far-right? Like “far-right”, “SJW” is mostly used as a pejorative to express disdain for an undifferentiated outgroup. In that sense, whether or not I am an SJW depends a lot on who is asking.
There are certainly concepts associated with social justice that I support. I am happy to call myself a feminist. I think the idea of “privilege” is a useful conceptual tool. I am center-left by Canadian standards. There are cases where I think that social justice people go overboard; there are cases where I think that the anti-social justice consensus on this website goes overboard and pats itself on the back for punching straw men. I’d like to think that, in my conversations here, I have not used any of the excessive and vicious tactics that are well known as the exclusive domain of the nefarious SJW, unless mild sarcasm became a super-weapon while I wasn’t watching.
Does that answer your question?
@Iain:
Thanks for quoting the original. I’m not sure if I had seen it. One problem with reading things here is that if a comment comes in while I am reading comments and is above the point I am currently reading, I don’t think I ever see it.
Take my point about the distinction between Muslims and NOI as applicable to the original you quoted as well as the later discussion. It’s an important difference
But my other point still holds. Choosing someone who is a Muslim because he is a Muslim would be, if not SJW madness, at least arguably bad SJ policy. Choosing someone for other reasons who happens to be Muslim is reasonable enough, although in the current U.S. political situation it might be imprudent.
Assuming the points about the Farrakhan connection are true, I think it does indicate serious problems with Ellison, as does the fact that he apparently lied about it in the past, claiming a much briefer and more distant involvement with the NOI.
I agree, however, that there are good things to be said about the NOI as well as bad. I’m not sure if the same is true of Farrakhan.
“Are you far-right?”
Depends on your definition of right. I’m a proponent of anarcho-capitalism, which by one definition is as far right as you can go.
“Like “far-right”, “SJW” is mostly used as a pejorative to express disdain for an undifferentiated outgroup.”
That may be true in some places. I don’t think it is true here. I can’t tell from your comments how much of SSC you have been reading for how long.
And I hadn’t seen the Spartacus film. I see almost no films, preferring to waste my time arguing with people online instead.
“I have not used any of the excessive and vicious tactics that are well known as the exclusive domain of the nefarious SJW”
I’m not sure anyone here claims they are exclusive to the SJW, merely that they distinguish the SJW from the generic SJ. Most of the tactics in question have been used, perhaps in other times and places, by people who are not leftists at all.
@David Friedman:
You know SJW gets thrown around cavalierly here. Please don’t try and make the argument that it is used with any sort of specific definition on a consistent basis.
It’s also very clear that that Iain has his tongue slightly in his cheek, which you reply to as if it were literal.
I’m sure this style works for you in many arguments. I find it to be disingenuous.
“You know SJW gets thrown around cavalierly here.”
Ever? I wouldn’t be surprised. I gather true of the comment about appointing a Muslim.
But not often enough to keep it from having a reasonable clear meaning here.
@David Friedman:
Oh please, I can find multiple examples in this Open Thread where it is misused/not used in the way you say is the accepted definition.
It is extremely easy to find plenty of examples of SJW being used as a boo light around here. The fact that, for purposes of argument, you claim to be blind to this speaks poorly of you, one way or the other.
In fact, you asked Iain to define SJW immediately after he had given two competing definitions. Given your stated desire to argue, I have to think you are trolling.
@HBC:
One of your examples of the loose use of SJW is a claim, whether true I don’t know, about its origin, not about its current use. None of the others supports either your account or mine.
For instance:
“the SJWs have won.”
“The SJWs seem to be in full rout, and their reaction has been …”
“I think any SJWs who want to troll the survey can well afford to stump up a dollar. ”
None of those tells us what subset of left winger “SJW” is being used as a label for.
Has anyone here described you as an “SJW?” Described Jill/Moon as one? On your account it should happen routinely.
@David Friedman:
Yeah, I figured that you would try and argue that those usages of SJW are actually speaking particularly of actual SJWs.
They are not specific, you should know it. The fact that you won’t even consider the possibility further confirms my thoughts that you are basically just trolling.
Is that what trolling is? People on this board think they are rationalists, think they are objective and unbiased. But this is a Right Wing echo chamber here, despite people’s beliefs that they are being objective. Nothing that you or I or anyone else here is doing, has changed that, or will.
Humans are being capable of infinite self-delusion. These people think they are objective. We think we are going to persuade them to become objective. All of us are wrong.
So what you’re saying is, after an accusation was submitted, David didn’t just submit? he actually asked for proof of misuse?
If you want me to justify, for example, why Trudeau bears the hallmarks of SJW, then I will be more than pleased to do so. The makers of the other remarks may have to stand for themselves, but looseness of the term hasn’t been proven; just looseness / applicability.
Moon, here’s a tip. Instead of going about vaguely whining about how this place is an irrational right-wing echo chamber, and how the irrational right wing has erected an echo chamber and drunk the kool-aid, challenge specific assertions. And if you don’t want to bother with that, then you’re just wasting the time of anyone who bothers reading your comment, because you’re just submitting an assertion without proof, which can then be dismissed without proof.
I’ve been reading for at least many months, pretty consistently, and I share Iain’s impression. There’s very little nuance, charity, or even clarity on the subject of so-called “SJW” here. It is one of a handful of subjects on which a plurality of SSC comments can be relied on to be very irrational.
@David Friedman: I don’t have much to add to what HeelBearCub and Brad have said, except to say that contra HeelBearCub I don’t think you are trolling. I do think that this appears to be a bit of a blind spot for you. I encourage you to think more deeply about the “far right” comparison. I think “SJW” often serves as a usefully vague label for the out-group here, in the same way that “far-right” might be used in a community to the left of this one: to identify the enemy, and provide a convenient excuse for rejecting a whole range of arguments without actually engaging with the most reasonable versions of them.
Another way to put it: some people on this site use “SJW” the same way that Moon uses “Right Wing”, and it’s no more endearing.
It’s a term that really needs tabooing. I avoid using it, both because using it marks you as a certain sort of person (which I am not), and because it could mean so many things it has become meaningless.
@dndnrsn
This is why I keep pushing “intersectional-feminist” or “intersectionalist” because it describes the subgroup most people have a problem with, as distinct from regular left-liberals and progressive liberals, and the critical theory of intersectionality is where all this privilege and progressive stack stuff comes from in the first place.
The term “social justice warrior” decays much easier into a snarl word, because potentially everyone is a warrior for some definition of justice in the social realm. It easily develops into a general purpose term for the left which only serves to squash intersectionalism together with regular progressive ideology. The big problem with outgroup homogenity bias is that it acts to make itself true. If you call people an SJW/fascist for long enough, they eventually start to absorb the ideology through osmosis.
This is why it’s really important to be pedantic about accurately categorizing ideologies. The best thing is to always make sure to distinguish sub-groupings from their larger categories and generally exhibit a little caution in naming things at all. If you can describe what a group is doing without having to name the group, then do that instead. It’s the behavior that should be the problem, after all.
SJW definitely needs tabooing.
@Tekhno:
I know people who would say they subscribe to intersectionality, are intersectional feminists, etc, who do not subscribe to forms of that which cause problems, and who I have had reasonable disagreements with, just as I know right wingers with whom I have had reasonable disagreements. In my personal experience, I have known people from different parts of the political spectrum, some of whom are reasonable and can be debated with productively, some of whom can’t be.
This seems to have more to do with a particular personality type than with their actual politics – I’ve related this anecdote before, but I have two acquaintances, both similar politics, both almost identical as far as “identity markers” go – both left wing activist types – but one is a good friend who I trust and who it’s possible to speak with productively, and the other is … well, a complete nightmare, and has been referred to by the latter as an “SJW”! (Thus being one of two people, the other a conservative, who I’ve actually heard use the term in person). On paper, they would seem very similar, but they aren’t.
The vibe I get from this sort of person is kind of an inquisitorial mindset. Disagreeing with them is impossible – you just prove you are whatever their particular politics have as the boogeyman (again, this isn’t just left-wingers – I’ve met right-wingers who think everyone who disagrees with them is a worthless pinko), and even agreeing with them is a rattling experience – very much walking on eggshells, as though they’re waiting for you to screw up.
I think that any ideology is going to attract some problem individuals. Some ideologies certainly attract more than others. But I’ve gotten the same vibe from disagreeable people with of a left-wing persuasion as I have from disagreeable people of a right-wing persuasion. It’s left me with the impression that there are some people whose politics, etc, are shaped by various factors – but they would be disagreeable people regardless of where they ended up politically.
Of course, the solution is not to throw up one’s hands and say all is lost, but to construct ideologies that prevent this sort of person from doing too much damage. This is why I distrust any ideology that tells its adherents “whatever you do is OK, as long as you pick the right targets, for you are the good guys and they are the bad guys.” Regardless of what the actual content of the ideology is.
@dndnrsn – “The vibe I get from this sort of person is kind of an inquisitorial mindset. Disagreeing with them is impossible – you just prove you are whatever their particular politics have as the boogeyman (again, this isn’t just left-wingers – I’ve met right-wingers who think everyone who disagrees with them is a worthless pinko), and even agreeing with them is a rattling experience – very much walking on eggshells, as though they’re waiting for you to screw up.”
…I’ve been thinking about something similar a bit. Let me run it past you.
I think, for some people, Tribal identity is a really big deal. Like, they’ve probably never heard the term “tribal identity”, but they place a great deal of emotional importance on the consensus positions of their group. For these people, political issues and talking points and facts and data and so on aren’t pieces of evidence to be critically interrogated, they’re shibboleths that all add up to “I’m part of your group”. When they show you the article from Jezebel or the clip from John Oliver, they expect you to laugh or be outraged or otherwise emote the same way they did, *because they assume you are like them*. If you instead frown and furrow your brow and start picking at inaccuracies or playing devil’s advocate, you’re effectively slapping away the offered hand of friendship.
I’m very sure this isn’t a Social Justice thing, or a liberal thing; I think very probably it’s just a people thing. My sister’s whole family of in-laws all are bog-standard centrist democrats who’d totally consider voting republican with the right candidate, and they love talking about politics, but only if the conversation is limited to what everyone agrees completely about. It’s maddening.
“But I’ve gotten the same vibe from disagreeable people with of a left-wing persuasion as I have from disagreeable people of a right-wing persuasion.”
Can you suggest a good, intuitive modifier to describe people of various ideologies who fit that pattern? “Bigotted” is one possibility, but a lot of people assume it only applies to a small subset of things one can be bigotted about. We need an X such that “X-libertarian” means the libertarian equivalent of an SJW.
@Tekhno:
That’s a really good example of how the term “SJW” is not used consistently around here. The “Warrior” part is theoretically supposed to identify specific illiberal tactics, not merely the recognition that the various different social categorization that apply to an individual combine to have a distinct effect in terms of how that individual navigates society.
The fact that you haven’t picked up that it is the tactics (such as shaming and no platforming) that are supposed to distinguish the SJW from standard intersectionalists shows that the term is in fact mostly being used inconstantly with that definition.
@dndnrsn
That ideology already exists, thankfully. It’s called liberalism, and it has left and right wings. Let’s have the left return to left-liberalism (just called “liberalism” in the US), and the right return to liberal-conservatism (generally just called conservatism though marked with its liberal heritage).
Let’s leave this intersectionalist and alt-right identity politics garbage behind entirely.
Then you should distrust intersectional identity politics specifically, and identity politics in general.
@HeelBearClub
How many people are going to possess that knowledge and then just sit there and do nothing with it? The concept itself leads to the warrior-like behavior.
The behavior is the actual problem. If we could describe what’s going on just by criticizing behavior then that would be great, but unfortunately there is an ideology behind the activism and the legislation. Instead we need to name that ideology precisely.
SJW is a bad term not because it conflates the warriors with the mere believers in social justice. It’s a bad term because it doesn’t describe what their metric for justice is, in the first place. Intersectionality is that metric. Attack that specific metric, then you can destroy that ideology without harming other leftists in the crossfire.
Same for the right.
What standard intersectionalists? Intersectionalism is this weird fringe ideology that was mostly concentrated in academia and only started to flood into popular left wing discourse in 2011. I remember this very clearly. A new generation became 18 at just the right time, I guess. In Occupy Wall St, protestors started setting up the progressive stack. Suddenly, you had an obscure ultra-fringe interpretation of feminism elucidated in the late 80s being a dominant force in shaping one of the biggest financial protests of our time.
Suddenly a weird shift started happening. People on the left started complaining about culture a lot more than they used to. They started acting like inverted religious conservatives.
I’m just going to reel off some of the stuff that has happened in roughly sequential order, so forgive grammar. First I learned of this stuff, my community, internet Atheism, tore itself apart over Elevatorgate and the new overzealous harassment policies at skeptic conferences, leading to Atheism+ and the end of New Atheism. Then “rape culture” started becoming a well known concept. The wage gap started entering politics. We learned that little girls had been subjected to abuse in Rotherham since 1997, with the police turning a blind eye for fear of being called racist, that people who tried to speak up were sent to diversity training, and that a parent that tried to retrieve his daughter was arrested, FINALLY leading to hearings in 2013. Yes means yes. Meg Lanqua Simmons. Rolling Stones. Mattress girl. Ants. Then politicians, major center-left world leaders like Justin Trudeau start mentioning Ants as a problem (what this little thing that should be just confined to gaming! What?). Meanwhile race relations are being torn apart and people are burning their own neighborhoods over shootings. Then BLM starts.
Then Universities go nuts as if its a medieval wave of hysteria. The Melissa Click incident. The “this is not an intellectual space” crap at Yale. An1ta and Zoe (name filter) Qunn are invited to the UN due to Ants and some Youtube videos. The UN! Earlier this very year, a law was narrowly shot down in France that would penalize games with the removal of tax rebates, and a new rating system, for sexist content (THIS IS WHAT CONSERVATIVES DO!).
Then Nottinghamshire starts recording catcalling as a “hate crime”. Then a corporate product, the new Ghostbusters movie, starts getting wielded to attack vloggers and tar them as misogynist for innocuous critical opinion. Then all the racistracistracistracistracist chants over Brexit. Then we finally reach the point just this winter where Stockholm, Sweden institutes its “gender equal snowploughing” policy resulting in gridlock, while the MPS who propose it double down on the policy, saying that feminist snowplough logistics hadn’t been implemented correctly, and this from the same country that declared it had a feminist foreign policy last year. Phew!
This is just the stuff I remember. Even if you agree with some of this stuff, or disagree but want to argue the details of whether it happened, you surely agree that something has happened, that a big shift in left wing politics occurred sometime after the decade began. The left and the right just aren’t the same things as they were in the period of 1980-2010.
I’ve mentioned in other posts, but I think it’s worth repeating: a big tell is that the phrase “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” to describe libertarians no longer makes any sense. Back in 2008, it was well understood that conservatism as a philosophy generally wanted to meddle in your bedroom and leave your pockets alone, and American liberalism wanted to meddle in your pockets and leave your bedroom alone. Then this weird shift happened and the phrase no longer made any sense. I thought I agreed with the left completely on cultural issues, but then suddenly I didn’t. All the forums and message boards I go to that are left of center suddenly started moving with the wind, and then suddenly things the exact same poster would have said four years ago, are now offensive. Something is happening.
The shift is affecting the right too. Hence, Trumpism, the alt-right, offensive right wing 4chan culture spreading to twitter. Political events like Brexit, and Donald Trump’s victory against regular conservatives, and then winning the White House.
So no, it isn’t just that the same people pushing the same old ideology suddenly started acting differently. It’s not just tactics. What happened was that a fringe ideology became popularized, which then lead to the change in behavior. Left-LIBERALS simply wouldn’t behave this way, because they wouldn’t be protesting culture to begin with. They’d be protesting laws, and part of the problem is that the only thing left to protest is culture. The seed of Fascism is growing somewhere in the right as well.
The only reason any of this is accepted as standard is because you’ve adjusted to the new normal.
@Tekhno
Hear, hear!
(Though I still think SJW is a good term. “Third wave intersectional feminist” doesn’t roll trippingly off the tongue, and misses the ones who put race before gender.)
So, I think you guys have proven my point. Thanks for that. I guess.
So apparently I am evil and the enemy now. Nice to know.
@HBC
Wha… ?
The enemy.
Evil.
Who said that? I didn’t say or even imply that. I’m really confused by this response.
Disagreement =/= YOU’RE THE ENEMY PREPARE TO DIE DO NOT PASS GO PROCEED TO GULAG
I mean, if we’re in the business of being melodramatic here…
@Tekhno:
Have you actually read the entirety of this thread that you are commenting in?
First comment at this level:
@HBC
Yes, AnonEEmous said that, but I don’t agree with it. Who are the “you guys”?
HBC writes:
“So apparently I am evil and the enemy now.”
Just when I was planning to offer, as evidence against your view of how SJW is used here, the lack of people describing you, or Jill/Moon, or Ozy a while back, as SJW’s. Do you have some counterexamples?
I don’t think you are evil or an enemy. Merely mistaken about many things.
@DavidFriedman:
Upthread you said SJW was uniformly used here to refer to people who used specific tactics and not as a general epithet to refer to the left.
Now Teknho and The Nybbler are using it to describe all intersectional feminists, and I have given you other quotes just in this thread where it is not being used in a manner that is consistent with applying it to only those who utilize those tactics.
But I need evidence that specifically it’s being applied to me to satisfy you? It is of course not generally applied to me. Presumably because those who use it in a pejorative manner for the left are constrained from directing insults at me by various factors.
Much in the way, if I were the kind of person who used the word “wing-nut” to describe the right, I wouldn’t directly address you as one.
The fact that words like “wing-nut” aren’t used around here should tell you something.
@Teknho:
You are trying describe it as a strictly neutral name for intersectional feminists. I think you are wrong in general, but definitely wrong in how it is used here.
I’m not talking about your preferred definition, I’m talking usage at SSC. I’ve provided examples from this post. But there are plenty more if you look at others.
SJW, at its core, is a function of bad-faith acting. It’s an “intersectional feminist” who will use any chance to call you a racist, or a sexist, or so forth. They will not brook disagreement and will call you sexist or racist for disagreeing, and they will actively enforce echo chambers and block out disagreement.
Hatred of this is a good thing. If you’re for “social justice”, but you’re willing to listen to criticism, then you’re not an SJW. I don’t know how other people are using it, precisely, but the problem is that almost all intersectional feminists / social justice advocates DO tend to act in this way, especially since if they didn’t they might stop being intersectional feminists / social justice advocates (or super-progressives). So it blends together, but not because the term is imprecise, just because the groups decline to differentiate themselves between good and bad.
As far as I can tell, among those who use the language of intersectional feminism, there are the academics (who write papers contributing a net negative, IMO, to the store of human knowledge) and you have the warriors. Some who are academics are also warriors; some of those confine their warring to academic realms.
If there are those who use the language of intersectional feminists with whom one can have a discussion without it coming down to block, ban, or some variant of “shut up you toxic ciswhitemale”, I haven’t seen one.
@The Nybbler:
It should be apparent at this point that I would put myself under the (very broad) umbrella of intersectional feminism.
“Now Teknho and The Nybbler are using it to describe all intersectional feminists,”
In an account of how it originated and how they think it should be used, not of how it is actually being used in the general conversation. In any case, even if it was being used that way, it wouldn’t fit your claim, since that’s still a narrow subset of leftists.
You agree that it isn’t used for you. How about Jill/Moon? If your view, that it is used here as a general purpose label for leftist were correct, wouldn’t you expect it to show up fairly often in references to two of the most visible leftists here, both of whom people routinely respond to critically?
All you offered in your previous response were uses that could have meant left wing bullies, could have meant anyone on the left. That isn’t evidence for either interpretation.
I don’t, by the way, think you are trolling and am unsure how you use the word when you claim I am. Perhaps you have broadened it out to a general purpose pejorative, just as you claim other people have done with SJW.
I do think that you are unwilling to face the fact that your confident assertion is inconsistent with the available evidence about the use of the term SJW in this group.
@David Friedman:
You, self admittedly, make arguments just because you like to argue. (Anticipated rebuttal: you will not deny having said this, but ask for proof)
An internet troll is someone who attempts to provoke discord by making untrue statements (usually inflammatory ones, but not always) I’m not saying you are a troll, but rather in some instances you engage in the behavior. You like to provoke people in argument.
I rather doubt you do not know what a troll or trolling is. I have not said anyone else was trolling. Odd that you would say that I am using it in a general manner.
The available evidence indicates that SJW is not used consistently, and is readily used as an epithet to apply to the left generally, rather than specifically to individuals posting here. This is a point I already made explicitly and you have chosen to ignore. See my prior argument about use of the word “wing-nut”.
HBC, I don’t know why we keep arguing with people who abuse Left of Center people, about definitions pf particular terms that many use in a pejorative fashion, and about whether we’re evil or whatever. I do it too. I just wonder why I do it. Bad habit, perhaps.
It would make more sense if people stopped using the term SJW around here, and said specifically what they are referring to, each time they comment on it. But that would be too rational. And I notice that rationalists don’t usually do things that are rational. Emotions rule– especially for rationalists. It just feels so satisfying for “rationalist” to bash people who are Left of Center, that they just can’t resist the temptation to do so, just because they are being unclear in their language.
We need an X such that “X-libertarian” means the libertarian equivalent of an SJW.
Some of ’em make me think they think Scrooge was a bleeding-heart liberal; workhouses for the idle and incapable paid for out of my money stolen via taxation and rates? What kind of crazy Communist talk is this?
If you think that’s a bit highly-coloured about preferring to die, my Victorian-born grandmother had a terror of the poorhouse/workhouse; her generation had been taught to fear it (because it was deliberately set up to discourage any but the most desperate) and people would prefer to die at home rather than go into the County Home (the institutions that took over from the poorhouses).
@HBC
No. I’m dropping the use of SJW entirely (I agree it should be tabooed, just for different reasons), and using a more accurate term to describe the actual problem ideology without homogenizing the left under one label, like how SJW gets used. Most leftists do not follow intersectionalist theory. Intersectional theory has illiberal conclusions. Liberal-leftists are not a problem at all.
What I really want to fight is not leftists, but illiberals, which is why I oppose the alt-right.
Um… no.
And I’m saying SSC should stop using an inaccurate snarl word like SJW, and use a term that refers to the theory behind the specific sub-group we are talking about. SJW as a term is too vague and has been rendered meaningless by the far-right.
What do you think intersectional feminism is? It’s not completely open ended in spite how the wiki article makes it sound.
I mean, I also believe that the problems a woman can face because of her gender overlap with the problems a woman can face because she’s black. This doesn’t make me an intersectional feminist, because intersectionality isn’t a mere statement of intersection, but a whole theory incorporating ideas such as “racism = prejudice + power”, and the progressive stack. It’s an extension of critical race theory applied to feminism. The definition of oppression in such theory is overly broad. You have to have a pre-existing belief that the problems are real problems at all.
If you merely believe that a woman who is black can face sexism and racism, then you have elementary observation powers, but there is no critical theory or dogma involved there. Intersectionality had to be invented to analyze this phenomena from the standpoint of a specific pre-existing framework.
If you agree with academic concepts of oppression, then fine, but you can’t expect other people on the board to not disagree with that and argue against you intensely.
Tabooing SJW shouldn’t mean that if you have an ideology you want to argue for that it goes unchallenged.
@DavidFriedman
Such a group might exist, but it would be especially self-inconsistent, as an SJW is authoritarian.
I’ve seen one self-described libertarian argue that the government should intervene to stop “the paternalism of the mob”, as he put it, which basically seemed to mean that institutions and individuals wouldn’t be allowed to advocate for socially conservative views.
@HBC:
“An internet troll is someone who attempts to provoke discord by making untrue statements (usually inflammatory ones, but not always) I’m not saying you are a troll, but rather in some instances you engage in the behavior. You like to provoke people in argument.”
I like to argue with people. I rarely do it by making incorrect arguments, and then as a pretty obvious joke. Off hand I cannot remember having ever done it here. I am arguing that SJC is used here with a fairly clear definition–very roughly left wing bullies. Neither you nor Jill/Moon is a bully, so you don’t get described as SJW’s.
“I rather doubt you do not know what a troll or trolling is.”
I know what trolling is. But since nothing I have been doing comes close to fitting the definition, the fact that you accused me of trolling suggested that you didn’t.
“The available evidence indicates that SJW is not used consistently, and is readily used as an epithet to apply to the left generally, rather than specifically to individuals posting here.”
You have so far failed to offer a single example of it being used here in that sense. If people routinely used it to apply to the left generally, one would expect it to be used to apply to the left here, at least by people whose feelings towards those they were applying it to were not friendly. That pretty clearly describes the feelings of many here towards (at least) Jill/Moon.
Scrooge was miserly, not greedy. Those aren’t the same thing; being a miser is about not wanting to spend your money and being greedy is wanting to get more money. Scrooge is used so often as a strawman greedy capitalist that people forget this.
@DavidFriedman:
A word that indicated, not the content of someone’s politics, but how they relate with others politically, would be useful. I can’t think of anything off the top of my head that is snappy and neutral.
Libertarians of that sort do definitely exist. Some of the most blunt abuse I’ve gotten online has been from libertarians unwilling to defend their positions, but willing to call me an advocate of theft, a moron, etc for doing little more than questioning their views.
@Tekhno:
Well, personally, I do distrust politics based around seeing ad hominems as a positive – which is what the group in question, and their right-wing equivalents, do – and I distrust groups that give off a zealot vibe. But there are intersectional feminists, or people who subscribe to intersectionality more general, who do not derive their discourse standards from it.
My wife suggested the word “bully” to describe at least part of the behavior pattern.
Libertarian Michael Cloud coined the term “libertarian macho flash” to describe a different part, but one that I think is more closely linked to the thread on gay pride parades.
SJW was coined to refer to intersectional feminists, but has now thanks to right wing overuse become a term meaning “something left wing I don’t like”. Basically everyone is an SJW now depending on who you are talking to.
I can’t speak to usage elsewhere, but in the posts and comments on this blog SJW has a reasonably clear meaning. Roughly speaking, an SJW is someone on the left who believes that all is fair in love and war and political disagreement counts as war. Hence someone who supports various tactics against those who disagree with him that many here disapprove of.
I guess we all need somebody to hate. And SJWs are the ones to hate on this site. This being a Right Wing site, most people would need to hate Leftists.
It is a testimony to the fact that there is little that is really hate-able about the Left, that an obscure group of Leftists had to be picked to hate– a group that is extreme in their tactics, a tiny group of people that most Left of Center people don’t know exists– unless they are live in the San Fran area or went to a very expensive college with a very sheltered environment.
I had never heard of SJWs before I came here. I know tons of liberals/progressives, none of whom have ever mentioned SJWs in the many years I’ve known them. But that suffices for someone for the Right to hate.
I don’t like extremists myself. But I don’t go looking under every rock for them either.
Moon, probably the biggest reason this blog is considered “right wing” is because you can’t just dismiss an entire political wing of people.
Justin Trudeau, for example, bears many of the hallmarks of SJW, and is the prime minister of Canada. Multiple governments in Europe have SJWs or super-progressives firmly ensconced within them. Bernie Sanders made the statement that “white people don’t know what it’s like to be poor”. The idea that SJWism is some lunatic fringe is just not the case. I’m not even going to go into the many, many media personalities who are SJWs as well. Face it: your side has made the fringe crazies their standard bearers, which is why I left it.
Given how I feel about the puppies, the ants, and the Passion of Saint Eich, I cannot honestly pretend to be anything else.
the Passion of Saint Eich?
Oh, the Mozilla guy.
Welcome to all Liberals of any shape or hue, coming out of the closet, including people who have just a bit of a tinge of Leftyness, by the standards of some country or another.
It doesn’t have to be a shameful thing to be a liberal. It’s actually the world’s best hope, I do believe. Rather like real news consumers (rather than fake news consumers, where all Dems are considered guilty until proven innocent, of anything anyone makes up to accuse them of.) Great to know you folks are here, even if some of you don’t comment much, which is your perfect right.
And Happy Thanksgiving to All, regardless of your political leanings or lack thereof.
I have trouble deciding if you are being sincere, but it doesn’t hurt…
So yes, I’m left-of-center. At least, I consider myself left-of-center.
I believe, based on the current evidence, that the combination of fair-but-regulated markets and progressive taxation and strong government presence in the fields where the free markets are very prone to facilitate poor decisions by the public (either by discounting externalities, or that framing some domains of society in terms of goods that can be traded for money can be problematic) and that government can be a positive force and should be active force in economy for the benefit of the society. In general, the German / Nordic model is a nearest thing we have seen for optimal society.
The belief that government can be fair, just, dynamic, uncorrupted and efficient is an important factor in maintaining the government that stays that way. Is there any capable person of good morals and ethical principles who wants to have a career in the public sector, if the image of public sector is terrible? Of course this depends on not only maintaining the image, but maintaining the reality the image is a reflection of.
On the other hand, I’m not sure if others think me as a left-of-center, and I suspect I would not be very welcome in many left-of-center parties in my country. For example, I’m also ready to admit that unions or minimum wage do not anymore have the net-positive effect they once had a century or half a century ago. I also don’t like some forms of multiculturalism, especially the relativistic viewpoints that treat cultures unchangeable monoliths and in effect currently in Europe help to create cultural ‘pockets’, sub-societies that exist by maintaining an identity based on how fundamentally different they are from the wider society instead of assimilating… but on the flip side of coin, no one should be judged by their skin color or name or other such background, and the effect of HBD is probably overstated by the people who make most noise about it.
I also maintain that nationalism that is healthy is possible and is for the benefit of the society and maintaining such healthy forms of nationalism is the best defense against fascism. (What is healthy nationalism? E. g. concentrating on the positivity and optimism, the general trust in the societal contract, appreciating the few national stereotypical quirks and traditions, inclusiveness, niceness, liberal democratic standards, not hating anybody, not looking down on other people or nationalities or ethnic groups…)
Thanks, nimim.k.m. for such a specific reply about what you do and do not believe about politics.
“Is there any capable person of good morals and ethical principles who wants to have a career in the public sector, if the image of public sector is terrible?”
Probably not. And that is a huge problem in the U.S. today. Bashing government and politicians wins elections, so people do it more and more. But once the election is over, perhaps not so much can be accomplished, because all the bashing has been quite destructive to the society, the government– and to good people who might run for public office if campaigning didn’t mean that they and their families would be bashed constantly, and that they would be assumed to be evil, regardless of what they said or accomplished.
I don’t know how our supposedly Kenyan born, supposedly Muslim, president tolerated all of this. I imagine he will be glad to leave office. Maybe even the supposedly murderer of 100 people, and supposed pedophiliac, Hillary Clinton will be glad to go back into private life, and not have her name smeared with all kinds of evil and groundless accusations from fake news constantly.
I’m not a liberal, but I’ve moved left since I started reading SSC actively. I think that might be another interesting statistic to track.
thoughts on why?
I’m a liberal but I’ve moved right since I started following SSC.
Either SSC has a strong moderating effect that moves people towards the center, or it’s just regression to the mean.
Although it’s not intentional, you’ve likely been propagandized by the SSC Right Wing echo chamber. If a human hears something 1000X, they’re very likely to start believing it. And it doesn’t take long at all, when reading SSC, to read Right Wing views 1000X.
There’s also the fact that people with Left Wing views are by far the ones who are most often abused here. And if you see some category of people being abused frequently, why make your life difficult? You’re likely to leave that group, if it is within your power to do so– i.e. if it isn’t based on something like skin color, which is beyond your control.
I’ll counter with my experience: Moon, the left wing doesn’t come out to argue. Especially on social issues, the left wing cannot even discuss terms without someone getting called racist, sexist, islamophobic, et cetera. As an obvious result, they’ve moved into being incorrect because there’s no way to be corrective, especially since left politics in many cases are centered around vocal minorities, letting them be hijacked by fringe crazies who speak convincingly about their pain. Not convinced?
Well, take a look at Tah-Nehisi Coates, who has the following story to tell: once upon a time, a black man shot one of his acquaintances fatally. Later, when Tah-Nehisi Coates viewed the 9/11 attacks, he felt numb, because Whiteness had killed his acquaintance. He then goes on to postulate that black people are ground up by the system to fuel it further, perhaps as gas or as lubricant.
The only thing I omitted from this story: the black man was, in fact, a policeman, which means of course that he was some kind of Avatar For Whiteness, or whatever. Meanwhile, the central conceit of the book really makes no sense; I’m not saying I’d want anything like this to happen, but if all African-Americans moved back to Africa, the country wouldn’t stop working (Joe Biden can fill in for two months, surely). It would probably take about a year to recover and frankly recoup a lot of welfare and policing costs. So in what sense are black people ground up to make America tick? In no actual sense, but it’s such a powerful victimhood narrative that no one’s actually challenged it.
By the way, this guy has a byline at the Atlantic.
In other news, it’s really getting on my nerves that your only argument seems to be “echo chamber, kool-aid, low information” and so forth. People can disagree with you legitimately. I came here because Scott said things that agreed with me, but also because he writes really well and I can respect his opinion on most issues. I suspect you’re just angry because, these days, intelligence has a conservative bias :O
AnonEEmous. Interesting that you had to look to literature for a SJW type person with an extreme Left Wing narrative. You had to look to some guy writing literature, using poetic license,. That that is because there aren’t very many SJWs who are politicians or political activists. You apparently were looking under every rock, determined to find an extreme Left Wing narrative somewhere.
I’m glad to be a Left Wing person– that movement where, if you want to find someone extreme, you have to find yourself a person writing literature, who is using poetic license, and who is not responsible for policy. By contrast, look at DT’s cabinet.
“AnonEEmous. Interesting that you had to look to literature for a SJW type person with an extreme Left Wing narrative. ”
then maybe you should read comments that reply to you more often because:
“Justin Trudeau, for example, bears many of the hallmarks of SJW, and is the prime minister of Canada. Multiple governments in Europe have SJWs or super-progressives firmly ensconced within them. Bernie Sanders made the statement that “white people don’t know what it’s like to be poor”.The idea that SJWism is some lunatic fringe is just not the case. I’m not even going to go into the many, many media personalities who are SJWs as well. ”
“You had to look to some guy writing literature, using poetic license,.”
let’s pause to note that you have no idea if that is the case or not
unpause
if by “poetic license” you refer to poeticizing a real process he believes exists, then yes. It’s just that said process…doesn’t exist. Whether or not black people are ground up by America, it doesn’t need to do this to survive in any real sense, and yet he asserts it without proof. Why? because it is an unstoppably powerful victimhood narrative.
“That that is because there aren’t very many SJWs who are politicians or political activists. You apparently were looking under every rock, determined to find an extreme Left Wing narrative somewhere.”
“every rock” i’m just citing random off-top examples of SJWism and how it can flourish due to the Left being unable to check it. Coates recites a story of personal pain, and no one stops to ask what it has to do with white people. He posits a painful theory, and no one stops to ask what it has to do with reality. I can find you articles calling him a high priest of progressivism, and certainly he’s treated that way by his devotees.
“I’m glad to be a Left Wing person– that movement where, if you want to find someone extreme, you have to find yourself a person writing literature, who is using poetic license, and who is not responsible for policy. By contrast, look at DT’s cabinet.”
sure thing
…ball’s in your court on this one; you’ve got the guy who desegregated his own state and successfully prosecuted KKK killers, a guy who runs a news site, head of the RNC, and uh… some CIA dude? Have fun with that one, but be warned: facts, in this case, might have a conservative bias 🙂
Well, I deconverted from Catholicism shortly after coming to SSC, which moved me leftwards on some social issues. The deconversion wasn’t primarily due to SSC, but it helped.
Additionally, Scott’s very well-spoken and persuasive. I think that as a result of reading his work, I’ve developed better defenses of the right-wing positions I still hold and a better understanding of left-wing positions in general. I’ve also increased the size of my “error bars”; I feel less confident in my positions if I can’t point to evidence backing them up, and am thus more likely to extend the benefit of the doubt across the aisle and listen to other peoples’ positions.
Finally, it caused me to consider future scenarios in which production is automated. In this situation, it seems clear to me that the libertarian policies I prefer would have horrific results, while the only thing that could support a large underclass would be a more socialist system. Thus, while I think my positions are a better fit for the world right now, I see us as on a spectrum that will end with my preferred policies being worse and others being better.
Interesting. SSC could indeed be considered Left on some social issues, although not on economic ones. Since it’s heavy with Libertarians– who are Republicans who smoke dope and who have nothing against gays.
I’m not a liberal by American standards, but I’m for giving the left a voice here. Not because I think they’re great, but rather because I’m staunchly against echo chambers. I don’t want the Great Sorting. Someone on the left might have a point that someone on the right may have missed, and they’ll never know if they’re run out of town. By symmetry, the left needs to go over the best of the right, in case there’s something the left has missed. If either side writes off the other as evil, greedy, hopelessly in thrall to propaganda, etc., I count that as a loss.
The only way I’ve seen so far to resolve such different points of view is to first rediscover the methods for resolution, or hammer out new ones, and the key I see there is rational discourse – which is the #1 reason I come to SSC/LW. The idiosyncratic crowd is fun, too, but I can find fun crowds in lots of places. SSC/LW stands out for their focus on design of discourse and reason, and their implementation.
Agreed on all points.
I think a Great Sorting may be happening based on whether sites require use of identifying information or not. For example, my Facebook feed is quite liberal. Twitter (generally used with real names) leans left. reddit (generally used with pseudonyms) leans right. 8chan (completely anonymous at all times) is freakishly right-wing.
I’m not sure how to solve this problem. Right-wingers will not post under their real names because they fear losing their jobs. Left-wingers don’t like interacting with pseudonymous/anonymous internet users because they are sometimes nasty. SSC’s policy of a “heads on sticks” moderation policy with pseudonyms allowed is one solution, but I wonder if there are others.
For my part, I don’t think any top-down solution will be a solution, although it could be part of one. All Scott’s doing with his moderation strategy is tending his garden. (And he has that right.) The catch is that some people might not like that, and leave. The question there is whether the people who stay are the people Scott would prefer to stay, and that in turn depends on how they perceive his methods. This all leads to a tension that I think is what holds a lot of the site together. It’s not top-down; rather, it’s a push-pull between Scott and the commenters and readers, probably ideally always under a little tension, but not too much.
I think that Scott wants the sort of people who seek what I described above – exploring rational discourse, regardless of whether it’s liberal, right-wing, whatever. Any threat to that is a threat to his garden. Hopefully my thinking is correct, because that’s why I hang around here, too. So my hope is that there’s enough people like this to keep the traffic going. Scott’s an interesting writer all by himself, but it helps me a lot to know there are a lot of other people who value good arguments.
Three reasons National Popular Vote by state compact will probably not make it:
1. They have taken all the low hanging fruit, further states have strong reasons not to sign on per Nate Silver
2. States Rights – This was thought to be a relic of the South and hoary conservatives like Pat Buchanan, but seems to be alive and well in NY, IL, and CA now that DJT is president.
2. If they get past #1 and #2, then there could well be a constitutional challenge
Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3
OTOH, If Trump really screws up, it’s suddenly going to start looking a lot more appealing to a whole lot of people. And if we get another massive EC/popular vote split within a decade or two, people might also be angrier. It’s not enough anger to push things under current circumstances, but if elections start diverging more, it might be.
Well, he could, but so far (early days) he is showing some very good signs. I am still puzzling through whether I could support PV. If we did, 8 or so metro areas would drive the country. We have had centralized power from essentially city states across history and it usually failed because provinces rebelled in conjunction/collusion with some external challenge. I think the founders were thinking about this when they set up the Electoral rules.
Not really – rural voters would still make up a far bigger share of the vote than any ethnic or religious minority, and those guys get politicians wooing them all the time. They might get a slightly less disproportionate piece of the political power (they’d still get disproportionate senate and probably house representation).
I’m confused what you’re arguing there – most governments in history have, at some point, failed. For most of history the vast majority of the population was rural, but since the industrial revolution, revolutions have been more likely to be urban than rural (e.g. Boston Tea Party, French Revolution).
The original purpose of the EC was supposed to be to keep populists out of the white house (the founders wanted there to be a barrier of elitism between the common man and the final decision). Making the Senate have two people per state (and then reinforcing this by splitting up rural territories, like Dakota, into multiple states), however, was partly motivated by this.
Apropros of Trump’s Action Plan, what does SSC think of the Common Core?
Education of young kids is not my field. My relations who are teachers say, (and I paraphrase)
– Whether or not you like the idea of Common Core has a lot to do with how much you’ve dealt with kids who were previously in a school district in another state. (*) It also has to do with how much you think Washington DC (vs your state capital) should be telling you about how to educate your classroom full of kids.
– Teachers have been dealing with kids who couldn’t pick up on concepts in the “traditional” manner for forever. Many schools – either deliberately or not – had developed workarounds – one or two teachers who were great at figuring out how the kid had to learn the material, and the kids with trouble might do some extra work wth them until they caught up. Common Core pretty much demands every teacher know all the tricks. There was a reason that schools didn’t use “all the teachers know all the tricks” before.
– In many areas, the rollout was HORRIFIC – they didn’t have materials, they didn’t have competent people to teach the teachers the new system, the whole thing was a mess. (This is the largest thing I’ve heard.) This was perhaps inevitable with a complex top down solution dumped on a decentralized system. It was still hard to live through.
– From outside the system, my first question is “how are they measuring the success of the program?” None of my relations are high enough to know/explain how this is being done, and I think that’s a very bad sign.
Again, not my field, but I have a desire to mail all the administrators a copy of Seeing Like a State.
(*) Apparently, the urban/suburban schools are dealing more with state-state transitioning kids. In rural/suburban schools, they’re dealing more with high truancy/broken home kids, and are doubtful CC has a fix for that.
I appreciate your writing this, keranih. I’ve not followed Common Core, and only got exposure to it in the form of occasional posts about it shared on various social media, and I only dug into the ones showing other ways of doing math. (As a math major, I found the “new” methods sound, but different – consistent with your account here.)
I’ll make the standard disclaimers here about how your account might be too subjective, AFAIK, given my definite naivete on the topic, but other than that, this is the first plausible summary of CC that I’ve read.
One argument I can think of in favor of CC is that, while most teachers cannot know all the special tricks, it’s possible that they could have stood to learn a few more, and CC pushed some of them in that direction. Whether that was worth what was spent on it is a claim I could see as dubious, but it does at least raise the question in my mind of whether teachers would benefit from learning a few more “tricks” at the expense of a seminar or two. (E.g. doing some arithmetic via the “making change” method.) My understanding is that teachers already do this type of training all over the place, but I have no idea one way or the other how well this was tracked – for all I know, maybe there were large parts of the country where fewer teachers were doing this.
Good points, Paul.
For me, I think that trying new ways of doing things is good, so long as one can track if this new way is better or not. And the whole education sector looks (to me) like it is allergic to the idea of objective measures. Breaks out in hives & panic attacks.
(No, SIL, not talking about you.)
PS: the one “new” trend that I think is good and should be tried more often is using non-fiction to teach reading/parts of speech/writing. While I suppose an argument could be made that as a narrative, self-focused species, we are more intrigued by stories of Dick and Jane going up the hill, but why not include narratives about the parts of a tree and what nutrients it needs?
I don’t see any particular reason that ever tiny little school district needs to have its own curricula. The idea that the local school board has some special insight into the supposed unique nature of their little snowflakes and so can design some bespoke curriculum that is superior to a general purpose one is nonsense.
There is an argument from natural experiments through homogeneity, but I think many of these choices are very close — it may be better, objectively speaking, to teach trigonometry with geometry rather than holding off and teaching it as part of pre-calculus, but it isn’t the type of thing that is going to make a huge difference in anyone’s life. And there are countervailing benefits to uniformity. Not just the obvious ones having to do with kids moving from one part of the country to another, but also less obvious ones having to do with being able to get better objective measures of outcomes (but with respect to students and to teachers) when everyone is trying to accomplish the same thing.
That’s not to say that I think every school should use the same textbook, or ever teacher the same lesson plans, but they should by and large being trying to teach the same things in the same years. At least as to public school, and at least as to the middle, say, 75% of student ability.
Here’s a change of pace from the politics: with Black Friday here, what are some suggestions for gifts? I’m shopping for gifts for a scientifically-minded Catholic guy who likes books, especially nonfiction and science fiction, and a very religiously-minded Catholic guy who’s big on stereotypically ‘manly things’ like beer, beards, and knives (less so on mechanics and guns). I don’t want the gifts to be specifically Catholic; I mentioned it as a disclaimer that the gifts shouldn’t be things that might offend.
A couple thoughts –
There’s a new edition of L’Engle’s Walking on Water out (here) – I would call it more ideal for a gal, but.
Mary Russel’s The Sparrow is another that might be found interesting, and – for a total change of pace – Son of the Black Sword is an epic-length new fantasy by Larry Correia.
My brother really enjoyed The Mad Scientist’s Guide To World Domination which was a delightful collection of different takes on mad geniuses.
From Narnia to Space Odessey: The War of Letters between Arthur C Clarke and CS Lewis – I found this an interesting exchange and think it should probably get more notice than it does.
There’s a 2007 edition out of The Crossbow by Ralph Payne-Gallwey.
Other thoughts: Is there a knife-making class at the local college?
Wow, you really hit it out of the park on those suggestions! All of those books look really good. The Mad Scientist’s Guide looks amazing, personally, and the war of letters book seems perfect for the first guy. The knife-making class is a good idea, but I don’t think that the second guy’s schedule permits much in the way of extra-curriculars; his job takes up a lot of time.
For someone who is big on knives, you might want to look at this very high end (and expensive) knife sharpening tool. I have it, and find that it works very well.
For a highly biased recommendation, your scientifically minded sf fan might enjoy my second novel, which is a fantasy with scientific magic whose underlying logic is based on some of the mathematics of quantum mechanics.
If either of your Catholic guys isn’t already a GKC fan, you might want to give him one of the essay collections. Deiseach can probably do a better job than I can of saying which would be best for the purpose.
For your scientifically minded guy who likes nonfiction, The Selfish Gene, if he hasn’t read it, is very good. Also Thinking Fast and Slow.
The reader’s a rabid Chesterton fan; he’s actually the reason I was first introduced.
I had no idea you wrote fiction, but I’ll check it out! Hard SF is definitely his speed.
Does he have the collected poetry of GKC? If not, he should.
I’ve published two novels. The first was marketed (by Baen) as fantasy, but is really a historical novel with made up history and geography–no magic, no elves, dwarves, or equivalent. The second, which I recommended, is a fantasy with scientific magic, set about thirty years after the magical equivalent of Newton, the person who takes the first big step towards converting magic from a craft to a science. That sounded better suited to your purpose.
For science fiction, I’d recommend John C. Wright’s Count to the Eschaton series – warning: has got Catholic themes and the author is also one of the Sad Puppies so politics warning there, but it is basically the tale of two warring geniuses trying to steer the fate of Earth and Humanity over millenia before the machine intelligences arrive to enslave us when we incurred a debt by triggering the Monument trap (also they are fighting over who gets the girl). It’s old-school trashy pulp SF of the Big Dumb Object ilk, only bigger and dumber than anything you may have read before, and I love it (always remembering, of course, that YMMV and your friend might hate it).
The Amazon page is a little out of date; it says it’s a four-book series but book five has just been released and whenever Tor get around to publishing book six (which has, according to Mr Wright, been sitting on the editor’s desk for over a year) that will be the end of the series.
Or maybe not. He pulled a huge plot-twist in this latest one.
As for your other friend, there are so many craft-beers and micro-breweries springing up all over (even here in my home town) that there is a bewildering choice of quirkily-named brews out there (God be with the days when it was Guinness, Murphys, or Beamish for stout or Smithwicks if you wanted to be fancy), so there probably are all sorts of taster packs being sold for Christmas. I imagine you can purchase a couple from a local supermarket or off-licence, stick a bow on them, and let him see which one (if any) he likes.
Catholic themes are a plus, actually; I was just trying to avoid an overtly religious gift since I wanted the present to be more about interests than identity. Craft beers are a good choice, too; thanks!
Has anyone else seen this thing with the reddit CEO apparently editing user posts?
https://gizmodo.com/reddit-ceo-caught-secretly-editing-user-comments-chatl-1789342358
Apparently he’s been receiving a lot of abuse from sections of /r/the_donald crowd and finally just used admin powers to directly edit several posts abusing him. Now I can totally understand getting sick of that sort of rubbish he was dealing with (extreme abuse apparently), but from my uninformed perspective it also seems like a worrying precedent not to mention a dazzling display of poor judgment. It’s one thing for moderation policies to be politicized, but if site admins started editing user posts on a regular basis it challenges the fundamental integrity of online debate. It’s demolishing the only reasonable Schelling Fence that I can think of.
This is not some obscure corner of the internet either. It seems like a huge deal to be happening on such a prominent site. I don’t have a strong opinion that someone is to blame here, just that this is a big deal.
It generally feels like there’s a general societal trend towards echo chambers, ideological trolling tactics, and fragmentation in all parts of the political spectrum in the West, which is worrying to say the least. Does anyone agree/disagree? What would help to reverse this trend?
Hadn’t seen it, and not crazy about the Gizmo link, but it seems that the largest issue was the secret editing, not the secret editing. Can’t block the signal, Mal.
Also, it might just be me, but I dunno about reddit being all that +/- bag of chips.
What is most disturbing for me is the allegation of lack of rules enforcement, which led to large amounts of written abuse, which then led to stupidity like “secret editing”.
WRT echo chambers and fragmentation, yes, I agree this is happening.
I am…less clear about it being a bad thing. Oh, sure, echo chambers not good. Shifting towards smaller groups with higher trust so we can discuss things without pulling knives on each other? I dunno. I think this can be good.
And until I get a better idea on whether fragmentation is a good or bad thing, I don’t know if I want to reverse it or not.
Reducing the number of things disagreed on is one way of reducing fragmentation, but both Scott and Monty Python have spoken on the need for splitters and outgroups. Plus, how do we stop disagreeing on something? A fiat from on high to either stop talking or agree that “X is the answer!”? Seems…unscientific. Likewise, reducing opportunities for buggering off elsewhere might make people learn to tolerate each other more, but also prevents people who are being abused by their group mates from finding greener pastures.
…random assignment to sports franchises, with a mandated requirement to participate in n-count game day festivities?
(That last one probably makes no sense to Brits, because the US doesn’t tend to have political divisions extend to who we cheer on at the stadium.)
Thanks for the comment. Chose the gizmodo link because it was a tech site rather than a news site the could be perceived to be politically biased, basically because I wanted to keep things meta if possible.
I’m guessing the lack of rules enforcement was just trolls popping up quicker than they could swat them. It’s deliberately quite easy to sign up for a reddit account, so there has always been a reasonable level of trollery on reddit afaik. Its just here it focused into a political goal and the CEO of the site became the target when he tried to prevent it. Still stunningly ill advised methods on his part I think.
I share most of your sentiment regarding the splitting stuff, and part of me is a big fan of Scott’s Archipelago. But another part of me worries when groups become organised enough not to just provide support and ideas, but manufacture their own insular environment of facts about the world. It seems then fragmentation is far more likely to have a slippery slope that leads to teaching “the outgroup must die”.
So basically while I’m unsure about this topic, my knee-jerk reaction is for the a democratic authority to say… have any opinion you like, but don’t lie about/misrepresent the opinions or actions of others. And, again in a knee-jerk sense, I do find appealing that deliberate mixing of different groups in that sort of way, where you don’t have to conform to their view but you have to be civil, honest and get along with them at some basic level. Maybe I just can’t decide if I like Mill or Hobbes…
Site owners and mods throwing hissy fits isn’t new, and neither is censorship of right-leaning subreddits.
Personally I’m a lot more worried about the “fake news” thing. If the big social media networks decided to enforce a ‘whiteout’ on alternative news sources then a big chunk of the population would be thrust back into the pre-internet MSM dark ages. The ability to tamp down on dissent that has already existed in TV and print can’t be allowed to extend to the internet as well.
Break up of the big media companies, either through anti-trust action or just by having all of their content pirated and their ads blocked.
People will always look to like-minded sources for news, that’s not new and it’s not the problem. But a bunch of uncoordinated bloggers can’t enforce a consistent narrative as well as an Official news apparatus. Without the present level of top-down control it will be harder for people to maintain ignorance and a lot more facts will slip through.
Yeah I have deep concerns on both sides of the fake news thing too, though I don’t think this is a sideshow by any means. I guess once we slide into a situation where the only choices are drowning in groupthinks or smothering all opinion, we’ve already lost our way. We really need better conceptual approaches to these issues now before one or the other of these options become entrenched.
There is only one side to fake new– the Right Wing side. See NYT article I cited and quoted in my comment further below here.
Inside a Fake News Sausage Factory: ‘This Is All About Income’
I’m not convinced the Right have the monopoly on disinformation, and don’t find debates over who’s the worst offender to be very productive. However the sides I was referring to above were not political but were to do with concerns about free speech on one hand and lies/hate speech on the other. They’re both valid issues to be worrying about, but I think if we consider one issue and forget the other, we’re lost.
I’m concerned that a bunch of uncoordinated bloggers will result in fractured knowledge. I’m worried that working from completely separate knowledge bases will greatly reduce our ability to have thoughtful discourse, which I think is already happening right now. If your facts and my facts uniformly disagree with each other, what hope do we have of reaching a consensus?
In fact, I think it will be easier for people to maintain ignorance, as they simply won’t be exposed to the facts slipping through. And I don’t think many people will go out of their way to broaden their knowledge base if it requires reading dozens of disparate news sources. I have a hard enough time keeping up with information as it is, and I think (if only by virtue of reading this blog) I am above-average in that realm. Further fractionalization would make my job of being a reasonably informed commenter nearly impossible.
” And I don’t think many people will go out of their way to broaden their knowledge base if it requires reading dozens of disparate news sources.”
Google News does a pretty good job of feeding me information from lots of different news sources. Looking at the page at the moment, the top has a critical piece on Castro from the WSJ, a positive piece from the Havana Times.
I use Google News as well, and find it does pull from a wide variety of sources. I don’t think Google News will be sufficient if hundreds pf fractionalized blogs are the main sources of information. More importantly, a “main stream” news source is incentivized to appeal to a wider audience and thus cover a larger variety of viewpoints, something that a smaller site has no reason to do.
I’m concerned that fact-checking is becoming (if it’s not already) a lost art. The traditional media still pays lip-service to correcting errata when pointed out, even if they do stick the correction in a tiny paragraph on the bottom of page ninety-four.
Online sources? How do you even? I see a lot of hogwash being uncritically swallowed (and I’m not pointing at anyone in particular, it’s endemic all over the place regardless of age, race, gender, creed or politics) and no apparent ability to recognise that someone in 1789 is very unlikely to speak like someone from 1990 or 2005. Everyone is happy to take the worst possible interpretation of their enemies’ motives or actions and the best possible of their own side (which is an endemic human problem throughout all of history, so it’s not a modern development by any means) but this only gets amplified by no obligation towards balance and how easy it is to cherry-pick a selection of links, out-of-context quotes, and put spin on things.
I dunno. As long as outrage and clickbait generate revenue, and as long as media runs on revenue so that traditional sources are ever more full of advertising, advertorials, and sponsored content and online sources will do anything for page views, I have no idea what the solution is, or if there even is one. We’re long past the days of one authoritative source for news, be that the BBC or Walter Cronkite, and that’s probably for the best, but the replacement isn’t cheering to contemplate.
On the other hand, that could be taking a dim view of it and this is the usual churn and noise when moving from doing things the old way to a whole new paradigm, and it’ll settle down in time?
If your facts and my facts uniformly disagree with each other, what hope do we have of reaching a consensus?
I believe we could, at this point, at least agree on which facts are in dispute.
(Side rant: I never liked the phrase “agree to disagree”. Always came off as a lazy cop-out. At least declare what the point of disagreement is.)
Agreeing on which facts are in dispute is already a step beyond what I usually see, where each side doesn’t even understand what the other side believes.
Another important step, IMO, is to understand the nature of groups. Declaring an entire group that believes proposition P also believes Q is pretty bold – they often don’t, even if Q -> P. Members of that group may arrive at P from many different directions.
Finally, once facts in dispute are established, individuals can then attempt to set down methods for resolving them, assuming they want to. This is a big step, since a lot of people are simply getting stuff off their chest, and sympathizing and offering a way out is all it takes.
Some of those remaining may be treating their arguments as soldiers, and it becomes necessary to figure out what argument is their king, and assure them you aren’t going to attack it. (If you DO mean to attack it, then you’re probably doomed. Enjoy fighting uphill.)
The ones left over after all that might be truly principled, which means you might have a common way to resolve which facts are actually facts.
Most fake news is Right Wing. Most abusive trolls are Right Wing. And Republicans intentionally use bashing and trolling type political campaigning, because it wins elections. So any attempt to censor fake news will have the Right Wing up in arms. Without fake news like Fox and Breitbart, the Right would not win any elections. There are no factual reasons why the majority of the country’s voters would want to buy what the Right is selling– a program where ordinary people are screwed over by mega-corporations and the .01%. If they are truthful about that, no one in their right mind would vote for it.
But FB and everyone else will probably end up giving in. Because the Right is powerful– controlling all 3 branches of government now. And so the Right could boycott and ruin businesses that refuse to publish their lies and propaganda. So FB and everyone else on the Internet, will probably give in to the Right Wing, as usual, and go back to making money being conduits for lies and propaganda. An historical account of this propaganda election strategy is here below– an account written by a Republican political scientist, BTW, from a Right Wing think tank.
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
I can’t blame anyone for denying that the U.S. is immersed in Right Wing propaganda. When propaganda works, almost everyone does deny that it exists. But election of people like DT, who lies 70% of the time, would likely be impossible if we were not so immersed, and if people had not learned over years to more easily believe lies than to believe the truth.
Has it any point occurred to you that we’re immersed in Left Wing “propaganda,” courtesy of the predominant left-wing opinions of the people in major newsrooms? It’d be invisible to you for the same reasons you’re saying you “can’t blame anyone for denying that the U.S. is immersed in Right Wing propaganda?”
Major news rooms? Like Fox, you mean? Which is America’s most trusted news source.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2015/05/13/poll-fox-news-is-americas-most-trusted-news-channel-infographic/#82ebaf21192a
Fox, Breitbart, Drudge etc. include ONLY the Right Wing point of view plus numerous lies and unsubstantiated accusations. Most other news media bend over backwards to include BOTH Right Wing and Left Wing points of view. So, on balance, there are more Right Wing slanted views than Left Wing, in the media.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/30/which-news-organization-is-the-most-trusted-the-answer-is-complicated/
I can’t really open that Forbes page, but I’m willing to bet it does something similar to a Washington Times article I clicked on Googling; namely, 28% of people call Fox News “most trusted”, but most people outside of that don’t trust Fox News at all.
“Most other news media bend over backwards to include BOTH Right Wing and Left Wing points of view.”
oh you sweet summer child
And that’s not to mention that Breitbart is one site; Drudge so far as I know just aggregates news, and Fox is one network.
The thing I found most startling about this incident is not that someone with admin privileges was pissed off by some message to use his privileges to remove it — that sort of thing has undoubtedly happened before. What I found startling is that the Reddit CEO apparently has an admin-level account/password on the main message-board systems. I mean, I’d expect the CEO’s job to consist of dealing with financial matters, meetings with the upper managers of the company, meeting with investors or reps from other companies with whom the company has a business relationship, not doing sysadmin tasks or admin tasks on the message boards (Reddit is big enough that the “keep the machines running” admins and the “deal with naughty users/messages on the boards” admins are probably separate departments). Under the Principle of Least Privilege, I wouldn’t have expected the admins to have ever given the CEO full admin privileges on the message boards.
Yeah I find it really weird too. Wikipedia says the company is valued at $500m, so its not like they’re some startup where the CEO is secretly also the network and database admin. I’ve worked places where the director demanded admin pw on the servers in a way that’s kind of difficult to say no to, but its pretty strange at a company this size. To be honest the casual way to which he admitted was really strange too. When I first looked I thought his account must have just been hacked.
Banning abusive trolling is ok by me, but secretly editing user posts seems like a fence that a social media admin or company should never ever ever cross. And it sucks because for all its faults reddit is a cool site and it would be a tragedy if either editing became accepted or reddit failed as a site.
The Guardian on fake news and the election:
Facebook’s failure: did fake news and polarized politics get Trump elected?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/10/facebook-fake-news-election-conspiracy-theories
“Fake news” is rapidly becoming meaningless. Originally it referred to the likes of The Daily Currant, which publishes plausible-but-false stories and hides behind being “satire” like the Onion (only without any of the jokes). Nowadays it’s more likely to refer to Breitbart or Zero Hedge, which are slanted and full of unsubstantiated rumors but really not that much worse than Salon or
GawkerThe Concourse, aside from being right-wing instead of left-wing. The former are a scourge and Facebook is within their rights to get them debunked; the latter are, though loathsome to me, within the bounds of legitimate discussion.I would like to see the sites full of unsubstantiated rumors, like Breitbart and Zero Hedge, debunked. But I can’t be hopeful that such a trend will last long. After all, we are in a capitalist society, where everything is about making money, regardless of whether it destroys our democracy and/or our country. And it’s profitable for FB and others to be a conduit for lies and propaganda. I would love to be proven wrong about that though.
A fake news site in the “arguably satire” sense targeting Christian fundamentalists. I think this is the one I came across as a result of someone who assumed it was real quoting it as evidence of how nutty fundamentalists are.
When a site goes from printing rumors they think might be true to just printing everything they hear that strikes their fancy, or outright making up their own rumors, that’s when it becomes a real issue. From the outside it is hard to know exactly when or if they’ve crossed that line.
NYT article today, noting that fake news is Republican. People don’t click on Democrat biased fake news. That’s because Fox, Breitbart etc. have been immersing us in Right Wing propaganda for decades, so that’s the kind of propaganda that people believe.
Inside a Fake News Sausage Factory: ‘This Is All About Income’
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/25/world/europe/fake-news-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-georgia.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=a-lede-package-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
“Jobless and with graduation looming, a computer science student at the premier university in the nation of Georgia decided early this year that money could be made from America’s voracious appetite for passionately partisan political news. He set up a website, posted gushing stories about Hillary Clinton and waited for ad sales to soar.
“I don’t know why, but it did not work,” said the student, Beqa Latsabidze, 22, who was savvy enough to change course when he realized what did drive traffic: laudatory stories about Donald J. Trump that mixed real — and completely fake — news in a stew of anti-Clinton fervor.”
They do, it’s just somehow never called fake news when it fits into prog narratives. Then it’s “Well, at least it got people talking about the issues!”.
Yes, you found a single piece of fake news that is Democrat biased. Congratulations. I stand corrected. I should have said “There is ALMOST no fake news that is Democrat biased.”
If you will read the NYT article above, you see that fake Dem news creators can not make any money off of it, whereas, Right Wing fake news creators are getting quite rich off of it, because people can’t stop clicking on it.
Sure, Carlos Slim’s blog is definitely a neutral arbiter of such things.
Yes, but on the other hand, right-wing fakers are far too incompetent to compete with left-wing fakers. The former may have the quantity, but the latter has the quality. And that’s something, ain’t it?
Like I said: some stories are considered “fake news”, others are considered “Unfortunate Developments that Nonetheless Helped the Narrative”.
When you are linking someone who died in 1957, you have to know you are stretching.
I could link to Mary Mapes, who had a fawning movie made about her exploits in the fake news business. Or I could link to Stephen Glass, who rose high in The New Republic while making up stories about rampant drug use and orgies at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Duranty is just the standard-bearer for this sort of thing.
For anyone curious, here is a link to a story on Glass with mentions of some other fakers.
It’s worth noting that the right wing false news people are pointing at is mostly web sites with no particular reason for anyone to believe them who doesn’t already agree.
The false news on the other side was in the NYT, New Republic, … .
I was reintroduced to Stephen Glass when Ta-Nehisi Coates brought up his piece on DC taxi drivers, an implausible series of crude racial stereotypes which happened to flatter the retrograde views of the New Republic’s erratic owner/editor Martin Peretz. (A lefty nickname for TNR during the later Peretz years was “The New Racist”; it was also known as “even the liberal New Republic” since it was the nominally left-wing media source that most consistently argued for right-wing causes, like invading whatever country Bush was trying to rile us up against this week.) And of course, the article that brought Glass down, about a teenage hacker, was completely apolitical.
It’s not so simple as “all the hoaxes are left wing omg!!!”
And these Macedonian websites with newsy-sounding names that have only produced falsehoods are a different beast entirely from anything we’re talking about here.
Moon, I’m inclined to ask why should amateurs on the Left bother creating fake news when the mainstream media is more than happy to do it for them?
Or rather, when the mainstream media frets that maybe it’s a tiny bit one-sided in its coverage, then reassures itself that it’s doing all it can to be balanced and fair.
Jill Stein just fleeced the left for $7 million on the “news” that voting machines were totally hacked and Hillary could still win this. Fake news is far from being only a right-wing phenomenon.
Not just Jill Stein. The original articles like “Computer scientists urge Clinton campaign to challenge election results” (CNN) were also fake news, basically uncritically reporting a press release. It took me, holding a mere bachelors in CS, about two seconds to figure out a possible cause and a few minutes to confirm that it was plausible. Yet all the stories I saw on it before 538 weighed in were completely uncritical. That’s fake news, even if the bogus assertions were actually made.
I think a lot of that is down the unfortunate economics for news media that have been unleashed by the internet. In the old days there would have plenty of time to get a second opinion from an independent expert before going to press the next day (or that night for TV news). But now ever outlet is racing to put up an article with a clickbait headline before it becomes stale.
I think “fleeced” is a bit strong here, since Ms Stein was only hopping aboard the “Hillary wuz robbed!” bandwagon many had cheerfully set a-rolling ‘cross them prairies (ah, remember back when it was proof that Trump was talking crazy talk when he said the election was rigged and he’d contest the results if he lost? Yes?).
The last-gasp dying swan routines have, thankfully, more or less settled down (appeals to faithless electors, plans to do away with the electoral college, all the write-in and phone-in scripts to state and national representatives I’ve seen shared around) but I suppose there’s a kick or two left in these dead frog’s legs before Trump is sworn in.
If the voting machines were hacked, what exactly could a re-examination of them achieve, other than possibly confirming that a hack took place? I mean, if someone did hack them, they probably overwrote whatever the “correct” data was, so it’s not like you could say “Aha! The original vote for HRC was xxx,xxx instead of yyy,yyy”.
The more common variety of voting machine is the Scantron style, where the voter fills out a paper ballot and the machine just scans and counts it. If the paper ballots are preserved (as they should be under any sane system), you can double-check them against the machine’s count.
With touchscreen voting machines (in use in many counties in Wisconsin AIUI), there is no paper trail and there’s nothing to recount, as you said.
Yeah, that’s basically what I was getting at; I should have been clearer and said “all-electronic voting machines” to rule out systems like the scanned paper ballots we have in Oklahoma.
She wants a recount to find out if there is any voting machine fraud going on. Of course it is not news unless fraud is found– which it won’t be anyway, because it is so easy to cover up without a trace.
You Right Wingers are really reaching– It is indeed true and correct news that Stein is collecting money to finance a recount. No lies there. That’s what is happening.
Of course it is not news unless fraud is found– which it won’t be anyway, because it is so easy to cover up without a trace.
Moon, please re-read that and then think about why you get little traction on here when you try to argue your points.
“There is massive fraud perpetrated by the right-wingers to make sure Hillary lost the election, and the fact that no evidence will be found just means that the conspiracy is all-powerful!”
That is the kind of reasoning one sees on sites arguing that Reptiloids are cross-breeding with humans and putting their hybrid offspring into positions of power and influence. If you want to be taken seriously, please step back from the brink a step or two.
Having recently acquired Moon-credits by virtue of publicly outing myself as leftish, allow me to spend them by seconding Deiseach: Moon, all this discussion of electoral fraud is counter-productive. Clinton’s team has spent the time since the election quietly going over the evidence to determine whether there is any sign of electoral fraud, and have concluded that there isn’t. Here’s their official response to Stein’s announcement.
If you are looking for a new pet cause to post about, I suggest taking a look at Trump’s transition team, and the ways in which Trump is already using the office of the presidency to help out his business empire. There are too many real issues right now to waste time on fake ones.
The recounts won’t show anything. There can not be evidence of electoral fraud when electronic voting machines are used. The software used on them is considered a trade secret by law. Therefore, if fraud is committed on electronic voting machines, it is completely safe from ever being detected, because it is allowed, actually required, to be kept secret, by law.
The solution is to get rid of electronic voting machines and use paper ballots. But if we wait until there is EVIDENCE of fraud, obviously we will wait forever, since fraud perpetrators are protected by law from ever being detected.
Let’s fight about something other than politics – climate change!
This article in the news recently – and a sample news story based on it:
So what does this mean?
(a) It’s the Antarctic not the Arctic, that’s why it’s different
(b) This proves AGW is a hoax!
(c) This proves AGW is real!
I defer to those with more knowledge of the subject.
In recent years, antarctic sea ice has been expanding even as arctic sea ice contracted. I don’t know if there is a generally accepted explanation, but the fact itself isn’t controversial. It’s just one of those facts that gets pointed at by one side of the debate and ignored, accept when it’s necessary to respond, by the other.
I did a search of the NSIDC site, and found:
“Antarctic sea ice appears to have reached its annual maximum extent on October 6. The maximum occurred relatively late compared to past years. In contrast to the past three years, the 2015 maximum did not set a new record high for the period of satellite observations, but was nevertheless slightly above the 1981 to 2010 average.”
But I found that by a search on “antarctic.” If I just start at the top page, I get four links to “arctic,” none to “antarctic,” plus a link to “sea ice data” that gives me the arctic tab on the subject, although at that point I can click on the antarctic tab.
I see a lot more news stories about arctic sea ice setting new lows than about antarctic setting new highs.
Progressives and liberals are constantly bashed wherever they go, especially bashed by “rationalists.” Apparently there is some tendency for the vast majority of rationalists to be Right Wing Libertarians, and for them to believe that this is the only rational way to believe.
Progressives are blamed for the problems of society. This despite the fact that they have zero power, that government in all branches and at all levels, is dominated by the sworn enemies of liberals, who seem obsessed with bashing them.
Liberals are fantasized to be very powerful, e.g. to control the media– the media that somehow was unable to stop voters from electing a government which is dominated by the Right Wing. in all its branches, and at both state and federal levels. Somehow liberals are very powerful– in controlling a supposedly “liberal media” that is totally ineffective at getting voters to vote for liberals.
How afraid and angry does one have to be, to be afraid of, and angry at, people who have no power– to feel compelled to bash them constantly, even after they’ve lost big elections, as powerless people do? Somehow they, and their defeated politicians, are still the ones to bash and blame for every serious problem.
Make sure that you make this the whole meaning of your life, to bash liberals, to be afraid of them, and to cause them to become less powerful– although for liberals right now, to become less powerful would mean for them to have less than zero power.
One party gets pretty much all the power. The other gets all the blame. Interesting how that works.
Carry on. Because, historically, movements of this type usually turn out well, don’t they?
I’d hardly call academia, Hollywood, the mainstream media, the judiciary, the sitting President and the civil service “zero power”.
You sound far more obsessed with the right wingers in this comment section then even they are obsessed over left wing power, so at risk of running foul of the rules, since I do think it is necessary, I’m going to lay you with the charge of more than a little projection.
I agree that it’s silly to overstate the amount of power progressives have in society, especially since the Republicans in the USA have just taken congress and the Presidency. However, you’d be guilty of the reverse error if you were to claim that the right has had the boot over your side all this time. If so, then they’ve been pretty terrible at advancing their program, despite apparent zero resistance.
How can it be that civil rights for minorities, black people, and gays advanced so much from the 60s up to now if this was the case? Clearly, contrary to what some right wingers imagine, there was a right wing pushback in the 80s, but even if we want to start the clock here, this did not reduce the power of the left to zero. Since, if we start the clock from the 80s up to now, we still see improvements in rights for minorities, with the most recent President, Obama, allowing gays to openly serve in the military, and same sex marriage bans being found unconstitutional in 2015.
I think part of your problem is that you interpret the consensus as being overwhelmingly right wing because you live in the United States, which is relatively further to the right compared to Europe (the Conservative Prime Minister initiated the bill to make gay marriage legal in the UK), Canada (just passed bill C-16!), and Australia (very high minimum wage), even though all Western countries have moved to the left on most social issues and the welfare state (while the right maintains a tight grip on finance). By comparison, the USA looks ultra right wing, but if you compare it to how it was in the 80s, the trajectory has still been to the left. You’re stuck in the same bubble that you criticize others of being stuck in.
Going forwards, something has certainly changed, and I think we are at the start of a genuine movement to the right and a reversal of many left wing victories. The wind has changed since Brexit and Trump, so yes, the right will have less and less credibility blaming things on the left, but up until this point there certainly hasn’t been a unilateral march of victory by the right wing. The left wing has won on most social issues, with the right winning on finance and military (and guns in America) issues since the 80s. Neither side has been reduced to having zero power and both sides remain extremely competitive. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote narrowly and only lost in the electoral college. During the campaign she had the backing of most major news networks. These things should point towards “progressives have zero power” being flat out false.
Do you know that sometimes I even suspect you of being a right winger trying to discredit the left? I don’t think I’m alone on that. I’d like to see more left wing posters here, and I’d like to reach out to them, but you’re not really helping when you behave this way. Please adjust yourself. We can all forge a better standard of discussion forum together.
We can’t post images here, but if we could I’d have itstimetostopposting.jpg cued up. I’m as close to a typical left-liberal as we get around here, I’m sympathetic to everything you say, but these multi-page rants are not helpful, to you or me or anyone else.
The “everyone who disagrees with me is a single giant mass who control everything and are motivated by pure evil and stupidity” shtick has finally worn out its welcome. Banned for one month.
To his credit, Trump himself doesn’t seem interested in locking Hillary up. Because he himself knows that all that stuff about her having committed criminal acts was just bs that he used to keep people from voting from her, so he could win the election.
But his naive followers, and other Right Wingers who listened to Trump’s statements and to other fake Right Wing news about Hillary, want to still believe every word Trump ever said, even though he lies most of the time and contradicts himself constantly. So these folks still can’t let go of obsessing over how criminal HRC supposedly is, and wanting to put her in jail.
Sometimes the stuff that people say and do to get elected, still keeps having effects after the election. If people are naive enough to believe fake news lies, they are not going to stop believing lies, just because the election is over.
So Fidel Castro, Communist dictator, and metaphorical Bugs Bunny to the CIA’s Elmer Fudd, is dead. It’s the end on an era. His life truly embodied the great political contradictions of the twentieth century; A tragic story of a liberator turned tyrant, an epic conflict between imperialism and Communism, …the death of Fredo. In times like this I turn to the Simpsons for wisdom.
I was curious as to the opinions any body here might have as to what this means: a change (further thawing) in US-Cuban relations, the beginning of the end of the Communist experiment in Cuba, or things will continue on much as they have done under Raúl, given that Fidel handed over power a decade ago?
You have to say this for him: he outlasted everyone and everything that anticipated, waited for, or even tried to bring about his death. Even the Orange Bowl stadium, as per this extract from Whispers in the Loggia:
Nothing will change. An explicit statutory condition for lifting the embargo is that neither Fidel nor Raul is in power. That leaves executive action, and the incoming State Department looks to be full of anticommunist hard-liners who are unlikely to budge a millimeter on anything short of full restoration of the Batista regime (OK, that’s an exaggeration, but not far from the truth).
Fidel’s death will have almost no political consequences for Cuba internally. Any real change will have to wait until the ascension of Miguel Díaz-Canel, and the likely change to a more collective politburo led style of leadership akin to Deng Xiaoping era china. I tend to think post-Raul Cuba will move ahead with market reforms, even without any change in relations with the US, but only time will tell.
As for what the shape of Trump administration Cuba policy will be, I don’t know that we have any way of knowing. BBA mentions the prospect of a state department full of old school cold warriors, and it could happen. But as of this post, Trump has yet to nominate a potential secretary of State, so at this point that is just speculation.
Much of the detailed policy making in the executive branch goes on at the level of undersecretary and below, and amazingly enough, Trump’s policy appears to be to turn the selection of thousands of lower level appointees through out the federal bureaucracy over to his cabinet. Mattis will have his people at defense (And thank god for small mercies there), Sessions will have his people at justice, and who ever reigns in foggy bottom will have a free hand to do as he likes personnel wise. Add to that the fact that there will be in effect two sate departments, one in the Truman Building, and one in Trump tower, and you have a recipe for organizational chaos.
The Cuban regime, and for that matter nearly every other third world dictatorship, will likely try to conduct negotiations directly with the Trump organization, offering valuable economic concessions in exchange for favorable policies. For all we know Trump will go full Hyman Roth, and the Havana skyline will soon feature the Yuuugist classiest Trump tower of them all.
Hi Scott,
Re your discrimination tax on hiring decisions argument in your left-liberal manifesto – wouldn’t it be almost the same to just abolish discrimination laws affecting pay, so that a Martian who realises he/she/it is being discriminated against can offer to work for a lower salary?
Granted, there two issues with this proposal, a) that you do not get to fund scholarships and b) that it is unfair that two equally qualified are not paid the same.
However, this solution addresses an issue your tax scheme doesn’t – that is, what happens if Martian candidates are actually not as qualified as Earthlings? With today’s mandatory minimum wage & discrimination laws, and under your tax scheme, and employer will have no incentive to hire Martians – hence, Martians would never get work experience, their offspring would grow up in an underprivileged environment &c, so they’d have no way to improve their lot [I cannot claim credit for this thought – Milton Friedman made this argument].
Interested you to hear your thoughts.
A.
Would anyone else be interested in an SSC meetup either at the NYC solstice celebration or in Michigan on an earlier date?
This is my second try posting this. We’ll see if it works this time.
Is there anyone else who would be interested in an SSC meetup either around the New York solstice celebration or on an earlier date in Michigan.
Note that there’ll be a megameetup (aiming at the general SSC crowd) the day after the Solstice celebration (Solstice celebration is the 17th, Megameetup is 18th)
https://www.facebook.com/events/187105845029955/
I’m considering it. I was hoping for something more directly SSC related.
Well, I’m obviously totes biased here, but it is my honest opinion having seen both Solstice Megameetups and the previous NYC Slatestar meetup, that they were essentially identical. (The Solstice itself is certainly it’s own thing that has a very different feel, but the Megameetup is just “the sort of people who comment on Slatestarcodex hanging out and talking”)
Trump voters, and many other Republicans, are an interesting study lately. Incredibly sore winners. Incapable of positive emotion. Their idea of happiness is feeling vengefulness and exhibiting cruelty. They are addicted to their own adrenaline, and addicted to conflict with, and abuse of, the other political tribe.
Have you ever seen a sports team, that after winning the game, can not be happy for their success, but is instead is completely obsessed with bashing the other team that just lost to them, and with gloating over that team’s sadness? Of course not. This is highly dysfunctional behavior.
After an election, if one’s candidate wins, a healthy individual might be expecting and hoping for their candidate to do good things for the whole nation, including the seventy something percent of eligible voters who did not vote for their candidate– because the other voters either stayed home, or else they voted for another candidate.
Divisiveness does win elections. And the GOP is most expert at divisiveness. But once the election is over, divisiveness can destroy the country, if people find themselves incapable of constructive behavior, cooperation toward common goals etc.
But humans are incredibly tribal. Since Big Money and mega-corporate donations rule politics, the political parties do not actually have much to offer ordinary voters– although I would argue that the Dems throw ordinary voters a bone much more often the the GOP does.
Since the GOP offers absolutely nothing to ordinary voters, voters can’t be pulled together through a focus on the positive constructive aspects of their own political tribe, because there aren’t any. So the way the GOP activates its voters’ tribal instincts, to get them to the polls, is to get them to hate the other tribe through fear and hate mongering fake news.
Thus you have the spectacle of HRC having lost the election. And then are Right Wingers talking about the wonderful things their GOP candidate is going to do? Not so much. They’re mostly focused on bashing the one remaining acceptable scapegoat in the country– liberals and liberal politicians.
How long after HRC has lost the election will people go on discussing the cattle futures trading she did 40 years ago, where there was no evidence whatsoever of any wrongdoing on her part– but she’s a liberal politician, so you have to give in to your urge to chant “Lock her up” nevertheless. It makes your day and gives meaning to your life, doesn’t it?
Having a bad day? Bash a liberal. That will make you feel better.
Under Trump, certainly those social justice believers who use extreme tactics aren’t going to have any power– perhaps not even in the expensive universities where they have had power in the past, and where they had secluded from the outside world. They were so secluded that 99% of liberals living outside of San Fran and very expensive universities had never hear of them. I had never heard of them either, until I came to this site.
But who cares that HRC, and extreme social justice tactics practitioners, and Dems in general have no power? That makes it even easier to bash a scapegoat, if that scapegoat has no power, doesn’t it?
As I said, carry on. When one party gets almost all the power and the other is the scapegoat and gets all the blame, history shows that this works out just fine, doesn’t it?
You need to adjust your model of reality. This is not true, not even on /r/the_donald. You get both the positive (“we’re going to make America great again”, “We did it! We elected a president with meme magic!”) and the negative (jail Hillary, throw out those illegals).
You can keep saying there’s no evidence, but it won’t make it so. In any case, the main person discussing those here was not a Donald Trump supporter and said he’d prefer Clinton to win over Trump.
One can hope, but I rather doubt it will be that clean a reversal.
I’m not willing to accept either your estimates or your implicit claim to be typical. Certainly many of these liberals outside SF had heard of Justine Sacco and Tim Hunt. Any of them who read the Guardian would be very familiar with their beliefs and actions. Perhaps they hadn’t heard the term SJW (a term mostly used by their opponents, though they have made some attempts to either muddy or reclaim it), but many were familiar with the phenomenon.
Another South Bay Meetup?
We’re thinking of hosting another meetup sometime before Christmas. Possible dates for us would be Friday December 9th or Saturday December 17th. What works for other people?
There are websites for that already. BetMoose is the first that comes up.
Yeah, but good luck convincing Republicans to support it when they think the EC gives them an unfair advantage. (Which isn’t necessarily even true, since turnout would be different under NPV.)