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:
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2. Comments of the week: this thread where people explain and evaluate the conflicting claims that global warming is worse than vs. not as bad as IPCC predictions; TheContinentalOp on the Electoral College, Alex Zavoluk on the role of selection in the altitude/obesity link.
3. There will be a meetup at the lobby of the Conrad New York Hotel, 102 N End Ave, New York, New York 10282, at 12 noon on Sunday 12/18. Please watch this space and the Facebook page in case any of this changes.
There has been a great deal of talk around here about the word “racist” lately.
Much like porn, I have a feeling that it becomes hard to define in an exacting way, as much depends on context and intent. But it is possible to “know it when you see it”. Therefore, I am curious, how many people view the following statements by Carl Paladino as being racist? And I am putting this here in OT65 because I would like as many people on the right to comment as would like. I may repeat it in 65.25.
The first one not so much, it just seems generally in poor taste, unless there are old racial stereotypes about cow relations I’m unaware of.
The second one sure, because it trips the “gorilla/ape/monkey” alarm. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think the gorilla/ape/monkey thing is well-known enough that people who don’t want to sound racist should know better than to mention one in the same sentence as a black person.
Pretty similar to what Montfort said, the first part just came across as vulgar personal invective without any particular racial component. And not even particularly clever or well-done vulgarity.
I would add that “outback of Zimbabwe” bit also trips similar bells to the gorilla talk, and seems a bit surreal. I mean, why Zimbabwe? Did Michelle make some comments defending their craptastic history of governance? If it’s some sort of “Go back where you came from” slur, why to her and not Obama going back to Kenya or somesuch?
That said, without context, I can’t really tell if this was intended as a racist attack, or was motivated by racial prejudice at all, or whether this is a case of an asshole grabbing for the most high-impact and emotionally-loaded imagery he can lay hands on to vent an entirely personal animus. In which case he’s still an asshole and shows poor judgement, but is probably not any more racist than a lot of the people calling each other faggots on Xbox Live.
EDIT: I suppose I should concede that there are many who think that the use of fag and homo in such venues are indicative of deepseated and widespread homophobia and casual heteronormative bias, but I’ve never agreed with that view. Again, high emotional energy, high-impact.
I don’t think the intent to be racist is necessary, merely the intent, in the case of an attack, to be offensive.
Otherwise, it would be praxrically impossible to say something was a racist attack unless the person said “I intend to be racist”.
To my mind, unambiguously, clearly racist statements are ones like “I don’t like black people, they smell and I don’t trust them, I don’t want them around me” and so on.
I don’t have much of a problem with that because in my experience actual racists are pretty happy to say things exactly that blatant openly given half a chance. Including on the job, and then acting surprised when HR cans their ass a few weeks later.
But why do you think Michelle Obama is being referred to as a gorilla who should live in Africa with another gorilla? Why is that specivic language used?
She is also being referred to as a transwoman. In both cases as insults.
Covered that already in the section of my initial reply you quoted, HBC.
1: Vile, but not racist. You can easily imagine someone saying the same about Bush and Cheney.
2: Racist, in itself. There’s a fence around associating black people with non-humans (because doing so is typical of unambiguous racists throughout history), and when you cross that fence, you’re strongly signaling racism.
Paladino’s responses were apparently written, in response to a survey by a local (Buffalo) alternative weekly. So this goes beyond poor impulse control, to doubling-down on a bad decision. Unless he developed a brain tumor after being named Trump’s New York State campaign co-chairman, it indicates either a lack of vetting on the campaign’s part, or a desire to lose.
Similar comments from Paladino came out during his run for governor in 2010. But that was back when the old rules of political campaigning applied – i.e., saying extremely vile things hurt your chances of winning – and it moved Paladino from a long shot to a no-hoper. These days, it’s just the new new normal.
The second one is making use of racist ideas of black people being akin to gorillas, so that one’s racist. Might also be making use of racist and sexist ideas about black women being unfeminine.
The first one is vile but isn’t racist towards Obama or black people; at least, I’m unaware of any stereotype about black people having relations with cows, so it seems to just be a personal insult. It’s possible Paladino has some idea that black people are generally traitors, but you can’t tell from the statement; I’d take his feelings about Jarret to be more likely to refer to her birth in Iran.
As a follow up, note the following:
And yet, when making at least some statements that are explicitly racist amidst others that are “merely” grossly insulting, and then singling out an editor who “happen” to be back, he denies the racism.
I’m not defending Paladino, but perhaps there should be corollary to Hanlon’s razor that goes “do not attribute to racism that which is adequately explained by stupidity/malice”.
In my experience stupidity and malice are highly correlated with racism. Unintelligent hateful people are much more likely to resort to making demeaning generalizations about other ethnic groups.
It’s also highly correlated with water being wet and dogs barking.
Saying that a particular insult was particularly insulting doesn’t actually tell us anything about any of the parties involved. As such the only proper answer to HBC’s question is that there is insufficient data for a meaningful answer.
@hlynkacg:
I’ll ask the same question I asked before to others. Are you saying that a statement can only be classified as racist if you know the person in question thought it was racist when they said it and intended it to be racist?
It depends on how broadly you want to define “racism” (see Lysenko’s comment below) but I’m personally inclined to say no. If you want to argue that you want to certain person is bigoted and abusive on the basis of “race”, go ahead and argue that. But the claim that there is a difference between “what you said is racist” and “you are racist” is fucking horseshit. Words aren’t racist, people are racist.
If #2 ain’t racist, what is?
Do we ever get to look at what people are saying and call it racist, or is it always just stupid? As I said above, does the person how to come out and say “I am explicitly intending to be racist?
That depends, HBC. Does racist in this context mean “using terminology and imagery historically associated with beliefs about racial inferiority and bias”? If so, yes.
Or does it mean “communicating the speaker’s beliefs about racial inferiority and bias”? If so, no, more evidence required. It nudges prior probability up a bit, but only a bit.
There is a difference between “what you said is racist” and “you are racist”.
See this rather well known video by II’ll Docttrine.
Yes, there is, which is why I said “If the first definition, yes”.
If I seem pedantic, it’s because while I have never found you to argue in bad faith here, I have also literally NEVER had or even seen a conversation about racism online that was not either begun in bad faith and the intent to weaponize the issue and use it as a club against a given target, or did not degenerate to that level over time.
Therefore, I approach any such conversation by laying out my terms as clearly as possible, in the anticipation that before too long, someone will come along and start attempting to deploy a bit of tactical ambiguity.
If Paladino wanted to attack the Obamas for being liberals, or Socialists, or something else unrelated to race, why bring up Zimbabwe? The only possible connection to Michele Obama is that she’s black.
In Paladino’s lurid screed Barack Obama is guilty of bestiality, and Michele is a Zimbabwean transsexual; it implies that he thinks those things are equivalently objectionable. If I say “hlynkacg, your mother is a whore”, it’s likely that we can infer that I have a low opinion of sex workers.
We have a social norm against demeaning people based on their ethnic origins, if you reject that norm just come out and say it. When right wingers defend comments like Paladino’s I don’t think their objecting to categorizing any particular statement as offensive, so much as rejecting the entire concept of racism as such. It’s very clear to me that many commenters here would refuse to classify any comment by any right wing politician as racist, on the grounds that such prejudices are entirely justified.
Crude and rude, but I don’t think it has much to do with race. I can imagine a similar set of comments targeting Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Indeed the first part would work better for Bill, since his image is, and Barack’s is not, associated with aggressive sexuality. On the second part, the implication of masculinity would probably work better for Hillary, the link to Africa and gorillas less well.
But all of it looks like crude insults by someone deliberately trying to be offensive.
On the meta question of what counts as racist.
To me, a racist is someone who dislikes or despises people of some race because of their race. I can see no evidence in the quotes that Paladino’s dislike for the Obamas has anything to do with their race.
1) If someone is trying to be extremely offensive, and they employ something that has clear racist implications, what are the odds that their specific choice of words only meant to give offense in the less offensive manner?
2) Are you making the argument that a statement can only be determined to be racist if we know the persons thoughts at the specific time they spoke them?
Well, he could have named any administration staffer, but he named Valerie Jarrett. And then he could have named any Buffalo News columnist, but he named Rod Watson.
At some point the distinction “he’s not provably racist, he’s just going out of his way to insult particular black people” ceases to have any value except for the most pedantic of pedants.
This is the (IMO invalid) “racism of the gaps”; if he attacks a black person it must be because that person is black unless proven otherwise. And for Watson, it seems likely it just has to do with his ongoing feud with Watson.
@The Nybbler
Attacking a black person seemingly arbitrarily is some degree of evidence in favour of racism. Doing so repeatedly is increasingly strong evidence.
Especially, when answering the meta-question, you go out of your way to specify another black person.
It’s _tiny_ evidence. Arbitrarily close to zero in the case of Watson, with whom he has prior history. As an argument for a person’s racism, it’s just a “gotcha”. “You attacked a black person, you must be racist, you racist!”
The key part is “seemingly arbitrarily”. Attacking Obama is not intrinsically racist, even though he’s black. Saying “I hate those greedy bankers, like…” and then naming twenty bankers who all just happen to be black is distinctly suspicious. I’m sure you would instantly recognise this pattern in other situations. If someone claimed “I really care about human rights abuses. For instance…” and then named twenty accounts of human rights abuse committed by the US, would you assume that they just happened to pick the US rather than Russia, China, Saudi Arabia etc.? Or would you suspect that they might have some problem with the US specifically?
@rlms:
He didn’t name 20 arbitrary people. He named two, one of whom he has a history with and one of whom is apparently some kind of bete noir (no pun intended) for some conservatives. This is incredibly weak evidence.
Paladino joked about Barack Obama being caught in an act of bestiality, and Michele being a Zimbabwean transsexual. If I said that 2017 will see David Friedman deported to Israel ,where he belongs, after he is caught sodomizing a twelve year old girl, would you not see an antisemitic implication?
Well, since I can’t argue with lefties for a while,* I might as well pick an argument with a libertarian.
Hey, @DavidFriedman: I’m a fairly mainstream, National Review-flavor conservative. What libertarian position can you persuade me to adopt? (Sorry, too late on pot.)
(* I was so insulted at being left off the right-wing blacklist that I’m boycotting the next few threads. Ob OOTS.)
I don’t know what positions you currently reject. Possible candidates:
1. Free trade.
2. Recreational Drug legalization.
3. Medical drug legalization. The FDA can certify drugs, but doctors and patients are free to use uncertified drugs if they want to.
4. Competing privately issued monies.
5. Abolish professional licensing, including doctors. Again, government agencies (or anyone else) can certify professionals, customers are free to use uncertified professionals if they want.
6. Non-interventionist foreign policy.
Surely you disagree with at least one of those.
Free trade would not be an interesting argument; I’d like to see us gradually head in that direction. Similarly medical drug legalization. Competing privately-issued monies are obviously impossible, plus they’re are already here, and don’t seem to be causing any problems. Legally requiring a license to practice is usually a scam.
And I’m not the only conservative who’d respond that way. Congratulations, libertarians are apparently convincing conservatives on some points.
(I kind of expected you to name more culture-war topics.)
So we’re left with recreational drug legalization (and I already think pot, LSD, MDMA, and most psychedelics should be legal, so we’d just be arguing heroin/crack/meth) and non-interventionist foreign policy.
I’ll take Non-Interventionist Foreign Policy for $100, Alex.
Let’s start with a policy target, and ignore how to get there for now.
We share a vision of the U.S. trading with the rest of the world, with some flow of people (and a whole lot more flow of people in your vision). I just don’t see how we keep that going without a military force that sometimes does things outside the country.
I do think many foreign interventions are mistakes (Libya, Canada). But some I think were necessary (Afghanistan) and others were at least defensible (Iraq 2003, though I didn’t think so in 2003). If Iran were on the verge of having nuclear weapons, and a military action could stop them, I’d be in favor of it.
What level of non-intervention would you like to see? How would that policy be better than the current level of foreign intervention? Would it be better than a perfect interventionist policy?
The U.S. military limits itself to protecting the U.S. against attacks. That policy would be better because an interventionist foreign policy is one of those things that it is worse to do badly than not to do, and the U.S. government is likely to do it badly. I wrote a chapter in defense of that argument quite a long time ago–Chapter 45, “Is There a Libertarian Foreign Policy,” of the second edition of my first book, conveniently webbed.
A perfect interventionist policy is by definition better, since when intervention is worse than non-intervention a perfect interventionist doesn’t intervene.
Why do you regard competing privately issued monies as obviously impossible?
This is not specific enough: One classic way to protect against attack is to preemptively invade. Another way to protect against attack is to conquer everything you can, creating a deep buffer (e.g. the Roman Empire, the Soviet Empire). Another is to keep an enemy’s country unstable with small military interventions (e.g. the contras in Nicaragua). I assume you are against all of those ways.
So would the U.S. military simply stand by until we absorb the first punch? How do you extend this to nuclear warfare?
What should we do if we see a large coalition coming together against us? Wouldn’t it be prudent to attack them before they’re ready?
Do you think the U.S. government will be competent at a non-interventionist foreign policy? If so, why? If not, then do you think the costs are somehow guaranteed to be lower than incompetence at interventionist foreign policy?
Yeah, this is why I don’t argue much with people who’ve written books on the subject at hand: I’m writing first drafts from scratch, they can just toss off a link to something polished. Grumble, grumble… if you really wanted me to read it, you wouldn’t have put 44 chapters ahead of it.
I don’t think that’s true, and even if it is, it isn’t obviously true. The situations are not independent. In fact, some opportunities to intervene will only occur because of past interventions, and other opportunities to intervene will only occur because of past non-interventions.
Feel free to pick which points to reply to; in my opinion, the last one is the most interesting, followed by what an incompetent non-interventionist policy would look like.
(Oh, and the full sentence about currencies was: “Competing privately-issued monies are obviously impossible, plus they’re already here, and don’t seem to be causing any problems.”)
Culture war topics either involve policies that violate freedom of association, which I am opposed to whether or not I agree with the cause it is being done for, or topics about how people should choose to live their lives. On the latter I’m pretty conservative. I’m in a conventional, monogamous, closed marriage, do not use any illegal drugs. I did try marijuana a few times forty some years ago but I didn’t like the effect.
Culture war topics are also the main thing separating (non-populist) conservatives from libertarians (at least in the American examples I’ve seen). But if you’re not interested in convincing me that same-sex couples should be able to legally marry, I can’t really force you.
If agree with 4 of these and don’t care about the remaining 2, might I already be a libertarian?
Likely enough. “Libertarian” isn’t a binary category.
I think this list is kind of cheaty. Do you consider someone who thinks we should have border guards to stop illegal immigrants, terrorists, and terrorist weapons to be anti-free trade? Because obviously there are lots of people who would say they love free trade who would favor guarding the borders against those things, and once it’s accepted that delaying trade at the border to check for contraband could be OK, the debate has become how much and in which ways to interfere with trade, not whether to interfere with trade. And a whole lot of views on that call themselves “free trade,” and there is of course no official standard as to what counts as genuine free trade, so people may have extensive disagreements with you that won’t be revealed as long as you use the two word description of your position.
And I think a lot of rationalists who are not outright libertarians are nonetheless more likely than the average person to agree with you on many of these issues; if I were a cynical sort, I’d think you were trying to give one of those lists that try to convince people that they’re really libertarians after all, by leaving out the issues where libertarians have the most unpopular positions. Of course, perhaps it’s because you made a list for a right-winger that you didn’t manage to come up with anything a leftist like me particularly strongly opposes, but then the rightist says the same thing, making me think it really is just a greatest hits of inoffensive libertarianism list.
No, although I’m not sure doing that is very useful. The U.S. hosts almost seventy million foreign tourists a year. Unless one is willing to radically reduce that, preventing illegal immigrants or terrorists from getting in doesn’t look like a viable strategy.
So? Suggest some.
Social security.
Boy, this voluntary exile thing is hard. I am going to stick to my pledge not to comment in the next three Open Threads (starting with the current one, 65.25) but leave it to the left-inclined.
It’s tough, though. Already there are two or three points I want to put my tuppence worth in.
Gotta remember: it’s a charge to my honour to keep my word! 🙂
I know the feeling. Stay strong sister!
i just haven’t clicked it. 65 or bust TBH
Just think about it this way: now OT65 is the right wing solidarity thread. It’s kind of appropriate to conservatism to hunker down in a traditional thread.
It’s kind of appropriate to conservatism to hunker down in a traditional thread.
Yes! Good sturdy old-fashioned threads like they used to make in our grandparents’ day, not these fancy modern threads that change with every fad and you don’t even know what material they’re made out of anymore.
Threads with lumps in that you have to strain out with a sieve, that’s what we stand for!
*snort*
I remain unnamed chopped liver, and so I shan’t refrain from gifting the universe w/ my pov.
As a point, there seem to be plenty of right wingers in 65.25.
Subjective, I’m sure.
Eh, not -just- subjective, HBC.
For my part, I agreed with the idea as something to be considered for an official rule, but didn’t go so far as Deiseach and unilaterally volunteer to implement it on myself.
I think most of the others who agreed to abide by it if Scott lays it down and said it had merit (like myself) are still posting in the meantime.
I as well never volunteered to unilaterally abandon SSC for a while, although it would leave me considerably more free time.
SSC is one of the higher quality discussion forums available online. Obviously the Open Threads are a big part of this and have some really awesome comments. But because of the huge volume of posts, it’s often hard to wade through the gigantic mass of comments to find what you really want to talk about. The OT is also often so massive there’s serious delays loading the thing on some devices (plus the reload every-time you post etc).
It would be quite nice if the was more organization to the comments, particularly the OT, so it was more manageable to read. This would also mean it might be potentially possible to look back over the history of discussion on a topic, to have some idea where the same stuff is repeated or if honestly new ideas are coming up. The sub seems slightly better at this, but doesn’t quite have the right structure, and doesn’t attract the numbers of people.
I wonder if having themed OTs might be a step in the right direction. So if the OTs are consistently getting a lot of discussion about the US election, or politics generally, or futurist topics, or rationalism, or health topics, or whatever, then Scott you could post a themed thread, eg. “Politics Open Thread”. If you’re really into politics this week, go there. If you’re not, go to the regular OT and read a more concise variety of other topics, because in there politics comments are politely removed and posters instructed to head over to the Politics OT. If you want to read over discussions involving say economics for the past year, now you have much less text to search. Basically, greatly reduced comment sprawl, but still freedom to discuss whatever you like!
On the subject of people on the left feeling beat upon …
Is there a solution that involves different people choosing to see different subsets of the comment thread? If you are on the left and you think my comments are almost always dismissive and uninteresting, the obvious solution is to configure the software so you don’t see my comments. I don’t think that can be done at present, but is there a reason why it couldn’t be?
I actually think that “shadow bans” of the sort you’re describing are even more corrosive to community norms and good epistemology than conventional bans/censorship.
I would honestly rather see everyone on Tekhno’s list (including myself and you) perma-banned than see such a “solution” implemented.
I believe this actually already possible, as their is a client-side tool that will autohide all comments from a certain nickname.
I do not believe that is a good solution. The obvious failure mode is easy to see. The regulars shadow-ban people and new-users haven’t, so the new user experience is increasingly dominated by those who have been shadow banned.
Plus, my goal is to influence the norms and shape of the community, not have my own personal best experience.
This in conjunction with the deliberate cultivation of an “out of touch elite” who have no idea of what’s happening in their own community is why I believe that this is even more corrosive than conventional banning.
Why does every single conversation on this site keep coming back to the failures of the Clinton campaign?
huh?
honestly that’s how I read it too first off
now that the election is over, gotta calm down. Wish Clinton would just go away for a couple of months, let everyone recuperate from the election. (Trump obviously won so that’s not an option, as such.)
Mostly in agreement. These sorts of “hide these people so I don’t have to look upon them” tools are in wide use on Tumblr – and twitter, for that matter.
(I don’t think it’s without any virtue – Tumblr (also) uses it for hiding spoilers, and it can be used there to block images/post tags, rather than *just* people.)
I think that a self-initiated block on some people (so that one chooses to not listen to them ones-ownself) is far less bad than outright banning or blocking people (so that no one in the community can hear them). To me, the first seems more like freedom of association, and the second most like censorship.
(I think that blocking people so that one doesn’t have to hear them is…a rather sophomoric move. But there are days when all of us are twelve.)
We are all selective in what sources of information we go to, what people we listen to. If one had infinite time it might make sense to read everything and everyone, but we don’t.
This whole discussion comes out of some people feeling that the active presence of too many people who disagree with them makes them uncomfortable. If that’s the problem, arranging for those who feel that way to see only a subset of those who disagree with them looks like the least damaging solution.
@David Friedman:
What a horribly dismissive and insulting statement. Also, prove it (or refrain from making the accusation).
@HBC:
How else would you describe the argument that having too many right wing people in the group drives left wing people out?
@DavidFriedman
Suppose every third poster who engaged with you here put three parentheses around your name. a) Would you feel less comfortable and b) Would your characterization capture that situation accurately?
I don’t think I would feel uncomfortable. It would strike me as rather weird. I might try to see if I could figure out what the view of the world was that led to that practice, see if I could talk one of them out of it.
A very long time ago, I was invited to a conference in Paris. A little before it happened, I was told that a number of other participants had withdrawn in protest against the inclusion of someone they viewed as a fascist–I believe someone who was part of Le Pen’s movement (Pere).
My reaction was that if he really was a fascist I would be very interested in meeting him, since it was obviously a point of view that had convinced a lot of people and I had never heard a competent defense of it.
As it turned out, he also withdrew in counter protest, but I managed to arrange to have dinner with him. He wasn’t a fascist, was interesting in an odd way, but that’s another story.
@Skef:
Another response:
I spend some time arguing climate issues on FB. It’s less fun than arguing with people here because the quality of the argument is much lower, which is why I spend much more time here.
Many of those arguing what I would describe as the Alarmist position on that issue routinely refer to those who disagree with them as “deniers,” routinely imply that anyone who disagrees with them is scientifically ignorant and probably a Christian fundamentalist.
That’s annoying because it gets in the way of the arguments I want to have, but I wouldn’t say it makes me uncomfortable. I know that my scientific background is much better than that of most people on either side of that particular argument, so why should I be made uncomfortable by other people believing things about me that are obviously false?
Similarly, if you are a left winger who supports (say) market socialism, it might be annoying if people imply that you are a Stalinist who believes in the superiority of central planning, but I don’t see why it would make you uncomfortable. Similarly if you are a left wing pacifist being blamed for Stalin’s invasion of Poland.
Can you be explicit about b? Take it as given that you’re very cosmopolitan about this sort of thing. I don’t see that attitude as doing the work of making “I disagree, and think the primary effect of raising the minimum wage would be fewer jobs for low-skilled workers” and “you’re disgusting” equivalent. And if they are different, the shades in between likely are too.
The original expressed concerns had to do with differences in interpretive charity, possibly tracing to “tribal” affiliations. Your characterization just washes that concern away.
They aren’t equivalent. I mentioned the FB climate discussions, where there is a fair amount of hostility and contempt, most of it tribal.
That makes for a less interesting conversation, but more for the lack of people actually arguing the issues, of whom there are a few there but not many, than for the presence of those not doing so.
Taking it to SSC, I can understand people saying that the conversation would be better if less of it consisted of expressions of hostility and more of argument. But the main solution being discussed involved taking people out of the discussion, which would result in less argument as well as less negative comment. Perhaps my impression of the problem was distorted by the solution being mostly, but not exclusively, discussed. Also, of course, expressions of hostility are probably more salient to those they are targeted at.
Going back to the idea of individuals arranging not to see posts by other individuals, if the problem is people being made uncomfortable by expressions of hostility rather than disagreement, selectively removing from the part of the conversation you see the people who are acting that way would seem an obvious solution.
It might have the further advantage of discouraging the behavior, since it’s no fun insulting someone if he can’t hear you and if he never responds you may eventually realize he isn’t listening.
Do I now correctly understand what you view the problem as being?
@HeelBearCub:
Can you explain a little about why you consider it dismissive and insulting? An alternative, more-accurate/fair/charitable/non-insulting summary would probably be helpful.
I can’t speak for HBC, but I agree that the phrasing is not maximally charitable. Most of the left-wing people who have commented on the issue have emphasized that they value the ability to engage with diverse opinions on this site. Most of them (us?) have also pointed to specific behaviours (dogpiling, gratuitous smears) that they find aggravating. It’s not, as David Friedman implies, discomfort with the mere presence of right-wing ideas, and it’s a bit snide to imply that is is.
Bear in mind that this experiment was not proposed by a left-wing poster. My impression is that it has also received more support from non-left posters.
What I said was “the active presence of too many people who disagree with them.”
Not the “mere presence” but the active presence in large numbers.
As best I could tell that was what was being complained about. What is dogpiling other than lots of people responding to a post to disagree with it? It’s a bit pointless if they are all saying the same thing, but that’s a natural enough result of a medium where people often respond without checking to see what other responses have been made.
Perhaps we should all make an effort to avoid doing so, or to delete responses when we notice that our point has already been made? I try to, but I don’t expect I always succeed.
David Friedman:
Are you sure? You opened this comment thread proposing the hypothetical problem:
Which doesn’t sound like the number of voices are the issue.
If you mean in Tekhno’s thread, perhaps you also noticed that most of the posts by actual self-identified left-leaning posters disagreed that dogpiling was the issue and complained of other perceived misconduct by (some) right-leaning posters. (Even citizensearth also complains about politicization of unpolitical topics).
@David Friedman:
You like to get your subtle digs in, an then nitpick about the precise language, don’t you?
Why you don’t you steelman what Iain and I are saying and come up with your best argument why what you said was not constructive and likely to engender ill will?
@David Friedman:
To be explicit: the dismissive reading of your statement is “there are a bunch of left-wingers who just can’t handle intellectual opposition, and they complained about having to interact with right-wing ideas”. If you were actually just talking about dogpiling, as you claim, then the next sentence is pretty strange. What do you mean, there are no better solutions? You have provided suggestions for dealing with dogpiling yourself! This reading also fits much better with the flow of the conversation at that point: “blocking people so that one doesn’t have to hear them is a rather sophomoric move”, and so on.
Stop playing dumb. You wrote a deliberately snide remark and worded it just ambiguously enough that you could defend it if challenged. I do not expect you to admit it in this thread, but I hope that you are at least honest enough to admit it to yourself.
To be clear: I love some good snark, and I am sure that I have occasionally taken it too far. I am keeping this thread alive not because of the comment itself, but because you seem to be doubling down on your denial that you were being snarky in the first place.
@Montfort:
I was describing the basis for the comment of mine that HBC reacted very negatively to. You are now quoting a later comment of mine based on a somewhat different interpretation of the problem due to comments responding to my earlier comment.
To expand (editing):
Original theory–problem is too many active posters disagreeing. One solution is for people facing that problem to reduce the number of such posters they read.
Various people strongly object to that interpretation.
Revised theory: Problem is too many people disagreeing in an unproductive way, hostile and dismissive.
If that is the problem, the same solution works, indeed works even better, since people facing that problem can selectively eliminate from what they read those people behaving in that way.
I hope that makes it clearer.
“To be explicit: the dismissive reading of your statement is “there are a bunch of left-wingers who just can’t handle intellectual opposition, and they complained about having to interact with right-wing ideas”.”
Only if, in reading it, you leave out what I just quoted from the post of mine you are objecting to:
“the active presence of too many people who disagree with them.”
The clear implication of both that and the suggestion was that a moderate number of people disagreeing would not be a problem. Which is inconsistent with your dismissive reading.
No, I’m afraid I didn’t quite follow. The “if you find [someone]… dismissive and uninteresting” comment was made (by you) Dec. 22; the “too many active voices” comment that HBC took offense at was made (by you) Dec. 23 (and your explanation of it that I quoted was on the 24th). To me, this makes it look like your initial understanding of the problem was perceived poster misconduct, and that you later commented as if the problem were number of disagreeing posts. Your last comment to me claims the reverse order, so maybe you’re using some other time frame?
This might be a bit hard to untangle in text, already I think this post will be at least as confusing to you as yours was to me.
Obviously you know your own mind better than I do, but I thought I would point out something that contributed to the perceived snark (for me, at least).
As for your later comment (not addressed to me), the dismissive reading of the comment takes “too many” to imply a number that is perhaps “one” or otherwise very small. I would be surprised if you had not come across this kind of statement before. To give an example:
“Stalinists tend to complain if there are too many active, vocal robber barons in a community” – I think it’s clear that here “too many” is just “one or more.”
Continuing with the dismissive reading, the suggestion would then be taken as “such people can block all posters they perceive as too right-wing, leaving just token opposition.”
I think part of the problem here is that in SSC culture (as I see it), one of the highest-valued virtues is the ability to charitably engage with everyone and not close themselves off from ideas. In other words, sincere words to the effect of your comment can sound to some sort of like an accusation of cowardice in the Old South.
@ HeelBearCub
I believe this actually already possible, as their is a client-side tool that will autohide all comments from a certain nickname.
Yes. If you click on an avatar, a box comes up offering to hide all future posts by that person. Hide them from you, I mean. It doesn’t affect other people seeing them, so I think the term ‘ban’ is confusing here. How about “Plonk”?
@houseboatonstyxb:
You mean plonk as in from usenet days?
I confess I was unfamiliar with the term, but yes it is more appropriate.
Shadow ban is more familiar to me, and this is adjacent to that.
@ HBC
You mean plonk as in from usenet days?
Yep. It’s probably too obscure, though. And it’s not as severe as plonk/killfile was iirc, because it’s easy to unhide. Anyway the crew here probably gave it some good name which I don’t remember.
I confess I was unfamiliar with the term, but yes it is more appropriate. … Shadow ban is more familiar to me, and this is adjacent to that.
This is nowhere near as severe as anything called a ‘ban’, sfaik. To make it resemble a ban, you’d have to get all or most of the commentariot to agree to hide this particular user, then each one apply it at her own account.
At a slight tangent, I liked the Usenet interface more than this one. It was easier to see what threads were there, select which ones interested you.
I feel compelled to chime in here. There is no such thing as the Usenet interface. One of the great strengths of Usenet is that it used a client/server protocol such that you could use any client that spoke the protocol and use it to read and post to Usenet. Hence the user interface was much more under the control of the user, and allowed much more functionality without requiring any changes on the server end.
Although I’d have to agree that pretty much any of the once widely-used Unix-based Usenet clients (nn, rn, trn, tin, GNUS) in terms of functionality blew away pretty much any web forum or blog comment section I’ve ever seen.
Is there a way of undoing it?
Death
Whose?
@ DavidFriedman
Is there a way of undoing it?
Of un-hiding with SSC’s ‘hide user’? Yes. The hide-ee posts’ texts don’t come up, but their avatar and nickname do. Clicking on the avatar brings up the same little box saying “Do you want to unhide this user?”
All this happens in the same thread, so you see the avatar or text at its place in the discussion.
I think there’s also a ‘Show’ option to toggle/hide show a particular post without un-hiding the rest.
@Houseboat:
Thanks. So what I was suggesting is already possible without any changes to the interface.
Anyone else associate Christmas with Nazis?
This comment made me burst out laughing, but then I thought about it a bit, and I guess you could analogize the idea of Christmas being this thin veneer of Christianity with Paganism underneath to the Nazis in some way. I can think of other things. Santa comes down the chimney and leaves presents, undesirables go up the chimney and leave presents (their property and assets).
I’m not sure what you are going for though. Please elaborate.
I just have a mental link between Christmas and Nazis for some reason, not based on actual connection. I imagine it comes from the fact that many films with Nazis are set in winter.
I don’ think Hans Gruber was a Nazi. Just a sociopathic, charismatic, criminal bent on using the levers of power to bring glory and riches to his band of blond-haired, blue-eyed supporters under the guise of bringing about a better world.
Hey ….
I think Hans Gruber was supposed to be a leftist turned ordinary criminal. From what I understand, in the novel (yes Die Hard was based on a novel) there is a very clear Baader-Meinhof parallel.
Googling, I found a Die Hard wiki which stated that, in-movie, he was kicked out of a movement called “volksfrei”, so I googled that and found:
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110608221843AA16flO
To sum up: volksfrei = “free people’s movement”, and google translate informs me that volk = people and frei = free, so I trust that part of it. Sounds pretty Left to me, honestly. I guess if we’re talking about National Socialists that makes sense, though ?
In the book that was the basis for the movie (Nothing Lasts Forever) it was the RAF/Baader-Meinhof, which was a left-wing terrorist group.
@AnonEEmous
I have very little knowledge of the German language, so any teutonic SSCers can feel free to correct me, but I’m pretty sure “volksfrei”, is gibberish. In German adjectives always come before nouns and are inflected depending on the gender of the noun. “Volksfrei” is just “people free”, it’s completely ungrammatical.
Unlike the romance languages, German has three grammatical genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter.
Volk is neuter, so I think, free peoples movement would be
“Freie Volksbewegung”, but I’m not entirely sure.
Yeah, the language might be off, but I think that’s a problem the film-makers had more than anything. (And I’m not saying you’d disagree with this either, or anything – just getting it out there.)
I decided to get my facts 100% solid, and found this very nice 3-second clip
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/c14f2744-e726-43ec-a102-b7e98d0a761b
of a news anchor saying “a member of the radical West German volksfrei movement” with a picture of a young Hans Gruber displayed.
So, looks like the film-makers did exactly what I did and basically used Google Translate. Heh. Good times.
@hyperboloid: Also, it would be volkfrei if anything. People-free does not seem like gibberish to me, it just means that some place is free of people. Also, das Volk is rather something like “the People” as in sort of like a nation rather than any group of people (that would be “die Leute”), I don’t think there is a good distinction between these two words in English.
@Tibor
Yeah, “people free” should be “people’s free” there, because the basic problem with Volksfrei is that it’s treating feri as a noun. Volkfrei, with no S, sounds to my unenlightened ears like a valid German construction (perhaps the inverse of Judenfrei), but it would be a strange name for leftist terrorist group. I think the screen writer just looked up two German words a stuck them together, judging correctly that American audiences wouldn’t care.
Hyperboloid:
Point of pedantry: unlike most of the Romance Languages. Romanian is the only Romance language (as far as I know) to have retained all three grammatical genders … though in a weird kind of cheaty way, where neuter words look like masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural.
@hyperboloid: Not entirely weird. The radical left (well, the Green Party Youth, so not the most radical left, although not that far from it) has protested recently against people waving German flags at football matches (in the European championship) because in their view patriotism=nationalism=racism and they reject the idea of nationhood entirely. I can imagine them calling themselves Volkfrei, especially since the word das Volk has some associations with national socialism, at least in Germany (and in any case it sounds kind of melodramatic and perhaps even a little archaic the way “the people” does not sound in English).
Only the ones played by Katherine Heigl.
All that’s coming to mind is “The Sound of Music”, and I wonder if that is as much to do with how it’s one of those movies that gets shown on TV every Christmas as it is with the “fleeing from the Nazis during winter” ending.
Happy Shortest Day of the Year, everybody!
Okay, on to the news. I was reading an article about the woes(?) of Apple and, as someone who has never been infected with the cult virus, merely nodding along going “Uh-huh, I see, yes that would explain it” until I reached this part (bolding mine):
That seems disturbing to me, at least in what it means for the USA. You may be innovative and creative, but you apparently are losing your technical and engineering skills. Part of that presumably is from moving production overseas and allowing companies there to catch up fast so they could service American manufacturing needs, this naturally meant home-based companies lost business and so probably shut up shop, at the least lost out in developing manufacturing skills in tandem with the advances in technology.
But as I said, this disturbs me: if you don’t have the skills to back up what you’re inventing, where is your advantage? I think it would be reasonable for Asian technological and creative industries to consider that they don’t need to buy in American designs or work for American companies as they could create their own designs and innovations and link up with their own country’s engineering facilities to put them into production.
Apple found it so expensive and difficult to re-tool (and I’m not surprised by that, they had to rebuild everything they had shed, after all) that they want to move production back overseas. Is this a good idea – setting aside protectionism and creating American jobs and all that – in the long run? Is it good for American industry/business if high-level skills are being/have been lost because they’ve been outsourced? If you can’t build what you have designed, will you hold on to a global market advantage in the long run?
the us succeeds on the basis of the having, by far, the best middle management in the world. That sounds like damning with faint praise, but it’s really significant. If you just want to crank out product, other countries are cheaper or have better labor policy or what have you. but if you want to do something new and difficult, something that requires people up and down the chain of command to try hard to do their best and not either half ass it or take advantage, that’s work you want to do in the US.
something that requires people up and down the chain of command to try hard to do their best and not either half ass it or take advantage
But my point is that if you lose the skills and capacity to do this, then all the best will in the world will not achieve your aims. You can have an entire team working their best to land a man on the Moon, but if they are working with rubber bands and bailing string, they are not going to get very far.
As I said, I don’t see why the overseas businesses that a company has encouraged to improve and upskill and become better than that at home would or should remain content to be under the lead or control of that company, rather than finding or developing their own leadership to compete with and overtake the American company.
I think the US is very important as a market, and as a global cultural leader, but I am wondering about falling behind in some respects. If company A designs better widgets that need high-precision engineering and they outsource this to China not alone because “China is cheaper” but “America can’t do this kind of work anymore”, that seems to me to be a warning bell. Heavy industry got mauled by precisely this: Indian and Chinese steel and ship-building took over. If your high-tech, high-value industries are going the same way… then maybe it’ll be “yeah, we’ll outsource this to America because they’ll work for relative peanuts and they’re the best middle managers in the world” for high-performing Chinese or Indian businesses.
(Or maybe not. Japan did not end up ruling the world despite all the 80s novels, movies and pop culture notions of glitzy high-tech and buying up properties overseas).
Japan also has less than a tenth of the population of China or India and was militarily paralyzed after WW2 (still partially is).
Other than that, I think that some Chinese tech companies already produce better stuff than American ones. My phone is a Lenovo. It is much cheaper than any comparable American product and its best models are better (and much cheaper) than anything Apple makes (or the Japanese Sony for that matter).
I am a bit ambivalent about the US being a “cultural leader”. On one hand, if there has to be such a thing, I guess the US is a lot better than Russia or China. On the other hand a lot of nonsense seems to be leaking from the US to Europe – the recent US outrage about fake news, which mostly had to do with the US election seems to have become a topic in European media shortly after. I don’t see any reason other than simply copycating US trends. Nonsense like “yes means yes” has not reached Europe (well, continental Europe anyway) yet (outside of very fringe radical leftwingers) and I would very much prefer that it stay that way. I also tend to be mildly annoyed when Europeans (continental), when speaking in English use the word soccer for football – and most seem to do that even though it is always called something like football in European languages. That is of course completely unimportant but it illustrates the cultural influence of the US, especially in the media. The European media also often flat-out take over the media narrative of the US (unless it turns out for example that the CIA spies on European politicians) and they write about the US politics more than seems necessary (OK, the US are an important country, but not THAT important and Trump is not going to be the president of the world). This last bit is especially true of the BBC, which seems to write almost entirely about the US at times. Were it not for the English spelling, you’d think they are an American newspaper. If that influence gets diluted a bit, it might be a good thing.
On the other hand, the influence of the US has perhaps shifted economic policies of European countries towards being a little more pro free market. It is not clear whether European politics would become (even) more socialist and more protectionist if the US cultural influence faded or whether that was mainly an issue during the Cold War (for the parts of Europe which were not Russian satellite states or even parts of the Soviet Union anyway). Currently, the most pro free-trade country in Europe is Switzerland (more than the US actually) which seems to be quite unconcerned politically with anything outside of its own borders (maintaining the armed neutrality and all) and which has a free market tradition probably independent of the US, but for example Germany would have been probably very different without the US influence (even if we assume them losing the war and not being fully occupied by the Russians afterwards)….I have a feeling I’ve gone completely off topic, so I will stop here 🙂
From an American perspective, they look very British when they’re reporting on American news. There’s this faint tone of incredulity that brings to mind an elderly vicar adjusting his spectacles, especially when the topic is guns, healthcare, or anything to do with the American electoral system.
Still, they’re one of the less clickbaity online sources, so I can’t badmouth them too much.
@Nornagest: I was not talking about what they are saying about the US but rather that they seem to be writing about the US more than about Britain.
I’m one of those bastards who has an adblocker on almost all the time (I turn it off here), but does the BBC website monetize itself at all, or does it manage to be entirely government-funded?
If there’s any aspect of profit/selling, or even internal incentives to maximize views, then demographic pressure for an english language news source is probably going to skew things American on the internet unless the editorial staff work very hard to stop it.
does the BBC website monetize itself at all
The BBC seems to have no idea how to do marketing, or rather, it concentrates on a few properties that are profitable, once it has been hammered into their skull that they are profitable (Dr Who is the ur-example here, since for years it was regarded as an embarrassment – a kid’s tacky SF show – but overseas markets ate it up and there was a steady stream of income from it). The whole Top Gear débacle, and the loss of The Great British Bake-Off, are more examples.
There is a recent BBC show that has just ended, and I and many other fans would be delighted to throw our money at them if they provided the usual tie-in products, but they have done bugger-all when it comes to providing rubbish for us to spend our cash on, simply because the powers that be got tired of the show in its second season, only grudgingly gave it a third season to finish up, and have been treating it like a red-haired step-child in comparison to another show that got tabloid attention in the UK.
They seem to concentrate on a few adaptations or series that they think will sell to a global market, but they often misjudge that – who here knows about or has watched the recent, much abridged, and sexed-up version of “War and Peace”? Even though they cast an American actor as Pierre?
Ahem. That was probably a digression from the intent of the original?
The BBC has often been criticised for leaning left-wing, and because it is publically funded by the licence fee and has a public service broadcast remit, often government ministers and Tory-leaning media make harrumphing noises about giving Tory politicans hard-hitting interviews (some of this is because the privately owned commercial media regard the BBC’s predominance with envious eyes and would like it broken up so they can grab its share of the market).
I have, but because I read the book recently (which is exactly 1 million times better).
PS. I think that Lily James was a greater draw than Paul Dano, who doesn’t seem to have a lot of ‘star power’
Merlin was better.
I really don’t know how they thought they could cram everything into a six-episode adaptation; one problem with that was that Lily James’ Natasha never really got the opportunity to change from “giddy, impressionable, romantic teenager to mature young woman” because she looked the same in all six episodes, and I have to admit I had very little interest in the love affairs of the pallid young blond(e)s that were the main stars (I was watching it mainly for Tom Burke as Dolokhov, who was a very naughty little Fedya indeed, though I found this version’s Denisov charming and a lovely bloke as well).
I was vastly amused that there seemed to be only one (1) competent general in the entire Russian army, and quite frankly I was cheering on Napoleon from the first moment he appeared because his early victories were so unequal 🙂
So you say, but as the series presented it, the Battle of Borodino was a pretty unambiguous Russian victory (we saw Napoleon giving the order to retreat), but Kutuzov decided to abandon Moscow anyway, just ’cause.
I grant you the Battle of Borodino, but up to that Napoleon was totally kicking ass and taking names (almost single-handedly too, given all the “silhouette of L’Empereur on horseback” shots we got) 🙂
Here, have a stirring cavalry charge
@Deiseach & Mr X
The book paints the outcome of war as mostly determined by low-level decisions and ‘mass delusions’ that guide armies, where generals have very limited agency to steer the outcomes (especially as the authority that generals have over armies generally derives from them catering to the mass delusions). Accounts of war tend to be post-facto rationalizations where it is argued that decisions of the generals led to the outcome, but this is mostly fiction. Tolstoy argues that Kutuzov was the least irrational general who understood some of the forces at work and as a general mostly sought to use his limited agency to minimize the casualties (but not at Borodino).
For instance, Tolstoy argues that the French had a mass delusion that conquering Moscow would bring them victory, glory and wealth. Once Kutuzov let them take Moscow and the Russians unexpectedly did not surrender, the French lost their aim. There was no longer an obvious path to victory. Much of the Russian wealth remained at Moscow. As a result, the soldiers could not bear to depart without dragging large quantities of riches with them, making them ineffective as a fighting force. The end result was that they could not act differently than how they did, seeking the shortest route back to France (over razed terrain that could not feed their army), carrying along their plunder which just slowed them down so they died in greater numbers.
At that point, the French army was destroying itself autonomously and any offensive action by the Russians would just cause unnecessary casualties. Tolstoy argues that Kutuzov tried to hold back his forces then, but the mass delusion of the Russian army (that they needed to kick the French out of their country) caused them to disregard this and suffer large losses.
But to be clear, Tolstoy explicitly argues that Kutuzov made irrational choices as well.
@The original Mr. X
I don’t remember that bit, but in the actual Battle at Borodino, the Russians withdrew. However, their positions were not overrun and they withdrew orderly, unlike in previous battles. Even though the Russians suffered more losses, they presented it as a victory, but the Russian army also lost enough men to no longer being able to defend further, requiring them to rebuild their army beyond Moscow. This allows the French to easily take Moscow, which led to their undoing, as Tolstoy argued.
Thanks; have one of your own.
D, Mr X –
Dunno if either of you have seen it yet, but you might be interested in Myn Bala: Warriors of the Steppe.
It’s not an excellent movie (the actual battle at the end is a mess) and some of the acting choices are subar, but it did have striking scenery and a few nice cav charges.
One of the things Apple has said is great about Chinese manufacturing is they can call up the factory to make a change and have the employees rousted from their dormitories and up on the factory floor in no time at all. I don’t think there’s any way we’ll be able to compete with that in the US in the forseeable future.
This article goes into it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html
As for Asia making their own designs… they’ve been trying. But with mixed success. Samsung and LG (Korean) and HTC (Taiwan… err… “Republic of China”) have done well in smartphones, but the mainland Chinese companies haven’t managed to really do so well in the Western market. And all these phones are based on software from two American companies.
And all these phones are based on software from two American companies.
Indeed, but the point of Apple wanting to move production back to China was the lack of skills in America. Leaving aside “able to make your workers work any hour, all hours”, it seems to be that the ability or production facilities are lacking or lagging behind in the USA.
Apple is not providing instruction to its manufacturers about how to make the changes, since they already have the knowledge, facilities, and workers to do that. It tells them “move this, drop that, insert the other”.
There is no reason why, eventually, the clever and industrious local companies cannot come up with their own designs and software. I mean, if you look at it from another angle, you could just as well say that the Chinese companies have outsourced the software design to the US, since the Americans are happy to work crazy hours on drugs to help them focus in order to come up with the latest must-have gadget 🙂
What’s missing isn’t really skills — we have that in the US, or Apple wouldn’t be able to do the manufacturing itself. When Apple tells Foxconn “do this”, Foxconn provides instructions to its workers and does whatever engineering is required to build the tools to “do this”, just like Apple did for the Mac Pro. But Apple doesn’t see it.
What’s missing is this enormous infrastructure (or “ecosystem” to use the usual buzzword) where manufacturing engineers are needed and available all the time to “do this” for the kind of high-volume consumer products that Apple builds, and the same for factories, tooling companies, parts suppliers, skilled workers, etc. And the reason we don’t have that is lack of demand. Since, even if we had that infrastructure, it would cost enormously more to do it in the US, therefore no one does, and so we don’t have the infrastructure.
Well, that’s comparative advantage for you.
I do understand that, but I also do worry that if one doesn’t have the infrastructure, eventually one is going to run into problems. Because it’s fine being able to model these advanced pieces of equipment but if in order to build the working prototype one needs one’s Chinese factory to run one up a couple, and the Chinese factory has decided that actually, its new partner doing the trendy phone designs is the company it wants to work with so it’s not going to make one’s products anymore, one is kind of stuck because, as you say, one can’t just magic “factories, tooling companies, parts suppliers, skilled workers, etc” out of thin air.
Right now it suits Foxconn and is very much in their interest to work as a sub-contractor for Apple, but what happens if/when it no longer suits them? Will Apple be able to find another sub-contractor eager to work with them, or will they have to play catch-up by bringing the new company up to speed? Which means they fall behind when whatever company Foxconn is now working for gets its products onto the market faster and cheaper and, most importantly, first.
I think you’re misunderstanding the process. For everything but a very few very heavy industrial processes, one of anything can be made in the US. If Apple’s doing the design of a new device and needs physical prototypes, they probably get built in Apple’s in-house prototype shop. The problem comes when you go from making a few prototypes to putting the thing into mass production. The processes involved are different, and the US does not have the infrastructure to support mass production of quite a few things that we can build one-offs of.
Oh, prototyping is different. The United States and other Western countries do have facilities that are good at that, and I imagine Apple has in-house prototyping facilities. High-volume production engineering is a different ball game.
The other problem applies whether you’re outsourcing to an Asian or an American manufacturer; either way you’ve got problems if they find another partner. But if Foxconn were to abandon Apple there’s a ton of other mainland Chinese companies who could be brought up to speed.
If China didn’t work out there’s other countries with that kind of infrastructure; Vietnam comes immediately to mind.
If we imagine that somehow the worst happened and none of the existing electronics manufacturing powerhouses were willing to deal with them, there’d probably be enough warning that things were going this way for Apple (and other Western companies who outsource to China) to hedge their bets by building up the infrastructure somewhere else — Mexico, Central America, India. But not the US or western Europe, it’s just going to be too expensive. (and not Russia for other reasons)
So, I’ve been thinking some more about the right wing bias of the comment section. It doesn’t seem to exist because of a lack of left wing users, but because right wing users seem to comment more. I keep getting frustrated when left wing users complain about being “dogpiled”, and I encourage the existing left wing users to jump in, but they are either busy or unwilling for whatever reason. Perhaps the psychological stress of being on edge and having to defend your position all the time from partisan attacks leads to left wing commenters posting less frequently. This seems to be the common form of the complaint.
One of the problems is that there aren’t any surefire ways to solve this that aren’t totally unfair to right wing commenters. As Scott says on his tumblr:
Instead of just banning everyone right wing, I would like to propose a different solution. Since there is already an existing contingent of left wing posters, the issue is probably confidence and coordination. A temporary ban on right wing comments might be a good compromise. It’s only a little unfair, and normal operation will resume afterwards.
I think there needs to be a few Open Threads tailored to bringing out the confidence of left wing posters (Not trying to be condescending! Nothing to be ashamed of. It’s a real issue. Confidence stems from the perception of our environment, and the right have already had so many boosts here.) and making a friendly environment before normal operation is resumed. This would mean that the left wing posters get to coordinate and build up a common consensus they can use to defend themselves against the right wing common consensus when normal threads resume. I’m proposing a kind of “Solidarity!” Open Thread, or more properly, a series of them.
My proposal to Scott is that in the next three Open Threads, he places a notice at the top saying “no right wing comments allowed”. In the resulting OT, Scott will then delete any right wing comments which are made. After the team building exercise is over, and we’ve cycled through three confidence building Open Threads, normal operation will return, and right wing comments will be allowed again.
Obviously, this depends on Scott’s subjective perception of what counts as a right wing comment, but he can be guided in this exercise by the left wing commentariat.
A slightly harsher version of the proposal would be to temp ban right wing users for the duration of the threads, which would make it easier for Scott to enforce without spending exorbitant amounts of time trying to police the Open Threads themselves. I still don’t think this would be too harsh, because it’s not like a permanent ban, just a temporary ban so that left wing posters are to engage in confidence boosting and comment without partisan attacks. Again, normal operation would return after the experiment is over.
The most obvious targets for temporary bans would be commenters who have identified themselves as right wing, which removes the subjective judgments Scott would have to make. I have taken the liberty of compiling this list, based on this reply train:
SSC commenters identifying as right wingers/affirmatively right leaning libertarians:
The Nybbler
FacelessCraven
Sandy
Dr Dealgood
hlynkacg
James Miller
Deiseach
Steve Sailer
Trofim_Lysenko
Whatever Happened to Anonymous
albertborrow
AnonEEmous
Others who questioned whether libertarianism is “right wing” (but are too dissonant with the left anyway):
David Friedman
sflicht
Chevalier Mal Fet
…
As an act of good faith, and to show that I’m not trolling, even though I don’t identify as any winger, I will also include myself among those who should be temp banned for the duration of the confidence building OTs (which I guess would actually be LTs).
If you’re right wing and outraged by this proposal – come on, try it, it’ll be fun! It’s only either a temporary ban on right comments or users. Temporary.
There is a problem. Posters have been complaining about this for a long time, and Scott even agrees it’s a problem, he just thinks that banning polite right wing posters would be too much. Let’s step back a notch to a compromise position and temp ban, or even further back and ban right wing comments.
Giving the left wing posters some breathing room might be a nice gesture, and an act of martyrdom is an act of good faith.
At the very least, what this does is help give Scott an idea of what the comment section would look like if he did remove all right wing users. Temporary harsh measures allow Scott to glean some feedback from the comment base. Right now, we’re stumbling in the dark.
Come on! Are you with me? It’ll be fun! Don’t say it isn’t an exciting idea? I’m someone who normally sides with the right wing in arguments here, but I think it’s time to nobly step aside for just a moment and allow for some space that allows the left to build confidence. If the right users have already built up their confidence from Scott’s links to REDACTED IDEOLOGY, then surely it’s time for a HARD but TEMPORARY push in the other direction?
*lip wobbling*
But… but… but you’re asking me not to shoot my mouth off on anything and everything that flitters across the vast empty spaces inside my skull?
WAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!
Okay, after this one, I’m willing to give it a go: three Open Threads with nobody on the right of centre saying boo to a goose, not even “Nice weather we’re having for the time of year”, is that right? I’m in. It will kill me to shut my yap but I will nobly sacrifice myself for the common good 🙂
I think it’s an interesting proposal, and maybe worth trying, though I personally expect the result to be a shift left, then an immediate shift back to the complained-about status quo ante once the temp bans are lifted.
Do you have any thoughts on a plan B if this doesn’t work?
Laugh hard.
I really, genuinely would like Moon/Jill to come back, and maybe this would coax her out of hiding? I would not like her to be hurt or offended, and if she got a chance to express herself without needing to be defensive (those trigger warning sarcasm posts weren’t the best idea in how the expression of her points was worked out), it might help the atmosphere.
I do like Moon, even if sometimes she is away with the fairies, and I’d hate for her to feel she’s been forced off by the vast and awful right-wing conspiracy on here.
So the idea/agreement is that from OT 65.25 onwards for three threads, nothing but left of centre (from very mildly just one step left to “cuddles their poster of Stalin in their arms every night before going to sleep” and beyond) comments get published? Okay, done!
I’d rather see two threads be made simultaneously, then right-wing people can still debate stuff in a ‘fresh’ thread.
There is no need to kick them out to provide left-wingers with a ‘safe space,’ is there?
She’s still banned for another week.
She’s been temporarily banned.
Having left-wing-only threads from time to time seems like a fair thing to do.
I have to disagree about Jill/Moon though. You couldn’t ask for a more idiotic parody of brain dead liberalism. The world doesn’t need more repetition of inane talking points.
I think the problem with lefty participation in a general forum is that lefty culture tends to put an extremely high premium on niceness. (The main trait that predicts left wing economic positions is agreeableness.) So, I would hypothesize that anywhere where there is robust debate, however polite, will tend to stress your average lefty out.
I want Scott to formalize this, of course, but I will also be absent for the next three Open Threads, starting from 65.25.
If I get included in this I might actually get something done in the next week. Assuming I don’t end up spending my time on WoW instead.
I want this idea to be razed to the ground and covered with salt so that nothing like it will ever grow again. It’s an invitation for people from side X to post falsehoods and bad faith about side Y, knowing that side Y cannot respond. (Typically it is done recklessly and not deliberately, but the effect is the same.)
Ehh, I have more faith in the vast majority of left-leaning posters here than that, Jiro.
And again, given the expiration date, I think it would be fairly transparent who was acting in bad faith. I’d rather give the rope.
The problem with dog-piling isn’t that the person being piled might be a soft sensitive flower, it’s that the pilers are going to go into full social-proof mode, and stop listening to reason.
I don’t really get the sense that that happens here – the arguments tend to remain reasonably good quality(compared to any other internet forum), and where people embarrass themselves with a real stinker of a comment, they tend to have the good grace to remain silent thereafter.
Personal attacks are heavily moderated.
I’ve experienced *bad* dog piling before, and I found it invigorating. I think a SSC dog pile would be really enjoyable.
So… um… a left wing comment…
Russians are bad?
I don’t expect that it will work, but the cost is so low it seems worth trying.
It’s easy for you to say, you’re not in the banlist!
the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about…..
I’d refrain, out of solidarity with my fellow right wing knuckle draggers.
This, IMHO, does not address at all the root of the problem, nor will it solve it.
The issue is that there is a lack of charity and clarity on the part of many of the right wing commenters. I can have a conversation with onyomi or Faceless Craven, for example. With many others it is always a knock down argument.
If a post is made that is of the form “here is a thing that is a problem on the right”, it gets dogpiled with uncharitable counter arguments, demands for extreme precision in language, etc.
This is further exacerbated because the specific outgroup of the blog is “SJW” further shortened to SJ. So even many left wing commenters spend time bashing on the left.
Having a momentary, boring, left-wing echo chamber won’t do much to address that, I don’t think.
Having an open thread where we only discussed failings or problems on the right, and couldn’t say “but SJ is sooooo bad, you must agree”? Maybe? Dunno.
@HBC
Vs
Is kind of hard to define at times.
That’s better, but it’s hard to focus on that as a guide to moderation. It requires Scott to be constantly making all these judgment calls about what counts and what doesn’t in the context of trying to make the tribe bias of the comment section more even.
The reason I think temporary shock measures might be better than permanent increases in the amount of scrutiny Scott uses with comments is that I think pruning is generally superior to bureaucracy, and it gives users a direction to organize themselves in over the long term without having ridiculous amounts of rules that can be lawyered, or having Scott burn himself trying to balance how charitable each tribe is being, in every comment thread, forever. Basically, shock measures means using authority to promote obedience to the spirit of the law, rather than excruciatingly laying down the letter of the law. Every now and then things should be shook up to decrystallize harmful behavior patterns.
My proposal is just a crazy dart at the wall, but if you can come up with better kinds of shock measures to shake people out of behavior patterns, then I’m very interested.
That’s not a bad idea, you know.
The thing is, I think some people define SJ too loosely in a way that’s not really distinct from the ideas of the liberal left. I prefer to just bash illiberals, since that packages a radical section of the right with a section of the left separate from the parts of the left and right that couch their preferred slant on issues in the liberal ideals of freedom of speech and exchange, individual rights, rule of law, equality before the law, separation of church and state, etc. The vast majority of rationalists are some kind of liberal in that broad sense.
I think a lot of left wing commenters here bash SJ because they are left-liberals, and SJ ideas like “intersectionality”, “racism is privilege + power”, and “progressive stack” are fundamentally anti-liberal, and anti-equality, since they imply the formation of a caste society. Furthermore, there are game theoretic reasons why such ideas just create a rod for your own back.
Not bashing these ideas isn’t really a solution, because people would either have to shut up, or forcefully change their minds to suddenly think that these ideas were great.
What I do think is that we do need a break from only focusing on left wing permutations of this phenomena, because it easily bleeds over into attacking left wing notions over all, and then all the people who want to promote things like worker’s rights, unions, and anti-racism get put off and leave making a right wing echo chamber.
Having a few OTs where you are not allowed to make anti-left wing comments might be a good shock to the system, and allow for more discussion on illiberal right wing ideologies to go unsidetracked. We need more negative discussion on movements like the alt-right.
Agreed, HBC.
These are the type of discussions I miss – I don’t really have strong opinions on unions/worker’s rights (besides being vaguely right-to-work), and I would love to see in depth arguments about them here. Similarly, talking about combatting racism outside the context of radical SJ’s “all are guilty” I think could be quite productive here.
And as for criticizing the alt-right, I’m all for that. Of course, remember when arguments about He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named and the Death Eaters dominated every thread, ever? It got so bad that Scott had to ban the term in the hopes that people would be more precise about what they meant – but instead it seems like people gradually stopped discussing it altogether (although the bans of several of the more vocal Death Eater posters may have played into that somewhat).
Either way, I wish we could fight about things other than “So is Hillary just the worst, or not quite as bad as those awful Social Justice types?” like we used to.
Why don’t you make top-level comments in 65.25 about this?
It seems more productive to ask yourself than to wait for someone else to do so. Because if everyone does that…
Having an open thread where we only discussed failings or problems on the right, and couldn’t say “but SJ is sooooo bad, you must agree”?
Well, why not? If someone wants to bring it up and enough people want to discuss it, you have three threads to go extravagant and say what you like, it’s Liberty Hall!
I solemnly promise I won’t be hiding under the bed waiting until the three threads are up to leap out and bash you over the head for anything that might have been said 🙂
Serious question.
Who is this comment aimed at and what reaction is it supposed to engender?
Who is this comment aimed at and what reaction is it supposed to engender?
Those who might otherwise be afraid to comment on the grounds that the right-wingers will all return en masse after voluntary exile/temp banning and start dogpiling on them, attacking them, and misrepresenting them for things they may have said in the three left-only open threads.
Sheesh, I’m trying to be nice here and give evidence of my bona fides, and it’s taken as some kind of sneak attack on, or pointed comment aimed at, someone or other in particular. Do I really need to start using “This is intended for the general you, not a particular anyone”? This really is evidence that the atmosphere needs airing out, and if three open threads restricted to one set of commenters will do that, I’m all for it.
@Deiseach:
I asked because, on a second thought, my take was that you were being genuine.
My first thought was that this was Deiseach snark aimed at pusillanimous liberals.
On third thought, I wasn’t sure either way.
Given your posting style, and general leanings, I’m not sure you can convey to liberals the message you wanted to by posting in this style. But maybe that is just me.
@HBC
This goes both ways, I also see a lack of charity and clarity in the other direction, where people are not asked to explain themselves better or hedge more, but the response is a knock down argument like: ‘you are being unfair to us!’ A response like that is usually the end of the debate.
These are different groups. One can criticize both or either.
There are also nationalists and white nationalists. Some criticisms apply to both groups, some to only the latter group. One can legitimately feel that both groups are thoroughly mistaken, without claiming that the former group has the same beliefs as the latter group.
I often have the feeling that some of this perceived bashing is projection of beliefs on commenters.
I’ve asked for exactly that and been told that I am making isolated demands for rigor.
Just a little higher up than this comment on the new comments widget is a post where you make fairly broad generalizations about “mainstream SJ”. That’s not unusual, you’ve arrogated to yourself status as an expert on the ideas, inner thoughts, and motivations of at various times, large sections of academia, feminists, and of course “SJ”. Why should anyone accept your claims about these ill defined but potentially large groups of people at face value?
When did I ask anyone to take it at face value?
I believe that I’ve done fairly extensive research and am making reasonable claims. For example, I base my opinion of what is mainstream SJ as what is advocated by NOW, BLM, the UN, my newspaper, major online newspapers, etc and to a lesser extent academic feminism (as that is not automatically mainstream).
But I am of course very much in favor of people coming to their own conclusions. My arguments about this are not and cannot be backed by hard science, so one cannot expect that level of evidence.
However, that doesn’t mean that generalizations/abstract reasoning is not useful. Or do you think that we should not talk about the ideas/beliefs/motivations of any group? There has also been quite a bit of speculation here of why people voted for Trump, yet I don’t remember you getting upset over that.
First, there’s a huge amount of ground between “evidence for the Higgs boson” and confidently asserted sweeping statements backed up by nothing more than an implicit appeal to your own authority. Claiming that “hard science” isn’t possible here is setting up a false dichotomy.
Second, charitable evidence-free armchair sociology may be just as worthless as anti-charitable evidence-free armchair sociology, but it is less annoying.
The Trump voters get the former, “SJ” gets the latter.
I would argue that I’m not being uncharitable in my portrayal and that people tend to consider fairly accurate, but critical comments about their ingroup uncharitable far sooner than about the outgroup.
I’ll grant you that I am not steelmanning the SJ position to the max, but that is because I want to address the actual mainstream beliefs, not one that is merely theoretical.
The group of people that tend to consider them fairly accurate don’t include any of the people whose opinions are being summarized and are overwhelmingly made up of people that share your strong dislike for that group. I don’t think that their approval is much of a signal that you are being accurate.
I personally would much rather have these semi-mythical SJ people around talking about what they believe than your posts making all kinds of claims as to what they believe. That would be far more informative. The “lack of charity and clarity” makes that much less likely to happen as it comes across as very hostile.
I’m asking you to hedge more, exactly what you claimed no one asked you to do. Make narrower statements, preferably ones you can and do support rather than grand sweeping ones you can’t or don’t feel like supporting.
I’d like you to give a better characterization then or pointing out specific mistakes in mine, rather than merely poo pooing, what is what you’ve been mostly doing.
Your objections come across as:
‘Your model of reality is wrong, but I have no examples of why, nor can I give a model that I think is better.’
PS. I also hedge quite a bit, but you appear to find my hedging offensive (like ‘mainstream,’ which recognizes diversity beyond majority SJ culture).
“I don’t know” is perfectly great answer. It certainly shouldn’t be denigrated as “poo pooing”.
If you claimed that GR and QM are unified by 11 dimensional branes, I said that I wanted some evidence of that or even just a discussion of the properties of these branes, would it be “poo pooing” because I don’t have my own model that unifies GR and QM?
“Mainstream SJ” is just as vague and meaningless as “SJ” to begin with. If you want to talk about someone’s ideas what don’t you name a concrete person and point to his or her writings? Why must you constantly post about what a strawman of your own creation believes? You might as well be posting about what superman, as depicted in your personal fanfic, believes.
The debate in the thread in which I talked about mainstream SJ was about how some SJ teachings can lead to self-hatred. It is not about how the beliefs of a specific person lead to that, because it is not about 1 person.
There were also people who debated that religion could lead to self-hatred and AFAIK no one demanded that specific religious people be named.
Whether these beliefs are mainstream or not wasn’t even the core part of my argument. It is just what you latch onto because you have a narrative and are no longer open to a good faith discussion.
I don’t see why you can’t just argue that the depicting is incorrect or that it isn’t self-hatred or whatever, rather than keep seeking evidence for how you are oppressed here.
It’s not just you who feels hostility here, you know. I feel that I have to talk on eggshells with a few people here.
I agree with HBC. This doesn’t seem helpful.
The SSC commentariat is what it is. I think it is good to acknowledge the biases and outgroups of this community. That’s why I made my observation about the relative pushback on self-hating Christians and self-hating leftists. But I don’t see any value in taking a right-leaning community and temporarily turning it into a sparsely populated left-wing echo chamber.
My reasons for posting here basically boil down to A) preaching to the heathens / somebody is wrong on the internet, and B) I like arguing. (Let’s be honest; it’s mostly B.) There are certainly times when I decide not to comment because I do not have the time or energy to follow it up, but that doesn’t mean I would post more if there were fewer people around with whom I disagreed. (For example: Tekhno, one of these days I will have enough time to argue with you about intersectionality and “privilege plus power”. Today, however, is not that day.)
Two things that I think actually might help:
1. Self-policing on the right. It’s a lot easier to tell somebody to tone it down a bit when you are ideologically aligned, because it doesn’t look like a partisan tactic. I have seen a number of right-ish people doing this, which I respect quite a bit: I don’t want to name names, because I would almost certainly miss people, but you know who you are.
2. It is tiring to try to respond to broad-based smears, because it’s often not quite clear where they are aimed, and the motte-and-bailey gets pretty tedious. As I’ve pointed out multiple times before, “SJW” can mean anything here from “thinks racism is worse than murder” to “thinks Keith Ellison could be a good DNC chairman, even though he is Muslim”. Instead of banning all right wing posts, I would be more than satisfied if, when making a broad generalization about a group, it was necessary to mention just one representative of that group by name.
I’m am all for a norm of supporting generalizations with examples, both for evidence and explanation’s sake. (Feel free to point out if I fail this)
I’m probably not one of the people doing this; I think I prefer to look the other way when someone is embarrassing themselves, although certainly sometimes it is because I agree with them and don’t realize it is poor argumentation. On reflection I doubt I am so charitable in reverse; it’s more fun to be the one to point out the flaw that arrives at a conclusion I already disagreed with than demolish the shoddy foundations of beliefs I hold. I can intend to change this, but I think it is safer to simply have different factions keep each other accountable for shoddy argumentation and simply try to stay honest and open to criticism.
I think this is a good idea and would codify it as… for the purposes of clarity any generalization should include at least one concrete example of the thing being generalized.
In place of the generalization “Birds fly” we say “birds such as sparrows and gulls fly”. While I see how this could lead to a certain amount of “No True Scotsmanning” (are ostriches not birds then?) I think having the goal-posts planted a bit more firmly would be worth it.
Clarity, perhaps, but liable to result in the generalization being rejected on the grounds that you’ve only provided the one obviously atypical data point. OK, two or three data points but they are clearly cherry-picked. Hey, can’t you be clear and concise and not gish-gallop us with fifty links every time we have a simple discussion?
Like I said, it’s a trade off.
If I make a controversial claim about a general group right now (“Christianity promotes self-hatred”, say), then presumably I have certain Christians in mind. People who reply to me are likely to be thinking of a different set of Christians. In the ensuing discussion, we will both be defending our sides based on our imagined representatives of Christianity. A significant chunk of the recent argument, I think, never made it past this point: the two sides were thinking of different sets of people and talking past each other.
That kind of debate implicitly boils down to a question of who is a central example. If people are explicit about their examples, then at least it is clear when that happens.
@ Iain
My thoughts exactly.
I feel I might be an irascible coot for saying this, but I’ve long been considering group generalizations to be approaching zero utility in political debates. Long gone are the days when one could say all liberals were against gun rights, and I suspect those days were never really around. It’s virtually impossible for me to point out a single liberal, for instance, who says or believes inconsistent things (except for Arthur Chu and one of my ex-GFs). Same with conservatives. Holding the individual responsible for the group is likewise a dead-end proposition. I can’t even police all rationalists, let alone 60 million voters.
So I think I’d be satisfied with pointing out examples only, and if you want to put that on groups, cite statistics, weather the debate that will come after that (maybe we’ll all learn more about statistical reasoning), and then see if you can Bayes your way to something.
thinks Keith Ellison could be a good DNC chairman, even though he is Muslim
Tanjdammit, now I want to have an argument about that, because I do think it is fascinating why the DNC picked him as an example of a Muslim in the context of Trump’s remarks and the brouhaha over Islamophobia, for instance it being part of Hillary’s “basket of deplorables”, but this is probably the equivalent of dousing dynamite in rocket fuel and setting fire to it with a flamethrower right now, I imagine.
I mean, I’d love to have an argument about that without coming across to people as “You hate Hillary” or “You hate the Democrat party” or “You love Trump”, all of which I don’t. But I suppose I do come across as very much carping about that, primarily as a very disgruntled reaction to the weeping and wailing in the media which is not being an objective source of news (the relatively recent American model of journalism as contrasted with partisan European journalism model; I know if I read newspaper A from my country or the UK which political party its proprietor is trying to get a knighthood from, so I can discount their bias, but I have no corresponding read with the American media, apart from in general it seems to like to think of itself as sophisticated and more virtuous and that means Blue Tribe, which is very irritating to someone who comes from Red Tribe culture of her own country).
I’m not even talking political bias; I hate the tendency in straight news stories to give a human interest twist to what should be reportage by writing what sound like drafts of their first novel: “Blonde, pretty, petite forty-year old Susan Whosis never imagined, as she set out on her morning jog, that a mere ten yards down the leafy suburban street where she and her husband Randy (42, hair starting to thin, boyishly-smiling investment banker), her 15 year old daughter Apricot whose bangs hide her shy face and braces, and their adorable labradoodle Pinkie have lived in a desirable four bed residence for the past six years…” For the love of God, just tell me the facts. If I want heartstring tugging, I’ll look up a Hallmark movie on Youtube!
But the counter-issue is that it’s you guys who end up dogpiling, counter-arguing, and asking for extreme precision for left-wing issues. So it’s kind of like…there’s already a group of people who does those things for left-wing attack posts, while arguing that the problem is that no one else is doing it. Maybe so, probably so, but at the end of the day you guys are still holding down that end just fine.
Then again, this probably qualifies as a knock-down argument. So I’ll leave it there, for the moment.
I think this is probably stupid, but it would be entertaining to discuss the intricacies of Marxist thought for an open thread. I doubt it would be entertaining for three threads though.
I mean, I hardly post anyway – perhaps once or twice per open thread – so it’s no skin off my nose. Sure, why not?
I agree, the comments in the last three years have shifted much more rightwards – but I think it’s a more specifically anti-SJ shift. Republicans don’t come under much fire here, apart from Earthly Knight and Moon’s valiant efforts, but I think that’s more an artifact of the fact that the Democratic party and the American left in general are those mostly in sway to that ideology. Now, it’s not all of them – I don’t even particularly think it’s a majority, given the way the Democratic primary shook out this year. But, most of our posters view the ctrl-Left as their outgroup, and gleefully lump everyone who even admits to some sympathy with them into the same group.
That is what folks like HBC (et al.) are complaining about, and I think they have a fair point. We demand carefully quantified posts full of caveats and cautions not to generalize when talking about Christians, or Trump voters, or the Red Tribe. But at the same time we make little distinction between Stein voters and Sanders supporters and Clintonistas – and I admit, I do get a sense of visceral pleasure watching commenters here affirm my own deeply-held suspicions that the Left does indeed eat babies, and I should probably speak up more to stop that sort of thing, since I’m pretty sure Iain hasn’t eaten even one baby in his life.
However, the fact that most of the comments’ ire is directed at the Left does not evince any particular support for the right here – at least the right inasmuch as it represents mainstream American conservatism. While people are willing to defend the legitimacy of opposition to gay marriage, I don’t think many people here actually oppose it, for example, or think that the Iraq war was on balance the right move (I still do, but I’m aware of my vanishingly small minority status). Instead, like I said above, it’s mostly that SJ is the outgroup, and their excesses draw our attention, and it’s fun to bash them. Most people were probably drawn here by Scott’s anti-SJ posts, hence the apparent majority in the comments section willing to gleefully eviscerate them.
I know I came and stuck around because here was a liberal who was willing to grant me that I probably wasn’t a horrible human being, merely mistaken on lots of things. Right-wingers don’t get that very often on the Internet, and when we do it’s usually places like Breitbart where the comments section is cancer. But SSC was something special – intelligent leftists and intelligent rightists treating each other civilly and actually hurling argument, logic, and evidence back and forth. We don’t really have that anymore – too much invective and tu quoque, not enough “here let’s look at the statistics and studies about gun control and try to figure out what actually works.”
Hopefully with the election over that tide will ebb, and we can all rally ’round bashing Trump’s follies together (without having to agree that Hillary would have been the better choice).
since I’m pretty sure Iain hasn’t eaten even one baby in his life.
{citation needed}
Does veal count?
(wipes chin with napkin)
…no.
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Seriously, I don’t think Tekhno’s proposal will work, but I had a very positive gut reaction to it and all the replies, because addressing the problem is the main thing IMO, regardless of what we ultimately do about it. And, I have faith (ahem) that there’s enough latent regard for reason around here that nearly everyone’s likely to self-police.
I think we forget how much energy rational discussion can take. It’s not about “1 part left wing, 1 part right wing”; if, say, the right wing really doesn’t have a leg to stand on on some issue, then we’re going to end up with a table with only left legs that would then lean, um, to the right. (Wow, this analogy sucks.)
Whatever. I think about this issue a lot (re: decades), and have a lot of opinions about it, so I’ll try to be brief in the spirit of the original proposal and make a counter:
When it turns into left-right debates, every so often, give the other side what I think it wants in the near term: a recognition of its steelman. Alternately, every so often, deliver your best shot at an objective survey of what the current disagreement is.
I’m going to assume you aren’t a libertarian.
I’m going to assume you’re getting at something that went over my head here. What was it?
To lay more information on the table: I’m much more libertarian than I am American liberal or conservative, if you go by sites like PoliticalCompass or ISideWith.
In this thread, I’m willing to recognize the bald fact that there exist people on the left here who feel they’re being dogpiled on this site, and that there exist people on the right here who feel they’re being dogpiled pretty much everywhere else. And that libertarians identify with the latter, so they’re probably siding with the right here more often than with the left.
Furthermore, I suspect that one of the easiest ways to relieve that sense of dogpiling is to hear their current opponents steelman them from time to time.
One of the frequent complaints of Libertarians is of the “Don’t just stand there, do something!” mindset among legislators that inclines those in power to attempt to solve a problem without considering whether the solution is worse than the problem. (Thomas Sowel explains this well in his books).
An action that addresses a problem without being a net long term improvement makes it worse. In government it is at least job security.
I am not criticizing your solution, but making a nit-picky point about your justification for one.
@Randmy M:
Note that Paul’s next sentence thinks we are likely to be able to self-police, that isn’t really a call for some outsider to force us into compliance. I don’t see a call for examination and discussion of a purported issue to be particularly anti-libertarian.
@Randy M:
Ohh, I get you. Heh. Does it help if the solution I propose is primarily along the lines of policing ourselves? Elsewhere in this OT, I said:
I consider this a libertarian tenet. Things to enforce, are best when self-enforced.
And so, my proposal: all of us, on our own, every so often, lays out the steelman of the other side, or their best objective take on the disagreement as it stands. I think this would be fair to all sides, as it would be required of all sides. This also means it avoids the question of who’s on what side. It has the benefit of precedent here and on LW. Everyone understands it, and may even have come here because of that understanding. And I think it will provide the catharsis the other side needs in any heated debate: that the other side at least understands you, even if they disagree with you.
There’s no plan B here. There doesn’t have to be. If any one of us doesn’t do it, it’s because we don’t want that style of discussion badly enough to hold up our own end. It would mean that we don’t want to avoid dogpiling as much as we want to win a tribal war on an internet forum. Either way, we’re getting what we want – assuming people agree with what I wrote.
I’m not saying Paul’s calling for intervention from on high, just that the opening paragraph of “I don’t think this will work, but it’s important to do something, doesn’t matter what” is very dangerous thinking applied to any context that matters.
How you solve a problem *is* the main thing, not whether you try. And I’m not even the utilitarian here!
Well, sure, but I was commenting on your apparent reasoning moreso than the issue.
That reasoning you impute to me wasn’t as firm as I’d inadvertently made it. This is getting well off into the “he said, she said” weeds, but it was more intended as “you claim something must be done, and yes, I suppose I can make something of a case here, so let’s figure out what needs to be done contingent on that”.
I could very well be projecting, but I remain certain that the people on Tekhno’s “right” list don’t consider running off all the leftists and liberals to be a victory.
I assumed it was probably careless, which is why I made just a quick over-vague remark. Should I have included an emoticon? I really should use winking emoticons more, they just strike me as so juvenile. My image as a mature adult
who takes six paragraphs to properly convey his tonewould be imperiled.There is at least one.
Edit for clarity:
As someone on the list I would not consider “running all the leftist out” to be a victory.
Thanks bean.
Is that so? I’m surprised they wouldn’t get banned for expressing such a view. Certainly it’s just.. Sad, to see that as a good thing. If that’s the way some people see things, it’s no wonder dogpiling is a thing.
You read him backwards. He was saying that, as a person on the list, he would be sad if all the leftists were driven off. (I didn’t make the list, but I’ll agree with that.)
Oh, my bad then. I’ll leave my prior comment up so this doesn’t turn out to be a mess.
No problem, I should have been less ambiguous.
@Paul Brinkley
I’m really pleased by the reaction, even if my idea is esoteric scattershot craziness. If the result is that someone creating a crazy solution brings more psychic finality to the problem, and promotes people to self-police, then that’s good.
I expected a lot of outraged right wingers, but the reaction has been positive even if in disagreement. Positive disagreement is a thing I feel, and it’s something we need to promote.
I think that even if your idea is scattershot craziness, it was shaking up the table in a way that I suspect nearly everyone feels was needed. I think even the people here who lean right aren’t simply happy with “Righties on the March!”. Everyone would, I’m betting, prefer more understanding of what the disagreements are.
since I’m pretty sure Iain hasn’t eaten even one baby in his life
Growth mindset, Chevalier Mal Fet!
This struck me as a really interesting point. I can understand said stress, having experienced it myself, both here and other places. I suspect most right-wing commentators would say the same. So why should such stress only affect left-wing commentators posting?
The first theory that springs to mind is that they’re not used to it, and we generally are. Yes, getting into a serious debate where you’re facing down a lot of people and don’t have others helping is stressful. But if you normally inhabit parts of the internet that are majority left-wing and you’re used to being one of the dogpilers, not the dogpilee, this stress is unexpected and might drive you away.
No, this doesn’t really suggest a solution, beyond “get used to it”. I’m not sure that one is even possible if we continue to allow a large number of right-wing commentators to operate here. And if I’m right, then temporarily declaring left-wing-only open threads will not help at all.
Edit:
Just to be clear, I’m not trying to score points over our left-wing members by something like “we’re tougher than you”. Being on the minority side of a debate is stressful, and I don’t blame them for not liking it all that much. But I don’t think there’s a good solution that would make anyone particularly happy.
@bean
I’m not suggesting that it’s a general difference between lefties and righties, only that it might be the case here, because of the history of Scott’s articles against “social justice warriors” and associations with REDACTED IDEOLOGY that allowed right wing users to feel more confident in this environment, even when more left leaning people slowly started to move into the comments. The perception that the comment section is right wing creates a feedback loop that raises right wing morale and lowers left wing morale, resulting in one side confidently dogpiling on, and the other side retreating because it perceives that it is outnumbered, regardless as to whether it is or not in reality.
Allowing the left wing side temporary free reign allows them to get a feel for how much left wing support there really is in the comment section, without the same 5 right wingers constantly attacking them, and it promotes discussion that is pre-selected for left wingness, that is, discussion that is internal to left wing principles. This gets left wingers used to responding to left wingers, and these same users can back each other up in the regular comment threads. If the right wing comments are introducing stress, then they might enjoy talking with fellow left wingers so much that they continue to move in a pack when they return, and their enjoyment of each other and their comradely behavior overcomes the stress of partisan attack, allowing them to persevere. That’s why I call it team building. Right now, regardless as to who outnumbers who, the right wing posters are subconsciously acting as a team, whereas the left wing posters are not. The solution then should be to create solidarity in the left wing userbase of SSC.
This is, of course, just a theory (straight out my ass).
EDIT:
From a left wing perspective, does this even score points? I thought one of the ideals of the left was getting away from being so egotistical about strength, and engaging in zero sum competition spirals, and that it’s okay to be honest about weakness, and to have humility, and that to accept deficiencies is a good thing, and that whatever deficiencies you may have, you are a human being and you deserve decency, respect, and human rights. Care and love is good, and a modern and civilized society can afford it, and so on.
That’s an interesting idea. I give it low odds, but it does seem worth trying. I would recommend initially restricting it to one OT, not three, though.
Edit:
Probably not. I added that because I realized that my comment may have come across as bashing the left-wingers, which was not my intent.
@Bean
My experience on the Internet is that social-justice leaning people tend to have a far smaller Overton Window and to consider unrestricted debate to be hostile. The anti-SJ people in turn tend to consider censoring to be really hostile.
IMHO, this difference in (subjective) discourse norms is a major reason why these groups have such a hard time talking to each other. Any choice in moderating is going to piss off one group or both.
This is why, I believe, any space for feminists to debate MRAs will end up being dominated by MRAs. The more ascendant and powerful and unquestioned your ideology is in the world at large, the more abhorrent and intolerable attacks on it seem, because you’re moved further toward an unstated assumption that “fair debate means everyone accepts my ideology is right”, so challenges must therefore be unfair and not worth tolerating. So they leave.
I don’t think this actually has anything to do with who is really correct, just who has more power in society and thus ability to assume fairness means agreeing with them. I imagine that if someone wanted to make some debate forum for Actual Literal Nazis to debate people who aren’t Nazis, the Actual Literal Nazis would completely dominate despite being wrong about every single thing, because almost everyone outside their group expects “a fair debate space” to mean “a space where Nazis are not allowed to talk” and would thus experience it as being unfair and leave. The only people who’d be able to stay would be the ones who had managed to convince themselves that Actual Literal Nazis are ascendant and powerful and popular.
This means there is no solution and never will be.
I would argue that again, my principle of victory comes out.
Feminists had solid points, once; then they won and implemented them all. Now MRAs have solid points, and they are starting to gradually win and implement them; very slightly thus far, mind. So what do you expect? MRAs have the rock-solid points and they will use them mercilessly; either feminists attempt to appropriate them and (usually) fail, or they crash against the rocks.
And finally, I would argue that any ideology which has made significant strides towards this unstated assumption is generally aberrant and warrants destroying, or at least its adherents should be taken down several pegs. That’s the solution. Oh, and to avoid ideologies like that from coming up to begin with.
I don’t think it works that way. Advocacy movements tend to be dominated by the aggrieved, who generally use stereotyping and ingroup/outgroup dynamics to argue their case and form a coalition. MRAs tend to target another ideology, rather than a gender, which is the best case scenario, IMO.
I think that (successful) advocacy movements commonly have this life cycle:
1. Only the extreme support the movement, due to the consequences of supporting things that are outside of the Overton Window
2. The mainstream starts recognizing some issues as valid and the Overton Window grows.
3. Less extreme/aggrieved people start supporting the movement openly.
4. Laws & policies get made that cater to the movement & people start behaving differently due to changing social norms.
5. The moderates leave the advocacy movement because their concerns have sufficiently been catered to.
6. The movement becomes smaller and increasingly extreme and irrational.
7. Backlash/marginalization
If MRAs manage to get their demands catered to, I fully expect them to become horrible at some point and require marginalization. However, they are probably around step 2 now.
Your thoughts mirror mine on the issue, but I don’t think this negates the point; feminism has the issue of inability to argue because no one really argues with it. I think that even as MRA philosophy comes up, it can still be argued with and dissected to the point that it doesn’t become as incapable of dealing with disagreement. Toxic and aggrieved, probably, yes.
I agree with what HeelBearCub wrote, and I had a variation on this above. People here tend to be sloppier when talking about stuff on the left than stuff on the right, and less charitable, than is the norm around here for either sloppiness or charity.
I think tabooing some words might help. But something needs to be done to change the community norms.
I think you might have switched up left and right, here.
I don’t think so but I’ve edited it to be clearer.
As some others, I also don’t think this will work. I’m further to the left than most here, but my sparse posting habits aren’t because I’m allergic to being dogpiled on. I make three sorts of comments here; those on subjects like history, gaming, cooking or whatever else; vaguely left-wing comments in political threads; and comments where I tell the phenomenon we’re talking about to get lost.
Regardless, I don’t think I even want for your preferred situation to happen. If the issue here is that you can’t have a leftist point of view without being dogpiled, that means some people on the right are defecting. This is very annoying, but short of a flood of bans you can’t really stop that from happening. Do we really want to go to the situation where both sides defect though? I don’t mind becoming that guy who yells at people he disagrees with over here just because I’m so damn angry, but I don’t think that’s going to turn out well for anyone.
Aside from that, I don’t think the problem is coordination, having no consensus, whatever, but rather the (imo true) observation that people on the right feel more threatened. Scott has written about this, even if some will take offence, but I do think this is true even so: lashing out at the other side is much more a threatened person’s reflex than that of someone who feels secure. We even see this in popular media; on tv, the right’s pundits spend their time tearing into and ranting about left wing figures. The left, on the other hand, has pundits who spend their time laughing at the other side. This seems part of human nature afaict, and I don’t think banning right wing comments for some time is going to change that.
This.
I frequently have this thought, “Do you really want me to just start dragging in this or that example of horrible Republican behavior?”
And I find that thought immediately exhausting. I have no real interest in it, but it seems that might be the only option. Post a list over and over and defend it against all of the digressions and demands for selective rigor and demands for ever more precision in language.
Even in the “do Christians believe in hell” thread, which was a different split (atheist/not), getting anyone on the non-atheist side to simply acknowledge that their is a rump that signals fundamentalist Christian beliefs was … not happening. Yet ~40% of Americans consistently answer that they believe in a YEC view of history. That should be enough. Do I really have to drag in every example of Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell, document every Dominionist in public power (which is relevant because it shows significant numbers of the relevant population will vote for this), etc?
I don’t want re-debate that. All I am saying is that this is an example of needing to be ever more excruciatingly precise, when the opposite side won’t be charitable in the discussion.
V cerqvpg n tbbq punapr fbzrbar jvyy gnxr zr gb gnfx sbe fnlvat gung gur nethzrag jnf nobhg jurgure Puevfgvnaf oryvrir va Uryy.
Really? I seem to recall explicitly granting that there is a culture where YEC is taught. (I would link to the comment, but I can’t figure out how to do so.) In fact, I admitted to having grown up in it. I defended it on the grounds that we’re not all evil monsters out to do whatever bad thing you expect YECs to do. (What bad thing that was, you wouldn’t tell me.)
Right click the date under the poster’s name.
Granting that it exists is the motte. Saying it’s prevalence is so small as to be inconsequential is the bailey. The word “rump” was doing significant work in my statement.
I don’t want to get into debating about that issue in this sub-thread though. If you want to keep discussing it, I or you can create a new thread in 65.25?
I’m up for continued discussion, although my position is more or less “so what?”. Why is YEC so bad? Even if we take that 40% number at face value, which may or may not be a good idea, why is this more than an interesting sociological curiosity?
Edit:
Next OT is up, and I posted there.
this post was more eloquent the first time but got swallowed, so exercise principle of charity plz
basically, look, HBC, your argument is that people are submitting unreasonable disagreements on right-wing issues but not left-wing issues, especially as the latter attack posts are more egregious. but this is fundamentally an issue of whether or not those disagreements are unreasonable, you know? so it’s sort of hard to make a conclusive argument because the underpinning of your argument isn’t so much number of posts (not that it should be) or something else objective, but rather subjectivity.
as such…we’ll see lol, it will come down to who is convinced versus who isn’t, since it is subjective; i’m just here to lay out the structure
Arguing about religion is always going to end up with scorched tail feathers on both sides. I really do try not to do it, but sometimes the representation of Catholic belief (to restrict it to my own denomination) by supposedly sophisticated thinkers is on a par with a Chick tract and I then jump in with my size nines* to stomp over the territory.
I note the new Open Thread has started and, as agreed, I am going to refrain from commenting there. I’ll be reading with interest, though (because I am genuinely interested to see what an intra-left/liberal discussion series will be like). Good luck to you all, each man to his corner, and come out swinging! 🙂
*Kidding, I’m UK size seven!
In a rationalist community, it is necessary to provide an explanation of why the presumption is that a culture teaching YEC is a bad thing?
Speaking only for myself, Eliezer’s cheap shots at religion were one of the things I liked less about the early rationalist community. And I’m an atheist.
But I’ve always been more into the instrumental side of things.
In a community devoted to rigor, I imagine that this chart captures a relevant thought.
Holy shit, that Wargames re-cut!
Pretty sure I not only acknowledged the existence of that rump, but tried to put hard numbers on its size.
Yet ~40% of Americans consistently answer that they believe in a YEC view of history.
That, is one of the major points of contention in the whole wretched discussion. There are people, including myself, who disagree with you about that quantitative point. People who can bring actual data to the table, and explanations as to why your one data might be misleading. Yet here you are, trying to characterize the debate by asserting that number as an unquestioned fact that the other side was somehow not acknowledging.
Charity, is not accusing you of being a damned liar for claiming that I refused to acknowledge the existence of fundamentalists. I have been charitable. You have not. And I am about done with it.
the fundamental issue of this entire argument is a sort of endogeneity problem, namely
do people disagree with you because you’re wrong or not
part of your argument seems to be that people are having unreasonable disagreements with you on one issue but not on others outside of the ideological spectrum
but “unreasonable” is 100% contextual. if you’re wrong about it, you have no argument remaining.
i don’t really have a good thing to say here, as such, but you see my point.
II’ll submit that this an instance of the absence of, rather than presence of, charity.
Especially as I explicitly did say that people acknowledged the existence of fundamentalists.
Sure
But I still hold that, for the moment, all sensible left-wing issues have been accepted as the norm, and as the Left has pushed further and further left as a result, they have lost the high ground ideologically
The same thing will happen to the right when (if?) they take power, of course, it’s hardly an ideological thing. I might switch back at that point.
I’m game, I guess. Though I also think it’s quite interesting that you have a group of people that replies to posts they disagree with complaining that no one else but them has replied; of course not, they are the people who are going to reply. Does that really warrant a sense of persecution, as such?
Well, my posts got filtered by this site for whatever reason once again, but here I am test posting and agreeing.
I’d still argue, though, that the primary issue is that the left achieved their goals, and so thoroughly that many on the right just treat those goals as common sense. Because of this, they’ve had to stray further and further afield, which may damage some of their core goals and also loses them legitimacy, especially as the Right now has core goals that are common sense, and will probably follow the same arc. So, for now, the right wing has an inherent ideological advantage, having culled their bad ideas and moved on to better ones; that’s a problem that only time will fix.
Larry Kudlow, a man whose near every prediction has been immediately been falsified by events, is being appointed CEA chair.
If (as I suspect) you see yourself as part of the meta-contrarian intelligent right that isn’t responsible for defending twits like that, very well; I’d only ask that the left not be held responsible for defending overenthused facebook posters calling for electoral college shenanigans, or extreme cases of social justice people gone all the way off the rails.
A comments section consisting of poster dunks on weakmen of various stripes is boring. So, for that matter, is a section consisting of lengthy tussles over whether or not a given position is a weakman. Serious ideologically mixed discussion ain’t easy to create, and it requires everyone to hold themselves to high standards regarding their own approach to argumentation.
I actually have no idea about Kudlow’s ideas, as such; as dndnrsn seems to have hit on, it’s more about social ideas than it is economic ones.
Tell me what his falsehoods are and I’d be perfectly fine to be held responsible for them, but generally we here and people in general focus more on culture than on economics, especially as they affect the way we interact with each other. Here, it seems that the left has accomplished its goals and is now tilting at windmills. If you’re on the left and you don’t agree, lay out the current social issues and we’ll discuss.
edit: Well, looks like he’s not any good at all. A shame.
There’s plenty of bad right-wing ideas that haven’t been culled.
Also what is this “the left” that has achieved its goals? The economic left certainly hasn’t, not in the US.
I’d argue that there aren’t nearly as many, and the ones that haven’t been are no longer mainstream. Because the really bad ones have been destroyed in public, whereas the left’s really bad ideas -gender is a social construct- are considered sacred in many circumstances and thus untouchable.
@dndnrsn
I’d argue that much of the left has abandoned their traditional welfare-based economic model, in favor of a ‘neoliberal’ free trade + cheap labor model. They seem to have achieved their goals, for the most part.
Sanders was part of that old school, while Clinton was the neoliberal. She stood for staying the course, he stood for change.
I still don’t see why it’s so important that people on the left feel “properly represented”. People don’t generally go to left-leaning places on the internet and demand they properly represent conservatives. It suspiciously seems like it only matters when a smart place on the internet isn’t sufficiently leftist. Why is that? Is it because of our relative high status compared to places like Breitbart? If it was simply about intellectual diversity than we could do one of these threads for every ideology. Communist, Fascist, Libertarian, Anarchist threads would be very interesting.
Instead of trying to use this place as an experiment, what about a new website that was explicitly dedicated to this kind of experience? That would be fairly interesting.
What do you think the purpose of Scott’s walled-garden is?
Civility, not forced diversity. Let me ask you: when was the last time you went to a majority liberal website and said there weren’t enough conservatives?
I would argue that he wants more than just civility, but the ability to present ideas, all ideas, and discuss them without descending into signalling wars based on perceived tribalism.
If this space is perceived as the realm of one particular tribe, that becomes very hard.
Holding SSC to a higher standard than the rest of the internet seems fine. Not every website needs to be equally terrible.
If we had signatures, I’d be using that for mine.
Seconding both Stephan and HBC.
HBC, in theory I agree with you. Signaling, rather than honest conversation is bad, and perceived hostility is too. I just don’t think using the mighty ban hammer is the way to do it. Forcibly pushing away people because of their views in favor of diversity goes against the spirit of free discussion. After all, many people in the US are creationists but I certainly don’t feel we have an obligation to make sure they are represented.
Essentially, my concern comes down to one question: why should liberals get special treatment from Scott when no one else does?
Am I the only one suddenly struck by the structural/meta-level parallels between this argument on corrective measures and…I don’t want to say left-right, but call it interventionist vs. conservative (in the general, not political) approach to problem solving?
“Equality of Posting Opportunity is what matters! If that means more conservatives are posting and scaring off liberals, that’s just the natural consequence of differences!”
“But the Inequality of Outcomes is damaging our viewpoint Diversity! This is a classic example of Market(place of ideas) Failure, when intervention is necessary!”
To be clear, not trying to snark at -either- side here. More that I suddenly see this disagreement on means as reflecting underlying philosophical/ problem-solving approach differences of various posters.
File me under the group that would be sad if there weren’t people around championing left wing/progressive ideology here, although I will be scrupulously honest and admit that there are some liberals -and- some conservatives I wouldn’t mind seeing less of. None of the really libertarian-ish posters come to mind, which probably illustrates my own in-group/out-group biases nicely.
i’d like to interject with the argument: they believe there is an inequality of opportunity.
There are two types of equality of opportunity; soft, in that you’re literally allowed to do X, and hard, in that you’re literally allowed to do X and also nobody will treat you badly for having done so.
I will not cosign that SSC has only soft equality of opportunity for political postings on the left. But, a demarcation between those two types exists, you know? And looking at HBC’s comment, it looks like a descriptor of Scott’s desire for a hard equality of opportunity, which A) may be true, B) is good, and C) may reflect some of his own feelings; I think the left brigade here is asking for a cultural shift towards a hard equality of opportunity, which is not what you said.
@Trofim_Lysenko
There is an interesting parallel to affirmative action in college admissions here. Schools claim, and I’ve defended, the view that affirmative action really is about building out a class. That treating college admissions at a particular school as a prize that a student deserves for this or that reason is the wrong way to look at what’s going on. Needless to say I’ve gotten a lot of push back on that.
Similarly here. If you look at this through the lens of fairness — who has the opportunity to say what and is that fair — you are going to come to a different conclusion than if you look at it as HBC does above — what’s the best tending and pruning strategy to get the best garden.
Does anyone ever ask if it is fair to roses that they aren’t allowed to take up the whole garden even if the 50th percentile rose is prettier than the 90th percentile posy?
By this metric, SSC is a lot ‘harder’ than the real world. Brendan Eich would say so, at least.
OK, that may have been a cheap shot. But speech in a debate will have consequences. If it doesn’t, then you’re not having a debate.
Eh, this ain’t a democracy, it’s Scott’s House, and Scott’s Rules, and I can respect that. His garden, he can prune and weed and shape how he sees fit and if I can’t take it I can GTFO.
I have problems with that approach in more public spaces (which brings up an interesting thought for AA vs. non-AA at private vs. public universities. Maybe something for the next OT? Although honestly I’ve never cared much about AA. I’m more worried about K-12 reform).
Anyway, back on-topic, I think the self-policing is good and will try to do it more myself, though I feel that I’m too new and lack the Thread Cred to make those sorts of comments with any authority.
I feel like the fact that no one is talking about equality of opportunity for creationists, fascists and other “undesirables” is further justifying my skepticism about the importance of this meta-principle.
@Trofim_Lysenko
I actually agree with you. Scott can do whatever he wants with his website. That’s what freedom of association is all about. I just don’t want him trying to justify it under the banner of “equality of opportunity” for the poor, beleaguered left. If you want to promote intellectual diversity, do it for everyone. I think we should really try harder at being aware of when our meta principles are just excuses to justify our object beliefs.
I come here to read and post because I want to see interaction between left and right. Without the interaction between disparate viewpoints, the conversation is largely worthless.
It’s because SSC is known for being a place where rationalists hang out, not a place where right-wingers hang out. If one sees mostly right-wingers there, it may say something disconcerting about the relation between right-wing and reason.
Or maybe it says something about the observer. Anyway.
I believe it’s not so much proper representation as proper recognition. I’ve been sorta pressing the point above. Each side wants to know they’re being understood by the other. If A thinks that B doesn’t understand A, then A may infer that A isn’t getting enough representation. But it might be that B understands A fine, and just hasn’t been indicating it.
I think you will find that proposition falsified by looking at almost every other on line right wing hangout.
@Paul Brinkley
re: reality bias, relationship between ideologies and reason.
One problem is that much of ideology isn’t based off reality in the sense of being dependent on objective facts. Much of ideology is based off preferences, and you can’t debate preferences.
“My favorite movie is The Godfather.”
“Excuuuuuuse me, but no it isn’t! If you’ll look at this chart for a second… ”
There are two orders to ideology, a lower and a higher. The lower order or base is the emotional content, innate preferences, or first order/intrinsic values. The higher order revolves around trying to realize those values in the world, which requires a dependence on fact, and from this emerges second order, or instrumental values.
In many debates the intrinsic values are completely hidden under a mountain of instrumental values. These instrumental values are up for debate, and therefore at least as far as the higher order of ideology goes, subject to the methods of rationality.
In other debates, it’s much easier to pull back the curtain and see the wizard. In these cases the intrinsic values are nearer to hand. Take abortion, for example.
You can argue using rationality and empiricism when you debate things like when the first heartbeat tends to happen in a fetus, or when it would first develop the ability to feel pain, as these questions have objective answers. However, you quickly reach the bottom of what rationality can dredge up. At the end of the day, you either arbitrarily define a thing as mattering or you don’t, and two different sets of people influenced by emotional association are going to have completely different intrinsic values. There can be no objective conclusion gleaned from debating that on that the grounds of reason and evidence.
“I think killing fetuses is/isn’t murder!”
“Excuuuuuse me, but that’s wrong! If you’ll look at this chart for a second…”
All debates have at their bottom, no matter how many layers down, pure preference, dependent not on fact, but on both acculturation and genetics. The reason such preferences end up so cloaked when they underlie political positions is because they decide who gets – figuratively speaking – clubbed on the head, and so we have to come up with a million and one strategies to try and show that our instrumental values will serve the intrinsic values of the person we are trying to convince and not just our own. Of course, eventually the instrumental values can become intrinsic values through a process of emotional osmosis, so we get to such a stage where we become emotionally outraged when abstract concepts like “human/property/worker’s/women’s/men’s rights” get violated.
tl;dr
“Nice spooks, nerd!” ~ t.Max Stirner
First things first, I want to unequivocally stress that I don’t think this should be an explicitly conservative site, so please don’t interpret me as saying that. If the place ends up leaning left, so be it. That being said…
This is exactly the kind of thing I’m getting at. Intellectual diversity can be good, but not always. When people share a common framework, then they can have rational discussions inside that framework instead of talking over each other. At some deeper level, politics isn’t about policy and you can’t have a rational conversation about it. You can’t change someones political preferences in a conversation but you can change their views on the margins. In the end, too much diversity ends up leading to nothing as both sides spend more time warring rather than speaking rationally. But again, sharing a common framework can be a disadvantage because people will make faulty assumptions without even understanding how someone could view things differently.
People keep wondering why SSC became more conservative. I think the simple answer is that people from more conservative website(Econlog, Money Illusion) kept linking here and brought their viewers. But I think the other part of it is that we chose this. Scott started doing more and more open threads and we decided to talk about what we wanted to talk about: politics. Conservatives wanted a chance to speak up because they don’t often get a chance to speak their minds. No liberal could ever lose their job for saying these things in public. But many conservatives could, which is why we are more likely to speak up than the numerous liberal commenters. When people here say talk about how liberals need to be “more represented”, I see that as a threat. Right now, it’s about “intellectual diversity”, but there is no affirmative action for conservatives. You may disagree with my concerns but I don’t think they’re ridiculous.
“All debates have at their bottom, no matter how many layers down, pure preference, dependent not on fact, but on both acculturation and genetics. ”
I do not believe that is correct.
Consider the minimum wage debate. If, as many opponents of raising the minimum wage believe, the main effect of the minimum wage is to price low skilled workers out of the market, then most of those who currently support raising it would not. Do you disagree with that? But that’s entirely an issue of fact, not preference.
To make the argument one of preference, I think you have to claim a factual situation where any such effect, if it exists, is relatively small, so the main effect is to give low skilled workers higher wages. You then might get some disagreement based on preferences.
The same is true of other issues. If, as Peltzman concluded, the effect of adding efficacy to the requirements for FDA approval was to cut the rate of introduction of new drugs in half without improving their average quality, it’s hard to see why anyone would be in favor of it. If, on the other hand, the effect was to eliminate only drugs that didn’t work, few people would oppose it.
I kind of disagree with that myself, actually. I believe that supporters of the minimum wage sincerely believe that allowing people to live on sub-minimum wages is an absolutely intolerable condition to be rectified by any means necessary. If the main effect of the minimum wage were to price low-skill workers out of the market, then what they would have us sacrifice is not the minimum wage but the (free) market.
@JS, that’s pretty accurate. Doing hard tedious labor for the current minimum wage is considered inhumane. As someone who works minimum wage doing tedious physical labor I quite agree. Of course given the proper stimulus or lucky break I could have better options available, but many people will not ever have better options.
Perhaps the major issue is the relative nature of poverty. If there is a large underclass, regardless of their objective wealth, many people would be unhappy. Part of the issue is that the goods of the lower classes rise in cost based on the wealth of all classes. There could be a situation where there is no realistic way for a minimum wage worker, even with 3 jobs, to have a decent place to live, even applying current rather than future standards of decent. This is sort of an issue in California, especially since NIMBY’s refuse to allow the construction of cheap housing because thanks to the free market it could lower the value of adjacent property, their property specifically. They still want a convenient Starbucks location with rock bottom prices though.
@DavidFriedman
I think that the financially literate advocates of raising the minimum wage see this as a logical and desired outcome (although they don’t necessarily believe that it is the ‘main’ effect; I would argue that there are two main effects: driving wages for some jobs up and eliminating some other jobs).
I don’t know if the financially illiterate advocates would change their view, they probably care more about income effects for the poor, which would be positive, if welfare is sufficient (which is questionable in the US context). In general, the ‘virtue of work’ seems to be much more of a right wing ideal than on the left (and being priced out of the job market doesn’t even mean that people won’t work, they just won’t do ‘paid jobs’).
Note that one can make a similar argument about opponents of raising the minimum wage. How many (poorer right wing people) don’t realize that their wages would increase and merely support it due to ‘more jobs is good’ reasoning, ignoring how they might benefit?
“I think that the financially literate advocates of raising the minimum wage see this as a logical and desired outcome”
Are you saying that they believe that pushing low skill workers out of a low paying job and into welfare is a net plus? I can imagine some people holding that position, but I don’t think I have seen anyone publicly arguing for it.
Yes. This is exactly what the UBI would do as well (assuming that you are willing to call it welfare). Many on the left also support the UBI for the reason that it moves those people from ‘having to work’ into ‘wants to do’ (where the latter can be things that the job market is unwilling to pay one for). It was the main argument that I heard last time it was proposed in my country.
There are people on the left who support subsidized jobs, which are a form of welfare. The jobs they want to subsidize are usually specific ones, not those that the businesses create, but rather, those that they feel should exist to improve society.
Both of these are basically ‘soft’ anti-capitalist positions (in the sense that they don’t want to scrap capitalism, but to reduce its scope).
Note that my knowledge of this mainly comes from politics in my country, not American sources, so the American left may be different in this regard. Of course, one could argue that it is not very left for the most part.
I think I’d really enjoy that.
Speaking only for myself, and offering only a datapoint rather than any proposals, this would do nothing for me. My problem with SSC commentary isn’t dogpiling–if I’m making a point that’s able to be dogpiled, I want to know it, not be protected from it. My problem is that whenever I start to truly nail down one of the more right-leaning commentators with a good left-leaning argument (not saying I manage to do this all the time, but sometimes!), they pretty much always abandon ship. This is indicative of a commentariat that is sophisticated when it comes to those things, because declining to engage an argument that you’re losing is a smart move, but from my perspective it kind of makes the whole exercise a loss either way.
I mean, that’s what victory looks like in internet arguments. Your interlocutor runs out of responses, slinks away, and — if you are lucky — changes their mind a little bit for next time.
Yeah, but out in the wild it’s usually really obvious. Here, people are smart enough with their disengagement that even I’m not sure what happened, let alone any third-party observers
My problem is that whenever I start to truly nail down one of the more right-leaning commentators with a good left-leaning argument (not saying I manage to do this all the time, but sometimes!), they pretty much always abandon ship.
Don’t reject the possibility that people have other lives/jobs/pursuits/interests than just “beating the opposition in an internet argument.” Particularly if it has gotten heated/retreading old ground without shared givens.
Which is why he specifies that it happens right when he has managed to catch one in a trap. They have all the time in the world till you’ve got them pinned is the implication.
The fact that one side in a debate believes he has caught the other in a trap doesn’t necessarily mean that the other side believes it.
Sometimes it happens when the other person thinks “this is going nowhere, we’re just arguing in circles now” or thinks “I’m getting unreasonably angry, I should step away and cool down” and either way, they don’t bother continuing the exchange anymore and walk away.
Yeah, I wouldn’t want to deny that any of the things y’all mention can be in play. Plus, they’re in no way mutually exclusive…. just giving my two cents on the “problem.”
Tekhno, by the way, is that list also doubling as “And the following will be first up against the wall come the glorious day of revolution?”
😀
Shhhh. If I can lead the leftist revolution myself then I can undermine it from the inside. Inverse-Leninism.
This all sounds a bit complicated, what about a simpler solution – we could agree to let each threat have only a certain number of posts (till you get to the lowest indentation level plus 5 more or something like that). Then, the thread may continue in the next OT. That sure prevents “dogpiling” (usually people are not online at the exact same time) has an additional advantage that people have to wait before they type in a response which may result in more thoughtful comments.
One problem might be that someone who argues for A, who is “outnumbered” by others who argue for B, might end up writing one post, only to be swarmed by the limiting number of replies. I’m not sure how common that is (my impression is that you tend to have a dialogue of something like at most A BB or A BBB which seems still fine). If it is indeed a problem then a simple rule (including the maximum length above) could be that if you argue for B, you have to follow an A (or wait till the next OT).
All of this would make discussions significantly slower, but I think that might actually be a good thing sometimes.
Or maybe Scott could just manually decide which threads count as dogpiling threads? It would be hard for him to moderate on that level of precision full time, but it would make it easier for him if someone wrote a program that targeted all threads with 7 or more posts in them or whatever, allowing quick access to controversial topics.
Or hell, maybe we could just have another button in combination with the report comment function, called the “report dogpile” button.
(All these proposals may be highly abusable).
I think that any solution that depends on Scott doing more than he is is wrong. This is something some commenters here have a problem with and since other commenters want to talk to them (at least some of them) house rules can be established and people follow them. There is a simpler solution than banning those who break those rules or deleting their post – you can always ignore them.
This would not work well if you had a large group of people talking here, but the complain seems to be that there is a very vocal minority with right-leaning views outshouting the vocal minority with left-leaning views. Well, since this is about people who all keep interacting with each other repeatedly, you can set up self-enforcing rules like that.
Personally, I find this whole thing a bit funny though. When I post something here, I am generally more interested in what people who disagree with me have to say. I am happy if there are more of them (as long as they say something interesting) and I don’t feel obliged to respond to all of what they say. The point is not to “win the debate” but to engage with the most interesting responses, the rest I can simply ignore. If all of them are interesting, then all the better. If most of them are partisan rants without much substance I ignore the comments And if they are name calling and stupid sneering, then I tend to mark that down and tend to avoid interacting with that commenter in the future.
Whew! It pays to keep your head down.
Seriously though, inasmuch as there’s any kind of political or rhetorical imbalance here that needs correcting (I haven’t been following that particular controversy closely), maybe the solution isn’t just to put a thumb on the scale, but to nudge the culture a bit. One of the things I appreciate most about this blog’s “commenter community” (slight grimace for using that term) aside from the incredible level of civility and intelligence on display, is the high average level of epistemological realism and self-awareness.
This gives me an idea for an experimental rule Scott could try out on one or two OTs:
Any time someone makes an opinionated statement or a statement of controversial fact, he or she must also provide an epistemic certainty quotient (ECQ) from 0-100%. If no ECQ is provided, others should demand it. Alternatively, one might add a description of one’s “epistemic status” about a topic, the way Scott does to many of his posts.
– People will not add an ECQ to non-controversial statements like “the sky is blue” and nobody will demand one. This self-regulating loophole is a feature.
– Even those who agree with a statement might still demand an ECQ for validation or because they are curious to compare with their own level of certainty.
– Forcing yourself to think about and explicitly state your own level of epistemological certainty will, I expect, have a cooling effect on the emotionally charged rhetoric that some commenters feel put off by.
– Forcing yourself to think about and explicitly state your own level of epistemological certainty will, I expect, have a cooling effect on tribal impulses, and this will hopefully radiate out to other interactions outside this blog.
Seconded as a good suggestion or experiment.
Thirded
countered
this is aids dude, it’s just a weird shout-out to the group dynamic, enforced as a rule / group norm. If you feel some type of way about people making statements they’re unsure about, you can surely enforce that in other ways. Besides, does anyone really have a good way to calculate their percentage?
Seems like a recipe for arguments over terminology.
Those happen already, anyway.
Besides, what’s your reason for saying so? Typing a number between 0 and 100 is a lot easier than arguing semantics. If I say something and you challenge the way I said it, I can compromise with you by simply lowering my ECQ. If anything, this would reduce the number of arguments over terminology.
Because “opinionated” or “controversial” statements have a value element, and by attaching an explicit credence to them one suggests such value elements have factual support. An argument about what is or isn’t normal isn’t likely to be productive.
Besides, it seems unlikely to be something people will take seriously.
The problem you describe seems like it would actually help to make the value elements of a statement more visible to both the person making the statement and those reading it. This visibility would be an effective form of feedback on the ECQ. Or else at least it would make it easier for people to say “OK, I see that’s just what your value priorities/first principles are. Let’s agree to disagree.”
Your first link is to a post on my own personal blog from a year and a half ago, so that seems irrelevant. Your second link (to a comment I made last month) calls me out pretty well. I don’t claim to be perfect, but I think I’ve cleaned up my act a lot in the past few weeks.
It was something I remembered your having written that had a relevant quality.
The point is that whatever the merits of the underlying ideas, it’s tedious and often unenlightened to debate those ideas through the proxy of terminology. Attaching explicit credences to specific phrasings will invite scrutiny about why that phrase was used and what support it has. That problem is one (of many) reasons why jargon takes hold in specialist subgroups. In the abstract going through the exercise of very careful choice of terminology might be beneficial, but practically it would either not work or leave the comments here even more opaque to newcomers.
I still am not sure I understand. Why would my suggestion necessarily result in more arguments over terminology than people already engage in?
If I say something and you challenge the way I said it, I can compromise with you by simply lowering my ECQ
Lowering it from, let us say, 70% to 55% won’t cut much ice when I want you to admit it’s completely wrong and mistaken and I want you to lower it all the way to as close to 0% as you’re prepared to go.
If you’re not willing to do that, because you’re certain you have correct facts, correct interpretation, or a reasonable opinion, I am still going to think you are tarring my side with the wrong brush and you are still going to think you are being unfairly pressured to change your mind about something you have good reason to think.
Here’s a different way of putting the point: Say you believe a certain state of affairs has probability p of being true of the world. It’s tempting to simply come up with some way of phrasing that state of affairs and asserting that that has probability p. But that second step is very fraught, because any given phrasing is likely to include concepts that have their own probability considerations, and by attaching p to those concepts in combination you wind up taking a position on more than just the original state of affairs.
To use an example from philosophy of language, suppose you point to a person at a party and say “It’s 80% likely that the man drinking the martini will be the chair of the philosophy department next year.” Now, you may have just been using “the man drinking the martini” to pick out a person to refer to, but now in your statement you’ve taken a position on how likely it is that someone in the room is drinking a martini, and who that person is. What if it’s just a water in a martini glass? What evidence do you really have that it’s a martini?
I’m 100% certain I am right about everything, except for the things I am wrong about.
I may not be 100% certain about the facts/thing that I am fighting over, but I am 100% certain I want to fight over them/it.
If the percentages aren’t based off real data and just represent confidence, then what’s the difference between using a number and just using various English expressions to express confidence? I guess it’s quicker?
Quicker, easier to generate, easier to find and compare.
But compare to what, though? Given that these are basically randomly generated probabilities, it seems as subject to people’s personal judgment as words are. I don’t think enough people here intrinsically know what “70%” is, to the point that they’d all agree. I mean, cognitively they do, but then again the dictionary agrees on the meaning of most words, so cognitively most people can come to agreement on that too. But in terms of actually calculating some type of probability, of something that’s not an actual coin-flip type probability…I don’t think people can make any type of reasonable comparison from that. Personally, I think the end-game is that there will be a probability which stands in for “pretty sure”, one which stands in for “kinda sure”, and one that stands in for “unsure”, and you will just have to learn them from the regulars if you want to comment.
And what if I am much better at implicitly making epistemiological estimates than at explicitly making them?
This is, in fact, a flaw of many such proposals: often people implicitly know how to do something, but not how to explicitly formalize it. Forcing them to formalize their argument may just mean that they are bad at formalizing rather than bad at arguing.
It’s like saying “we won’t permit you to have a driver’s license unless you can write down the exact sequence of muscle movements you need to make in order to perform a U-turn”. You can know how to exercise that sequence without being able to write it down.
So you’ve compiled a list of those who will temporarily be denied full membership in the community and the opportunity to speak, but only for the duration of the current state of emergency?
As a conservative, I see no way that could possibly go wrong.
This is a great comment. Speaking from the centre/centre-left, I agree denying speech in this way is a bad way to tackle the problem. And this is despite the fact that I’ve often felt dogpiled by right wing posters here whenever they saw anything they could turn political in a discussion. There has to be more constructive ways to address that.
if your being nonserious then good 1
if your being serious then you take an L for that 1
My two cents is that I have multiple times felt dogpiled or had subthread hijacked like you describe. It has been particularly annoying when people turn a non-political topic into a political one. And I think I’m close to the centre or maybe centre-left, so I can understand the lefties on here being a bit concerned. However, I still think silencing people in this way doesn’t seem very constructive or fair. I also think solutions should try to address the problem at meta level rather than object level.
Maybe rather than than establishing some process that is left-wing-this or ring-wing-that, you could establish some kind of rule or norm that higher standards of niceness/politeness apply to any opinions that are outnumbering a minority *opinion* (rather than person). This would only apply within that particular subthread, Then again this might tilt things in favour of more contrarian views, which may or may not be a good thing. At least it would be somewhat fairer.
Another option would be to put some sort of limit on the *quantity* of comments each person (regardless of views) could make, like giving everyone their fair share of the microphone, so to speak, but I imagine that might be difficult to implement.
In any case freedom of speech (with sensible caveats) is kind of a theme on SSC, so imho it would be pretty bad to see that undermined. 🙁
I appreciate the effort, but this is a terrible idea that can only make things worse. The problem is this subculture’s standards of rationality when it comes to political topics, which are an over-the-top parody of affirmative action.
Scott, I’d love it if you could go ahead and share an in depth review of your reasoning behind opposing fully open borders in a post in the future.
I’m thinking about what you were hinting at in a footnote in Three great articles on poverty, and why I disagree with all of them:
http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/12/is-the-problem-one-of-insufficient-market-wages-inadequate-social-insurance-polanyian-disruption-of-patterns-of-life-.html
I’m not sure this is correct, but I’m pretty sure that people don’t have an innate desire to earn what they get– most people don’t feel bad about inherited money even if it’s so much they’ll never have to work.
Yeah… I think that the need to be paid for the work you have done, and for that work to be valuable, is a cultural rather than innate tendency. There are areas in our culture where you get a pass for not having contributed, and it’s all pretty inconsistent.
I’d say that in general, what he is saying is true, though.
That’s true – but it doesn’t have to involve money or goods. I like to think that there are people out there who have my back, and I have theirs. It’s pretty complicated, but none of my most important relationships are related to mutual exchange of goods or money.
In terms of broader society, as a simple man, I want to feel that I’m fitting into society and not upsetting anyone – the actual economics of “blahdy blah marginal utility etc.” I can really take or leave. It’s not something that I think about or that motivates me.
I’m not sure that this paragraph fits in with the rest of the piece – personally I’d take the second option – expose the llusion and establish a more realistic understanding.
For anything approaching a Universal Basic Income to work (apart from all the problems in implementing it, funding it, etc.) it will have to be very strongly presented as a right, not a handout or charity: “you are receiving this income because you are a citizen”, not “we’re giving you this handout because you are such a loser you need to leech off society”.
Yeah, maybe – the UK has essentially had a citizens basic income for the past decade for people with children, and the way they managed to implement it was by not really talking about it.
(Same as most major changes made by Labour)
For me, for the past couple of years, about half of my income has been in the form of government benefits, and I don’t really care what the government says it is for, as long as I receive it. (Though, to be honest, I wouldn’t be all that bothered if I didn’t receive it.)
For most people it’s just about how the system works – they’ll get worked up about particularly egregious scroungers, if it’s presented in the right way, but normal people claiming child benefit, or whatever, are generally ok as long as no-one really thinks about it.
Yes, but Mark, both in the UK and in Ireland there are periodic flaps about “dole spongers” and “scroungers”, generally when the government is trying to introduce welfare/public spending cuts or some other unpopular measure, and it offers a scapegoat for public anger.
The irony in the last coalition government here was the Labour minister in charge of the Department of Social Protection following the line of the majority partner right-wing party when it came to cuts and austerity, after Labour got into (shared) power on a campaign of looking out for the interests of the less well off and vulnerable, and opposing public spending cuts.
They even introduced a measure where police officers were sitting in on interviews with people applying to claim social welfare – this was all for the optics, the idea was trumpeted as cracking down on fraud and over-payment, to make it seem as if all the rise in claims was down to deliberate fraud and criminality.
Never mind that in actuality, deliberate fraud and crime accounts for only a small proportion of welfare over-payments, in line with international levels, and that often the cases are genuine mistakes or the fault of the officials, not the claimants.
So it would be all too easy to tar the recipients of UBI with the brush of “lazy, scroungers, lifestyle choice not to work, leeches”, especially in the early days when it was being implemented.
That’s absolutely true.
But, I think if I was trying to sell it to the nation, I wouldn’t emphasise it being a “right”, at least not until a majority already thought that way.
It’s a bit like immigration – everyone agrees that uncontrolled immigration is bad, but nobody really minds any individual immigrants.
I think that’s where we’re at with benefits – as long as the system sounds fairly sane, few will object.
You’ve got to try and present it in the least confrontational way possible – if you’re saying “these people have this right” where many citizens aren’t particularly well disposed to “those people” (largely invented) it’s just going to p- them off and provoke a reaction.
I think they’d be better off just saying “blah blah automation… this is the best way of managing things.. pah ha ha… those silly ludites… this is how the system works” and just not really talking about the moral objections.
Well, except for that pesky ‘U’ in ‘UBI’, which means that anyone playing that game would be tarring their own allies, constituents, etc, with the same labels.
This is one of the key reasons why a Universal Basic Income might avoid the pitfalls of so may other social welfare schemes. But only if we stick to the principle of universality – and universality in practice, not just in theory. If we set up a UBI and then apply social pressure to the still-gainfully-employed upper classes to not collect theirs so they can feel smugly superior to the unemployed, that way also lies disaster.
In Alaska residents get an annual check from the oil extraction. A UBI could be sold as the “dividends” of a successful modern economy.
What about the “Negative Income Tax” structure? I get that the US tax code is a dumpster fire. I don’t know anything about other countries beyond the basic theory of VAT and the name inland revenue.
But at least here in the US the EITC and various other forms of incentives and tax credits are pretty well accepted by both liberals and conservatives, even as they gripe and grumble about who gets which and how much.
As long as we’re committing to a very politically ambitious and sweeping change like UBI -anyway-, we might as well go ahead and see about dumping some water on that dumpster fire while we’re at it and replacing as much of that clustfuck as possible with a straightforward deduction-driven NIT.
I -do- worry about the massive COLI differences, though. I mean, people talk about the difference between New York City or Los Angeles and Saint Louis. I’m talking about the difference between NYC and LA and Cape Girardeau, Missouri (where I live right now), and I’m sure there are smaller, cheaper towns.
Any redistribution system no matter how clever is going to run into the problem that everyone wants to be (at least) middle class, but in order for there to be a middle class there needs to be a lower class. People not only want to feel like what they receive is what they have earned but that it be more than what other people receive.
It’s more about consumption than income.
I think England has the best class system, because everyone feels superior to everyone else. Working class people aren’t jealous of middle class everyday consumption – they think it’s ridiculous. Middle class people *do* look down on working class consumption, and they think the upper classes are idiots.
Who knows what the upper class think – probably something very similar.
I’ll take your word that it works in England but I don’t think it would in the US. If Harlan Whitaker goes down the job everyday to dig and refill holes in the ground he isn’t going to be happy if Shatiqua Jones gets the same check for braiding people’s hair. He’s a hard working, self supporting, American man who only gets what he deserves and she’s a lazy welfare queen in a make work job. It simply isn’t right that he be no better off.
Yes, I think he’s engaging in some serious typical-mind fallacy. There’s a lot of people who are perfectly happy to be cheaters provided they win. And even more that aren’t upset by an unearned (but honestly come-by) windfall.
I object to his central claims. His third claim discounts human agency and says everything we earn is due to luck. This is a great way to justify redistribution but if everything is due to luck, why don’t I sit on my butt and collect those “dividends from our societal capital”? If “none of us is worth what we are paid” (the implication is that we’re all overvalued, not merely misvalued), then all of us can do that and live a comfortable life without having to lift a finger in work. This seems unlikely. (well, it is what I’m doing now, but I’m living off principal and not dividends…)
This is possibly heartless of me, but honestly, the phrase “couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery” with regard to Hillary’s campaign and the increasingly forlorn supporters springs irresistably to mind.
I’ve read the reports of the results for the Electoral College votes, and I see that all the beseeching and appealing and targeting of electors to be faithless and not vote in accordance with the vote of their state worked – to turn five Democrats against Hillary! Even better, originally eight Democrats wanted to vote against her, three were over-ruled by their state rules! (So how are all those calls for state rules about voting for the state winner not to be binding on electors looking now, Hillary supporters?)
Agreed, two Republicans broke ranks and voted for alternates – one for Kasich, one for Ron Paul, both of these in Texas.
But eight of the electors in Hillary-won states wanted to vote against her. Quite a triumph, everyone! All that touted experience in the job seems to have done is soured her own people on her.
Frankly, I’m rolling on the floor here, lads 🙂 Now I’m going to sit back and wait for the
shrieking harpy vituperationexplanations put forward by the opinion columnists and thought leaders as to why this might have been so. YOU HAVE DISAPPOINTED AND LET DOWN LENA DUNHAM AND SAMANTHA BEE, HOW COULD YOU? HOW COULD YOU???? DOES THE HUFFINGTON POST MEAN NOTHING, NOTHING AT ALL, TO YOU?Surely you could also explain it as the Hillary electors knowing there’s really nothing on the line, and thus the perfect opportunity for making whatever statement they want to make?
Yes, but the big hoo-haa was all about (1) She won the popular vote! by staggering numbers! (even though the margin only works out to about 2% more which does not stagger me, but the actual number is not what is important here) (2) We must stop Trump at any cost because of the terrible danger he poses to the nation and the world! (3) Help us, faithless electors, you are our only hope! (4) Hillary is our Last Best Hope but if you can’t vote for her, vote for anyone other than He Who Must Not Be Named!
And the sum total of their pleading was that they convinced people on their side to vote against their candidate. I don’t think the faithless electors in the Democrat-won states would have been emboldened to protest-vote/make a statement vote had it not been for all the noise about “you don’t have to vote according to what the state election says”. There’s making a statement, there’s shooting yourself in the foot, and then there’s this, which I don’t even know how to classify but yes, I am laughing about it.
This surely has to put in its grave once and for all “Hillary – the People’s Choice, the one we are all crying out for to save us”, but I don’t really expect it will. Hillary won the popular vote by a very slight margin by reason of the way the large urban population centres shook out; her campaign made a pig’s ear of strategising to win the electoral votes, and there weren’t any huge numbers of rebellious electors ready to jump aboard the Anyone But Trump train, even if Martin Sheen (whom I quite like but for the love of God, Martin, cool it with the politics, you are not actually in reality Jeb Bartlett) and Michael Moore and Joss Whedon made special videos for them. In short, she lost, she got beaten, she did not run a winning campaign, and it is not all the fault of misogyny/sexism/white racism/white supremacy/Pepe the Frog/the Russians, the Democrat side has to take some of the responsibility for it. They couldn’t get enough people to like, trust or want her as the next president.
This entire post-election exercise with recounts and such seems to show that many on the left feel they are entitled to the election (being on the side of the truth and good), and they shouldn’t have to earn it. I was kind of cheering the effort all the way as it is just embarrassing sour grapes.
Results:
Recount = Trump gains votes
Electoral = Trump gains votes
A few of the media outlets came out against the electoral effort.
USA Today: “Fundamentally, America is not a place where you change the rules after the game is over.”
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/12/15/electoral-college-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-editorials-debates/95447368/
But most happily reported on it continuously and printed only opinions to overturn the election through legal chicanery (I am looking at you NYT) which I find a bit distasteful. Not that the NYT editorial board isn’t caught taking hypocritical positions every 3 days.
By the way, has anyone heard HRC won the popular vote? It’s true! It appears that any article on the election is legally required to state this within the first 3 lines.
And, of course, it’s not actually true. Hillary merely lost the popular vote by a smaller margin than anyone else, 48-46-3-1-1-noise.
Nobody won a majority of the popular vote, and mere pluralities alone seem less popular even than watery tarts throwing swords as a means of legitimizing supreme executive power. Real democracies generally require a runoff election or a ranked-preference ballot or coalition-building in the legislature, rather than simply handing over power to someone most of the electorate voted against.
In the United States, we first run this past the (now mostly Republican, thanks to the voters) Electors, and if that’s still a tie, the (ditto) House of Representatives. Every democratic path I can see with this electorate, leads to the same end, President Donald J. Trump. But we can at least damage his legitimacy, can’t we?
Have you considered that it’s instead a perfectly reasonable reaction to the election of the worst major-party presidential candidate in history? Trump is a known sexual predator, a compulsive liar, and on track to set all-time records for corruption. I don’t know if there are any circumstances under which the electoral college should fail to rubber stamp the election’s apparent winner, but if there are, yesterday would have been the time.
If Trump’s victory ever had any legitimacy at all, that all drained away the day we found out that he owes his presidency to espionage carried out by a hostile and illiberal foreign power.
@Earthly Knight
The worst presidential candidate in history? Worse than George “Bring Back Segregation” Wallace or Strom “Don’t End It In The First Place” Thurmond? Or, going back a bit further, worse than Aaron Burr, who while Vice President killed Alexander Hamilton, then ran off to foment revolution in Mexico?
Fortunately, I edited my comment to include the qualifier “major-party” before “presidential candidate” in advance of your response. Note also that Aaron Burr was never a presidential candidate and that both the duel with Hamilton and the treason took place after he had left office.
I suppose you could say that Jefferson’s owning slaves and raping them made him a worse candidate than Trump, at least if we are evaluating Jefferson by contemporary standards.
In those days, electors had two votes and the President was the guy with the most votes and the Vice President was the guy with the second most votes. The D-R party goofed their plan to have one of their electors not vote for Burr, so they tied and the house state delegations picked Jefferson over Burr (after 35 ballots), so while he ran on Jefferson’s ticket, he was eligible to become president in the house voting (and got 6 states on the first 35 House ballots).
@Earthly Knight
Thanks, I haven’t heard anything like this during the election, I don’t know how I could have missed it. It must be particularly difficult to understand how anyone could vote for Trump. Let me go ahead and answer that. They are racists, xenophobes, uneducated, sexists, and Islamophobes. At least that is what I read at those very same sources. Believing this, it is of course 100% ethical and honorable to throw out a fairly elected candidate based on the fact they fail an arbitrary purity test.
You said it, not me.
Do you think there are any circumstances under which the electoral college should fail to certify the election’s apparent winner? If so, why not Trump?
For myself, I think Andrew Jackson needs to be in the discussion, and while I might be able to spin some hypothetical situation where the electoral college should refuse to ratify the results of an election, strongly disagreeing with the voters choice is not one of them. It would have to involve something new occurring or coming out after the election.
Pretty much never, never ever by someone in the opposing party, and certainly never ever based on routine petty politics.
The examples cited were known by the voters so re-litigating those in the Electoral College would be clearly irresponsible. It is also likely Washington would rightly burn to the ground if HRC was installed in this manner. People are kidding themselves if they think this would somehow magically work out.
Of course one can imagine many things such as the president-elect being severely disabled medically, or was a secret alien agent from the planet ZzzXxx and so forth.
Yes, but it’s only stuff which would cause the president to be removed anyway. If it’s something that would get him impeached, declared incompetent, or dead, then the electoral college will certify someone else. The most likely choice is the VP-elect. Nothing Trump has done yet remotely approaches those thresholds.
@ tscharf
The depth of corruption Trump plans to bring to the presidency is, I won’t say a revelation, but something we are only now seeing with our own eyes. Similarly for the fact that Russia interfered in the election with the aim of helping Trump, and the fact that he never had any intention of keeping several of his central campaign promises. I agree, though, that the things we knew about before the election– his contempt for the constitution, his admiration for autocrats, his long history of sexually assaulting women, his misappropriation of funds from his charity, his habitual lying– are the worst of it. So what? Should the electoral college never revoke the will of the voters, no matter how obviously unqualified, deranged, and criminal their selection?
If you had asked me two years ago under what circumstances it would be acceptable for the electoral college to fail to certify the apparent winner of a presidential election, I don’t know exactly what I would have said, but it would have been something close to: “Maybe if a corrupt, incompetent demagogue with a long history of criminal behavior wins the election by stirring up racism and xenophobia and promoting wild conspiracy theories.” But the possibility would have seemed so remote as to be laughable at the time. McCain and Romney, at least, were decent and competent men.
@ bean
Really? Is serial sexual assault not an impeachable offense in your book?
I was expecting something like that. I’ll be frank. I find Trump’s behavior towards women boorish and crude in the extreme. I don’t approve of it. But AFAIK, what he’s done isn’t criminal anywhere other than a college campus, and it’s certainly not worse than, say, Bill Clinton’s. Which, I should point out, didn’t actually get him removed from office. (Or Hillary’s handling of classified information, come to think of it.) But all of that said, the level of motivated reasoning from your side on this is rather breathtaking. If Trump was a liberal, and very competent, then I strongly suspect he’d get a pass on the whole ‘sexual assault’ thing. (See Bill Clinton.)
Also, there were no new revelations on that between the election and the electoral college. If Watergate had broken between election day and the electoral college, that would be the sort of thing I was referring to. Not “he’s a bad guy, so you shouldn’t select him”. It would have to be gamechanging, to the point where if there was a re-vote at the time of the electoral college’s decision, the result would certainly be different. If Trump was in a coma or in jail for murder or rape, then they would be, IMO, justified in changing their votes to Pence. None of the electors had a specific mandate to change their votes based on what their ‘constituents’ would say now as opposed to what they said a month ago.
Uh, several of the alleged victims claim that he tried to shove his hands up their skirts while they forcibly resisted. (Did you not read the article I linked to? Read it.) Is there anywhere in the developed world where this is not considered a crime?
You didn’t link to an article. I’m also going to point out that we work on an ‘innocent until proven guilty’ basis. Between motivation to smear Trump and the simple ambiguity of such cases, I don’t think that we’re anywhere near the level you’d need to claim that Trump should actually be in jail.
Here, again, is the article I linked to above. Please do not respond to my comment without reading it this time, I’m not interested in participating in a weird farce where you profess Trump’s innocence without even knowing what he’s accused of.
Yes, one in which the testimony of a dozen witnesses and an apparent confession from the defendant is generally sufficient to secure a conviction.
“Jefferson’s owning slaves and raping them”
There is good reason to believe that Sally Hemmings was Jefferson’s mistress although not, I think, conclusive proof. Is it your view that the fact that she was his slave made sex with her automatically rape? Is there any evidence that she was unwilling?
Or were you thinking of something else?
I didn’t scroll up far enough. My apologies.
Going through the list, several of the incidents are not illegal, just crude. The comments to the young girls and Alicia Machado fall into this category, and it’s hard to take the list seriously when it mixes categories like this.
Several of the others are also stretching the definition of sexual assault much, much too far. Requesting that only attractive women be hired for his resorts seems like fairly normal practice, and while it is sexist, sexism isn’t totally illegal. Likewise the employee harassment thing. Do you have any clue as to what the base rate of sexual harassment claims is? I don’t have time to run it down now, but 0.5% of lawsuits seems like it’s not unreasonable.
Several others have fairly plausible more-or-less innocent explanations. Have you never walked in on someone you didn’t mean to (Miss Teen USA 1997) or bumped into someone and been embarrassed (Mindy McGillivray)?
So we’re left with a small core of cases ranging from the disturbing to the flat-out illegal. Most of them happened 10+ years ago, and were not reported until Trump became famous, with two exceptions. Both seemed to be settled, to the point that the women in question were friendly with Trump a decade later. That seems unusual for rape victims. And the rest? Well, people’s memories are terrible (see Brian Williams) and people sometimes lie about these kind of things. Nowhere near the legal standard of proof.
No, each witness has separate testimony on a separate incident, and Trump has testimony, too. Good luck getting a conviction on “he said, she said”.
Just to be clear, I don’t like Trump. I wish the GOP had picked almost anyone else from the primary. But he is the president, and wishful thinking about throwing him in jail for sexual assault isn’t going to get you anywhere good.
I’m not EK, but I think that’s an interesting question. Stockholm syndrome is a thing, and I think the left contention that huge power differentials make consent categorically different has some merit.
I’d have to say it depends on how Jefferson and his household treated slaves, but if it was typical [my conception of] of the times, where compliance was strictly enforced via immediate punishment, it should be the assumption. Something different with the same name, like the Hellenic world perhaps, maybe not.
@ bean
The idea was for you to focus on the dozen women accusing Trump of non-consensual kissing and groping.* Here is an article which includes mostly those incidents, if that makes it easier for you to evaluate the evidence. Note that:
–6 of the incidents occurred since 2005.
–Trump has a consistent modus operandi throughout many of the accusations, which jibes with his own boasts from the Access Hollywood tape: he walks up to women he barely knows, just starts kissing them– he doesn’t even wait– or grabs them by their buttocks, breasts, or genitals.
–Many of the women have some degree of corroborating evidence for their claims, typically, friends and family members who attest that the alleged victim informed them about the incident at the time that it occurred.
*Setting aside the accusation of marital rape, which emerged in a divorce proceeding and was subsequently recanted, and the accusation of child rape, which has not, to my mind, been adequately substantiated.
Okay? I’m not sure it matters much that there are a dozen witnesses to a dozen cases of Trump forcing himself on women rather than a dozen witnesses to a single case. For comparison, if a dozen homeowners accused the same man of breaking and entering each of their houses, wouldn’t we consider that fairly damning evidence that he’s guilty of most or all of the crimes?
@ David Friedman
Yes, and this seems rather obvious to me. No valid consent can be give where the consenter could legally be beaten or killed for saying “no”.
You picked the link, not me.
Here’s the full breakdown:
2 in 2005
2 in 2006
1 in 2007
1 in 2013
I would place all except the last far enough back that I’m really suspicious of people’s memories. And the last was mostly an allegation that he treats pageant contestants ‘like cattle’, which, while shameful, isn’t exactly groundbreaking or illegal.
I still suspect that some of these are very strongly exaggerated, but I’ll grant you that. But the last story with any serious details (beyond ‘objectifies women’, which we knew anyway) is from 2007. Is it possible that he’s stopped doing it, and just doesn’t want to admit that he used to for obvious reasons?
The article you just linked to didn’t say that. In the only case which mentioned friends, it specifically said that she waited until recently to tell them.
This, at least, we agree on.
If the homeowners made the accusations independently and without political motive (and without waiting 9+ years to do it) I’d agree. (I’d also point out that burglary is a less ambiguous crime than inappropriate kisses/touching.) As it is, the whole thing has the vague reek of the Clinton Death List (although significantly less stupid). Throwing out enough crimes and then saying “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” even if each one, when looked at closely, falls completely to pieces.
The 2013 allegation includes the claim that “[Trump] continually grabbed my ass and invited me to his hotel room.” It’s possible, I suppose, that Trump’s lechery has tapered off in recent years– he’s a septuagenarian now, after all– but I don’t see why that should matter. This is a man who has spent a lifetime molesting women, treating their bodies as his private property.
Stoynoff, McGillivray, and Harth all informed friends and relatives at the time of the incidents (you may need to follow up on some of the links in the People article to verify this). The incident involving Heller had one or two direct eyewitnesses.
Are there a dozen witnesses who claim to have observed Bill or Hillary personally killing someone?
That was not the main thrust of her FB post, it was a comment to said post. I’m not sure what to make of it, but I can’t see any reason she wouldn’t have lead with that. If you’re against someone, you lead with your strongest argument. I haven’t seen a screengrab of the comment about groping, and I suspect sarcasm or something of that nature.
Well, there are two reasons for the change. Either decreased libido or a change of heart.
I’ll grant you Heller. I’m really suspicious of Harth, as she appeared to be on good terms with Trump as recently as a year ago. McGillivray seems like it could easily be a case where Trump accidentally bumped into her. Stoynoff is troubling, but something seems off. Why wouldn’t People have run a story about Trump raping/trying to have an affair? That seems contrary to their normal incentives.
Obviously not. I explicitly said that this was less stupid that the Death List. This feels a lot like Scott’s argument with the Atlantean at the end of Still Crying Wolf.
I’m sure you can find fairly ad hoc reasons to be skeptical about any of the individual claims, but taken together, they amount to powerful evidence that Trump has a long history of forcing himself on women, exactly as the Access Hollywood tape suggested. The worst of the allegations clearly qualify as sexual assault, and you appear to agree that sexual assault is an impeachable offense; hence, Trump meets your original requirement that the electoral college should only refuse to certify a candidate for offenses which would also be grounds for impeachment.
While really do I appreciate you bringing this back to where it started, you’re still not quite getting my point. The electoral college should not select the normal winner if and only if there’s a reason that a supermajority of the country would agree is a good one. Trump got 46% of the popular vote, and there hasn’t been a massive revelation since election day to change that, so that’s right out.
Good reasons for electing someone else:
1. President-elect is dead.
2. President-elect is unable to carry out duties of office for medical reasons.
3. President-elect is in jail, or very obviously headed there very soon.
In all cases, the VP candidate should probably be selected instead, and I think that you’d get the supermajority in each case. We’re not even remotely close to that point with Trump.
It is not up to the Electoral College to attempt to resolve assertions of unseemly behavior, many of them politically motivated by their timing. There is a separate criminal justice system to resolve these issues. Every election the loser’s party could make assertions before the electoral vote and ask people totally unqualified to adjudicate them. How could that system go wrong?
We have an existing system that allows people to prioritize what they feel is important and vote accordingly. Many people feel very strongly on subjects such as abortion, illegal immigration, the size of government, farm subsidies, the economy, the social safety net, foreign policy, race relations, etc. What candidate X did in his personal life may not be very important to many because they have bigger fish to fry.
The allegations on Trump were reported far and wide. They were taken into consideration and deemed to not disqualify him in many people’s minds. Feeling extra super duper strongly on something means exactly nothing. Everyone gets one vote. If one’s specific cause ends up on the losing side of the ledger that represents a failure on their part to communicate effectively and convince others. Full stop.
HRC made this election a referendum on Trump’s character. That sells to many people, but not enough in this case. Her election strategy could be summarized as “I’m the one not named Donald Trump”. It almost worked. But.it.didn’t. Time to move on.
@ bean
That’s not what you said originally, which was:
But we have seen that there is compelling evidence that Trump has committed impeachable offenses, one of the “thresholds” you set for the electoral college failing to certify.
I’m inclined to think that both directions of this biconditional are false. What matters most is whether there is actually a good reason for the electoral college not to certify the election’s apparent winner, not whether most people think there is one. A convicted murderer or traitor probably should not be made president, no matter how beloved she might be, while a competent, qualified, and morally upright candidate should not be rejected by the electoral college, no matter how widely she’s despised.
@ tscharf
No one is suggesting that the electoral college should have failed to certify Trump on the basis of mere “assertions” made by the “loser’s party.” The claim is that they should not have done so because of the compelling evidence that he’s a sexual predator.
This assumes that Trump’s supporters were familiar with the details of the allegations against him and evaluated them rationally. This seems highly dubious in light of the fact that only 13% of Trump supporters can identify President Obama’s religion and 23% his country of birth. If the voters fail to recognize that their favored candidate is a criminal because their minds are festering sewers of delusion, this seems like as good a time for the electoral college to step in as any.
No, Trump’s level of sexual assault is not an impeachable offense. Bill Clinton is proof of this. We have a criminal justice system for a reason, and while a few of the things Trump is accused of doing do reach the threshold where charges might be brought, they haven’t been proved to nearly the level you’d need to impeach. So far we have one side saying ‘he did’ and another saying ‘he didn’t’. Once we start to get facts on the legal record (which has much higher standards than the one where you merely have to be able to mount a libel defense), we can talk again about what he did or didn’t do.
Disagree. The integrity of our electoral system is vital.
(In retrospect, I may retract the ‘if and only if’ and replace with ‘only if’.)
Trump hasn’t been convicted of anything, and I’d like to see a beloved murderer or traitor.
How does he get from winning the presidency to despised by a supermajority in a month, while the Electoral College is still smart enough to see him as being upright?
You’re throwing out silly hypotheticals. I’ll grant that if either of them were somehow to come true, you might have a point. But they’re incredibly unlikely, and the damage that picking someone besides the original winner in a case that I didn’t outline would do to trust in our electoral system is massive.
I don’t know why you keep bringing Bill Clinton up. The most credible accusation against him, Juanita Broaddrick’s, didn’t emerge until the end of his second term, after he’d already been impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice. It also concerned an incident that took place in 1978. I suppose congress could have impeached him again for a crime that occurred twenty years prior, but there were many good reasons for them not to, none of which in any way implies that rape is not grounds for impeachment.
I agree that there would have been serious repercussions had the electoral college failed to certify Trump, although it’s not so clear to me that this wouldn’t still be a better option than a Trump presidency. But, in principle, this seems like just the sort of situation where the electoral college should get involved, when the voters select a lying, corrupt, and criminal demagogue.
Because he’s also a serial sexual predator. If you really want, I’ll dig up a list of accusations against him, and we can compare his with Trump’s.
(I note you ignored my point about why the criminal justice system is important in cases like this.)
But how much uncertainty is on either side of that? If you’re not sure it wouldn’t be a better option, why are you proposing it? If Trump is a high-variance candidate, you’re proposing an ultrahigh-variance alternative.
In principle, I agree with you, and if I was designing a system of government there would be a mechanism in place to do that. In practice, the electoral college is not that body, and trying to turn it into that body after the election just makes you look like something between a sore loser and a direct threat to democracy.
@Earthly Knight
Dumb people have rights.
Uninformed people have rights.
Racists have rights.
Republicans have rights.
Democrats have rights.
BLM activists have rights.
These rights are identical to the rights you have. One of these rights is voting. If a dumb, uninformed, racist really cares about abortion (for the record I am pro choice) more than anything, the line of argument you seem to think is the only one that matters, actually doesn’t matter at all.
If a dumb, uninformed, racist really cares about how women are treated, he votes differently.
You may have tunnel vision on a single issue, others do not share this. If you think the rules need to be changed for presidential eligibility based on (fill in your personal moral absolute) then work on changing the Constitution.
You don’t seem to get that people didn’t vote for Trump because he groped women, they voted for him in spite of it. They had perfectly valid reasons to overlook this.
@Randy M:
On the Sally Hemmings question … . She was apparently with Jefferson and his daughter first in London and then in Paris for about two years. That was after the French revolution, so I’m not sure if slavery would have been enforced. If not, she could have left Jefferson at that point if she wanted to.
@ tscharf
The constitution decrees that the president is to be chosen by the electoral college, one of whose purposes is to prevent the election of popular but dangerous demagogues. If the electoral college had chosen not to certify Trump, it would have been well within its constitutional mandate.
I don’t think either of these things is true– given how out of touch with reality virtually all Trump supporters are, I suspect that most of them don’t believe that he gropes women, and would not no matter how overwhelming the evidence to that effect. I agree that there would be a stronger reason for the electoral college not to override the vote for Trump if the public had made an informed choice to elect a sexual predator, but I see no reason to think this is actually what happened.
There’s both a written and an unwritten constitution. The unwritten constitution is explicit (or as explicit as it can be) that the electoral college is there to vote for the people who they are supposed to vote for. The fact that liberals have suddenly rediscovered the point of the electoral college (after spending the better part of two decades damning it) looks like confirming every bad sterotype the right has about them as not caring about the process, only about it getting the right results. This is not helpful to anything, particularly as it was never actually going to change anything.
I think… probably the liberals are being consistent here. They want the electoral college to certify the candidate with the plurality, and they want the electoral college to go away because with all or nothing votes from states the candidate with the plurality doesn’t always get elected.
Those who now want it to vote against Trump because he’s deplorable, rather than the popular vote loser, yes, are being inconsistent.
But that’s not the argument that Earthly Knight has been making in this thread. He’s been arguing for not picking Trump because Trump is uniquely terrible, and it’s the ECs job to pick candidates which are not terrible, which seems fundamentally at odds with the argument that the EC is undemocratic and thus terrible. I don’t think many of the appeals to Republican electors were based on the popular vote totals, because that would have been stupid and futile.
FWIW I agree with bean. I think the “appeal to the electors” movement was both unprincipled and a strategic mistake.
Unprincipled because as soon as it became convenient to do so, so many people flocked to originalism and the federalist papers.
It is has been the position of the political and ideological left that our system of government is a living, evolving thing for longer than anyone has been alive. That evolving system turned the electoral college into a rubber stamp two centuries ago.
On top of that, it’s a good thing it did so according to our principles. We should support more democracy (i.e. by abolishing the EC) not less (i.e. by empowering it as an independent body).
To all of a sudden channel Antonin Scalia because it would benefit our candidate is to act in just as an unprincipled fashion as he did in his Bush v Gore concurrence.
Secondly, on the strategic front, exposing this internal hypocrisy and eroding a good and important norm, accomplished exactly nothing. And it was entirely predictable that it would accomplish exactly nothing.
@ Brad,
Fair points.
And they did exactly that. Trump won. Again.
Do you have a problem with the process or the result?
For the record, exactly what do you think the end result should have justifiably been? Pence, HRC, Romney, Kaisch? You are going to have to tie yourself into a 4 dimensional logic pretzel to justify putting HRC in there.
Your original claim was that the attempt to prevent Trump from winning in the electoral college demonstrated that “many on the left feel they are entitled to the election.” I have shown that, to the contrary, it was entirely reasonable to request that the electoral college not certify Trump as the winner, given both the purposes of the institution and how uniquely odious, unqualified, and incompetent Trump has proven himself to be.
If the request was reasonable, they would have done it. Since the electors voted nearly unanimously for Trump the request was clearly not reasonable in their view.
And yes I find “Trump is odious therefore the left should win anyway even though we lost the election” to be a sign of entitlement. If you want to argue to put Pence in that is slightly less insane.
@DavidFriedman, If Sally Hemmings was with Jefferson in London in post-revolutionary times, there is no need to be so coy. Slavery was not enforced in England at that time.[1] What her prospects would have been if she had run away from Jefferson in London is a complicated question, but one threat she would not have faced is the threat that authorities in England would capture her and return her to slavery.
1: The Somerset decision of 1772 seems to be regarded as conclusive on this point, though to the credit of the English, their courts had been finding excuses to not enforce slavery for centuries before that.
The “idea” seems to have been a Gish gallop.
It is not reasonable to produce a long list of accusations against Trump and then claim that your list has substance because someone hasn’t debunked every single one.
As the resident federalist and Scalia apologist, I’m going to jump in here.
I think this is entirely orthogonal to originalism. This is because most people forget that originalism is merely an addendum to textualism. The primary thing is the text – what does the Constitution say? Now, there can still be ambiguities in what it says. If there are, we move to originalism. That is, we try to understand the words in the text according to the context in which they were adopted (to Scalia, this is original public meaning, but there are other varieties).
With this in mind, originalism says jack about the present question, and flocking to/from it just doesn’t make any sense. Instead, originalism says that the Constitution gives the States the ability to select a number of electors equal to the sum of their senators and representatives. That’s it. It doesn’t say anything about whether they should vote their individual conscience or just rubber stamp the state’s popular vote – those are state laws. The fact that those state laws change over time, producing a living, evolving political system has precisely nothing to do with whether originalism is an appropriate method of Constitutional analysis.
This is more difficult. The federalist papers assumed that states would engage in selecting electors in a way such that “the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” I think that both the left and the Not Trump right can say, “Something about the way states are going about this has failed,” (maybe even “something about the way states have evolved on this has failed”) while not embracing the federalist papers. That is to say that they can simply reject the premise of that portion of the federalist papers, and in doing so, reject the conclusions therein rather than embracing them.
The most difficult question is, “…and what are we going to do about it?” I would contend that your proposal probably wouldn’t work. Trump got 46% of the popular vote, only 2% behind Clinton. If someone who you think is not “in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications” could get that close (when it’s not the measure that matters), do you really have confidence that going to NPV would prevent the success of future such candidates?!
Now in the correct place.
I concede that technically what the “appeal to the electors” are doing isn’t originalism in the strict sense. But I do contend that all the articles trumpeting the “true purpose of the EC” based on federalist 68 constitutes a sort of parallel lay originalism. One that is contrary to the gestalt of the New Deal and post New Deal theory of American government on the left.
I’m not sure what you are getting at with your last paragraph, I don’t think I mooted any solutions. Trump won the election, and he should and will become President. Both before and after the election I thought we should go to NPV for reasons not having specifically to do with Trump or a Trump like candidate.
Finally if you want to be a self declared AS apologist then I’d love to see a defense of the B v G concurrence which inasmuch as it would interfere with a state court decision on a state law issue was contrary to the entire rest of his jurisprudence. Indeed I seem to recall that he had to reach back to a Warren Court precedent from the massive resistance era to find a cite to rest on.
I agree that this is inconsistent. I disagree that it has anything to do with Scalia or originalism. Not even “technically”; like, at all. Just pick another word, and don’t mention Scalia, because that would be very very wrong. Honestly, I’m not even sure it makes sense in any overarching gestalt – it’s pure immediate reward politics.
Fair enough. However, even if I think they’re currently acting out of expediency, I think it’s worthwhile (for my political goals) to point out to them that moving to NPV won’t solve their problem. Instead, I’ll invite them to the dark side of federalism, and encourage them to pay their federalism insurance premium.
I’m Jew-ish, but I’ve been told I’m not allowed to work on (observed) Christmas, so perhaps I’ll have some time this weekend to dust it off. I haven’t gone through it in a while (actually, I’m not sure I’ve ever really formed an opinion on it; it happened before I really became interested in law, and I’ve always kind of brushed it off in the category of “most EPC law is made up”… but perhaps I really need to engage with it). Fair warning, while I say that I’m a Scalia apologist, I don’t always agree with him – I just think most of the criticism he gets wildly misrepresents his views. Bush v. Gore may be in the same category as Hollingsworth v. Perry – I think Kennedy wrote a fantastic opinion (…that hurts a little to say) that embraces a form of “judicial federalism” that I really think should be taken more seriously… and I think Scalia was on the wrong side of it. Anyway, I’ll try to top-level Bush/Gore this weekend.
@EK:
The problem with bringing up those accusations is that no one believes them. Not literally “no one”, but almost nobody. Nearly all Trump supporters automatically discounted them as politically-motivated mudslinging, and I’d wager a majority of Hillary supporters did the same even if they used them. They certainly had a rather short half-life in the media spotlight, which to me implies they just didn’t get traction.
This disbelief certainly applies to the electoral college, and that is why there was no chance the sexual assault allegations could have affected the vote.
This wasn’t a case of a bunch of rubes electing a President despite them knowing he was the next best thing to a rapist, something perhaps Hamilton would say the Electoral College should correct. This was a case of voters disregarding what looked like mudslinging to vote for their favored candidate.
@ tscharf
So, in your view, not only will the electoral college respond to any reasonable request, the electors are also (in aggregate) infallible judges about which requests are reasonable and which not?
@ Jiro
I don’t really see where this is coming from. Are you not on board with the principle that the probability that x is guilty of a crime increases with the number of eyewitnesses who attest that x committed a crime in their presence?
@ The Nybbler
Here’s a poll suggesting that a third of republicans and the vast majority of democrats believed the accusations were true.
@EK
The problem with your focus on his sexual ‘adventures’ is that it is something that doesn’t affect 99.9999% of Americans, while they are affected by such issues as the healthcare changes that he makes.
I think that politics operates somewhat similar to the Maslow hierarchy, where people tend to vote based on their most basic need that they feel is not addressed sufficiently (with the caveat that I think that Maslow’s hierarchy is too black/white and that people move left to right within the pyramid rather than from the bottom to the top, so after getting some love, they want more safety, etc).
I would argue that a major mismatch that we saw in this election was between the people who are high up in the hierarchy vs the people who are low. The former often cannot understand why the thing that they concerned about (like Trump’s sexual behavior) is not disqualifying for the latter group, while the latter group cannot understand why an in their eyes relatively trivial issue is considered so important by the former.
So I would argue that your position is probably heavily influenced by your personal well-being in the current system. It matters naught if a politician is a criminal, if the electorate believe that the overall package is still better than the opposition.
It’s amusing that you say this, given how much energy Trump and his surrogates devoted to accusing Hillary of criminal behavior during the campaign (remember the “lock her up” chants?). Voters evidently do care that their political leaders abide by the law, it’s just that Trump supporters were badly deluded about which candidate was actually the criminal in this election.
@EK
That accusation was part of the narrative that Trump spun: Clinton doesn’t care about this nation’s (= your) interests, evident by how careless she was with classified information.
Clinton came up with her own narrative: Trump is a racist/sexist/etc who will make laws to harm black people/women/etc, evident by how he treats women near him.
Neither narratives were particularly rational, as the evidence didn’t provide very strong evidence for the conclusion in either case.
IMHO, you are stuck inside the Clinton narrative. This post and my earlier one is an attempt to pull you out, by explaining that your point of view is subjective and explaining how another point of view can lead to a different conclusion (I’m not asking you to agree with this conclusion, but merely to understand how people come to it).
As we’ve seen, though, the evidence that Trump has sexually assaulted women in the past is, in fact, quite strong. You seem to want there to be parity between the two parties on this, but there is not– the republican rank-and-file has become uniquely deranged. This is how we ended up with a birther as president.
@CF
I like your posts and I look forward to reading your analysis of the B v G concurrence, but this rubs me the wrong way. I know what originalism is — original intent, original public meaning, original expected application, and both Amar and Balkin’s versions.
I’ve read all of Scalia’s books and many many of his decisions, I’ve seen him speak twice and have a book autographed by him. I’ve also read two of Bork’s books. I’ve was following the Volokh Conspiracy back when Juan Non-Volokh was posting there.
Disagreement is fine, that’s what we are all here for, but please don’t patronize me.
This is more like having lots of eyewitnesses each testifying, at the same trial, that someone committed a separate crime. No sensible court would allow that. Furthermore, bringing lots of accusations against someone in a court would take a certain amount of effort, which discourages the tactic of bringing so many accusations that your opponent can’t refute them all simply because of how unwieldy it is to handle that many.
Gish gallops, on the other hand, are easy.
@EK
Sigh. You keep completely missing my point and I don’t know how to say it in a way that you might understand.
@ Jiro
http://crimejustice.law.nyu.edu/wp-content/uploads/Admissibility-of-the-Defendant%E2%80%99s-Criminal-Records-at-Trial.pdf
In 1994, Congress approved amendments to the Federal Rules of Evidence specifically applicable to the admissibility of prior sex crime convictions and bad acts (Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994). FRE 413 provides that “[i] n a criminal case in which a defendant is accused of a sexual assault, the court may admit evidence that the defendant committed any other sexual assault. The evidence may be considered on any matter to which it is relevant” (Fed. R. Evid. 413).
(“bad acts” means criminal conduct which did not lead to a conviction.)
Yes, I think we’d all agree that prior criminal convictions would constitute evidence…
…which is what that link actually says. So how is it relevant to Jiro’s point?
Read more carefully. The article explicitly states that prior bad acts– which, again, means criminal conduct which did not lead to a conviction– can also be admissible in sexual assault cases. It gives the following example:
In US v. Johnson, for example, the defendant was accused of sexually assaulting one passenger and two flight attendants on board an airplane. At trial, the judge permitted the prosecutor to introduce evidence of other instances where Johnson was accused of, although not prosecuted for, sexual assault (United States v. Johnson, 458 F. App’ x 727 (10th Cir. 2012)).
@Brad
I apologize. I didn’t intend to patronize you, and I likewise enjoy your posts. You’re probably my favorite of the left-of-center commenters here.
While you didn’t quote it, I think part of what might have turned you off was my statement that I think much of the criticism of Scalia wildly misrepresents his views. If so, I assure you that I did not intend for that statement to apply to you. I was speaking more generally about why I find myself defending Scalia, and why it’s not that I think he’s always right. Surely you’ve seen criticism after criticism in the general atmosphere that simply doesn’t understand the point of his jurisprudence, right?
That being said, I’ve laid down my case for why I think Scalia’s originalism is completely orthogonal to the question of faithless electors. Because of that, I’d personally prefer that you use a different word, because I think it muddies the water in a way that is all too familiar in the general atmosphere. If you think my case is wrong and that they are related, I’d like to hear your counter. Or if you agree there and just don’t want to use a different word, could you explain why you think there are enough benefits to using that word to overcome such definitional mud?
I said that no sensible court would do that, Sex crimes are a magnet for unreasonable laws that dispense with justice instead of dispensing justice. These laws are not sensible, and I don’t think you can seriously claim that they are, so they can’t be used to justify doing the same for Trump.
It’s like saying that it’s okay to be prejudiced against someone based on his ethnic background because, hey, the court system did it to the Japanese-Americans, so it must be okay.
You will need to articulate the rationale for why no sensible court would allow such a thing, and show why it should apply to laymen’s judgments of criminal accusations, too. From what I understand, the main reason why evidence pertaining to prior bad acts or convictions is usually inadmissible at a trial for a subsequent crime is the worry that it will prejudice the jury too much against the defendant, making them too eager to convict even if the evidence connecting him directly to the crime for which he is presently being tried is flimsy. If a criminal already has a long rap sheet, informing the jury of his prior bad acts would virtually guarantee his conviction on any subsequent charge and lead thereby to frequent miscarriages of justice. This is a reasonable worry in the criminal justice system where the goal is to determine whether the defendant is guilty of a specific crime, but we are not trying to establish whether Trump committed one particular sexual assault, we wish to know whether he committed at least one of the assaults of which he has been accused. And I see no reason why we should not take the testimony of all of the purported eyewitnesses into account when making this assessment. So it remains highly likely, given that a dozen women have publicly testified that they witnessed Trump committing a crime against them, that he is indeed guilty of one or more of the allegations.
If a dozen women independently testify that Trump committed sexual assault, and the probability of each accusation being true is merely 6%, it’s more likely than not that Trump committed one or more of those sexual assaults.
But… that depends on somehow being able to precisely evaluate the actual probability of each accusation. And it depends on them being independent. Neither of which is true here.
As for your poll, it asks whether or not Trump committed some unspecified sexual assault at some unspecified time in the past, not whether any of those particular allegations were credible.
The main reason why we shouldn’t allow evidence of prior crimes at trials when there is no conviction for those prior crimes is that it violates what we would consider as justice. The suspect is being punished by the legal system for a crime, but he has almost none of the protections one would normally have when accused by the legal system of a crime.
Suppose ten women accuse Trump of sexual assault long after the assault is claimed to have happened, during a time when Trump is a high profile and very controversial figure. To calculate the probability that it is true of at least one of them it isn’t enough to look at those ten women. You have to consider the much larger number of women who could have invented such charges–women who had some contact with Trump at some time in the past in which an assault could have occurred–and the probability that each would have invented the charge under these circumstances.
If there were a thousand such women, as there easily might be, and each had only a 1% chance of inventing such a charge, then about ten accusers is what you would get if Trump was innocent.
The logic of that case parallels one in a different context that I have thought and written about. Suppose we have a complete DNA database of the U.S. population. The jury is told that the defendant in a particular crime has a DNA match with the evidence that has only one chance in ten million of occurring by accident. That sounds very impressive–until we discover that he was found by looking through the data base and charging the first man they found who matched.
@ The Nybbler
It is unreasonable to expect that every piece of evidence should come with a precise credence attached and a principled rationale for assigning it that credence and no other. This would paralyze us, make it impossible for us to get around in the world at all. We must make do with an intuitive and holistic assessment of the strength of the total evidence, bearing in mind the various types of bias and error that have the potential to infect our judgment.
It looks to me as if four of the accusations are basically independent (five if we count Ivana Trump’s since-recanted claim of marital rape). We have Jill Harth, who sued Trump for attempted rape in 1997; Cassandra Searles, who accused Trump on facebook this past June, but whose allegations were not widely reported at the time; and Jessica Leeds and Rachel Crooks, the two women whose stories were first picked up by the Times. Even if we ignore all of the other allegations, ignore the Access Hollywood tape, and set aside more circumstantial evidence of Trump’s lechery, like his habit of bursting into women’s dressing rooms unannounced, I suspect that these four accusations alone will make it more likely than not that Trump is guilty of at least one of the charges.
You’re making life difficult for yourself here, though, because “more likely than not” is not really enough justification to go around accusing people of serious crimes. Still, if we drop the arbitrary restrictions and instead take the total evidence into account, it seems clear to me that our estimate of the probability that Trump committed sexual assault at least once in his life should be in the .90-.97 range.
@ Jiro
I agree that testimony becomes stronger evidence if the witness is sworn in under penalty of perjury and cross-examined by hostile counsel. I do not see why we should give eyewitness testimony zero weight if these conditions are not met, however.
@ David Friedman
This line of reasoning ends up not working because of the scarcity of accusations of sexual assault lodged against other major political figures. If your probability estimates were reasonable, we should expect there to be comparable numbers of women accusing Obama of sexual assault, accusing Romney of sexual assault, accusing McCain, Kerry, Bush, and so on. AFAIK Bill Clinton is the only presidential candidate to face similar charges (Gore was also accused of molesting a couple of masseuses, but this was long after his political career had ended).
As I noted above, a number of the women also have friends or family willing to attest that they either observed the alleged groping or were informed about it by the victim at the time. Harth’s suit, moreover, was filed in 1997, back when Trump was at best a C-list celebrity.
In which case methods which depend on such precise credence cannot be used to confidently arrive at conclusions. That includes “Look at all those accusations; even if each of them is very shaky on its own, it’s likely at least one of them is true”.
When creationists produce lists of 200 reasons why we should accept creationism, it’s easy to find a bunch of plausible-sounding independent reasons there, and then to say “even ignoring the really bad reasons, surely just these couple of plausible reasons make it likely that creationism is true.”
The trick in a Gish gallop is that rebutting accusations takes some effort and has a nonzero failure rate. If the list of accusations is long, it’s impossible to rebut everything in an airtight way, simply because of the quantity. If you try, you won’t get everything, and then the person presenting the Gish gallop can say “even if you ignore all the other accusations (which you happen to have rebutted more thoroughly), this accusation that you didn’t rebut very well proves that the whole thing is true.”
If you’re faced with a Gish gallop, all you really can do is rebut a few of the easier ones and refuse to do them all, even if you’ve left behind a bunch of “independent” accusations that “survived examination”.
@Control Freak
Sorry it took me a while to respond. I’m out of town.
I think perhaps I misread the tone of your prior post, so we can just chalk that up to tone being hard in writing.
I’m not wed to the “lay originalism” phrase. My basic point was that there were a lot of people quoting federalist 68 at me two weeks ago that two months ago would have said that didn’t care one fig what Hamilton thought that the underlying purpose of the Electoral College was. And I think they were right two months ago.
Separately I think there is a discussion to be had about how people without a sophisticated understanding understand how the Constitution and are system of government should work and how to label them. Probably save that one for another day.
As for AS I agree that he gets a lot of criticism from people too ignorant to make it. Even though I rarely agreed with him, he was a great legal mind and writer that was mostly consistent to his own principles. It was that made the deviations (e.g. B v G, Gonzales v Raich) so disappointing. CT btw also comes in for some very unfair criticism.
@ The Nybbler
The only “method” here is drawing a conclusion with high confidence from many pieces of evidence which are severally weak but collectively strong. I do not think you or anyone else could possibly dispense with this “method” of reasoning.
@ Jiro
This is a weird analogy in several respects. For one, the chief reason to think that creationism is false is the overwhelming evidence that the theory of evolution by natural selection explains the history of life on Earth. There is not, for comparison, much in the way of evidence that Trump is innocent– we have only his own word for it, and we all know how little that means. For two, the points a creationist is likely to make in a debate are going to require some inference on the reader’s part, often fairly elaborate inferences, while in the Trump case we’re talking about eyewitness testimony, which is about as direct as evidence gets.
To be honest, I don’t think you’re going to have much success arguing that it’s in general a bad thing to have multiple, independent sources of evidence to draw on.
EK: Do you know what a Gish Gallop is?
Yes, and I’m urging you to set the jargon aside and focus on the principle that if many witnesses attest that x committed a crime we have solid evidence that x committed a crime. If whatever you’ve read about gish gallops makes you think otherwise, either you are interpreting what you’ve read incorrectly, or what you’ve read is wrong.
It’s a fair point: if the nation was so on board with a Clinton victory, you wouldn’t expect the thought of making any message other than I’m With Her to even enter into their minds.
There are these fascinating maps that show what the United States would look like if you divided it up according to who voted for Trump and who voted for Hillary. It shows how her vote was very much concentrated in a few key areas.
But to how much of an extent is that just because votes can only come from people, and people are concentrated in a few key areas?
As a follow-up to this, I decided to look at the history of faithless electors, expecting faithless electors for the losing candidate to be fairly commonplace. I was wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector#2000_to_present
It seems like even on the losing side, everyone pretty much votes for their candidate: at most one faithless elector across both sides since 1912.
Why does everyone say “faithless” instead of “unfaithful” on this? I don’t recall hearing that form of the word much before, but it is ubiquitous on the topic. Is this my ignorance, or some manipulation of connotations? Any other word aficionados care to clarify for me?
“Faithless elector” is a term of art; it goes back at least to 1969
There’s a 1704 reference to the War of the Spanish Succession, about a faithless elector of the Holy Roman Empire; I don’t know if the American usage derives from that.
Seems extremely unlikely. The electors of the HRE were all major political leaders in their own right, who represented themselves in voting for emperor; they weren’t representing anyone else, and voting for emperor was only a small part of why they mattered. And the elector in question, the Elector of Bavaria, actively plotted the violent overthrow of the Holy Roman Emperor; it wasn’t a matter of voting irregularities. The situations don’t appear comparable.
Before 1920, faithless was more common in general. It is still half as common as unfaithful.
It also has better rhythm in this phrase, which I think actually counts for a lot in determining what becomes the standard pat line.
“Faithless” is the term being used, and it seems to me to have some connotations of “breaking faith with the electorate”, whereas “unfaithful” seems to have more to do with sexual fidelity within a relationship, or to be used more in that context. A bit like adultery, which is mostly and almost exclusively used about marital unfaithfulness, even though it can also be used in speaking of the adulteration of goods.
I kind of suspect that regardless of the reality, every campaign that loses is going to be painted as complete incompetents in retrospect. My bet is that they all look like giant clusterf***s while they’re going on, since these are huge operations spun up in a relatively short time and with unalterable deadlines. If you lost, there will be plenty of tales of chaos to relate after the fact. If you win, the same tales would exist, but they get the gloss of “yeah, we worked hard and burned the midnight oil and it was crazy at times, but by golly we did it!”
I kind of suspect that regardless of the reality, every campaign that loses is going to be painted as complete incompetents in retrospect.
Well, that depends. Had Hillary’s campaign stuck to keeping quiet and accepting through gritted teeth that Trump had won (which, to be fair, seemed to be their initial reaction), probably once the dust had settled it would have been accepted as “they fought hard but lost because they just weren’t prepared for Trump and his style”.
But with everyone including media talking heads screaming about traitors to the sisterhood and the advent of forced re-orientation gay torture camps, and the floating of the balloon about the possibility of faithless electors, and the constant harping on about “She won the popular vote, you know!”, and Jill Stein getting involved in the recount call, and then Podesta jumping on the “The CIA says the Russians hacked the election” bandwagon – all of that just focused even more of a spotlight on her campaign, so any flaws got magnified.
And when the big push to convince the electors to change their minds and “vote their conscience” only results in your own guys voting against you – and let’s take a moment to let that sink in: they were prepared to accept on their behalf a doomed attempt by cheerleaders and supporters to get sufficient Republican electors to change their votes, but it all only resulted in Democrat electors changing their votes from their own candidate – then yes, we’re talking “complete incompetents”. By any stretch of the word “competence”, you cannot include under its aegis “we needed to convince enough of the other side to change their vote for us; however, by raising the possibility of not voting as dictated by the popular vote, we managed to convince our side to change their vote against us”.
If they’d shut up, taken their licking, and went back to overhaul the whole damn structure root and branch so as not to be caught with their pants down again in 2020, they would have come out of this looking a lot better.
I don’t for a moment believe that’s true.
First off, it isn’t possible. There’s no “Clinton Campaign” anymore, and to the extent that there was one, Jill Stein certainly doesn’t count as part of it. If you can lump ‘Jill Stein’s badly-organized recount efforts’ into ‘Clinton making herself look bad’, who couldn’t you add to that basket? What you’re actually saying here is “Everybody who doesn’t like Trump should accept this all gracefully”, a phenomenon I am fairly sure has never happened in the history of America.
Second, while I agree that the electoral swaying efforts were doomed to failure and I’m most sympathetic to arguments that this made people look dumb… so what? There’s a colorable argument that the electoral system was made to resist the election of a crazy demagogue, so to the extent that these people believe Trump to be one, it makes sense to make the argument. You laugh that all they did was shift Clinton’s electors, but you know what the difference between losing by six more electoral votes is? Absolutely nothing. There was really nothing for those people to lose, here.
Finally, I don’t get the pushback on the reminders that Trump lost the popular vote. Sure, it doesn’t make a legal difference. Sure, you can argue that it doesn’t count because ‘people would have campaigned differently then’, or ‘it’s important for Wisconsinites to be worth more than Californians at the electoral level’. Some people disagree that these are compelling arguments and think that it’s important to draw attention to this mechanism, if nothing else to push back against Trump calling his victory a landslide every time he holds a victory rally.
(And look at it the other way- if the fact that Trump lost the popular vote is really so meaningless, why does it ruffle so many feathers to post it? Perhaps some people on both sides of the aisle find something significant there.)
I know perfectly well Jill Stein is not part of the Democratic Party or the Clinton campaign, but she inserted herself into the controversy to make hay and nobody told her “go away, we don’t want you doing this”. What would have been the perfect opportunity to show her quality and exhibit strong leadership by Clinton would have been to issue a statement – or make a public appearance – accepting the result and saying she had no reason to ask for a recount, even if she could not stop any other candidate from asking for one. Instead, what we got was conspicuous silence from Hillary – Achilles sulking in his tent – and her campaign being coy:
After a defeat of this nature, you have to look at what you, your campaign, your allies, and your supporters in the broader realm did and are doing, and if what they are doing is making you look ridiculous, then stop. doing. it.
Indeed, with Podesta leaping onto the “Russians hacked the election and robbed us!” narrative as an excuse, Clinton’s ex-campaign (who are still around as persons available to do work for whomever hires them next, and who had connections, links and ties to the Democrats) workers are making themselves part of the ongoing hysteria, which is not helpful in any way. Trump is now the president of the United States, and his administration is going to be in charge for the next four years. Howling about “not my president” is not going to change that, and some leadership from the Democrats to quell the “we’re all going to die!” circle of mutual conviction would be for the benefit of the entire country. Flailing about looking for “It was the fault of this, that and the other, not our fault!” is not going to stand them or the party well in the next election, and I really do want the Democrats to stand a strong candidate in the next election. But unless some hard lessons have been learned, they look like laying flattering unction to their wounds and making the same old mistakes once more.
When there is a popular delusion of the extent that persuaded people Clinton could still win the election by some jiggery-pokery in the Electoral College, someone to burst that bubble would have been a public service. However, instead we had the media providing space to all kinds of punditry and columnists about how exactly this would work out, actors convinced enough of their own importance to make videos directly addressing the electors to change their votes, and the end result was yet more embarrassment for Clinton and the Democrats. Bad enough that there was never any chance of the magic sudden rebellion by sufficient electors to change the result of the election, but to have the only success be to persuade a handful of electors – and I agree it was only a few – to rebel against your own candidate? That moves from the realm of “fought a decent campaign but made a few missteps” to “making a fool of yourself before God and the public”.
What I care about re: Trump and the popular vote is how it is being presented. Again and again I read what I can only call propaganda – she won massive amounts, she won by a staggering number, she is vastly the winner etc. and this is being uncritically accepted. There is no mention of how narrow the margin is, that it is something like 51% to 49% – a bare majority. I bet that if you ask someone “how much do you think Clinton’s lead over Trump is?” they’d come up with a higher figure, even much higher (the same way people over-estimate the percentage of LGBT in the population) due to this message being drummed into them over and over – Clinton should be the president because she won the popular vote by a whole heap!
What is Hillary doing right now? I have no idea. Is she going to continue in politics or retire to head their Foundation? No idea. She appears to be briefly popping up here and there. Is she going to give up all that she fought for over the years? Is she going to try and run for the Senate again, or will she remain behind the scenes as a party insider? Where can she go from here?
I’m sure whatever it is you’ll post lengthy screeds about it that put it in the worst possible light.
More than half of Republicans believe that Trump won the popular vote.
To be fair, the DNC’s announcement that they were going to participate in the recount events had an almost snarky undertone of “…to make sure there’s an adult in the room while this nonsense goes on”.
More than half of Republicans believe that Trump won the popular vote.
Not the question I asked, Iain, and not one on party grounds either. By how much do people think Hillary won the popular vote?
I’m not disputing she won it. I am disputing how it’s reported. I do think that a distorted impression, that she won by a huge margin and is therefore somehow legitimately the victor, is out there and is being promulgated. If Americans want to change their system to “first past the post” winner of the popular vote, let them do so. That’s not the thing I’m arguing over; I am arguing over the impression being stoked by the media in the phrases it uses as to the margin of victory.
51%-49% results are generally described as close-run, near things, bare majorities and the like. It’s taken as indicating that the winning position did not convince everyone/the losing position very nearly won, or at least that’s how I’m accustomed to seeing it read and interpreted. In the various referenda on divorce in my own country, such results heartened the pro-divorce campaigners to keep pushing for their aim; it was certainly never taken as “Well damn, we lost by 2%, we better give up!”
But this time, this particular result? Yuuuuge numbers! She wuz robbed!
@Deiseach
Well, going by the poll that found 29% of voters thought Trump won the popular vote, 29% of voters presumably think that Clinton won by -2% or something.
Yeah. What I think you are missing, Deiseach, is that the discussion of Hillary’s margin of victory is not happening in a vacuum. It is a corrective to claims that Trump won in a landslide with a massive mandate.
Hillary’s margin of victory in the popular vote would not be particularly impressive if she’d won. But it is unprecedented in modern American politics for the loser of an election to be this far ahead in the popular vote. That’s worth pointing out.
If the corrective to a lie is another lie, you just end up with two tribes that believe in a (different) lie.
How is this at all connected to anything I said? I’m not advocating for lying about the popular vote; I’m just defending its relevance.
You argued that it was a corrective. I argued that a falsehood is a bad corrective.
I never said that you were advocating lying. I was discussing the consequences of using a falsehood as a corrective.
This may not be what interests you or the direction in which you may want to take the discussion and if so, you are free not to reply.
Do you think that your hypothetical situation about lying has any bearing on the situation we were discussing? If so, please elaborate. If not, why did you bring it up?
The post you made looks an awful lot like you wanted to insinuate that people talking about Clinton’s popular vote margin were lying, while maintaining plausible deniability.
” By any stretch of the word “competence”, you cannot include under its aegis “we needed to convince enough of the other side to change their vote for us; however, by raising the possibility of not voting as dictated by the popular vote, we managed to convince our side to change their vote against us”.”
Think about it as a gamble. Suppose they believed that the probability of getting enough Trump supporters to switch to throw it into the House and then getting the House to choose whichever candidate ended up number three in electoral votes was 5%, the probability that they would lose more electoral votes than Trump 95%. Hillary losing electoral votes doesn’t change the outcome, Trump losing enough electoral votes might.
Note also that if that was the plan, it makes sense, as part of the plan, for some of Hillary’s electors to switch to a candidate who they think the House would prefer to Trump in order to make sure that he was in the number three spot. I doubt that’s what happened but it isn’t impossible, given that some of the electoral votes were apparently switched from Hillary to Colin Powell.
It was a poorly thought-out gamble, though I do agree that if I could believe there was that much strategy behind it, I would respect the attempt more.
As you say, if it failed, they were no worse off since she had already lost. But the trouble was betting that enough Republican electors would switch to a non-Trump candidate, presumably because of the perception that Trump was so distasteful to the Republican party.
Now, had there been an agreed third candidate that all the Republican electors could have voted for (be it Rubio or Romney or the Ghost of Christmas Past), this might even have worked, at least to get a respectable number (and in this instance, even ten Republicans switching their vote would have been a respectable result) to vote against their state.
But in the end, there wasn’t an agreed third candidate, so from the Republican side it just looked like “we want you to switch votes so your party does not gain the presidency” – something to which I can’t see anyone being surprised that they said “Hell, no!” It really may have been not so much that they were voting for Trump as voting to keep the Republican Party victory after two terms of a Democrat president.
Also, since there wasn’t a coordinated candidate for the faithless Democrat electors (there was a vote for Faith Spotted Eagle as well as a vote and an attempted vote for Bernie Sanders), and since the aim of getting faithless electors was not alone to prevent Trump from gaining the presidency but to drag Hillary over the line, I don’t think it was an actual strategy or gamble to get a third candidate who would appeal to the House enough to push Trump into third place. It really was more of a popular (populist?) appeal, I don’t think the party itself had any faith in it working or supported it much more than very lukewarmly. I also wonder what the reaction would have been should, for instance, Powell or Warren or Sanders get the nod instead of Clinton. Presumably some people would have been happy on the basis that “better the Devil than Trump”, but all those penning screeds about how third-party voters had betrayed the nation and how white feminists had put their whiteness over solidarity with the sisterhood by voting for Trump or Johnson or Stein instead of Hillary? I don’t think they would have liked that result, either.
And when you end up with more of your own side voting against your candidate than the opposition side voting against their candidate, it looks unplanned, incompetent, and as if you deserved to be beaten.
A dignified acceptance of loss can be respected even by ideological opponents. Getting into a situation where you get beaten twice in a row plus manage to shoot yourself in the foot – that looks rather more like desperation and inability to judge reality correctly.
“There’s no “Clinton Campaign” anymore”
Deiseach doesnt want to hear that.
The day of Trumps first disaster she’ll be here trying to bring the conversation back to the personality flaws of HRC.
Care to make a wager?
When there’s a disaster, I’ll be very happy to discuss it with you all as to what happened and how it could have been avoided.
I will not, however, change my mind on “If only Hillary had been elected, this would never have happened”, anymore than back in the first days of Hope’n’Change, I believed Obama was going to be anything more than a competent politician who would do some good things, fail to do other things, and all in all would be moderately okay.
I don’t think Trump is going to be anything like a great president, I acknowledge he has a lot of flaws, but I also do not believe any of the hysteria about him being a real genuine Nazi or that he will instigate a nuclear war.
@Deiseach
What if the disaster is “Trump embezzles juge amounts of money from the government for his personal use”? Would you argue that would have been equally probable under Hillary?
rlms, I don’t know. I know the Clintons have been tainted with accusations of corruption, but I don’t know how factual those are. So far as I can make out, there was nothing about him/her/them diverting public funds to their own use while in office, either as governor or president; it’s more influence peddling and good old cash-for-access like many other politicians.
So I would not at all be prepared to say “embezzlement would be more likely under Hillary”.
Is Trump an embezzler? Again, that’s something I have no idea. He’s supposed to have fiddled his taxes, but whether he really cheated on not paying what he legally owed, or merely took advantage of the tax avoidance loopholes in the law (like Apple) is something for the IRS to figure out. He is also supposed to have a long record of not paying his contractors. But that’s not embezzlement.
So the question is: (a) Is Trump likely to dip sticky fingers into the till while in office? (b) Is this something equally likely/would never have happened had Hillary been elected?
I think (a) is a very good question to argue, if anyone can produce facts (not “Trump is so bad, of course he’ll steal the pennies from the poor!”) to make a case, e.g. instances where he diverted money raised for Purpose A into his own personal bank accounts.
@Deiseach
The Wikipedia page for the Donald J. Trump Foundation has a long section on “legal and ethical controversies“. As I understand it, it is a private foundation not a public charity, and so doesn’t have any obligation to engage in philanthropy. But from a purely legal perspective, it seems to have got in trouble several times for “purchasing goods and services for personal or business benefit with foundation money” which sounds like what you want. There is a difference between taking money from an organisation that is supposed to be working for your benefit, and from the US government, but it is immaterial if Trump decides that the US government should be working for his benefit.
@rlms:
Trump is highly unlikely, IMO, to embezzle money. Way too direct and completely unnecessary. Using the power of the office to cause money to go to his business interests or influence decisions so that they are favorable to his interests seems almost impossible to avoid, however.
rlms, I think discussing charitable foundations is going to get us bogged down in a quagmire, since the foundation of The Name I Should Avoid candidate also had a bit of trouble about “too much of your funds are going for what look like ‘jobs for the boys’ appointments”.
Personally, I think private foundations etc. are all a huge con-job to (at best) avoid tax in a legitimate way and (at worst) be a private piggy-bank for the board of directors. There are honourable exceptions, but I suppose I’m a bit burned by some scandals here in Ireland.
So if Trump used his private foundation for jiggery-pokery, I have to say (1) I’m neither surprised nor shocked, though I would prefer this kind of thing didn’t happen (2) it’s not on the same level as embezzlement from the government, though I agree it could well be indicative. But ahem, Other Candidate can’t throw stones on that one, you know?
I worry a lot about this in the context of history. there is no political campaign in the world that doesn’t make a few unorthodox decisions and have some squabbling among the senior leadership. If the campaign wins, we call those moves “brilliant realizations” and the squabbling “a team of rivals”. If they lose, it’s “boneheaded mistakes” and “wracked by infighting”. Had hillary won, we’d no doubt be hearing stories about how she bravely and wisely knew she could take resources out of traditional battlegrounds to build up a larger coalition. Instead, we hear how she wasted resources in places she was never going to win.
Did mitt romney run a good campaign? I really feel I have no idea. Maybe he ran an amazing campaign but fundamentals matter more and 61 million votes was simply the maximum that a republican could get in 2012. Or maybe he blew it entirely and should have walked away with 70. I feel we have no way to objectively judge.
I’m getting the feeling that Deiseach took exactly the wrong lesson from her banning and then unbanning.
The apparent schadenfreude is unbecoming, I admit.
Agreed
I have to agree. I was a huge fan of her comments pre-ban, but I feel like they’ve taken a nosedive post-election. No offense, I think yours have too… so, uh, there’s that.
I’m sure I’m not on a completely even keel since the election.
I think I avoided posting at all for a week specifically to not post something really regrettable.
I find the fact that community has no particular interest in Trump’s weaknesses as a to-be-president and what they will mean for the presidency to be disturbing.
I can’t speak for other people, but I am quite unsure what Trump will do exactly. So I don’t know what I can write that isn’t pure speculation or hedged into nothingness.
This is not the same as not being interested, so I think that you might be mistaken in the motives behind the lack of discussion of certain topics (which I think you exaggerate, btw, since topics like potential nuclear war, trade wars, etc have been discussed).
I felt that it was so obvious that Trump would be a problem, even among this greyer tribe, that his downsides weren’t worth chewing through again. I likewise felt that that was pretty consistent with the vast majority of anti-Clinton arguments here. The primary argument of interest here was apparently whether Clinton was bad enough to push her down into Trump territory, and even beyond, since there’s obvious disagreement there. So that’s where the arguments went.
I guess I appreciate HBC taking whatever time off he felt he needed. It could have been worse; EK seems to still be ignoring Clinton’s drawbacks, and fixated on Trump’s.
One example of what I think HBC is talking about: we spent a lot of time pre-election talking about Clinton being corrupt. Trump isn’t even president yet, and we’ve already seen conflict of interest issues at least as bad as anything Clinton ever did. Here’s another example.
I’m sure the anti-corruption crusaders were going to get around to talking about it eventually, though.
I know I’ve already called out Trump as probably the most corrupt US president since Ulysses S. Grant. I think I’ve seen others do the same, all to the same lack of response and subsequent discussion. Because, duh, everybody here understands that Donald J. Trump is corrupt; what’s to discuss?
Point out that Hillary Clinton is also corrupt, then you get discussion. And arguably dogpiling. Maybe there are places where calling out Trump as corrupt would spark a similar argument, but his defenders here at least usually aren’t foolish enough to defend his ethics.
The downsides of Trump have been everywhere for 8 straight months. Talking about these is like reviewing HRC’s email habits again. Asked. Answered. Ad. Infinitum.
We are now in the grace period between hypothetically bad to judging actual performance which is what really matters. I think people are burned out on hypothetical hysteria. Most Trumpsters are in a tenuous wait and see mode.
Many see this grace period as the only potentially fun time because they get to spike the football before Trump starts doing actual crazy stuff that matters.
Trump is likely a high standard deviation president with a PDF that leans toward bad. Just like Obama, everything Trump actually does will have polar opposite interpretations from partisans.
I expect Trump to do some incredibly dumb and impulsive things, but almost all of these dumb things will be inconsequential in the grand scheme but light up the media like fireworks. I expect the right to get hammered in 2018 and 2020 for what they will do in the next 2 years and legislative balance to be restored (see Obama 2008). I prefer gridlock over an activist government any day.
I also expect Trump to bring change to DC, and by all appearances that is going to happen. Good? Bad? I don’t know. He is going to put DC into a mixer and hit puree and see what happens which is exactly what many voters want.
My main prediction: It isn’t going to be boring.
I posted my views on Trump on my blog after he won. He could be very bad, he could be pretty good, he will probably be mildly bad, not necessarily worse than Hillary would have been.
Is it Festivus already? 😛
(sorry, that’s a worthless comment; the timing of the “airing of grievances” brought to mind an old Seinfeld trope).
I agree D, you should think about the purpose of any post with “Clinton” in it for awhile.
She got banned for her comment to another person here, literally telling them she will be happy when they burn in hell. That’s quite a difference from general schadenfreude.
True? Kind? Necessary?
I doubt the Sufi Buddha would approve.
This is certainly not the worst comment I’ve seen on this open thread, so I apologize for you being the one who receives the response. There’s just something that seems especially classless about replying to someone by making disparaging remarks about them to others in public.
We’ve got a button for reporting comments, if someone has crossed the line. There is the option of silence, if they haven’t. And in either case, it can be worthwhile to comment on it to them directly. But commenting on it to third parties seems like a good way to recruit allies and pick a fight. I doubt that was what you wanted.
Anyway, in the future, please think twice before posting. Especially when referencing another commenter’s personal qualities–that sort of thing seems especially likely to end poorly.
‘You used to be better’ is not particularly disparaging. It clearly doesn’t speak to one’s personal qualities, but rather, to a state change.
I think that we’ve all had times where we were in a bad way and ‘aren’t ourselves.’ It can be very healthy to get this pointed out, so one can examine the cause of the change and whether to consciously try to fight against it.
Pointing this out isn’t inherently much different from pointing out that one has adopted a false belief, which compromises one’s ability to reason correctly, IMO.
I’m not sure who this comment is a reply to.
Did I make a disparaging remark about Deiseach’s personal qualities? I don’t think I have here. I’m referring to the content of her posts, and the mindset they appear to convey.
Deiseach was banned (roughly) for saying untoward things that she said she knew would be perceived as untoward. She appears to now be repeating that on some regular basis.
She appears to also be on a trend line of ramping invective, although my subjective interpretation of this is obviously suspect.
In the past I’ve pointed out that Desieach does not like people, something she herself said originally. I’ve also asked politely several times that she tone down her rhetoric. What else would you have me do?
Scott is not paid to be a moderator here. If we do not attempt to self enforce community norms, it is unlikely that mere moderation will retain the community.
I considered the comment to stand for this, plus the fact that both are regulars here, and therefore they presumably know what lines they can cross with the other.
Totally acceptable to criticize a current behavior in a way that implies it’s only current, not innate.
It seemed like a matter of phrasing to me. “This comment violates community norms” seems fine, if stern, and “This comment is the kind of thing that got you banned” also seems appropriate. They are both about the content, rather than the person. On the other hand, “It looks like X learned the wrong lesson from Y” definitely seems to be about the person.
I’m in favor of enforcing community norms. And I appreciate you doing that. However, I also think that if its done in a way that’s easy to read as a personal attack (again, not that that’s what you were going for), or in a way that invites dogpiling it can cause more problems than it solves, mostly by polarizing commentors and/or serving to start arguments of its own. Which is apparently what happened when I tried upthread. Just forget I mentioned it; I don’t really want to have this conversation anymore.
Seeing as my name is being taken in vain, I don’t object to what HeelBear Cub is saying. He is perfectly entitled to his opinion of what this persona is like from the writing, and I have to admit I do lose the volume control at times and start yelling when stepping back and shutting the feck up would be a better idea. So a reminder from time to time doesn’t hurt, even if it is an unfortunate necessity. I do have good intentions of being nice and reasonable and only posting about kittens and rainbows, but that all flies out the window when “Somebody said this? OUTRAGE!” happens.
Thank you to those who defended my honour, but if I ever feel truly insulted by someone, I won’t be backward about coming forward. A good row that isn’t an insult is a different matter, as is being misunderstood and/or misrepresented. If I think X (not meaning any particular X, this is a general hypothetical X) is trying to say that I said something I did not say, I will first try to explain myself – because it could well be that I did not make my point clear and X is labouring under a misapprehension – and if they insist on “No, you said what I said you said, not what you said you said”, then I start yelling.
Which leaves our end back at our beginning, does it not?
There are no private messages here. The only intermediate option between ignoring and reporting (which is a black box, invisible to the reported one) is publicly calling people out. If one wants to establish community norms, that’s pretty much the only option, and being the resident manners scold is part of HBC’s thing.
Plus, in this case, he was right.
Agreed on everything you say; it’s just that I was tired last night and I think the phrasing is troublesome. I think there’s an important difference between “X, you are violating community norms, stop that.” (the 2nd person approach) and “Hey everybody, looks like X is violating community norms again” (the 3rd person approach).
Maybe I just don’t understand communicating online? But offline, the 2nd person approach, while direct, might cause an improvement if the tone is right. The 3rd person approach is good for consensus building, so long as it is done out of X’s hearing; then the community can present X with a united front regarding their behavior. But trying the 3rd person approach right in X’s face seems rude and unlikely to help. It’s hard for me to see how that changes when you take it online.
As you say, there are no private messages here, so building a consensus in private isn’t possible. But doing it as a direct comment on the post in question seems like throwing it in the person’s face. Maybe it works better as a separate top-level comment? That seems to have its own problems. I don’t really know anymore.
In any case, the huge argument I feared hasn’t manifested. Everyone in this subthread has been quite civil, and I don’t see any arguments here except the one I’ve managed to start. So I’ll just keep my mouth shut and my critical nose out of places that aren’t broken from now on; it’s clear that I don’t understand the social dynamic here as well as I thought I did. Apologies.
@Jaskologist: I’m going to assume you got the threading mixed up.
@bassicallyboss:
No, I’m with (the original) you on this one. Deiseach wrote a comment which said literally nothing about any commenters here, and HeelBearCub replied with:
The lesson from the Deiseach ban was that you shouldn’t attack your fellow commenters, including but not limited to telling them you’ll laugh to see them in hell. The Clinton campaign’s still fair game (and the Trump campaign would be, if one could discern anything worthy of the name).
If HBC wanted to complain about D’s over-the-top schadenfreude, he could have written something like, “Hey, watch the over-the-top schadenfreude; that’s what Tumbler is for.” The way he phrased it is…. what’s the charitable term for “like a giant dick, but not in any good sense of the word”? Oh, right: “less constructive.”
(Deiseach’s also wrong on the substance of her comment, but that’s fodder for a separate comment.)
Has Scott Alexander already commented on the article “The Myth of Self-Control” and somehow I just missed it?
I’m trying to write a blog post where I want to refer to what I call the “is-versus-ought” fallacy, but I’ve tried looking it up and the technical definition is not what I was assuming it was. The “casual” definition of the fallacy which I’ve seen mentioned in comments sections is that someone misinterprets advice or suggestions in the face of the existing environment as an indication that those existing conditions are the way things ought to be. “Is-versus-ought” probably commonly refers to some similar types of misinterpretations as well. Can anyone here point me towards a source for this sense of the is/ought fallacy, or is this simply an uncommon misuse of the terminology?
There are many is-ought fallacies. I’m not sure which one you mean. Maybe: interpreting the advice “Lock your door or you will be burgled” as failing to condemn burglars? That is too complicated to be the is-ought fallacy. Also, this is a psychological error about the implications of a statement about the mental state of the speaker, rather than a logical error, and I don’t think such things are usually called fallacies.
I do believe the example you give, while perhaps too specifically complex to be called “the fallacy”, does count as a fallacy. Even if it’s a misinterpretation of the mental state of the speaker, it still originates from the misconception that the “there are burglars where we live” and “there ought to be burglars where we live” are essentially equivalent. At any rate, I was thinking of a slightly more general circumstance where “the world is X” is confused with “the world ought to be X”.
I’m not sure that’s really what’s going on in my example, but if it’s not your example, it’s not important.
Sure, the characteristic of the is-ought fallacy is confusing is and ought. If you just want to use the phrase “an is-ought fallacy” to mean that before you explain the specific confusion in your specific example, that sounds pretty reasonable. If I had to choose a specific meaning, I would choose the naturalistic fallacy, but I’d rather not rely on it communicating a precise meaning.
Do you think such generality is a misuse? Why? Here is the first google hit for it. Does that not cover your use? (Well, this only covers arguing ought from is, not vice versa, but that’s what you want, isn’t it?) Or do you think people use it casually in a very specific manner?
The “is-ought fallacy”– this is jargon, and you should avoid thinking in jargon where at all possible– can be defined as any attempt to infer a prescriptive conclusion (which will typically contain “ought” or “should”) from a set of purely descriptive premises. Note that this definition is even more general than your original gloss. There are also logically valid arguments which contain this fallacy, e.g.:
1. The moon is red and it is not the case that the moon is red.
—
2. You ought to steal the Hope diamond.
I agree with Earthly Knight that the definitive Is-Ought Divide is Hume’s Guillotine. The general idea is that ethics and physics are like oil and water.
Hume’s Guillotine is most often mentioned when someone deduces normative conclusions from purely descriptive premises. E.g. “Abortion is murder. Therefore, abortion should be illegal.” Someone with different ethics might draw an incompatible conclusion from the same premises.
Hume’s Guillotine is also sometimes mentioned when someone voices their desires, but refuse to engage with reality pragmatically. E.g. “Everything should be free.” So who’s gonna foot the bill? “I dunno.”
Based on your description, you’re discussing a related idea that all extent phenomena are morally-just ipso facto. Relevant memes include the Appeal to Nature, the Appeal to Tradition, the Just World Hypothesis, etc. Or maybe none of the above fit. Also. All these terms are fuzzy and interrelated due to semantic drift. So to repeat Earthly Knight again, I’d be explicit to avoid confusion.
I’m not sure what you mean by the is – ought fallacy exactly, but perhaps this is related.
Considering rape – in the ideal world, women should be able to go to any place any time without the fear of being raped. But in the real world, going alone to some sketchy neighbourhoods at 3 am is not a very good idea (not even for a man sometimes but especially for a woman). However, some women get pretty annoyed when you say that – they interpret that as something like “it’s your own fault you get raped if you go there in the middle of the night”.
For some strange reason, this does not work with burglaries. The same neighbourhoods where (mostly) women are in an increased danger of a sexual assault are also usually places where anybody has an increased chance of getting mobbed. If you know that, you should avoid that place. That is not the same as saying hat it is your fault that you were robbed – again, morally the perpetrator is to blame. It does suggest that you deserve a bit less sympathy than someone who got robbed/raped in a place which does not have a reputation for being dangerous (to take it ad absurdum – if you go to a clearly labeled minefield and get blown up, it will be sad and the fault of those who put the mines there, but you were also really stupid and so I will have less sympathy for you than for someone who by a misfortune stumbled upon an unexploded WW2 bomb while doing some construction in his basement and it blew him up)
Somehow, it seems (to me at least) like people accept that with burglaries (or at least some people do that even in case of murder if people go to dangerous places in dangerous countries) but not in the case of rape. I suppose that is because rape is more emotionally charged than burglary.
Yes. Equally, no-one says “well, it was your own fault you were murdered, you shouldn’t have gone to that sketchy neighbourhood and flashed your wallet around, what did you think was going to happen?!”.
This is also because it is usually fairly difficult/pointless to talk to the dead. Unless you are very good at
scienceseance.Ho boy, this turned to the topic of the rape victim-blaming debate fairly quickly. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Certainly it is an example of the fallacy I’m thinking of, although that fallacy is far more general.
To sum up a very complex situation in a nutshell, I would say this roughly comes down to two things. One: there is an anti-rape movement that has become much more prominent in American culture than any anti-burglar movement (arguably rape has been more widespread than burglary in recent decades in the first place). And two: there is a certain existing conservative attitude that anti-rape activists are trying to push back against (“even if she said no with her mouth, she shouldn’t have said yes with her eyes / dress”) that rlms alludes to below.
I’m not American and I have not talked about this with American women (I actually don’t know any American women personally). But I think it is sort of the similar effect as with other highly politicized things – if something sounds like it could be advocating a position you don’t like, you tend to hear it as an apology for that position. So if you’re a woman and you hear someone say “well, going to a neighbourhood with a well-known reputation for crime at night and alone is something you should not do because you are increasing the risk that you’ll get raped”, you interpret it as “if you do that, then it’s your own fault!”.
Generally, “You should do X in order to Y” can be often understood as “You should do X”. The first statement is positive, the second is normative, but if it is something politically charged or something you care about emotionally, you might miss the distinction.
(arguably rape has been more widespread than burglary in recent decades in the first place)
I think this is not correct. The FBI stats report, for 2015, over 1.5 million burglaries. For rape, it was just over 90K. That’s two orders of magnitude difference.
(This information has the great fortune of matching my personal experience – having my stuff burgled multiple times, but not ever sexually assaulted. And while there is an underreporting problem with rape, it’s not like everyone makes a police report for all theft, either. I surely haven’t.)
As for the broader point about people blaming the victim – eh. It has been my experience that people do say things like “well, you knew it was going to be like that when you bought the house in that neighborhood” or “you left it unlocked? Seriously?”
And Peter Moskos talks here (read the comments) about the high false reporting for burglaries.
I think that people think that rape happens more & that only rape victims get (significant) victim blaming is little more than confirmation bias.
There is a narrative that people believe and they notice the things that confirm it, but not the counterexamples. If your friend gets burgled, that was just a crime. If your friend tell you he/she was raped, it is interpreted as proof of rape culture.
Regarding Russian hacking and “fake news”: so far as I can tell, all the fake stuff originates within the US, and everything Wikileaks has leaked has been real. Is it really bad for our electoral process if foreign sources are telling us true information about our politicians? Donna Brazile wouldn’t have gotten in trouble without Wikileaks, for example, but does anyone think she didn’t deserve to get in trouble? If foreigners are revealing to us how our own politicians are perverting our own process, isn’t that a good thing for our electoral process?
There are scenario’s where you can be manipulated into making worse decisions with the truth. For example, imagine that candidate A secretly plans to start a nuclear war and candidate B secretly plans to increase your taxes. Both secret plans make a candidate lose to a blank slate candidate, although voters dislike secret plan A more than B.
A hacker who discovered both these secret plans can choose to make A win by only telling people about the tax increase plan.
A similar, but weaker scenario is one where the hacker only digs into candidate B, so they will never even discover the secret plans of A.
I mean, other than “don’t help our opponents win” what would be the position of those currently complaining about Russian hacking and/or Wikileaks?
Foreigners shouldn’t make information relevant to US elections available to US citizens, even if it’s all true?
It’s okay for foreigners to make information relevant to US elections available to US citizens, but only if they reveal an equal amount of flattering and unflattering stuff about both parties?
You’re really eliding the part where the information was stolen! I wonder why?
Do most media outlets abide by a standard where, if their source came by information through questionable means, they won’t release it, even if it seems important?
Trump didn’t know he was being recorded on the Access Hollywood bus; isn’t releasing that an invasion of his privacy? I’m not saying it shouldn’t have been released, just that releasing DNC e-mails doesn’t strike me as worse than releasing that tape.
Do all 40,000 or whatever emails “seem important” to you?
Many have standards in which the importance of the information is weighted against the impropriety of the means of access, yes. Here’s a decent article about it – recent enough to be engaging with the question of hacking, but before this election cycle.
As mentioned in that article, one of the factors involved is when the leaker of illegally acquired documents appears to be acting for personal or political gain rather than in the public interest.
@Brad
Thats one half of a double-bind. If they release everything, you complain that they released unimportant stuff. If they release selectively, you complain that they’re cherry-picking to make the releases look worse than they are.
The pages from Trump’s state tax returns which they NYT published were every bit as stolen. Perhaps we can complain about that for a while, just for a change of pace.
Rob K, upthread there’s a discussion if the USA should bring about the overthrow of a sovereign government. Even if that position is held to be acting for the good of the people of that country, and granted that the material was private and was stolen, the US complaining about interference by a foreign government in its elections so as to bring about a regime change favorable to the interests of that foreign government – well, are you surprised this is met with dry “Oh, how shocking. Terrible, absolutely terrible”?
@ Deiseach
I object to the Access Hollywood tape unless an equally disturbing video is released about HRC.
This tape showed up two weeks before the election, and I’m going to say something crazy here…those who released it probably had it before then and timed the release for maximum damage.
There is nobody demanding an investigation into the source and motives of the Access Hollywood tape. I’m going to say something crazy…they probably wanted to tilt the election to HRC.
Scandal! Congressional hearings! Nuke the Russians! Cancel the Electoral College vote!
Or not.
Yeah, I actually don’t have a firm, principled stance on who should or should not release what information under what circumstances. I agree that people should have some expectation of privacy in their correspondences, even on the internet.
At the same time, I think private citizens should expect a higher level of privacy than people running for public office, and I can also see an argument that, once in possession of “important” information, however they came by it, a media outlet, should be allowed or maybe even should feel obligated to make it public, if it is crucial to e. g. determining who the best candidate to vote for is (what if you, as a result of digging through his dumpster, find a letter which reveals candidate A is a Manchurian candidate baby killer who plans to get us into a war for profit… do you have a right, maybe even an obligation to reveal this fact?).*
But I also think people have a right to privacy in what they say when they think they are having a private conversation and don’t realize they’re being recorded, and in the content of their tax returns, as well.
My point is, simply, if Trump’s stolen tax returns or comments caught on tape when he thought he was having a private convo. are fair game, then I don’t see why e-mails intercepted by Russian intelligence aren’t. And if comments made 10 years ago about how women let me grab them because I’m a celebrity rise to the level of “public needs to know,” I don’t see how “we cheated to make sure we got the nominee we wanted” doesn’t.
*Edit: Problem is, of course, the subjective judgment about what the public “needs” to know. I’m not sure where the line exactly should be, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t include “former wrestler and reality tv star has embarrassing sex tape.”
@Deiseach As it happens I’m opposed to the US government overthrowing foreign governments, and have made no reference to the “morality” of foreign intervention, focusing instead on whether things are good or bad for the US electoral process and how we ought to react.
But…thanks for the drive-by expression of distaste?
There was a post on LessWrong about a similar problem about a bunch of boxes some of which contain diamonds:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/js/the_bottom_line/
The argument really boils down to “people would have voted for us if they hadn’t read our emails and found out…what…internal… ah crap…”
I’m not seeing anything (but it could be out there, who knows?) that says the Russian hackers invented any of the things they leaked, so that is the basic complaint: people got to see inside the sausage factory.
Please post your username and password so all of us might read your emails.
I do not keep up with the news so I am not sure about the broader talking points but personally the issues as I see them are, internal information was leaked about one campaign in a close election and it might have made enough of a difference to swing the election. A foreign government intentionally leaked this information, possible to generate this exact effect.
The election result is unfortunate, the implications of a foreign government swinging the results of our election are troubling.
I assume the main reason people are still talking about the emails is the Russian connection.
The ‘it’s the truth so who cares’ response from the right is interesting, at first I was confused by it, but then I remembered the post 9/11 right to privacy political landscape, I guess privacy is more of a liberal value?
Do we even have evidence yet that Russia was the source of the leak? Real evidence, not “we have an anonymous source in the CIA who totes says it was.”
Internal information was leaked about both campaigns in a close election, and we still don’t know whose hackers or spies gave Trump’s old tax returns to the New York Times. Could be Chinese, North Korean, any of several domestic factions, plenty of interested parties. Whoever it was, they got far more media play at the time, almost certainly swung more voters, and as far as I’m concerned nobody who wasn’t complaining then has much credibility complaining now.
@Brad
Hardly equivalent, considering that Deiseach is not a public figure running for office, or someone close to a campaign.
I had just assumed that the leaks Trump had were the garden variety, I happen to have this information, so I am going to leak it, kind? Was his tax returns *actually stolen?
In any case, my primary concern is the connection to Russia, if Russia or China had been behind the Trump leak then I would consider that equally worrying, less so with NK and dramatically less so with some random hacker group. If I had to guess, I think this comes from a fear of how competent and capable the manipulating agent is, in my eyes.
I don’t watch much news, but I do listen to NPR to and from work, and I was hearing ’19 different intelligence agencies confirmed Russian hackers’ for a long time before this apparently recent report by the CIA, I think it even came up in one of the debates?
Honestly at this point I am a bit worried that I am missing something obvious. Was there more than one major leak from the democratic side of things this election? I assumed everything in the wiki leaks came from the DNC leak?
*Edit:
By actually stolen I mean intentionally stolen , since I am not sure if it would or would not be theft to leak a private document that you had without consent of the owner of the document.…I am not sure what I mean, maybe somebody else can understand the distinction I am trying to draw here and give me the words needed to describe it?Also because the real reason not to give out one’s password is because it can be used for identity theft, not fear of transparency.
@Tekhno
IIRC Deiseach is some sort of public servant. Why do they deserve privacy when campaign staffers don’t? Or worse still anyone that ever emailed a campaign staffer.
Somehow I don’t think any of you thought through any principled limits on this one.
Pretty much no one does. Honestly, I’d be willing to bet that you don’t, either.
@Brad
If you’re working in the public sector, I think that would make a good cut off point for reduced privacy rights, in proportion with how high up you are. I’ve often argued for progressive regulation for business before, and in a similar vein for progressive justice, or revocation of rights.
I’ve proposed getting money out of politics before by having senators and so on have to completely give up any wealth and previous assets, and become legally cut off from funding outside of the state. I believe that the job should be absolutely austere, and that servants of the public should be dependent on the public.
I’m quite cool with civil servants giving up some rights normal citizens have to become part of the machine. Obviously, civil servants are quite low down in the hierarchy, so it’s not as important as for senators or MPs, who are not as important as Presidents or Prime Ministers.
So you can brush me off as a crazy radical with unworkable ideas, but you can’t say I haven’t put thought into it. Taking aside specific policies, there has to be some kind of hierarchy of responsibility in society, and when it comes to information, we need more access to information on those at the top who purport to rule us. I’m very much in favor of transparent administration on class interest grounds if nothing else.
If you emailed a campaign staffer and get caught up in an absolutely necessary investigation, then that’s a shame, but I consider it worth it in light of this.
I think “Foreigners shouldn’t deliberately help one particular party win” would be a reasonable and consistent stance. If you hack them both and only find dirt on one, that’s fine, so much the worse for the dirty guy. But if you have dirt on both and release for only one, or if you only go looking for dirt on the guy you hate, that indicates that your goal was to swing the election against that candidate, not to make US citizens better-informed.
You’re framing this as if Russia just happened to find themselves with a lot of dirt on Clinton and nothing on Trump, and had to decide to release it or not. But the more likely scenario is that it was intentional – either they specifically targeted Clinton in their research, or they targeted both and then released what they found selectively.
(Actually, WikiLeaks has outright stated that they received leaks about Trump, and didn’t think they were important enough to release. Why should I take their word for it?)
If Wikileaks did receive leaks about Trump, then that makes it sound less likely Russia was intentionally trying to influence the election one way or another. In such a case it goes back to being Wikileaks’s fault. Or else the dirt on Trump genuinely wasn’t interesting. But most of our US news agencies and media outlets have clear biases and preferences, so I don’t know why a non-US outlet shouldn’t be allowed to.
More generally, I think “non-US citizens aren’t allowed to influence US elections, even by simply selectively distributing accurate information” is going to be an increasingly impossible and unreasonable standard to hold. The more globalization and communications technology continue to develop (and the more the US government insists on getting involved abroad), the more non-US citizens and government have strong vested interests in particular outcomes of US elections (and, as many have pointed out, it’s kind of ironic in a “shoe on the other foot” sort of way for Americans now to be complaining about foreigners influencing their elections for their own potential benefit), and the more impossible it will be to prevent Americans hearing what they have to say.
Is there any possible thing that could have been leaked about Trump that would have changed anyone’s mind about him?
When? The closest I can find is Assange saying
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/2200412-julian-assange-of-wikileaks-says-russian-government-wasnt-his-source/
I can think of a few things. Mostly of the “serious felony” sort. A personal bankruptcy filing in the immediately before the election might have also done the trick.
@Onyomi, are you asking what Russia should do or what they will do? Because you sounded like you were framing this in terms of moral obligation – “Isn’t it a good thing to release this information, because that makes American citizens better informed?” That’s why I gave you an argument that involved moral reasoning – “No, if you act with malicious intent, you aren’t making them better-informed.”
If all you care about is what’s practical, then the answer’s simple – Russia does whatever the hell they want in cyberspace, because we can’t practically stop them and we won’t escalate over a little bit of spying. We do whatever the hell we want in return, for the same reason. You know, standard international politics.
@The Nybbler:
The best I could find is this quote from Assange: http://theweek.com/speedreads/645239/julian-assange-tells-megyn-kelly-why-wikileaks-isnt-releasing-dirt-donald-trump
“You know, some people have asked us, ‘When will you release information on Donald Trump?'” Assange said later. “And of course we’re very interested in all countries, to reveal the truth about any candidate, so people can understand, but actually it’s really hard for us to release anything worse than what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth every second day.”
Seems like this would be okay in proportion to the degree to which the actions revealed are in fact “perverting our own process”, vs the extent to which selective release of stolen private files is itself perverting the process.
So, e.g. revealing a plan to engage in widespread voter fraud or falsification of results would be kosher, since the harm done by that action would (presumably) be greater than the harm of the theft and release of the information.
Selectively releasing the internal deliberations of one side in order to negatively frame benign actions or search for unguarded turns of phrase in private communication, on the other hand, would seem like a case where the harm done by an outside actor using its ability to breach private data to influence the outcome of the election in accordance with its aims is by far the greater.
With those as the extremes, there are grey areas in between, but given that I believe that (1) most organization’s internal communications could be used to make that organization look bad if released and treated as inherently newsworthy by the media and (2) giving outside entities power to influence our elections proportional to their skill at accessing private data and using it to influence our media is bad, I’m inclined to put the tipping point closer to the “revelations of major fraud schemes” side.
This seems very similar to Denton’s defenses of Gawker. I don’t recall, what was your position on that?
Hulk Hogan was a politician? I did not know that.
Do you know what the word similar means?
The argument to release the information about Clinton is that it revealed how she acted in her job. The sex tape didn’t do so in any way for HH.
Also, there is far less benefit to mankind to expose a dishonest wrestler, than to expose a dishonest politician.
Sure. I can even use it in a sentence. For example, “A semi-retired wrestler isn’t similar to a Presidential candidate.”
I didn’t pay much attention to that, but Hulk Hogan wasn’t running for office? Releasing a sex video about a private individual strikes me as very different from releasing campaign related emails from political professionals.
Denton claims that the powerful in society, whether that power is a result of political position, wealth, or fame, should be subject to public scrutiny.
For myself, I think private communication ought to be private absent some compelling justification. They ought not to be stolen, and if stolen ought not to be published, and if published ought not to be reported on.
Maybe informing the public about Donna Brazile leaking questions rises to the level of compelling, though I’d tend to lean the other way, but if so just that email could have been leaked.
Just as we saw with Manning, Wikileaks is an indiscriminate organization. Unless your moral code includes radical transparency (hence the Denton comparison) such indiscriminate publishing is immoral. That immorality extends to their sources.
So is the problem that they are indiscriminate, or too selective? Below, Chalid says part of the problem is that they were deceptively selective in what they chose to release.
My understanding is that Wikileaks largely releases big “dumps” of info and leaves others to sort through. Maybe this shows a lack of respect for privacy, but it seems hard to simultaneously claim that they’re too indiscriminate in what true information they reveal and that they are also too partisan/manipulative.
It seems a bit lose-lose: release everything you have and you’re immoral for not respecting privacy; selectively release only the “important” stuff and you’re putting your finger on the scale.
I think the main question, though, to me is: is the fact that Wikileaks isn’t an American media outlet relevant?
I think that’s with respect to Russia, the putative source, not wikileaks.
I don’t think I’m simultaneously claiming that. Or anyone is really. As far as I know, no one is claiming that wikileaks had RNC material and didn’t disclose it. As you say, they are about indiscriminate privacy violations — like Gawker. I think that’s immoral.
No, not with respect to wikileaks, at least in my opinion. But if Russia was the leaker I do think that’s relevant. I’m not sure why you are conflating the two throughout this post.
Okay, so the primary problem is Russia (assuming they are Wikileaks’s source, which I don’t think has been proven?), not Wikileaks.
Then, same question: if Russia, by whatever means (and I assume our government is also trying to hack Russian e-mail accounts), is in possession of information relevant to a US election, are they obligated to keep it secret? To reveal it all indiscriminately? To reveal only the “important” stuff, but in a manner designed not to help or hurt either party, on net?
I’m not sure what you mean by primary. As I’ve said, in my opinion wikileaks is an immoral organization.
Leaving that aside. Russia is a country with its own sovereign interests. I don’t think they acted immorally in hacking the emails — the era of “gentlemen don’t read each other’s letters” is long over. I also don’t think they have an obligation to keep it secret. If they think it is in their national interest, all things considered, to publish then they should publish.
That said, I’m not Russian and I don’t much care about the Russian national interest. I consider both the hacking and the leaking to be bad from the US perspective and I’d like to see our government, which is supposed to protect our interests, respond so as to make sure the Russian calculation was incorrect as to the Russian national interest.
So it was bad for US voters to be provided with true information relevant to their election because the source was foreign?
That sounds very ominous.
No, not because the source was foreign. It would have been equally bad if the source was domestic, but then the remedy would have been in the criminal law rather than international diplomacy.
And I disagree with your framing. I don’t think the information was particularly relevant. At least not enough to outweigh the privacy interests at stake.
I’m not sure what is so ominous about it. If we don’t want countries to do things like this, then we need to make sure they don’t come out ahead.
“I don’t think the information was particularly relevant.”
Knowing that the DNC conspired with news organizations to ensure that Hillary, rather than Bernie, was nominated, seems pretty relevant to our electoral process to me.
@onyomi
My assumption is that even benign leaked information, if treated as newsworthy, is going to be damaging for the side that had its information leaked. As such, this means that an entity that displays the capacity to repeatedly steal information is going to gain power to swing elections if news outlets and the public treat the information as newsworthy and the fact of the leak as neutral.
That, in turn, would incentivize our political leaders to align their policies with the interests of entities proven to be powerful enough to hack and release internal organizational communications.
Given that I don’t want, e.g., American politics to become a proxy fight between Russian and Chinese interests, or for certain sets of national interests to become off limits, I prefer a set of public norms about this type of information that make us more suspicious of it, and make news organizations less likely to publish it, or at least to heavily caveat it with references to the unknown motives of the leakers.
I agree that Americans should be more suspicious of news in general, and, in the future, it is probably a good idea to be suspicious of the motives behind leaks of foreign origin. However, I’m not sure we can establish a firm or even soft “norm” about what gets leaked now that information so easily flows across borders (and that’s mostly a good thing, I think).
However, I think we also have to evaluate based on the source, foreign or domestic. Based purely on its track record, I trust Wikileaks more than a lot of prominent US news organizations.
That, in turn, would incentivize our political leaders to align their policies with the interests of entities proven to be powerful enough to hack and release internal organizational communications.
Perhaps. But it also incentivizes our political leaders to be honest and transparent with us, those they putatively serve, so as to avoid embarrassing public-position/private-position revelations. Call me Pollyanna, but I believe this is the more likely—and more desirable!—outcome.
Sunlight being the best metaphorical disinfectant, and all.
That’s quite the spin. It also doesn’t address the point, I’ve made several times about discriminate versus indiscriminate publication.
Quite the spin?
Though the degree of intentional media complicity may be debatable, how else do you interpret the Chairperson of the DNC conspiring to sabotage one candidate for her own party’s nomination, or vice-Chairperson of the DNC giving debate questions to one candidate in advance at the same time as she worked for a major network?
I will say, that reading more about Donna Brazile’s career, I like her a good deal more now that I know she said:
“Look, I’m a woman, so I like Hillary. I’m black; I like Obama. But I’m also grumpy, so I like John McCain.”
Much of the embarrassment seems to stem from the fact that the emails showed campaigners (in both the presidential and the congressional elections) smiling sweetly at the candidates they were supposed to be supporting and saying “Hi, so glad to be working with you!” then behind their back going “That bitch* is such a screw-up, this is so bad for the party if they’re selected”.
Very embarrassing for the people involved, but if your own campaign don’t think you’re fit to be in charge of a pigsty, why should the people of the state/the nation be lumbered with you simply due to lack of information which the campaign knows but which is not publicly available?
*Intended as gender-neutral term, not to indicate any particular person; some of the people their campaigns wanted to get shot of were guys.
It should be noted that if the RNC was hacked and emails released, it would likely show them conspiring to prevent Trump from getting elected.
This would surprise almost no-one, since they pretty much held this position in clear view.
I think it’s worth distinguishing between two questions:
1. Ideally, what ought the rules about obtaining secret information and releasing it be?
2. What are the rules, as revealed in what behavior is routinely accepted when done for purposes one approves of?
Most of the discussion in the thread seems to be on question 1.
Going to question 2 … . It appears to be generally agreed that the NSA tapped Angela Merkel’s phone. It seems to be generally agreed that the NSA, more generally, is in the business of accessing secret information abroad via the clever use of computer technology. Hence it is hypocritical for the U.S. to object to Russia successfully doing the same thing in the U.S.
President Obama attempted, perhaps unsuccessfully, to influence the outcome of the Brexit vote in the U.K. Hence it is hypocritical for the U.S. government, in particular Obama, to object to Russia trying to influence the outcome of the presidential election here.
All that remains is the combination of the two offenses–using information obtained by successful computer intrusion to influence the U.S. election. That seems a pretty weak basis for all the outrage, running up to arguments for reversing the electoral outcome by persuading electors to transfer their votes.
Back in 2012 someone accessed confidential documents of the Heartland Institute, a think tank critical of global warming policies, apparently by pretending to be a board member and conning someone into sending him the documents. He not only released the information, he released some of it in an edited form to make it look worse. People on the same side as the victims were outraged, but, so far as I could tell at the time, people on his side were mostly gleeful. The leaked information was published by the NYT, Huffington, and others.
Along similar lines in the opposite direction, the Climategate case involved someone getting at the emails of the Climatic Research Unit and publishing them in order to make the AGW side of the argument look bad. As best I can remember, it was again the case that all the outrage came from the victims’ side.
Or in other words, it’s mostly a question of whose ox is gored.
@DavidFriedman
I think it is quite obvious that the sum of the offences is greater than its parts. Specifically, hacking emails in order to generally get more intelligence about a foreign government is very different to hacking them in order to influence an election, much like how stealing a car in order to take your dying husband to hospital is very different to stealing a car to use in a bank robbery. I agree that complaining about a hypothetical Russian hack of some senator’s emails would be hypocritical, as would complaining about Putin endorsing Trump in a manner similar to Obama antiendorsing Brexit (and also that being outraged to the extent of claiming the election’s result is invalid is silly). But it is not hypocritical to be moderately outraged by the allegations, since I would have expected a similar level of outrage if Obama had tried to influence Brexit by hacking Farage’s emails (probably slightly less, since Brexit is less important than the US election).
@DavidFriedman
You don’t see any difference between openly campaigning for a foreign candidate or referendum and using your intelligence service to covertly influence an election and then strenuously denying it?
Certainly you never miss a chance to gore Clinton’s ox. Wonder what’s going on there.
@Deiseach
When are you publishing all your private correspondence again?
This is totally true, and it’s really shameful to watch the masses of people go through the ritual of determining who the “good guys” and “bad guys” are before deciding whether a specific hack/leak was “a totally impermissible invasion of privacy” or, uh, not. You gave climate change examples; others gave the example of Trump’s tax return. I remember seeing the original response to the OPM hack. Perhaps I spend too much time in some anti-gov’t portions of reddit, but it started off with, “Good! The government is evil and deserves to be hurt.” Later, there was, “Actually, there are some good people who just work for the government, and they’re going to be hurt by this, too!” Of course, there’s still some amount of sneering about this whenever someone floats an idea that maybe the feds should do something in the digital domain… as if the fact that they do things in the digital domain implies that they deserved the OPM hack.
Ashley Madison was a great one, too. I saw a lot of, “Good! Cheaters really hurt their spouses,” followed by, “But there are good reasons to use Ashley Madison! There are some good people who will be hurt by this!”
And don’t even get me started on that weekend that the Panama Papers dropped (before taking a vacation… presumably to some quiet Central American resort). It was really fun seeing everyone try to grapple with their complete ignorance of international tax and corporate law. Some just assumed “The Wealthy”, which is obviously The Bad. Most spun in circles trying to figure out bad guys/good guys before they could pass judgment.
Hulk Hogan is an interesting example, in that it was more that the leakers were viewed as bad guys… almost precluding any judgment of Hogan, himself (I’m not sure how much of this is at work with the difference between Russia and the unknown-Trump-tax-leaker). He still almost lost public opinion, because the presence of Notable Bad Guy Peter Thiel nearly tainted him to be worse than the other bad guys.
I’m sure I’m missing tons of examples, but nearly every leak I’ve seen has followed some version of this pattern. The Sony hack was bad, because North Korea is bad. The Yahoo hack is comical and not bad, because nobody you know uses Yahoo and they cooperated with NSA. Pretty much everyone flips on these things.
Honestly, one of the most amusing things out of this whole ordeal is watching all of these pro-leak folks turn on Wikileaks, now that they can be dumped into Camp Russia. The pro/anti-Wikileaks popcorn has been very buttery.
Finally, just in case one of you enterprising folks is wrapped up enough in Camp Clinton that you’re preparing a post to defend an anti-leak position in every one of these cases, I have one word for you: Snowden. Start your super consistent anti-leak position there. And no claims of, “I think the NSA was being the bad guy.”
“You don’t see any difference between openly campaigning for a foreign candidate or referendum and using your intelligence service to covertly influence an election and then strenuously denying it?”
Some difference, as I said. But my guess is that the U.S. has routinely done things along those lines for a long time, and probably other countries as well.
Do you find governments lying about what they do surprising? Unusual? Shocking?
Off topic, but I wonder if that’s really true.
Indeed, the Literally Voldemort contingent in the news media attempted to tar the whole thing with Thiel. But I put it to you that a) the Literally Voldemort contingent were reasoning backwards from their conclusion (Gawker good! Therefore, Gawker’s enemies bad!) and so whoever funded Hogan’s lawsuit would have been designated a hate figure; and b) the news media in this country is widely and roundly despised and ignored, so I’m dubious about their ability to move the needle on a relatively obscure figure like Thiel. Indeed, they might end up creating a backlash in his favor, purely because they expressed their dislike so vehemently.
@ Controls Freak
Finally, just in case one of you enterprising folks is wrapped up enough in Camp Clinton that you’re preparing a post to defend an anti-leak position in every one of these cases
I’m usually pro-leak in the kind of examples you’re using. But … in all this long thread, who is the object of ‘should’? Where’s King Canute when you need him? As soon as y’all agree with each other on who should publish what leaked material and to whom … who is going to enforce this, and how? — Before the Web there was a standard of enforcement and respectable paid news sources to enforce it (at least among themselves). But now, maybe we should be building arcs or surfboards or something.
When are you publishing all your private correspondence again?
Brad, the day I present myself to run as the Third Female President of Ireland and my campaign is to present myself as a flawless saint who has never said or done anything wrong, you are quite free to quote excerpts from my comments on here to tell the public what I am really like.
You are particularly welcome to do that in a case where those in my party or campaign know I am flawed and unsuitable for the position, but to the public are full of rah-rah enthusiasm about how I am the best possible choice.
I’m not arguing for indiscriminate dirt-digging, but I am saying that where their own party doesn’t even want them in office, it’s perhaps in the public interest to know this. Their own party dislikes them because they really are going to crack down on corruption and horsetrading? That’s good to know, and the public might have even more confidence in the candidate. Their own party dislikes them because they are just waiting for the next scandal in a string of scandals to come along? That also is good to know.
Re: the Gawker thing, that was pure prurience and muck-raking. It was done on the basis that sex sells. There was no service to the public in knowing how or in what way Hulk Hogan likes to have sex. Adultery is no longer a crime, and indeed the encounter seems to have been set up with the knowledge and consent of both spouses, so we can’t even say that the husband was being cheated upon. It was a nasty, tacky affair and the selling of the tape was damn close to blackmail on the part of the man. Gawker were not claiming any kind of revelation of shocking depravity or racist attitudes or abuse to his sexual partner or the likes; they put their rationale right up there in the first paragraph before transcribing the contents like they were going for a first draft of their own version of “Fifty Shades of Grey”:
What the public are interested in is not the same thing as the public interest, as someone surely has said. All that Gawker appealed to was: “Here’s a famous guy having sex, and we’ll write it up for you with a teaser extract of the clip, just like any of those ‘real wives’ videos on porn sites”.
So yeah, in this case I think they deserved to be sued. They want to be a porn hub, there’s already one in operation. But if so, then be honest that you’re not peddling news, you’re peddling “wanna see giant horsecocks in hot threesome action!” like the other wank sites.
It wasn’t HRC’s private correspondence that was stolen and published.
And I never said Hillary’s or anyone else’s private correspondence should be revealed, so I don’t know what point there you originally wanted to make, Brad.
What I did say was if you assessed your candidate for congress as a bad lot and you didn’t want him in the job and you did all you could to sabotage his campaign so a different candidate would run, and this later gets leaked, then that kind of information is in the public interest – if the public is being asked to vote for Bob and you know Bob is rotten, then if you’re more interested in keeping the party name clean, and someone else leaks that info, they are acting in the public interest and you don’t really have a leg to stand on when complaining about it.
You contradict yourself within the space of a single post. When you say that when someone steals and publishes private correspondence they are acting in the public interest you are saying that someone’s private correspondence should be revealed.
At least have the decency to own where your obsession with Hillary Clinton has lead you.
If “private correspondence” = “correspondence about private matters” (like, say, who you’re having sex with) and “public correspondence” = “correspondence about public matters” (like, say, stuff relating to your candidacy for public office), then there’s no contradiction at all.
Given that the situation under discussion resembles your hypothetical not at all — because the emails that were stolen were not from a candidate for public office and all the emails were published regardless of topicality, I’d say your reading is highly strained at best.
Hulk Hogan is powerful in society? I did not know that.
And yes, “similar” I do know. But Hulk Hogan/2012 and Hillary Clinton/2016 are about as different as two people can be and still qualify as newsworthy, if we stretch the definition of “newsworthy” to the limit in Hogan’s case.
I think you will find broad bipartisan support for keeping Hillary’s sex tape under wraps.
Ok that made me chuckle.
Jaskologist, I will not say “That is an image I did not need”, because my brain comes to a screeching halt at the words “Hillary” and “sex tape” in conjunction and refuses to go any further, much less provide visual interpretation.
But this is not a concept I ever needed to contemplate this, or the other, side of the grave.
How many Hillary bashing posts is that for you, Deiseach?
Its got to be nearing 4-500 at this point.
I cant wait until the Trump presidency begins.
That’s when you get to start playing defense.
Oh, you dont support Trump, you say?
Ha ha.
SSCons.
Your first two and last three lines add nothing of value. Please up your game.
@Brad
He’s spoke for himself now, but personally, I was for press freedom. I think privacy should generally be a user side issue (on the internet it almost entirely is already; try going to the police about a hacked forum account some time), with pragmatic exceptions for stolen information that concerns finance like credit card numbers and so on. Information on people’s foibles shouldn’t be protected legally merely on the grounds that it is embarrassing or compromising.
I will take the stance that government officials deserve less privacy than the rest of us, however, and there is a right for the public to know almost everything about the government and the people who are running for office, with pragmatic exceptions like information on troop movements and other classified info.
How did you feel about Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns?
Bad. Hasn’t pretty much every President done it? I heard it was unprecedented.
The other issue is that Presidents are supposed to keep their business interests on freeze, but Trump is trying to get around that. I’m not sure what US law says on that explicitly, but it runs against my personal desire for leaders to be as isolated from outside finance as possible anyway.
US law specifically exempts the President and other elected officials from conflict of interest law. So he could legally continue to run his business while President, though you would think sheer exhaustion would prevent that. He’s said he will remove himself from operations, though I’m not sure he hasn’t said the opposite since.
He’s almost certainly not going to sell off his shares of the Trump Organization, and it will be impossible as President for him to avoid doing things which affect the fortunes of that organization, so conflict is inevitable. Even if he gave up all ownership interest, he’d almost certainly give it up to his family, which would still result in a conflict of interest.
It’s a playground-level reaction. Every savvy kid knows that when you get tattled on, you don’t dispute the charge (after all, the tattler could have proof of the allegation he hasn’t disclosed), but rather you collaterally attack the tattler for violating a social norm.
Aren’t you banned?
No, not at all. Perhaps you are thinking of someone with a similar anonymous-pun name? I have been “the anonymouse” for my entire tenure at SSC, but admittedly, I haven’t posted much in the last year.
@Brad
http://i.imgur.com/RbzfAjc.jpg
@NIP
It appears you have some talent with MS Paint. Unfortunately your message is gibberish. Probably some moronic 4chan thing. Feel free to never respond to me again.
Allow me to translate:
“Not an argument.”
Your reply to anonymouse was not an argument. It was, instead, your typical brand of dismissive obtuseness whenever you’re confronted with a line of thinking that makes you uncomfortable. Such low-content replies are only deserving of moronic 4chan gibberish.
>Feel free to never respond to me again.
Oh Brad-senpai, where I come from, that means we’re friends now.
@ NIP
This is the post you should have written the first time around.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy a dank meme or one liner, (I do) it just isn’t what I come to SSC for.
Pre-ban warning for everyone involved in this conversation
Heeded. 🙂
Understood
@Scott
Oh, you’re no fun. But I respect the rules of your house. If you don’t want me going around making people’s monocle’s pop, then I won’t do it, no matter how tempting.
@hlynkacg
You’re probably right. Conversation can be catty enough around here without maymays flying fast and furious. Though I was honestly kind of curious as to whether I’d get any in response. Apparently my hopes were misplaced 🙁
The Democrats (I believe Brazile in particular) did try to dispute the veracity of the emails once or twice. Then someone discovered the DKIM signatures (which mean that altering them would have required access to some high-value private keys, including Google’s), and that was the end of that.
I claim no expertise in the verification of emails, but disputing the veracity of something you know is true–presumably, hoping it can’t be proven and you can skate–also speaks to one’s character.
As a savvy kid I found denial to be a dramatically better tactic in almost all situations, children basically never have proof of anything, and I had good grades and was well liked by the teachers.
The problem is that the leaks are being read and interpreted uncritically.
I think we know that if you take any large organization and selectively leak that organization’s emails with an eye to making them look bad, then you’ll able to succeed in making them look bad. There are always going to be things that people say in “private” that will look immensely embarrassing when released to a wider audience.
So is it *news* that John Podesta might have said unflattering things about other people in private? Probably not, and it shouldn’t be breathlessly reported as such.
So the problem is really a failure of rationality – when we read these emails we mostly think “this looks bad” and stop there. But we should be asking “does this look worse than I’d expect a selective hostile release of emails to look?” and most of us do not think about that question at all. (And even if you do think about the second question, few of us are good enough rationalists to actually override our first gut-level “this looks bad” reaction.)
It doesn’t help that, in general, the news media encourages the first type of thinking because it is more sensational.
But all media outlets must be selective about what they release and the problem of voters being bad at interpreting that is also universal. Moreover, Wikileaks seems unusually unselective in what they release, releasing big “dumps” of info and leaving it to others to sort through.
But does the fact that they are a foreign organization make a difference?
So is it *news* that John Podesta might have said unflattering things about other people in private? Probably not, and it shouldn’t be breathlessly reported as such.
Seeing as how Mr Podesta and others are presenting to the public people they say “Joe Schmoe is a sterling citizen and I’m both proud and excited that he has chosen to work for us, with Joe on the team you the great American public can be assured that the forests will flourish, there will be a chicken in every pot, and no child will be judged on the bathroom their self-identity chooses to use”, then between themselves it’s “Ugh, can you believe we got stuck with Schmoe? Of all the losers out there, why did they pick him? Whose blackmail photos does he have in his possession?”, then it is (for once) in the public interest to know these things.
Okay, I’ll admit the breathlessly gossipy exchanges between that artist and the Podesta brothers about attending her little soirée were not politically pertinent, but they were damn amusing, and if the people can’t get to laugh at the movers and shakers forming their destinies, it’s a poor look-out 🙂
It’s arguably important if you’re Joe Schmoe. It’s not important otherwise. Every organization will have (and *ought to have*) some disconnect between what they say publicly and what they say internally. Acting as if that fact is news, or is scandalous, is ridiculous.
You work on arranging government benefits for people who need them, right? Surely you’ve said unpleasant things about some of those people in private. Would it be in anyone’s interest to release that information?
Various people are worried that the ability of the Russians to access secret information and release it selectively gives them leverage over American politics. The obvious solution is not less intrusion but more. It isn’t as if the techniques used are restricted to the Great Powers of the world.
Countries, individuals, factions, are all players in the game. If there are enough of them, the combined effect should be equal openness for all. That, presumably, is the Wikileaks objective.
Is there’s no such thing as privacy in the glorious anarchist future?
Brad, most people in ancapistan(like most people in america) have little to worry about in terms of privacy, but if you are concerned about your privacy, I am sure Lifelock and their competitors will offer you some great deals on their various privacy protection/home security/fraud protection bundles.
Have you ever worked in a large organization? You need to be able to talk frankly and honestly with your colleagues. That includes occasionally saying things like “this client is a huge asshole so make sure that the people we send to meet him are prepared for being shouted at” or “these customers are pretty ignorant, so when you meet them be sure to carefully go over the basics” – the sorts of things which would be very destructive to the relationship were they to become public.
And of course there are a whole bunch of other categories where secrecy is necessary – for example, negotiating positions or intellectual property/research results or personal employee information.
Full transparency might solve the hacking problem but would hurt organizational performance as a whole.
I guarantee you if the hiring committee made a show of having public competition for a job opening, and it was revealed that they had actually conspired to promote a favored candidate, heads would roll.
It’s like you’re not even trying to grapple with what actually happened, preferring to discuss hypotheticals that paint your side much more favorably than reality does.
While I grew up in the era of privacy and think it’s worth effort to guard on the personal and organizational level, I increasingly suspect the long run it’s no longer a sustainable equilibrium for anyone whose affairs are of interest.
It seems pretty clear at this point that no amount of leak-fueled scandal is going to get most people (outside a small subset of highly disciplined organizations) to adopt serious (but inconvenient) security procedures– and that this is most difficult to apply at the top.
It at least seems as if there are only so many times they can get blindsided by information releases before it becomes clear that it’s not a question of whether but when.
That organizations might be better off with some secure secrets may matter no more than the fact that dinosaurs would be better off without an asteroid hitting the planet. Survival may depend on ability to adapt to what is, rather than regretting what’s been lost.
(I don’t expect to be comfortable in that world, but I wouldn’t have been comfortable living as part of an extended family in a longhouse with no internal walls either. Humans have probably lived without appreciable privacy more often than they’ve had that luxury.)
I work in a large organization that is perfectly comfortable saying that some conversations don’t happen unless e.g. everyone in the room has left their smartphone outside.
I have no problem saying that anyone who finds this to be an insurmountable problem, shouldn’t be trusted with high-level political power in the 21st century.
I work for a multinational corporation, and we have specific training telling us not to talk like that anytime we’re leaving a record. IIRC the stated reason was more to do with legal discovery than with hacking, but there was a clear message that we should never write (or say on a recorded phone line) anything that would embarrass the company if it happened to be revealed in the course of a lawsuit.
This is actually exactly how the government rolls (without the heads). I had a job position created specifically with the intent to bring me on. They said, “We have to get you through the competitive process, and personnel is a black box, so we might not even get to see your CV.” Sure enough, I didn’t make it through personnel (I learned later that you should actually just lie to personnel, because they don’t even bother checking whether you tell the truth). So, they just didn’t hire anyone on the competitive announcement and went through a more arduous process to bring me on without a competitive announcement.
In addition to what Loquat said, this is the thing that really gets me.
If you can’t even follow the most basic of information security procedures like “Don’t discuss X on an open line” you aren’t qualified for the job.
It’s arguably important if you’re Joe Schmoe. It’s not important otherwise.
It may be embarrassing and hurtful for Joe Schmoe. It’s even more hurtful for the public if, six months down the line, Schmoe gets caught in bed with an underage hooker, flown in from South America on the public purse, and the incompetence, corruption and incapacity to do his job has meant that the service he was supposed to provide has not been provided, and the political insiders knew all this about him at the time they were urging him on the public as their representative.
As you may or may not know from some of the anecdotes I’ve relayed on here, certainly there are unpleasant facts about some of our clients. We would certainly release that information to the appropriate bodies if we had (a) sufficient proof (b) our legal advisors permitted us. Sometimes there are quite shocking circumstances that we can do nothing about because it’s all second-hand information, or the informants are too afraid to agree to go to the police and support the complaint.
There are personal and confidential facts about people’s lives and circumstances and misfortunes that we learn in the course of doing the job which are of no concern to anyone but the person involved. Other times there are things such as “This client was verbally and physically aggressive when they came in for interview, just to let you know not to go alone into the interview room with him” which we tell other members of staff here or in our city office, which of course we would not relate publicly – unless it became a public matter, e.g. if we made a formal complaint to the police over that client breaking a door or threatening a staff member.
That is a different matter to “I know the new Head of Section is transferring money from the budget to a vanity project which will profit his brother-in-law’s construction company who got the job by the new Head fiddling with the tender process, which is why the commercial property rates have been increased in order to cover the shortfall, but as long as you and me and Bill in the office know this, the public – including the businesses paying the increased rates – don’t have any reason to be told”.
I work for a multinational corporation, and we have specific training telling us not to talk like that anytime we’re leaving a record. IIRC the stated reason was more to do with legal discovery than with hacking,
I received the same training back when I was at a big corporation. And the result, at least if you look at the banking industry, the result is that a) it is in fact pretty inconvenient, and b) people write emails like that anyway. For publicly available examples, look at how the SEC always manages to dig up and publish comically terrible quotes when it brings an action against a company.
And, at least in banking, the training mostly extends to “don’t call clients muppets on email” or “if you’re doing something that might look unethical if looked at the wrong way, use the phone.” If you look at everything which, if released by hostile hackers, would be damaging to the organization, it’s a huge part of the ordinary course of business. Negotiating positions. Employee performance and promotion. Code. Trading strategies. Private and confidential information about clients. Work on mergers that need to stay secret until they are complete. ALL of these are discussed in email.
Didn’t we learn about eight years ago that the banking industry is not actually run by the sort of cautious, risk-averse people we want to have wielding great power in our society?
There are other corporate and institutional cultures, from which we can reseed any niches left fallow by people who couldn’t tolerate necessary inconveniences. Think of it as evolution in action, though the SEC might constitute Unnatural Selection.
This can backfire. I was talking to my wife’s 401K provider and querying why index fund fees were so high when I can buy them on the open market way cheaper (off topic…I understand they have extra reporting costs but the fees were excessive).
Anyhow the agent absolutely refused to have the conversation on email, it was obvious this was his training. I wanted to use email so I can copy/paste stuff, time shifting, etc. Now to me this puts up red flags that he is unwilling to say anything on the record and that seems suspicious.
I imagine it is the new legal liability laws brokers are under that has made them ultra-paranoid.
There are other corporate and institutional cultures, from which we can reseed any niches left fallow by people who couldn’t tolerate necessary inconveniences. Think of it as evolution in action, though the SEC might constitute Unnatural Selection.
I get that you’re very careful about national security information, and good on you for that. But I notice that you are not, in fact, telling me that you live in a company where your negotiating positions, discussions about deals with suppliers and customers, employee performance discussions, etc. all take place exclusively offline.
Imagine you’re telling a subordinate to go buy some electronics from a vendor. You tell him that your company will be happy to pay the full list price of $30/part, because the parts are absolutely essential for the project and the competitors’ $25 versions don’t quite meet your needs. But he should try to see if he can convince your vendor to give you a discount by pointing to the competitors’ parts.
If hostile hackers released this information you’d never get a discount from this company.
Do you agree that this is
a) an appropriate sort of conversation for a business to have internally?
b) a conversation which would be damaging to the company if released?
c) the sort of conversation that even the most careful companies would not be shy about putting in email?
On the one hand, I think it is very useful for organization to have some disconnect between what is said publically and what is said internally.
On the other hand, I believe in systematically stripping government organizations of that ability outside of very strictly defined limits (national/operational security and negotiating advantage with other states, for example), and combining that with criminalizing (not merely making it a violation of best practice, but a go-directly-to-jail offense) using alternative communication channels for work-related communications.
I’m perfectly fine with the idea of public servants having about the same expectation of privacy in their workplace and work-related activities vis a vis the American public as I had as an E-2 in the Barracks vis a vis my NCOs (i.e. None. They could, and did, enter unannounced at any time for any or no reason, search my belongings, toss my room, etc).
And for much the same reason.
I’d argue that if we had an expectation of transparency except where merited (security/diplomatic reasons, for example), and with those exceptions subject to strictly enforced timed disclosure rules, it would undermine a lot of the perceived legitimacy of various hackers. We actually DO have some laws that aspire towards this, but they don’t work particularly well and they are generally spottily enforced and/or depend on prodding and attention from outside actors to work.
If you have a good mechanism for keeping the public informed, it strengthens your hand when you want to crack down on people trying to argue that they’re doing what you won’t vis a vis the public’s right to know.
This was the take before the election, nothing to see here, and it was pretty much unscandalous scandal for the primary US vote. It was important inside the DNC and took Wasserman down rightfully.
After the vote the postmortems didn’t mention this as a factor at all, but now the DNC wants to halt the Electoral College vote because of their own unscandalous emails and security incompetence.
Color me unimpressed with this line of thinking.
now the DNC wants to halt the Electoral College vote
no it doesn’t.
Source?
I am referring to Podesta backing the call for intelligence briefings (which would delay the vote, security clearances, blah blah blah). The wording could have been more precise.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/clinton-campaign-backs-call-for-intelligence-briefing-before-electoral-college-vote-232512
I thought that SNL sketch about Hillary calling to the home of an elector was simply satirical comedy, but apparently no, they really have targeted the electors with video messages from celebs?
About all that’s left now is grabbing onto the electors’ trouserlegs while crumpled in a sobbing heap and wailing “But she was supposed to be our first female president! We had the fireworks barge and everything ready!”
Wait, that was a thing? And it was in the public record before election day?
OK, my respect for Trump’s alleged deal-making skills has taken (another) dive, that he wasn’t able to buy that barge for ten cents on the dollar at about 9 PM on the 8th and have it towed over to his celebration.
Didn’t Trump claim that he at least made that offer?
He says he did. For five cents on the dollar, not ten.
Consider your faith in Trump as both a deal-maker and a master troll restored.
You are being too generous. A master deal maker has to actually close the deals.
@Randy M
True, but you can’t really conclude much from one deal. Even a master deal-maker doesn’t make every deal. There’s probably even some ideal percentage of deals a person has to be seen to walk away from to improve their chances in the others.
I suspect the problem would be legal. You couldn’t get the permits changed on such short notice, and asking the various authorities for permission to tow a loaded barge through a heavily-traveled river is something I’d only like to see from a great distance.
That said, the article makes me somewhat annoyed. The FD is obviously going to be asked to support a fireworks display. The fact that Clinton is the one doing the display is irrelevant.
(I’m not sure what the exact permits she was using were. I assume there’s a special category for things like sport victories which allow you to shoot them at a variety of times.)
Also, I should point that the display was only supposed to last two minutes, which isn’t very long at all, and implies that the shoot wasn’t very big. Having some nice stuff to do when you declare victory is par for the course. 2 minutes of pyro, unless you try to replicate this, is pretty small potatoes.
I imagine Hillary was in such an incandescence of fury about her loss that she would have cut the throat of her grand-daughter on live television before she even entertained the idea of responding to Trump’s offer, so even if he made it, it would have gone nowhere.
As bean says, the boring truth is probably that by the time the awful truth sunk in, it was too late and too much trouble to try and move the barge to the real victory party 🙂
Anyway, forget the barge, the part I really loved was deliberately hiring the venue with the big glass ceiling for symbolic value. See, this is why bringing back the Classics is a good idea – every Greek tragedy would have taught her about hubris and what happens when you make big, splashy, symbolic gestures that tempt Fate 🙂
Annnnd that’s when Nemesis strapped on her sandals and looked up your address on her GPS, Hillary 🙂
On farther investigation, they were apparently planning to use 10″ shells. I withdraw my earlier statement that a 2-minute display is likely to be pretty small. 10″ shells are not cheap, and using them means you’re putting on a pretty big show. (The reported $7 million budget seems way too high. That would probably put it in the top 5 displays in the country for 2016, and while it is physically possible to shoot that much in 2 minutes, it’s going to look like the Big Bay Boom, 2012.)
Context: For legal reasons, the biggest shells in a medium-sized show are rarely over 8″. The problem is that fireworks over 8″ are classified as shipping category 1.1G instead of 1.3G. There’s only one port in the country that can take 1.1 explosives, and it’s in Louisiana. Oh, and you can’t ship 1.1 through the Panama Canal, either. So it’s basically impossible to import stuff above 8″ from China, where 95+% of the fireworks you see come from. Anything you see above 8″ is produced domestically, because it’s not actually that hard to move 1.1 within the country, but American fireworks are a lot more expensive than Chinese fireworks. Normally a show using 10″ shells is going to last a lot more than 2 minutes, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the type of show Hillary was doing had that as the time limit.
She’s lucky she lost, I think. If she’d won, I suspect that the barge would have exploded (yes, it happens from time to time) and that glass ceiling would have broken for real.
If she’d won, I suspect that the barge would have exploded
bean, are you telling me…
RUSSIANS HACKED THE VICTORY BARGE TO ASSASSINATE HILLARY BEFORE SHE COULD BE INAUGURATED???
Come on, this is too glorious an addition to the conspiracy to let such a tantalising detail be debunked by the cold pitiless light of fact 😉
They say an image is worth a thousand words, so here’s 1005.
Uhh….
Well, that would explain what happened in San Diego in 2012, which was frankly incredible according to the explanation I got.
(They also would have had to physically sabotage the barge, or at least the racks/sandboxes on the barge.)
I was just thinking that Nemesis was merciful and allowed her to lose instead of killing her in a freak fireworks accident with lots of extra irony. But your version is definitely better.
As an aside, I dislike the phrasing that’s going around “hacking our election”; in popular parlance hacking is seen as accessing some technological device to change it’s function, and hacking the election very strongly implies something like manipulating voting devices or the tabulated results, when the crime was more in the order of “selectively leaking information stolen from a political organization in an attempt to covertly persuade people.”
The difference being that I think if the former were done that should immediately invalidate the results, but not if the latter were done. In no election do voters have entirely true or rational beliefs in their heads, so one can’t draw a line when some portion of those beliefs are there due to foreign sources, and thus the results should stand as they accurately reflect the will of the electorate at the time of the election.
I feel like there are two claims here that are being purposely conflated…
A) That the Russians (or someone else with a bone to pick with Clinton and the DNC) obtained some unflattering but otherwise genuine material, including evidence of corruption, and decided to release it in a manner designed to cause maximum embarrassment to the DNC, and undermine Clinton’s electoral chances.
B) That Putin actively colluded with the Trump campaign to “hack” the election by using Russian assets to sabotage the DNC, alter ballots, and spread pro-Trump propaganda.
‘A’ strikes me as being highly plausible, even probable. That said, our government routinely uses “strategic leaks” to influence current events so it’d be kind of hypocritical
of us to treat that as Casus Belli. After all, spies goanna spy, and turn-about is fair play.
‘B’ if true, would be a legit reason IMO to call a mulligan on the whole election and perhaps send a harshly worded note to the Kremlin taped to a very large bomb. However, all the evidence thus far has been in the form of “A is probably true therefore B must be true” and I find that only slightly more convincing than the whole “pizzagate” thing.
Even here though I think you are conflating dissimilar acts. “Altering ballots” means the actual vote was a farce; spreading Pro-Trump propaganda means doing nothing more than what any other citizen–or, heck, non-citizen–is entitled to do. (Although with possible violation of election laws depending on the level of coordination and spending involved)
Sabotaging the DNC covers a wide range of actions that all should be stopped but of varying severity. I am sure that having elections retain credibility means such things do not happen regularly or without punishment; I’m not sure if they can be mitigated after the fact without causing more damage. That is, would power being cut to a phone bank in FL on for a couple days before the election invalidate the entire vote in and of itself? Would it be worth an unprecidented re-vote? I doubt it, but if such things happened regularly it would of course undermine the republic.
I do not believe that this is a realistic expectation. The sort of hacking we are talking about is too easy to do, too hard to detect, too easy to deny, and not nearly hard enough to falsely attribute to a third party. And the sort of hackers we are talking about, mostly work for foreign regimes that don’t care about our norms or our angry words and can mount a nuclear-grade defense against any material retaliation, or for criminal enterprises that care even less and cannot be pinned down in any targetable sense. They benefit simply from casting doubt on the legitimacy of our elections, and we can’t realistically punish them for it.
We can, plausibly, demand that our country be run by people smart enough not to hand over their password to anyone who sends them an “I’m from the IT department and I’m here to help” email, and disciplined enough to leave their phones in the lockboxes outside the hall before they talk about the 47% or the deplorables or whatever.
I may be wrong, but I don’t think there is an ability to revote. Electoral college change, impeachment, etc may be paths. But a new vote based on new rules made up after the election? What could go wrong?
@ John
Sorry, in that particular quote you responded to I was referring to the broader category of “sabotaging the DNC” and had in mind things like intimidating staffers, Watergate type stuff, etc., things I haven’t seen alleged to have happened but what comes to mind when I see the phrase hlynkacg used in B above.
I agree with you that IT security is always going to be imperfect, but what I was trying to say was that if the public felt that one particular political party was subject to recurring intimidation or undermining, it would be a bad thing and require some sort of response, even though I don’t know the proper response to an isolated incident but think demanding the vote be seen as invalidated would be too much of one.
If we covertly assassinated a Russian or Chinese hacker there would no doubt be some sort of serious retaliation but a nuclear bomb seems highly far-fetched.
A conventional bomb or missile “accidentally” hitting one of our embassies somewhere seems rather less far-fetched, and harder for us to complain about. The nukes are to keep us from retaliating for that.
Or they could just stick to retaliatory assassinations; that’s not a game we are likely to win against an ex-KGB colonel serving as head of state for the nation that still has all the KGB’s assassins on staff.
I would hope that if we covertly assassinated a Russian hacker we’d at least have the sense to pin it on domestic enemies or the Chinese or maybe the Israelis. What’s the point in being a sinister intelligence agency if you can’t engage in false-flagging?
(and I don’t buy the “accidental” bombing of the Chinese embassy either)
@John Ankara, your move Russia.
Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated, so there is precedent for this type of action. This wouldn’t be a great loss for the Russian regime, so it may not be useful here.
Or they could just stick to retaliatory assassinations; that’s not a game we are likely to win against an ex-KGB colonel serving as head of state for the nation that still has all the KGB’s assassins on staff.
The Russian ambassador to Turkey has just been killed, so talking about political assassinations is a bit close to the bone right now.
My impression is that, more than those two claims, it feels to me like some are hoping to conflate the following*:
1. Russians gave illicitly obtained info to Wikileaks, which helped swing the election for Trump.
+
2. Various news outlets spread “fake” news about Hillary with no basis in reality, helping to swing the election for Trump.
=
3. Russia swung our election in favor of Trump with fake news.
My point being, if Russia did help Trump, they did it with real news. Whether that was a good thing, of course, is another matter, but I think this conflation works to the advantage of those looking to retaliate against Russia and/or clamp down on media here because “foreign government interfered in our election with disinformation” sounds a lot more sinister than “foreign government interfered in our election with accurate information” and/or “domestic news outlets sometimes make stuff up.”
*(I haven’t heard anyone seriously claim Russians e. g. rigged our voting machines, though maybe some are subtly implying that)
Even your “1” assumes that the Russians were trying to help Trump, as opposed to simply sowing maximum discord. Supposedly they also attempted to hack the RNC, but either failed or didn’t find anything they wanted to release. If it’s the former, it could well be that they wanted to discredit both candidates but only managed to get the dirt on Hillary’s side.
EDIT: In hlynkacg’s original post there’s actually another possibility – that Russia was intentionally helping Trump, but Trump had no knowledge of this or coordination. “Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the election” is the weakest / least supported leap (but would obviously be the most damning if true).
“Russia wanted to help Trump via leaks of hacked emails” kind of relies on assuming that they had potentially damaging info on Trump and chose not to release it. But “failed to get damaging info despite trying” seems at least as plausible, if not more likely. Hell, at this point, how do we even know that what we have from the DNC is the worst the Russians found? Maybe they kept a juicy reserve for blackmail (of either candidate) and just released a teaser to prove they could?
What?
Also, onyomi’s “1” makes no assumptions about Russian intentions.
You’re right, onyomi made no explicit statement re: Russia’s intentions so I wasn’t fair to onyomi. But that does seem to be the form the argument is taking in the wild, that Russia was deliberately attempting to help Trump win.
We apparently have evidence that Russians at least attempted to hack RNC accounts. For DNC email hacking alone to prove that Russia’s goal was to help Trump, one has to assume that these attacks on the RNC were intended to help Trump – which seems weird.
Either they failed to penetrate the RNC, succeeded but found no juicy dirt, or they succeeded and found dirt and chose not to release it. Either of the first two leave open the possibility that they wanted to discredit Trump as well, but failed.
Either they failed to penetrate the RNC, succeeded but found no juicy dirt, or they succeeded and found dirt and chose not to release it.
If the RNC had good, solid dirt on Trump I think they would have used it, because unless we think they really, really wanted Trump as their candidate, why wouldn’t they? And unless we think they were all lying all along in an elaborate bluff by running all those other candidates and having top party members refusing to endorse Trump, it sure looked like they didn’t want him as their candidate.
So it could be the Russians either were not able to hack the RNC or did hack them but found nothing new on Trump that wasn’t already out there re: tax, not paying his contractors, being crude and lascivious around women, etc.
This most shocking thing possible in a RNC email would be them secretly conspiring to support and elect Trump.
Yeah, I mean, if publishing or withholding information to influence an election counts as election-hacking, then I guess Scott’s decision not to publish “You’re Still Crying Wolf” until after November 8 means that he’s now an election-hacker.
I always suspected Scott stole that essay from the Kremlin propaganda arm!
Worse still, it means Scott is an agent of the Kremlin propaganda arm! 🙂
On the subject of hacking an election …
I seem to remember claims that, during one of Obama’s elections, the software used by the Republicans for coordinating their election day efforts didn’t work and it was suspected that it had been deliberately sabotaged by someone on the other side.
Does anyone remember the details and whether there was actual evidence?
There’s a Wikipedia page on the software:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORCA_(computer_system)
This arstechnica article references the sabotage claims
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/orca-was-no-fail-whale-says-romneys-digital-director/
That points here:
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2012/11/was-al-gores-dev-in-charge-of-romneys-aps.html
Anyway, if there was anything to the claims, I expect they’d have shown up in Podesta’s emails.
You know what is even worse about the whole affair? These extracts from leaked emails from 2014, where Hillary is giving speeches and talking about exactly this – cybersecurity risks given that Russia and China are targeting US government departments:
And now there is outrage about oh no, who knew the Russians were doing this, how dare they? Either the DNC was remarkably cavalier about believing the reported threat (and the article on it makes it sound like a Mickey Mouse operation, where they had one part-time guy handling IT security who didn’t believe the FBI agent was a real agent), or didn’t know about it even though Hillary was telling the world on her speech-giving circuit that the Russians and the Chinese were hacking the US!
This whole affair is like a French farce!
To add a more explicit model to the arguments already made on this thread:
The worry is more about the combination of capacity and national interests. Imagine that the NSA started handing massive info-dumps related to one candidate over to Wikileaks. A natural conclusion would be that the NSA doesn’t want that candidate elected. Beyond generic privacy issues that affect every American, the NSA is in an unusually good position (on a technical level) to turn up “dirt”. If actual dirt has a roughly uniform distribution, and they’re only turning over dirt on one candidate, they could have a distorting effect on the election even if everything turn over is genuine.
Russia doesn’t have the legal force in the U.S. that the NSA has, but it still has the resources of a large, technically adept nation engaged in espionage. Some people seem to have the attitude that technology is so leveling that scrappy hackers and national governments are equivalent in that arena, but finding genuinely new vulnerabilities and (keeping them for private use) is hard and, ultimately, expensive. Stuff that’s used too much gets countered and patched. So if Russia plausibly has significantly better capacities, and an interest in how our elections turn out, the sort of worries that have been raised are plausible.
So does China. So does North Korea, and France, Israel, etc. And some large subnational organizations. The idea that all of these are going to voluntarily refrain from “hacking our elections” because we say that Violates a Norm, is ludicrous. Particularly when it is the United States making that claim.
I don’t think I have seen anyone make that claim. At most, it is relevant that “scrappy hackers” are capable enough that they could plausibly have gotten lucky and stumbled on to some particular piece of juicy data, and the theory that they might have done so gives plausible deniability to the government that really did so.
Fortunately, making your critical systems secure even against a large nation-state’s espionage arms is something we know how to do, even as “make the scary foreigners stop trying to Hack Our Elections!”, isn’t.
Well it’s kind of funny that the subject of what Obama should do about is not even discussed. You either accept it, or do something about it. If it crosses a line, fight back. Did this cross Obama’s line? I can’t tell.
I imagine Obama is terrified to leave Trump with an escalating situation with Russia because the new CEO always want to have an immediate impact on his organization. Trump isn’t likely to back down during week 1.
My guess is Obama does nothing, and Putin assumed this all along.
The last time someone crossed one of Obama’s explicit red lines, his response was pious speechifying until Vladimir Putin showed up and said “look, I can make this all go away for you and you won’t have to get your hands dirty”. I’m certain Vlad can cough up a promise that he’ll for sure go after those naughty rogue hackers and make sure this never happens again.
I imagine Obama is terrified to leave Trump with an escalating situation with Russia
No, I imagine Obama would be quite happy to leave Trump in the soup, but his concern would be if that affects his “legacy”. He is very concerned with his reputation, so doing nothing and letting it all go to Hell and getting the blame for that in the “judgement of history” may be enough of a prick to his vanity to get him to do something.
Though what, realistically, can he do? All the tut-tutting and finger-wagging about Trump antagonising China – isn’t it just as bad to antagonise Russia?
“The last time someone crossed one of Obama’s explicit red lines,
his response was pious speechifying
until Vladimir Putin showed up and said “look, I can make this all go away for you and you won’t have to get your hands dirty”.
I’m certain Vlad can cough up a promise that he’ll for sure go after
those naughty rogue hackers and make sure this never happens again.”
Wow six poisonous implicatures injected into one bitter cookie.
If actual dirt has a roughly uniform distribution, and they’re only turning over dirt on one candidate, they could have a distorting effect on the election even if everything turn over is genuine.
Was that the case with Trump vs Clinton, though? The assumption about Trump was that he was unelectable because of what he did in public – he was arrogant, boastful, crude, vulgar, sexist, racist, tax dodger, bilked his creditors, etc etc etc. There wasn’t any “he presents this slick, clean public image but wait until we dish the dirt and people find out he likes hanging around younger women, pretending to be richer than he is, has some very incorrect opinions about minority ethnicities and religions, and oh yeah – his grandfather was an immigrant!”
Even that lurid paedophilia rape-murder accusation was out there, though that seems to have little to no effect on the campaign – maybe because it wasn’t taken up by the mainstream media?
And the Clinton campaign emails were not saying anything really extreme – let’s ignore Pizzagate because that was a separate matter of something being cooked up as deliberate nonsense that was then taken seriously by a small contingent already disposed to conspiracy theorising – it was just the volume of stuff leaked and the look at how internal party politics are run. The biggest damage, I think (because it seems to be the part being downplayed and pooh-poohed by Democrat-inclined or supporters in articles and online) was the revelation that the DNC were favouring one candidate over another to the point of doing all they could to make Hillary the sole choice and nominee and helping her campaign over Sanders; not being neutral or following the will of the party and members, but being the Hillary National Convention.
Even had the RNC had its documents revealed in the same way (and it seems that the Russians – if we take it that we are talking about Russian-government backed or at least associated hackers doing all this – did indeed also hack, or attempt to hack, the RNC but didn’t find anything worth leaking) it would not have been the same kind of revelation: the Republican party doesn’t like Trump as a candidate? They want to try and get someone else in his stead? We already knew that! Unless there was something there about, say, pro-Cruz supporters within the RNC trying to sabotage Jeb or something, there was nothing as harmful.
Well, unless they had dynamite material to destroy Trump’s campaign, but if they had, they would have used it all along.
I agree that nobody wants outside influence in their internal affairs especially when it comes to elections and the popular vote, I agree that this is truly harmful, but the main problem is that the Democrats and Hillary’s campaign caused themselves all this trouble. If all the Russians had found from the DNC attack was “We are going to follow the rules scrupulously and those rules are not going to be set up in such a way that candidate A has all the chances and candidate B is scuppered, and it is indeed going to be the best interests of the party that are served” and if the congressional campaigns had all been “we love and fully support our candidates because they are all the best on offer” and if Hillary’s campaign had not been so up itself, the Russians would have nothing to leak.
The Podestas like pretentious art? Would have been five minutes’ worth of gossip and mockery and nothing else. Pretentious artist who likes to think she is Fighting Da Man is actually as tightly knit in the circles of affluence and influence that her art struggles against, and is quite happy to engage in the class rituals of nice little dinner parties for like-minded and schmoozing donors? Ditto.
BUT – Hillary much prefers schmoozing rich donors* to mingling with the little folks on the stump, the campaign is as rife with in-fighting and back-stabbing and jealousy like a bunch of fourteen year old girls, there’s quid pro quo in “Hey John, I am Bigbucks Donor whom you should very well be aware makes regular large contributions to your party coffers, my kid is looking for an internship with Fancy Schmancy And Klassy Partners, put a word in for him okay?” and the rest of it? Drastically undercuts your “I’m With Her ‘Cos She’s With You, the Underprivileged” message.
*Refusing to release contents of speeches made to banks, etc. on the paid to speak after-dinner circuit, which are then leaked? Doesn’t make you look good, does make you look secretive, two-faced and so forth. Yes, even though this is material you are using for your paid speech-giving, because that makes it seem even more like talking out of both sides of your mouth: you are telling your paymasters the real deal, you are saying something different to the electorate which you have no intention of doing once you get into power.
And so does the electorate when you are asking them to vote for you, Hillary. Telling those deemed worthy to be in the know that sure, there’s a difference between what you say in public and what you say in private, because you have to make all kinds of compromises to get deals made does not help you – even if it’s true! – when it comes out in the wash. The last resort of spin control is this: if it’s going to be made public anyway, then you make it public yourself, because that way you can exercise some control over it.
@Deiseach
The actual and much more damaging revelation was that Clinton gave a speech to German bankers that was different from her other speeches and very critical of bankers, specifically to leak that one speech to the press, misleading the public about the content of her other speeches.
It probably didn’t make the other banks which had paid to hear flattering speeches from her very happy, either 🙂
That would depend on what the banks think her real position is, probably.
@Deiseach, I’m disappointed– after that opening I expected you to continue through the entire alphabet.
There’s a Jewish confessional prayer said at Yom Kippur, Ashamnu, that does that in Hebrew. At least in Reform Judaism as I’ve experienced it, English renderings tend to keep the idea of an alphabetical list of sins, rather than go for literalism, and IIRC often begin along the lines of “We have been arrogant, boastful, cruel…” Though some of the letters are… challenges. (Where I grew up, “x” was “xenophobia”. Googling turned up a list that punted and went for “extortion”.)
Deiseach is becoming an embarrassing liability for the dogpile crew.
She’s just too conspicuously hyped on hate.
But if you owned as much stock in Trump’s presidential performance as she does you might do the same.
This is not helpful.
Banned for this and several related posts.
This is false. Some of it also comes from Macedonian scammers, Russian propaganda outlets like Russia Today, and British Putin sympathizers.
Where can I read critiques of Marxism that:
-Weren’t written by libertarians
-Actually critique the theories put forwards by Marx and not just the generic concept of socialism
-Aren’t written by other varieties of radical leftist making moralistic claims like “It’s too class essentialist!”
?
I would look for contemporary critics. Post-1917 everything written about Marx is going to be in the shadow of the Russian Revolution.
Contemporary critics were still in the thrall of the labor theory of value.
Popper?
Kolakowski.
Scott critiqued Marxism a couple of times. Once in his review of Red Plenty and another time somewhere else that I can’t find.
That fails point 1.
Didn’t Scott also write the Anti-Libertarian FAQ? And the whole concept of Moloch as the embodiment of coordination problems?
Did you read the Anti-Libertarian FAQ past the title?
When you are defining libertarian to be that broad, you are essentially diluting the concept to mean “not a socialist”, in which case answering the original question becomes impossible.
Why? Have you ever encountered the theories put forward by Marx? Have they had any effect on the world? People conflate “Marxism” and socialism because that’s pretty much all that “Marxism” means.
This is atrociously bad web design and addresses only dialectical materialism, having nothing to do with economics, but it’s comprehensive. To be clear, it’s more anti-Hegel than anti-Marx, and Marx himself was fairly anti-Hegel, but still, I don’t know where else you turn that isn’t hopelessly confounded by Soviet Communism.
Since there’s a sandworm in the OP: what are everyone’s experiences with Dune? I’ll go first — I thought it was terrible.
I read it as a kid and liked it, but couldn’t get into the sequels or prequels or whatever came next. I can’t explain why I liked the first book, which probably means its due for a re-read, so that’s all I can say on it for now.
The movie is terrible mostly due to hilariously compressed pacing, and boring under-acting (except for the guy who plays Baron Harkonnen who is hilarious), but I really like the music, set design, and surreal visuals. I’m pretty sure I watched it once when I was sick and delirious as a kid, and kept waking up at different parts, and it somehow felt even more like a 9 hour movie. I’m pretty sure they milk a cat at one point, but that could have been a hallucination.
I hated it so much that I wrote this rant the day I finished reading it:
I just finished reading Dune today. Man, that book sucked.
On page 5 or so, there’s a sentence “But could he really be the one?” When you see such a sentence so early in the book, you just know it’s not going well.
…it’s so awfully written. The characters are so incredibly flat and cartoonish. The action moves by jerks and spasms. Nothing is believable, everything is wooden. Most characters have a “thing” that follows them everywhere; if this guy’s in a scene, the “inkvine scar on his jaw” will “ripple”. So freaking bored with this rippling scar.
But the worst thing is, Herbert can’t manage information to save his life. Everyone learns facts by staring into space and having an important epiphany – everyone, not just the main character the prophet. Right at the beginning of the book, there’s a scene where the main bad guy talks to his henchman and nephew and carefully explains to the reader everything about the upcoming intrigue. This is done under the guise of explaining it to the nephew, and is as artless and stupid way to infodump plot on the reader as I’ve seen in a long while.
The hero’s mind is frequently filled with his terrible purpose. He doesn’t know what the terrible purpose is, but he sure can feel when something important’s happening. Someone says something that’s kind of a clue to what the hell’s going on, but what if the stupid reader misses the clue? Wait, I know, Paul will feel a tugging of his terrible purpose at hearing those words. Pretty convenient, that.
The main bad guy is the master of intrigue and deception, holds the planet for 80 years, knows everything about everyone, but somehow believes until the end of the book that the Fremen are a tiny bunch of inconsequential rag-men – even though they’re unbelievably hardened killers that have been killing his people by the thousands constantly, always taking at least 3 enemies for every one of their own. Again, can’t manage information.
Gah, I just can’t believe how awful that book turned out to be.
P.S. The list of the rippling scar in action:
“The inkvine scar along his jawline writhed as he turned, casting a smile across the room.”
“And he grinned wolfishly, the inkvine scar rippling along his jaw.”
“He looked at the beet-colored inkvine scar on the man’s jaw, remembering the story of how it had been put there…”
“…the scar of the inkvine whip slashed across his jawline seemed to move with a life of its own.”
“The inkvine scar along his jaw writhed with the scowl.”
“He rubbed the inkvine scar along his jaw, studying the scene, decided it would be safest to lead a ground party through the ridge.”
“Paul looked up to see the old and well-remembered wolfish grin on Halleck’s face, the ripple of the inkvine scar along the man’s jaw.”
“Paul marked the rage in the man’s face, the way the inkvine scar stood out dark and ridged.”
Don’t forget the cup of coffee epiphany, where Jessica is drinking a cup of coffee and goes off on about five pages of introspection leading to a conclusion 🙂
To be fair, the book is of its time (the 60s) so big infodumps plonked down on the page were the style. I don’t know anyone who has ever read the Dune books for their prose style.
I feel like world-building fiction that aims to be its own mythology has to get something of a pass: the Silmarilion, for example, is about as engaging as watching paint dry, but is appropriate for something that is imitating the style of religious texts.
@Anatoly
…
I’m guessing I’m going to hate the book on re-read.
I loved the intricate world building and the epicness of the novel, but I agree with Anatoly that the writing is rather poor.
@Aapje
Yeah, I definitely like the world or setting. It’s very much the medieval ages in space, with the guilds and houses and so on, but without being explicitly the medieval ages in space (there are no space knights to my knowledge). It could be that a lot of Dune love is for the setting and the potential that’s there, rather than the execution. All sorts of stuff like the Mentats and the Butlerian Jihad are fascinating.
Maybe it’s better as a wikipedia page than a book series.
@Tekhno
Personally, I thought that the good parts outweighed the bad. It might have been nostalgia, because I played the Dune II game a lot as a kid and it was the first proper real-time strategy game. So when I read the book, many years later, it filled in a lot of the gaps.
I also think that a lot of people don’t mind bad writing and might even appreciate it over more ‘clever’ writing. The books that top the best-seller lists are frequently quite poor (Fifty Shades of Grey, for example, sold 100 million copies and is…linguistically challenged).
PS. I chose to read only the first Dune book, as each seems to worse than the next.
PS2. It seems to be the kind of book that one should not reread (just like Dune II is a game that one should not replay).
Yes, the writing was pretty bad (at least by modern standards, maybe that style was in vogue when it was written). But I liked the essential idea. Couldn’t get into the sequels though.
For some reason, the writing style and central ideas seem inextricably linked to me. Usually if I read something with good ideas but bad execution I can imagine what the book might have been like if a better writer had done it. But I can’t imagine what Dune would have been like without the weird prose and cliches. Maybe it’s because the prose is bad, but in a characterful way.
It had a few conspicuously terrible moments in the original reading. I felt particularly let down when the “Imperial Conditioning” that made doctors like Wellington Yueh absolutely totally incapable of treachery, trust us this is the real deal, could in fact be subverted by the impossibly clever and no doubt unprecedented tactic of – wait for it – abducting the doctor’s wife and threatening to kill her if he doesn’t sign on for her captor’s schemes.
But I enjoyed it for the incredible depth of the world-building and plotting, 90% of which was not as conspicuously terrible as e.g. Yueh’s betrayal. And Paul Atreides made for a suitable wish-fulfillment fantasy at the time. Mediocre prose and mostly one-dimensional characters were something you generally had to put up with to get deep plotting and world-building in your SF, Back In The Day (along with walking five miles through deep snow to and from the bookstore, uphill both ways). It is I think rightly considered a classic, but probably not a timeless one.
The sequels were increasingly dire; I stopped at #3 and should have stopped with the original. I do recall the 1984 Dune Encyclopedia as being particularly good; even the parts that covered the sequels I didn’t much care for. But then, that was just worldbuilding and top-level plot outline, not prose storytelling.
Had very high hopes for the movie, which were mostly dashed when they handed out a cheat sheet with the tickets and, yep, someone seems to have deliberately edited that thing into incomprehensibility. Or perhaps the original script was even worse. Did very much like the look and feel, which weren’t quite what I had envisioned when I was reading but were nonetheless appropriate.
The SciFi channel miniseries, I had recalibrated my expectations down to “this will be laughably bad”, and was pleasantly surprised by the writing. Unpleasantly surprised by the fact that they apparently wasted their entire effects, sets, and costumes budget on the Big Ridiculous Hats everybody wore to make it clear which faction they belonged to. I do have a pleasant fantasy where someone with the time and budget to do it right combines the miniseries’ script with the movie’s visuals.
Based on the descriptions, I have no interest in ever reading any of the Brian Herbert additions to the “canon”.
I didn’t think it was anything special, but I enjoyed it enough to keep reading the series, and I’m glad I did, because God-Emperor was excellent.
Amusingly…my first experience with Dune was a computer game made by WestWood Studios.
(WestWood used a better version of the games core engine, and built a game series called Command and Conquer…)
Much later, I tried to read the novel. I didn’t like it very much.
Later, on re-read, the novel seemed better. However, it is definitely poorly-written. And the sequels seemed to make the built world less enjoyable.
Yeah, but then they were bought by EA. C&C 3 was passable. But what idiot signed off on C&C 4 taking an RTS game building game and getting rid of resource collecting, base building, and most of the strategy parts?
I loved the book. The first time I saw the original movie, I hated it, because it wasn’t at all like the book… But I re-watched the movie later, and I think it works well, if treated as a completely independent work.
I have a pretty unusual perspective. I’ve seen only the movie and not read the books. From a plot standpoint I thought it was pretty lame.
But, the one thing I REALLY liked was the really strange hand animated/rotoscoped effects for the energy shields (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYUolurihOQ). I really love how unconventional they looked, and how it makes sense for the fields to be these simplified shapes, like boxy planes and polygons instead of some round sparkling bubble that we usually get. To me it looked like it wasn’t designed to look like a standard movie effect but to just look weird and optimized for functionality rather than just looking cool.
I read it many times as a kid– enough times to recognize that a lot of the dialogue in the movie was word-for-word. I didn’t like the sequels by Herbert, and didn’t read any of the sequels by other people.
I’m not sure what I liked so much about the first book– scope and weirdness, I suppose.
I really enjoyed it. It had an original world (with some original mechanics), some really tense scenes, and a nice pace. I found the time that one guy (not the MC) spends in the desert and getting married kind of boring, and my memory is fuzzy but I don’t think I was ecstatic about the ending. But all in all I found it not only very enjoyable but a valuable experience.
To the people discussing the Syrian Civil War: where do you get your geopolitical news? For me, sources I remember are: War Nerd, War Tard, Stratfor, Geopolitical Futures, Archdruid Report, some mainstream media, and much history reading.
Meta-comment that, I guess, is obvious, but which I’ve been thinking about lately:
I’m not a fan of the mainstream US news media at the best of times, but it strikes me that their biggest failing of all, at least in my lifetime, but which seems not much commented upon, is their general lack of commentary on anything happening outside the US. In particular we almost never see reports taking place on the ground in foreign countries unless we happen to have some kind of armed conflict going on there at the moment, in which case one has the impression that foreign countries consist mainly of rubble and refugees.
I mean, we engage in military actions in places most Americans couldn’t even find on a map*… this feels to me sort of… not good?
*I feel it is more okay to not know where Aleppo is, however, if your view is “don’t get involved.”
That’s what happens when news is run for profit. Eyeballs are the metric, not information.
The average American does not care about U.K.-French trade policy disputes or the rise Marin Le Pen. You will hear coverage of Europe on the BBC and NPR. You can seek out other more global sources of news on the web. But the CBS evening news has 22 minutes or so, and they will spend it on subjects which motivate the most viewers to keep watching.
I don’t think it’s just that. You can make almost anything engaging, especially if you do some actual legwork and leave the office/studio once in a while.
That sounds more expensive.
The only way to make trade policy exciting is to talk about it in a way that has no bearing on reality.
I think ISW has consistently good reporting and analysis, but their recommendations are always “so send in the entire US military now,” which is about what I’d expect given that their sponsors are largely defense contractors.
I used to like Reuters quite a bit also, as it seemed to me they stuck to “just the facts,” but the last several months have seen a decline in quality.
Never not read history. Or listen to the audiobooks.
Besides that, I read StrategyPage and listen to their companion podcast, StrategyTalk. And sometimes take a look at at War Is Boring, though they are less interesting since some of the content went inside a paywall.
I’m currently playing a Dungeon Keeper clone called War for the Overworld, which was a kickstarter project. It’s nice, taking a look at it a few years after the kickstarter, because I don’t have to deal with the anxiety over whether or not the devs will deliver. It feels a lot like the old games, and if you get the chance to play it, I would recommend (although it’s still pretty pricey).
Does anyone on here work in tech in a non-programming/engineering role, and willing to answer a few questions for me?
I am trying to learn about jobs in the tech world for those with a non-tech related background.
In the alternative, anyone who has experience in tech in a software/engineering and is happy to offer advice, I’d love to speak with you as well.
Thanks!
More info needed.
Where are you at in your career now? When you say you are non-technical, what does that mean? Or you the kind of person that understands how to use technology, but don’t feel able to create it?
Project managers, product managers, QA, support, sales engineers, and even sales itself can all be linked to tech, depending.
Thanks for the response.
I am at the beginning stages of my career, and I presently work in law (in Canada).
I’m beginning to explore what types of roles align with my skill set/interests that I could potentially get hired for.
I have zero experience in engineering or programming. That being said, I think I have a good intuitive grasp of how technology works, but as stated above, no actual experience doing anything with it.
I read a lot about start-ups, tech companies, hacker news and that sort of stuff, so I have general background knowledge on the field.
Dumping info here since you didn’t email me back.
Sounds like you want to switch from law to tech. No technical background? No problem.
There are a bunch of roles—more than I can name—in tech that don’t require a technical background. Meaning, you don’t necessarily need to know how to write code or debug a computer or anything like that. There will be other domain-specific knowledge you need to learn of course. A lot of it you can learn online and in books, for free. From there I recommend leveraging your network to find an entry-level job.
Look for people who are in a position to hire you or recommend you to someone, and who are looking for people who are smart and can learn, rather than already having impressive resumes. You of course will also need to demonstrate an understanding of the fundamentals of whatever role you’re interested in, and an eagerness/ability to learn more.
Below are as many of the aforementioned roles as I can think of in 2 minutes. There are of course many others:
– UX designer
– UX researcher
– Agile coach/scrum master
– Project manager
– Graphic designer
– Content editor
– Information architect
Since you’re at the beginning of a law career, I assume it means you’re good at reading a lot of documents and presenting short digested bits of important material you find in them to others. That is a very good skill for a UX researcher or a project manager. If you’re good at writing, content editor might be a nice fit too.
But I recommend you look up descriptions of all the roles I listed, then read some blogs or something by people who are in the roles you find most interesting, maybe reach out with some questions. (You can ask me too; my job is closest to UX researcher.)
Other SSC commenters can list/describe other non-technical roles too.
That’s me. What do you want to know?
Can I email you? I didn’t find yours on your site, so can you either post it here, or send me an email (mine is listed on my site)?
Thanks
Emailed you.
So I’m listening to “the United states of Anxiety” a podcast by wnyc that sells itself as an attempt to understand Trumps America and the Great Divide in America,
And it’s so goddamn weird!
Like the the people making it are in newYork and they’re trying to understand the other side so where do they go to find the other side? Long Island!!!
They dedicate the entire second episode to going over desegregation and relitigating red lining and white flight (yet again) but they aren’t trying score points! Like they’re trying crazy hard to be empathetic and just can’t comprehend that middle America have bigger concerns than the left and the academy’s perpetual identity crisis about race.
Like this is the first time I’ve listened to someone and had that weird “I am encountering a spacealien who is desperately trying to understand the Hu-Man and failing” since the radical religious right was a political force in the early 2000s.
And it’s especially weird since I’ve been listening to WNYC and NPR stuff for the past 8 years! Like I found out about the podcast on the Atantics website (this podcast was ranked the #2 podcast of the year there) so it’s not like I’ve stepped into someone else’s bubble and been confused THIS IS THE BUBBLE I’VE LIVED IN FOR 8-16 YEARS.
I think Trump just pushed a certain neurotic east coast segment of the left too far and now we’re seeing all the layers of crazy that’s been hidden behind establishment pragmatism come forth (like every side has crazy woven into it but it’s really special when it’s just exposed like this)
Like I was raised in this stuff and am still waste deep in it (4th year philosophy and English student at a top 30 university in a major metropolis ) and I don’t recognize it anymore, like their model has slipped just to far out of reality and now it’s hard to model them.
In conclusion: I highly recommend “the United States of Anxiety”, it’s just an amazing subject for political anthropology, and really shows how divided the major “elite”enclaves are from the discussions of everyone else, like they’re trying so damn hard to understand and yet will not entertain the slightest idea or argument which is not already part of their model of America even when people have been shouting the what there concerned about for the past 8 years
Do you know anything about Long Island?
its a 100 mile long island in New York whose only bridges to the rest of America go through NYC, and is mostly consumed with the suburbs and vacation haunts of people who live and work in NYC.
I understand its rural and the middleclass/lowermiddle class live there but I could not think of a less representative place of the Rest of America a WNYC podcast could go.
It would be like if a Toronto podcast wanted to get out and relate to rural Canadians so they interviewed people in Muskoka region (the premiere cottage and vacation destination for Toronto).
If you want to relate to Trumps America its probably best to go to a state you would expect trump to win and which isn’t deeply interwoven with “the elite” to the point that the Hamptons are a large segment of the region.
Are they interviewing people who live/vacation in the Hamptons?
If not, why bring it up?
It seems to me if you want to find people who feel aggrieved, caught between upscale elites and urban masses, and you are in NYC (with a presumably limited budget) Long Island is not a bad place to go. The fact that these guys vote red reliably is another point in its favor.
I mean Trump is from New York. He didn’t grow a long beard and go “Duck Dynasty” and start quoting the Bible.
If New Yorkers didn’t vote Trump, I wouldn’t expect “Trump is from New York” to actually mean anything.
Granted, as someone from the Rochester suburbs, there’s something a little hypocritical about denying class differences over a trivial distance like that. You can move one neighborhood to the left of mine and get a completely different opinion.
Trump won Suffolk County 51.82% / 43.70%. That’s very similar to the results in Ohio.
Yes but the very fact that it is in NY state would seem to suggest a different dynamic than states that are not huddled round the elite.
I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of Long island politics, my broader point doesn’t depend on it and the insistence th at racial anxiety must be at the heart of it seems the real smoking gun of just not getting it, it just seemed really iffy to a non American.
I have read a lot of the liberal diagnoses of Trump supporters and many (not all) are so far off base that it’s kind of funny. What I don’t understand is when they go to the social science department at Columbia or Harvard and ask for answers like it is an anthropological dig site of extinct Egyptians where bizarre Trump hieroglyphs need decoded. Certainly high end scholars could be a good source and usually are, but in this case it seems not to be the case. Best to leave the bubble for this one. I should note here that KY, WV, OH, MI, AK, et. al. all have universities with people who can spell and form sentences that probably have a much better pulse on Trump voters than NYC or Cambridge. That is a good step in the right direction.
The thing is these people writing post modems and opinion pieces are supposed to be experts. If they don’t understand the other side, and cannot understand the other side no matter how hard they try, then they’ve never understood the issues “a person who does not understand the agents against his own position understands little of his own”, to paraphrase John Stuart Mill, and have never had the skills to be experts.
Skills that university was supposed to teach and was supposed to be the bare minimum for being a pundit.
A few years from now someone will write a book on this utter failure of the educated class and it’s institutions.
Since when were universities supposed to teach people to interpret the statements by less educated people and divine their base concerns from their often badly phrased or inappropriately attributed complaints?
IMHO, this is a skill that universities anti-teach, if anything (as the focus is to find weaknesses in stated positions, rather than steelman the arguments by others).
This is almost the whole point of qualitative anthropology (although they would shudder to use the phrase less educated )
I was talking more about the general education that people receive in college. My argument was not that there is no (niche) field that would teach this, but rather, that the average university-educated person is not taught this.
I think that very few of the media people who try to understand Trump voters have studied qualitative anthropology (probably closer to 0% than 1% of them).
Yes, they would presumably be more specific and use terms like ‘without a college education’. They might also be unwilling to state outright that people with a higher IQ, with more knowledge & a larger vocabulary can express their concerns better than than people who ‘score’ less on those.
However, I think that it is a truth that is worth stating, as too often, people who express their concerns badly are assumed not to have valid concerns or it is assumed that their concerns are what well-educated people think is important (which I think is not always the case).
@ Aapje
people who express their concerns badly are assumed not to have valid concerns
To find higher educated people to interview about Trump supporters, you might look through a list of Trump supporters who have already been outed, and note which ones have letters after their name.
>Since when were universities supposed to teach people to interpret the statements by less educated people and divine their base concerns from their often badly phrased or inappropriately attributed complaints?
This was honestly a large part of my Engineering Curriculum.
In all of our projects, we were taught that customers have no idea what they actually want or need, and to do our best to figure it out so they won’t fuck us over by changing their minds 30 times mid project.
Hypothesis: left-wing people with this kind of engineering background are better at an ideological Turing test than other left-wing people.
Seems like an interesting thing to research.
I empathize with Luke the CIA Stooge and, reading about the podcast, share his frustrations/bewilderment/amusement.
However, there is still the problem that Trump Country doesn’t necessarily have a convenient representative to talk to. If you want high-level theory and observation and discussion of Trump Country, social scientists are a reasonable place to turn. I don’t know to what extent a social science professor at Ohio State has a better finger on the pulse of Regular America than one at Harvard. Maybe a better one, but if that professor commutes home by going down High Street to a swanky loft in the Short North or downtown, he’s probably in just as thick a bubble.
That said, it sounds like in the podcast they went for more of a man-on-the-street research method, in which case I agree they should have gone to the Midwest or the South. Like this guy did.
The Blankenhorn piece was very good, I read this way back. People like JD Vance who went to Yale but grew up in KY/OH seem to explain things a lot better than most.
There are likely near zero social scientists who voted Trump, but I think it would be a good idea to have someone explain Trump who voted for him. Part of this is a real problem where conservative culture and thinking is being expunged from campus, part of it is there are a lot of valid reasons why academia wouldn’t like Trump regardless.
The media and academia are part of what the backlash is against, so asking them to explain this requires them to examine their own inadequacies which will take a while to digest. These guys are spending too much time trying to influence culture instead of reporting/studying it.
Yeah and it is very dangerous to mix these roles. There is a reason why governments generally both have an executive and congress.
If the media engages in politics, it is easy for them to stop doing their jobs when that interferes with their political aims.
Just listened to their episode after the election .
They had on Gloria “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t support women (vote for hillary)” Steinam as an authority on gender, power and American culture, uncritically.
It’s like they don’t even get that the 50% of America is angry at Them.
Maybe that’s why the (college educated urban) elite keeping bringing up race and identity politics, they can’t understand 48+% of Americans hate Them.
I’m really fascinated by this, like I’ve studied Aristotle, the medievals, Hobbes, religious conservatives, communists, etc.
And I cannot comprehend that all of these educated intelligent people from “Liberal” Colleges cannot pass a simple ideological Turing test (and a Turing test where we have heard the opinions of both sides non stop for the past year)
Like I don’t care what side your on, that’s a massively interesting phenomenon.
Like being able to understand and be easy with different view Points fron different places is what cosmopolitanism is all about, and yet these 80th percentile and up educated cosmopolitan elites cannot comprehend the other side of the argument.
That’s putting it a bit strongly. Most Trump supporters, I think, don’t “hate” anyone, including people like the producers of that podcast. (Though some do. A good portion of the Alt Right, for instance.)
Just needed saying.
I do think there is a large portion of of the red tribe/grey tribe does genuinely despise what the neo…. new responderites refer to as THE CATHEDRAL even though they’d never use the term.
The intersection of public sector bereaucrats, academia, the media, middle-management make work types and the NGO/activist busy body industrial complex does genuinely seem to be the natural class enemies of Trumps coalition, they are enevitably culturally, economically and politically incompatible.
Like if drain the swamp isn’t directed towards this group (of which lobbyists are a cross section/subset) I don’t know that drain the swamp has a meaning.
Although you are right: HATE is a rhetorical flourish on my part to highlight that I do think the meme about racial resentments, which as far as I can tell are mostly illusory, is a way for the urban university educated elite to delegitimize and deny the, very real, class and cultural resentments of the rural classes.
Anything someone said two days after the election should probably get a pass. I listened to this one and was a bit amused when their defacto Trump supporter was asked to reply to an interview on the subway where a black girl asked “Is Trump going to bring back slavery?”.
The podcast before that they used “science” to explain Trump’s performance in a debate was best explained as a chimp “performing spectacular displays” to intimidate its peers. I kid you not. This is WKNY / The Atlantic / Charlie Rose having a serious discussion on this. They then medicalize a Trump voter in various ways.
Episode 7: This Is Your Brain on Politics
http://www.wnyc.org/story/united-states-of-anxiety-podcast-episode-7
The parts I listened to were almost uniformly terrible, I will give them credit to at least try and the parts with Chris Arnade were pretty good. In the end this was more election propaganda than a serious effort. They did the normal trick where when they wanted to talk to a Trump supporter they went to WalMart and interviewed the biggest hicks they could find.
Yes but it’s sooooo uniformly terrible it goes right around to being fascinating again.
Like these people are university educated and worldly cosmopolitans yet cannot decipher one of the least complicated and loudly repeated political pitches of the past 50 years.
Imagine if the anarchocapitalists had taken off or the neo… new responderites or [insert weird political movement here]. Movements with genuinely counterintuitive ideas and difficult learning curves. What the hell would they do!?
These are professional idea people! And they’re just helpless if anyone has different set of ideas or values and are willing to Act on it.
Trump will fade (hopefully: if he’s a catastrophe he won’t) but the establishments flailing helplessness will be studied for generations
Trump will fade (hopefully: if he’s a catastrophe he won’t)
Due to some Irish political polling results, I think part of why I find the flailing over Trump (he’s literally Hitler! his vice-president is going to set up gay torture camps to forcibly turn gay teens straight – and yes, I have seen that one out in the wild, God help us all) so reminiscent of Chicken Little and the Falling Sky is this:
Were any of the four presidential candidates (we’ll take them as broadly representative of their parties, though in both Hillary and Trump’s cases they are not their party leaders) involved in deaths? I don’t mean that lurid Vince Foster really murdered accusation trailing around after Hillary (and/or Bill) because I don’t believe it, and I also don’t believe that lurid paedophile rape/murder alleged link thrown at Trump, because apart from everything else, that story seems to have been shopped around for a couple of years, starting in California, and no journalist has been able to get in direct contact with the woman making the allegations, only parties claiming to represent or be linked with her.
No, what I mean is something like this – the latest “Sunday Times Behaviour and Attitudes Poll” finds that support for Sinn Féin (one of our political parties) has risen slightly (by 2 points) to 19 per cent.
However, despite the rise for his party, the satisfaction rating with the leader, Gerry Adams, dropped 6 points. This has been attributed to the recent extensive coverage of the 1984 shooting of prison officer Brian Stack, allegedly by the IRA. One of Mr Stack’s sons has been raising the question of what Gerry Adams knows (i.e. that he knows the identity of the killers or at least knows who does know, because he set up a meeting in 2013 with an IRA official and Mr Stack’s sons). Mr Adams even made a statement in the Dáil (our parliament) on the matter.
So when I see all this running around about how Trump is Actual Hitler with Actual Nazis and Stormtroopers in his administration who will set up Actual Concentration Camps and “women, minorities, LGBT people will suffer” – I am not that impressed. Any of your four party leaders credibly linked to armed insurrection/terrorism? No? Then you are all making a mountain out of a molehill.
Irish politics has either raised or lowered the bar, I’m not sure which, re: what it takes to make me shocked, shocked! about politicians 🙂
Like these people are university educated and worldly cosmopolitans yet cannot decipher one of the least complicated and loudly repeated political pitches of the past 50 years.
“This just in: calling people pig-ignorant bigots not likely to make them vote for you! Who knew?” 🙂
I don’t see how this follows.
I also find the Sinn-Fein-are-automatically-disqualified-from-office-due-to-links-to-the-IRA trope unhelpful. The goal of any resolution of a sectarian conflict should be a movement towards peace and political coexistence. Pre-committing to refusing to allow groups like the IRA (and more relevant lately, FARC) to transition to politics prevents any way out of a conflict other than exterminating one side.
@Deiseach
To be fair, it’s a little hard to understand why calling people “deplorables” is bad but saying “I love the poorly educated” was not a gaffe as well. The term “poorly educated” isn’t actually a slur but it’s hard for those of us in the overeducated set not to see it as having negative connotations. Obviously Trump’s poorly educated constituency did not.
What I meant was: there is all kinds of panicking about what Trump may or may not do, or what his administration and advisers may or may not do, and the way the talk in some places is structured, you would think these were proven murderers and leaders of private armies, instead of a (fairly) rich businessman, some career politician and a selection of people from all arts and parts, none of whom have actually – so far as anyone can prove – caused any deaths, tortures or disappearing of their enemies.
Meanwhile, as part of the peace process in my country, we have from both sides of the divide in the North, and from one side in the South, people as members of our national parliament and in a party often bruited to form/be kept out of coalition after the next election (every election so far in recent years), people who have demonstrable links with paramilitaries and were indeed familiar with both the Armalite and the ballot box.
This has not led to bloodshed, rioting in the streets, or rounding up victims for involuntary re-orientation therapy camps. Indeed, part of the reason the main parties want to marginalise Sinn Féin is precisely because it is populist to an extent and has picked up a lot of the disaffected working class voters Labour, for one, shed when it decided to chase after urban/suburban middle-class voters and cater to their interests instead (sounding familiar?)
Our main parties themselves came out of our Civil War in 1922 and have the heritage of gunmen becoming politicians and ministers in governments.
So when I see the way Trump and his representation of the Republican party, or the rural vote, or the white working class, or what you will is turned into some kind of monstrous bogeyman, I’m not very impressed. It’s a little under half the country, and he and his team have views on social and economic matters that the Chicken Littles do not have, and that is the extent of the division.
I’m not saying it’s not a big division, but when other countries have managed to integrate much more extreme and indeed genuine bloodshed views, it seems a tiny bit ridiculous to be having fits about “mass deportation! all women and minorities living in fear! actual real Nazis!”
On a less serious note, the Irish version of Red Tribe (the cultural, not the political) 🙂
@Deiseach
One of those things is very much not like the others. Mass deportation was, during the campaign at least, a stated policy of Donald Trump.
Trump largely owes his political career to deranged fear mongering about Mexican rapists and murderers, so it’s not crazy to think that he might try to make good on this promise.
I don’t really feel strongly on immigration, but deporting illegal immigrants is the stated policy of The United States of America, not Trump. Obama deported a lot of people.
@tscharf
Obama may have deported a lot of people, but he also supported comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to citizenship, and implemented a deferred action for childhood arrivals policy that protects many immigrants who arrived as minors.
On the other hand if we take Trump seriously, he proposed the creation of a “deportation force” to expel 11 million people in two years. If actually implemented this plan would be one of the largest forced transfers of population since the second world war.
@The Nybbler
In my experience, people with less education tend to understand that fact and that there are jobs that they cannot due due to their lack of skills and education, like being a politician. This is really no different than my belief that I cannot hold my own as a player for an NFL team.
My self-esteem is not diminished due to my lack of American Football skills, because I choose to define it based on what I can do. People with a lesser education tend to do the same.
Generally, they are also aware of the importance of politics and are glad to see a highly educated person defend their interests. Saying this honestly can actually make this politician more liked, as the voters can see it as ‘truth-telling.’
This is differently from obvious moral judgments like ‘deplorable.’
@hyperboloid
This why we have a formal law making process, and until the laws changes the current laws stand. Obama may want lots of things but until he convinces the lawmakers to go along the current law stands. Feeling very strongly about it changes nothing.
The executive branch enforces the laws so they have some flexibility into what gets enforced and how. Trump disavowed the round ups, but what he originally proposed may have been entirely legal, I don’t know.
@ The Nybbler:
Trump’s statement was instantly recognizable to those of us in red states as pointed self-deprecation; the real butt of the joke was the well educated, i.e. coastal liberal elites. That kind of ironic, “I’m just a dumb country boy” stance is extremely common here, and the fact that Trump can so fluently adopt the idiom is a big part of why he won.
That liberals didn’t seem to get it at all should have tripped more alarms in my head, in retrospect. It wasn’t a “gaffe” in any way, it was completely deliberate.
There’s no point in being elite if you can’t look down your nose at your inferiors, and NPR has long been about being elite. Why would they even care that 50% of America is angry at Them? Those 50% were never going to listen to NPR anyway.
Less of this kind of crap comment, please.
Totally on point Nybbler, charlie mike.
There’s no point in being elite if you are still wasting time worrying about what other people think.
Like being able to understand and be easy with different view Points fron different places is what cosmopolitanism is all about
No. What cosmopolitianism is all about is the class of people who are educated, moderately to very rich, and who move easily in the same circles that, most importantly, all share the same foundational views (socially liberal, hovering around the centre either mildly left or mildly right) about what is True, Right and Good.
It’s Boris Johnson being one-eighth Turkish. It’s the international students who pay the extravagant fees at universities in the UK and USA who want to attract the scions of rich families, and who have more in common with their classmates than they do the natives of their own country who work in their houses, businesses, drive cabs, or form the mass of the population.
Cosmopolitanism is linked with Scott’s Universal Culture. I just love that Zedian cuisine, it’s so delicious! It’s great we have authentic restaurants run by real Zedians cooking traditional foods of the country here in our large city, imagine having to live in those benighted parts of our nation where you can’t even get a vegan pizza!
I haven’t listen to this in particular, but I don’t think this is the problem. Ultimately I think it comes down to what information people trust.
My impression is that the Left generally thinks that it’s truths are universal truths, not only are the universal truths they are obvious truths, check the science!
The Radical Religious, like Trump supporters, seem to reject this truth. In the case of the religious there is a ready explanation for why they would be willing to reject such obvious truth. In the case of Trump supporters, less so.
So, the obvious truth is that Trump is bad(this includes economic issues, etc), yet people vote for Trump, they must reject the obvious truth. Why do they reject the truth?
I think that is the question liberals are trying to answer.
Yes this take comes through loud and clear. The rubes can’t take the
liberalliteral truth!Some of the solutions like using media fact checkers to self check media stories at Facebook aren’t likely to improve the situation. This is a crisis of trust for the media (Republican trust = 14%). The real question is “Why don’t they trust us anymore?”
Sure some of the info people believe is…ahem…tainted, but the fake news interventionalists should spend sometime at the Puffington Host and Salon after they scour Breibart for inaccuracies.
There are two parts to this, one is why trust was lost, the other is how to gain trust back. If the media cannot self examine and connect the dots from a near unanimous editorial vote for HRC to Trumpsters believing they are putting their thumbs on the scale then they are going to keep digging the hole deeper.
I will just bring up one example. Candidate self elimination, or gaffe score keeping. Who made up these rules where Trump was eliminated because he said (fill in random stupid tweet)? Who decided (fill in any blue in group) cannot be criticized because this is racist or xenophobic? Where did these norms come from?
Trump blew up these rules with a tactical nuke. People responded favorably not because they like Trump, but because they didn’t like the rules and were just waiting for anybody to take a stand. Trumpsters feel like they have no representation in the social rule making committee, and they don’t. But they do get to vote.
The road back to trust is long and hard. Give a voice to Trumpsters and allow them to vent even if it is distasteful. The formula of “non-platforming” Trumpsters has just backfired spectacularly. You can’t erase these social conflicts by pretending they don’t exist and wishing they would go away.
Great post.
This kind of thing should make you at least somewhat skeptical of all efforts to understand groups one isn’t a part of, and especially groups one is opposed to.
So at work, I’m the Excel guy. It’s a good role for me to have. I enjoy it, I’m pretty good at it, and it makes me seem like a wizard even to fairly technically minded people. I’ve mastered “basic advanced” stuff like conditional formatting, index/matching, and indirect references. I’m learning to work with pivot tables (does it annoy anyone else how godawful the formatting tools for these are?).
I want to learn more. Array formulas and Vbasic are at the top of the list. I also would like to learn more about access, and particularly using powerpivot to get excel to interact with access. Does anyone have a book/series of article/youtube series, whatever that they would recommend?
I’m sorry that I don’t have any resources for you, on the contrary, I’d also like any resources on Excel for people-who’d-like-to-learn-serious-Excel-and-have-serious-technical-background. I spent once an evening trying to google for this stuff, and most of the stuff I found was amazingly terrible or looked like a scam or at best, targeted at non-technical people (“here is this deeply amazing advanced Excel-wizard skill to calculate means and sums!”) [addendum. or final category, targeted at people who already are on the level where they can ask the right questions, telling about “how to do this specific thing” ]. Contrast with my previous experience with other sutff … for example, when you search for a tutorial to some programming language or web dev or framework thing, you often find something that is useful. Tutorials, MOOCs, Mozilla and Microsoft Developer Networks, and so on.
Actually the best reference I have found is just, well, the official Office documentation, it at least tells how the functions work even if it isn’t the advanced material that teaches advanced magicks together with practice problems and exercises I’d really want.
reddit.com/r/excel is pretty good if you have a particlar problem you need solved, but bad on bigger picture education.
I don’t have any good resources, but as one of the three “Excel guys” at my work- I’d agree that array formulas should be near the top of your list. Skip vbasic if you can do any programming outside of excel, because you can just have your scripts work on the csv files or whatnot. Similarly, skip access if you can get a real SQL database instead.
If you use excel to make a lot of charts, check out stuff like Google Visualizations and other easy-to-learn data visualization code snippets so that you can do chart wizardry on the web as well.
The one thing I did that helped a lot was to make use of the “record macro” feature. Do something by hand that’s sort of like what you want to achieve, use “record macro” to grab it in VB code, the dig in and unpick the code to work out how it does it. It’s a very quick way into the VB side.
Does anyone else think this is a scam? Because reading the story it keeps screaming to me that this is not genuine.
Alleged Leonardo da Vinci sketch discovered. You read it, and it sounds (to me) highly dodgy. If I were a no-goodnik, this is exactly what I would do if I were trying to pass off a forgery or sell a genuine but stolen piece: mix it in with a collection of genuine but low-value minor stuff, claim that I knew nuzzing about ze art but my father/uncle/grandfather collected this stuff and is it worth anything? Then I’d stand back and pretend ignorance and nonchalance as the
pigeonauction house valuer’s eyes bugged out on stalks and they were wetting themselves with excitement.Maybe I’m sceptical because of the spate of “genuine lost Gospel fragments found – Jesus was married/gay/a woman/dead and here’s the family tomb” stories that crop up every Christmas and Easter – like the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife that ended up burning the professor who swore up, down and sideways it was genuine – but this sounds awfully like the kind of fakery in antiquities that has been going on forever:
I’ll just bet he wants to remain anonymous.
Dodgy provenance? Now where have we come across that before? Stolen/looted items (often in the aftermath of the Second World War) and/or fakery. There’s a very good reason for looking for chain of ownership or a history behind a “lost masterpiece” that suddenly pops up.
But this is what takes the biscuit, the entire cake, my breath away, and the prize with brass knobs on (bolding mine):
And this is not ringing any alarm bells with anyone? A genuine sketch has this study of optics plus inscription on the back, and an alleged sketch also has a study of optics with an inscription on the back, and nobody is going “Possibly this could be a faker copying the genuine item”?
And on a quite amateur and personal opinion only note, if you look at the sketch, there is something not quite right with that left arm in that position – it’s not a Leonardo position (like Botticelli, sometimes his figures are posed a little too graciously, rhythmically and prettily). I’d be willing to go “school of” or a copy of a lost genuine sketch, but Leo hisself? Not convinced. More convinced a professional forger/con artist lucked into a genuine fragment of Leo’s notes and decided to gild the lily and bump up the value by forging a sketch on the other side, precisely because of the Hamburg item and how it could be used to convey similarity and authenticity.
I know visions of millions of euro/reputation-making discovery are dancing in everyone’s heads, but boy will they have egg all over their faces if this turns out to be a fake or genuine but stolen, and they took the word of a guy who quite literally walked in off the street that he was the owner and it came into his possession the way he said it did.
I will be very interested to hear, in a couple of months’ time, what the story on this is. If it is genuine and the guy is honest, I will eat my words. But I don’t anticipate having to!
I’d think they could use some scientific tools to help determine whether or not it was real. Radioactive nuclides in the paper and ink would reveal all but the most sophisticated modern forgeries. Maybe microscopic analysis of the fibers and such too… I’m not too familiar with the methods but I’m sure they could at least figure out whether or not it was drawn in the 15th/16th century. That wouldn’t rule out contemporary copies or inspired-by works made by someone else if it turns out to be old enough, of course. They would know the chance of it being a modern fake is very low – or verify that it is indeed a modern fake.
Having read a bit about forgery, I’m pretty sure this is not the case. There’s an active market in antique paper, testing the ink tends to mean destroying part of the image, and aging generally is a chemical process that can be faked via other chemical processes.
This reminds me of a book I just finished, called The Relic Master. It’s about a guy who tries to track down relics for Frederick of Saxony and Albrecht of Brandenburg in 1517. He talks about how the trade used to be respectable, but now that there’s so much money in relics (because of the sale of indulgences), items of dubious provenance are now everywhere. Frederick really cares about having something genuine, but Albrecht wants something impressive and only needs the provenance to be somewhat plausible.
Anyway, it’s not terribly related, but this post reminded me of it a lot and you seem like someone who would appreciate that book.
At what point do military coups become okay? Obviously they are brutal and disappear thousands of people, but when the existing democratically elected state is collapsing due to incompetence, does it at some point balance out?
Venezuela certainly looks like it’s collapsing, and it looks like they are going to keep doubling down on the policies that have been ruining their economy, or perhaps coming with whole new interesting ways to destroy it.
Does Venezuela need a Pinochet?
US meddling has long been used to make regime changes favorable to the United States, and has hence become an excuse for terrible populist economics in Latin America, but when you get to the stage where the government is running out of money to pay for money and people are being busted for toilet paper smuggling, wouldn’t a CIA backed junta be an improvement on policies that are supposedly conducted to combat the USA? If the USA is going to get blamed anyway, isn’t it better for them to get blamed for overthrowing shit governments, than to get blamed while being used as an excuse by those same shit governments?
I’m generally against changing foreign governments for ideological reasons, usually think that foreign intervention just creates resentment, and wouldn’t want boots on the ground, but if the CIA funded some domestic coup against Maduro, there’s a good chance that more deaths would be prevented than caused. Maybe it’s too early, but since they seem to be doubling down, Venezuela is a good test case. At what point would assisting the overthrow of Maduro be a net-positive idea? Maybe it needs to get a lot worse first. I just feel that a civil war that kills lots of people would be unlikely in this case, and unlike some cases in the Middle East where Islamists fill the vacuum left by the fall of secular dictators, there’s no worse group present than the existing bonkers regime.
I’m almost always against such things, so please explain to me why I’m wrong, so I can get back on track.
I think the ethical version of the policy you’re calling for does not involve the CIA or any covert action. Rather the US could unequivocally state — and using its political influence to convince military leaders — that the Maduro regime’s policies have cost it its democratic legitimacy, there should be a new round of elections to determine new political leadership, and that the Venezuelan armed forces have a patriotic duty to disobey any orders from Maduro to disrupt or influence the transition of political power.
This approach shows respect for Venezuelan national sovereignty and would probably go over better with military hard-liners than a more aggressive form of military support for an opposition movement. Plus of which, most people’s goal really is a *peaceful* transition of power, so it seems like a better idea to orient policy around making this as likely as possible, rather than around making sure “the good guys” win after the situation devolves into violence. I realize that may seem hopelessly naive, but I wonder if it isn’t the CIA types who argue for arming “the good opposition” (e.g. in places like Syria) who are the true naifs.
This is a terrible idea.
First, it’s very likely to fail. It lets Maduro go from “inept chavez successor” to “brave defier of yankee imperialism”. Meanwhile, if the military decides to act, they are no longer “patriotic officers doing something unpleasant but necessary”, but “tools of yankee oppression”. It makes the political optics for a coup terrible. You don’t put US prestige on the line like that unless you are very certain you will succeed.
Second, even if it works, it still looks like the US is shitting all over Venezuelan sovereignty by effectively ordering their army to oust their democratic leadership. We’d literally be endorsing military dictatorship over democracy in a way that could hardly be calculated to irritate the political left. Just look at the response the left had to the honduras “coup” a few years ago. The US was not involved at all, the actions taken were arguably (at least quasi) legal, and despite Obama condemning the coup, the US was still accused of supporting dictatorship by not doing more.
If the USA is going to get blamed anyway, isn’t it better for them to get blamed for overthrowing shit governments, than to get blamed while being used as an excuse by those same shit governments?
No. Your shit government is blaming the USA for its own faults, you can still think the USA is pretty decent and it’s not its fault your country has crappy dishonest embezzling politicians. The USA installs a shit government that still screws you over but they make nice with the USA so that’s the main thing, you are likely to start thinking those guys in the jungle with the AK-47s have a point about burning down the whole thing and starting over, and hello there twenty years of civil war.
One thing worth considering is whether deaths from death squads are equal to deaths from mis-government-caused starvation. I don’t think they are, which means that even if resurrecting Pinochet would result in fewer deaths (which I think is doubtful, a brief search suggest that deaths from starvation are in the tens, deaths from Pinochet were in the thousands) it wouldn’t necessarily be sensible.
I also think that an attempted coup at this point would likely lead to a civil war, since there is no reason to assume the existing government would go quietly. I can see the case for a coup if we get to the point where there is a powerful opposition, but not before then.
>One thing worth considering is whether deaths from death squads are equal to deaths from mis-government-caused starvation
I’m curious why you think this. If the government makes it illegal for you to buy food, they’re killing you just as surely as if they put a bullet in your head.
And in a much more drawn-out and unpleasant way, to boot.
Would you prefer to live in a country where many people starve because it is illegal to buy food (I don’t think that country is Venezuela, but we can suppose it is for the purposes of this question), or one where you are likely to be tortured and executed by a government death squad? I would much prefer to face the possibility of starving (presuming the probabilities are equal).
Starvation can be alleviated by a black market, particularly if conditions have annoyed the border control officers to the point that they’re willing as a group to turn a blind eye to large-scale illegal food importation. There’s nothing similar ordinary citizens can do to reduce the problem of death squads.
If we are positing willful blindness on the part of the border guards, they can leave.
And really, that’s the preferred option to starvation as well.
John: smugglers pay more and better bribes than refugees.
Obviously implausible if what they are smuggling is staple foodstuffs. Cite?
Apparently North Korea has a thriving black market that really took off in reaction to a famine in the late 90’s. I had the impression that they imported a lot of food, though googling around for sources I mainly only see references to technically-illegal small farms within NK itself providing significant amounts of the country’s “unofficial” food supply.
Total cost of brokering an escape from NK is purportedly $12,000. ~1300 defectors in 2015 = $15.6 million market. Do you think smugglers import more or less than $15.6M worth of food? Keep in mind, the average price of rice in NK is something like $0.60/kg – to have the same size market on rice alone would require 9000 tons of rice imported, and NK often has an import shortfall of hundreds of thousands of tons (graph page 3, only goes to 2008). Or do you have data that suggests guards get substantially different percentages from the different goods smuggled?
Your data is incomplete and inconsistent. North Korea has been largely self-sufficient in food production in recent years; the people who are still literally starving are mostly the political prisoners for whom that is deliberate policy (and who are behind an extra layer of effectively unbribeable guards). And as Loquat notes, the black market is now mostly local – also more grey than black, as Jong Un has legitimized the private plots and gardens.
And your 1300 “defectors” are only the ones who showed up in South Korea, in 2015. Back in 2008, for something closer to apples/apples, the number was twice as high. But more importantly, most refugees from North Korea don’t show up in South Korea and formally defect. They wind up living off the books in China or Southeast Asia, and I don’t think anyone has solid numbers on how many there are or how much they pay on average, either now or back in 2008.
>Starvation can be alleviated by a black market, particularly if conditions have annoyed the border control officers to the point that they’re willing as a group to turn a blind eye to large-scale illegal food importation. There’s nothing similar ordinary citizens can do to reduce the problem of death squads.
If you’re positing bribery, then you can bribe death squads as easily as border guards. RLMS argument is predicated on the equal likelihood of death vs. starvation or death vs. death squad.
@monfort
>smugglers pay more and better bribes than refugees.
I don’t have any empirical evidence to back this, but I’d bet it’s almost certainly NOT true. Smugglers will only pay bribes up to the limit of profitability. Refugees will give you literally everything they have. And if you stipulate that they’re poor and don’t have much, then they also don’t have much to pay the smugglers.
Okay, great, so now they’re not starving they don’t need to bribe the guards to let in food. That doesn’t tell us much about how easy it would be to import food when you do need it.
Back in 2008, the cost of defection to South Korea was also much lower, though all I have is the Washington Post figure of something like $8,000 for some time between 2006 and 2015. The refugees leaving to China or South Asia I didn’t mention because I have little direct data. Considering the smugglers make something like $33.30 (in 2016) for each migrant worker they smuggle across, I’m guessing the arrangement with the guards is not that expensive? Prices would go up if there was more scrutiny at the border, though, which I imagine there would be if people weren’t coming back.
And also in 2008, rice was significantly more expensive – up to 4,500 NK won/kg just before China approved more exports to around 2,500 after. The black market rate for USD in NK won nearest 2008 that I can find is something like 2-3,000 won to the dollar from sometime in 2009 (buried way down in a quote from a WSJ article I can’t access, ctrl-f “generally traded”), which would give us something like $1.00-1.50/kg.
If you use the $8,000 per refugee to SK, 2,600 of them and $1/kg of rice, we’re looking for something like 20,800 tons imported + (1 ton / ?? refugees to China, Vietnam, etc. times ?? refugees).
I do agree with you that data on NK and smuggling economics in general is woefully incomplete.
But actually, the best argument against me (IMO) is not the poor quality of the statistics, but rather that my initial post doesn’t really mean anything in context. What does “more and better bribes” mean when comparing significantly different smuggling tasks – more and better in total? Per some unit? How does that relate to whether it would be easier to get enough food to live through a famine on the black market or escape government deathsquads by illegal emigration?
To make it meaningful, I suppose I’d say that my subjective impression is that as a private citizen you need more money and connections to successfully smuggle yourself out of a country with deathsquads than to acquire enough food to live through a famine on the black market. And one of the reasons for that impression is my subjective impression that guards are more sympathetic during times of shared hardship as well as more likely to be under economic pressure that might force them to neglect their duties. (Though of course a smart government tries to keep the guards reasonably well fed).
See above, that post was dumb and doesn’t directly engage with the point JS was making. But I don’t know what you’re doing with the last sentence I quote – are you saying that smugglers don’t sell to multiple people too poor to leave the country? Or that a proper basis of comparison wouldn’t include the proceeds from those (and why)?
That depends on how bloodless the coup would be, doesn’t it?
If you can find a way to predict how bloody a coup will end up being before launching, that could be a useful question to ask.
(I know you’re snarking, but I couldn’t resist.)
No, I’m not snarking (I probably only do that once a year). If a communist famine had killed 100,000 people and was expected to kill thousands more, and you compared that to a Chile like coup where 30,000 or so are estimated (high) to have been killed, it might be worth it.
I suggested Venezuela’s collapse would need more time to stew in the OP, but having the red line be a death toll of 100,000 might give appropriate room.
You can’t predict in advance how coups will go, but you can get some idea from looking at the ground conditions and institutional factors before relatively bloodless coups in history, and try to structure your take over in the same way. I’d also imagine that in the case of economic collapse and starvation, less people would be interested in being loyal to the regime that’s starving them, but I could be drastically, drastically wrong.
@Tekhno
How many people have starved in Venezuela so far?
I mean, I think the USA gets blamed because it has a real history of doing this sort of thing. If we really stopped doing it, eventually dictators’ ability to use us as a scapegoat for their country’s own problems would weaken. I think sanctions function similarly: imposed from the outside, they just give the bad rulers an external thing to blame for their country’s poverty. Best case scenario we enjoy a couple decades of US-friendly dictatorship under a Batista or a Shah, followed by something much worse than we started with.
Jews got blamed for thousands of years, and didn’t have a history of doing this sort of thing.
Jews used to integrate rather badly and generally opposed interfaith marriage. Many societies are or were tribal to a lesser or greater extent, based on family relations. For example, a lot of peace treaties were established by marriage between the families of the factions. The lack of these connections between goyim and Jews & the cultural differences, made Jews into an obvious outgroup and thus a fairly easy scapegoat.
However…none of these reasons are reasonable explanations for the dislike of the US. For example, many Iranian families have American relatives. Iranian culture also seems very materialistic and hedonistic (although with a heavy dose of ‘purity’ virtue signalling). I think that the Iranian people like US culture a lot more than many other cultures.
IMO, the opposition to the US seems to revolve primarily around an impression that the US provides crucial support to certain factions, which the opponents of those factions dislike.
You’re being very selective about mentioning which traits of the Jews made Jews into scapegoats. Jews are poorly assimilated people who make money. Making money makes you a target, and America is clearly richer than Venezuela. You caught the fact that Jews “integrate very badly”, but you missed that when someone hates a country instead of a group of natives, the country is inherently separate, so while it may be that Iranians never go to mosque with Jews, they certainly never go to mosque with Americans because America isn’t located inside Iran. Also, Jews and Americans are too moral and/or too weak–it’s safe to hate Jews and Americans without risking the chance that they’ll kill you for blaming your problems on them.
America is a market-dominant minority on a global level. That’s all it takes for America to be hated.
@Jiro
I think that Jewish wealth is a far smaller factor than people believe. The conspiracy theories about Jews are generally about how ‘Jews control everything,’ not how they hoard all the wealth.
Nor do they go to mosque with Swedes. Or Chileans.
Seriously? Americans are known for dropping bombs on people’s heads and if anything, America gets blamed for much more covert meddling than they are realistically capable of doing (and they still do more meddling than anyone else).
The Iranian government really doesn’t hate the US because they think that the US is weak, but rather, because they think that the US is a major threat to their interests.
“They hate us because we are awesome and have the best economy”
Sure. The sanctions against Iran might upset people a lot more, I would say, but what do I know.
Gypsies aren’t known for making money, and they’re even more hated than the Jews.
Yes, but not dropping bombs on people’s heads for shouting “Death to America”. If ISIS is around, shouting ‘Death to ISIS” is likely to be very dangerous to your health. Americans are safe to rail against.
@Jiro
I think that you are severely over- and/or underestimating* people’s ability to connect their objections to American policies to a belief that America will go after them.
* Depending on whether you look at a simplistic 1-on-1 dynamic, where the person who shouts something will get bombed; or whether you look at a belief that society-wide resistance to American supremacy will end in consequences for that nation.
It’s not always something that they consciously do. It falls out of the way social movements develop. Movements which insult safe targets are likely to win at the memetic competition and movements which insult dangerous targets are likely to lose. I’m sure potential mobs connected their troubles to ISIS just as much to America–it’s just that the ones who connect their troubles to America are still around to keep doing it.
Also, there’s the role of governments and mob leaders in fomenting hate. They are probably doing it more consciously, and know that if they want to get a mob, they want a safe target for the mob.
@Jiro
I think that first and foremost, there needs to be a level of credibility to the accusations. Accusations that America is involved with plots against X are more credible because America has historically been involved with plots. Accusations that Jews control banking/the world government/whatever are more credible because Jews disproportionately are/were in positions of power.
American plots often make use of local operatives and Jews look Caucasian, which means that in both cases, it is easy to get the following thought process:
1. Person A gets told about a plot/that many powerful people are Jews.
2. Person A realizes that this is true and that they never noticed it before because it was not overt
3. Person A starts wondering how much more there is that they don’t see
Conspiracy theories work optimally when there is solid proof that something happens (a bit), yet it is very likely that there are also cases that are not public and no clear limit on such cases. At that point, it is easy for people to assign the blame for all that goes wrong to this semi-hidden force.
That is an important factor, IMO, but I don’t see how it is particularly safe when Iran blames Israel & the US for everything or when Russia blames the US. I have a hard time coming up with more dangerous opponents that they could have picked.
I think that you focus way more on the ‘safe’ aspect than is reasonable.
When Iran blames Israel or Russia blames the US, it’s very safe. We all know what the US or Israel is going to do in response to such things: Nothing.
Israel has bombed Iran in the past and the Israeli right pretty clearly considers Iran a major threat due to their rhetoric. This doesn’t seem very safe.
>At what point do military coups become okay? Obviously they are brutal and disappear thousands of people, but when the existing democratically elected state is collapsing due to incompetence, does it at some point balance out?
They don’t have to do those things. Just look at the history of the turkish coups prior to the last one. They usually are though.
That said, to answer the question, I’d say there two times. One, the number of people actually dying because of government policy dramatically exceeds those likely to be killed in a coup. Two, the existing government is doing more damage to valued norms of government (e.g. anti-corruption, rule of law, democratic governance) than the coup will do.
Of course, all of these things are highly contingent. A coup in Turkey was to be feared a lot less than one almost anywhere else because the Turkish military had a long history of coups that were effective, largely bloodless, and most importantly, short. The military would kick out the troublemakers then then go back to the barracks. A coup in Venezuela would be a hell of a lot messier.
>Does Venezuela need a Pinochet?
Yes. Sadly, I doubt they’ll get one.
>US meddling has long been used to make regime changes favorable to the United States, and has hence become an excuse for terrible populist economics in Latin America,
It’s worth pointing out that the US did NOT back the coup that put pinochet in power. They did back a coup in chile a few months before Pinochet’s, but it failed badly. Decades of investigation have failed to produce any hard evidence that the US was involved. this should not be surprising. If I were planning a coup, and I knew that the CIA had just fucked one up, I wouldn’t want them involved either. The US certainly wasn’t against pinochet’s coup, but they didn’t have much to do with it.
>if the CIA funded some domestic coup against Maduro, there’s a good chance that more deaths would be prevented than caused. Maybe it’s too early, but since they seem to be doubling down, Venezuela is a good test case. At what point would assisting the overthrow of Maduro be a net-positive idea?
You’re implicitly assuming that the CIA is competent to do such a thing. Frankly, I wouldn’t trust it. Even if you go back to the “glory days” of CIA covert ops in the 50s, the history of every CIA coup I’ve ever read comes off as downright farcical. The CIA is an analysts’ organization, through and through. They have never been particularly good at this covert action stuff.
If you mean to say that on the morning of September 11th 1973, the CIA had no direct relationship with general Pinochet, we have only their, very unreliable, word for that. But even if we except their version of events
your point is at best a technicality. The CIA went out of it’s way to undermine Allende’s government, through both violent and non violent means. they organized strikes, and protests, they funded terrorist organizations, and plotted the assassination of the commander-in-chief of the Chilean army, general René Schneider. The CIA was by the late early nineteen seventies the largest source of funds for the Chilean extreme right, including explicitly fascist groups like El Frente Nacionalista Patria y Libertad, which had a close relation general Roberto Viaux, the leader of the coup attempt you mentioned. .
It should be clear that, through it’s choice of allies, the United States let it be known that it wanted regime change in Chile and that violence was not only acceptable, but welcome in that cause.
Pinochet always said that he acted in large part because the US had made it obvious that it wanted Allende gone, and that he feared what the superpower might do if the president was not removed. After he sized power, members of Patria y Libertad, and other individuals with close ties to the CIA helped to form the core of his secret police.
Pinochet staged a coup from a position that he held due to the fact that the CIA had assassinated one of his predecessors, in collusion with people known to be in the employ of the CIA, and by his own account in response to American actions in Chile. We will probably never know exactly what transpired in the days leading up to September 11th, but given the context of the times the perception that Washington was behind the coup is well founded.
>If you mean to say that on the morning of September 11th 1973, the CIA had no direct relationship with general Pinochet, we have only their, very unreliable, word for that. But even if we except their version of events
We have their extremely well documented word on it.
>your point is at best a technicality. The CIA went out of it’s way to undermine Allende’s government, through both violent and non violent means. they organized strikes, and protests, they funded terrorist organizations, and plotted the assassination of the commander-in-chief of the Chilean army, general René Schneider.
The CIA meddled. that their meddling was in any way decisive is doubtful at best, and certainly impossible to prove.
>Pinochet always said that he acted in large part because the US had made it obvious that it wanted Allende gone, and that he feared what the superpower might do if the president was not removed.
Funny how he only came to that conclusion after the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Allende was acting unconstitutionally and called for the military to intervene, and Chamber of Deputies’ voted almost 2:1 saying the same thing
>that he held due to the fact that the CIA had assassinated one of his predecessors,
who are you talking about?
>We will probably never know exactly what transpired in the days leading up to September 11th,
We know what happened, Pinochet launched a coup and didn’t tell the US about it.
>but given the context of the times the perception that Washington was behind the coup is well founded.
Well founded at the time, yes. But still wrong.
First, you’ve got your facts wrong, Pinochet was appointed as commander-in-chief of the Chilean army on august 23rd, the day after the chamber of deputies vote, so he obviously could not have acted before that date. Furthermore the Chilean supreme court never called for a military intervention against the president, and it would have been scandalous to do so, as legally the supreme court held no such power.
Second, I often see this claim made by American apologists for Pinochet’s regime, though almost never by Chilean rightists themselves, for reasons that will become clear if you take the time to learn a little history.
In 1970 in the aftermath of the presidential election in which Allende’s popular unity coalition had won a plurality of the vote; the CIA conspired with members of the extreme right to assassinate gen René Schneider Chereau, the commander-in-chief of the Chilean army, a strict constitutionalist, and opponent of Military intervention in politics. This act had almost the exact opposite effect intended by the assassins and rallied the congress of the republic, in particular the moderate Christian democratic party, to support Allende’s election to the presidency.
Allende replaced Schneider with another constitutionalist, general Carlos Prats. Unlike Schneider, Gen. Prats was known for holding leftist views and was as one of Allende’s strongest supporters in the military. Prats would go on to hold two different posts in Allende’s government, Minister of Minister of the Interior, and Minister of National Defense. Importantly he held these posts, while still holding the rank of general in the Chilean army, a fact that led many to accuse Allende of violating article 22 of the constitution.
The popular unity government was an awkward alliance, including moderates like Allende’s Socialists, and the liberal Partido Radical, and more, well.. radical, groups like the the Movimiento de Acción Popular Unitario (MAPU), and the Communists, who’s policies frightened more centrist parties. This unwieldy coalition was never able to effectively govern the country and it began loosing support not long after taking office, with the Christian democrats increasingly shifting to outright opposition, where they were joined by a breakaway faction of the Radicalistas (the confusingly named Partido de Izquierda Radical) in forming the Confederación de la Democracia (CODE), with Jorge Alessandri Rodríguez’s right wing national party. The CODE did relatively well in the 1973 parliamentary elections, but fell short of the majority in senate needed to impeach Allende.
It was the parties of the CODE that drafted the resolution passed by the chamber of deputies on august 22nd. The resolution presented a long, and my opinion exaggerated, list of grievances against the popular unity government, and called upon the armed forces to disobey unconstitutional orders; but, and I say this in defense of the honor of mainstream Chilean conservatives and Christian democrats, it never called for a military coup.
The relevant section is produced bellow in Spanish:
And in English:
Article 22 of the Chilean constitution of 1925
reads thus:
A literal rendering of that in English gives:
“fuerza pública” is a political term of art used in Spanish speaking countries that means, roughly, the forces of the state, that is to to say in this case the armed forces and the Carabineros (the Chilean national police) taken together.
The Spanish verb deliberar, is a cognate of the English word deliberate, but it has a specific significance in legalese, so you get more of the meaning if you translate it as “deliberate politically” or “make political decisions”.
It would make little to sense to invoke the constitutional principle of civilian control of the armed forces in an appeal to launch a military action against an elected president. Indeed, Allende, and the majority, though not all, of the left, and most of the leaders of the opposition remained committed to a peaceful solution up until the last days of civilian rule. The Christian democrats, tried to work out a deal for the resignation of congress and the president and the calling of new elections. Allende for his part proposed a plebiscite (that he expected to lose) on the continuation of his administration; a kind of self recall that would provide a face saving way for him to step down while preserving the institutions of Chilean democracy.
The notion that the coup was launched to preserve constitutional order is ridiculous. The Chilean far right had long resented the 1925 constitution as being overly liberal, and the junta did away with it’s protections the minute they took power, launching a brutal purge that took the lives of thousands of Chilean citizens.
As to the CIA’s role; our friends in northern Virginia had played an important role in Chilean politics
since the early nineteen sixties, providing important support to the Christian democrats and Eduardo Frei Montalva’s presidential campaign. Under Kennedy, and Johnson’s alliance for progress policies, the progressive Frei administration was considered an exemplar of the kind of social reform that would help head off communist insurgency in Latin America.
During the early nineteen seventies this policy changed, in great part because the Nixon administration had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal campaign contributions from American businesses with interests in Chile, in particular ITT. Fearing that Christian democratic candidate Radomiro Tomic Romero would support nationalizing the property of US business interests, the Nixon administration shifted US support from the PDC, to the National party and more extreme right groups like Patria y Libertad. It should be noted that change was ordered over the objections of career CIA officers, who saw no national security reason for intervening to protect the property of Republican campaign donors.
We know the company played a decisive role in the killing of Gen. Schneider, we know they helped organizer the strikes and lockouts that so destabilized the popular unity government, we know they were the principle financiers of right wing terrorism in Chile, and we know that after the coup that members of organizations that had been funded by the CIA formed the backbone of the DINA, general Pinochet’s secret police. Based on declassified records we know that Gen. Manuel Contreras, the head of DINA, remained on the payroll of the CIA, even as he plotted to order Michael Townley, an American citizen and former member of Patria y Libertad, to travel to the United States, where he murdered former defense minister Orlando Letelier and his aid, a young American women named Ronni Moffitt. We know that the CIA was aware of this plot in advance and did nothing to stop it.
We have clear evidence that the minute they it happed the CIA backed the coup, subsequent repression, to the hilt. but we do not know with certainty what happed on September 11th, it may be the case that Pinochet acted without informing Washington of his plans in advance; but
things like this tend not get written down, and the only witnesses have a history of being less than reliable with the truth .
The fact that you are repeating mistakes made only in English language secondary sources leads me to believe that you can’t speak Spanish, and that your knowledge of Chilean history is based primarily on Wikipedia.
In short, you just plain don’t know what your talking about.
What do you mean by “decisive”? What evidence do you have that the role was decisive?
My libertarian side says a coup is okay iff everyone thinks it’s okay, and the more who don’t, the less okay it is, roughly speaking. My epistemic side says that this means the coup has to look okay, and that this is where you’ll get into logistical problems.
First, who are the players? Maduro’s one. Most of us don’t care what he thinks. But he has supporters. Gotta cater to them. Why are they in for Maduro’s politics? Some of them are involved in the brutality, but some are just passive supporters who think collectivism is a good idea. We can appeal to their conscience (overwhelmingly Christian; probably agree killing is wrong), provided they’re convinced that that’s primarily why the coup is there to prevent. In fact, that’s probably the dominant appeal.
Trouble is, coups kill too, so you need a way to rein that in, and also a way to convince everyone that that way will work – hence, all the logistical problems. Anyone motivated enough to stage a coup is probably also motivated enough to break a lot more people. And people know that, so they’ll need a lot of convincing. The main way I can see for coups to work and also appear so, is if the alternative is clearly worse, and it very often isn’t.
Upon victory.
Leave Venezuela as it is… it’s a reminder to the rest of the world about how terrible socialism is. Never forget to mention that Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves when the topic comes up, either.
Is oil like cars, in that I am constantly hearing about how every other country has the biggest oil reserve in the world?
The most common way of counting is “proven” oil reserves, which only counts oil which is economically viable to recover at >90% certainty. This means that on top of the discovery of new formations, the known formations dip in and out of “proven” status based on the price of oil and advance of technology. I believe Venezuela claims to be the top country there, but there’s some question as to the veracity of their estimate.
Then you have “probable” and “possible” reserves on either side of 50% certainty, plus the question of whether to estimate undiscovered formations based on geologic similarity. With so many ways of counting every country can cherry-pick.
Additionally, sometimes you’ll see “resource” numbers rather than “reserves”, where “resources” refer to the total amount of oil&gas, regardless of whether those fluids could ever conceivably be recovered.
Sometimes people will throw around resources numbers in the case of shale deposits. 4.8 trillion barrels of shale oil resources! Okay – at what recovery factor?
It depends on the nature of the oath sworn by the military personnel, in my mind. That said, my general case would be something like:
“When the foundational principles upon which the country was founded are threatened, and the legal and procedural safeguards in place to allow the threat or threats to be dealth with have been fatally compromised.”
For example:
A hypothetical future President starts issuing executive orders nullifying one or more of the bill of rights or otherwise altering the constitution. Due to previous court-packing, the Supreme Court upholds this as a valid exercise of executive authority. Congress votes for impeachment but the president refuses to comply with the trial process. Congress delivers a conviction which the president declares is unlawful and treasonous since he didn’t participate in the trial. Law enforcement is unwilling (due to cooption by the president) or unable (due to secret service interference) to take the President into custody…
…at THAT point, I would -hope- the military or at least elements would intervene, although I could see it rapidly threatening to spin into a civil war.
Hmmm, typing that out has led me to a more concise phrasing:
-A Military Coup is proper when it is planned with the intent of preserving the core legal and cultural principles of the society, and when it is executed only in response to the reasonable belief that a civil war is imminent or the total breakdown of law and order due to misrule has already begun.
I know a person reasonably well whose wealth is in the low 8 digits.
I don’t think they are very charitable (could be wrong) or care/know about singularity (might be wrong). They’re intelligent and very practical and even rational when it comes to managing their own wealth. My moral views dictate that I have an obligation to attempt to get them to help with X-risk prevention, since even a 1% chance of success would be quite significant, and I feel guilty and pretty frustrated with myself for not having taken any steps in that direction.
If I wanted to change that, does trying to improve persuasive skills work, and if so what are the best resources for it?
It depends what exactly is the nature of your relationship with this person.
Edited to add: As far as whether improving your persuasive skills “works”, taking steps to improve ANY skill will improve that skill, if you’re using the right methods of improvement and sticking with it.
Also, building on what I first said, persuasion looks very different depending on the context. If I’m trying to talk my wife into not changing the color of a room in our house, my persuasion technique will be very different than if I’m giving a talk at a conference and want to persuade my audience to start practicing Agile the way my company does.
@Well…
I’d be interested to hear about this (in a new thread if you don’t want to hijack this one.)
Disclaimer: That was just an example. I haven’t actually ever given a talk on Agile, and I’m not nearly as qualified to do so as some other people in my company. (I’ve given talks on other topics.)
Without giving away what might potentially be too much IP and too much of my own anonymity, I’ll just say my company practices Agile very faithfully while delivering complex system products to large clients that often aren’t used to Agile.
Agile manifesto.
Do any other software developers read ‘practice Agile faithfully’ and twitch?
In my own experience, there is agile as described in the document, in which a developer can poke their head above their desk and say to their business contact “Hey, this process we’re about to follow to create this deliverable which will be archived, it doesn’t seem like it’s adding any value. Do you need it? No? Great. I’ll send an email to the team saying we’re skipping this step.”, and Agile as delivered by consultants and evangelists, where people freak the hell out when you bring up that the story-point estimations and burn-down charts are utter fictions and should be disregarded.
I think part of my confusion is that as it says in the manifesto, doing agile means doing what works for your team at this moment in time, including ignoring the manifesto, so talking about practicing it faithfully gets into weird recursion paradox issues.
Yes, but that’s true with any methodology in place of Agile. Software isn’t at the point where it can be reduced to following procedures out of a three-ring binder or even a book with an animal on its cover. I find software people who desire that it become that baffling.
I’ve heard of companies that say “We practice Agile” and then after probing turns out they have stand-up meetings…and that’s it. (And their stand-up meetings are 30+ minutes long.) I meant to indicate we were not like those companies.
We were playing in the same clan of a game for a while, talked and chatted through skype.
Okay, but what are the right methods?
OK, so it’s an internet friend. Someone who you might potentially grab a beer with if he’s in town for some reason.
Maybe you should propose such an occasion, and then get to talking about charity after you’ve had a few beers together. I can easily envision a smooth way to have that conversation.
Swap out details as needed to suit your particular situation. You could even learn some fascinating stuff about what it’s really like to have the kind of spending options this guy does. I’m personally curious to know.
Are you giving money to charity this year? (It’s very common to give right before the end of the fiscal year, aka “giving season”.) If so, you might ask them whether/where they are giving and share where you are giving.
I would highly recommend against using any sort of high-pressure sales tactics. Persuasion seems like the wrong approach. Your “in” with this person is that you know them reasonably well. If I was rich, I’d always be worried about my friends being phoney. Don’t ruin your “in” by trying to be a person that you’re not. I think it’d be much better to be straight up and explain the drowning child argument and why you feel like you have a moral obligation to try to convince them to give to charity. At least it’s not phoney. It probably won’t work, but you might stay friends afterwards.
Yeah, I dropped a donation to Miri just a couple of days ago.
I’m not convinced that starting by asking about what they gave to charity is a good idea, though. But I definitely see the argument of your second paragraph.
I’ll second Reasoner – avoid anything that’s likely to give the impression that you care more about getting this person’s money to your pet cause than you do about them as a person. If you’ve ever been evangelized to by a religious person who claimed to be very concerned about your fate in the afterlife, but seemed to you to be more concerned with adding a notch to their conversion belt, that’s exactly the kind of thing you want to not do.
Crossposting this from the subreddit, since the DOD Office of Net Assessment source I point out there seemed to spark genuine interest among some commenters, and I expect some non-redditors on SSC would also find it as fascinating as I did.
What’s the best place to upload pictures if I want to link a graph I’ve made here?
imgur, probably.
Defining types of economies based on how you access goods:
Type 1 Economy: You hunt, gather, and make your own goods with help from kin. The variety of goods is dependent on what you and your kin make out of the natural environment. The primary and secondary sector is mostly tribal. Examples: hunter gatherer communities, subsistence agriculture.
Intermediate types (1a,etc): Barter based economies, mercantile feudal economies.
Type 2 Economy: You use a common means of exchange to trade for goods you cannot make yourself. The variety of goods is dependent on what goods private business or government make from processed materials. The primary, secondary, and tertiary sector is mostly societal. Examples: pre-capitalist market economies, “capitalism”, “socialism” (state capitalism).
Intermediate types: ?
Type 3 Economy: You use automated machinery to create any custom good you desire out of raw materials provided by business or government. The variety of goods is dependent on what advanced additive manufacturing machines can make out of various processed materials. The primary sector is societal, but much of the secondary, and tertiary sectors is individual. Examples: Not yet available. (Star Trek?)
In your structure, at what point does Type 1 become Type 2? I mean, what fraction of your subsistance needs or material horde needs to be “storeboughten” before Type 1 becomes Type 2?
Also, for Type 3 – how are you defining “advanced additive manufacturing machines” and how is running a plant of these different than herding goats to produce milk, cheese, and roast goat?
Presumably Type 1 transitions into Type 2 at the point where we get dodgy Babylonian merchants like Ea-Nasir 🙂
My favorite part is that he was apparently keeping all these clay tablets with angry letters calling him a crook. Like, was he proud of the amount of hate mail he got?
I imagine he was keeping track of exactly what scam he pulled where on who – so that (for instance) “Okay, I can’t try the ol’ low quality copper thing in that town for a bit, but I haven’t done the house flipping scam there yet”.
It was probably necessary to know who he’d pissed off for what reason so that if he did get hauled into court (or they sent the leg-breakers round), he could keep his story straight and avoid visiting that part of the country until things cooled down 🙂
The two blend smoothly into each other through intermediate types of economy. It’s a general description, not a precise one. More primitive economies are dominated by type 1 economic activity, and more advanced economies are dominated by type 2 activity.
Because with goats, you (and your “tribe”) have to do work, and the goods you can get are limited by the nature of goats, which are not designed to produce any conceivable good for human consumption.
It’s very different to having something more like a Star Trek replicator, where you can get any kind of good you want with no labor.
Let’s rephrase.
Type 1: You have to work hard with your nearest group to produce a limited range of goods for subsistence. Good selection is limited by your local ability to manipulate nature.
Type 2: You work hard to gain means of exchange to purchase things others have produced that you couldn’t produce for yourself. Good selection is limited by how market actors (or government in a socialist state) respond to demand, and a less limited ability to manipulate raw materials due to scale economies and modern technology.
Type 3: You ask a machine for the precise good you want and it gives it to you. Good selection is no longer limited directly by market factors, since you have control over secondary stage production, and due to the advanced stage of manufacturing, any conceivable good can be replicated within size and ration constraints.
Type 3 reminds me of Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age.” The idea being that once it was no more expensive to build out of diamond than concrete (due to the invention of “matter compilers,” i. e. Star Trek’s replicators), people started building everything out of diamond. In the same book he proposed some alternative to this kind of economy, which the Chinese were developing in the future and he called “the seed.” I’m not sure I really understood what he was proposing with that, though. I think the basic idea was that the matter compiler “feed” was more planned, while the “seed” was more “open source,” non-linear, decentralized, or something. Maybe more ancapish, but I’m not sure how it was supposed to interface with the different technologies.
Diamond age was what I thought of as well. I thought the idea of the feed was that it created a sort of anti-UBI? You could have anything you wanted whenever you wanted, but you had to keep up payments to the feed or it would stop. And the idea behind the Seed was that it would be self contained or self sustaining, they would somehow incorporate the means to produce the raw material and the replicator in the same system so you no longer needed a third party provider.
Its been a long time since I read the books though so I might have just made all that up.
In any case the appeal to culturalism and the enclaves in that book were the most interesting part for me, at the time of reading at least.
That sounds right based on my recollection. And I agree the cultural enclaves were interesting. Feels like Stephenson predicted neo-ethnonationalism a long time ago.
I guess the key with the feed is that, once you only need power to produce any configuration of matter, then power becomes in some sense, the only resource. Or was it more like the feed controlled the blueprints for building stuff, so you could have anything in the world cheaply, but the ability to provide it like that was, in some sense, copyright?
Either way, I guess it points to at least the possibility of, in the future, some kind of mega-powerful cartels developing to control e. g. robot production. Like, in a world where robots make everything, the robot maker is king (or Mom)?
3D printers might be the first step on the road to Type 3, if I’m understanding you correctly.
I’d say there are 2 types.
1) You spend your days producing food largely for your own consumption. What you don’t consume is mostly taxed away. A small share is used for the purchase of the few goods in enough demand that a small number of people can survive making them, typically salt, metal tools, glass, liquor, and luxuries.
2) You spend your days making money, then buy your food at some sort of market. If you do produce food, you do so not for your own consumption, but to sell on the market.
That’s the important distinction, the biggest disjoint in human history. Prior to 1700, pretty much everyone spent all day producing food for their own consumption. Automation, industrialization, gathering vs. farming, all small potatoes compared to that shift.
Hypothesis: mental illness is contagious, and can spread via social media.
We already know emotions can spread via social media – angry statuses make people angry and make more angry statuses (for more, see That Research Paper Facebook wrote). I’m not sure where anxiety and depression fall on a spectrum between emotions and illnesses, but I think they blur the distinction. Also unsure if stress can cause mental illness, but I think the answer is yes.
Ultimately, I’d like my friends (who qualitatively seem to have mental health problems in direct proportion to how much time they spend on SJ Tumblr) to see their mental health not as something they’re born with (because my friends weren’t like this when we were in college, and had less time to spend on social media), but as something that’s being done to them.
Sorry for not providing citations or evidence – I’m mostly hoping to start a conversation and see if others are qualitatively noticing the same thing.
Social media is a mental illness, just an externalized one. (Similar to how a shopping list is an externalized form of memory.)
BTW there’s a lot of literature on the effects of social media on mental health.
If you haven’t already, you should delete all your social media accounts.
Hmm, presumably SSC comment threads don’t qualify as social media under your definition of the term. I think SSC comments, as well as all message boards, are social media. What’s your definition?
I haven’t thought about a formal definition for social media, but off the top of my head two typical features of social media illustrate important differences between it and SSC comment threads:
– social media is engineered so you put more and more of your life into it, starting with the first carefully-designed prompt to share whatever’s on your mind
– social media encourages you to make “connections” and grow your “network”
– social media is outwardly positioned as a “platform” or public resource rather than as a private website
Okay. I’m comfortable saying that I believe my hypothesis applies equally well to message boards or SSC comments – it’s not a product of the technology, it’s a product of the company you keep.
The idea of ideas as memetic parasites/symbiotes that spread through hosts across communication vectors is a creature I’m willing to house in my headmeat.
(I do faintly recall a Youtube video on the subject of ideas being susceptible to evolutionary pressures, with the more successful ones mutating to spread farther and across more minds, but I’m on mobile. Will come back if I find it once home.)
EDIT: Here it is.
I saw that! It borrows pretty heavily from Scott’s “Toxoplasmosis of Rage” article, I think.
Speaking of Toxoplasma… stage 2 of my hypothesis is that social media “deliberately” cultivates depressive behaviors. If you think jobs are bullshit, you’re less likely to keep your job. If you think you live in an oppressive culture that harasses / assaults / arrests / shoots you just for going outside, you’re more likely to stay inside.
And if you stay inside and become unemployed, you’re the perfect host. You’re more likely to upvoterebloglikesharecomment these kinds of memes, and followfriend your allies who share these kinds of memes. The memes become super successful because they’ve cultivated a strong core of people, with lots of free time, promoting them.
I don’t think mental illness can spread like a memetic virus through social media because I don’t think thinking you have depression, or might develop depression, increases your likelihood of actually having it or developing it, though it might increase the number of people claiming to have it.
I do think excessive or harmful social media use may be a symptom and/or enabler of mental illness in the way that say, easy availability of alcohol enables alcoholism but doesn’t cause it, per se. Having a cheap liquor store right around the corner doesn’t cause you to become an alcoholic; you may never set foot in the place. But it may increase the probability of it.
Speaking as someone with OCD tendencies, I can say that there is an extent to which if it isn’t one thing, it’s another. That is, given that social media is available, I may become obsessed with it in an unhealthy way; but social media didn’t cause my inherent tendency to become unhealthfully obsessed with things, and if social media didn’t exist I might just become obsessed with something else, possibly more harmful (or possibly more constructive). That is, in the alcohol example, if you are the type of person who becomes an alcoholic “because” of the corner liquor store, there is a decent chance that, absent the corner liquor store, you’d still become one, or, if you had a corner blow dealer instead, addicted to something worse.
I do think there is an extent to which social media and other digital technology including TV, cell phone games, etc. may be:mental health::McDonald’s:healthy weight. It is possible to eat McDonald’s, even to eat McDonald’s regularly, and maintain a healthy weight. Some people may be able to eat McDonald’s all the time and never get fat. But having easy access to McDonald’s may make it harder to maintain a healthy weight. Probably does, because it’s carefully engineered to pack maximum fat+carbs+sodium into the cheapest, tastiest, fastest available package. Similarly, media today is designed to be addictive; therefore, having a healthy relationship to it may be a greater challenge today in the same way as having a healthy relationship to food may be.
I’m building off Scott’s “Mental Disorders as Networks” model, where “depression” is just a cluster of symptoms related by a complex chain of causes. I think some people are Born This Way, unable to synthesize or receive dopamine properly. For example, I definitely think Hyperbole and a Half’s illustration of depression is very different from any of my friends’. But I think depression is generally broader than the Born This Way crowd, and that it may still be a useful term.
I can imagine social media patterns fitting the causal model very well. Maybe Trump Anxiety disturbs your sleep, causing fatigue. And fatigue causes you to snap at your boss. Maybe that thinkpiece on Bullshit Jobs feeds your feelings of worthlessness and causes you to slack at work. Maybe your irritability and dislike of work causes you to lose your job, and then to stop seeking work. (Again, this is all quite theoretical.)
Oh shit, I think you just gave me depression.
Why is tumblr worse than just my day to day life sucking?
If you lose your job, your day-to-day life will absolutely suck. Tumblr isn’t “worse” here, it’s just a vector to transmit depression into an otherwise-happy life.
(This hyposthesis does cause me a lot of distress, and I do personally agree with the statement “Tumblr is worse than my day-to-day life.”)
I could see this potentially working in this sense, and have probably observed such a pattern in people I know: because it is now possible to cultivate a media bubble for oneself–to be exposed 24/7 to whatever type of messaging you want, it is conceivable that one can become “addicted” to news or opinions that feel like they scratch an itch in the short run–reports about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket, “outrage porn,” and so on, but which make you less happy or more vulnerable to mental illness in the long run.
Like, in the past, if you were prone to get obsessively outraged about perceived injustice, your ability to surround yourself with stories about that particular kind of outrage was limited. Now, it isn’t. As a libertarian, I can spend all day, every day, reading about government atrocities if I want to, as an SJW could spend all day, every day, reading about violence against minorities and women, and so on.
Onyomi
Taking that idea to a conclusion
Positive inspirational tumblr bubble as free therapy?
Yes, I do think there is a sense in which “you are what you eat (for your media diet),” for good and for ill. I have a friend who looks at pictures of fat people to help him keep off the weight (and anorexics, of course, look at pictures of skeletal models for motivation–not healthy, but it probably helps them achieve that goal). These are probably… not ideal, but there is probably a… nicer, more constructive way to do something like this. /fit/ for example posts only slightly homoerotic pictures of muscular men to inspire one another to get ripped, etc.
Are there any cute motivational memes to keep me from losing faith in the peer review process, maybe?
Not sure where I heard this but for years now I’ve always believed in the saying: “The first sign of clinical depression is a Tumblr account.”
I think there’s a kernel of truth there. Like you, I don’t have any evidence to back up the claim but in my experience there certainly is a link between the Tumblr user friends/ex-gfs and depression. It might not be causal, maybe Tumblr for some reason attracts the depressed, but I suspect something is going on here also…
My hypothesis is that the Tumblr community, being an SJW enclave (is this accurate? That’s my impression of Tumblr), rewards people that claim to have depression with attention and social validation. This is the Oppression Olympics in action. The more oppressed/victimized you are, the more online street cred you get. So you’re incentivized in the Tumblr community to be oppressed or victimized in some way. Depression is one form that is easy to adopt.
Obligatory “there is a Tumblr outside the SJ-sphere” comment.
I can see the connection, and it fits with my personal experience as well, but I don’t think it’s SJ-related. Tumblr’s seemingly endless ocean of content and infinite scrolling make it very low-effort entertainment that doesn’t require you to leave your bed, so it could be attractive to the depressed. The SJ stuff and glorification of mental illness don’t hurt but I don’t think they alone can explain the connection. (Disclaimer: have a Tumblr, don’t frequent the SJ side, not depressed or otherwise mentally ill.)
I mean, Tumblr is basically Facebook for lonely nerdy(ish) people, SJ-aligned or not.
I don’t think that’s at all an accurate representation of Tumblr. Consider porn is still the biggest constituent of all Internet traffic, and Tumblr is the only of the major social media providers that doesn’t censor what you’re allowed to post. It’s a massive dissemination point for free content, both third-party reposts and fledgling individual performers trying to make names for themselves. Free porn is the only reason I have a Tumblr account. Your feed is completely customizable, and if all you ever see is SJW posts, that’s because that is what you chose to see.
I don’t have anything relevant to say, but I thought this comment was interesting and I encourage you to post more if you have other interesting ideas.
Thanks! I posted a much more interesting, much more dubious corollary here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/17/ot65-the-early-thread-gets-the-worm/#comment-445251
I don’t like the term social media. Facebook, instagram, linkedin, snapchat and twitter are all really quite different from each other in how they work and how people use them. I don’t think the category as whole is very useful for much of anything — other perhaps than as an investment sector.
I think what you describe is more like an effect of joining a cult, than social media per se. People who join cults have their personalities changed, and become pessimistic about everything that is not related to the cult.
Social media is just a tool to keep the cult members connected all the time, because the more time one spends with fellow cultists, the less time one can spend with unbelievers or doing some independent thinking. Attention is a scarce resource, and the cult extracts as much as it can.
But in some ways, the social media are more insidious than e.g. using a phone for the same purpose would be. With phone, it’s 1:1; with social media, you are connected to the whole group. With phone, you know when you are talking to other cult members, and when you are talking to unbelievers. With social media it feels like you are communicating with the whole world freely, but you are actually self-censoring all the time (or get “called out” by someone from your group). It’s like having your phone calls monitored by your fellow cultists, but of course you are nominally free to talk to anyone, as long as there is zero wrongthink on your side (so technically all you can do with most people is just preaching to them or screaming at them).
The similarities between the “social justice” and the standard cult criteria are too big to be coincidental (black and white thinking, requiring perfect purity, believing your side is predestined to win, denying individual experience that contradicts the group teachings, controlling the way you speak, redefining the language, disconnecting from nonbelievers, being publicly judged by the group, having a “science” you are not allowed to be skeptical about, etc.).
I hate to imagine what you’d think of mainstream religion.
Unsong question: So if I remember correctly, Appollo 11 crashed into the crystal sphere. What about the previous missions that circled the moon, like Appollo 8?
It was Apollo 8 that crashed into the crystal sphere. Apollo 11 was then repurposed to *land* on the crystal sphere.
The story sort of neglects that Apollo 8 wasn’t the first circumlunar flight, only the first *manned* circumlunar flight.
So I think “crashed into” the sphere is the wrong way of looking at it. This is a metaphorical process not a mechanical one. More accurate would be to say it “crashed” the sphere.
The thing that caused the destruction was reading the old testament beyond the sphere. Uriel says “YOU INJECTED THE CODE FOR THE ORIGINAL SYSTEM VIA A BUFFER OVERFLOW ATTACK.” Not doing that would have kept the lunar sphere just metaphorical enough to pass a spaceship through it.
Paul Bloom reads SSC! He mentioned one of Scott’s posts (about Trump) in the latest Very Bad Wizards podcast.
He does, and has for at least a year AFAIK. He’s also Tweeted at least several of Scott’s articles.
How strong is the experimental basis for the complaints about media representation in terms of race, gender, sexuality, etc.? Most studies on the topic are either in communications or “____ Studies” and focus on picking apart the medium in question (ex: looking at %female in TV shows) but there seem to be much fewer papers in econ/psych/etc. – something that could, for example, experimentally determine how representation (or lack thereof) of one’s group affects mindset/goals/etc, and that goes beyond stereotype threat? The closest to what I was looking for that I could find was “Racial and Gender Differences in the Relationship Between Children’s Television Use and Self-Esteem: A Longitudinal Panel Study” by Martins and Harrison. This honors thesis (for a B.A. in psych, written this year) attempts a literature review and actually says that there’s very few experiments in which actual variables were manipulated. Am I not looking hard enough? I realize that this is very difficult to study since there’s a thousand potential confounders at work.
Alternately, are people complaining about media representation trying to get at something more than “it has bad effects on these groups’ self-esteem”?
I think there’s also a belief that if you seldom or never see anyone from a group in a fairly particular positive role, you’re less likely to choose someone for that group to fill that role.
Also, a lot of people do seem to have trouble imagining themselves doing something that they haven’t seen someone like them do. This is not to deny that there are also plenty of people who are immune to this limitation.
My handiest example is that I’ve seen a bunch of people say (sorry no cite) that it was a shocking realization that they could become a writer. This may be a special case because books don’t have an obvious human source. Being a writer isn’t like being a doctor.
Speaking vaguely of, any recommendations for positive-to-neutral portrayals of people from the white working class in popular media?
I’d consider police to usually be working class (even if very well-paid working class), and there are quite a few procedurals out there that cast the police in favorable lights.
I’m going to limit this to recognisably Earth cultures.
Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell’s Childermass is a good example if you don’t mind going back to the regency era.
The Bartimaeus trilogy has some heroic working class muggles rebelling against the magocracy set in a fairly modern fantasy London.
Jack Murdock from the Daredevil tv series definitely counts even though he has limited screen time.
The Mario Brothers probably don’t count, but canonically they are plumbers.
Left for Dead 2 has all or almost all working class characters. Left for Dead 1 has one or two.
The protagonist of an obscure (and very good) webcomic Shades is a tailor. Another charachter is a cabbie and his niece/nephews. It’s complete and free so check it out.
The protagonist of angelmaker is a watch repair man. The other protagonist is harder to place (she’s basically a female James Bond, so her background mostly begins in spy training).
The only white working class character in Left 4 Dead 2 is Ellis, and only Coach and Ellis are working class regardless of race. Nick is a criminal and con man, and if that doesn’t disqualify him from being working class, his casual wear of an expensive (even if probably not really $3000) white suit sure does. Rochelle is a TV news producer, making her part of a high-class credentialed service economy and also a member of The News Media.
Speaking vaguely of, any recommendations for positive-to-neutral portrayals of people from the white working class in popular media?
I’ve heard people talk about Deepwater Horizon in this way. Mike Rowe’s non-fiction Dirty Jobs series might count.
The suggestion for police procedurals is a good one – try Bluebloods. Longmire and Justified are also good for this, I think. You might also look for old works – John Wayne westerns, etc.
My handiest example is that I’ve seen a bunch of people say (sorry no cite) that it was a shocking realization that they could become a writer.
Look up the story of the Florida Highwayman painters, some time.
I’ve heard this thought expressed, too, and it never made sense to me – that there was a profession which it was not possible that people like me could do. In charity, though, it does seem to have happened to a lot of people.
Flipping it around, I wonder how many people never thought that they are the sort of people who would steal, or whore themselves out, or do drugs, or kill someone, or taunt someone into suicide. I mean, like ‘retire at middle management’, it’s generally not something seven year olds put on their “life accomplishment wish list”.
Yet people all around the world from various walks of life do that thing every day.
In Eric Flint’s 1632 and its sequels, the protagonists are the inhabitants of a modern West Virginia mining town that gets suddenly transplanted to Central Europe during the 30 Years’ War.
William Gibson’s The Peripheral might count? Near-ish future sci-fi with half the action taking place in small town rural America. Gibson is not optimistic about the prospects of the working class, but the most sympathetic character is white working class and the book takes their problems seriously.
Great point/question about the (white) working class in media. Other than police serials, the next most common portrayals are probably soldiers (you tell me what this says about our society). Forest Gump falls into that category, with some twists. You can probably also find a lot of positive minor roles by looking at the protagonists parents: successful child of struggling parents is a common trope. But that’s sidelining them to be overshadowed by their upper middle class offspring.
Would you count October Skies? It’s fairly negative about the situation of being working class but is positive about the individuals as far as I recall. Same for John Steinbeck.
And since we were all thinking it but didn’t want to bring it up: Ayn Rand is probably the place to look for this.
@ tgb
In the movie Rand’s main characters look and behave like very comfortable working class. (Especially in Part II — I haven’t seen Part III.) I was impressed with the choice to get rid of what glamour there was left in Part I. I’d have enjoyed more glamour all through, but ordinary people showed her message better.
I would assume that television still counts as media, and for as long as television has existed there has been a pretty steady supply of sitcoms centered on an affectionate portrayal of a white working-class family. Or, I suppose, yellow working class.
I think one complaint that is not related to what you are talking about, is that by casting white people to play non-white people you are taking jobs away from non-white actors.
I don’t actually understand this belief very well but I have heard it expressed.
As there are people talking about career advice here:
I’ve just about completed a year long dipGrad in computer science and am looking to work in the field. Problem is the field is seems so complex I’m finding it hard to develop good career strategy. Does anyone have experience/resources on this? Also it seems a portfolio really helps to get a job, any tips on how to get a good looking portfolio? I have a three week break and I want to use it to get myself on the right path. Any help would be much appreciated.
I assume you want to work as a programmer? If you can string a few lines of code together and paid attention in the intro classes on algorithms and datastructures, you don’t need any portfolio. Especially if you are willing to move internationally.
Do befriend some people working at Google and Facebook et al. Online is fine. That way you can get referrals, which basically guarantee you a phone screen interview—so you resume doesn’t end up in a black hole.
The field has been a real sellers market for some time. Programmers can afford to be picky.
What’s your current situation like? Where in the world are you based? What’s your passport? Can you solve something like https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/even-tree in less than an hour?
Yeah, a programmer is what I’m looking to be. I’m a New Zealander (with passport) and also have Irish citizenship. I’m very happy to travel elsewhere; I want to see some more of the world outside my little island. However the way student loans work here is that they’re interest free until you travel overseas. So I’ll only really travel if I have a good job on the other end.
I’ll try that challenge and a couple like it when I get a free spot today. At a glance, challenges like these would probably take me an hour and a half; more or less depending on mistakes etc. I’m still relatively new to this.
Tom White at Victoria University New Zealand does the awesomest things with neural networks. Much of his code is up on github, check it out, might inspire you.
Creating a LinkedIn account may lead to recruiters emailing you with offers, which solves the calling-companies-cold problem pretty well.
LinkedIn recruiters are pretty bad. I got much better leads from stackoverflow’s career website.
http://stackoverflow.com/jobs
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/
Awesome resources, cheers for the responses.
What are the best books you read in 2016?
I am not completely sure if any of the best books I read in 2016 were first published in 2016 but I am completely sure that nobody will agree with all the books on my list:
Sapiens
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari-ebook/dp/B00K7ED54M/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1482008113&sr=1-1&keywords=sapiens
A Fraction of the Whole
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fraction-Whole-Steve-Toltz-ebook/dp/B002RI993M/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1482008185&sr=1-1&keywords=fraction+of+the+whole
Warlord Trilogy
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Winter-King-Arthur-Warlord-Chronicles-ebook/dp/B002ZJSU6A/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1482008265&sr=1-1&keywords=warlord+trilogy
Prize of all the Oceans
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Prize-All-Oceans-Glyn-Williams/dp/0007292724/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1482008304&sr=1-1&keywords=prize+of+all+the+oceans
Lazarus is Dead
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lazarus-Dead-Richard-Beard-ebook/dp/B005E87CJK/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1482008355&sr=1-1&keywords=lazarus+is+dead
Other Peoples Money
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Other-Peoples-Money-Universe-Servants-ebook/dp/B00UJD8AS2/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1482008417&sr=1-1&keywords=other+peoples+money+john+kay
Rubicon
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rubicon-Triumph-Tragedy-Roman-Republic-ebook/dp/B004YD1RYM/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1482008553&sr=1-1&keywords=rubicon
Now that I look at the list it seems that apart from Sapiens none of these really have anything to do with this blog. I did read The House of God on Scott’s recommendation and I enjoyed it but the magical realism element irritated me.
Will be interested to see what others come up with!
1. _The Northern Caves_, a novelette by tumblr-user nostalgebraist. Very well written, with a genuinely bone-chilling idea at its core (though the genre isn’t horror), this stands far above the usual level of quality of fanfic or original fic I’ve encountered in rationalist circles. In my opinion it’s also far superior to the author’s other novelette, _Floornight_. I wish the author would try to publish it; I think he’s convinced that since much of the story is told through the medium of an early-2000s web forum posts, lovingly preserved in style and form, it isn’t publishable. I don’t know if that’s really so; in my ideal world, it’d get the Hugo.
2. W.G.Sebald, _The Emigrants_. Four tales about four different people who ended up leaving their native countries for different reasons, though that isn’t necessarily the most important fact in their lives. Purports to be semi-autobiographical in that the people are claimed to be acquaintances or relatives of the author. Sebald’s prose (in translation) is beautiful, and somehow manages to be both wistful and precise. A quirk of the book is that Nabokov, the author, makes a cameo appearance or mention in each one of the otherwise unconnected tales.
3. Penelope Fitzgerald, _Human Voices_. A short (all of Fitzgerald’s novels are short) novel about the inner goings-on at the BBC during the Blitz. Wonderfully funny and moving.
[The large concert-hall inside the BBC headquarters has been turned into a dormitory for the workers, who found it difficult to get home when the attacks came]
Quantities of metal bunks were dragged into Broadcasting House. […] The bunks were fitted on top of each other in unstable tiers, and the platform, including the half-sacred spot where the grand piano had once stood, was converted into cubicles. […] At length a cord was stretched across the great hall, dividing it in half, and grey hospital blankets were draped over it in place of a curtain. Barnett and his staff thought this part of the job by no means up to standard.
‘It’ll provide privacy for the ladies, which is the main point. But I don’t like to see a job left like that.’
And might not the makeshift nature of the blankets lead to moral confusion? There were a lot of very young people among the temporary staff. Barnett was asked whether he thought there’d be goings on?
‘Surely not while England’s in danger.’ he replied.
4. Julian Barnes, _Cross Channel_. My favorite, and I think underappreciated, book by this author, a collection of short stories each of which deals with the English-French connection in some way. _Evermore_, the story about an old maid making an annual pilgrimage to all the WWI mass graves of British soldiers in France, in honor and memory of her brother lying in one of them, is heartbreaking.
Superb!
That dry humour reminds me of the Booker of Bookers, The Siege of Krishnapur. A really outstanding novel.
I’m not sure if it’s the best, but certainly the one that affected me the most is: The Library at Mount Char.
Unfortunately I can’t explain why it affected me without massive spoilers; and I don’t think there’s spoiler tags here. I can say it’s very very dark.
If you want to post spoilers, you can use rot13.
I don’t know whether you’ve got a blog, but you could also write up your spoilerish explanation and include a link to where you put it.
Good idea. Massive spoilers to follow:
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Ur riraghnyyl ernyvmrf gung ur’f orra yrsg creznaragyl nzbeny, naq trgf obneq bs ehyvat guvf havirefr, naq qrpvqrf gb genva n fhpprffbe jub’yy or nzbeny rabhtu gb ehyr ohg abg dhvgr nf onq nf uvzfrys.
Nyy va nyy, vg’f n irel vagrerfgvat zbgvir naq vg’f n jryy jevggra obbx. Ohg V svaq vg uneq gb trg bire gur snpg gung qrfcvgr orvat evqvphybhfyl rivy, gur jvmneq arire snprf nal xnezn sbe uvf npgvbaf. Sebz na va fgbel havirefr vg znxrf frafr gung ur’yy trg njnl jvgu vg, ur’f onfvpnyyl tbq, bs pbhefr vg jbhyq nyy tb nppbeqvat gb cyna. Ohg fgvyy…
These are of course my opinion. I read mostly Sci-Fi and the rest random. All audio books.
Favorite Sci-Fi:
1. We Are Legion (We Are Bob): Bobiverse (Don’t judge a book by its title)
2. Three Body Series (Chinese Sci-Fi which was surprisingly good)
3. Dark Matter
Random:
A Man Called Ove (One of the few I ever read twice, hilarious)
Hillbilly Elegy (This struck me as more accurate than most stereotypes)
The Gene: An Intimate History (same author as The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer)
FWIW, I’ve read the Three Body series, and while it started out quite well, it didn’t end up that way. My opinion of it can be summed up thusly: http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=176450
I’ve been reading a lot of old stuff, mainly pulpish crime and detective. Though I was vastly amused by this attitude in a series of stories by Melville Davisson Post; I don’t know if you’d call it “reverse racism” or what, but condensing it down to the essentials – a mysterious Oriental has turned up as a messenger to a young English woman regarding the fate of her father, a doctor and explorer, who died in the Gobi Desert. The mysterious Oriental is not of the Sinister but is of the Inscrutable kind and is not there as comic relief, servant, or other stereotype.
Paraphrasing mightily, an exchange in the story goes something like this:
Mongolian: We generally like the English, but there was something a bit off about Lord Eckhart
Young woman: Well, he has a German grandmother
Mongolian: Ah! That would explain it
Can we tell this was written post-First World War when The Hun were the bad, bad boys? 🙂
The Violet Hour. It’s about the last few weeks of several famous figures lives. It’s a really interesting exploration of how people confront death.
Lattimore’s Iliad. Much better than Fagles and Fitzgerald. As good as Lombardo, although its stylistic opposite.
David Hackett Fischer’s “Historians’ Fallacies”. You’d think the kind of stuff discussed in his book would be standard practice, but it’s not.
Francis Bacon’s Essays. Written for the 17th Century, but still applicable and entertaining.
I read Lombardo’s Iliad this summer, it was fantastic. Went with Lattimore for the Odyssey, which I didn’t find as impressive. I don’t think it was the translation’s fault though. The next time I read the Iliad I’m gonna go for one of the old-fashioned translations, either Chapman or Pope.
Most books I read this year I gave 3 or 3.5 out of 5 stars, idk if that’s good enough to say “best”. A few that stood out were:
“Notes on Democracy”- Mencken
“Shooting Up: A Short History of Drugs and War”- Kamienski
“The Badass Librarians of Timbuktu”- Hammer
“Never Let Me Go”- Ishiguro
My favorite book I read this year was “The Righteous Mind” but I assume most people on SSC are already familiar with it.
Somebody above also mentioned “Sapiens”- I read it but I didn’t like it.
I only very rarely read books the year they come out. I don’t quite understand why so many people do. Is it a matter of wanting to discuss books with others?
Generally I find an author I like, read all their past books, and then all their future books I read the
yearweek they come out.I don’t know about the best books, but both Seeing Like a State and The Art of Not Being Governed were certainly good books I read that year.
The Diamond Age yet again because damn.
Men at Arms yet again because damn.
Crystal Society.
Reflections on the Revolution in France.
Fun Home.
In the Shadow of the Sword.
The Great Debate.
That’s kind of weird – ‘In the Shadow of the Sword’ and ‘Rubicon’, both of which I read and enjoyed this year, have already been recommended. Must be the amazon algorithms at work.
Um… I quite enjoyed the First Law Trilogy – fun fantasy series – I particularly liked the ending.
(And Elric: The Ruby Throne – but I was only really looking at the pictures)
I recently attended a talk given by Tom Holland (the author of both Rubicon and In the Shadow of the Sword). His thesis was that there is a clear line between the teachings of St Paul and the legalisation of gay marriage. I thought he made his case very persuasively. The talk was one of a day of talks organised by the Adam Smith Institute and his was the stand out for me and you could sense that the whole room was really paying attention to what (for me at least) was a completely new line of thinking.
I had a quick chat with him afterwards (“I am such a fan Mr Holland . . .”). HIs next book will be on Chritianity hence the talk he gave. He said he thought it would be quite controversial and he seemed to do one ‘straight’ book and one controversial book turn and turn about. I remarked that In the Shadow of the Sword was quite dense and that I’d found it hard to follow the argument. He summed it up for me in a couple of sentences and I had to admit that, yes, it was extremely controversial.
Anyway really am such a fan . . .
A “clear line” which takes the best part of two thousand years to manifest itself?
The talk was fascinating and I won’t do it justice but his argument was not that Paul preached in favour of gay marriage but rather that the message he preached made room for a philosophy that was open to this. He didn’t mention other faiths in this context (as best as I can remember) but they came to mind. Anyway I have the memory of a goldfish so I’ll leave you to make what you like of it when the book comes out.
Moving Mars by Greg Bear. SF that worked very well on a political level.
The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War by Robert J. Gordon did a very good job of giving a sense of what life used to be like and what, exactly, has improved since 1850.
Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane by Frederick Starr on a piece of history I didn’t know much about and how a fairly enlightened society can fall into superstition.
Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution by Nick Lane on lots of cool things that life does.
Too Like the Lightening by Ada Palmer. An actual historian imagines a fictional future which is as far removed from the present socially as the present is from the past. Also good fiction.
A Rifleman Went To War, Herbert W. McBride–a straightforward, matter-of-fact recollection of the author’s time as a sniper in the Canadian Army in WWI. He rather enjoyed it.
The Wake, Paul Kingsnorth–post-apocalyptic science fiction, in which the apocalypse is the Norman Conquest of Britain. (cf. Thanksgiving is an SF story.) Written in a ginned-up pre-Norman English. Very good.
Rivethead, Ben Hamper–a memoir of life on the GM assembly line. Discussed here.
Snow Crash and The Diamond Age (I also liked Seveneves, but I gather that not everyone did).
Trustee from the Toolroom–I think I saw this recommended in SSC comments. Mild-mannered machinist goes on a tropical Pacific adventure. I also liked On the Beach, but I read that quite a few years back.
Submission, The Elementary Particles, Platform–#blackpill.
Novels I enjoyed:
Please Don’t Tell My Parents [I’m A Supervillain] series by Richard Roberts.
Reckoners series by Brandon Sanderson.
Wearing The Cape series by Marion Harmon.
Light novel with the overly long name by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Kate Daniels series by Ilona Andrews.
Alex Verus series by Benedict Jacka.
The Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein.
Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs.
The Forbidden Library series by Django Wexler.
The Laundry Files series by Charles Stross.
Web serials I enjoyed:
Mother of Learning by Domagoj Kurmaic.
Unsong by Scott Alexander.
How To Avoid Death on a Daily Basis by Mooderino.
Dungeon Keeper Ami by Pusakuronu.
(HPMOR finished last year)
Story webcomics I enjoyed: Strong Female Protagonist, Order of the Stick, Paranatural, Skin Horse, Girl Genius, Freefall, Wilde Life, Grrl Power, Schlock Mercenary, Sluggy Freelance, El Goonish Shive, Dumbing of Age, Erfworld, Gunnerkrigg Court.
Non-story webcomics I enjoyed: xkcd, Penny Arcade, Dinosaur Comics, Wondermark.
Speaking as someone with very similar preferences, that cluster suggests you would enjoy Worm by Wildbow, once you get past the first part.
For that same reason, I’m going to check out Richard Roberts’ series. Thanks!
I read Worm by Wildbow but it wasn’t this year. 🙂
I liked most of it but some of it was darker than I wanted it to be.
I’ve tried Pact and Twig but they feel even darker than Worm, so I haven’t gotten super far in either.
Have you read Pact and Twig? If so, what did you think? I quite liked Pact (not as much as Worm) but couldn’t get into Twig.
This year (in fact, in the second half of this year) I read both Worm and Pact (by Wildbow).
WARNING: Worm is a gigantic nerd-sniping infohazard for anyone who’s ever read a comic book and thought at the same time. I am not joking when I say I missed a day of work to keep reading it. And it’s the length of five Robert Jordan-sized novels, with no obvious place to take a month-long break.
Either Pact isn’t quite as addictive, or I’d built up some sort of Wildbow tolerance, but I still read the sucker all the way through, with maybe a day or two off here and there. Also, Pact doesn’t slaughter anywhere near as many innocent civilians as Worm.
Spoiler: Abguvat va Jbez gryyf lbh jul vg’f pnyyrq gung.
Response to spoiler: V gubhtug gung gur cbjre-tvivat nyvraf jrer “jbezf”.
For story webcomics, I like those by John Allison (e.g., Bad Machinery). You can find his stuff at scarygoround.com.
Seems many people revisiting Stephenson. I have only read Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. Which of his others should be next, assuming I just want to read his best books and don’t care about e. g. chronology?
_Anathem_, then _Cryptonomicon_.
Mostly Stephenson’s novels stand alone. The exception is the Baroque Cycle, which is a trilogy. I liked Anathem and Cryptonomicon best.
The Baroque Cycle is a (distant) prequel to Cryptonomicon, and the latter work probably ought to be read first.
I found Anathem and Cryptonomicon both to be worse than what you have already read. Personally Snow Crash > Baroque Cycle > Diamond Age > Cyrpt I honestly wouldn’t even recommend Anathem I had a hard time finishing it.
Conversely, I preferred Cryptonomicon to Snow Crash! I haven’t read any of the others.
That ten page letter to penthouse in the middle was a bit much for me.
I had a hard time finishing Anathem as well, but only because it was taxing a part of my knowledge that I really wanted to expand, so I ended up pressing forward with it for the reason someone might keep eating their vegetables. It generally very heavy on math, philosophy, logic… you know, rationalist porn. The only thing it was missing was Yudkowsky in casual wear talking about trolley problems.
Huh? There was a trolley problem at the end; they solved it by superposing quantum states to make the trolley go both ways, thus motivating the solitary guy to get the hell off the track.
And you can’t put a Yudkowsky character in a novel, because the character’s existence* would be wildly unrealistic.
I read Anathem twice, once last year and once a couple years before that (I got the hardcover). I also read Cryptonomicon twice; I bought the trade paperback after randomly opening it in a bookstore and reading the “heirloom furniture” digression. By then I’d already read Snow Crash two or three times. I’ve read the Baroque Trilogy, but only once so far.
I like all of Stephenson’s work, including the “Flag’s Enemies are Legion” Wired article long ago. I haven’t gotten around to Seveneves yet, or his first (uncharacteristically short) novel Zodiac. I did think Anathem stood out stylistically; it’s got a somewhat simpler writing style, which is carrying somewhat more-sophisticated but less-complex scientific/mathematical/philosophical ideas than in the Baroque Trilogy (I really liked the Watered Steel digression, and the tuned-mercury trick).
(* Or possibly, continued existence.)
thus motivating the solitary guy to get the hell off the track
Isn’t that cheating, at least as regards the classical problem? Isn’t the set-up supposed to be “No, you can’t yell at the single man on the track to get him to move so the track will be empty, no you can’t get the five (or however many) people to move, everyone is stuck where they are and can’t be warned or shifted, you have to choose: one or five?”
I’m all for cheating on the trolley problem, but if the “single guy on track B” is free to get off track B, why the need for quantum superimposition? Just get a loudhailer and yell at him “Hey, shift your arse, trolley coming!”
Just because I can’t allow someone to be wrong on the internet, [url=https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0011GA0AM]Stephenson’s first book The Big U[/url]. It’s not a very good book mind, in fact I’d heard he for a time went around used bookstores buying up copies to destroy, but it has a lot of interesting scenes and it’s fun seeing a writer stumbling about all shaky baby deer legs etc.
On the other hand, I preferred Anathem to Baroque by miles, and to Cryptonomicon by a hair.
I’ve been reading quicksilver this year, and finding it slow going. PArts of it are quite interesting, but overall I find there isn’t a very coherent narrative or plot thread to drive it forward (as well as some excessive descriptions at times). This probably makes it more true to life, but less gripping.
The series gets better.
Oh it does, even in this book once other protagonists are introduced. But still, 5/6th of the way in, Daniel finally looks like he has a plot or agenda of some kind to pursue beyond “Go check in with a famous scientist or politician for a bit.”
edit to John below: This is the first of his I’ve read.
If you’ve read “Cryptonomicon”, you know that it does come together and approximately what the end state is. If not, trust us that there is a plot. The clanking, rumbling noise you hear in the distance is the locomotive taking up the slack at the head of the train. In the meantime, enjoy the baroque assortment of rolling stock that has been set out before you.
As is usual with Stephenson, there isn’t as much of an ending as you might like, though that’s another part where the existence of “Cryptonomicon” helps.
You might judge it more charitably if you read Cryptonomicon first, as the Baroque Cycle is something of a prequel to it. There are probably lots of winks and nods you’re missing.
Plot in general (particularly ending a plot) does not seem to be a strong suit of Stephenson’s. REAMDE is probably the closest to a riveting page-turner, and even that is fairly convoluted. And it’s also polarizing among fans since it’s basically a geekier Tom Clancy novel (but fun if you’re both a geek and a Tom Clancy fan!)
That’s the best (or worst) thing about Stephenson – he doesn’t write the same novel twice. He doesn’t stick to a category. You’ve got cyberpunk, historical novels, a spy book, techno thrillers, speculative fiction, satire, and environmental terrorism. I’d wager most people into sci-fi would like at least one of Stephenson’s books, but also that most fans will definitely have favorites and least favorites among his work.
I liked Anathem which was pretty different, but I liked Snow Crash much more than the rest of his stuff.
If you liked Snow Crash then you may also like Ready Player One which is my favorite SF of all time, mostly because I grew up in the time period referenced and was intimately familiar with the video game culture.
There are three separate questions: what should you read, what is his best book, and what book would you like most. In your case, the answer to all three is Anathem.
From the ones I’ve read that you haven’t:
Cryptonomicon is my favorite, it’s got some very clever spy trickery that I thought was really cool, and skillfully blends the use of cryptography and secret information into its story.
Anathem has some very interesting worldbuilding with the maths and the society around them. It talks a lot about Platonic epistemology, and gets sorta weird near the end. IIRC you’re into weird designs for society, so you might like it.
REAMDE is a bog-standard techno-thriller, the MMORPG and digital currency concepts are just a device to kick things off. I wasn’t a fan.
Anathem for sure, it’s my favorite Stephenson book, right next to Snow Crash. Cryptonomicon is ok, I guess. I personally loved The Big U, but I understand that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea; if you don’t like surrealism, don’t read it.
Avoid the Baroque Cycle at all costs, unless perhaps you have insomnia and are looking for a fast-acting remedy.
Deluge by Adam Tooze.
https://www.amazon.com/Deluge-America-Remaking-Global-1916-1931/dp/0143127977
Tooze wrote what I regard as the single best book on WW2 a few years ago (this is the only competition), and while Deluge is not quite as good, it’s an amazing look at the the economics of WW1.
Also excellent is fire in the sky that really gets into the how and why of history, not just the what.
Geoffrey Parker’s The army of Flanders. Fascinating look into the world of early modern modern states, logistics, armies, etc.
And while I’ve read it before, I did reread Jonathan Isreal’s magnum opus, and it was at least as good thesecond time around.
Lastly, I have not read any of them this year, but any list of history books should mention Robert Massie. His books flow like novels. I have read all of them, each is more excellent than the last. They cannot be recommended highly enough if you have even a vague interest in the subjects.
Hey, we’re enemies, but thank you a lot for recommending Fire in the Sky, I just started reading it and it’s amazing. Relevant to my special interests~
If you want to elaborate on those interests, I might have more recommendations.
Parker is pretty great. I was assigned The Military Revolution in college and liked it a lot. Army of Flanders looks like another good one.
I am also loving Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction, though I’m only partway through.
Another rave review for Tooze. Wages of Destruction is one of the best works of nonfiction I’ve read.
Not published in 2016, but I read it this year:
Stealing The General: The Great Locomotive Chase and the First Medal of Honor by Russell S.Bonds.
https://www.amazon.com/Stealing-General-Great-Locomotive-Chase/dp/1594160783
On April 12, 1862, twenty Union soldiers in disguise boarded a train in Georgia to execute a scheme that was meant to bring a quick end to the Civil War. The plan, devised by a quinine-smuggling Union scout and an astronomer turned general, was to steal a locomotive and drive it to Chattanooga, capturing a key railroad connection whose loss would cut the Confederacy in half. The raid might have succeeded if not for the train’s conductor, who pursued the hijackers on foot (“this seemed to be funny to some of the crowd,” he said later, “but it wasn’t so to me”) and then by handcar and a series of three engines. The Union men were captured, and eight were hung as spies; some of the survivors were later the first-ever recipients of the Medal of Honor. The chase became a contemporary legend – it’s now best known as the basis of a Buster Keaton film – and Bonds’s account, the first major study in decades, is thoroughly worthy of an expedition that, a Union officer wrote, “had the wildness of a romance.”
I can barely remember what I’ve read in the last four months, but I would definitely recommend:
“The Robbers” by Friedrich Schiller (also available free from Project Gutenberg with an older translation). A play about a young aristocrat who goes astray and leads the titular band of robbers. A bit melodramatic and idealistic in places (especially where Amalia appears), but that’s part of it’s charm.
Eifelheim by Michael Flynn. Historical fiction / sci-fi that hit the notes I wanted to see for a first contact story in medieval Germany. I don’t think it’s obvious from the publisher’s description, so I’ll note that I found it to be a rather sad story in the end.
From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. Graphic novel about Jack the Ripper, clearly thoroughly researched, but history is subordinated to literary needs. As violent and twisted as you might expect, but also surreal and as much about society of the time and human nature as the actual events depicted.
As long as we’re talking about Michael Flynn, Firestar is also great; I liked it better than Eifelheim.
An awesome question, mostly because of the many good answers which it is likely to motivate.
I added three books to my list of favorites on goodreads (includes all my favourite books, also those I did not read this year…):
The Second World War, by Winston Churchill.
Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World, by Patricia Crone.
The Biology of Moral Systems, by Richard Alexander.
Other books that probably deserve to be mentioned are:
Human Drug Metabolism: An Introduction, by Michael Coleman. Thinking back, I’m not sure why I didn’t add that one to the list as well. I might still do it, it’s a great book.
A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution, by Bowles and Gintis.
On a lighter note, there’s Blackadder: The Whole Damn Dynasty, 1485-1917. In the same vein, The Complete Yes Prime Minister. Also, Wilt, by Tom Sharpe. I liked all the Wilt novels, but the first one was the best, in my opinion.
A complete list of the books I read this year which includes goodreads ratings and links to reviews and blog posts about the books (~150) is available here. If you prefer the goodreads format with cover views, this link should work.
Incidentally people who contributed to the ‘which books do you recommend to me’-thread a while back might like to know that I’ll probably today be finishing my last Dick Francis novel (they were good/great, or I wouldn’t have read them…), and so I’ll have another look at the thread again tomorrow to see where to go next. As I noted back then, all those recommendations will likely to me be a gift that keeps on giving for a long time to come…
Thank you.
Between Berlin and the Russian ambassador and some local things and the American election drama (is it over now please God let it be over) and…just 2016. Freaking 201.
Anyway, I was feeling very down and gloomy.
Thank you. I’m glad you liked the Dick Francis books. Which ones were your favorites? I like many of them, but Come to Grief and Whip Hand andBanker and Proof and Rat Race are all deeply loved.
And to think I got into the books for the ponies.
“Between Berlin and the Russian ambassador and some local things and the American election drama (is it over now please God let it be over) and…just 2016. Freaking 201.
Anyway, I was feeling very down and gloomy.”
(I have no idea what ‘Berlin and the Russian ambassador’ means, but I can definitely empathise with the ‘down and gloomy’ part. Anyway…).
I gave The Edge five stars on goodreads, the only Francis novel that got that rating; I’m not sure I’d say it’s the best one although going by rating that should be so – I mostly gave it five stars because I’ll usually be able to find something to grumble about when I’m reading books I like, some detail or other that I did not like, but in that book’s case I couldn’t really find anything significant to even grumble about, so I figured I ought to let my rating reflect that. Like you, I also like the Syd Halley novels. The Danger, especially the interactions between Douglas and Alessia, was very good. Rat Race and High Stakes also springs to mind.
It was always the characters and the interesting settings and life circumstances explored, not the ponies, that kept me reading.
Berlin refers to the recent terrorist attack in Berlin.
The Russian ambassador to Turkey was killed the other day.
I realized earlier today. I generally don’t follow the news much, but when something is on wikipedia’s front page I’ll usually notice, and by now both events have been added there. But thanks for the explanation anyway. I must admit that when I read his comment I was very puzzled. What noteworthy event had happened in Berlin this year? Russian ambassador?? It makes sense now, but it didn’t back then.
Hot Money was one of my favorites, in part because of the narrator’s very interesting father, in part because of the tension between the father’s perfectly reasonable policy ex ante for his kids and the persuasive arguments for why he should violate it ex post.
I also liked High Stakes, in part for the picture of the prejudice against rich people, not a theme I often see explored.
But lots of the others are good as well.
I really liked Constellation Games; I agree with one of the Amazon reviewers who said something like, “this book makes me want to be a better person”.
I also liked the Half a King trilogy. It’s a technically YA book, so it doesn’t have the same mind-shattering punch as his more well-known First Law trilogy, but it’s still pretty good. The trilogy uses an interesting trick to demonstrate that how we see ourselves is very different from how other people may see us; and that history is a lot more difficult to steer than most people imagine.
Albion’s Seed*, American Nations, A History of China and A History of India (by Blackwell), A History of Iran – Empire of the Mind, Empires of the Silk Road, Empires of Medieval West Africa, The Lost History of Christianity, Vanished Kingdoms, Firearms – A Global History to 1700*, The Myth of Continents, Essential Sufism, Meditations on Violence*, Digger*, and Schlock Mercenary*. Strongest recommendations asterisked; Firearms (…) to 1700 not strictly as military history, but because it covers a lot of regional histories, geography, and development theory, and Schlock Mercenary starting from Book 10 (also, it’s still bbeing made, and Book 17 just started).
I have no idea what a white nationalist really is, if I am one, or whether I should be insulted if I am called one. I think nationalism is kind of being used in place of patriotism now because it sounds less virtuous.
Nationalist: a person who advocates political independence for a country. or a person with strong patriotic feelings, especially one who believes in the superiority of their country over others.
I believe its use in the media is usually as a racial epithet. What I think we have here is an example of the motte and bailey doctrine? As our host pointed out in an earlier post the number of people who are promoting for a “superiority of a white only nation” is tiny. The media is flooding the zone here and they are less than careful about connecting this term with Trump supporters in general.
It seems to be a very recent and very sharp spike of interest.
https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=white%20nationalist
The NYT says: “White nationalism, he said, is the belief that national identity should be built around white ethnicity, and that white people should therefore maintain both a demographic majority and dominance of the nation’s culture and public life.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/world/americas/white-nationalism-explained.html?_r=0
Very few people are going to self identify as this, but then…they expand it to effectively mean red tribe culture.
NYT: “Many of those *** voters *** would not think of themselves as white nationalists, and the cultural values and traditions they seek to protect are not necessarily explicitly racial. However, those traditions formed when national identity and culture were essentially synonymous with whiteness.”
WV is 98% white. If someone values Appalachian culture (or southern, Ozark, Mormon, etc.) they are white nationalists by this expanded definition. Simply the act of voting for white people is an act of white nationalism. That sure simplifies social science.
So here we are again with by definition: white culture = bad, non-white culture = good, and one is absolved by voting blue. Sigh. The thing is this isn’t clever, it isn’t effective (Trump’s margin was >40% in WV), it is repelling. Given the stigma in the social sciences associated with pushing back against this dogma, nobody will ever stick their neck out to do it. The closest thing I have seen is Kevin Drum here:
Let’s Be Careful With the “White Supremacy” Label
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/11/lets-please-kill-white-supremacy-fad
The feedback from the usual suspects wasn’t very supportive.
A good heuristic would be that someone who was willing to do something that harmed their country overall, but screwed up their outgroup within the country more than themselves, may well be a nationalist but would not be a patriot. (This is a sufficient but not necessary condition).
It’s a difficult question, because historically these words have changed meaning.
In 19th century German speaking central Europe to take one example, nationalists were the ones who wanted to unite and overcome small statelets. These days nationalisms often means drawing boundaries smaller, instead of bigger.
But a 19th c. nationalist in the Russian or Austro-Hungarian empires wanted to draw boundaries smaller.
I would say that originally, nationalism was the idea that political boundaries should be re-drawn to match (as closely as possible) ethnic and linguistic divisions.
Nowadays nationalism might mean taking existing boundaries as a given, and wanting a state to act for own benefit, not for the benefit of other states, and for the benefit of its citizens, and not for foreigners.
Right. Today “nationalism” on its own is usually contrasted with “globalism”, whereas “ethnic nationalism” is closer to the older meaning of the term.
I think nationalism isn’t just about how one wants a state to act. It’s also about identifying one’s status with the status of your state–wanting your state to appear better and/or more powerful than other states.
There’s an enormous difference between “nationalism” and “white nationalism”. I don’t even think they’re the same category, really.
White nationalism is the idea that a nation should be built around white ethnicity.
There’s a long Wikipedia article about “nationalism”, but today, politically, it mostly seems to mean supporting policies that openly favor one’s own nation and citizens of one’s own nation over outsiders.
Nationalism = nation-statism, which is the idea that states should serve the interests of a particular nation, or people.
There are a variety of different ideas of what the nation in question should be. You could be a political nationalist (such as in liberal nationalism/civic nationalism, which is what I’d self-define as when asked) by defining the nation based on political values. You could be some sort of cultural nationalist, but that’s largely just a more extreme version of political nationalism. Or you could go as far to define the nation based on a common phenotype or set of genetic characteristics, (which would fit into ethno-nationalism), and race based nationalism would be the most common subset (though hypothetical never before done variants like IQ based nations would count). White nationalism is of that third type.
The problem is that by this point, outgroup homogenity has meant that all forms of nationalism have got vaguely squashed into the most extreme form, which is similar to what happened to socialism in America.
Civic nationalism tends to get overwhelmed by ethnic nationalism, doesn’t it? Consider France, where officially civic nationalism is the game in town, but realistically the nationalist force is the FN, which is ethnic nationalist at its core.
That’s because “civic nationalism” is flaccid and unappealing. Just look at Sajid Javid’s laughable attempt to pin down “British values” to make people swear allegiance to.
Is attempting to construct some sort of set of common values “nationalism” though?
I would amend that to say that the sort of “civic nationalism” that is considered acceptable in polite company is flaccid and unappealing.
Consider…
or…
My impression was that it was the reverse under most conditions. Most people want the nation to be about something to do with their cultural or political values, but aren’t willing to engage in total exclusion based on race. At least outside of drastically dire times, ethno-nationalism doesn’t have much political capital anymore. As far as I’m aware, that’s reflected in the Front National, which only gained popularity after an extensive period of “de-diabolization” (their term, not mine!), in which antisemitism and race oriented policy was removed from the party. Yes, the core of white nationalist types still exist in the party, but it sounds like they’ve been overwhelmed by civic nationalism, not the other way around.
The white nationalists wouldn’t be involved at all, if left-liberal parties were the ones to adopt civic nationalism and cut them off at the pass. There are really only three options, and the migrant crisis is showing de facto not-nationalism to be unsustainable. If you want a welfare state (you have to have one btw), you end up incentivizing migration waves from incompatible cultures, and so you need to slow the inflows to give integration (overwriting their culture with Western culture) time to work and avoid dumping them all into ghettos. This means you need some border/visa control, and an idea of what your state stands for, what its identity and attendant values are that people should be integrating to, in other words, what the nation part of the term nation-state will be.
If you don’t want the far right wing parties to turn those ideals into racial ones, then you have to have some civic values in place instead. You can still possess values that allow for muliculturalism, but not in the open ended sense of today. Multiculturalism has to exist within a box, defined by some values. Complete openness is the same as nothingness, and politics abhors a vacuum, which is what the center-right to left parties in Europe seem to be finding out all too late.
If the worry is that civic nationalism can morph into ethno-nationalism, the answer isn’t no-nationalism/internationalism (not sustainable for political and incentive reasons), the answer is that the non-far right parties impose civic nationalism first, and then counter-signal strongly against ethno-nationalism from a position that has some responsiveness to the ground conditions in Europe. But they didn’t do that, and they just doubled down, until the last moment where, now in Germany, Merkel is desperately throwing in detrimental policies like banning the burqa that she imagines nationalists might like, in order to try and save herself. She might as well be throwing pepperoni slices at a lion.
Whoops!
The attempt at civic nationalism has been very poor. Let’s look at France. The FN has gotten anti-semitism out of their basic brand, but their appeal is still anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim and is still targeted almost entirely at ethnic French, insofar as that is a thing (there are local divisions). France, technically, considers all French citizens French, but has done a really piss-poor job of avoiding ghettoization, immigrants living in poverty, all that.
France could do civic nationalism, really fire it up, they’ve already got precedent, but it would require an external enemy. Get all Frenchmen/Frenchwomen/Frenchpersons – everyone who speaks the language and is loyal to “France”, whatever that is – together to unite against some dastardly foe. It’s hard to unite everybody against nothing. If France’s problems are “internal” problems – not enough jobs, budget issues, whatever – those problems will get blamed on internal foes. That’s their big issue.
Merkel is a different kind of fucked: neither ethnic nor civic nationalism seems that politically feasible in Germany, they’re one of the few adults in the room, and their economy is dependent on international trade at a time that’s looking pretty threatened. If Germany could peel off and integrate the best of the asylum seekers and migrants showing up, they could do very well, but I think that would require a level of civic nationalism maybe not possible in German politics.
Religious nationalism can cut across ethnicities and work pretty well, it has worked pretty well in Israel and India, but religious identity is pretty weak in Europe and America. There is, in France right now, Francois Fillon pushing a brand of Catholic nationalism, but we’ll have to wait and see how that works out. I don’t think anyone else, be it PVV in the Netherlands or AFD in Germany or the Sweden Democrats, is really pushing any kind of religious nationalism; they’re not trying to restore the primacy of the Christian faith in Europe, they just want to diminish the spread of Islam in their countries. Fillon actually is a devout Catholic with a lot of traditionalist Catholic supporters.
“Get all Frenchmen/Frenchwomen/Frenchpersons – everyone who speaks the language and is loyal to “France”, whatever that is – together to unite against some dastardly foe. ”
There is an obvious target sitting right across the channel. Perhaps Brexit could be interpreted as a dastardly stab in the back?
I know you’re being facetious but there is an obvious foe and it aint the brits.
The French dealt with that enemy back in 732. The English have been a problem more recently.
That’s all right, since the immigrants and Muslims are the source for the anti-semitism.
It’s really not useful at all as a term, considering that by it’s definition, almost every single nation in history was {race}-nationalist. The idea that a nation is built to benefit the people who built the nation shouldn’t be controversial, and this as a competing, evil stance has only been made possible by cosmopolitanism (which is still very similar to nationalism, but with a distributed nation).
This only makes sense if you think that only white people built America.
Depends on what you’re defining as “built”.
You’re the one who used the word. You tell me.
Established the institutions that define, run, and support the state.
America was established by rich white men. What makes “white” the important part? Should America be ruled by the rich, for the rich? Should women be excluded from government?
Your problem appears to be that you are trying to work out your definition by reasoning backwards from the exclusion of non-white people. Perhaps you should take some time to consider why you are doing this.
Both of those things did actually happen, though. And the “white” part is important because they were born and raised surrounded by a culture made up of entirely white people, which influenced their view on the world considerably.
You still seem to be arguing against the idea that the US was founded by white people, for white people, which is why even though it is no longer the prevailing ideology of the era, some people believe that.
Okay, now I am confused.
You claim that it should not be controversial that a nation continue to be organized to benefit the people who established it. But it is absolutely controversial to say that women and non-elites should be second-class citizens. You are correct that women were previously denied the vote — but that’s generally considered to be a mistake. Do you disagree? If not, what is your justification for saying that race is different from gender or class?
People who build a nation-state do so with the intention of pushing their group’s ideal political structure, society and culture over alternatives that another group might produce. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say America was built based on the preferred political structure, society and culture of Anglo-Saxon Protestants, by Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Much of the reason China today is an ethnonationalist Han state is that the Chinese nationalists who created the Republic of China did so with the explicit goal of dismantling the society and culture of the Manchu rulers and “expelling the Tatar barbarians”. It’s also the same reason millions of Muslims packed up and left India in 1947 — the state that was being built might have included a lot of Muslims, it might even have had a few Muslim leaders, but it would not in any way be a Muslim society or culture.
If you would not justify the exclusion of Catholics from America based on this principle, it is unclear how it would justify the exclusion of non-white Americans.
The principle in its purest form would indeed justify the exclusion of Catholics from America, and you can in fact find immigration debates in Congressional records from the late 1800’s describing Catholics from Ireland, Poland and Italy as “locusts” descending on America, but we live in an age where religion plays an increasingly smaller role in public life, so people mostly focus on the “Anglo-Saxon” part. And not even that, given that Slavs, Celts and Magyars aren’t considered subhuman anymore, so it’s just about European descent.
“The idea that a nation is built to benefit the people who built the nation shouldn’t be controversial”
Perhaps not for other nations. The U.S. has been largely a nation of immigrants from early on. Your principle looks as though it implies whatever policies with regard to immigrants are best for those who were here when the country was founded, and perhaps their descendants.
Is that your position? It would exclude from consideration the interests of a large fraction, possibly a majority, of the present population.
C’mon David, that exact sentiment is right in the Preamble – “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…”
This bizarre idea that America was nothing more than a propositional nation, that there is a magical property to American soil that makes any who step foot on it “American”* merely by being present, is preposterous, and is purely a modern fiction besides; you will find this notion nowhere in any of the comments made by the founding citizens.
*It is worth noting that, in the main, those granted this title don’t seem to feel much loyalty themselves to their fellow Americans, and sure seem perfectly comfortable clinging to their tribal loyalties. It out to be clear that while governments might grant citizenship, they cannot grant kinship.
What was immigration policy, as set by the founders like?
How hard did they make it to become an American citizen?
If they allowed for immigration, and granted immigrants citizenship, is it then made otherwise clear that they still did not intend for said immigrants to be considered “People of the United States”.
It just seems to me that there are plenty of other countries that have done a much better job of maintaining the kind of homogeneous cultural structures that you seem to imply the founding fathers wanted. So I am forced to wonder, if that is what they wanted, why were they so bad at it?
Practically non-existent; until around 1830, immigrants made up less than 1% of the populace, and stays at around 1% until around 1850, when it starts to pick up; for much of the next century, immigration tends to go in a pattern of “large wave – panic – restrictions – easing of restriction – lather, rinse, repeat”
The Founders emphatically were not begging for the tired, huddled masses of the world to come to our shores, something even a cursory glance at writings of the era can attest.
You mean, why were they bad at reaching from the grave and stopping people from undoing the restrictions that they placed? You might as well ask why, if they didn’t want the Congress to regulate every private transaction, they were so bad at stopping a Congress from using the Interstate Commerce Clause to do so almost 150 years later. Laws aren’t magic, and no legal system can be crafted that is self-executing.
It just seems to me you’re making rather drastic leaps in logic to justify the assertion that we’ve always been a nation of immigrants.
It was not my intention to say that we have always been a nation of immigrants, rather that if their intention was that immigrants were non-american in a meaningful way or should be considered as such, then they should have been able to put that into the language of the documents in pretty straight forward terms.
It seems to me, unlike say gay rights, that the issue of immigration and its influence should have been fairly well understood by the founders? Maybe this is not the case?
If this was a highly valued terminal goal of the founders, like say, the right to bare arms, then it seems that they did a surprisingly poor job of protecting it, right?
I read you as saying that this was clearly their intention and yet they failed to include any strong language in any founding documents to insure this intention.
My knowledge of history is very poor so I could be confused on some fundamental element of this issue though.
I think they actually were fairly clear on this; the Naturalization Act of 1790, the first rules on American citizenship, limited citizenship to “free white persons of good character”, and that wasn’t changed until after the Civil War, at which point the Founding Fathers were all dead and a new set of leaders were making changes to the Constitution (like the 14th Amendment).
Again, my understanding of history is not great, but free white people is going to be basically anyone who would try to immigrate to America during that time period right?
I am not trying to say the founding fathers thought that black people would be citizens, simply that immigrants would be citizens.
For clarity.
Native Americans with a taste for civilization would have been plausible, at least in the imaginations of civilized people. Likewise free Afro-Caribbeans or Mestizos, especially if only temporarily free and looking for someplace to escape retaliation for a slave revolt.
Or, for that matter, black-, brown- and redskins looking on citizenship only as a loophole in democracy and seeking to form a plurality for the “paleface go home” party; not actually plausible at the time but could have been seen as a threat given the prejudices of the time.
Most of them felt immigrants would be citizens, but they meant European immigrants exclusively. There were some like Hamilton who expressed misgivings about even that, because immigrants would “corrupt the national spirit” and “confound and confuse public opinion”, but most took the view that Europeans could immigrate so long as they were Protestants, learned English and abandoned European loyalties for American ones.
I think our confusion here is about what “people who built the nation” means. I think for you it means those Americans who were in the country at the time of the revolution, and thus their descendants, to the exclusion of immigrants who came later (even European ones). There is, however, some evidence that the Founders saw the United States as separate from European polities but nonetheless part of a larger white race.
I’m not aware of many ethnonationalists, on any position on that spectrum, who exclude people of their identified in-group who live in foreign states from entering or being part of their state. This is why the Chinese government’s refugee policy almost exclusively caters to the Han diaspora, why Israel has the Law of Return, why Nazi expansionism started out with the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia, why Nasser unified Egypt and Syria.
The Census didn’t ask for place of birth until 1850. The first piece of actual data on the subject places the foreign-born population at 9.7%. It’s more likely that the data pre-1850 is bad than that the immigrant population is less than 1%. Not only that, but the data you’re “citing” doesn’t agree with you. You’re also putting your thumb on the scales. So, the US immigrant population probably reached a low-point of 1.5% in 1815, but you claim that it was less than 1%. It didn’t stay “at around 1%,” it bottomed out at 1.5% because of the Napoleonic Wars and then increased until it was 9.7% the first time it was officially measured, in 1850.
The whole post is ignorant at best, and intentionally misleading at worst.
It was quite easy to immigrate to the United States throughout the 20th century if you were white. The Know Nothing party also did jack shit to stop immigration. You’re making up a fictional history for the United States.
“until around 1830, immigrants made up less than 1% of the populace, and stays at around 1% until around 1850, when it starts to pick up;”
Not quite right, at least going by the Wiki article. It shows foreign born in 1840 at 4.7% of the population. By 1850 it was about ten percent.
“for much of the next century, immigration tends to go in a pattern of “large wave – panic – restrictions – easing of restriction – lather, rinse, repeat””
Again I don’t think quite correct. The Know Nothing party in the 1850’s was anti-immigrant, but it didn’t actually get restrictions passed. There are some limits on oriental immigration passed in the late 19th century, but other than that immigration restrictions only come in in the 1920’s.
Just to pile on (not), this whole thing reminded me of a Politico article
LBJ changed that and the doors opened to all countries in the 60’s. My family was in the middle 1800’s, poor and crossed the country and ran out of oxen in Illinois. Not exactly rich. But considered American. I am sure they would have voted for Trump, though I did not.
Also, nations weren’t built on race in the modern sense, though the older British sense which was something more like ethnicity might fit.
Germany, Italy, and France weren’t about race. So far as I know they were about one sub-group in a region dominating other sub-groups.
The people who built the nation have been dead for two centuries.
Yes. A nation’s purpose is up to its citizens, not the people who happened to found it X amount of years ago.
By this reasoning, constitutions have no justification – why shouldn’t 50% +1 of the population be free to enact draconian speech restrictions today, to be undone tomorrow if 50% + 1 of the population so wishes?
For that matter, why leave it at people x amount of years ago? Why even try to hold a person at their word for promises given yesterday? Surely, their purpose is whatever they feel it to be in the moment, and shame on the man who expects his family, friends, and neighbors to keep their word.
I’m sorry, do you have a strawman quotum to reach? If so, don’t let me stop you, carry on, you can certainly go ahead and do so with other posts of mine, I won’t mind much.
Yet another indictment of the sorry state of our health-care system.
Speaking of “white nationalism,” I was struck by the use of the term in this subheadline:
Angels of the Resistance (and a Serial Killer) in Nazi-Occupied Paris
Brave women helped downed Allied flyers escape the Germans. But more than that, they showed Hitler’s white nationalists they would not surrender, would not submit.
(Emphasis added. Is this what we call avant la lettre?)
It’s “staying on message”; that’s the narrative, the author’s got his marching orders, so that’s the phrase he’s going to use.
It wouldn’t really be avant la lettre since Nazism wasn’t about “white” nationalism in any meaningful sense.
Calling Hitler a white nationalist is definitely a mistake (the author should have just gone with “racist”), as distinctively white nationalism is basically a phenomenon of the states of the former British empire.
But it’s a mistake that has it’s origins with US style white nationalists, many of whom worship the Nazi’s in an almost cartoonish kind of a way.
Not really avant la lettre; that Hitler has been made into a symbol of white nationalism by some white nationalists doesn’t change that the Nazis intended very bad things for large groups of people who nobody would describe as not being “white”. They could very well be described as Germanic nationalists or Nordic nationalists. White nationalism, however, seems to be something that only exists in the US and other places where the context means that smaller divisions matter less.
Weirdly, you also see pro-Nazi people make a similar error/claim – the existence of Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, etc neo-Nazis baffles me, considering the plans the Nazis had for the Slavs.
I wouldn’t call the Nazis German Nationalists, considering that they were also willing to kill a good many German citizens. They killed German Jews, and I don’t know whether the Roma they killed were citizens. I think those were the only Germans who were targeted on ethnic grounds.
I’d call them “Aryan” nationalists, and keep the scare quotes.
Clearly, the German Jews weren’t German enough, or else they’d just be proper Germans.
@Nancy Lebovitz: I specified Germanic nationalists, not German – to take into account volksdeutsche, some groups the Nazis considered to basically be German, and some other stuff from their racial theorizing, etc, and to take into account that there were German citizens they considered not to be German. I should have explained this, so that’s an error on my part.
The Roma they killed were almost entirely from outside of Germany, but the same is true of the Jews they killed. Mostly in the East, too.
I thought the Nazis killed a high proportion of German Jews, but they killed a great many more Polish Jews because there were more Jews in Poland.
There were many more Jews in Poland than in Germany. The percentage killed was the same for both countries.
So “nation” means something very different from “race”. Consider a couple of examples:
The Irish nation is all those people who are generally considered Irish, regardless of where they were born, what their skin colour is etc.
The Jewish nation is all those who are generally seen as Jewish, regardless of their religion, their place of birth, or in fact how related they are genetically to other people who also call themselves jewish.
Nationhood is a matter of collective self-identification, of a group recognising a shared kinship that goes beyond simply race, religion, or location, (though of course it’s closely connected with those things). It’s a cultural thing more than anything else. See the English nation, which has existed basically unchanged since 900 despite the enormous demographic and ethnic changes that have happened since.
“White” nationalism is the claim that all white people everywhere form a nation as tight-knit and worthy of the protections of a nation state as the Jews or the Irish. Which is … kind of absurd on its face. Large parts of the urban white Democratic vote think of their black fellow Democrats as more “thier kind” than the Trump voting rural whites. If there is a white nation then lots of white democrats aren’t part of it.
I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think white nationalism is normally about all white people. In America the White Nationalist movement (the real one, not just republican voters) as I understand it, is mostly about the white people of America banding together to create a white nation for white Americans, to protect their future and their cultural heritage. They waver from being fuzzy on the details of how this will be achieved, to making direct homage to Adolf Hitler, depending on the kind of White nationalist you are talking to.
White democrats in big cities are mostly going to be seen as race traitors and tend to be the loudest voices against the very culture that white nationalism is trying to protect.
I believe they way they put it is “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”.
That’s pretty much about white people. They no doubt see their white opponents as “race traitors”, but they’d accept the children of these white opponents as being part of the “white nation”.
I assumed Geekethics main point was that ‘White nationalism’ was silly because white coastal democrats disagree with the goals of white nationalism as strongly as people of other races.
So I explained that white nationalists do not intend to include these people, and that the word ‘white’ as they are using it, includes some cultural conitations.
As far as I can tell you agree with me, adding in that they would be willing to steal/keep the children of these race traitors. I don’t think you are totally wrong, but that many orphans would require a lot of welfare and I don’t know how much they would like that.
It’s the white Democrats that want to celebrate and protect the cultural heritage of all their in groups, but the impression of Trump supporters is that they do not value and do not want to protect the cultural heritage of out group whites. I think this is explicitly plain by their actions (e.g. banning Merry Xmas) but we should defer that argument for another day.
This is an emotional issue for Trump supporters, what they see is an attempt to protect their culture being vilified as “white nationalism” and racism. Most Trump supporters are fine with the city slickers making up the rules for their cities, but are offended when the cities start encroaching on Trump territory values (the 2016 vote was basically rural vs city).
And here is an important distinction, Trump supporters see these culture issue fights as proxy fights for who gets to make the rules for their territory. Imagine a world where the people of rural NC told NYC exactly what their bathroom rules should be or that their power must be coal sourced. Would there be a fight? Yes. Many liberals have never even considered what this shoe looks like on the other foot. Trump supporters see big city liberals as having an entitlement problem that needs corrected.
Much of the heat of the culture wars would be diminished if the rural areas were allowed to move at their own pace toward the promised land of the liberal world order. Fences make good neighbors, stay in your yard, otherwise you get Trump, ha ha.
This might capture the entire spirit of Trumpism, in just a few short words.
Is this a reply to me?
I was talking about actual white nationalist, they are a tiny minority and I doubt they had any significant impact on who got elected.
Only a very indirect reply to your point about cultural heritage. I go off on tangents easily, ha ha.
The standard definition white nationalists do look to be almost non-existent, which is why I’m wondering why so much virtual ink is being spilled on them. If they announce a national meeting my guess is the media will outnumber the participants.
A transparent attempt by some to enlarge the white nationalist bag to stuff more people in dilutes the evilness of the group characteristics. I just have no idea who they are talking about any more.
This isn’t accurate. There simply aren’t enough people in rural areas. In Ohio, for example, the metro areas of: Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati (only the Ohio part), and Dayton make up more than half the state’s population. In Texas, Dallas-Ft Worth and the metro areas of Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin are about 2/3rds. Similar statements can be made about Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and so on.
It is in the suburbs that the Presidential elections was won and lost.
You missed Houston
Brad,
Looking at the county map it is very clearly rural vs city, but that has been the case for a while now. In this election the rural areas were very decisively for Trump and the cities were not as decisively for Clinton and of course there is in between as you say, which I wouldn’t disagree with.
See the change in vote from 2012 here:
US election 2016: Trump victory in maps
http://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37889032
@Spookykou
Looks like I put Dallas in twice instead.
@tscharf
As you say the rural area and urban area split has been true for a while now. Rural areas went for DJT and dense urban areas went for HRC. If you want to tell a story that attempts to explain what this election was about you can’t start with a fact that isn’t unique to this election.
Although any single aboutness story in an election this large and this close is going to inevitably be too simplistic, the least bad one is probably the Saboteur / Luddite one vis-a-vis the rust belt.
The only non-rust belt flip versus 2012 was Florida and that state has been very close for a long time now.
As I understand it, white nationalism is the idea that the United States should promote, or be run in accordance with, traditional white American customs and social/cultural institutions. I.e., it wants the US to explicitly be a white ethno-state, the way it implicitly has been for most of its existence. This makes it stand in opposition to the pluralist position that no culture should be favored in national policy. Broadly speaking, white nationalist positions probably include things like being Christian or holding Christian-compatible values; communicating in Standard American English or something close to it; and keeping close ties with Europe and limiting immigration from non-white countries.
It’s not exactly an Anglo-Saxon Protestant thing, as another commenter said, because the white ethnic identity in America is a lot wider than Anglo-Saxon, and because Christian sectarianism is at a historic low. But thinking of it as a Anglo-Saxon Protestant thing is an okay first approximation.
Many white nationalists are racist, which can make positions hard to pull apart, but as closely as I can tell, white nationalism seems to be about culture, not race. I.e., white nationalists want a white ethnostate, but this doesn’t mean getting rid* of all non-racially white Americans; it would probably be sufficient for them to just adopt white cultural practices, speech patterns, mannerisms, etc. On that note, it’s not clear that they need to be gotten rid* of at all; so long as minority numbers are kept reasonably low, it should still be possible to reap the benefits of cooperation and trust that most single-ethnicity states enjoy.
*”getting rid of” is a terrible phrasing that conjures images of mass murder or forced relocation a la the Trail of Tears. These things are obviously horrible, and people who advocate them deserve our disapproval. Fortunately, there is already a name for those people that’s loaded with negative affect: “White supremacist.” I do think white supremacy can be seen as a subset of white nationalist beliefs; however, since it’s useful to preserve the distinction between the two terms**, it seems better to reserve “white nationalist” for the less horrible suggestions.
So, what less horrible suggestions are there? I’ve seen it suggested that the country could be split up and some part of it could become a black ethno-state, or that the government could pay non-whites to emigrate. However, goals like this are pretty far-fetched. More realistic white nationalist policies are things like tightly controlling immigration, and opposing pluralism in favor of encouraging (white) “American” values and traditions.
**I favor preserving the distinction for two reasons: First, because I’m a bit of a pedant and I like precision. Secondly, because I think we risk radicalizing people if we group [White people who prefer their own cultural norms] together with actual neo-Nazis.
This is a pretty good take I think, and avoids all the hot button words that inflame which is about impossible for most people, including myself.
If the term “traditionalists” was used instead of “white nationalists” people might be able to have a civil discussion on the subject.
It may be fair to say many people like the status quo of their local/regional culture and see no benefit to cosmopolitanism….and need to be convinced. I think the effort to promote and convince others of the benefits of cosmopolitanism is almost nonexistent. For a random example, why should people from WV welcome Muslims (…if they represent a terror risk…)? Many are repelled that this question is even asked which probably says more about the problem than people realize. It should be asked and answered anyway. There are strong arguments that can be made that just aren’t (e.g. they aren’t really a terror risk statistically, sharia law isn’t going to happen, we screen for radicals, etc.). Many are fine with simply it’s the morally right thing to do, but others are not.
I read somewhere else that the viewpoint of this question is different depending on tribe. One tribe would consider WV as a business, and all people have equal rights to shop at the business and denying someone a right to shop is bad and shouldn’t be allowed. The other tribe considers WV a home and before they invite someone into their home they have the right to evaluate whether the person will fit in and is an asset to the community.
@tscharf
This assumes that the benefit is there. A lot of what people are objecting is not the kebab takeaway, but terrorism, anti-semitism, oppression of women, etc; as well as parallel sub-societies where people have their own institutions and in some cases, cannot even speak the national language.
The idea that people ‘need to be convinced’ is exactly the kind of statement that infuriates the people who believe that they have solid objections, yet don’t see their concerns addressed seriously.
As far as I see, globalists tend to believe that the upsides outweigh the downsides, where the problems will eventually disappear. The problem with this is that it:
– involves a lot of optimism which cannot be proven to be accurate (and there is solid evidence to be skeptical of it)
– is based on the subjective belief that benefits A, B and C outweigh the downsides X, Y and Z. Other people can value these differently.
– assumes that the upsides and downsides are distributed evenly. However, globalists tend to disproportionately be people that benefit more from A, B and C than the anti-globalists; and are hurt less from X, Y and Z. As such, there are strong class warfare elements to the migration debate, where people argue for things that benefit themselves, by portraying their position as morally superior.
– ignores that large number of migrants from a culture tend to integrate much more poorly than small quantities.
– has a strong ‘Utopian’ element. A lot of proponents of globalism seem to hold an ideal (like multiculturalism) and are willing to make substantial sacrifices to get to that utopia. The problem is that Utopian ideals tend to be strongly faith-based.
There are also strong arguments that can be made the other way:
– Most statistical analyses of whether Muslim attacks commit a large percentage of terrorism seem to use very questionable methods, which likely bias the outcomes (like focusing on the number of attacks, rather than the number of victims; counting violence as terrorism if the person is deemed to have extremist views, even if the actual violence didn’t seem intended to target people indiscriminately, exclude 9/11, etc). The most accurate statement seems to be that there are various groups which disproportionately use political violence/terrorism, where Muslims are not the worst of these.
– Sharia mediation/non-official courts do exist in EU and the US. Muslim women can feel obligated to submit to this, as a civil divorce is often not recognized by Muslims, so they will still be considered married if they do not get a religious divorce and then travel to certain nations (or if their ex-husband takes the kids and travels to such a nation). Also, they can get into trouble with their family.
– It seems that a lot of terrorists are 2nd or 3rd generation immigrants; or converts who became Muslim after contact with these. None of those can be screened for. Also, it is a fact that Syrian refugees were not screened properly in Europe and that terrorists mingled with them to enter Europe.
And if I invite you into my home, you don’t get to redecorate my living room…
My point is this discussion needs to happen. I am personally wavering on globalism after supporting it for decades.
If cosmopolitanism is a great good, it shouldn’t be very difficult to layout that argument. I haven’t seen both sides of it during the election cycle and I’ve been looking for it.
The logic of “if we don’t let any Muslims/Mexicans in, then we won’t be letting in any Muslim terrorists/Mexican rapists” is sound. This should be acknowledged. Now the opposing side gets to argue that the net effect of this immigration is positive because of moral arguments (helping people in need) or they bring other benefits that overcome the risk of terrorism.
The economic benefits have been uneven. I find the “manufacturing is never coming back” to be a weak dismissal that is self serving in almost every case. Many who believe allowing immigration is a moral duty seem to have little morals left for the economic losers of globalism.
I am unmoved by human interest stories on undocumented people when the other side of the story remains untold. This selection bias is where the media fails.
Do you think it is weak because you think it is a post hoc justification? Or do you think it is weak because it is not true? Or something else?
It weak because it is categorical in nature and something can be done. $400 tax on iPhones and Apple starts manufacturing in the US. Is this good long term economics? Maybe not. Government intervention can change the economic equations for offshoring.
I’m no fan of interventionism, Venezuela isn’t my role model, ha ha. If everything is manufactured offshore to the uneven benefits of the knowledge class, this might result in social upheaval which needs to be avoided. Trump is a warning shot.
It’s weak in that the optimization of GDP is not the only thing that should be considered at this time period. Protectionism may be bad fundamentals in the pure economic sense but it may be worth taking one for the team to try to even the distribution of benefits.
If a $400 tax were put on the iphone unless it were wholly manufactured in the US:
1) What do you think the new price of the iphone would be?
2) How many fewer iphones do you think would be sold at the new price?
3) How many new jobs do you think would be created in the US? Where do you think they would be located? What do you think would the median compensation be for the new hires?
4) How many now existing jobs do you think would be eliminated in the US? What is there median compensation?
5) What do you think would happen to the stock prices of AAPL? Given that AAPL is around 3.1% of the S&P 500 and 2.4% of total US equity funds, what effect if any do you think that change would have on people’s retirement savings?
There are many on the left that are quite willing to consider redistribution policies to soften the landing of those with few or obsolete skills. But that is rejected out of hand. Instead we have people that stamp their feet and insist that the clock must be turned back. That’s simply not possible. I cannot take these suggestions seriously as I have yet to see any that engages with the real world in any serious fashion.
It’s kind of like rent control. You can’t find an economist that will say anything nice about it. Many of them come from cultures where they would want to be for it — and economist that came out in defense of rent control would definitely be written up glowing in the likes of Salon — but they just can’t because it is so obviously a terrible idea. Not in some abstract maximizing gdp sense that you are strawmanning but in the very real sense that it makes almost everyone worse off.
What do you mean, they can’t be screened for? Simply don’t let in the 1st generation.
Holding people responsible for the misdeeds of their ancestors is silly enough already, holding them responsible for their eventual successors seems quite about the same.
“Holding them responsible” implies the response is execution or Gitmo. Or some kind of active punishment beyond the status quo. “We think three generations out the country will be worse off if we allowed in group x, so we won’t” is perfectly fair since group x has no claim on the country.
@Anonymous
That’s not screening.
Not being allowed to do something you want to do, that is not infringing upon anyone’s rights is totally a punishment.
But, as not every person in the world, or even just the ones seeking it, are allowed even temporary entry into the nation, it is not active punishment beyond the status quo.
Also, it is still not holding them responsible for the acts of their descendants.
No.
1. The foreseen consequences of that action have an effect on others. (Few actions haven’t, really.) As a potential victim of these consequences, I’d feel pretty infringed upon.
2. Countries have the right to not let anyone they don’t like in, for any reason, including no reason.
(I’m sorry if this is sarcasm and I took it at face value. I cannot be too careful about that these days.)
How is it not? You’re not letting in people based on criteria. Seems like screening to me.
I’d like to point out that it’s pretty common practice in the west that parents are responsible for their children’s actions while the children are young. Was certainly the case in my time. If I got into a fight and gave someone a black eye, my parents got in trouble for it. Just saying – it’s not completely unthinkable.
My ownership of a securely-stored hydrogen bomb does not, itself, infringe on anyone’s rights; am I being punished unjustly? Because I thought we had a pretty solid consensus on that a couple of open threads ago.
Or are we talking about someone’s right to not live in fear of what nuclear terrorists / radicalized second-generation immigrants might do, in which case maybe it isn’t an unjust punishment to say you need to have a permit before you come into someone else’s country and start breeding second-generation immigrants. Which brings us to discussing a rational cost-benefit trade, not making blanket assertions of absolute moral principle. At least, not this principle.
How foreseen are these consequences? If there was another hypothetical group whose children were disproportionately criminal and murderous, much more so than muslims, but were already inside the country, would you agree to have punitive action applied to them?
Most terrorists are of age, these hypothetical terrorists haven’t even been born.
You are being punished (unjustly or not is a matter of discussion, though I’d say no),
I mean, sure, it’s reasonable, but how are you even supposed to have a permit if the possibility that your descendants might get radicalized is motive enough to not let you in?
There are lots of things you can do. They should be debated and held up to a bright light of scrutiny.
Things like examining social media posts of potential immigrants for extremist leanings seems obvious, but yet many people are against this.
Finding potential terrorists is a needle in a haystack effort similar to trying to find the next crazy white guy who is going to go on a shooting rampage. They will invariably over select, the system will be fairly easy to trick, and some terror events will happen anyway. There is no way to measure their actual effectiveness.
However, this should be more of an exercise in calming the irrational fear of terrorism in the public, not finding a magic solution. They put people with machine guns in airports after terror events to calm the public, not because they expect firefights to break out. Security theater at the airport check-in is another example.
Terror screening as security theater is still probably a good idea.
Of course. Why wouldn’t I?
Well, you’re consistent, I’ll give you that.
@Anonymous
What about a group that themselves are disproportionately murderous (in fact they commit 90% of homicides)? If you would suggest punitive measures against them (and I don’t see why you wouldn’t) then I eagerly await your plans of how to deal with the terrible problem of the existence of men.
In a hypothetical society of advanced peaceful aliens (forming the establishment) and current-day-model humans (a minority or disenfranchised majority), it would be entirely rational and reasonable of the aliens to put into place measures to stop the humans from preying on their fellow aliens. Measures such as creating, in effect, separate societies so that humans couldn’t predate on the aliens by dint of not being anywhere near aliens to predate on them.
@rlms
The obvious historical solution, seeing as how parthenogenesis in humans is extraordinarily rare, is to impose a strictly enforced system of interlocking responsibilities and privileges that reward social behavior while punishing anti-social behavior.
Unfortunately “Responsibility” and “Privilege” seem to have become dirty words these days. So it goes.
@hlynkacg
Also, the tried-and-true way to reduce the problem, and the way in which Europeans became less prone to violence over time, is to declare the new rules (“No murdering!”) and kill everyone who has the temerity to differ.
That would be the “strictly enforced” part.
I see. Very good!
@rlms
The problem with your suggestion is that society molds men into hyperagents and reaps the benefits of this & suffers from the downsides. It seems rather abusive to then increase the punishment for the downsides (which is already greater for men), without actually allowing men to behave differently.
For example, one way that men are molded are by giving them less support for their problems and shaming them if they seek support, to make them fix their own problems. Punishing them for fixing their own problems through vigilantism, without giving them an alternative, leads to ‘A Clockwork Orange’ style outcome.
@Aapje
That’s close to being a fully general “it’s society’s fault” argument. I could equally say “Muslims are moulded into society into being disposed towards terrorism. It seems rather abusive to punish them for this, when it isn’t their fault”. If you argue that the vast majority of Muslims aren’t terrorists, and therefore they clearly have a choice, the same is true of men and murder.
@rlms
It seems pretty clear to me that the justification for Muslim terrorism doesn’t come from Western society, but a regressive movement within Islam, commonly called Salafism (more accurately, an extremist form of that).
I would also argue that pretty much all immigrant groups suffer from ‘integration friction,’ where a portion of the (1st, 2nd, 3rd) generation of immigrants get severely upset with problems related to various aspects of migration to a country with different culture, language, etc.
I don’t see how either of these are automatically the fault of the host society.
PS. I agree that men have a choice, but men generally have fewer alternatives. IMHO, a just legal system gives lower sentences to people who have fewer alternatives to crime, rather than higher sentences, as was proposed here.
But we aren’t talking about justification, we’re talking about cause (at least I am). The patriarchal structures that lead to disproportionate violence from men can’t be blamed on anyone, they just are things that exist. Likewise with Islamist ideology and the other factors that lead to terrorism. But if you are removing blame for violence from men because of the patriarchal structures, you also have to remove blame from Muslims for because of Islamist ideology (and Western Foreign Policy (TM), and the other factors).
@rlms
One of the causes for male behavior is that men feel justified in acting like that, because they feel that this is the best (or least bad) of the options that they realistically have, where these options are heavily influenced by gender norms (the same is true for female behavior, but with different norms). So the two are related (because people reason about their actions, resulting in…justifications).
Total nonsense. It’s not ‘structures’ that punish men and women socially for not behaving according to their gender norms, it’s people doing that. It’s not robots that allocate much more funds to help women who are homeless, experience domestic violence, it’s people; etc; etc.
I argued against simply punishing men who do not see another option to solve their problems, rather than simply giving them the same options that the less violent people have (which might actually be a major reason why they are less violent!).
Let’s get concrete. We have two jobless people, A and B. A gets welfare and doesn’t commit crimes. B doesn’t get welfare and steals food.
What do you think is the likely reason that B steals food:
1. A lack of harsh punishment
2. The lack of welfare, which means that B has to choose between starving & stealing and B decides that the latter option is the lesser evil
If you agree with me that 2 makes more sense, then isn’t the rational response to grant equality to B by giving him welfare as well? If he keeps stealing, then it is fair to argue that B could reasonably make the same choices as A and ought to be (harshy) punished. At that point, A and B have similar choices, so are equally to blame if they choose to be criminals.
As for Muslim extremists, I think that terrorism is different from the crimes that men tend to commit more than women and is far less excusable.
This is odd phrasing that assumes they agree it is the right thing to do but object anyway. Asserting it is the morally right thing to do is highly unconvincing.
This means that some people have values that will accept cosmopolitanism for strictly moral reasons and don’t need to be convinced further. Everyone else sees it as a trade off that needs to be evaluated. This second group has been summarily dismissed as xenophobes, racists, etc. and this was a huge tactical mistake.
This discussion has exited the Overton Window in liberal circles, but they fail to recognize that is not the case elsewhere. They lose because they refuse to engage.
White nationalism is the idea that a nation should be created by and exclusively for people of biologically European descent. I want to be very clear about something, there is no such thing as “white culture”; thanks largely to centuries of imperialism there is no distinctive cultural trait or habit of any form, held exclusively by people of European stock.
One can speak meaningfully of western culture, or Christian culture, or European culture, but not of white culture. There is nothing an Englishmen holds in common with a Russian that he does not also hold in common with a Mexican, or a Chilean. One of the things that sets the United Sates apart from the nations of Latin America, is that the Spanish and Portuguese empires adopted a purely cultural conception of European identity, and consequently went out of their way to culturally assimilate as many non Europeans as possible.
The United States on the other hand set strict racial boundaries; banning miscegenation, and enforcing a “one drop” blood quantum concept of ethnic identity. The legacy of this policy continued continued in some form or another until the nineteen sixties, when racial integration and changes in immigration laws fatally undermined any biological conception of American identity.
One of these things is very much not like the others. If one one wanted to preserve traditional Christian values, encouraging immigration from the various majority Christian nations of the third would be a very effective policy, maintaining strong ties with highly secular Europe would not.
If one wanted to have a common homogeneous national culture, then racial integration, and civil rights would be one’s highest priority, as divides is this area do great damage to national unity.
White nationalism has always been about preserving racial purity, and modern white nationalists are very explicit about this. Do you think they are are idiots; that when they say they want a nation for white people, they mean something else entirely?
This, I agree with. There is no single culture held in common by white people worldwide. The thing to remember, though, is that we aren’t talking about all Caucasian-descended people worldwide. We’re talking about them specifically in the United States, where “white” actually does denote a cultural identity. A fourth-generation immigrant from any of those countries would probably be considered “white.” For a first-generation immigrant from any but England, it would probably depend on how well they adopted American norms. (The color of their skin would probably come into play too, though mostly because I think it’s harder for people to accept as one of their own someone who looks different in such an obvious way.)
The main reason I think this isn’t mainly about race is from reading what actual white nationalists have to say on the matter. However, I think the issue of immigrants from Mexico is a good example. Hispanic and mestizo people from Mexico have traditionally been considered “white” in U.S. law going back quite a long ways. Yet white nationalists worry quite a bit about the large numbers of immigrants from Mexico in recent decades. Nobody worried about immigrants from Mexico when the volume was small, because sparse immigrants have little choice but to adopt the ways of their new homes.
Now, I would agree that most people I’ve seen who are white nationalists do care race. I think that the two issues are closely intertwined, if one cares about them both. But I have, in fact, talked to self-identified white nationalists who don’t care about biological race. And it seems like it’s worthwhile to disentangle the two ideas philosophically, while remembering that they often coincide in practice. Again, we want to have different names for “ner-nazis” vs. “People who want America’s European heritage preserved but don’t think less of non-Europeans as a group.”
It seems little different than French not wanting their land to be German, or Indians not wanting their land to be English, or Brazilians preferring their countrymen speak Portuguese and not Spanish. It’s possible to prefer to be governed by one’s own culture without disdaining others, just as it’s possible to prefer to live in one’s hometown without believing all other towns to be inferior.
Anyway, since race is a queer thing, partly biological and partly cultural, I propose the following dictum:
Insofar as race is culture, white nationalism necessarily cares about race.
Insofar as race is biology, white nationalism doesn’t care about race, though individual white nationalists often do.
I think that a major issue is that we often lack the vocabulary to accurately describe the concerns that people have.
I would argue that the majority of the opposition to migration is monoculturalism, where people favor their own culture (or the culture as it was), not racism. However, because the people with other cultures tend to have a certain ethnicity, the two become conflated.
“the Spanish and Portuguese […] went out of their way to culturally assimilate as many non Europeans as possible. The United States on the other hand set strict racial boundaries; banning miscegenation, and enforcing a “one drop” blood quantum concept of ethnic identity.”
Yes, this is exactly what happened. Jews were not prosecuted and burned alive in Portugal and Spain as recently as the 19th century. No, they were well integrated. The reason why slavery was abolished in mainland of Portugal and Spain was not because the kings wanted them expelled and working in the colonies. No, we very much loved and integrated them. This is why there are today so many muslims, blacks and jews in Portugal and Spain. It’s a much more accepting and diverse country than America.
Thank you for rewriting the history of my country. 🙂
AFAIK, Spanish and Portuguese Jews were prosecuted for their faith, not for their race. If they converted and practiced Catholicism properly*, they were not prosecuted. This can be classified as forced integration, in this case, to a Catholic culture.
A much stronger case against hyperboloid’s assertion is ‘limpieza de sangre,’ where people with ‘impure’ blood were kept out of certain professions.
* Although there seems to have been strong suspicion that Jews faked their conversion, which resulted in the inquisition fiercely trying to root out people who secretly practiced their old faith.
Mi amigo peninsular, hablé de los Imperios Americanos de España y Portugal, y Sus estados sucesores, los países de America latina. En muchas de estas nacionas, las clases políticas, por necesidad o Inclinación natural, alentaron la creación de un identidad mestizo, y permitieron la inclusión de muchas personas del patrimonio indígena en posiciones de privilegio .
Now to be clear the process of integrating the indigenous population into new Iberian dominated social systems
was neither peaceable, nor particularly humane, in fact in many places it was extremely brutal. Nevertheless the political elite did recognize the necessity of fully accepting as subjects and citizens at the very least the so called Gente de razón; those mestizo and indigenous people who had most throughly adopted European culture. In many, though not all, parts of the Americas such people could acquire land and wealth, and become members of a new local elite.
You seem to be misunderstanding me for two reasons. The first is probably a language issue; the English
word assimilate doesn’t necessarily have any particularly begin connotations. In the sentence, “The spanish empire […] went out of their way to culturally assimilate as many non Europeans as possible. “, most native English speakers would understand the word assimilate in a distinctly “Es inútil resistirse” sort of way. The second, less forgivable problem, is you didn’t read what I said; I never spoke about your country’s domestic history, only about the history of the Iberian empires in the western hemisphere.
At any rate the history of Moriscos and, Jewish Conversos is a complicated one, with treatment varying greatly across different regions and different times. Some Christians of Arab, Berber, or Jewish descent, including ironically Tomás de Torquemada, attained considerable rank within Spanish society. On the other hand any account that argues that all that happed was process of forced conversion has to reckon with the fact that Philip II essentially ordered the ethnic cleansing of Valencia in 1609. Nevertheless there was never any thorough expulsion of those of non European descent, and today genetic studies have shown that as much 20 percent of the Spanish population has north African or middle eastern ancestry.
How much of this assimilation was promoted by the Crown, and how much was it the Catholic Church just butting in?
At what point did the Spanish Crown see the interests of the Catholic Church as diverging from its own?
Maybe not divergent, but parallel. What I mean is that this assimilation might not have entirely been policy, rather than just something that was tolerated in a way that wasn’t in the anglosphere.
Spreading the true faith was what ostensibly justified the whole enterprise, so as far as that entailed assimilation, that was the policy of both the crown and the church. The friction was mostly between them and the settlers, whose power the crown did its best to limit.
I tried using the notify me of follow-up comments checkbox, but it gave me all the new comments for the post rather than for one thread. Is there any way to get notified of just the comments in a thread or just the comments to me?
Agreed, this would be useful.
Thirded.
Picking up an old comment thread– I like the way the right wing doesn’t teach self-hatred.
Excuse me if this has already been posted to ssc. I think both the story of a journal article which was plagiarized by a reviewer and the paper itself (comparion of several popular diets) are of interes.
http://retractionwatch.com/2016/12/12/dear-peer-reviewer-stole-paper-authors-worst-nightmare/
http://annals.org/aim/article/2592773/dear-plagiarist-letter-peer-reviewer-who-stole-published-our-manuscript
http://annals.org/aim/article/2592773/dear-plagiarist-letter-peer-reviewer-who-stole-published-our-manuscript
It’s sad that this is a non-universal position. I feel like teaching self-hatred in order to further political cause is like funding terrorists to further your nation’s interests.
It’s often effective, but it’s going to have consequences.
I don’t think teaching self-hatred for a cause is even effective beyond the margins. Because the people who will buy into it and still have enough stability to do anything positive for a cause were allies or future allies in the first place, and could have been reached and energized with less toxic messaging. One also flips some neutrals into opponents and strengthens the resolve of other opponents. Seems like a terrible strategy overall. I’m not talking about a much more delicate “Hey, the Blue Group has done a lot of bad stuff to the Green Group and even those who don’t actively hurt others often support it without realizing it, so especially if you’re Blue be careful about x, y, and z” which gets the same benefits with a lot less harm.
I’ve seen a theory that the self-hatred on the left is a Stalinist covert attack that keeps on running on its own. The theory doesn’t seem completely crazy to me– American embarrassment at being American is historically really weird– countries typically aren’t like that.
Other theories which don’t conflict with that– self-hatred fits with ideas about original sin. It’s also (thanks Scott) not exactly *self* hatred, it’s actually a way of expressing hatred of the outgroup (nearby competing groups).
Eh.
“Real”(tm) America hates the godless, liberal, hippies that live in the corrupt and decadent cities. What is “Make America Great Again” other than professing a belief that America is not great?
Honestly, I think the idea that liberals “hate” America in some sort of unique way is convenient for people to push as narrative, but I don’t think there is any “there” there.
It is pretty typical in the Anglosphere. I’d argue that Canada, Australia, and England itself all are equally, if not more extreme cases, which suggests a common descent or influence from England. It does seem to be associated with left-wing politics in all of them, although this may not always have been true. It has been at least since Disraeli, though.
I like Tom Wolfe’s explanation — colonized countries are embarrassed at not being as cultured as the colonial powers.
Notably, if you squint at it hard enough, it predicted the current wave of liberal BBC-mania.
And Mencken, who was undoubtedly influential (for one thing, he introduced Nietzsche to America), definitely had a similar complex; the difference is that he was embarrassed that his country wasn’t as cultured as Central Europe. He was Real Mad™ that there weren’t many opera houses in Kansas.
You mean aside from the Christian portions, right? I’m pretty sure that Christianity does. It gives you self hatred for free and then sells you the cure at the price of your eternal soul.
Christianity also provides resistance to the lesser teachers of self hatred. Once someone believes they deserve hell and are completely redeemed by a mystic process, there’s not much else to be gained by teaching them different self hatred.
Given that strong religiosity, including of the Christian variety, is positively correlated with mental health, the idea that Christianity promotes self-hatred seems a little dubious.
There are plenty of self-flagellating Christians. “I am an irredeemable sinner unworthy of God’s love” is definitely a thing.
Furslid wasn’t talking about a subset of Christians, he was talking about Christianity, without qualification.
But “original sinner, only redeemed by God’s love” is bog standard Christian messaging.
The fact that people don’t always take that message to its end state doesn’t mean that it isn’t there in the message. Furslid was specifically referring to the teachings via Nancy’s OP.
Heck, the most popular Bible story for kids is the one where God drowns the entire world because of how awful people are.
Yeah, and being redeemed means that we’re changed so that we’re no longer damnable sinners.
Perhaps you might want to, y’know, brush up on Christian theology a bit before you accuse others of ignoring the implications of their beliefs.
@The original Mr. X:
What exactly do you think my background is?
I assume you are familiar with Jack Chick? His comics floated around my hometown with a fair amount of regularity. They aren’t exactly shining beacons of positive messaging about self worth.
I grew up Catholic. In a very liberal college town, I attended the Newman Center, the liberal college outreach arm of the Catholic Church. Even there I was well aware of the duality of the Christian message that we are not worthy of God’s love, and yet God loves us anyway.
You, personally, may not feel that Christianity has a message of self-hate, but I would suggest that you simply never took it that way.
Frankly, I’m far more interested in your theological knowledge, as shown by your posts here. It doesn’t matter how many times you went to church, if you don’t understand what Christianity teaches about redemption, you don’t understand what Christianity teaches about redemption.
ETA: Also, I am familiar with Jack Chick, because some of my friends used to pass around a few of his tracts with comments like “Hey, isn’t this hilarious? What wacky things those fundamentalists come out with!” So you’ll excuse me if I don’t treat his writings as a particularly serious guide to Christian theology.
@The Original Mr. X:
I wonder whether I know more or less about Christian theology than the average Christian in the U.S.?
The relevant comparison isn’t to a pastor or even the most knowledgeable follower, but the broad mass of Christians.
I understand what Christians teach about redemption.
Don’t pull the “they aren’t true Christians fallacy on us.
@ HBC:
You started by saying that we should look at what Christianity teaches, not what Christians believe (“The fact that people don’t always take that message to its end state doesn’t mean that it isn’t there in the message. Furslid was specifically referring to the teachings via Nancy’s OP”); now you’re suggesting precisely the opposite, that we should ignore what Christian teachers says, and instead look at “the broad mass of Christians”. Why are you trying to change the subject?
@ Jiro:
Which Christians are you talking about, Christian teachers or “the broad mass”?
@The Original Mr. X:
It’s a valid point, but a) I’d appreciate if you took your enmity down two notches, and b) what I was saying is not every Christian will receive the entirety of the message.
Let’s take as an example the words I heard, which the congregation speaks, every single Sunday I have attended Catholic Church, as part of the presentation of the Eucharist.
“Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.”
Thus, a central message is that you are currently unworthy. God needs to do something to you in order for you to be worthy. You are not OK as you are, but are a hopeless sinner in need of God.
This isn’t ” being redeemed means that we’re changed so that we’re no longer damnable sinners” but rather a constant affirmation of continually being in a state of sin, needing God’s love to constantly heal us. We always need the training wheels. I don’t believe this is a non-standard belief among theologians.
There is a fairly consistent tradition in many faiths of repeating “I am not worthy”. The message can be taken as one of humility before God.
The standard lay person may receive this as “I’m cool so long as I keep going to church” but I found the idea deeply disturbing. Certainly the amount of self-hate (and general anger and hate aimed at society as a whole) professed by my devout Catholic grand-father were of a piece with this.
Not particularly relevant, but I always used to think that this is a classic ‘sneaky villain’ line, like when Scar crowns himself in the Lion King.
More relevant: catholic scrupulosity is certainly a thing that the church recognises as an issue, where the church succeeds too much in making its followers feel like unworthy sinners.
@ HBC:
It’s not “enmity”, it’s keeping on-topic.
If you think that “I’m not worthy to receive the holiest thing in the world” counts as self-hatred, then anybody who’s not a total megalomaniac would be considered as self-hating.
Another teaching, of course, is that God loves you enough to die for you — hardly something to encourage self-hatred.
Again, though, you seem to be defining “self-hatred” far too broadly. Only a megalomaniac would disagree with the statement “I can’t make myself perfect through my own efforts”.
ETA: And, once again, higher levels of religiosity are correlated with higher levels of mental health and reported well-being. Presumably, more religious people would be more likely to agree with their religion’s tenets, including “We’re all sinners”. And yet, this clearly doesn’t result in them hating themselves.
@HBC:
And? To me, that looks pretty obvious. I can’t do it on my own. I sin daily, despite my best efforts. Fortunately, he’s covered me, but reminding myself that he’s done so and it’s not by any merit of my own seems like a good cure for one of the many ways it’s possible to screw up Christianity.
All of my theology references are at home, so I’m working from memory here. This is an area where Catholics and Protestants disagree. Being redeemed means that you’re no longer under the dominion of sin, but under grace. God sees you as being pure, and you should both strive to be pure (even knowing that you won’t be able to reach it) and avoid seeing yourself as merely a sinner who happens to be saved. That I will agree is wrong, if a common problem in certain areas of Christianity.
It always seemed to me that humans always have a substantial amount of things to feel ashamed and guilty of. Christianity offers a way for them to deal with that fact and move on, so I see it as a net positive.
“being redeemed means that we’re changed so that we’re no longer damnable sinners.”
Is directly contradictory to every Christian sect I’ve ever heard of. “We are all of us sinners” is a VERY common refrain.
it’s certainly a thing with the catholic guilt.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xpokuj_what-being-a-catholic-means_fun
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5kW7hjr2rI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_guilt
I can only speak to my interpretation of Christianity, but I view it as promoting self hatred. This may not be a universal experience.
1. God does not punish people with hell because he is a sadist who wants them to suffer or a megalomaniac who will do anything to make people submit to him. God is merciful, and if it would be just to do anything less horrible to someone He would. There is something so wrong with me that it would be an affront against justice for me not to be punished with an eternity of torture. That seems to promote self hatred.
2. God wants to offer redemption. To do this, he sent His Son to die. God didn’t chose to have Jesus sacrificed because he wanted to make Jesus suffer. He chose to have Jesus sacrificed because there was no way to save humanity without something this horrific. I am so broken, that redeeming me required the torture, degradation, and death of the most perfect being ever. This seems to promote self hatred.
3. Sins are horrible and disgusting. They are also unavoidable. It is possible to sin just by thinking the wrong things (like lust). No human being can avoid sinning, and all sins are terrible. I will inevitably do disgusting and horrible things regularly. This seems to promote self hatred.
4. Humans’ personal virtue is completely insufficient. No person can save themselves. A person could cure cancer, invent a free limitless energy source, build a society without injustice, feed the hungry, and write the greatest works of literature. Without Jesus’s grace they would be just as damned as the worst monsters of history. I must recognize that I am helpless and can achieve nothing worthwhile. I must throw myself on the mercy of God. This seems to promote self hatred.
You can say what you want about Christianity not promoting self hatred. But all of these are mainstream Christian beliefs, even if the phrasing is a little different than normal.
@Furslid
All of your doctrinal points are true. But despite all of that, despite your (and my) unworthiness, God chose to pay the cost to redeem us anyway. I can’t think of a better antidote to self-hatred than that. Despite how bad I am, God loved me enough to sacrifice his Son to torture to redeem me. I’m saddened when I fail him, but ultimately, he still loves me and he’s a lot smarter than I am.
Sunk cost fallacy
@ HBC and others
Typical average Christian? ~1940, C.S. Lewis wrote Mere Christianity to lay out what some might call the ‘motte’ — the bare bones that Christian denominations agree on, in contrast to the things they disagree on (a wide ‘bailey’).
Has anyone done anything like this recently? If so, we could compare sales figures to get a rough, vague, fuzzy estimate of how many people are familiar with the sort of Christianity that Lewis was describing.
Probably the best recent “motte” book on Christianity is N T Wright, Simply Christian.
I would second the point that “I have [harmed others] in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do, through my own faults” is not to me an easy statement to contradict. (With [harmed others] replaced with sinned, that’s the Confiteor–the acknowledgement of sin at the beginning of Catholic Mass.) What Christianity offers is the ability to acknowledge that, and then to consider it forgiven–neither considering ones’ own failings trivial, nor considering them unforgiveable.
I’ve never been religious, but from my external point of view, it’s all a matter of perspective.
I think both Christians and non-Christians can agree that, as humans, we have all done some hurtful things, and that none of us are perfect. Assuming that we agree on this fact, what conclusion do we draw ? Here’s where the differences come in.
Non-Christians would say that you should make amends to anyone whom you’ve hurt, if at all possible. Perhaps more importantly, you should take not of the pattern of thought and behavior that led you to such actions, and correct it in the future. The word “should” does not imply some sort of an external authority who is giving you orders; rather, it denotes a conclusion based on evidence, similar to saying “you should avoid hitting your finger with a hammer”.
Christianity (at least, some of its denominations) teaches that none of that stuff matters, and that you are a horribly corrupt sinful creature; your only option is to submit fully to Christ, surrendering your will to the Divine. You’ll still be a worthless sinner, but at least you’ll be redeemed. In addition to that, Christianity (or, again, some specific sects) teaches that the category of “sin” is much wider than merely the set of actions that hurt other people; it also includes many thoughts (i.e. lust), as well as actions that hurt no other humans (i.e. worshiping the wrong god).
Based on this, I’d say that Christianity (or, again, a few specific sects) promotes self-hatred, and impedes positive change, more so than secular modes of thought tend to do.
And what percentage of Christians belong to these sects?
@The original Mr. X:
According to this article, about 50.1% of Christians are Catholic; Catholics definitely fit the description, although I hear they’ve been easing up on homosexuality lately. Evangelicals make up another 13%. I’m sure there are other Protestant denominations that fit the description, but there are so many of them, it’s hard to keep track…
@ Bugmaster:
Instead of getting into a debate about Catholic theology, I’ll just ask you to provide some actual evidence for your claims. Do you know of a study showing that Catholics, on average, have poorer mental health than atheists, on average? If Catholicism really promotes self-hatred like you say, there should be plenty of studies you can point to.
Sins are horrible and disgusting. They are also unavoidable. It is possible to sin just by thinking the wrong things (like lust). No human being can avoid sinning, and all sins are terrible. I will inevitably do disgusting and horrible things regularly.
This looks like bare realism to me. Extraordinarily vile things are happening all the time in all human societies. Is nobody responsible for them?
People generally oppose the really vile things and very good things happen a lot as well.
I would argue that humans sacrifice their selfish desires substantially, for the benefit of other humans, although not completely.
If not being a sinner requires complete sacrifice of one’s personal happiness, the term has become meaningless IMHO, because then not being a sinner requires personal unhappiness, which is a vile thing to demand.
Truly vile things are usually done by a small minority of people. When this is not the case, they are usually side effects and/or caused by humans not being rational entities (like global warming or unconscious racism).
If humans have limited abilities and try to cope with that as well as they can, I consider it unfair to attack them for their inability. It’s attacking someone for something that he cannot do, which in itself is vile.
IMO, this is different from a message that people are imperfect, but should strive to do as well as they (reasonably) can.
Last I checked, no major Christian denomination today demands misery as a condition of being saved. In fact, some claim the exact opposite, and AIUI, surveys seem to back them up.
I think that’s only true on a technicality: Whatever their requirements are, they always assert that those requirements don’t lead to misery. That’s a cheat because it can make any requirement whatsoever consistent with not demanding misery.
There are Christian denominations which demand things which lead to misery if you ignore the denominations’ claim that they don’t.
@Jiro:
I see where you’re coming from, but I don’t really agree. From a Christian perspective, God doesn’t want us to be miserable, so the requirements he puts on us shouldn’t make us miserable. “Take my yoke upon you, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Christian hedonism is … interestingly named, but I endorse it as good theology.)
I don’t argue from a non-Christian perspective on these things, because it’s impossible for me to win on those terms.
Such as?
And again, I point to the surveys which show that religious people are happier. Real experiment beats thought experiment.
People generally oppose the really vile things
In theory, yes.
Truly vile things are usually done by a small minority of people.
The word “usually” is doing an awful lot of work in this sentence.
being a sinner requires personal unhappiness
Trying to escape suffering is a fool’s errand. All you can hope for is meaning.
“Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.”
Which is from the story of the Centurion and his servant, and in the new translation (which goes back to the old translation), the resemblance is much clearer: the original first English translation I knew it as “Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldst enter under my roof, say but the word and my soul shall be healed”. Version above, new translation from late 70s onwards. New (current) translation, in use since 2010 or so: “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed”.
Referring back to Matthew 8: 5-13
@Thursday
You were defending these words as being realistic:
Sins are horrible and disgusting. They are also unavoidable. It is possible to sin just by thinking the wrong things (like lust). No human being can avoid sinning, and all sins are terrible. I will inevitably do disgusting and horrible things regularly.
These words specifically state that every human being commits terrible sins.
If you concede that not all people commit terrible sins, then you are now making a lesser claim. If you don’t, I’d like to know what kind of vile sins you think that everyone commits. Is lust a vile sin in your view? Because I would not count that as such, at all.
@Thursday
I guess that this conversation is hopeless when you have such a black/white view that doesn’t distinguish greater and lesser suffering.
@ Jiro:
And yet, when we look at the statistics, there is a strong positive correlation between religiosity and wellbeing. So, whilst there are no doubt some fringe groups who demand things that inevitably lead to misery, they’re apparently too tiny to have any measurable effect.
@ Aapje:
Do they? How many Germans, as a percentage, opposed the things the Nazis did? How many Russians tried to stop Stalin engineering the Ukrainian famine, or sending thousands of dissidents to the gulags? How many English Protestants opposed the Penal Laws, how many Americans opposed killing or expelling the natives from their land?
Cf. the banality of evil.
@The original Mr. X
Your question is based on the false premise that the Germans knew exactly what the Nazis did.
The Nazis were known for their propaganda and took extensive measures to hide the holocaust from the public.
Again, most Russians did not know about the Ukrainian famine. Even after de-Stalinization, people were only allowed to talk about ‘food difficulties,’ not famine.
As for your claim that Stalin engineered the famine, there is no hard evidence of this (in the form of this intent being written down somewhere). Modern scholars disagree on whether the policies of the time were intended to create this famine or whether they were merely stupidity.
The dissidents who opposed this were…sent to the gulags. The reason why the opposition is (un)succesful in stopping an oppressive government is very complex and involves much more than whether ‘the people’ support or do not support the policies.
I suggest you replace your black/white model of evil vs good with a more nuanced model that includes the complexity that shapes people’s decision, which can include choosing a less risky path that is more likely to save some lives; over high risk choices that almost certainly fail.
Arendt was taken in by the role that Eichmann played during the trial. Eichmann was far from the banal bureaucrat that just followed orders. I suggest you watch ‘The Last of the Unjust’ which is an interview with a rabbi who worked with Eichmann for a very long time and who knew him well.
Injunctions against homosexuality, or contraception. Depending on the sect, claims as to the proper role of women.
For rationalists, requiring adherents to believe things that appear, to nonbelievers, to be unscientific (creationism) or philosophically unsound (communion wafers changing their essence into flesh without changing their substance).
If you go to Nazi Germany, you’ll find there’s a strong positive correlation between being a Nazi and wellbeing, and a negative correlation between being a Jew and wellbeing. It’s not because Naziism is good, it’s because dominant social movements give their members advantages and nonmembers disadvantages merely by being dominant social movements.
@ Aapje:
The Nazis did more than just the Holocaust, you know. When they took power, one of the first things they did was to round up opposition party members and throw them in prison. This wasn’t exactly kept secret. Nor were the Nuremberg Laws, state-enforced eugenics, Kristallnacht, and lots of other nasty things.
Your original claim wasn’t simply that the people don’t support bad things, but that they “generally oppose” them. In the case of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, this statement is demonstrably false: the vast majority of the population did precisely nothing to oppose their governments.
Plus, how exactly are you defining “support” in the first place? Does somebody have to actively help with something, or do you subscribe to the “silence gives consent” school of thought?
Also, I note that you’ve said precisely nothing about my third and fourth examples. Do you think that most English Protestants didn’t know that Catholicism was persecuted, or that most Americans had no idea that the new land they were expanding into was already occupied?
@ Jiro:
It’s the accidents that remain the same, not the substance, you philosophically unsound person.
First of all, the correlation between religiosity and wellbeing applies, AFAIK, in secular countries where organised religion can hardly be described as a “dominant social movement”.
Secondly, the correlation holds within religions as well — so, for example, somebody who goes to church every day will have higher wellbeing than somebody who only goes on Sunday because he has to to be thought respectable. But going once a week would be enough to make you a member in good standing of the religion. So if the wellbeing advantages religion gives were only due to being part of the dominant social movement, going to church every day would bring no more benefit than going once a week. But this doesn’t seem to be the case.
Thirdly, if you truly hate yourself, this would represent such a big hit to your wellbeing that it’s hard to see how being part of an important social group could compensate. So even if you think the positive effects of religion are confined to making you more important socially, it’s still implausible that religion tends to engender self-hatred in its believers.
@Jiro
I’ve already attacked how the church handles homosexuality at great length. I’m not Catholic, so I’m with you on birth-control. And suggesting that traditional views on women promote self-hatred seems at odds with the happiness data. (Just to be clear, I’m more or less Complementarian.)
Creationism is a mess, but from inside it’s not nearly as irrational as it looks. And still not a Catholic, so I feel no need to defend transubstantiation.
>vague comment implying certain negative values are ubiquitous to the blue tribe
>response pointing out that plenty of people in the red tribe engage in belief/behaviour/thought pattern
>uncritical quantification that generalizes a positive behaviour to the whole red tribe with no attempt at quantification
Can we please stop having this conversation every thread? I’m really starting to get sick of it.
The funny thing is that in the very next comment you uncritically generalize the whole red tribe.
@Aapje Did I? Show me the line where I did that, please.
Never mind, I misread.
Agreeing here. Isn’t the part of the point of this community to avoid these types of circular discussions where noone actually convince people, but instead just attack the other team?
“Man those red/blue tribers suck” is what a lot of political comments here boil down to..
No, it gives you your eternal soul at the price of saying, sincerely, “please give me an eternal soul” and “thank you for the eternal soul”.
It also teaches that you cannot by sheer willpower alone be as good a person as you know you ought to be, which I suppose could be characterized as “self-hatred” by the extremely uncharitable.
@John Schilling:
It teaches that you can’t be good enough not to deserve eternal torture.
That’s a wee bit farther down the line than simply not quite good enough.
If by “torture” you mean not being able to hang out with the loving God that non-Christians don’t even believe exists in the first place, sure. Otherwise, you’re cherry-picking.
Wait, are you claiming that “burning in the fires of hell” is either not torture, or not a central claim of most US Christians?
I believe the standard Christian explanation of Hell nowadays is that it is a state of having rejected God’s love. That is, yes, Hell is miserable, but only because people tend to be miserable without God’s love, which, since He gave them free will, they are free not to accept.*
Dante and Hieronymus Bosch, however, make me think this wasn’t always the case.
So it’s sort of a strawman today to say that Christians scare you with visions of eternal torment, since I don’t think many Christians any longer believe in that idea of Hell, or tell kids that version of Hell in Sunday school. But our popular conception of Hell still comes more from Dante than recent developments in Christian theology, so it is also not implausible that someone, especially children, even today, would come away thinking Hell=place were you are tortured by demons forever.
*Edit: I am not sure exactly how this squares with Heaven and Hell being permanent states, which, at least when I went to high school, was standard Catholicism, since presumably one doesn’t lose one’s free will in Heaven or Hell, meaning anyone in Heaven should, theoretically, be free to reject God’s love, and anyone in Hell to accept it. The way it was explained to me was that that’s what purgatory is for (actually, the whole “burning torment” thing might correspond better to purgatory than Hell in Catholic theology, because arguably being purified, like gold being melted to remove impurities, is a more painful process than just being in a static state of suck).
My impression is that large numbers of lay-Christians still believe in Hell as a literal place of active, deliberate torture by demons or God, and that it’s mostly just the clergy and educated theologians that follow the “absence of God” interpretation. Could be a regional thing though.
C.S. Lewis seems to be pretty popular with American Christians, and his picture of Hell in The Great Divorce contains no demons or torture.
@DavidFriedman
Quantify “popular”. I expect that far more American Christians watch televangelists than read CS Lewis’ books on Christianity.
@onyomi:
“Hell houses are haunted attractions typically run by Christian churches or parachurch organizations. These depict real-life situations, sin, the torments of the damned in Hell, and usually conclude with a depiction of Heaven. They are most typically operated in the days preceding Halloween.”
Sure, the cognoscenti talk about separation from God. But the billboards on I95 that say you are going to burn in hell if you do not repent aren’t talking about metaphorical flames.
I had never heard of “Hell Houses,” but I agree that the popular idea of Hell among workaday Christians is still probably a lot closer to “place you get punished after death if you were bad in life” than the more philosophical “state of rejecting God’s love.”
Besides the fact that Christianity has tried to make itself more palatable to modern sensibilities, there’s also the issue of “inner” and “public” teachings, which most religions have had for a very long time. So even if the “real” teaching is that you will suffer if you chose to reject God’s love, if the easy-to-understand teaching used to scare the hoi polloi into being good is more legalistic, I think it’s fair to criticize that.
@rlms:
Americans are more likely to watch television than to read books. Do you think that, of the books American Christians read, there are ones giving the traditional picture of Hell that are much more popular than Lewis’ books?
I just want to throw in that of the three seriously conservative (young earth creationist) Christians I’ve actually discussed this with, all believed in a literal hell with literal torture for even virtuous nonbelievers, and I think they each claimed it was the normal belief in their communities. All were extremely educated too, FWIW.
So I’m really skeptical of anyone claiming this is some kind of fringe belief.
@David Friedman:
The Left Behind series sold extremely well and depicts a literal rapture, with planes falling from the sky as their pilots are raptured, and a literal apocalypse with a rise to power of the anti-Christ, etc.
I seriously think some of you are so wrapped up in criticizing the left that you aren’t paying any attention at all to anything on the right. Hyper literal fundamentalist Christianity in the U.S. is not a straw man at all. Dominion theology is a real thing. The Creation Museum is an actual place with large attendance. Young earth creationists are plentiful in the ranks of Republican elected officials.
Since the people in question have already rejected God’s love while still alive, it’s hard to see how Hell is any more miserable than Earth.
Dominion theology is a real thing
Yes it exists, but so does literal Che’ admiring, “Stalin did nothing wrong”, leftism. The question is are they representative of the American left?
According to this article the Creation Museum’s average yearly attendance since it opened is 300,000 and has been declining. I don’t know how we’re defining “large attendance” but we’re talking about a country where a second tier college football team can draw upwards of 400,000 fans a year, and popular attractions typically measure their attendance in millions.
@hlynkacg
Biblical literalist Evangelicals are much more representative of the American right than ardent tankies are representative of the American left, considering that Christian Fundamentalists are a voting block that have to appeased by Republicans, whereas actual “seize the means of production” socialists can be safely ignored, or even mocked and laughed at by the mainstream of the party.
EDIT: before edit with link.
I wasn’t aware that they had declined that much, because literalist Christians were a huge force back in the mid-2000s on the internet. Even with this this election, Trump had to signal to them a bit, so I’m inclined to believe that fundamentalists have an outsized impact compared to their numbers.
The “Left Behind” series sold an average of 3.8 million copies per novel.
The highest-rated current televangelist is Joel Osteen at seven million weekly viewers. That’s worldwide, and by reputation he’s one of the ones with the generally positive message, not fire-and-brimstone.
And from the sparse evidence available, there might be as many as five hundred of them in the nation.
There are well over two hundred million Christians in the United States. Do any of you all have any data at all on what typical Christians believe, or is it just going to be dredging up the most obnoxious examples you can remember and saying “yep, they’re all like that”?
I think the question has to be asked…
Where do you draw the line between “the devout” and “a fundamentalist”? Do you draw a line?
Because if you’re saying that devout Christians are a big enough voting block that they have to be appeased, I agree. But from my own experience a good chunk of that same block would also tell you that the Creation Museum (and attractions like it) are stupid, tacky, and borderline sacrilegious.
Near as I can tell, the genuine literalists are to the American right what Tankies and full on “property is theft” Marxists are to the left. They exist, and they are valuable when it comes to mobilizing the rabble but most of the time they’re something of an embarrassment.
I’ve met these too. I genuinely can’t understand how people who believe something like “most humans will be tortured for eternity” can go about their lives normally, instead of being constantly paralyzed with horror.
Looking for information on how many young Earth creationists there are, I found a blog post with a fairly detailed account of the differing results of different polls. Its conclusion is about 10% of the American population. But depending on what questions you ask, results can go as high as 44%.
People in this life might reject God’s love, but aren’t separated from it. People in Hell rejected God’s love, and as a consequence are separated from it.
This feels like one of those things that makes it difficult for people on either side to have an honest conversation – it seems to impute an unwarranted degree of epistemic bad faith onto non-Christians.
This universe simply does not feel like one in which there is a god offering me love, but whom I don’t fancy taking up on his offer. It feels like a universe in which there is no particular compelling evidence in favour of the existence of any gods at all, and certainly no good evidence to favour any one religion as more likely to be true than any other, where I am a human surrounded by humans who tend on average to adopt the religion of their family and then become absurdly overconfident about how likely that religion is to be true relative to all the others.
To say that I am not-separated from God’s love, when there is nothing about my conscious experience that suggests that a god is trying to love me, kind of necessitates that someone making that argument presupposes that I am lying about my conscious experience. And yet, if you believe in God and Hell, then unless you are willing to bite the bullet and agree that the god of Christianity is a douchebag troll deity who deliberately sets out to trick some of us, you kind of *have* to make that argument, because that’s the only way you can reconcile a loving omnimax god, the concept of Hell as a punishment for non-belief, and the fact that there are lots of people who, having considered the God hypothesis, do not believe it.
@David Friedman:
That conclusion is over confident, based as it it on one survey (about continental drift).
Note that, even in the milder form of the question, only 51% of people are willing to express a belief in evolution.
What you see consistently in that article is that around 40% of people know that the “right” answer to the question they are being asked is to agree with YEC. Regardless of whether they know enough to then answer other questions consistent with that expressed belief, it shows that the YEC answer is one that marks the boundaries of their in-group.
It’s amusing to see so many demands for quantification and evidence when the shoe is on the other foot.
Have you considered that maybe it isn’t the numbers that matter so much as control of the narrative? (I think that’s the next step in the dance.)
Attacking the public opinion question from a different angle, according to this poll from March 2000, 16% of Americans thought evolution should not be taught in public schools – only creationism. Another 13% believe that they should be treated equally. The remainder believes in various degrees of tilt toward evolution.
Recall that this was a nationally controversial issue in the 2000 election. Even the generally liberal and pro-science Al Gore waffled and made noises about local control. I suspect it would have remained controversial if not for various court cases which made the issue less viable.
If the question you ask can possibly be interpreted as “Are you really a Christian?”, the answer you get is likely to be the one that cannot possibly be misinterpreted as anything but “Yes, I really am a Christian”. And with ‘Creation’ and ‘Evolution’ often treated as codewords for ‘Christian’ and ‘Atheist’, you’re not going to get good results if those terms are front and center in your question.
Believing that God torments sinners is no worse than believing that God creates cancer, hurricanes, and Zika virus, and even proper theologically educated people believe that.
@ Winter Shaker:
I’m not going to start lecturing you on what your personal motivations “really” are, but on the general point, motivated reasoning is a well-known and well-established phenomenon, and I see no reason to suppose that it would magically not apply to atheists. Or, as Thomas Nagel put it:
In speaking of the fear of religion, I don’t mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper–namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.
He’s very much not fire and brimstone. I once saw a clip where someone tried to pin him down on the existence of a literal hell, and he was basically a politician with an uncomfortable question.
Re YECs, I actually come from that culture, to the point where I’ve been to the creation museum twice (it was surprisingly well-executed), and sat through a bunch of different church presentations on the subject. Personally, I think the way the church has handled the issue is terrible in the extreme, and that I genuinely am not sure how God created life and brought it to its current state. But this puts me well out of the norm among my peers, and I generally avoid talking about this among Christians who aren’t my friends because it’s really, really uncomfortable. John is right about it being a strong signalling question.
@John Schilling/@bean:
If it is a signalling question, and people are answering it as a signalling question, (which I mostly agree with), then we know what the churches and community are teaching is the right answer, yes?
@HeelBearCub:
Obviously. Would you care to explain where you’re going with this?
Actually, I have something to reassure you that teaching creation in schools is unlikely to bring about the apocalypse. Unfortunately, I lost the paper, and don’t have a cite, but I saw a paper where they ran a trial of attitudes and change during a freshman biology class after three methods of teaching. One was evolution-heavy, one was standard, and one actually tried to engage with intelligent design. Guess which one showed the greatest change in attitudes? That’s right, the one where they actually treated ID with some degree of respect. The one that was evolution-heavy had by far the highest number of people decline to respond. In retrospect, this was entirely predictable. If the other people are signalling that all of your friends are idiots and anti-science, then you tend to disagree with what those people are telling you. (I wonder if this is part of the explanation for the right’s position on AGW.) The really ironic part was that this paper was given to me by the guy teaching my church’s class on evolution (and doing a terrible job) and he didn’t see the obvious result, which was that both sides have their positions on teaching evolution entirely the wrong way around. I suppose it’s possible that the creationists actually are trying to manipulate your side, but I don’t think they’re nearly that smart.
@bean:
All I am trying to “prove” is that the there is a faith tradition of the US which teaches Biblical literalism as the right answer, and it is not confined to some very small minority of the public, but consists of the a substantial plurality, which constitutes a majority of the conservative coalition.
I frankly agree that, for anyone who currently believes in creationism, engaging with the arguments for creationism is a good idea. However, if you are teaching that the arguments for creationism are just as good, scientifically, as those for evolution, then you aren’t going to move people.
If you just say, some people claim X, some claim Y, you decide, it’s a poor substitute for walking through the critical arguments to show why scientists accepts evolution as essentially a settled question (with arguments being centered around HOW evolution has worked, not whether it occurred/is occurring).
The right answer to what, though?
I’m not sure you’re getting it. “Engaging with the arguments” tends to come off as “explaining why they’re wrong and stupid”. (This is not limited to evolutionists, to be fair.) The class I mentioned actually read ID literature and took it seriously.
I find it difficult to have a conversation about stuff like this for a different reason from Winter Shaker: some of the words don’t seem to have their usual meanings. It’s particularly disorienting how separation becomes a consequence of rejection in the second sentence after having been a non-consequence in the first, though it would be difficult in any case to see just how the distinction manages to turn the middling-happy atheists we see on earth into the miserable atheists in Hell.
Edward Feser has a new series of posts explaining the traditional Thomist view of hell:
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.ca/2016/10/how-to-go-to-hell_29.html
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.ca/2016/11/does-god-damn-you.html
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.ca/2016/12/why-not-annihilation.html
It sounds pretty horrifying, though the emphasis is not on physical torment.
Why? God is using different rules in different worlds. In ours, he gives people the chance of salvation. In the next, he’s withdrawn that chance (I think this may be a necessary feature of eternity, actually.)
When you’re stuck as a flawed human for all eternity, without God and without hope, it’s not really hard to see how you could be miserable. I didn’t get through the whole of The Great Divorce, but the first few pages cover this pretty well.
Mr X:
Okay, but I’m not really talking about reasoning at all, but subjective experience. It doesn’t feel to me like there is a god out there trying to offer me love, which I am rejecting. I will admit that I am probably quite difficult to win round to the god hypothesis now, having read what I’ve read about Christianity and other religions, but I would have been perfectly receptive to any god that wanted to talk to me while I was a child, learning about religious topics at school from teachers who, as far as I could tell at the time, were sincere in their beliefs and who I had no reason to presuppose weren’t telling me the truth. Yet no gods came calling, as far as I can make out.
How would you go about telling the difference between someone whose subjective experiences genuinely lead them to not sense the presence of any gods, as opposed to someone whose motivated reasoning leads them to unfairly reject a god, the subjective experience of whose love is actually being felt by that person, but consciously or subconsciously suppressed?
Ed Feser, “How to go to Hell”:
This brings us to Aquinas’s treatment of the changeability or lack thereof of the human will. (See especially Summa Contra Gentiles Book 4, Chapter 95.) Prior to death, it is always possible for the human will to correct course, for the reasons described above. A passion inclining one to evil can be overcome; a bad habit can be counteracted by a contrary appetite; new knowledge might be acquired by which an erroneous judgment can be revised. Hence, at any time before death, there is at least some hope that damnation can be avoided.
But after death, Aquinas argues, things are different. At death the soul is separated from the body, a separation which involves the intellect and will – which were never corporeal faculties in the first place – carrying on without the corporeal faculties that influenced their operation during life. In effect, the soul now operates, in all relevant respects, the way an angelic intellect does. Just as an angel, immediately after its creation, either takes God as its ultimate end or something less than God as its ultimate end, so too does the disembodied human soul make the same choice immediately upon death. And just as the angel’s choice is irreversible given that the corporeal preconditions of a change are absent, so too is the newly disembodied soul’s choice irreversible, and for the same reason. The corporeal preconditions of a change of orientation toward an ultimate good, which were present in life, are now gone. Hence the soul which opts for God as its ultimate end is “locked on” to that end forever, and the soul which opts instead for something less than God is “locked on” to that forever. The former soul therefore enjoys eternal beatitude, the latter eternal separation from God or damnation.
The only way a change could be made is if the soul could come to judge something else instead as a higher end or good than what it has opted for. But it cannot do so. Being disembodied, it lacks any passions that could sway it away from this choice. It also, like an angel, now lacks any competing appetite which might pull its will away from the end it has chosen. Thus it is immediately habituated to aiming toward whatever, following death, it opted for as its highest end or good – whether God or something less than God. Nor is there any new knowledge which might change its course, since, now lacking sensation and imagination and everything that goes with them, it does not know discursively but rather in an all-at-once way, as an angel does. There is no longer any cognitive process whose direction might be corrected.
ETA: Ninja’d, twice over.
The issue is hardly unique to Feser’s account, but he’s the one to be mentioned here; I find it hard to see how his heaven is a desirable afterlife, or even an afterlife at all. A being incapable of change doesn’t seem to be me continuing to exist, it seems to be some other kind of thing. And of course his hell seems a matter of indifference to me for the same reason.
Well, if somebody’s arguments about how there’s no evidence for God always seem to descend into a rant about how it’s so unfair that the Church won’t let them sin like they want to (I’ve talked with a few people like this), that would be a warning sign. In general, though, I prefer to leave such matters to them and God.
Hyper literal fundamentalist Christianity in the U.S. is not a straw man at all.
It exists, and widely enough to allow for a certain amount of book sales etc. But that’s not enough in itself to show that that is what most politically conservative, orthodox Protestants in the U.S. believe.
@onyomi
I think I grew up with the catholic nun version of hell which was very clear that they definitely did mean literal fire, literal endless pain and suffering. A pretty accurate portrayal from a story I read growing up:
A traditional irish catholic would typically be extremely clear that their version of hell is very very similar to the unsong version of hell, differing mainly in how the worst of the worst are treated because that’s just a chilling little flair that scot added.
And you are doing a poor job of it, because you are wrong about the “substantial plurality” and “majority of the conservative coalition” parts.
Biblical literalism is the doctrine of the Southern Baptists, the Pentecoltalists, the Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod), and AFIK no other major Christian denomination in the United States. All of those together come to 32 million people, or 10% of the population. Even if we double that to allow for minor literalist denominations and literalist members of generally non-literalist denominations, it is still less than the 21% who are (decidedly non-literalist) Catholics or the 25% divided among the various non-literalist Protestant denominations.
Not a plurality. Nor does 10-20% of the population make up a “majority of the conservative coalition”.
And 10-20% is what the polling consistently shows, for every issue other than the explicitly politicized Christian-vs-Atheist one of evolution. So if all you’ve got for your “proof” is the polling on that one contentious issue, and fringe stuff like “Hell houses”, you’re a long way from proving anything.
Hellfire and damnation of the eternal torture variety, as a dominant concern of Christianity? That’s another 10-20% belief. The vast majority of Christian churches at least implicitly teach, and the vast majority of Christians believe, that Hell is generally unimportant. Heaven, is important. Getting into heaven is the most important thing there is. Fortunately, it’s ridiculously easy, if you are there in the audience for a sermon you’re 95% of the way there – and it is taken for granted that you and everyone around you is going to do the other 5%, because duh, heaven, so the nature of the alternative simply doesn’t matter. Any actual tortures in Hell are for Adolf Hitler, Jeffrey Dahmer, and the 9/11 terrorists, and it is considered unseemly to gloat.
Interestingly, no. The people who ministered to him in prison said (reports via my parents, who were Church of Christ at the time) that he was genuinely sincere in his repentance, and I thus have to conclude that he made it to Heaven.
Re John’s larger point, even in my history in pretty literalist churches, Hell is largely minimized. It does get brought up occasionally, but it’s uncomfortable when it does. As for the idea that we’d be happy about people going to Hell, that’s a WBC-level rarity. People going to Hell is bad, and I’m genuinely saddened by the thought of my friends going there.
I assume you still believe that sending them to Hell is justice, and not sending them to Hell would be injustice. How can you be saddened by the fact that justice is dispensed instead of injustice?
I’m saddened that they didn’t take advantage of the monstrous injustice of salvation. I’m sad that they’re going to hell when they could have chosen to go to heaven. I’m not sad that they’re in hell after having chosen to go there. You can be sad that someone committed a crime and is going to jail for it without denying that they should go to jail for the crime.
I’ve always thought that the opposite belief would be more likely to result in self-hatred — if people can will themselves to perfection, and you can’t be perfect no matter how hard you try, well then, clearly you’re not just trying hard enough, you little weakling…
I’m pretty amazed at all the second hand accusations of strawman. I’d be shocked if any random Christian off the street gave any of the answers that you all seem to be giving about the nature of hell.
I think part of the issue here is that most of the SSC community doesn’t live in red tribe territory. I grew up an hour outside of Cincinnati, and I was definitely taught that hell was eternal torture by my parents, Sunday school, pastors, and the lovely “lefty” private Catholic school that I went to for middle/high school. Some of the things that you guys are saying (separation from god, etc.) was brought up every now and then, but it was always followed by hasty assurances that this was the most painful thing that a human soul could ever bear.
Since I can’t reply to comments below directly, I’m just going to do that here.
When did we start taking theology seriously as an academic discipline? I must have missed that memo.
Counterpoint: the Screwtape Letters.
I think it’s really disengenuous to argue that fire and brimstone has no place in Christian theology, when the Bible itself explicitly uses language to that effect in multiple places.
Finally, you lot are painting this with a happy face, so let’s swing by what Pope Francis has to say about the matter:
Oh, is that all? I’ll just forever long to fulfill the purpose that I was created for, reliving my dying gasps for all eternity? Well, why didn’t you say so! That’s so warm and fuzzy, it almost makes me glad to be damned for the rest of my existence.
So, to wrap up:
1) hell is a place of torture for most Christians
2) this is a mainstream Christian belief
3) there is no 3, I literally can’t understand how anyone would seriously think this isn’t the majority belief.
So, Christianity can be adequately described or defined by your personal experience in one small corner of Ohio, and if anyone doesn’t understand this Ugly Truth it is because they are defining Christianity only by their limited personal experience in the wrong sort of community? That’s a mighty selective brand of anecdata you are invoking there.
For the record, I have attended more Christian churches than I can count in more Christian denominations than I can count, in rural New York, urban Texas, Southern California, West Virginia, Regular Virginia, and Garrison Keillor Minnesota. I have actual young-earth Creationists in my family and among my close friends.
Hellfire and damnation as a central concern for actual American Christians, is in my rather broad and cross-tribal experience, a 10-20% thing. Maybe you grew up in one of those bubbles, and maybe you still have scars from it. That’s not the only story that matters, and it doesn’t define the reality of a quarter of a billion people.
@John Schilling Where did I say that was the only form of Christianity was Biblical ‘extremism’, as you call it? Those are your words.
You and a boatload of other people in this thread are acting like this group of people doesn’t exist.
Oh please. Get off your high horse you pretentious fuck.
This is exactly like when people bring up concerns about Islamic terrorism, and then all the concern trolls go on about “painting a quarter of a billion Muslims with the same brush”. No, you are by trying to deny that this group exists.
Maybe a better phrasing of my 3rd point would have been “I can’t understand how anyone would think this isn’t a widely held belief”, but I stand by everything else I said.
EarthSeaSky, thank you.
I was under the impression that being cut off from God’s love was supposed to be very painful (at a minimum, you don’t have earthly comforts and distractions), but you’ve got evidence it’s seen that way.
I suppose it’s stating the obvious, but it’s worth noting that people in certain conservative religious communities can end up with a lot of self-hatred based around their sexuality, even around very common behaviors like masturbation.
If things go wrong in such communities, that’s the way they tend to go wrong. But it’s quite another thing to show that that’s how they generally turn out.
I’ll agree that the way the church deals with such things is often very poor. Sexual sins are easier to target (there’s a lot less ambiguity about what is and isn’t OK than there is in a lot of sins), which leads to stronger shaming. The general attitude towards such things is probably too strong, as it hampers people getting help, while a lot of other sins (gossip is the classic case) get off really lightly. But that’s an implementation problem, not a fundamental one.
A question for you. Let’s say that we have a church which stigmatizes gossip as much as current churches stigmatize sexual sin, and doesn’t stigmatize sexual sin. Is this as much of a problem as the current situation? If not, why?
In terms of the utilitarian view: very little difference. In terms of something like virtue ethics… it seems worse to choose a policy which sentences a minority like gay kids to lifelong guilt and stigma for how they’re born vs targeting something random that affects everyone but isn’t really specific to any group and becomes just yet another random prohibition.
The former creates an automatic outgroup while most groups are good at ignoring many cases of the latter.
@Murphy
Note that the post I was replying to used masturbation as the example, not homosexuality. I’ll agree that the conservative church’s treatment of gays has been shameful. It’s viewed as a much bigger sin than gossip (or even masturbation) and gays as a group are seriously stigmatized. I’m not saying that it’s not a sin, but it’s a sin just like whatever it was that you (hypothetical conservative Christian you) did today. We should treat it the same.
I’ve called people out on this a couple of times, and they generally reacted much better than you’d expect. There was sort of a subdued “oops” when they realized that even if they were speaking the truth, it definitely wasn’t in love.
And I’d contest the idea that gossip is evenly distributed, any more than homosexuality is. Different people have different temptations.
You can say “I think homosexuality is a sin, but no more of a sin than these other sins that are not stigmatized”, but there’s one big difference: Homosexuals aren’t repentant and in fact insist that they are acting perfectly Christian. You don’t see adulterers holding pride parades, nor do you see shoplifters who are otherwise Christian but insist that shoplifting is perfectly compatible with Christianity.
Wouldn’t that mean that, in practice, you would consider homosexuals within Christianity worse than other sinners within Christianity?
I think that the Church does have a fundamental problem with the way it treats sexuality — in that it condemns certain behaviours (by labeling them as “sinful”), and even certain thoughts, for reasons that look rather arbitrary to a non-Christian.
For example, many Christian denominations treat masturbation as a sin, on par with theft or bearing false witness; but unlike theft or bearing false witness, masturbation has few of any negative consequences on this Material Plane (one can argue that it can turn into an addiction, but then, so can any other behaviour). On top of that, Christianity states that merely thinking of another person as sexy may be sinful, regardless or not of whether you ever act on those feelings. This creates a self-perpetuating cycle of guilt that can, IMO, be quite damaging.
Of course, the same can be said of homosexuality, or perhaps BDSM; but masturbation and lust are IMO much more clear-cut examples, since only ~8% of the population are gay, whereas about 99.9% of people have sexy thoughts now and then.
@bean
Fair enough.
I do think that people tend to view it as a hierarchy of sins and tend to class the ones other people do as worse while classing their own as tending to barely count.
of course not always. Some people do wrap themselves up in trivial guilts. I remember finding it heartbreaking when my dementia-addled grandmother was dying. She was a woman who seemed to have spent her whole life devoted to caring for others and being generally kind and well-meaning but she died clutching rosary beads crying believing she was going to hell to “burn”. She wasn’t very coherent for months before her death but being sure she was going to hell but not sure why was a common theme.
It’s why I mention the utilitarian view, it’s still not morally great to load people down with ll those little guilts for trivial things.
@Jiro:
The Church has made two different responses to homosexuality:
1. Treating it as the worst sin, and stigmatizing it to the point where even in an otherwise very good church, where other sins are discussed fairly openly, at least one family of my acquaintance has decided not to disclose that one of their kids is gay, because of the potential for drama. (Said kid has selected option 2.)
2. Treat it as not being a sin.
Both of these are bad responses, but frankly churches which pick Option 2 are way off the rails in other ways, too. Female clergy, premartial sex, abortion, and other heretical positions.
Even if they are (debatable), what the conservative church needs right now is to go out of our way to treat them well, without minimizing the sinfulness of what they’re doing.
@Bugmaster:
I’ll agree that they look arbitrary to a non-Christian, but I would point out that if God exists and is omnipotent and we are not, it’s almost tautological that he would put restrictions in place which don’t make sense to us. Saying that because it doesn’t make sense, it must be wrong seems to be the height of arrogance, a sort of supercharged version of ignoring Chesterton’s Fence. Not only do we not know why the fence is there, we know that the person who put it up is smarter than us.
@Murphy:
I’ll agree that this happens, and that it’s not correct.
This is one of the many reasons I’m not Catholic.
@bean:
Your point is entirely correct, but IMO somewhat tangential. You appear to agree that the Christian religion promotes lifetime guilt and increases mental suffering (at least, as compared to the secular alternative); however, you argue that this is not an arbitrary act, but rather, a necessary cost that must be paid in order to gain increased benefits in the afterlife (or possibly spiritual benefits in this life). However, our discussion so far was solely about the mental suffering in this world, on the Material Plane / mortal coil / however you want to name it.
The problem with spiritual benefits is that they are invisible to anyone who is not a Christian. From a non-Christian perspective, it doesn’t look like a Chesterton’s fence. It looks like there’s a fork in the road, where the left path leads to a beautiful meadow full of fruit trees, and the right path leads to a ravine full of jagged rocks and poison ivy. Lots of secular people take the left fork, and enjoy the fruits in the meadow. The Christian stands at the crossroads, and tries to steer people toward the right fork, because, according to him, there’s an invisible dragon in the meadow who is going to eat everyone there any day now — despite being completely undetectable, and in fact totally absent for thousands of years. Sometimes, additional Christians join the first Christian, and instead of shouting at passersby they begin arguing with each other regarding the exact shape of the invisible dragon’s teeth.
@bugmaster:
No, I don’t agree. I’m forgiven for the things I did. A little bit of guilt, the bit that reminds you that you failed, is important, so long as you also remember that you’re forgiven, and don’t allow the guilt to rule. Excessive feelings of guilt and self-hatred are of the Devil.
It’s tautologically obvious that if you don’t think you’re doing the wrong thing, you’re not going to mentally suffer over it. But if all we care about it minimizing mental suffering, we’d simply remove any chance of guilt by allowing everything. Or maybe not, because things like adultery, theft and murder cause mental suffering to others, too. Some mental suffering over things you’ve done is good, in the sense that the consequences of removing it are worse.
With that said, the problem seems to come to ‘Christianity is imposing additional and arbitrary guilt on people for things which aren’t actually bad’. This is where my point about Chesterton’s Fence comes in. I can’t see how I can take my religion seriously without also defending the parts which don’t make sense to me.
Obviously, I can’t win that debate on a theological/philosophical level, so I’m not even going to try. 1 Cor 15:19.
On an empirical level, I’d point out that religious people are mentally healthier, which is exactly the opposite of what you’d expect if all we’re doing is getting guilt.
” Not only do we not know why the fence is there, we know that the person who put it up is smarter than us.”
Provided one believes both that that person exists and that we have a reliable account of what he wants. Many people disagree with the first, many others agree with the first but disagree on the account.
The point is that since homosexuals are unrepentant, and Christians who masturbate or shoplift or whatever are repentant, it seems like Christianity mandates thinking of homosexuality (in practice) as worse than other sins (in practice).
I get your point, but unrepentant is not a necessary feature of homosexuality. It’s downplayed by most of those who are repentant, and those who aren’t find churches which don’t condemn it.
My point is that even if it is a greater sin (and I suspect that there are lots of other unrepentant sinners in churches, it’s just harder to see them elsewhere, even leaving aside if degrees of sinfulness are meaningful), tactical concerns mean that we need to be as loving as we possibly can be. No, giving up the fundamental sinfulness of the act isn’t loving, but including statements from 1960s-era reports on how violent homosexuals are in Sunday School presentations definitely isn’t either. (Yes, I actually saw that.)
The unrepentant homosexual, (or fornicator, or etc.), may say “this isn’t a sin,” but the unrepentant thief or liar (etc.) may say “what I did isn’t stealing or lying because x”. Not sure if there is a difference there, other than maybe the ease of persuading others.
I mean, it depends on the branch, no?
The Catholics seems like the most self-hating among Christians, and they’re also the leftier ones.
You’re projecting the political spectrum into places it doesn’t belong. There’s a definite left-right divide among the Protestant churches, but the Catholics are separate on an axis orthogonal to the normal political one. So far as they can be reduced to a position on the left-right spectrum, they’re definitely on the right.
A lot of Catholic reputation for self-hating seems to come out of Irish Catholicism and its extended dominance over Catholicism in the U.S. I don’t get the same impression from Italian or Latin American Catholicism.
That’s a very good point, and I wish I’d thought of it. (ETA: And I don’t think that Catholics in the UK have the reputation of hating themselves either, or if they do, it’s due to cultural osmosis from the US.)
Of course, now that you mention it, the Irish (and hence US) Catholic Church was strongly influenced by Jansenism, a kind of Catholic Calvinism which emphasised very strongly doctrines like original sin and total depravity, so much so that they got slapped down by the Pope a couple of times for having heterodox tendencies. Now it makes sense that Calvinism and beliefs similar to Calvinism might send people a bit crazy (the idea that God might have predestined you to Hell and there’s literally nothing you can do or could ever have done to avoid it it pretty scary, after all), but these have never been mainstream beliefs in the Catholic Church as a whole.
Quick chime-in from a catholic christian who does not hate himself. A more sanguine presentation of the dilemma might follow an arc like this:
“I have diabetes (or whatever). I don’t hate it, am not even bitter about it, but it’ll eventually take me down anyway. The world’s best Doctor has invented a cure that costs zero $$$ and will give me a life-time supply.”
Self-hatred is indeed dysfunctional and soul-destroying, but I haven’t caught the habit yet. I prefer something like the above, with all due respect to the unconvinced.
Being from a more orthodox background I object to the notion that salvation costs nothing. But agree with the framing of sin as a disease/affliction.
What I don’t understand is how anyone thought they could get away with plagiarizing the article they were reviewing? It’s a crime that you must, inherently, include your name on after wards, and for which the journal has evidence that it happened (the original copy to be peer reviewed and knowledge of who the peer reviewers were). As far as I can tell from the letter, the only things changed were authors and institutions: fifth graders put more effort into their plagiarism than this. (They apparently also added a new, fabricated cohort of subjects, which is equally egregious.)
It also brings to question whether there should be some effort to find plagiarism on the part of the journals. There are standard software packages to detect highschoolers’ plagiarism. Though this might just up the ante and make people disguise their plagiarism.
One account mentioned that the article was plagiarized into an obscure journal, presumably to have a cite to add to the resume.
It’s stupid to think that the original author wouldn’t keep up with research related to their topic, but people have been known to be stupid.
Wow– I’ve never started such a long thread and I wasn’t expecting it to happen this time.
That being said, my angle on this is more about the time when I told someone that I’m impressed with America for being so much less anti-Semitic than Europe, and getting answered with racism.
To my mind, there’s a vortex on the left that pulls people away from any praise of America.
Yes I know there’s still anti-Semitism in the US, some of it deadly, but there’s still a remarkable improvement. I’m curious about whether this improvement is purely historically contingent, or if there’s something about it which can be duplicated to cut way back on other prejudices.
Going back to the original post: the two parts of it have nothing to do with each other, right? I’ve been trying to figure out what the plagiarism thing has to do with self hatred and coming up empty.
They weren’t connected, they were just two things that were on my mind.
I’ve sometimes thought that racism explains the relative lack of antisemitism in America. In Europe Jews were the despised minority and those feelings are hard to displace from a culture, while in America there was already a the despised minority when we arrived and after a few decades we became “white enough.”
Following this line of thought, the only way to escape oppression is to become an oppressor. Pretty damn bleak but I haven’t got a counterexample.
It’s certainly possible to hold more than one prejudice at the same time.
Here’s a somewhat more cheerful explanation.
Protestants want to distinguish themselves from Catholics. One way of doing this is by being more anti-Semitic, and the other is by being less anti-Semitic.
Another possibility is that America was founded at a time when religious tolerance was seen as a cool thing (the Thirty Years War was a vivid example of what you could get if you weren’t religiously tolerant), so it was possible to have a reset button on the subject.
I do find it moderately amusing that the original post’s implication that the left wing teaches self-hatred has received literally zero pushback, while the suggestion that the same claim might apply to some versions of Christianity has people up in arms.
It is undeniable that Christianity leads some people into deep personal self-loathing. You can argue that they are interpreting it wrong. I probably even agree. But aside from a few over-scrupulous men who get tied up in anxious knots by (I would argue similarly inaccurate) interpretations of feminism, who are the equivalent self-haters on the left?
The case for self-hating Christians certainly doesn’t seem any weaker than the case for self-hating leftists. But only one of those claims gets any pushback here.
Is this the case where you aren’t using literally literally, or should I link HBC’s skeptical comment above?
Oh, you’re right. I forgot about that one. I skimmed through the thread before making the claim, but must have missed it.
I think my point is still clear, though.
Eh.
It was pushback, but of the most anodyne sort. And I was the only one.
Not sure whether that mean people are unanimous in rejecting the proposal, or accepting it.
I think it’s pretty clear that certain reasonably common versions of Christianity encourage self-hatred — everyone’s a sinner, everyone’s not worthy, and everyone should feel bad about it. But as to exact percentages, I have no idea.
“Feeling bad” is not the same as “self-hatred”.
I think it kinda does, but maybe you have a different sense than what I’m thinking of.
I was raised Roman Catholic, and one of the common beliefs was that we were all born with original sin, inherited from Adam and Eve. Because of that, we were all going to hell by default – except we were all saved by Christ. In addition, we were all virtually certain to be sinners in various ways.
Is this self-hatred? Arguably so. Looked at from another angle, we were all taught humility about ourselves, and humility is considered a virtue. So we were all taught to view ourselves unfavorably, but could then claim a little positivity by way of our being humble (assuming it was genuine).
Having left the RC faith around college, I still thought many of their virtues were worth keeping. More on topic, I know a lot of them, and they’re generally pretty happy people AFAICT, modulo those who suffer typical human hardship.
You guys are missing my point (and Randy M.’s)
I pushed back against the idea that the left teaches self-hatred (at least in any way that is meaningfully different from what the right teaches).
@HBC
I think that there may be some confusion here, where some people talk about self-hatred in the context of society (‘is our culture harmful’) and others in a more personal context (‘am I a sinner’).
I would argue that most orthodox religious believers and SJ believers consider people sinners by default and believe that it is much harder for people to do the right thing than the wrong thing. I think that this can be considered ‘encouraging self-hatred.’
I also think that SJ believers tend to have a a very negative view of society as a whole, but here there is also a strong similarity with orthodox religious believers who think that we have turned away from faith, etc.
However, my (subjective) view is that the red tribe has more diversity in these matters: there are more red tribers who reject the orthodox religious views than blue tribers who reject the SJ beliefs about ‘sin.’
On the other hand, mainstream SJ tends to teach large groups that they are pure victims and cannot be sinners, while orthodox religious views tends to not make exceptions.
So…
This is the exact kind of uncharitable, blanket, reductive, distorted and accusatory statement that I find to be common here.
I know what you are referring to, or at least I assume I do. Your are missing both the meaning of implicit bias (a concept that rationalist adjacent folks should be quite sympathetic to) and structural racism.
@HeelBearCub
I’m confused why you think that implicit bias and structural racism are counterpoints to my statements, so you probably misunderstand me.
The mainstream SJ point of view seems to be that:
– There is structural/systematic oppression which is one-directional. White people do things that structurally hurt black people, but not vice versa. Men do things that structurally hurt women, but not vice versa. Let’s call this type 1.
– There is incidental abuse which is multi-directional. A woman can hit a man and this hurts that specific man, but this is not contributing to structural oppression of men. Let’s call this type 2.
The existence of type 1, means that all people in an oppressor group get unearned privilege, which they ought to be ashamed to have. As there is implicit bias, which no one can escape, they cannot avoid being sexist/racist/etc. Also, because people tend to be blind to their privilege, they often cannot see their privilege, so any accusation by an oppressed group person that goes against their own judgement, is probably right. When interacting with an oppressed group person, there is a high chance that they ‘sin.’
In contract, people in an oppressed group cannot be guilty of type 1 oppression against a person who is in the oppressor group, merely of type 2 abuse. However, this is not on the group level and doesn’t contribute to kind of collective self-hatred that is being discussed here.
—
So…my argument is that mainstream SJ teaches people that a certain identity/group are collectively sinners, while other groups are not.
In contrast, Christianity, Islam, etc teaches that all people are sinners. There is no inherent hierarchy where certain groups are more prone to sinning than others.
In practice this means that in certain contexts, like a black person talking to a white person, mainstream SJ pushes self-hatred on the white person, but not on the black person. More specifically, the white person is pushed to feel that in this interaction, he can unwittingly do something to perpetuate the oppression of black people as a group and the black person is pushed to believe that he cannot do anything in that interaction which harms white people as a group.
So, HBC, do you agree that the feelings of the white person in this scenario can be classified as ‘self-hatred?’ Do you agree with me that mainstream SJ teachings foster these feelings in people with an oppressor identity?
I think it was because nobody had good evidence or personal experience being a self-hating liberal (although Faceless Craven comes to mind?) and couldn’t push the point, while lots of people know religious people or former and have considerable opinion on the temporal merits of it, none of them too close to objective.
In other words, I think your measured objection was effective. That thread didn’t really continue past it, did it? (Or rather, it seems to be now, between you and aapje, but rather productively.)
FWIW, I’d say the ctrl-left (or should I stick to sjw? or far left?) does encourage hatred, but not so much self-hatred. There’s plenty of ways for the devout to separate themselves from the cis-het-white-gentile-male-uneducated oppressors.
Well, it’s like with christianity, it depends on the brand of leftism too. I certainly wouldn’t disagree with the claim that some branches of Christianity promote self-hatred, it’s part of the reason SJ is so often compared to a religion.
Gets pushback from some people here. I find agreement with both claims. Left wing identity politics and Fundamentalist Christianity are both chock full of self-haters.
I once met a white woman who seemed torn up with guilt over the fact that she almost never hung out with black people (she was a graduate student and we were at a big grad student party — IME there tends to be a dearth of African-Americans at those). She hated herself for not having dated any black men and even claimed that it is racist for a white person to be in a relationship with another white person. Upon being pressed, she tied herself up in knots by claiming for consistency that gay men are sexist for sleeping only with other men as well. I believe these viewpoints would definitely clarify as “self-hatred on the left”, but hopefully this woman was very exceptional. I’m actually not sure whether she’s more exceptional than the “few overly-scrupulous men” referred to above, though.
How much had she had to drink? If this happened at a grad student party (where grad students drink to console themselves)… People can come up with some ideas they do not believe in the sober light of day. Given that I don’t know how much this could be used as an example.
I don’t know for sure how much she’d had to drink, but she came across as sober. Alcohol was in generous supply, but my impression is that most people at this party weren’t drunk.
Grad students are often experienced drinkers, and experienced drinkers are sometimes better at hiding how impaired they are.
Some people are really hard to spot. There are people I know really well where it’s scary – they seem basically fine, no motor skills issues or slurring their words or anything, and then they turn on a dime and become argumentative, make horrible decisions, etc, and you realize “wow, they are wasted”.
In haste….
Steve Sailer once posted on his blog about a story in one of Obama’s autobiographies about his grandparents in Hawaii. His grandmother was afraid to take the bus to work because of a rough-looking man who was often at the bus stop. Obama’s grandfather refused to drive her to work because he thought she was being racist because the man was Black. The grandfather got very upset and would not cooperate on any plan till Obama offered to drive her “till she gets over her fear of Blacks”.
Apparently this sort of conflict was common in thier famiy. I’ve seen this sort of people called ‘white guilt liberals’; there might be some overlap here with ‘self-loathing’.
Likewise. All this outrage that people are painting Christians with a broad brush and demand for evidence that the claimed subset is a large portion of the total. Where are all these posters when broad unsubstantiated claims are made about “the left”, academia, feminists or one of the other favored punching bags of the SSC commentariat?
In a secret tribal hideout equal and opposite to the one you hang out in when people are offering broad and unsubstantiated defamation of e.g. Christianity. Duh.
Ours is a cave underneath a stately manor in one of New York’s finer suburbs, with an assortment of impractically specific gadgetry left by the previous owner. Your is I believe a solitary crystalline fortress somewhere in the arctic north? The commute must be a bitch.
Given New York area traffic, the commute to the crystalline fortress is actually easier. Provided you have the advantages the original owner had, anyway.
Scott said doesn’t want this place to continue transforming into a right wing echo chamber. When you have a huge dog-pile against anyone that dares say anything slightly negative about Christians and one or two solitary voices calling out the rampant, evidence free, ranting and raving about so-called social justice warriors, then you are going to get evaporative cooling.
So what exactly do you propose we do, forbid people from defending x if not enough people defended y in another, previous, discussion?
How much “outrage” exactly is there? Other people are discussing the issue and you are getting annoyed at it.
Then:
Moon
HeelBearCub
Spookykou
BBA
rlms
Mark
dndnrsn
hyperboloid
John Nerst
Stefan Drinic
tmk
superordinance
Iain
stillnotking
erenold
ChetC3
nimim.k.m
Earthly Knight
Immanentizing Eschatons
Glen Raphael
…Are all invited to provide pushback. If the same five extreme right wingers start dogpiling, then the posters who identify as left wing can add more dogs to the pile.
Scott could introduce a “no dogpiling” rule but I imagine it would result in most threads containing only two posters.
I didn’t make the list of left-wingers? I’m hurt! I suppose I don’t post enough.
This seems to come up all the time on here.
It is very hard for me to get emotionally upset when people insult or snark on the left.
IMO the right already lost, they lost a long time ago, liberals/left already control every place I would ever want to be.
Just look at the map by districts which voted Dem vs Rep, I can’t imagine why I would ever want to visit a single red district on that whole list(natural landmarks aside), much less live there.
If I went to my dream college(s), got my dream job(s), and actually managed to do something worthwhile with my life, I would be surrounded by liberals at every turn.
I am often confused honestly when some of the other liberal on here seem to take it so personally, the whole reason I am here is to read this kind of stuff, If I did not actively seek it out, I don’t think I would ever see an intellectually held position to the right of myself. If every now and then I have to read some random ‘the left eats babies’ comment, well I just can’t muster the energy to be outraged about it.
@Protagoras
Seeing as I generally enjoy your posts; No, you don’t post enough.
@Spookykou
Are you aware who the next President will be?
@rlms
I am not sure why I am supposed to be nervous about Trump, with regard to what I said.
Sure I think he is a boob and I doubt he will be a good president, but I don’t see what that has to do with liberal control of all the places I would ever actually want to be?
What implication am I supposed to be getting from a Trump presidency that I am missing here?
@Spookykou (a response to your earlier post)
I think that the lack of interaction with others is exactly why. In the bubble, everything is obvious and people broadly agree which way to go for utopia. The dissenters are obviously old white men who cling to their guns until they die and then Utopia will come in the form of multicultural paradise.
And then an election happens and the bubble is pierced.
You see the exact same thing on the right, at sites like Breitbart. The comment section there is also full of ‘it’s all so obvious, why don’t they get it?!?!!’
The saddest/amusing part is that both sides see the grey tribe as the enemy/part of other side. I would argue that there are way more grey tribers than red tribers here.
That the right is in control of the entire country, obviously.
@ rlms
Spooky did specify “intellectually held” positions. 😛
Personally I would like to see more “intellectually held” left wing positions as challenges IMO keep one honest. In fact I would assert that perceived weakness of left wing principals and much of resultant wailing and gnashing of teeth is a result of an apparent failure to remember that the opposition is allowed to be clever too.
@Tekhno
The solution is not equalized dogpiling or a ban on dogpiling. It’s a ban on evidence-free ranting and raving about, not to mention constant strawmaning and weakmanning of, so-called social justice warriors, progressives, the left, feminists, etc.
Scott has to pick whether he is more interested in: providing a safe space for those with real or perceived grudges against the “blue tribe” to unload their rage, or one that includes non-trivial numbers of participants from that tribe. Trying to do both isn’t going to work. Maybe it all rolls off Spookykou, but that’s pretty unusual.
@Brad
It’s not that it doesn’t bother me at all, I even complained about a particularly low effort left bashing comment a few threads ago, I don’t think they add anything to the conversation and ideally I come to SSC for the conversation. It is mostly my, possibly totally unwarranted, confidence that the left already won, that at the end of the day their words and protests are the hollow cries of a dying thing.
Cthulhu will swim on, and I am happy to be pulled along in its wake.
I assume, Brad, that this is a complaint you are bringing in from beyond just this thread, as I can’t seem to find any instances of rage in this thread. Or are you seeing some here? Can you give an example of “outrage” or “rage”? Perhaps this is just different communications styles; I see some polite conversation and probably a bit of defensiveness. Occasionally a questioning of experience which doesn’t approach a personal attack, and a lack of ranting or raving.
Nancy’s bit that started it about self-hating liberals was a generalization without backing of examples or data (unless it’s in the links, but argument via links without discussion of the conclusions therein doesn’t make for great discussion fora etiquette, imo), which is not terribly convincing. Here’s how you can respond: “Say, that generalization isn’t being supported by evidence. Can you either back it up or retract it?”
Well… linked this down thread, and the interviews in it perfectly comport with my view of Trump voters.
It reinforces all of the beliefs I stated earlier, as to the culture war and what a Trump presidency means, in terms of the culture war.
@ Spookykou
As an aside, I enjoyed reading that. Thanks for the link.
Scott has to pick whether he is more interested in: providing a safe space for those with real or perceived grudges against the “blue tribe” to unload their rage, or one that includes non-trivial numbers of participants from that tribe. Trying to do both isn’t going to work. Maybe it all rolls off Spookykou, but that’s pretty unusual.
I believe the expectation around here is that we’re all supposed to police ourselves. If we’re relying on Scott to warn and ban us, we’re Doing It Wrong.
After all, we supposedly came here for rational discussion, and we furthermore believe that rationality isn’t monopolized by any one side of the American political mob. We’re supposed to want less lazy ranting and bellyaching, etc.
So for my part, given that I believe the above, the question I ponder is how to get that rational side of political viewpoints that I don’t agree with, while offering the same. In a large sense, I think this question is asked and answered.
@Randy M
There’s a great deal of weakmanning around here of various positions on the left except perhaps a certain strand of left-wing libertarianism. There’s also a great deal of equivocation/ignorance about terms. “Liberal” and “leftist” get used synonymously, people who are liberals get described as leftists and vice versa, “radical” gets misused, etc. The presence (perhaps not the volume, but certainly the numbers) of some parts of the left in the left as a whole is exaggerated.
Overall, the standards for sloppiness are lower for talking about stuff on the political left than the standards usually are here. This primarily affects people being talked about in the third person – I haven’t, say, been accused of holding a position I don’t, which happens for, say, some person in the papers, but that’s just my experience.
““Liberal” and “leftist” get used synonymously, people who are liberals get described as leftists and vice versa, “radical” gets misused”
I cannot tell from this what you think the words mean.
I would have said that, in the modern American context, “liberal” and “leftist” don’t have definitions that clearly distinguish them, although it’s clear that some people consider themselves leftists and not liberals. In the 19th century, “liberal” meant about what “libertarian” now means and it still has some of that meaning in Europe.
A radical, to me, is someone who proposes fundamental changes. One can be a radical libertarian, a radical egalitarian, a radical socialist.
@dndnrsn (are you a D&D nurse?)
And none of that rises to rage, does it? Certainly not this thread. I agree precision in language is important, especially for complex discussions that occur here. While we try to disentangle liberal from leftist from sjw, let’s not conflate “rant and rage” with “calm if sometimes fallacious disagreement.” *
*There are some posters I’ve begun to skim over more, but I read over this thread more carefully before posting here; maybe there’s valid complaints elsewhere, but again, precision. If you want to be effective, anyway.
@DavidFriedman:
The American meaning of a lot of political terms and symbols is all wacky. How many countries does red mean right and blue mean left? And yes, that is what I mean by radical. People who do not propose radical change get called radicals all the time – I would prefer that this not happen, because it’s sloppy and prevents clear communication. It’s very weird to see a middle-of-the-road liberal feminist get called a “radical feminist”.
@Randy M
Brad mentioned strawmanning and weakmanning as well. I think that in general there is a surprising degree of sloppiness. I wouldn’t say it rises to rage much – my high-water mark for rage against the left is mainstream Republican forums in the mid-2000s, personally.
Once the radical change has taken place, are these people now conservatives, or does that take a generation where they are merely moderate feminists?
Like, if we did reparations, would the people who supported it still be radical anti-racists (grant for a moment that conjunction) if they now felt all was right?
Is every term merely relative to the eternal now?
(Not advocating for anything here)
@Randy M
A radical feminist is someone who really wants to tear down society and rebuild it along feminist lines. You’ve got mid-20th century radical feminists who were in all seriousness discussing straight-up utopian stuff: abolishing families, raising all children in common, that sort of thing. The feminists who have won/are winning are the liberal feminists, who were focused on changing the system.
A radical anti-racist would be calling for changing society in big and really disruptive ways, and might well consider reparations to just be shifting money around.
There are, of course, people who call themselves radicals who are not actually radicals – but they like to think of themselves as such.
If you, correctly, assume this then why go on to write more paragraphs and another post that refute something you’ve assumed wasn’t intended?
Because, given that you brought it up here, and I wasn’t sure we’d share criteria for raging forum posts, hench the request for confirmation in the sentence after the one you quoted.
“Or are you seeing some here?”
That is why. I don’t see much rage on this forum, so I don’t quite get your complaint. But, I can go back to ignoring it if trying to understand it comes off so poorly.
Thanks for providing examples.
The first two don’t seem like rage. Strawmen, then? The quotes are imputing motives based on behavior, and extrapolating end goals. I guess it is better to assume the ones they talk about don’t realize that firing people for taboo words will lead them to either starve or recant?
I can see them bothering you if you think they lump you (as, I assume, some intellectually serious leftist) in with those activists who use social media to pressure corporations to though police their employees.
(The third guy seems rather depressed about it, but hopefully that’s hyperbole.)
There needs to be a term for leftist activists that use social & economic pressure to attempt to enforce very specific speech and though taboos, because this is a phenomenon that exists, and that way we can keep from painting the entire left with that behavior while still discussing it when it occurs or is relevant (and I’ll grant that some posters will bemoan it more than it is). SJW works for this unless you have something better.
Just as a follow up, I wasn’t trying to be mocking with my reference to a safe space. There are people who genuinely feel oppressed by the “blue tribe”. I might disagree with the reasonableness of their perceptions, but not with the genuineness of their feelings. And people that feel oppressed do sometimes want to scream to the world and get affirmation in return rather than demands for evidence and calls to be charitable. There is a legit need for a place where that can happen, I just would hope this isn’t it.
I’m certainly not going to argue for it to be. Push back with all your impassioned rhetoric, piercing logic, and abounding evidence, please.
@ Tekhno:
I don’t push back much about criticism of the (broadly construed) left because I think a lot of that criticism is both warranted and urgently necessary. I provide some of it myself.
The Republicans have a lock on all levels of government right now. It’s insane that more liberals aren’t asking ourselves what we might be doing wrong, rather than reflexively defending the positions and attitudes that brought us to this sorry pass. One reason I like SSC is that this isn’t likely to be dismissed as “concern trolling”, and I can read right-wing perspectives that seem mostly honest, too.
@ Randy M.
imputing motives based on behavior, and extrapolating end goals
That’s a pretty neat description, useful on many subjects and occasions — but it needs to be snappier. Any ideas?
It is simply preposterous for liberals or minorities to feel anxiety or fear regarding the incoming presidential administration.
it is eminently reasonable to spend two years pushing panic on pigeon-hearted peers because a single CEO in California was pressured to resign.
Depends on the minority. Illegal immigrants of any sort should certainly feel anxiety or fear; increasing deportation seems like the part of Trump’s plan he’s most likely to make an effort to deliver on. Muslims here on a temporary visa have good reason to worry as well. Muslims who are permanent residents or citizens have less reason to worry but it’s still not unreasonable.
People here on an H-1B might have reason to worry, though I consider Trump doing anything about it to be unlikely (his talk has gone both ways and at the end of they day, disgruntled American tech workers aren’t his constituency. The other big category is nurses which might be more important to him). Those on a visa (e.g. a B-1) used to work around H-1B quotas should probably plan to go home.
Black people, gay people, transgender people, Latinos (citizens and legal residents), etc…. the amount of fear about issues related specifically to them is far out of proportion to anything one might expect Trump to do. He’s not even going to roll back gay marriage, let alone re-institute segregation. Same with women; while he’s personally lewd, nothing about his past suggests he’s going to be putting women back in the kitchen.
I’ve gone and listed other public cases before (including Nobel laureate Tim Hunt). And those of us once on the front lines know there are others not so famous.
The case was alluded to at the very beginning. There have been many studies looking at the relationship between religion and mental health, and they overwhelmingly come out in favor of religion. For example:
It’s just that lots of people wanted to talk instead about how belief in Hell proves Christianity is worse for mental health if you assume perfectly spherical cows.
(PS: Belief in Hell is good for the economy. Paging Trump’s stimulus team. Maybe we can even use this to balance out decreased immigration!)
What other significant Grey Tribe hubs are there, aside from SSC and LW?
Of those, are there any that share LW’s no-politics norm?
(I am tired of the Two Years Hate and want to get away from it)
Free market econ blogs such as: Marginal Revolution, EconLog, Askblog, and Cafe Hayek.
Especially the market monetarists come to mind.
Those first two are fun, but definitely not “no-politics”.
Don’t know about the others, but the MR comments’ section is cancer and in any event certainly not politics free. The posts are a mixed bag, but since there are so many of them, that’s fine.
Two Years Hate?
Did you check out Hacker News?
No. Why, is it worse?
(SSC is better than most with respect to the TYH, but after some troubles elsewhere in my life, my appetite for politics has been extinguished for the foreseeable future)
Related to the 80.000 hours thing… I’d like some help from you 🙂
I’m from Colombia, I studied mathematics in university and I’ve been working as a Software Engineer for Google in Sweden for about 4 months.
My job is OK, but not especially fulfilling or meaningful (I feel like an asshole saying this, but well…) I could use some ideas on what to do with my life to have a bit more of impact. 🙂
I would suggest getting their free book. Also, I think they offer free consultations for people like you and you might want to take advantage of that.
Having a larger impact doesn’t need to start with redirecting your life. You can do small things at the margin, and experiment until you find something that becomes a new vocation or a way to scale up your impact, or that stays a powerful and meaning-giving hobby or side-project.
E.g., I volunteer with Techfugees which is trying to find ways for the technology industry to help solve problems for refugees. We are still learning how best to have a substantial impact, and being a part of that conversation is one way I am trying to scale up my impact.
(We’d be happy to have you involved if this is interesting 🙂 )
I’d love to hear more about what you do with Techfugees (and would also enjoy volunteering for it if possible)
Apropos margin: do make use of your 20% time at Google!
And look for some mailing list on g/ discussing these issues. You are not the only one.
Will try 🙂
Do you have an specific mailing list in mind?
Not quite sure about specific mailing lists. Do some searching. 🙂
There’s quite a few people at Google interested in volunteering / altruism, and they have a charity arm, too.
It looks interesting. Will definitely take a look, thanks!
Computer security experts: If the Russians were responsible for breaking into the files of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign chairman and the Russians were not trying to make it obvious that they did it, is it likely that U.S. intelligence has evidence that could let them reasonably conclude that the Russians almost certainly did this hacking?
Why does this need to be limited to the purview of computer security experts? I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that the US has people embedded in Russian intelligence circles.
It’s very possible. There are several well-known threat actors with well-established ties to Russian State Intelligence (the two best known are referred to by the cryptonyms “Cozy Bear” and “Fancy Bear”). Fingerprinting of persistent threat actors can take a number of forms, but it includes things like code reuse in malware, operational patterns, re-use of toolchains or staging/attack servers, etc. This information can be combined with public statements (e.g. Guccifer 2.0 was identified as Russian, in part, because they released a statement in Romanian, but repeatedly made mistakes and used idioms common amongst Russians learning Romanian) or data forensics performed on the machines themselves.
The US intelligence community (hereafter IC) is in a good place to analyze the attack and fingerprint the attackers. The IC (especially the NSA) have several privileged positions on the network that could allow for reliable analysis of attack traffic and would probably have had access to the effected machines. If they could, e.g., get malware samples from the phishing emails that were sent to DNC staff, they may very well be able to draw meaningful connections between those payloads and previous attacks.
That’s in addition to any other information they may have via espionage or other means.
The question is if you were a very skilled hacker Ex-KGB or Ex-NSA how hard would it be to fool someone into connecting a bunch of manufactured circumstantial dots and falsely blaming Russia?
In my opinion if Putin and company want to cause chaos in the US all they need to do is manufacture evidence that Trump / Russia were coordinating efforts during the election. If you read NYT comment threads there are an enormous number of people primed and ready to believe that.
Couldn’t it be a Chinese/Israeli/Belgian hacker doing a good job of pretending to be a Russian hacker doing a bad job of pretending to be a Romanian hacker?
While not exactly the conjunction fallacy, I think adding more complexity like that probably lowers the likelihood of that being the case.
The story I heard was that the Romanian looked machine-translated and his English looked Russian. He certainly has some mistakes in the articles, but different languages have different patterns of use of articles — I’d be interested in if there are any languages where one would say e.g. “fight for the world without Illuminati” instead of “…a world…”. If not, his native language probably has no articles; if so, his native language is probably that.
Most Balto-Slavic languages don’t have articles; the only exception I know of is Bulgarian. The Romance and Germanic languages all have articles. Hungarian has them, but Finnish and Estonian don’t. Greek and Albanian also have them. Further out in the Russian orbit, Georgian doesn’t, but Armenian does.
The thing that stands out most from both the VICE interview and the blog is that the guy is bad with the English tense/aspect system. If I felt like devoting more time to this, what I’d do is find papers on Russian-native-speaker acquisition of English that focus on articles and the tense system, see what falls out of that, and compare it to similar papers for other languages. Unfortunately, L2 acquisition is not something I know very much about.
I’d expect the Russian intelligence services to be able to find a fluent speaker of Romanian.
I’m unaware of any reason to rule out many less serious attackers and thereby suspect the FSB or another Russian government agency was involved. I consider that a rumor. Lots of people had an interest in embarassing Clinton and due to crappy security on the DNCs part also the means to do so.
Wikileaks forced them to admit a hack took place, which forced them to present a guilty party. But locating the true source of a hack (if somewhat competently performed) is notoriously difficult. The Russia explanation has two purely political advantages. First, it doesn’t embarass the Democrats and the FBI too badly. “A nation state! Ooooh! Well in that case you never had a chance to stop them of course!” Second, it doesn’t worsen relations with anybody because relations with Russia are already terrible.
I’m not saying they don’t have a trustworthy mole in the FSB that told them it was the Russians for sure. What I am saying is that if they simply didn’t know, or of it was Wikileaks or some other embarassingly puny enemy, or if it was someone they can’t publicly blame (like the Israelis), “it was Russia” is exactly the kind of thing they would say.
I would of chosen North Korea as a scapegoat. Relations are terrible, there is a lot less need for cooperation between the states when compared to Russia, it’s not prodding a global superpower and people already know them for hacking since the Sony thing.
Those are my thoughts though, and I don’t know what level I’m playing at.
Yeah, but North Korea is not really a good scapegoat for public consumption, since most people think of it as “oh that crazy guy with the cult of personality” and don’t consider it a serious threat, even though they may be. Saying “North Korea hacked the election!” would just make most people laugh and go “Well, sure Kim Jong-un wants Trump in office, they’re the same kind of ridiculously vain, puffed-up guys!”
Is there any realistic assessment of what exactly North Korea’s capabilities for causing mayhem are?
as explained by this blog, they are the fargroup (And I buy that whole set of theories whole-heartedly). So yeah, regardless of the reality of the situation that would probably be the reaction.
Oh, also, Callum; North Korea just isn’t…that powerful. The idea that they could puppeteer an election isn’t entirely out of the question, but it’d be very weird, and they’re just not a threat to us apart from that one nuke they had. Russia could legitimately use their power to take advantage of a president who made “bad decisions” that just happened to benefit Russia. North Korea might benefit from this situation, but not to a ridiculous degree, being too weak, and honestly not having their fingers in a lot of pies.
When it came out that a DNC IT staffer took calls from the FBI for seven months telling him that a foreign adversary was breaking into their system and chose to do nothing because he didn’t believe it was the “real FBI” I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe.
Then Podesta blames the FBI for not visiting them in person. Podesta himself doesn’t know enough not to click on email links that are phishing attempts. Nobody ever told Podesta about these things? They might as well have faxed all their documents directly to the Russian Embassy. The incompetence here is inexcusable.
This whole election and the campaign and just about everything to do with it all has definitely moved into the farce part of “History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”.
Being sceptical of a guy calling saying he’s from the FBI and he wants to warn you about hackers may be justified (because the first thing you’re warned about is not to fall for people claiming to be with big organisations wanting you to mess around with your IT details) but for seven months? Nobody thought to ring up the FBI and ask if they had a guy trying to contact them?
And then from too much scepticism to not enough re: the phishing. I can’t even, as the young people say.
As to faxing the Russians, that’s a little less careless than what happened with the British government (or at least Julia Dockerill, Chief of Staff to the Tory party Vice-Chair Mark Field) after a meeting about Brexit in the end of November.
She walked into Downing Street with her notepad under her arm with the handwritten notes facing outwards, so naturally a free-lance photographer snapped a photo and there was much interpretation of what could be made out from it. This has become known as the “have cake and eat it” Brexit notes affair (after a phrase on the page):
Give this woman a job working for Mr Podesta now! 🙂
If that’s true it shows startling incompetence. Not just by the staffer, but by the managers of her organization.
Hillary Clinton’s staff should have procedures for verifying that someone is with the FBI/CIA/DNC/Any other important organization. These might be as simple as “Give me your agent number, department, and supervising agent. We’ll contact you back through FBI channels within the next half hour.” Either these procedures weren’t in place or whoever took the call didn’t spend 5 minutes following them.
Also, there should have been a designated point of contact for the FBI to call. The FBI should not have had to resort to contacting IT directly.
Here are the gory details from the NYT (long)
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html
I will stipulate that the Russians still shouldn’t be messing with our elections anyway. I would call it standard operating procedure spy stuff that they broke in to the DNC and could really care less about that. They crossed a line when releasing it to WikiLeaks, although Wikileaks still says they got it from someone else. Given the inept security it wouldn’t be surprising that multiple people got these documents.
I work in infosec, and I think it’s very possible to muddy the waters by planting false information to make attribution very difficult. That is, by leaving a few traces that point to villain_of_the_week, you can very effectively hide your involvement.
I’m going to assume the US assumes the Russians, the Chinese, the Israelis and various others are hacking them, as they are hacking the Russians, the Chinese, the Israelis and others.
Didn’t we already have an intelligence person on here saying yes, of course we spy (including using cyber methods) on our allies and friendly governments, we need to know what they’re really thinking as distinct from what their ambassadors say their government is thinking?
Wasn’t Podesta’s email taken due to him clicking on a simple phishing link, rather than a hack?
The story I heard was confusing.
Apparently the FBI was trying to warn the DNC that they were being hacked for several months, and the IT guy for the DNC just didn’t trust the FBI agent.
Then after several months of that, Podesta clicked the phishing link.
The only explanation I can think of that there was a clear indication of Hackers trying to get into the DNC, probably through multiple different means, and Podesta’s phishing email was just one of them/the one that actually worked.
But as I said, the whole thing sounded confusing.
given that podesta was hillary’s campaign chief, I had assumed that what you’re discussing was two different issues entirely. But maybe I’m wrong . ?
It was not clear to me specifically what information was gotten just from Podesta I am probably just combining two separate instances.
Apparently the FBI was trying to warn the DNC that they were being hacked for several months, and the IT guy for the DNC just didn’t trust the FBI agent.
Ironic, in view of the frothing at the mouth that the FBI and Comey were out to get Hillary and were working for the Republicans to bring her down re: the email revelations. It would explain a lot, though, if there were bad blood/mistrust between the FBI and Hillary’s people with a while before ever the whole investigation of the emails started. No wonder they were so quick off the mark to claim it was all a conspiracy to ruin her chances in the election!
Then after several months of that, Podesta clicked the phishing link.
If that’s so, I’m kind of hanging my head in my hands here; the people who were operating on the idea that they were the best and brightest working for the future first female president who was going to bring in all the best progressive policies to help uplift everyone fell for the kind of thing you are told to be aware about when you’re thirteen and being allowed on the Internet on your own.
Though on the other hand, it is very human and does turn them into flesh-and-blood ‘real people’ rather than the stock characters in a morality play.
On the gripping hand, it makes the whole private email server thing even more hair-tearing-out because plainly the people sending each other emails on it hadn’t a clue about basic security.
Software developer here with an interest in security, but not a professional.
I think a pretty good contrarian take on this hacking mess is this one by Harper’s. Specifically, in answer to your question, it gives a good example of a hack where attribution was intentionally muddied:
In contrast, for a real taste of a what a nation state is capable of, read this excellent story on the discovery and analysis of Stuxnet. To this day, I don’t think anything about the code has been linked to anyone, although circumstantial non-technological evidence implies it was the U.S. and Israel behind it.
But the available evidence that I’ve seen so far is fairly obvious stuff (IP addresses and “command and control” servers associated with Fancy Bear / Cozy Bear, which are assumed to be associated with Russian intelligence groups). Like, if they were trying hard *not* to be caught, then these are the sorts of obvious mistakes they wouldn’t make. It’s trivial to know that the servers you’re using will show up in the DNC logs, and so it’s obvious that people would make that connection. As best I can tell, the available public evidence is that some of the malware used
Now as for whether someone else could make it look like them, I believe so. Since these hacking groups operate covertly, they’re almost defined by the tools and techniques they use, and those are available for others to use as well. For example, one bit of evidence in the case today is that an IP address was used that was also used to hack the German parliament (another attack by Cozy or Fancy, I forget). However, that server was not an official Russian government server, it was just one running outdated code and hence was exploited by them. It’s not hard to imagine another group similarly exploiting it.
Here’s a good blog post from the summer with some skepticism about the DNC hack. I’m not aware of any new public information since then, although the US Intelligence community has since made its various statements.
It could be sloppiness or a flase flag operation, but it could also very well be that the Russians fully intended to be identified.
Helping a more pro-Russian candidate win is clearly in their interest, but so is undermining public trust in democracy.
This is a little-discussed aspect of the issue I find especially interesting:
Assuming that Trump is, in the words of HRC, a puppet of Putin (Putpet? Puptin?) and intends to do bad things like favor Russia in all kinds of world deals or sacrifice the safety of allies*- is it more damaging to let that slide and ignore it or to continue to raise the issue and risk injecting more cynicism and distrust into a political process which is already reaching critical levels of distrust?
I feel intuitively that the answer would be graduated. For example, if Trump gives a Russian ambassador a better seat at a state dinner, it’s probably not worth challenging the legitimacy of the Union to call him out for that. On the other hand, if he announces that every nuke in America is going to be shipped to Russia for safe-keeping, it seems obvious that “let’s keep quiet about that one” is the wrong answer.
But then, what overt act tips the scales?
*And I think there is indeed evidence for this, although to what threshold it rises, I couldn’t say.
How important is the difference between a puppet of Putin, and someone who favours Russia in good faith?
You’d expect someone who favors Russia to still act in America’s interest when the two conflict. Unless you consider that this is always the case.
Yea or nay to donating to the White Helmets?
Nay. Go over to the syriancivilwar reddit. There you will find plenty of evidence that the “white helmets” are not impartial humanitarian workers. They have been secretly supporting the Islamist rebels, who, by the way, are the bad guys (or at least, the “worse guys”) in this conflict, even though the Western media seems to want to skirt around that issue and place all the blame for the fighting in Aleppo on the SAA and Russia. It takes two to be willing to tango in a dense urban environment with civilians all around. And the SAA has been offering EXTREMELY lenient terms to the rebels to stop the fighting. Some have taken up the offer to turn in their weapons and be transported to other rebel-controlled territory in Idlib province (where they will probably take up new weapons and fight some more). And this is the courtesy being extended to people affiliated with those who were beheading Western journalists just the other day! Never have I heard of a conquering army offering such generous terms of surrender in my life! And yet, the merciful (yes, merciful in this case!) SAA and Assad get painted as monsters by the Western media, even NPR lately. Ridiculous!
(By the way, there IS NO significant, politically-relevant number of moderate rebels anymore. Almost all got brainwashed/sidelined/incorporated by the Islamists back in 2015, unfortunately).
Eh. SAA and Assad are arguably monsters, but no more so than any other authoritarian regime in history, dating all the way back to Sargon the Great.
The Western media does not “lie” about what Assad’s government does, in the sense of reporting false information. The cool part about a sectarian civil war is you can paint anybody you want as being the bad guys of the narrative and have hard evidence to back it up. Western media lies by omission, by failing to report atrocities committed by rebels as much as atrocities committed by the SAA.
I mean. Take WW2. Imagine if I met somebody who, somehow, had never even heard of the conflict, never heard of the countries involved. And imagine I sat that guy down and explained the bare facts of the conflict- about how Russia had invaded Poland in 1939, how America invaded Italy and North Africa, how our island hopping campaign brought our bombers in range of Japanese civilians.
How we burned Dresden out of spite. How we invented nuclear bombs to crush enemy resistance. How our Marines mailed Jap ears and heads home by post. How Chairman Mao, the bloodiest dictator the world has ever seen, joined up with the Allies to seize Japanese territory. How the British resorted to terrorism to destabilize governments allied to Germany and Italy. How Native American snipers and scouts would scalp dead Germans. What the Russians did to POWs.
That guy who didn’t know what WW2 was is gonna get the wrong impression, yeah? He’s hearing nothing but hard, documented facts, but he’s not hearing them in context. And he’s DEFINITELY not hearing ALL the facts.
Western media and governments report hard facts about what the SAA and Russians do to civilians and obscure what rebels and jihadis do civilians. This gives a skewed idea of what is happening. But you can’t pretend like every report of barrel bombs and chemical strikes and artillery bombardment is just made up out of whole cloth. Shockingly, most authoritarian regimes are willing to use force to keep their population in line.
End of the day, Syria is getting torn apart by five different factions of varying strength, all of whom want to rewrite the political structure of Syria in blood. SDF wants a free and socialist autonomous north. The SAA wants to return to 2009 before the riots came. The FSA wants to overthrow Assad and install a Sunni government, whatever that may look like. Daesh wants a global Islamic state. Jabhat al Nusra/Ahrar as Shams/ al Qaeda want an Islamic State too, but they’re locals instead of foreigners like Daesh is.
And every major power around- Iran, US, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Hezbollah- sees an opportunity to stick their oar in to help their faction win, which of course means that NO ONE will win; the war will just drag on until either every outside power gets sick of playing the game, or until the local population drops so low that the fighting becomes logistically impossible to continue.
Trying to make out like the SAA are the good guys in this story isn’t a statement of fact, it’s a statement of preference. You’re saying a secular Baathist regime is better than an Islamic terrorist state. Well, I agree with you. But let’s not pretend that secular Baathist state is going to guarantee human rights for its citizens, or address economic crises, or deal with any internal dissent with anything other than a bullet and a torture chamber.
>This gives a skewed idea of what is happening. But you can’t pretend like every report of barrel bombs and chemical strikes and artillery bombardment is just made up out of whole cloth
I’m unilaterally declaring a moratorium on the use of the buzzword “barrel bombs” until the cessation of conflict in Syria. Civilians aren’t killed any deader by a bomb that is makeshift and dropped slowly out of a helicopter as compared with a JDAM. Ditto for chemical agents and artillery strikes, now that I think of it. If you’d like to call a faction out on atrocities, fine, but please refrain from repeating propaganda terms invented to smear one faction in particular on the basis that their atrocities being carried out more creatively somehow makes them worse. We’re not journalists – we have some sense of self-respect here at SSC.
I will admit that “barrel bomb” has become a buzzword meaning, “Syrian government evil tactic”. But, it is also a word. It describes an actual tactic with a specific intent. As such, it is a buzzword that ALSO describes a piece of reality.
Barrel bombing means you target a neighborhood in general- not a position, not an enemy strong point or facility, but a neighborhood. This is distinguished from drone striking because such precise strikes are aimed at an actual target that is, broadly speaking, considered legitimate.
A barrel bomb hits a segment of population at a random point, basically just tossing a really big grenade out the window as you fly by. You do it because you want to batter the neighborhood in question into submission.
A precise airstrike, using technology so exact you can choose which end of a car to impact on, hits a specific target- a guntruck, a militia checkpoint, a mortar team. You do it so the other team no longer has a guntruck to use anymore, or a checkpoint, or a mortar team.
There IS a difference. I say the difference is at least worth noticing.
I admit that at the impact zone it doesn’t matter none whether it was a barrel bomb or a drone strike. But if someone gave you the option- live in a neighborhood under threat of barrel bombs, or live in a neighborhood with drones overhead looking for armed men on patrol, which would you prefef?
I mean, sure, it’s more than possible you’ll be zapped by accident by a hellfire missiles. But crunch the odds. Purely random destruction, or intentional, targeted application of firepower?
I don’t blame the SAA for using airborne IEDs. It’s war, normal standards of behavior go out the window. If the use of barrel bombs shortens the fight by so much as a week they’re a valid tactic as far as I’m concerned. But is it really reasonable to totally ignore the decisions made by the factions involved? To act like there’s absolutely no difference in intention and result between one tactic and another?
>is it really reasonable to totally ignore the decisions made by the factions involved? To act like there’s absolutely no difference in intention and result between one tactic and another?
Of course not. As I said, calling out any faction in a war on their atrocities, intentional or accidental, is fair game; as long as you provide context. My point was merely that the usage of the term “barrel bombs” in the press of late is pretty much a rhetorical bludgeon with which to hit the Assad regime, used without any context and with the implication that the usage of the weapon itself is somehow a violation of the rules of war. I’d much prefer if everyone would try to stick to pointing out specific instances of noncombatants being killed or maimed, rather than criticizing the manner in which one side or another wages war. Of course that’s not going to happen in the press; they’ve got their story and they’re sticking to it. But in a free and open comment section among intelligent people, I try whenever possible to encourage higher standards.
As to whether I’d prefer to be under the threat of helicopters imprecisely lobbing high explosives, or drones raining targeted hellfires, of course I’d take the drones…if I were a civilian. I imagine that JDAM kits are somewhat thin on the ground in the SAA’s stockpiles at the moment, which is why they resort to such tactics. If they had targeted munitions, I imagine they’d use them.
That assumes they have timely and accurate intelligence with which to target their precision munitions, and also that their goal is not to intentionally target civilians and infrastructure. I don’t think those are good assumptions.
It does seem like a pretty, uh, unethical weapon, going by this:
It seems particularly relevant in a conflict where hospitals seem to be getting bombed quite frequently.
J. Mensch:
I suppose it all depends on context. I mean, every weapon kills people, that’s what they’re there for. And I guess it’s fine to say that using automatic grenade launchers, 500 lb bombs, and .50 cal machine guns is fine, but using barrel bombs and chlorine gas is not.
But it seems like one hell of a coincidence that the armed forces that depends on grenade launchers, machine guns, and bombs is the one that came to that conclusion. And all three of those tried and tested Western weapons caused its fair share of collateral damage over the years.
Take a regime that is fighting not only for its own continuance as a state, but also for the survival of their coastal communities against the bigoted heretics out in the desert, and I’m not surprised that they came to the conclusion that gas attacks and barrel bombs in rebel neighborhoods is acceptable.
Calling one set of armaments “unethical” because of their use to kill civilians does seem a little arbitrary, since every weapon can and has been used to kill civilians. It seems like how “unethical” a weapon is depends on how badly they vex the side that’s judging it: armored knights getting pissed at the crossbow for letting peasants murder Dukes in battle, or German infantrymen in the trenches getting pissed that the British unfairly use tanks, or American soldiers getting pissed at IEDs in Iraq or Afghanistan.
To me, the only ethical question in war is: “Will this tactic/weapon/strategy end the war speedily in my favor?” That’s not prescriptive, that’s descriptive. Think of how it would be if every Syrian would be if the civil war was just two weeks of blood and fire and horrific war crimes where 2,000 rebels and 50,000 civilians were slain with chemicals, firing squads, bombings, and snipers. Would they be better off as they are now, 500,000 dead and millions left destitute and fleeing the country, with no end in sight?
War ethics that only ask about how accurate a weapon is, or how it is employed, do not address how to bring the war to some kind of conclusion. Sherman is remembered as a monster in Georgia to this day for cutting a ten mile swathe of fire and sword through Georgia, but in doing so he brought the war to an end by destroying the enemy’s ability to continue. He saved untold tens of thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers by torching Georgia. Was his willingness to target civilian homesteads immoral?
But some are worse than others…
I’m not sure how you reached this conclusion. The international community’s condemnation of, say, chemical weapons did not arise in this way, and I don’t think IEDs have ever been treated as ‘unethical’ in the same way chemical weapons have.
Really? So you’d happily use, say, a nuclear weapon if you were certainly they wouldn’t respond in kind?
I don’t think that’s a fair comparison.
I think the issue with “barrel bombs” in particular is that they are basically useless as anything but an anti-civilian terror weapon. They are improvised big-ass-bombs that you roll out of a slow-moving low-altitude helicopter. You can’t aim them particularly effectively and the delivery method is pretty vulnerable, so they aren’t that useful in an area where effective opposition is suspected.
If you’re dropping IBABs on enemy positions because you’re out of more precise weapons, that’s one thing, but I don’t get the impression that that is what’s happening. For the really-needs-to-get-blown-up targets, the Syrians call in a Russian airstrike.
Honestly I don’t think IEDs or even suicide bombers are inherently “unethical” weapons, if used against military targets. A suicide bomber on a bus full of schoolkids is definitely unethical, but then so is whacking the bus with a Hellfire.
A lot of this gets tangled up when the enemy is a paramilitary, non-uniform force entrenched among a civilian population, and in that case there will certainly be more civilian casualties (I think the blame should be at least in part on the paramilitary force). But a barrel bomb isn’t even trying. It’s “this city block was insufficiently loyal, so I’m going to level it and everyone in it”.
Modern suicide bombers have to disguise themselves as civilians in order to get to a place that they can blow up. Even if their targets are military, by disguising themselves as civilians, they can be considered unethical.
There would, of course, still be suicide bombers that are ethical by these criteria (Japanese kamikazes certainly didn’t pretend to be civilian airplanes), but Middle Eastern suicide bombers wouldn’t qualify.
@Jiro
I think it is possible to disagree that pretending to be a civilian is inherently unethical (I’m not sure). In any case, I would definitely consider disguising as a civilian to be considerably less unethical than deliberately targeting civilians.
Though if the enemy has a policy of trying to avoid civilian casualties, a combatant disguising himself as a civilian has the foreseeable effect of making actual civilians into targets. (Much as it’s unethical to transport soldiers or materiel in vehicles marked with a red cross.)
@LHN
Indeed, but that only means your actions are increasing the risk of civilians being targeted, rather than tautologically guaranteeing it if you target civilians yourself.
@Jiro
The problem is that when one is confronted with a technologically superior enemy, following the rules completely can be suicide.
A strong argument can be made that historically, people break whatever rules are necessary to reach their objective anyway. So most criticisms of Geneva convention breaches by other nations/groups are deeply hypocritical, as they merely reflect that the critiquing side has no need to use those specific tactics.
Quite frequently, one side breaches the rules in one way and simultaneously criticizes the other sides for other breaches of the rules.
The history of US warfare alone provides plenty of examples of this.
@RLMS
Consider such questions in a more realistic context. In an urban environment, the guerrillas are using VBIEDs to target military convoys, bases, other personnel. They make every effort to conceal their VBIEDs as normal, civilian commuter and commercial traffic in order to close with their military targets.
An obvious counter, one used IRL, is for the military force to establish traffic control points, and to announce loudly and clearly that any vehicle that appears to be trying to close quickly with the military’s forces at checkpoints, bases, or on patrol, or that gets closer than a certain distance without permission will be fired on.
This can be interpreted as “Deliberately targeting the civilian population”. Certainly if a vehicle guns its engine and speeds towards a TCP and the officer or NCO in charge orders it engaged, those troops are “deliberately targeting the civilian population” if it later turns out to be someone rushing to get a pregnant woman to a hospital and not a VBIED.
Is it your position that the military engaging in these practices is MORE unethical than the paramilitary force engaging in the use of VBIEDs in urban environments?
What steps can that military take in force protection and to fight and destroy the enemy that is deliberately hiding amongst the civilian population that you would consider ethical?
Officers and NCOs swear oaths to protect the men and women of their unit, and it is generally held that they have a moral duty to protect their lives and to spend them as sparingly as possible, and for as much effect as possible.
Do you accept this moral duty? How does this balance with their obligation not to target civilians?
@Trofim_Lysenko
I’m saying that detonating a bomb on a bus of civilians is more unethical than pretending to be a civilian when you attack a military target (because the latter only leads to a probability of opposing forces accidentally targeting civilians). I’m not making any claims about the ethics of the opposing force doing things that might lead to the deaths of civilians (but where that is not the primary purpose). I think that varies from case to case (based on the usefulness and the likelihood of harming civilians). The checkpoints in your example are probably justifiable. Shooting anyone who looks at you shiftily because lots of rebels do that before attacking is probably not.
What do you get if you apply this morality to the other side? When faced with a massively superior force meeting them on their terms would be suicide.
1: Everyone in uniform is getting slaughtered! Moral imperative: get all of your troops out of uniform.
2. All coordinated attacks end in high casualty numbers for us, limited damage on their side. Moral imperative: Find methods of attack that cost as few of our lives as possible for their lives.
Guerillas are allowed to disguise themselves as civilians, so long as they distinguish themselves while they’re in combat or on a military operation. If you can’t do that, carrying your arms openly will suffice.
The rules don’t stop you from using disguise, camouflage, ambush, or guerilla tactics. They don’t require a “fair” fight by any stretch of the imagination. They just require you to give the enemy an option that’s better than “kill ’em all and sort out the corpses later.”
All this boils down to is organized armies bargaining with disorganized ones. “You stop using the tactics that are the most difficult to deal with and we will cut back on civilian casualties”.
@Baconbacon
Well, yeah? What did you THINK the various conventions and “laws of war” were?
With the obvious (to me) corrolary that if one side starts breaking those norms, the other side should feel free to start taking the gloves off.
Just how FAR off the gloves come is up for debate, of course, but I think it follows pretty logically that the more one side hides among and uses the civilian population for cover, the more civilian casualties become the price of doing business without being judged as purely the fault of the more organized side.
Honestly, I think that most guerrilla and insurgent groups believe and accept that too, and count on it to help with recruitment and motivation. I would in their shoes, even if I wouldn’t go so far as to deliberately court increased civilian casualties.
This highlights how awful people are in justifying their sides actions in war. “Taking the gloves off” here means killing more civilians, at the expense mostly of civilians not the enemy combatants.
Judged by who? The surviving relatives aren’t particularly likely to say “I know that it was a US drone strike that killed my three brothers, but really it was the Taliban’s fault for doing X”.
It is also a bullshit moral perspective. If you shoot 3 people you are responsible for their deaths. Your actions were either justified against those 3 individuals or they weren’t, “hey a psychopath told me that they were murderers” isn’t justification (why are you letting a psycho dictate your decisions?), and neither is “I was trying to kill them because they reminded me of someone that deserves killing”.
Taking the gloves part way off is usually a sucker’s move in war. If your goal is total subjugation then you take them all the way off, if your goal is peaceful occupation then you have to restrain yourself to get to that end. Taking the gloves off a little at a time is likely to lead to perpetual fighting.
It’s perfectly conceivable that you’ve never heard of such an offer before, but it gets trotted out reasonably frequently in sieges – a relevant term is “free retreat”, though it’s devilishly unsearchable on the general web. In a less formal version, armies will sometimes allow their opponents to retreat from a strong position relatively easily rather than risk provoking them to attack or stay for a long battle (for instance, the siege of Boston, or the alleged original plan for the battle of Mosul).
Armies usually offer free retreat on the principle that they’d rather fight 5,000 men on the open field of battle than try to fight the same 5,000 invested in heavily fortified positions. (And, knowing this, defenders will often refuse such terms until their position is hopeless).
Here’s a Google search that will turn up examples of free retreats as you’ve described them:
“free retreat” war -family
Thanks. I’d suggest adding a -veterans and maybe -resort or -vacation as well.
Syria is a choice between “bad guys” and “worse guys”. Who are the bad and who are the worse is something that changes with viewpoint, sympathies, and events of the hour.
The White Helmets only work in rebel neighborhoods under bombardment. They aren’t some Red Cross/ Red Crescent who treats the wounded of every faction equally. They are partisan; they only help populations that aid and support the various rebel movements.
Sending them money- even if they only spend it on medical supplies and not, say, ammunition- is a political statement whether you like it or not. You’re saying those rebels are right to oppose Assad’s government. And as citizencokane mentions, you may well find out you disagree with 99% of most rebel groups’ platform.
There are no good guys in Syria.
Based on everything I’ve read about the Syrian civil war, I’ve felt for a long time now that it is a battle between evil and evil-er, and you wouldn’t want to donate to either side.
I have sometimes entertained the idea of suggested by one of the Icelandic poems David Friedman mentions in The Machinery of Freedom, and donating to whichever side is weakest, until it isn’t, and then donating to the other side. And keeping that up until they either stop fighting or wear each other down to rubble.
The main reason I have for not doing that (other than the difficulty of making sure donations actually reach them) is that they seem to be hurting a lot of innocents along the way.
Interesting idea, but I can’t think of anything I’ve mentioned that fits your description. Could you give any more details?
I dug it up. I extrapolated it from your mention* of Njal’s Saga (not a poem, then, as I’d thought):
The incentives in that scene are somewhat different, as there’s a strong culture of paying for one’s kills. In the case of Syria, there does not appear to be such a culture, but there are obvious incentives I think can be exploited.
*Second Edition of TMoF, in case it matters.
Paul,
I think you’ve misinterpreted the story, though. It’s probably because you missed that “kill more men than they can afford” refers to the amount of weregeld the winner would have to pay. In either course of action, the “neutral” man is contemplating actions that help the same party. He doesn’t sound completely neutral to me; he sounds like a non-combatant who’s aligned with the faction asking him the question.
Friedman offers this story to illustrate the point that even in the midst of a serious breakdown in order – open fighting in court – the man answering the question still expects the usual laws (paying of wergeld) to apply to any violence that might occur.
Did you overlook the part of where I said “The incentives in that scene are somewhat different, as there’s a strong culture of paying for one’s kills”?
Well, in this case, the “cultural norms” are also written laws in actual law books. And the setting is a court of law. The “neutral” responder is calculating part of his answers based on his expectation that if violence breaks out, it will result in lawsuits.
But ultimately what I was getting at is that he wasn’t planning to support both sides. His plan to stay out of the fight if he’s not needed has him trying to limit its costliness – to the winner! Do you see how that might be different from what you were picturing?
Sorry; didn’t notice your reply until just now…
I think I might take a somewhat different view of law than a lot of other people (that might even be worth its own subthread). To me, that something is written in law only means that enough people felt strongly enough about something to authorize the use of force to enforce it. (I see logical consequences of this, but again, subthread.) So if it’s law, that’s not nearly as interesting to me as the fact that it was enough of a cultural norm to become a law in the first place.
I certainly see how the Icelander’s situation is different from Syria. In multiple ways. They’re not important to the thrust of my point, which is that in both cases, someone is acting to incentivize someone to stop fighting, and none of those incentives require some shared morality to implement, beyond the very bare, arguably natural imperatives of wanting to survive and wanting to keep one’s property.
I suppose it’s somewhat interesting to explore just what the neutral Icelander’s options are in the event that the leader speaking to him begins winning. He says he’ll break up the fight; what form will that take, which does not amount to “help the other side”? If that’s in fact what he does, how is that different (again, aside from the scale and collateral damage) from donating aid to the losing side in Syria?
This reminded me of Lord Gro in The Worm Ouroboros. As I recall, he was sympathetic to losing sides. The problem was that he was so competent that if he helped a side it would start winning, so he’d go over to their opponents. He was eventually killed for being a traitor.
I see you were thinking of someone who publicly offered to help the losing side as a way of defusing a conflict, which is a very different thing.
Wow. That sounds … utterly horrible. If you’ve got enough money that’s literally just a proposal to keep wars going forever without altering which side is most likely to eventually win.
That sort of thing kept Iran and Iraq from making trouble for the West for quite some time.
And we all know how well Iran and Iraq have turned out in the long run.
I think it’s actually very benign (provided that everyone involved in the conflict actually wanted to be involved – innocents being bombed tosses this all completely out the window for me). I’m not saying we’d donate secretively; rather, we’d publicly say this is how we’ll donate. They can’t help but know they can’t win this way – so the only winning move is not to fight.
This entire strategy is based on an intense dispreference for physical violence, dominated only by individual will. If you really wanna fight, this strategy says, well, here’s your stick, and have at ye. I’ll make sure you regret it.
Only in a world of perfect or at least open information. In our world the winning move would often be to lose in all the areas that will increase donations the most, pool up a large amount of resources and then attempt to crush the opposition in a massive counterattack.
For any side that had an advantage there is now much less risk in overextending. A massive but failed push to win the war is mitigated by a sudden surge in backing which prevents a complete collapse.
This type of war would be amazingly horrific. Outside observers are likely to donate after large casualties are reported, and large geographic areas are lost. A strategy of lightly arming drafted civilians and forcing them into positions where they are massacred would be great for gaining outside support with little risk to the likelihood of winning. Benefits for your regulars/devotees, tragedy for everyone else.
In the real world, where innocents are inevitably caught up in wars in huge numbers, my suspicion is that the best outcome is usually for one side to win a victory so comprehensive that they feel completely unthreatened by what’s left of the losers and over time feel able to treat them relatively generously, leading to integration. A clear outcome isn’t enough; it has to be so crushing that there is no serious possibility of a rematch.
I would add “quick” to that.
You know what usually works out well? Power hungry dictators with no opposition. Those guys always settle down and start respecting human life right after a crushing and ego boosting victory.
The types of people who engage in these types of wars don’t tend to be guys you want in charge of civilian populations after the war.
How do you get a “crushing victory” if there is “no opposition”?
We are, at least implicitly, assuming that the opposition isn’t going to win. We know that the opposition in Syria (or whatever comes next) doesn’t have the means for that, and after the Libya fiasco we know that the United States Cavalry is not going to ride in to save the day.
And, OK, “no opposition” was probably meant as hyperbole. But the choices are between the ruthless dictator who easily crushed some minimal opposition, and the ruthless dictator who just won a bloody victory over a painfully annoying but ultimately unsuccessful opposition. A dictator who knows that his foes are wholly ineffectual, or one who knows that if his foes are allowed to gather they can cause him real harm. How certain are you that it is the former tyrant who will impose the most oppressive tyranny?
The no opposition is after the crushing victory.
Even if they don’t “win”, the losers (generically, not specific to this conflict) can sometimes force terms, or control small regions that can act as havens and as points for potential uprisings to start. Longer conflicts are also more likely to require the winner to make alliances and concessions.
How confident/certain would I be? Not very, but that should be true of most predictions with complex out comes.
Which is Stalin? No individual state in the bloc was likely to effectively leave the USSR, so his atrocities there can be seen as straightforward bullying on an extreme level. On the other hand perhaps disruption in one causes a chain he he doubted the ability to hold all down together and so it was a strategic approach. Or perhaps he was just the type of asshole who would extend his power as far as it would go and that was his only real limit, and it had nothing to do with how dangerous his enemies really were to him. I lean to the 3rd explanation.
Doesn’t work, because war is rarely a matter of pure attrition. World War I, the classic example of such, saw the German army with twice as many men under arms, more than twice as many guns, tanks, planes, boats, whatever, in 1918 compared to 1914. What they lacked was morale – the endgame of almost any war is a mass psychological collapse on the losing side, and seeing that from the winning side tends to restore some of of the morale that had been eroded away on their own side. Don’t ever expect that you can calibrate “let’s you and him fight” so closely as to prevent the winning side from emerging stronger than it was at the start.
Plus, as you note, it’s hell on the civilians. If you care about that sort of thing, again note that the war will predictably end with a general collapse in morale, and the sooner that happens the less total suffering there will be along the way. It does nobody any good to offer false hope to the losing side, if you’re not actually going to follow up with the sort of assistance that is going to turn them into the winning side. Aleppo, for example, should have surrendered months ago, and it’s partly on vocal Western do-gooders that it didn’t.
Fortunately for us, the strength of a victorious Assad regime will be mainly in its alliance with Russia, and living with a powerful, dangerous Russian Empire is a problem we already have to solve. So we aren’t multiplying our difficulties, and Russia probably isn’t greatly increasing its own strength, when this ends with Syria as a de facto Russian protectorate.
Don’t ever expect that you can calibrate “let’s you and him fight” so closely as to prevent the winning side from emerging stronger than it was at the start.
Definitely agreed; it’s another reason in addition to innocent casualties that makes this ultimately a non-option IMO.
So we aren’t multiplying our difficulties, and Russia probably isn’t greatly increasing its own strength, when this ends with Syria as a de facto Russian protectorate.
Given that, why is Russia bothering with the expense?
For the same reason the US got involved: Syria was already a Russian ally. The point of supporting the rebels was to remove a Russian piece from the board. Russia gains nothing by keeping the piece, except not having lost the piece. But if Russia lost the piece, that would be a pretty large setback.
It’s like trying to pick out the good guys from the bad guys between the Nazis and Soviets. Sure the Soviets were defending themselves (natural sympathy to that view). But Stalin was also horrible, and for all we know might have attacked Germany in the future.
Donating is injecting entropy. It’s a complex system of horrible people who keep getting money based on which is judged to be a ‘lesser evil,’ that they then use to buy more guns.
Obviously humanitarian aid in terms of food/medicine is different. Even then… there are some… darker views on conflict that suggest it is most optimal to provide no help such that the war ends as fast and decisively as possible. I can’t advocate those because I imagine if I was a dying/starving civilian I’d desperately want food and medicine.
If you’re going to go the food-and-medicine route, you really want it to be through someone like the Red Cross / Red Crescent, where the well-established reputation is such that nobody is going to confuse this as an implied promise of military assistance to come, we just sent the food first because priorities. If the Red Cross isn’t delivering food and medicine, it’s probably because nobody can deliver food and medicine without an army to break through the siege lines (that’s sort of the point of a siege), which brings you back to whether or not you’re up for an honest military intervention.
W/re Aleppo, I get the strong impression that the rebels were convinced Western armies would break the siege if they posted enough photos of sad telegenic children on social media. Whoever convinced them of that, did real harm.