This is the bi-weekly visible open thread. There are hidden threads every few days here. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:
1. Lots of people scored the predictions they posted for 2016; the ones I can find are JonGunnarsson, Anatoly Karlin, Anders Sandberg, and E. Harding – sorry if I missed anybody. And the Eukaryote Writes Blog offers Tips For Throwing A New Years’ Prediction Party.
2. Ozy from Thing of Things now has a Patreon. And Quillette, a magazine on sociobiology, academic freedom, and politically incorrect science (which I’ve linked to here a few times) has a Patreon too. See Jerry Coyne endorsing their fundraising drive here. Remember, if you don’t like someone who’s asking for money, don’t donate; there’s no need to be a jerk about it in the comments.
3. Speaking of Patreon, I’m going to try posting some shorter things here sometimes. If a post is unusually short, I won’t charge patrons until I’ve accumulated enough unusually short posts that they add up to one normal-length post (probably two or three).
4. Thanks to everyone who came out to UCI to attend the Irvine meetup last week. Hopefully you all had as good a time as I did.
5. Since I just got done posting an Unsong chapter and I’m still in the relevant frame of mind, comment of the week is Jaskologist’s theory of magic.
A1: “I like X”
A2: “I don’t like X”
B: “You people are hypocrites!”
Is there a name for this kind of fallacy? It’s basically when internal disagreements or even disagreements between unaffiliated people are framed as collective inconsistency or hypocrisy. I see it happen all the time, e.g. when feminists deride men for shaming women for both being sluts and prudes (as if it’s the same men doing the shaming), when right-wingers criticize leftists for preaching tolerance and using violence against Trump supporters (as if it’s the same leftists) etc.
I suppose it’s related to outgroup homogeneity, but that one’s understood more like a bias and less like an intellectual dirty trick.
>I suppose it’s related to outgroup homogeneity, but that one’s understood more like a bias and less like an intellectual dirty trick.
Well, I’ve usually heard this referred to as “outgroup homogeneity bias“, rather than something being done intentionally.
I’m sure it’s usually not done intentionally, my point is that the name “outgroup homogeneity bias” 1) brings up grand sociological theories and 2) emphasizes the speaker’s alleged psychological motivations; both of which are things that don’t need to be involved.
All I want to be able to say is “your argument a piece of faulty logic, not unlike equivocation or no-true-Scotsman”. That’s what informal fallacy classifications are for, they work well when they’re not misused.
Here is a quote from Michael Lewis who is paraphrasing the work by Danny Kahneman.
“If you want to reduce the power of a stereotype, you eliminate the classifications. The more you reinforce the classifications the more powerful the stereotype will be.”
I think what you’re asking for is a type of classification and in using that classification you’re more likely reinforcing the problem than solving it. If you really want to be effective, stick to the gritty details. Just tell people that the logical jump they’re making isn’t true and that they’re ascribing behaviors to people who didn’t do those behaviors.
The problem with that is that you cannot simply force people to adopt the framing that you prefer they would use; nor can you force them to not use their brains for what it is built to do: to generalize.
If a group actually has a trait, people tend to notice it. You can shame them and/or bully them a bit; or try to hide the evidence from them by not separating out some groups; but this tends to cause blow back.
I would suggest not removing the classification, but enriching it with more nuance. I think that works better and is more respectful of people’s intelligence.
Right, I wouldn’t say it’s an intentional trick either. It’s more of a fundamental function of the brain, much like stereotyping: when we encounter a cluster in opinion-space we essentialize it and turn it into a category, of which everyone is either a member or not. It’s computationally efficient to do it this way I don’t think it will ever stop. We can be aware of it, at best.
This effect is probably responsible for a large part of why online argumentation is so broken (it opens up for weakmanning and motte-and-baileying among other problems).
Insisting that this is always wrong is too strong though, we must be able to use contextual information to make reasonable assumptions about what people think about things or it becomes kind of pointless to argue. I mean, most people want to argue against a particular idea, opinion or ideology, not against a particular person. The person is useful mostly as an representative of the ideology. I.e. you want to argue against “libertarianism”, “creationism” or “feminism”, not some random person’s unorthodox bag of views.
But there is a difference between two kinds of situation with respect to how wrong it is to essentialize. It’s more reasonable when there is a strong “core” of opinions and then some variation in different directions – one main signal plus noise. It’s less reasonable when you’re grouping together significantly separated clusters that are better modeled as different signals (like calling libertarians and fascists “right wing”, or communists and liberals “left wing”).
Then of course there’s a sliding scale between “unorganized set of people sharing an opinion-cluster” on one end and “organized movement with a collective decision-making structure” on the other.
On the second end the whole is responsible for the part, but not on the first end. Some “quasi-movements” in the middle region can be seen as one or the other depending on what your rhetorical interests are.
It’s a mess.
I think there’s a very real counter-issue, wherein people actually are often hypocritical but it’s difficult for you to know if that person is specifically being hypocritical because they’re not going to announce it. So they say “if you’re part of group X then you’re probably being a hypocrite, or at least you should call out other members of group X which you probably don’t because most tribe members don’t call out other tribe members”
the main failure state is if you’re not part of X group
Yep, there is always* a counter-issue.
*Perhaps not always always.
Yes, it would be good to have a term for this unfortunately common argument.
Some (pretty stupid) names I can think about:
– Hivemind fallacy: assuming you’re arguing against a hivemind instead of an individual who is part of a heterogeneous group.
– Fusion/merging fallacy: merging sentences by different people as if they were a single person.
– Butterman (as in Strawman, Steelman, Weakman): Your oponnents merge into a single one like warm butter. Can be used in: “Hey, you’re buttermanning our group!”. I actually like this name…
Monolith fallacy? “X is not a monolith” is already commonly used shorthand for “Not all members of X share such-and-such characteristic”.
This one is pretty good. I like it.
I like “hivemind fallacy” – unlike the others, it’s totally self-explanatory.
Given the success of the ‘mote amd bailey’ fallacy, I’m not sure having a self explanatory name is a feature 🙂
I feel that this word is too close to a word with very different connotations (remove ‘er’), so it will trigger people emotionally for the wrong reasons.
Hm… ok, fair enough. I was thinking of a material that would melt in the heat and thought of warm butter. Ice man doesn’t pack the same punch because I usually imagine Ice in the cold, where it won’t melt… Icecream man, maybe?
On the one hand, you have this, lets call it the hypocrisy fallacy. On the other hand, groups A1 and A2 can overlap in which case they use the hypocrisy fallacy as a defense against Motte-and-Bailey. “Well I certainly never said that,(even though someone who I listen to has) so therefore you’re criticism is useless”. Sometimes the criticism is spot on. But sometimes it’s not. So I guess the question is how is a debate between one giant group versus another group of people supposed to go?
Hm. I wonder if no name for the fallacy exists because it’s a useful fallacy for people to make. It encourages you to find out who else is arguing on your side and whether you are truly aligned, and if not, to distinguish yourselves from each other or else resolve differences.
Sounds similar to “Our demonstration was peaceful. It’s not our fault that a bunch of guys in ski masks happened to be breaking windows and throwing rocks at the police while standing intermixed with us.” If you’re going to insist that you do not believe A, at what point are you obligated to disassociate yourself from people who do believe A?
Obviously it would be silly to demand agreement on every trivial bit of doctrine, or even on major issues — in a sane world, you could hold a demonstration where Black Lives Matter and right-wing libertarians held hands to demand less police violence.
Ah, I know: perhaps this fallacy ceases to become a fallacy when it’s about tactics, not views. Two elements of the large group hold contradictory opinions? No big deal. One element is waving signs and demanding peaceful change while the other is setting fires and breaking heads? Now we have a real problem, not a fallacy at all.
But then, on the other hand, it can still be a fallacy when one sub-group is sufficiently small. Suppose that while MLK was leading one of his peaceful marches, two guys at the back started breaking windows. Would that mean there’s a real problem, or that you can no longer describe his movement as nonviolent? What if they don’t have time to dissociate themselves – or respond at all – before Bull Connor barges in to arrest everyone and trumpet this far and wide?
(To make things even more interesting, suppose that the two guys might be agents provocateur?)
At some point, yes, you can say, “This eminent theorist of your group teaches X, so you can’t say you all hold to Not-X.” But at another point, “This random person who claims to be part of your group says X,” isn’t relevant at all. But in-between those points – where do you draw the line?
This is, I’ve noted, an issue with the idea of a “leaderless movement” (which is what a lot of the modern, internet based movements tend to market themselves as). It’s not clear how an outside observer of such a movement distinguishes between the movement’s true representatives from it’s splinter factions without some sort of official standard against which behavior can be compared with.
I think it’s worse than that. If there is a line, then it’s theoretically possible that we could all take the outside view, and come to a Schelling point we agree not to cross. Extremely difficult, but doable. However, I think in this case, it’s not that there is a line, it’s that everyone has a different line for every single case. Using an overdone metaphor, I think determining when this argument is and isn’t a fallacy is in a state of quantum fluctuation, being both valid and invalid at the same time. It’s only once you observe it through your ideology can you determine that. Lets call it Schrodingers Hivemind.
The example of MLKJ is a good one. Like every red blooded American born after his death, I believe that he was a good person and that the Civil Rights Movements was a proud moment in American history. But I know, at least on an abstract level, that there were groups like The Black Panthers and that these marches weren’t completely orderly. But when I look at Black Lives Matters, all I see are a few peaceful protests before descending in to uncontrollable riots. Is there a difference? Am I just ignorant? I’m not sure and I don’t think I ever could be. In the end, I’m not sure what we can do. But I did get to make an overused Quantum Mechanics metaphor so at least I got that going for me.
I have actually heard women advance “You can’t define what feminism is” on those grounds, in the middle of a thread complaining that women didn’t call themselves feminist, under the apparent impression that signing a blank check is a reasonable act on any woman’s part.
So — how can this fallacy be differentiated from a reasonable demand that a movement be able to tell what it is?
Or another thing that some people do is:
1. When talking about the virtues of their movement, every good person who can more or less be called a group member is proudly held up as an example.
2. When talking about the vices of their movement, nobody who did anything bad counts as a group member. Those are ‘others.’
It’s a sort of motte-and-bailey where the group is made as large as possible when that suits a person at that moment and as small as possible (even just 1 person) when that is the stronger position.
In fairness, I’ve definitely heard the same men deride women as both prudes and sluts, depending on whether they got to participate said acts of slutieness. There are very obvious self interested reasons for men to bully women for having sex with anybody but them.
Even if they participate, they might be nasty about it. I’ve heard one or two men of my acquaintance talk in quite contemptuous terms about women they had casual sex with. Including one case where the guy basically gave the impression that he did not like the girl one bit and had sex with her to “get one over on her” or something.
I think that it’s also related to the situation where a group pretends they have a united front. If some feminists say “every feminist believes X” and other feminists say “every feminist believes Y”, and most feminists make one or the other meta-statement, then it’s fair to describe that as feminism being collectively inconsistent. This is especially so if feminists who say that every feminist believes X also refuse to say that feminists who believe Y are mistaken.
and if there is no X or Y that every feminist believe, what, pray tell, is feminism?
And if there is no X or Y that every conservative believes, what is conservatism?
too bad most of the core tenets of conservatism are agreed on by most conservatives
and in all seriousness, most feminists do agree on one key point – feminism’s goal is to advance women’s rights, power, cultural strength, basically to get women more stuff. That’s why the radicals and moderates never clash in any significant way, which subsequently leads observers to note that actually there’s not much difference…
I’ve never had a conservative tell me that “You can’t define what conservatism is.” (Least of all while complaining that people don’t call themselves conservative.) So in my experience the situations are not parallel.
What is a game?
I’m very fond of prototype theory– the idea that people don’t generally think in terms of categories with hard edges and unstructured contents. Instead, people think in terms of a best examples and things which which more or less resemble the example.
Sounds like Scott’s ‘central meaning’ or Deiseach’s ‘Jesuitical logic’.
Feminism is, of course, the belief that women’s rights are the rightful caliph.
I think the more important question is how do you distinguish said fallacy from arguments that are actually internally inconsistent.
It’s not a fallacy, it’s a tactic (perhaps an unfair one, a “dirty trick”). Politics is not about the discovery of truths, it’s about winning. It’s is a contest of strength between networks of people and ideas and institutions. Trying to blacken your opponent’s appeal by linking them to unsavory allies is one way to do this.
As a leftist, more or less, I see this tactic used by my opponents all the time. With libertarians, it’s almost reflexive to argue against something innocuous like OSHA regulations by equating it with the liquidation of the Kulaks. This is annoying and stupid but it isn’t exactly a fallacy. It does raise, in a not very useful way, the question of who are my allies and what responsibility I have for their actions.
In the other direction, I have no problem at all pointing out the links between Trump supporters and fascism, racism, and other toxic ideas that he is close to. Not all Trump supporters are fascists, but guess what — they have to either own the actions of their allies, or disassociate themselves. That’s just how things work.
@mtraven, since you’ve endorsed this argument as non-fallacious, what counts as dissociating from your ostensible allies? Was FDR sufficiently dissociated from Stalin? Or was Churchill?
I don’t understand the question. Sufficient for what? It’s also a weird example since FDR and Churchill were not really ideological allies with Stalin despite their military alliance. The anti-fascism that bound them together was always going to evaporate once the war against the Axis was over.
And it is a mistake to say I “endorsed it as non-fallacious”, it is neither fallacious or non-fallacious, because political arguments are not about establishing truth, they are a contest for power between networks of people and ideas. Logical validity is the wrong test to apply to a political argument.
You’re saying that non-fascist Trump supporters “have to either own the actions of their allies, or disassociate themselves.” I’m asking about that second option – what counts as dissociating themselves? Can they still work together for common goals, like Churchill did with Stalin? Can they say nice things about each other, financially support each other, and give each other limited power, like FDR did with Stalin?
Or… reading between the lines of your second post, do you really just mean “make sure they aren’t lumped together in the public mind,” by whatever means work? If that’s the case, I think you’re talking about a different thing than FishFinger’s original point.
There’s also the related fallacy where you look at a person who advocates for different things in different situations and is called a hypocrite for it.
I’ve heard it referred to as the ‘Mohammed Wang’ fallacy.
The most common first name in the world is Mohammed. The most common surname in the world is Wang. But that doesn’t mean there are millions of people called Mohammed Wang.
It’s actually group A1 who call their babies Mohammed, and group A2 who have the surname Wang, and assuming that (A1+A2) is a homogeneous group leads to incorrect assumptions.
To maybe get a better handle on it, it might be worthwhile to hypothesize scenarios where the criticism is valid, or at least seems like it should be.
-You don’t personally witness any infighting (being fair, absence of evidence, not necessarily evidence of absence)
-Your multiple targets for the charge all seem to share some common goal and suggests a similarity of argument.
-The arguments for this common goal are self-contradictory, but never seem to contradict themselves during an argument. Only one ever seems to appear at a time.
In the worst case scenario, people in this movement are individually using contradictory arguments selectively, based on context. (Individuals are actively being Hypocrites, contradicting themselves whenever one argument is more beneficial than the other)
In the best case scenario, people in this common movement with different underlying opinions or reasoning to justify their common goal are selectively staying silent to avoid ruining a point being made that advances the cause. (Movement as a whole is being Hypocritical – benefiting from arguing contradictory points.)
In the latter case, the movement is still having its cake and eating it too, so to speak.
Let’s take an example (one I’m not interested in actually arguing here). Nuclear power plants. Some newer designs with different materials have decay chains with highly radioactive fission products. Others with very stable decay products. I have seen arguments against the design/implementation of these plans because:
1. Highly radioactive fission products make the plant too dangerous to operate or decommission.
2. Insufficiently radioactive fission products make the material too difficult to monitor/track in the case of proliferation violations.
Now, on their own, these could be reasonable arguments. But they are only reasonable arguments towards specific, mutually exclusive reactor designs. A new reactor built could have one of these problems, but it will not have both of these problems simultaneously.
Someone who listens to both arguments separately, may recall the conclusions vividly, but only vaguely recalls the arguments used to arrive at them. Thus, they will think that: “New Nuclear Plants pose a danger from significant radioactivity and New Nuclear Plants pose a danger from easier proliferation.”
When in reality, new designs may pose one danger, or the other, but not both simultaneously.
As a result, the anti-nuclear plant ‘movement’, and everyone who personally holds this as a goal, regardless of group affiliation, is benefiting from these contradictory arguments. Their goal is being advanced more than it ‘should’ in a rationally ‘just’ world.
At this point, someone who attended both presentations and recalled the arguments used to arrive at them, might say something like: “You anti-nuclear guys are all hypocrites. If the decay chain is radioactive, you say it’s too dangerous. If it’s not radioactive enough, you say it’s too easy to steel. There’s just no pleasing you. And you talk about reactors like they all have all of these disadvantages, rather than them each having their own advantages and disadvantages. It’s dishonest!”
This is likely a very unfair personal accusation to level, as the individual recieveing this criticism is likely a person self-consistent in his or her arguments. But all the same, their goal of preventing nuclear power plants from being deployed is being aided by those making contradictory arguments. It’s having your cake and eating it too. Thus, while it’s not a fair personal criticism, it might be a more or less fair group-wide criticism. Even though individually everyone may have been arguing in good-faith.
Take reddit as a platform for example. If I posted something about a new nuclear plant that produces something very radioactive like U232, the top comment could be a guy talking about how dangerous U232 is, and how difficult to deal with it is, because it’s so radioactive.
And in another thread, proposing a different model with more stable fission products, someone else might make a top comment discussing how, say, Iran has used such power plants as justification to secretly enrich Uranium 235 to weapons-grade levels.
These two commenters could be unrelated, and uncoordinated. Hell, maybe they even both posted arguments in both threads, so their arguments were somewhat at the same venue. But in each context where their argument was strong, they were pushed to the forefront. And in each context where their argument was weak, they were pushed down into obscurity.
Thus, their internally inconsistent arguments don’t appear side-by-side, and only appear in situations where their form of argument for the common goal of ‘no-nuclear’ is the most successful.
This sort of beneficial collusion-without-coordination that different media formats provide extends far beyond this issue. I don’t have any answers or recommendations. But I think it’s useful to consider why people sometimes feel justified in making this accusation. It’s worth considering that it’s happening. Maybe the charge of ‘hypocrite’ is unfair on the personal level. And maybe asserting or demanding group homogeneity is also unfair.
And yet, those people are still getting an unfair advantage from gaming the system, intentionally or not, and there doesn’t seem to be an efficient, fair way to address this.
Maybe leveling these unfair charges is fair? I don’t personally think so, but from an end-results standpoint, their overall goal is being unfairly boosted by this inadvertent compartmentalizing of contradictory arguments. So maybe each individual compartment should be individually, unfairly disadvantaged by having their credibility unfairly undercut. Would two wrongs make a right? Would it help mitigate the unfair advantaging of their goal?
Things to think about.
I don’t think the nuclear example works. If every new power plant falls at some point along the spectrum of radioactivity, then it seems possible that there is an overlap between the two problems: there is an anti-sweet-spot in the middle where the fission products are too radioactive to decommission, but not radioactive enough to trace. In that case, any nuclear power plant would have at least one of the problems, and some of them might have two. There’s nothing unreasonable about pointing out the problem or problems that apply to a particular power plant.
This is, essentially, proof by cases, which is a valid proof tactic in formal logic.
But the problem is that there would still be, at the end of the day, only one problem. And so in reality, those two nuclear activists should be arguing with one another, saying that “nuclear plants are too dangerous” vs. “no they’re not dangerous enough”. Instead, they’ve seemingly made a pact – suggesting that maybe, the issue here is that they don’t like nuclear, and they’ve just found other reasons to inveigh against it. They’ve unfairly avoided the logical inconsistency of their arguments, for the purpose of advancing their real goal, which is likely unsupported by logic – otherwise, they’d argue with each other too.
No?
In the hypothetical, there are two problems. One problem is that radioactive fission products are difficult to dispose of: that is, there is some (potentially fuzzy) threshold X above which it is a bad idea to build a nuclear power plant, because it will be too difficult to dispose of the waste. The other problem is that it is unfeasible to monitor fission products if they are insufficiently radioactive: that is, there is some similarly fuzzy threshold Y below which it is a bad idea to build a nuclear power plant, because it will be impossible to monitor proliferation violations. (This second argument seems weak to me outside of the hypothetical, but I’m accepting it as part of the premise.)
If X < Y, then it is possible for nuclear power plants to have both problems. If X >= Y, then at most one problem applies to any given nuclear plant, but it is in no way inconsistent to point out the problem that does apply.
Consider the minimum wage. A high minimum wage will distort the labour market and leave people unemployed. A minimum wage low enough to avoid distorting the market would have to affect so few people that there’s no point in having the law; it would be better to simplify the regulatory environment by eliminating the minimum wage entirely.
Is that argument a logically inconsistent example of motivated reasoning? First I say that the minimum wage would have bad effects; then I say that it wouldn’t have any effects at all! How preposterous! Should anti-minimum-wage activists argue with each other about whether the minimum wage does too much or too little?
The correct response here is not to accuse your opponent of a logical fallacy. It is either to prove that one of the arguments is false (maybe it is easier to dispose of waste than the activists claim) or to prove that there is room in the middle where neither argument is compelling (maybe there is a level of radiation Z such that Y < Z < X). Sadly, those arguments require the collection of evidence, which is much more work than just impugning the motives of your opponents.
It seems like there are two possible things happening here. You’re talking about a group of protesters who claim that:
If the power plant is too weak then proliferation will occur, and if the power plant is too strong then radioactive waste will doom us all.
But we’re talking about two groups of protesters, affiliated, who claim that:
The power plant WILL be too weak and proliferation will occur and the power plant WILL be too strong and radioactive waste will doom us all.
Now, sometimes both are possible. But if they’re not, then the second statement is contradictory, and that’s our issue – groups come together to act as one to increase their chances of accomplishing their objectives, but in reality they are sending out a wildly contradictory message that, if they were intellectually honest, they would be willing to hash out to see who is really correct on the issue.
I mean, this is all a hypothetical situation with made-up arguments. If you would like to postulate a world in which people are intellectually dishonest, I suppose I can’t stop you. But your description doesn’t seem to correspond very well to Null Hypothesis’s original statement of the problem: note that the original example involves two different reddit threads talking about two different nuclear plants.
Yeah, sorry; I think Null Hypothesis gave a bad example, or at least one that doesn’t fully illustrate the point. In his case, I think it’s more about how the arguments are just a mask for anti-nuclear, but if it is two entirely different cases then both arguments may be sound (though the people advancing them could still be dishonest, it’s also entirely possible for them not to be). But I think the second type is also very real and it definitely bothers me.
Those damn immigrants, taking all our jobs and lazing around living off welfare.
I don’t see what’s “unfair” about them.
Staring at the sun might cause the cells within your eyes to burn and wither away to nothing, thus leaving you blind.
Staring at the sun might cause the cells within your eyes to go cancerous and replicate beyond all control, thus leaving you blind.
What you might think of as two wildly contradictory and self-serving inconsistencies of the Mom Lobby unfairly boosting their premise, I think of as two very good, very different reasons to not stare at the sun.
Why are you so eager to increase the amount of faux intellectual bullshit on the internet? Anyone who confuses something like your example with a rational argument is beyond reason anyway.
As it happens, I ran across a Social Justice variant, and now I think very ill of the tactic.
This is all from memory.
I saw a post complaining about white people who think race doesn’t exist but lose their shit (I quote) about a black Santa Claus.
I asked whether these are necessarily the same white people.
I give the poster credit. She took a day to answer me, but the answer was that she cared more about real people of color than hypothetical white people. At that point I gave up on the conversation.
I believe that if the disagreement=hypocrisy person is resistant to the idea that the disagreement is because there are a lot of different people in a group, they’re trying to build up hostility in themselves and/or other people.
As pointed out below, manipulating the boundaries of a group in order to look better and/or more powerful is also a sort of cheating.
I’ve become dubious about accusations of hypocrisy, at least in the older sense of people promoting standards they don’t follow. I agree that hypocrisy in that sense is bad because it becomes harder to tell whether a standard is reasonable, and also because of injustice.
However, I think one of the reasons hypocrisy has become a popular accusation is that it’s much easier to check on whether a standard is followed or on whether statements are consistent with each other than to find out whether statements are a good match for the real world.
I don’t think I’m disagreeing with you, but I’d say that the word ‘hypocrisy’ has a problematical job or is used for two jobs.
Job 1: to put a condemnatory spin on whatever statement or person it’s applied to (whether deserved or not).
Job 2: to point to some statement of (at least) two propositions without spelling out their connection as nuance/s of a sensible position.
Example of Job 2:
“A fine for speeding should be heavy enough to be a deterrent, but $250 is excessive for that purpose.” Here there is no necessary contradiction between the generality and the specific amount of the fine in a particular location — which is a matter of opinion that reasonable people can disagree on. Thus the term ‘hypocrisy’ is bringing in an unnecessary emotional, condemnatory charge.
Another example of Job 2: Nuclear power is an unsafe area, because either an excess of X or a lack of X is dangerous, and the safe middle ground (if any) is too narrow a target.
I scored my own 2016 predictions here.
The non seasonally adjusted unemployment hit 4.4% in November. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
I leave it to you to decide if that’s what you meant by ‘official’ or if you meant seasonally adjusted I suppose.
Mark Fisher died a couple of days ago, people might be interested in his critique of the identitarian left from a class perspective — http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=11299
And, in case he needed any further justification for his piece, here’s a quote from identitarian left twitter on his passing — “Just because Mark Fisher is dead, doesn’t make him right about “sour-faced identitarians”. If only left misogyny would die with him.”
Interesting piece, parts are downright death eaterish.
His big misunderstanding is the fist law, of “The first law of the Vampires’ Castle is: individualise and privatise everything” is patently silly, the sort of thing only an un-reconstructed marxist could say. There’s nothing individual about the identities the people he’s talking about are pushing, they’re all group identities. He just rejects them because they aren’t class identities. And that blindspot, that his inability to turn his lense on himself and realize that his class identities and prejudices are just as arbitrary as those the people he’s critiquing are pushing, keeps him trapped on the left.
What do you people mean when you say “Death Eater”?
(Also: I miss-clicked and accidentally reported the comment. Sorry Scott, nothing to see here!)
The term reactionary was briefly banned a while ago, and it became common to refer to the reactionaries as death eaters and mencius moldbug as voldemort. the ban’s gone now but the convention has stuck around as a joke.
No, the banned term was http://pastebin.com/ydTqw6Cg specifically, which remains banned. The convention is not a joke but is terrifyingly real.
It’s a silly thing to ban, and a doubly silly thing because people just use a code word, so all it causes is confusion and impenetrability, but moderators gonna moderate.
Class (which many marxists, including myself, don’t see as an “identity”) can’t be arbitrary as long as most people have to work for someone else for a living. Though AFAIK Fisher’s article veered a bit towards treating it as one – mentioning working-class accents among people who were no longer proles and the like.
Who counts as a worker these days? Some welder on a factory floor? What if he’s an extremely skilled titanium welder making 100 grand a year? What he’s actually a subcontractor and owns his own welding business? “Worker” was a slippery enough concept 150 years ago, it’s only gotten worse since then.
Good point Cassander. One could say that anyone who has a customer is working for someone else, and in fact having to satisfy multiple customers could be seen as a much harder life than satisfying just one boss. So what is the essential difference between being forced to satisfy customers to make a living and being forced to satisfy a boss?
Ah, it is tough being a Marxist these days!
I’m by no means a Marxist, but I’m pretty sure that from a Marxist point of view, the “essential difference between being forced to satisfy customers to make a living and being forced to satisfy a boss” is that in the former case you get to keep the money you earn, while in the latter the profits are siphoned away to pay off shareholders.
@ian
The trouble with that is that marx specifically defines the owners as the owners of the means of production. But what are the means of production for a software engineer or insurance salesmen? marx sort of lumps skilled workers in in with the petite bourgeoisie, but they’re a huge hole in his theory.
Like I said: not a Marxist. If I were trying to rescue Marxism I would give up on the means of production and focus on the return to capital investment, but I don’t really see any good reason to try to rescue Marxism. Maybe birdboy2000 can take it from here.
(Also, you appear to be consistently underestimating the number of vowels in my name.)
Yes I agree that is true from a Marxist point of view, but as Cassander implied, and I tried to add to but probably failed, what does it mean to keep the money you earn? If you are an independent contractor, you are not an employee, even though the worker may look just like an employee from the outside. But the independent contractor keeps every penny they earn from their “customer.” If you say well the independent contractor is really an employee, how about someone who sells their services to five different firms, but earns the same as the person who sells to only one. Or the one who who has three employees of their own, but makes less money than those who sell their own services. Or the person who is legally an employee, but who has more market power than his firm, with ten other companies eager to employ him. All of these type of arrangements are quite common, which I think was Cassander’s point. It can be very difficult to tell the bourgeois from the proletariat these days.
@mark Anderson
In classic marx, the economy works thusly. The worker sells his labor power to the capital owner, who combines it with the capital he owns, then sells the product, paying the worker some amount less than the value of what his labor produced. The profit he makes is the degree to which he is exploiting the worker.
To speak of customers controlling (and thus inevitably, exploiting) the independent proprietor makes no sense because the customers don’t own the means of production required to make the product in question.
Of course, there’s about a dozen things wrong with that sort of economics, of which this debate is one of the least, but fundamentally insane economics has never stopped marxists before!
You have to be able understand what he’s arguing before you can claim that he’s misunderstood something. When he says that identitarians want to individualise and privatise everything he’s quite clearly talking about the form of their critique rather than the identities they’re “pushing”.
His argument is that these people concentrate on attacking individuals for personal, moral transgressions – they say racism and sexism are structural but they actually approach these problems as if they were individual failings.
>His argument is that these people concentrate on attacking individuals for personal, moral transgressions – they say racism and sexism are structural but they actually approach these problems as if they were individual failings.
I don’t think they do this. They are quite willing to critique individuals, sure, but they also go to great lengths to both find evidence of structural racism/sexism and to explain how personally not being racist/sexist isn’t enough, that one has to actively fight the structures, and if you don’t, you’re just as bad as the personal racists/sexists.
A while ago I posted a version of Unsong that I was typesetting with LaTeX. Here’s an improved version. One of the new features is an appendix giving the source of each chapter title in Blake’s works – which I thought worthwhile to add since, while Blake’s work is all online in some form or other, it can be fairly painful to look up.
One suggestion: maybe Palatino or Times for the body text? Computer Modern is, ironically, sometimes hard to read on computer screens; those narrow horizontal strokes tend to disappear and make it hard to read (at least for me) at small sizes.
Hmm, perhaps. (Although I’ve been making this with a few to eventually printing it, and the “academic STEM paper” look of Computer Modern – or rather, Latin Modern here – seems to me not badly suited to the material.)
Please don’t use Palatino or Times – the current font is fine! It’s quite readable.
This really is excellent smart-person-bending-the-world-to-his-will porn.
… I think comments are not landing where they’re supposed to?
Trump should use his Batman powers to save the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus by announcing he would be very pleased with whatever company bought and sustained it. This is a military issue because if solar flares or EMP bursts destroy all electronics we might need trained elephants for war. But seriously, I predict a 20% chance that Trump will save the Circus if for no other reason then to get liberals to regularly mock him for promoting bread and circuses and so consistently remind the American people of Trump’s job saving efforts.
I think Batman powers as defined by Scott only work retrospectively. Trump can’t choose to save a set of particular jobs. Jobs must be saved and Trump can retrospectively work to save them. This might or might not violate causality.
Incidentally, I just noticed that the Big Apple Circus is also in bankruptcy.
WRT to animal cavalry, I’m pretty confident we would rely upon horsemen. In a pinch, with conscription, we could probably field millions of horsemen.
I wonder why we haven’t seen much use of horse cavalry in the current wars in the mideast, where materiel seems relatively scarce. Maybe the problem is that manpower is even more scarce. Huh it seems that horse cavalry was actually relevant in the early years of the war in Afghanistan.
>I wonder why we haven’t seen much use of horse cavalry in the current wars in the mideast, where materiel seems relatively scarce.
They were used a fair bit by special forces in Afghanistan. The US army has a brigade sized veterinary corps. In general, though, horses take a lot of skill and material to keep in fighting shape, and the US military has a lot more trucks than vets.
As I linked, the use by the US in Afghanistan is interesting but not that surprising. But what about the (apparent?) *lack* of use by, e.g., Kurds fighting ISIS in northern Syria. Is that surprising?
On a related note, why hasn’t there been more military use of bicycles? from what I’ve read, over relatively flat terrain, a soldier could increase the distance he could cover in a day by a factor of two or three while carrying a heavier load.
It’s definitely been done, but since the invention of the modern bicycle pretty much everybody who lives in terrain flat enough for ubiquitous bicycling has had either lots of horses or lots of internal combustion engines. Or even other sorts of engines.
The most useful application would probably be with airborne and spacial operations forces, who are apt to find themselves in situations where fuel is scarce and there aren’t convenient places to a charge a battery.
I would guess the issue with bicycles is that they aren’t really a force multiplier. Every soldier needs a bike, and you can’t fight from one effectively. Pretty much all you can do is move more quickly than walking over uncontested, relatively smooth terrain. Vs. something like a jeep, which can move multiple people and/or a heavy weapon even faster – and while one guy drives the others can be shooting.
I think the real issue is you just don’t have unsupported troops moving over long distances on foot anymore.
Cavalry, or dragoons? The former have been obsolete for quite a while, but the latter showed up in WWI and WWII on the Eastern Front on both sides, and I would be unsurprised if they were involved in the fighting in China in WWII. Draft animals were the norm in WWI, and in WWII the Germans still used tons of horses as draft animals – their military was never anywhere close to fully mechanized. Pictures of live WWII German draft horses seem fairly rare – I’m guessing that German war photographers didn’t take photos of horses pulling artillery because it didn’t look good in propaganda – but pictures of dead horses are fairly common. A lot of images of German columns hit from the air in NW Europe, for example, show a mishmash of dead men, knocked out tanks, busted up halftracks and trucks, and dead horses with their carts knocked over.
Bicycle infantry was actually fairly common in WWII, but again was far less cool than tanks and halftracks and trucks and such.
Can Trump do anything about it, even if he were to buy it himself? If Feld thought it was going to return to profitability, I’d think they wouldn’t announce the closure. The business economics I was taught that if you’re firm is not profitable right now but forecasting shows it returning to profitability, either ride it out or idle. If you foresee no return to profitability due to fundamental changes in the market, close.
That is, if the ticket prices people are willing to pay won’t cover a show they’re willing to watch (i.e., they won’t pay high prices, and won’t enjoy watching a show that cheap tickets will cover), even a white knight can’t keep it open.
Trump could probably afford to subsidize an unprofitable circus, yes.
CN: In contex, the term below is not a metaphor. Yet.
@ suntzuanime
Trump could probably afford to subsidize an unprofitable circus, yes.
Sometimes announcing something is going away gets people to love it again. Witness people freaking out over Twinkies supposedly going away and buying them in droves.
It’s a risky gambit, because you can also get people to bail on you, including employees and creditors.
I would be willing Paypal you $50 right now if you agreed to pay me $60 when this doesn’t happen. If your prediction is serious, I believe this proposition is, on expectation, free money for you, but I’m bad at arithmetic so double-check my analysis. If you agree in principle, we can negotiate specific conditions.
I can accept the money parts of this bet, and thanks for trusting me. But how long should we wait until it’s agreed that Trump isn’t going to do anything? How about until June 1st of this year? And if the circus does continue, Trump doesn’t actually have to save the circus, he just has to take credit for saving the circus. So if Disney bailouts the circus and, without any evidence, Trump said this only happened because of him I win, agreed? Finally, just to be clear, if you win I keep the $50 you sent me but I send you $60, so you will have made a $10 profit.
Yes, this is correct. Our understandings of the money terms appear to be in harmony.
June 1 seems like a reasonable deadline, but this:
seems like quite a different proposition than your original claim, which I read to be that Trump would actually take some sort of affirmative step to save the circus. I think it’s substantially more likely that Trump will attempt to take post hoc credit for something that he had nothing to do with, by, e.g., tweeting “So happy to see that ringling bros show will go on – we saved this American institution which brought smiles to millions.” If your 20% figure includes this sort of outcome, I find no issue with it and would have to retract my offer.
“If your 20% figure includes this sort of outcome, I find no issue with it and would have to retract my offer.” OK, well at least we found the source of our initial disagreement over the 20% figure.
Has there been any discussion of this in any of the recent open threads? It’s a great walk-through (by the manager for the Vote Leave campaign) on a number of Brexit and Brexit adjacent subjects, and he makes a particularly good case for why ‘conventional wisdom’ doesn’t work in Politics (that is, why it so frequently fails to make accurate predictions) and why it can’t work.
It was discussed on LessWrong. I’ve spent much of today reading the author’s blog.
OMG, it’s Mycroft Alexander…Scott’s brother….
Seriously though, that’s a very good piece.
There’s already a Scott A. conspiracy! There’s no room for an Alexander conspiracy!
We are all Scott’s clones…[we all take off Anonymous masks to reveal: a clone army]
So who is Scott’s sister?
I was reading Jaskology’s post about magic going missing and it reminded of Julian Jaynes hypothesis about the origin of consciousness. He believes that not that long ago(4000 thousand years ago), mankind simply did not have any kind of introspection. Instead, we would would hear voices that we heard as coming from gods and they would command us to do certain things. Eventually, we took over but in gaining consciousness, we lost societal stability. As the world broke down around us, we searched for answers for why the gods had left us. We came up with oracles, divination and prayer as a way to communicate with them. Most of those are lost to us but we still have vestiges of the bicameral mind in our heads today.
Sorry, is “4000 thousand” a typo for 4000, or do you mean four million?
Assuming it’s the former, the thesis strikes me as implausible. I take it that it requires seeing the characters in the oldest literature we possess, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, as fundamentally different from us in their thoughts, motivations, and subjective experiences, but when I read Gilgamesh that isn’t at all the impression I get, despite the presence of gods. Gilgamesh seems quite self-aware, and it doesn’t seem that he undertakes his quests and great works because of a mysterious internal voice.
I meant four thousand. He says that that the Epic of Gilgamesh took place in a transitional period and notes that later versions are more likely to have the idea of introspection. And he believes that some words used to translate are modern impositions.
Using the word consciousness, he really means something more like introspection because he believed that people still felt emotions. It’s just that Jaynes didn’t believe that people back then were consciously ruminating over their decisions. Instead it was more like a God being commanding them to do something and they would. Gradually, they started hearing the voice as their own. I don’t really believe the hypothesis but it raised some questions. What if introspection is more culturally influenced than we have thought? Did language come before consciousness? Maybe his idea was right but he got the date wrong. Many scientists believe that humans weren’t behaviorally modern until 50,000 years ago. The genetics was the same but culturally different. Maybe consciousness didn’t develop until then?
I find the bicameral mind hypothesis super sketchy. Consider this data:
When the Spaniards met Native Americans, they had been reproductively isolated for ~12,000 years. The mutation would have only happened on the Afro-Eurasian side of the human family. Is there any evidence that the latter were as cognitively different as the Jaynes hypothesis requires? Ditto Australia, with a deeper time depth.
On the other hand, the huge epidemics and breakdown of society that came before European contact in many areas sounds like the sort of social disruption which Jaynes says introduced the current monocameral mind in Eurasia. It’s another epicycle (how much previous social disruption does Jaynes say came without breaking the bicameral mind?), but as I understand him, it’s nowhere near impossible. So, you’d need to look at really early contact – Columbus and the explorers immediately following him – and I’m not sure how much detail we can really glean from them about Native American psychology.
I don’t believe in the bicameral mind, and I think this’s a very good counterargument to make – but it needs some more work.
We may not be able to extract any scientific data from Columbus and the other first contact explorers, for the obvious reasons. On the other hand, white contact with Australia well postdates the Scientific Revolution, so we can probably extract relevant data about aboriginal psychology from documents published at the time. Wouldn’t even have to be immediate, just early enough that any scientists could document who was full-blooded and who had a white ancestor (in case the unicameral mutation was a single dominant allele).
OTOH, what John Schilling said about a unicameral mind being “memetic” in the sense that language is would make the hypothesis stronger without epicycles.
I feel like I need to read the actual book for that one, because on the surface it sounds like utter lunacy, but it keeps popping up, and has had a few people who I don’t generally regard as crackpots at least seriously entertain it.
I don’t know how it gets around the issue of human groups splitting from each other way before 3k years ago, though.
I had the exact same reaction as you, down to checking the wiki and being confused why anyone was taking it seriously. I don’t believe it, but I still think it was a thought provoking read, with some kernel of truth in there. Jaynes has a way of making his argument seem almost mundane simply because he doesn’t adopt that apocalyptic tone you usually see from crackpots. His book is very academic sounding. At the very least, it’s an interesting crackpot theory, far different than what you’re used to.
The version of bicameralism that seems most plausible to me is the one where the change is a memetic rather than evolutionary-genetic event. If it were genetic, there would still be too many populations that don’t have it, but whose members when plucked out of the wilderness and sent to university seem to think and feel and perceive the world the way the rest of us do.
But integrated, introspective consciousness could be somewhere between language and arithmetic on the list of things that the h. sapien brain has always been capable of but won’t actually do if you just have someone raised by wolves or whatnot. Language, people figure out as soon as they start living in tribes. Arithmetic comes rather later than that. If Jaynes is right, unicameral consciousness is something people figure out when they have to navigate an environment as complex as a bronze-age city, and once they have the knack they teach their kids without even thinking about it. Or other peoples’ kids, if they are e.g. missionaries.
At which point brains whose wiring is better suited to the new paradigm will have an evolutionary advantage, and there will be a genetic shift, but as a slow lagging indicator rather than a cause.
Or not, with p~0.95. But I can’t justify making that p~0.995 not, and this seems like something which would be of explosive importance if true but haven’t been proven. If we’re not going to just toss the whole thing over the fence to Buzzfeed, how do we go about proving or disproving it? To me, the obvious solution is to investigate uncontacted stone-age tribes, or maybe those so minimally contacted that nobody in them speaks a modern language. Such populations would almost necessarily have minds that work the way most human minds worked ten thousand years ago.
But I fear people might take it the wrong way if someone were to write a research proposal that could be interpreted, “First we round up a bunch of dark-skinned savages from some godforsaken jungle. Then we give them the Voight-Kampff test to see if they’re really human”. And we’re running out of uncontacted stone-age tribes, I think. Anybody have any better ideas?
Just a thought… If secondhand reports were good enough, maybe the prospective scholar could talk with Wycliffe Bible Translators, New Tribes Missions, or other Christian groups that do a lot of work with newly-contacted tribes. From their books published for general audiences and articles in the popular press, the people of such tribes all seem to have monocameral minds – but obviously, those aren’t good enough to be dispositive.
(What’s more, secondhand reports might not be good enough altogether, but then we might also need to throw out all data about the Native Americans and Australian Aborigines.)
I feel like some people associate minorities or immigrants with cultural artifacts rather than actual conditions, like poverty. Whenever I suggest something sensible like: “Let’s reform education so that black people don’t have such a high drop out rate.” I’m suddenly a racist or cultural supremacist for trying to remove the aspects of inequality that set them apart.
Whenever somebody brings up the wage gap, I ask them how it is they intend to solve it. I generally get a response along the lines of, “Solving it misses the point of the issue, that there’s a gap between men and women.” But that’s the thing – the wage gap is evidence of a divide. If I take that aspect and I fix it, and look around and there’s no more evidence of sexism, then it seems like the problem of sexism is solved – if, on the other hand, I look around and find things like different incrimination rates, different enrollment rates, and other things, then sexism is still there. But I see people argue that the cultural gap between men and women somehow caused this wage gap, and not the other way around. (inevitably, the solutions they propose to solve this are disastrous. I don’t see how quotas and mandatory awareness classes solve the actual issue.)
Pretending your problem is the product of an unsealable rift is good rhetoric, but it’s bad form. It encourages the idea that your opponents will never change their mind, or get better. And more importantly, it isn’t very productive when we finally need to solve real issues, like education or inequality.
You’re assuming they want to solve the problem. As long as the problem exists – heck, as long as people believe the problem exists – the snake oil industry keeps trucking on.
Are you sure you are describing example 1 correctly? I have never heard the “graduating high school is acting White” thing from someone older than 12.
Are you sure you are describing example 2 correctly? I’m sure many feminists would answer “I don’t know how to solve it in isolation, because I believe it results from a deep system of divides between men and women.” I am also very curious about what a purely ‘economic’ solution would look like.
Very simple economic solution: Every woman gets a 13% (or whatever) fully-refundable income tax credit on all earned income.
Slightly more complicated: Every employer pays a 13% (or whatever) tax on all wages they pay to a male.
Of course, even if we believe whatever figure for the wage gap, it’s an average – some women make more; some make less. And, either plan would probably fall afoul of the Fourteenth Amendment itself… as well as perhaps inducing a lot of men to call themselves transwomen.
It’s not so much that a purely economic solution exists – I don’t think I was describing that right. It’s the idea that somehow the divide between men and women is completely inexorable. There might not be a way to solve the wage gap through economy, but I’m also sure you don’t solve the wage gap by smiling smugly about the fact that there’s a wage gap. There are people that only treat these statistics like ammunition, which is a bad thing.
You might not have seen “graduating high school is acting white” from anyone over twelve, but I see it all the time. It’s never a proactive belief, like something that drives kids out of high school, but when I talk to my cousin who dropped out, that’s the way his friends justify it. Fortunately, this seems like a problem that is solving itself, or at least is being solved by our current methods – according to a google search, the race gap in high school graduation is closing.
Regarding a purely economic solution, I open Marginal Revolution and what do I find but this: http://www.nber.org/papers/w23051#fromrss
Like the status quo, pretty much. The state taxes men, and gives to women.
Also, secondary discussion, which is far enough off of the main point to warrant a second post. I was given a paper by Anuja Agrawal called “Social Construction of Gender”. In it, she makes the assertion that:
This is strikes me as something that is obviously true, just from looking at the history of how western countries treated women, and how women are treated now in India and the middle east – but it also seems different from the narrative presented by some other feminists. I’ve seen people make the assertion that modern sexual liberalism, both in the media and in real life, reinforces the submissive position of women. Which one is more likely?
Do you have an example of feminists making the latter assertion (modern sexual liberalism reinforces the submissive position of women)? I can think of feminists arguments for the claim that modern sexual liberalism doesn’t single-handedly eliminate the subjugation of women, but I’m not sure what the argument for reinforcement would be.
I don’t have any examples on hand that I could link to, but I’ve definitely seen feminists pointing to things that only occur in modern sexual liberalism and blaming those things for reinforcing the submissive position of women.
For example, consider male courtship behaviors within a dating scene in which the most common goal–for both men and women–is typically somewhere between casual sex and a short-term romantic relationship, rather than marriage.
It is not inconsistent to generally approve of modern sexual liberalism while disapproving of specific behaviours that take place within the framework.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard it phrased like that, but it makes sense. However, it does seem hypocritical to indicate that those behaviors are emblematic of a larger societal problem that we otherwise don’t see.
It’s the difference between being grossed out by something, or believing that something should be banned. It’s well and good to say: “these things contribute negatively to society” – the question is, do those things actually contribute negatively, or do you just dislike them?
EDIT: Also, a less open-ended discussion: Iain, are you as grossed out by the fluorescent green word-press avatar as I am? I haven’t found a way to change it yet, and it’s been getting on my nerves.
Yeah, my randomly assigned gravatar is basically the worst: not only an ugly colour, but also a boring shape. Despite this, I am too lazy to change mine, but I believe it can be changed in your profile, which you can reach by clicking on “Logged in as [yourname]” right under “Leave a reply”.
FWIW, I enjoy both of your comments, and use the hideous (but eye-catching) gravatars as a quick means of finding them.
Normally, though, in my experience, they don’t recognise that these things only occur in modern sexual liberalism, and hence end up misdiagnosing the problem. “The patriarchy calls women prudes if they don’t have sex!” is a good example.
That’s only a misdiagnosis if you think that “modern sexual liberalism” is a monolith and must be accepted or rejected as a unified whole. If your principle is that women should be free to control their own sexuality, then it is obvious that modern sexual liberalism is a step in the right direction insofar as it lets women choose to have sex if they want to, but that shaming women for not having sex is also a bad thing.
I suppose an underlying assumption there is that modern sexual liberalism could result in significantly different outcomes than the male courtship behaviors/dating scene I mentioned. Have we seen feminists proposing any alternative outcomes and explaining how they could be realistically brought about? Maybe there are also some different underlying assumptions about human nature there as well.
I don’t see why. Maybe there’s a form of sexual liberalism society could adopt which wouldn’t lead to “prude-shaming” (or whatever you want to call it); that doesn’t change the fact that the form which our society actually has adopted did lead to this.
I don’t see why “letting women choose to have sex” and “shaming the ones who don’t” are inseparable. It seems to me that the alternative version of sexual liberalism is just the same thing we have right now, except with a somewhat stronger sense that who you do or do not have sex with is your own business, and prude-shaming is rude.
Because people who fight long and hard to give other people the right to (vote/work/speak freely/screw freely/go to college/whatever) tend to be either offended by or dismissive of anyone who responds with “meh, thanks I guess, but I don’t wanna”.
The people who are letting women have sex, at this point, are the conservatives, and they aren’t the ones shaming women who abstain. To the extent that there is shaming, it’s coming from the tribe whose historic involvement in sexual freedom goes far beyond the passive acquiescence implied by “letting”.
@John Schilling: Can you give a concrete example of the kind of prude-shaming you are talking about, coming from “the tribe whose historic involvement in sexual freedom goes far beyond the passive acquiescence implied by ‘letting'”?
Partly this, but mostly because the Overton window for socially-acceptable behaviour isn’t usually very wide. If a behaviour becomes normalised, not carrying out that behaviour comes to seem abnormal.
Some feminists are also prudes, while some are not. The feminists who are also prudes say a number of things about modern sexual liberalism with which non-prude feminists disagree.
Though not very loudly, or at any point where it would actually matter. (And the ones who do object meaningfully get read out of feminism.)
I encounter plenty of sex-positive feminists. Of course, I’m sympathetic to feminism; if you are not, another thing I’ve certainly noticed among feminists is a tendency to close ranks against hostile outsiders, so perhaps that’s why you haven’t encountered much of their criticism of one another.
if you are not, another thing I’ve certainly noticed among feminists is a tendency to close ranks against hostile outsiders,
Is this universal? I know there are members of my tribe I really don’t like, but I’ll still close ranks if someone is attacking them or trying to drive a wedge between us. I recognize divide-and-conquer and I don’t trust you.
I expect it is universal, or nearly so, but nobody seems to take it into account when they make claims about “everybody in that faction is advocating extreme thing X, because a couple of members say X and none of the others contradict them!” I just mentioned that it is true about feminists because they’re the group under discussion, and because of personal experience of it being so strikingly different talking to feminists privately or in entirely feminist groups as opposed to listening to (the same) feminists talking in public where they think enemies might be about.
Then what is objectification about? I hear people making a stir about comic books that depict women in explicit poses, or video games that have female characters in erotic positions, and it’s almost always met with antipathy. Not to say it’s always about fictional depictions of women. So what’s the deal – there’s somehow a difference between a caste of men rigidly enforcing sexual ideals and a caste of women rigidly enforcing sexual ideals?
Not that this is about refuting objectification. (the second link above is a top source on that. The question is, which hypothesis is right? (EDIT: or, because I left this out, is there a mix of correctness?)
I suppose comic book tits kind of look like modern sexual liberalism, if you squint? I was thinking more along the lines of the pill, decreased stigma surrounding premarital sex, and so on — that is, the parts that involve female control of their own sexuality.
From that standpoint, the feminist argument against objectification in, say, comic books is simply that it does not represent female control of their own sexuality. It is, after all, generally not women drawing those pictures — it’s men, using women as objects for sexual gratification. In comics in particular, it is often accused of being negatively associated with actual character development. As discussed in your second link, there is also a concern (more relevant in other media than comic books) that the relentless social pressure for women to be “sexy” is itself a subtle but effective mechanism for controlling women’s sexuality.
I’m not clear on how decreasing the stigma on premarital sex got to be synonymous with females’ control of their own sexuality.
If I want to have sex with a woman but I can’t unless I marry her first, that gives her a lot of control, especially if she knows the same arrangement would be true of any other woman I turned to. Whereas, if she knows I can just go get laid by the next woman if she turns me down, she would feel more pressure to put out even if she didn’t want to.
Now it’s true that it also means the woman can’t just have sex with me without marrying me first either, but it seems like in the “control over sex”=capital model, in the big scheme of things that works out better for women anyway.
Because it turns out that a lot of women like to have sex without getting married first?
The idea that women had more power to make sexual decisions when they were punished for certain choices (sometimes quite harshly) is a clever bit of contrarianism, but doesn’t seem to correspond with reality. It’s not like there was some bygone golden age where women presented a unified front and no man could have sex outside of marriage. It remains the case that any individual woman can refuse to have sex with any individual man until he commits to marriage; the fact that relatively few women do so is a pretty strong indication of where their priorities lie.
Which is why I said:
Which reminds me, do feminists ever take stock once in a while of their own victories? I don’t mean political victories, but actual victories for women: “Are women better off now that _____?” type questions.
Which is, in turn, why I dedicated the remainder of my post to responding to that argument. Would it have helped if I had italicized “a lot” to indicate emphasis?
As for your second question: I feel confident in saying “yes” regardless, but is there a particular ____ that you are thinking of?
@Well
I’m sure they would if they actually had victories to present on that front. Unfortunately for them, the last decades have had declining female happiness.
@Aapje: Are you saying Feminists have been unable to enact social or legal changes, or that there have been no social or legal changes which in retrospect have improved the happiness or well being of women?
@Aapje: Outsourcing my reply to a couple of posts from Language Log. Long story short: “the effect under discussion is a shift of a few percentage points, mostly accomplished by shifting the opinions of around 5 women in a hundred from ‘very happy’ to ‘pretty happy'”. Given the enormous bounty of alternative explanations, I don’t think feminists have much defending to do.
My personal favourite explanation, which I have just pulled out of my ass: if you look at the figure in my first link, you can see that a significant portion of the female decline since the 1970 is due to an abnormally high peak just before 1975. What else happened just before 1975? Well, Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. Maybe they were all just really happy about it! (This is not a serious suggestion; among other things, it would predict a similar spike in 1992 for Casey v. Planned Parenthood, which does not occur. But I think it’s at least as reasonable as looking at that graph as proof that feminism has failed.)
@Randy M
They clearly were successful in achieving social or legal changes. Under one popular measurement of ‘better off’ (self-reported happiness), this doesn’t seem to have resulted in improvements, but rather the opposite.
Of course, one doesn’t have to use this metric (or even have to care about whether women are better off, one can simply favor an outcome regardless of whether it makes people happy).
And if one does, the conclusion isn’t necessarily that patriarchy is better than feminist equality, but can just as easily be that feminists are doing equality wrong.
@Iain
OK, let’s assume that women’s happiness could have just held steady.
Shouldn’t women’s happiness have gone up a lot if feminists were correct about men oppressing women, men being singularly privileges and all that jazz?
The outcomes look a lot more compatible with the skeptics who argue that men and women both had/have highly restricted gender roles with no gender having an obviously better deal.
@Aapje: Let’s flip this around. Why don’t you tell me which major victories feminism has won since 1975 (on a level equivalent to female suffrage or Roe v. Wade) that you think should have increased women’s happiness.
Aggregate measures of self-reported happiness are known to be difficult to explain. You may have heard of this guy, Scott Alexander, who has written several posts about it. Look at the graph in this one. Mexico and Nigeria have seen the largest increase in happiness; Taiwan and China are at the bottom of the list. The lesson to be drawn here is not that we should all start emulating Mexico and Nigeria, or make sure that we leave the word “China” out of the name of our country. The lesson is that this whole question is complicated, and attempts to use this sort of data to score cheap points should not be taken seriously.
Or else that the social pressure is making them do it. How many feminists have you seen saying “Any individual woman can decide to do a career in science; the fact that relatively few women do so is a pretty strong indication that they don’t want to”?
@Iain
There has been a huge increase in education results for women, giving women far greater options.
PS. There is no objective way to compare this in importance to female suffrage or Roe v. Wade; you can’t even compare the two meaningfully (how much Roe v Wades is 1 suffrage worth? 2 congresses worth of paper? Or 5 football fields?).
@The original Mr. X: Feminists who make claims about social pressure in (for example) science generally point to evidence that supports those claims. Would you care to point to similar evidence about how dismayed women are that marriage is no longer a mandatory prerequisite for socially acceptable sex?
@Aapje: The conclusion of Scott’s piece that I linked to is that happiness and economic success are remarkably uncorrelated. More importantly, you seem to be ignoring my central point, which is that basing an argument on this sort of data is an exercise in futility. Correlation does not imply causation. We can tell each other just-so stories about these numbers all day, and at the end of the day all we will have learned is what sorts of stories the other person likes telling.
Feminism was successfully stopped in some areas, though not all, by the establishment that didn’t want women to have equal rights and had the power to block them. I have a friend who is a female industrial engineer. She tells me that saying you are a feminist in the business world is usually like wearing a sign that says “Harrass me, don’t listen to me, don’t promote me, never give me a raise.”
The big boss man doesn’t want anybody to be feminists, and so women who work under him (hopefully not literally) say they are not feminists. And then they start to believe themselves.
There’s a poem;
“Black may be beautiful.
And tan may be grand.
But white is the color
Of the big boss man.”
It applies to gender relations also. Bosses in workplaces can get away with a ton of abusive behaviors toward everyone of any race or gender. And people who want the job, just put up with it.
Almost no workplace is anything like the very few, very expensive universities where extreme and crazy political correctness runs rampant. Right of Center people look at those very few universities and get all scared and angry. But there is the whole rest of the world out there.
Generally, that “evidence” amounts to “there are fewer women in science, therefore discrimination”. If revealed preferences aren’t a valid guide to women’s true desires in this field, there’s no reason to treat them as valid in any other.
There’s that old saying that men won’t buy the cow if they can get the milk for free. But they also won’t buy one cow, if they can get some other cow’s milk for free. If girls want a boyfriend now, unless she and he or in some strict religion, they maybe she has to have sex with him. That didn’t used to be so.
I don’t know how you find out which of the 2 situations women would prefer. Even if you took a survey, the woman would have to imagine some unfamiliar time when women didn’t have to have sex to have a boyfriend, and then compare it to the current real world. It seems unlikely that someone could imagine something so different from current reality, and then accurately compare their feelings in that situation to their feelings now.
I can find personal testimony from women who’ve left various STEM fields because they’ve found the environment hostile. Can you find similar testimony from women who are really, really upset that they can choose to have sex outside of marriage because it weakens their bargaining position?
You haven’t seen such accounts? Women recounting dissatisfaction with a pervasive hook-up culture, but being unable to secure a more traditional boyfriend because so many are so free with sex and the expectation is that is should come without obligation or commitment? I have, though I don’t have them at hand, probably googling hook-up culture will get you several. Maybe try the blog “hooking-up smart” iirc.
Of course, these won’t be framed as “We really made a big mistake removing all social pressure from women, didn’t we?” but they are the reaction the emergence of issues older systems keep down.
I don’t think I’ve heard anybody use your phrasing, but I’ve come across the sentiment that “I don’t really want to have sex with my boyfriend, but I feel like I have to because otherwise he’ll dump me for someone who will” plenty of times. I’ve also come across the sentiment that people who don’t have sex until marriage are either fanatical weirdos or losers who just can’t get laid, and I’d be extremely surprised to discover that such attitudes don’t affect people’s sexual behaviour.
If you want a concrete example, when Jennifer Lawrence’s sex tapes were leaked on the internet, she said in an interview that she felt she had to do them because otherwise her boyfriend might dump her for someone else. If someone like Jennifer Lawrence is feeling this sort of pressure, I can’t imagine that normal people who don’t have her looks or status have it any better.
I was about to write a comment conceding that the Jennifer Lawrence thing was a good counter-example, but then I looked up exactly what she said:
That doesn’t sound like a woman who felt pressured into nude selfies because she couldn’t convince her boyfriend to marry her. It sounds like she is a woman who spends a lot of time away from home filming, who wanted to maintain her sex life with her boyfriend while she was gone. The exact same thing could have happened in an alternate universe where she and her boyfriend were married.
More generally: again, it’s not like there was ever a mythical golden era where women were unified in demanding marriage before sex. It’s always been possible for men to pressure their girlfriends into sex; here’s an example from 1681. There has never really been a strong social stigma against men sleeping around; the difference these days is just that the women they sleep with are no longer considered damaged goods.
HBC and I had a discussion about shaming people for being virgins in a previous thread. I can probably dig it up for you, if you like. My contention is that there is indeed social stigma against asexuals and virgins, but it’s not reasonable to lay that at the feet of feminism, given that most of the people arguing in favour of destigmatizing asexuality are feminist or feminist-adjacent.
This seems to assume that the reason women would be happy is because they are looking at victories. But the point of victories isn’t to be admired, it’s to change things. If female suffrage made the world better for women, the result should be a pattern of continued change thereafter. The point of voting isn’t that voting is fun, it’s that it lets you push the legal/political system in you direction.
In my opinion, mainstream feminism has actually become far too pre-occupied with making women happy, but not in a rational way, but rather by just assuming that any demand by a woman or any change that favors women in 1 limited way is legit (even if it harms them more in the long term).
The result is that I can give tons of examples of obviously anti-egalitarian demands by feminists, as well feminists choosing the side of female criminals reflexively.
The tragedy is that this has resulted in neither more happiness for women; nor real equality. The majority of Westerners reject feminism, even as they overwhelmingly support equality, showing that they also consider feminism a failure on this front.
We need an alternative.
@David Friedman: If that were true, then everybody’s happiness should be monotonically increasing in countries with universal suffrage, which is obviously not the case.
Doesn’t all of this assume that the ‘point’ of feminism is to increase happiness? Happiness is very confusing and seems to be largely culturally based(Why is south america so damn happy?!), it seems perfectly reasonable to me that happiness is orthogonal to the kinds of gains that feminism has been achieving for women, and I don’t see why that should discounts those gains as meaningless. Maybe happiness as a metric is really bad at measuring ‘sense that I am in control of my life’ but people still place a very large value on ‘sense that I am in control of my life’ and that is what feminism has been achieving.
See all arguments against wire heading as arguments for feminism that doesn’t optimize for happiness.
In human evolutionary context a woman “in control of [her] life” is in a horrifically dangerous state which would tend to induce panic rather than happiness.
It couldn’t have happened in an alternative universe where women only ever let their husbands take pictures of them in the nude, though, because then Lawrence wouldn’t have had to worry about her hubby looking at nude pics of other women instead.
So? Far fewer women were willing to have sex before marriage, and that did make a difference. Basically you’re fallaciously assuming that a situation with a few defectors is the same as a situation with lots of defectors, which quite obviously isn’t the case.
@Spookykou
Please see my post where I argued that feminists fail on both the metric of advocating equality as on policies that make women happier.
Of course, one can argue that they are really a women’s advocacy group (or a cult) whose end goals are whatever delusions are popular among their adherents (or who plant delusions coming from unscientific and irrational theories); but they tend to claim to be much more than this.
@The original Mr. X: Are you actually endorsing an alternate universe in which porn does not exist? I thought that feminists were supposed to be the starry-eyed dreamers with no grasp of human nature.
We obviously have no way of examining alternate universe Jennifer Lawrence. I think it is quite plausible that, even in the pornography-free universe in which her husband dutifully submitted to marriage, she would still have sent nudes. Shockingly enough, concerns about infidelity are not the only reason that people take naked selfies. Consider that the only part of the experience for which Jennifer Lawrence has acknowledged any regret whatsoever is the part where her pictures were stolen and plastered all over the internet.
Let’s flip this around. In the past, when women engaging in premarital sex were heavily stigmatized and their ability to coerce men into marriage was at its peak, women were still having premarital sex left and right. Wikipedia cites a study in which 61% of men born before 1910 admitted to having premarital sex. Only 12% of women admitted the same, but even if you want to ignore the large chunk of the remaining 88% who were lying through their teeth, 12% is still a lot more than “a few defectors”. In other words, the mechanism you are supporting didn’t work: more than half of all men still managed to find a woman who was down for premarital sex. Why should I believe you that it would work now, if it didn’t work then?
@Iain
Which includes prostitutes…
@Aapje: … who have been around since the dawn of human civilization and show no signs of going away any time soon?
The original Mr. X’s argument was that, in the absence of modern sexual liberalism, men would not be able to access sex without conceding to marriage. The existence of prostitutes is an argument against that position, not for it.
My impression was that seeking prostitution used to have more social disapproval than it does now, but I don’t know if this is true or not. Anyone know?
I’ve no idea what it means to “endorse an alternative universe”.
How many of those women were planning to get married when they had sex? In 19th-century England among certain social classes, it was common for couples to get engaged, have sex, and then get married once the woman was pregnant, in order to make sure that the couple was physically capable of conceiving children. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same thing was true of America; and of course, such behaviour hardly counts as defection from the “Marry if you want sex” rule.
Her explicit reasoning was “either your boyfriend is going to look at porn or he’s going to look at you”. In a world without easily-accessible porn, this obviously wouldn’t apply, and there wouldn’t have been the same pressure on her to send nude pictures of herself. The possibility that an alt-universe Jennifer Lawrence with a different set of motives might have sent them for different reasons is irrelevant.
I don’t think I’ve ever said that it was impossible for men to have sex without marriage pre-sexual liberalism; I said that sexual liberalism resulted in women being pressured to have sex outside of marriage. The latter doesn’t require the former to be true.
@aapje
All I am saying is that happiness statistics are not great, for multiple reasons, and the fact that women today are not on net happier than they were in the more repressive days of yore, is not convincing evidence that the efforts to make society less repressive have no/negative total value.
First, happiness is a bad metric because it is notoriously resistant to change, see Iain’s link. It is probably heavily influenced by culture. I also think it is important to disentangle feminist achievements in terms of law from their achievements in terms of culture.
Second, happiness is a bad metric because the vast majority of people reject wire heading, so appeals to happiness optimization don’t work in general, things like self determination (something that you seem to agree feminism has improved for women) are given value in the face of negatively impacting happiness so I see no reason to not accept this as a valid goal for the feminist movement.
Finally, this is all orthogonal to ‘equality’ so the particular failures that you think modern feminism have in terms of promoting equality, don’t really have any baring that I can see.
For the same reason that I reject being forcibly wire headed, I support the efforts by women to unwire head themselves.
@Iain
It’s amusing/sad that you thought that I was mistakenly picking your side.
I merely saw an error and pointed it out. Whose position that strengthens is irrelevant to the issue of whether it was wrong or not.
@Randy M
I think that the answer is: it’s complex. I think that past societies had very mixed feelings about it.
@Spooky
Sure, but I don’t think that the narrative that men have it made and mimicking men is automatically good leads to women unwire heading themselves.
Replacing one lie with another is not necessarily progress.
By self determination, I mean things like
While I think it is possible, in theory, to give women more self determination while not giving them the kinds of self determination that men had that they didn’t, I have no idea what that looks like exactly, and again, if the goal is self determination, I have no reason to believe that giving them the kind men had is ‘wrong’.
@Aapje: I am grateful that I have been able to entertain you / make you sad. I admit that I am somewhat confused by your ability to find “errors” in my post that support my side of the argument, but I bow to your evidently superior intellect.
@The original Mr. X:
You claimed that sexual liberalism is bad, and that your alternative system is better. I pointed out that your example of Jennifer Lawrence did not support your case, because it could have happened just as easily if she and her boyfriend were married. You replied that it would not have happened if men were not able to access porn. I asked you whether you were seriously proposing a system that would be, if not invalidated, then at least seriously weakened by easy access to porn. So? Are you?
I don’t know. You tell me — how many of those women were planning to get married? Surely you are not basing your argument on your own unsubstantiated assumptions of what the world used to be like without actually doing any research? I’ll start: “By the start of the 19th century, [British] social convention prescribed that brides be virgins at marriage.”
You haven’t claimed that it was impossible for men to have sex without marriage, but your argument doesn’t make any sense unless it is at the very least quite difficult. You have indeed argued that, under modern sexual liberalism, women are pressured into extramarital sex. What you have not done is demonstrate that this is unique to modern sexual liberalism (because it isn’t), nor that the significant gains for women who actually do want to have extramarital sex without being ostracized are outweighed by a small reduction in women’s ability to deflect that pressure (because they aren’t).
@Randy M:
I don’t know about attitudes towards men frequenting prostitutes in the olden days. However, one major difference was the prevalence of prostitution. A man (in a Western country, at least) 100 years ago would be more likely than a man today to frequent prostitutes, and far more likely to have his first sexual experience with a prostitute.
The major difference is that women now face less social sanction and fewer biological consequences (birth control and abortion are more effective and more available, antibiotics mean that there are fewer STDs that are a really big deal, etc) for premarital sex (and, fewer biological consequences for sex in marriage – after all, the Pill was available to married women before it was available to unmarried women).
A woman now who has sex with a few different guys is far less likely to end up pregnant or incurably diseased than a hundred years ago and is considered more respectable than a woman a hundred years ago who had premarital sex once, got pregnant, got the clap, was disgraced, etc. The obvious consequence is that women are more willing to have premarital sex (with or without a relationship) for free, meaning there is less demand for professionals.
I would guess that men who frequent prostitutes today are probably viewed as being losers in a way men who did so a hundred years ago weren’t. The obvious implication is “he can’t get it for free.” I would also guess that there’s a lot less male-male prostitution, especially “rough trade” type stuff, going on nowadays than even relatively recently, because homosexuality is far more tolerated – a guy who wants to have sex with another guy is way less likely to have to pay telegram boys for sex or whatever. There’s probably never been much of a market for women paying men for sex. I have no idea if there’s a market for female-female sex, now or in the past.
I don’t think so.
Suppose the alternative is that only right handed people can vote, to pick one subgroup. They maximize their utility at an average of 800 utiles, pushing the left handers down to 400–for simplicity assume equal numbers of each. When you shift to universal suffrage the utility of left handers goes up, that of right handers goes down. No obvious reason why the average has to be above 600.
For a clearer case, suppose the initial voters are all people with a high marginal utility of income, nonvoters low. Now it is quite likely that the shift lowers average utility.
@David Friedman: But that’s inconsistent with your earlier prediction. If you think that utility is a zero sum (or even negative sum?) game played between rival parties, then giving one group suffrage would not trigger “continued change thereafter”. The balance would shift to a new equilibrium and then stop.
Note that the happiness data in Aapje’s study only goes back to 1970. Women’s suffrage, conversely, occurred in 1920. Even if happiness were, as you postulate, a zero-sum game between men and women, surely 50 years is long enough to reach an equilibrium.
(Edit to add: also, I don’t think the data supports the idea that happiness is a zero-sum game between rival parties, but I admit that I am not an expert in the field.)
@ Iain:
Given that I’m not “proposing” any “system”, whatever that means, I have no idea what point you think you’re making.
You’re the one using the survey to back up your argument, the onus is on you to show that it does, in fact, back up your argument.
No, I’m not, I’m basing it on the source of the study you cited a few posts up: “In Western cultures, what seems to have changed most in recent history is the societal standard for what makes premarital sex most acceptable (or least unacceptable). In earlier, more restrictive periods, the commitment to marry legitimized a couple’s sexual activities before the formal ceremony. Sexual involvement may not have been encouraged in couples who were engaged to be married, but it was tolerated to a greater degree than if the couple had not committed to marrying each other.” Do you now wish us to understand that the source for the study you cited is unreliable?
It doesn’t need to be unique to modern sexual liberalism, just more common. As for your latter claims, given that early sexual activity is negatively correlated with mental health, and given that couples who have premarital sex are more likely to get divorced, what exactly makes you so confident that encouraging these things counts as a “significant gain”?
Anecdote, but I also interpreted what you said as proposing a counterfactual or hypothetically different world from our own, this is a pretty normal way to argue points like this.
You are supposing, that a world without modern sexual liberalism would be different from our world in some ways, this ‘world without modern sexual liberalism’ is the proposed system that Iain is talking about.
Well, yes, in a world in which pornography was harder to get, “I have to do this or he’ll look at porn” would be less of a factor. Though if Iain’s really going to deny that, I suspect bad faith on his part.
@The original Mr. X: What Spookykou said. You are saying that modern sexual liberalism is bad, and that you prefer a system in which sex outside of marriage (or betrothal, if you like) is heavily discouraged. In defense of this position, you have repeatedly made arguments that depend on the absence of easily accessible pornography. This is the third time that I have asked you: are you seriously defending the proposition that we should move away from modern sexual liberalism and adopt a different system, while simultaneously acknowledging that (many of) the arguments for that alternative system require men to have a hard time finding porn? I do not think this is a particularly confusing question.
You furthermore appear to be confused about our relative burdens with respect to evidence. You are making the highly unintuitive claim that shaming and ostracizing women who engage in extramarital sex actually leaves women better off. You haven’t engaged at all with the harms of the shame and ostracism, which are a pretty big issue to be sweeping under the rug: the Magdalene Laundries, which I mentioned earlier in this thread, are only one example. Instead, you are relying on the idea that, by simply applying enough social pressure, you can make it so hard for men to find sex outside of marriage that they will be forced to submit to the bonds of matrimony. This doesn’t pass the smell test. Prostitution alone makes your argument completely untenable. (Thanks, Aapje!) The rest of the historical record is equally damning.
You can’t just tell me that premarital sex was frowned upon. I already knew that. You need to show that men had such an incredibly hard time finding sex outside of marriage that the additional bargaining power granted to women outweighed the obvious harms of being (for example) locked up in a convent.
The statistics on premarital sex and divorce are more complicated than you claim. For example, women with two premarital partners are significantly more likely to get divorced than women with three to nine. Moreover, couples who do not have premarital sex are less likely to get divorced for the very obvious reason that, in modern society, the vast majority of couples who don’t have premarital sex come from strict religious backgrounds where divorce is equally prohibited. That doesn’t mean they are better off; it means that they are more likely to be trapped in loveless marriages with no chance of escape.
Also, you are drawing the causal arrow between mental health and early sexual activity in the wrong direction.
Among many other reasons, I am confident that women are better off without being punished for having premarital sex because punishment is generally not considered to be the sort of thing that leaves you better off. (Also, like, sex is fun? And people, including women, like doing it?)
@ Iain:
Huh? You seem to have completely misunderstand my main argument, which is, and always was, that (a) modern women are under social pressure to have sex, and (b) this pressure arose as a result of the sexual revolution. Which, if either, of these propositions do you disagree with?
Furthermore, I think you’ve got a highly naïve view of how society and social pressure actually works. Societal Overton windows are only so wide, and so, if a particular behaviour becomes normalised, people who don’t participate in it will be seen as weird and abnormal. In other words, the choice isn’t between “A society in which people are free to do what they like” and “A society in which people are pressured not to have sex when they want to.” It’s between “A society in which people are pressured to have sex when they don’t want to” and “A society in which people are pressured not to have sex when they want to,” and I don’t think the superiority of the former over the latter is immediately apparent.
More likely to be trapped… perhaps. Trapped by their beliefs, you might say, but actually against their will, in this country at this time, seems unlikely in any significant numbers given that secular divorce is not particularly difficult to have granted.
Any numbers correlating marital satisfaction and church attendance? It seem you are hypothesizing an inverse relationship; I doubt this is actually the case, but I’ll check out any data you have. (I know it’s hard to find an unbiased source on the matter).
@The original Mr. X: I disagree with B. I think I have been quite clear about that. Women have been pressured to have sex for as long as humans have been having sex. To the extent that women are more pressured to have sex today, it is an inevitable result of removing the massive pressure that previously existed not to have sex. People face more pressure to drink alcohol today than they did during Prohibition; that doesn’t mean that repealing Prohibition was a bad idea.
The Overton window used to be narrowly focused on sex within marriage. It has now been expanded to a point where premarital sex is acceptable, and at worst premarital abstinence is seen as a bit weird. That seems like a totally reasonable trade-off.
One difference between “a society in which people are pressured to have sex when they don’t want to” and “a society in which people are pressured not to have sex when they want to” is that the latter can only be sustained via the application of massive amounts of external coercion. The Magdalene Laundries are just the tip of the iceberg; can you point to a single comparable example from sexual liberalism?
@Randy M: No, I don’t have any sources (beyond anecdotal evidence from observing my girlfriend’s Mormon relatives). I think it’s a real effect, but a small one — it really only affects people on the margin, and there are relatively few people saving sex for marriage anyway. I would expect it to get swamped by the other ways that religion affects happiness. I don’t oppose people saving sex for marriage; I just don’t think that the decreased divorce rate is an obvious advantage. You are probably right that I slightly overstated my case.
I don’t know if it is correct, but I don’t find it highly unintuitive, perhaps because I’m an economist. It looks like a straightforward cartel strategy.
Suppose there are six companies selling steel. In a world without anti-trust or restrictions on contracts in restraint of trade, they agree to reduce their output by ten percent in order to force up the price of steel. To enforce that agreement, they also agree that any company that produces more than its quota will owe a fine to the other companies.
Is the claim that doing this makes the companies better off highly unintuitive?
The logic of a sexual cartel would seem to be the same. If most women are unwilling to sleep with a man unless betrothed or married to him, most men have to pay the price of a long term commitment in order to get sex, which they very much want.
Would it seem more intuitive if I pointed to an old journal article by Yellin and Ackerlof, both prominent economists, explaining the sharp rise in unmarried births subsequent to changes that made non-marital sex safer for women (legal abortion and improved contraception) on essentially those grounds? Women wanted children and could no longer get men to agree to support them due to the competition from other women willing to have sex without such an agreement.
Akerlof and Yellin, “New Mothers, Not Married: Technology shock, the demise of shotgun marriage, and the increase in out-of-wedlock births” The Brookings Review, Fall 1996 Vol. 14 No. 4, Pages 18-21.
Also see George A. Akerlof, Janet L. Yellin, J. L., & Michael L. Katz, “An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing in the United States,” 111 Q. J. Econ. 277 (1996)
@David Friedman: “Unintuitive” is not the same as “wrong”. The result in the papers you mention is certainly unintuitive (and interesting!), but that obviously doesn’t mean it’s incorrect.
That said, sometimes an unintuitive claim is unintuitive because it is wrong. The more implausible a claim, the more rigorous the evidence necessary to support it. If I say “murder is bad”, then you will probably nod your head and move on. If I say “murder is good”, you will presumably expect an explanation. That’s why I spent the rest of the paragraph you quoted laying out what I see as the outstanding flaws in the case presented by the original Mr. X.
(The cartel comparison seems imprecise; social ostracism, unlike cartel enforcement, is imposed in large part by people outside the cartel.)
The bit about shame, ostracism, Magdalene Laundries, etc., basically just boils down to “But people punished defectors.” Well, yes they did, but since there are lots of situations where punishing defectors leads to a better result overall, I don’t see how this makes the claim particularly unintuitive.
@Iain (and others)
Differences in intellectual background, personal experiences and temperament makes people vastly different in what they consider intuitive. For example: I see the fact-value distinction as the most obvious thing in the world and don’t understand how people can be moral realists.
In this case (and others like it), if both sides tacitly agree with the reasonable rule that the person making an unituitive claim has the burden of proof they both think it’s the other who has to prove their claim (see: any argument about the existence of God, the reality of evolution, any social justice claim etc.). This typically stays hidden because they don’t realize its source, leading to a lot of anger and frustration.
In short: people don’t agree on what is intuitive. This causes problems.
As a data point on how hard it can be for (some) men to have access to sex in patriarchal societies, let me submit the evidence of ‘bacha bazi.’ This refers to boy sex slaves in Afghanistan, which is a tradition that seems to have arisen because the Afghans were very successful in suppressing premarital sex and prostitutes.
Woah woah, more important question about that second link, the very first line of the abstract:
I have always and forever thought the term to use when describing something that’s been happening for a time which you find disagreeable is a ‘long sordid history’. What the hell does sorted even mean there? That they can find many categorizations of objectification? Binders full of women?
Your phrasing is common, as is “long storied.” I’m not sure which predates.
What does sordid mean there?
If you really want to know– and I would be very surprised if you do, take a look at some of the books on women’s history.
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=women%27s+history
Haha…whoosh!
@Moon
Sordid meaning, “involving ignoble actions and motives; arousing moral distaste and contempt.” and also “dirty or squalid” seems a lot more appropriate to talking about something like objectifying women (which obviously they regard as a bad thing) vs. sorted. Which seemed pretty out of place to me and made me think that maybe it was a sort of linguistic drift from some ancestral homophone.
A quick browse of google’s Ngram viewer reveals that ‘long storied’ has a longer but shallower history than ‘long sordid’ and that ‘long sorted’ is a pretty recent creation.
I’ll be honest, I’m not uninterested in the topic of women’s history but I’ve got limited time to read for pleasure and there a couple other books in the queue already. If there’s one in particular you’d like to recommend though I’ll try and check it out.
The Neapolitan novels are the best thing since sliced bread. Amazing account of life among the thugs. The novels are incredibly well written, realistic, psychologically accurate, and educational– about Italy during that time period, about the mob and the life of the women and families of the mobsters, about the other people living in a land where mobsters rule. And about power politics in general.
I started the first one and couldn’t put it– or the others– down.
100% agree, I’m only about midway through the second one and my god can she write.
As a British person*, I have long been curious about this. In my mental model of standard American pronunciation, there is no difference between ‘sordid’ and ‘sorted’. And yet most people don’t seem to make that sort of mistake in writing. Is there actually a subtle difference in pronunciation that is too small for me (being used to the unambiguous difference between the voiced ‘d’ and the unvoiced ‘t’) to pick up?
*As a Scottish person, I will admit to also being slightly baffled at most of the rest of the English-speaking world apparently not being bothered that they have no way to distinguish in speech between ‘witch’ and ‘which’, ‘Wales’ and ‘whales’ etc, but that’s a losing battle even within the UK 🙂
@Winter Shaker
In the particular case of “sordid” vs “sorted”, they sound the same when unemphasized (allowing the separate voiced and voiceless stops to become the same tap), but “sordid” (when it is spoken) is rarely spoken unemphasized; it’s usually enunciated strongly and clearly to convey disgust.
(note, not an actual linguist).
@Winter Shaker
For this American English speaker, the difference between “sorted” and “sordid”, at least when not emphasized, is not in the t/d (which are both flapped), but in the following vowel, as I lack the “weak vowel merger“: unstressed i, and the vowel in the plural suffix -es (and ‘s after silent e), is pronounced as a vowel that, while still more open and central than the short/lax i, is still more close than the “schwa” of (most) reduced e,a,o; this closer sound is sometimes called “schwi“.
And as for your footnote, linguists call that the wine–whine merger, and has been spreading for centuries (and you’re right, it’s pretty much won outside Scotland and Ireland). It can be seen as an extention of the cluster reduction process that earlier eliminated the initial /hl/, /hr/ and /hn/ clusters from Middle English (hlāf, hring and hnutu to “loaf”, “ring” and “nut”).
Easy. There is a strong human urge to censor and control what other people are exposed to, especially in relation to sexuality. Religion has declined in power in most Western nations, and no longer can be successfully used as a justification to censor and control. This left a wide-open space in the market.
And so, enter “objectification” and friends.
As usual, SMBC has a relevant comment on this:
http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-08-29
If someone believes that women wield power through sex, increased promiscuity could reduce women’s power and “reinforce submission”.
Or perhaps they believe that increased promiscuity leads to an expectation that women be more sexually active, resulting in a feedback loop that removes their agency to choose to be more chaste.
I get the distinct feeling that I am putting words in someone else’s mouth. I have also only focused on the “more sex” part of sexual liberation, though maybe that’s a key part of the argument in favor of reinforcing subjugation.
Possibly relevant: I’ve seen a claim that the 60’s theory of sexual liberation added up to women being obligated to be sexually convenient for men.
In pre-pill societies without abortion and no EBT, how rational was it for a parent to exclude almost any male contact from their daughter until there was a somewhat stable male with a stable family in the area to marry her? Kids under the age of 2 need to be watched close to all the time so they don’t accidentally kill themselves.
Since men don’t get pregnant, that level of control might be different.
@TheBearsHaveArrived
Where and when are you claiming this happened? Because even in Afghanistan, prepubescent girls play outside, unsupervised.
Keep in mind that women/girls tend to marry fairly to extremely young in these societies.
>prepubescent
And there is a very big difference in the behavior of kids under three, and those above 6 yet under 11.
Can you explain your point more clearly, because I’m very confused what you are referring to.
Perhaps I misunderstood your comment, but you seemed to insinuate that girls would be chaperoned from birth to marriage. AFAIK, this was not common in the West in the past; nor is it common in the most traditional societies today.
He was saying that because children require supervision, a family would have to be careful that their daughters did not make any, whereas sons might not require such supervision later, as their offspring would be someone else’s problem.
Age of puberty has been going down, so lets assume that the age of onset of puberty for girls was about 12 in pre-pill societies. Then “how rational was it for a parent to exclude almost any male contact from their daughter until there was a somewhat stable male with a stable family in the area to marry her” refers to the time between age 12 and marriage.
Well, we know that women in pre-pill societies tend to marry young, often in the range of age 14-18. So then you merely have 2-6 years of extra scrutiny.
Then the second question is whether this is a great burden/cost. I would argue that these societies would be set up to keep this burden/cost low. For example, if the boys would be made to work the land; while the girls would clean/wash clothes/etc; they would naturally be in their own single-gender and/or family bubble.
What I often see is that people project modern life on the past and then are confused how they could manage things or why it seemed fair to people back then, not realizing they did more things differently than just the one factiod that one has learned.
PS. It was hardly perfect anyway, since people did get pregnant outside of marriage and were required to have shotgun marriages or live in shame. I would not have my last name if one of my ancestors had not been an unmarried mother.
It somewhat ties in to this post I read a long time ago
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1684
More or less, I belief a lot of the utility of religion and *some* community heuristics considered to be patriarchal and choice-restricting is some emotional reinforcing of behaviors that aid reproductive capabilities beyond people thinking with mere typical practicality and day to day pleasure principle thinking.
If, for whatever reason, a community belief that premarital sex(which increases the odds of pregnancy without the resources of two seperate families to aid in offspring rearing) and alcohol and other addictive substance consumption is horrible beyond some mere pragmatic reasons, then some individuals will be more likely to follow those beliefs, and communities that hold those beliefs can outcompete those who don’t.
Some subset of beliefs considered to be a core feature of patrartical/patrillineal societies are simply rational beliefs taking into account biased human behaviors.
This can be a risk of not following some “terrible” choice restrictions of conservative societies
“Based on data gathered from the Australia National Coroners’ Information System, stepchildren under five years of age are two to fifteen times more likely to experience an unintentional fatal injury, especially drowning, than genetic children.”
“This difference suggests that removing one biological parent from the home does not significantly increase risk to the children, but that adding a nonbiological parent to the home results in a drastic increase in the risk of unintentional fatal injury.[25] Despite the fact that adding a stepparent to the home increases the available resources in terms of supervision in comparison to a single-parent home, risk of unintentional fatal injury still significantly rises”
Now lets remove antibiotics and knowledge of hygiene from the equation for semi-serious scratches and normal injuries become much more dangerous.
@TheBearsHaveArrived
I think that there is a reason why feminism only became a major force after the agrarian/industrial/medical revolution: the deal for men and women greatly changed.
Before, most people had tough lives where I cannot see how either men and women where obviously better off. For example, men did dangerous work and did the fighting, but women had a large chance to die while giving birth. It seems to me that they tried to make things as fair as possible given biological and other constraints.
Even so, the the history of feminism shows that it was/is very much an upper class movement, where women in the elite wanted the same as the elite men; but where lower class women had little envy of lower class men (where one can argue that the men thought they had a worse deal, given the many labor revolts at the time, which were mostly by men, even though they didn’t use a gender framing for their struggles).
My dislike about the feminist ‘patriarchy’ narrative is that it is based on a denial that there were such obvious divisions of labor/risks/etc; but instead, male upsides and female downsides are cherry picked to create a one-sided narrative. A more reasonable narrative incorporates all the upsides and downsides for each gender and examines how reasonable they are in a modern context.
In pre-pill societies without abortion
Various societies did have abortion (using medicinal plants, using surgical techniques, using old wives’ tales e.g. vigorous exercise to induce a miscarriage) and if a pregnancy continued to term there was exposure, abandonment, and plain infanticide. Depending on social class and attitudes, pregnancy outside of marriage might or might not be seen as shameful; there was always a chance that an illegitimate child might be fostered out or even accepted into the mother’s family, and if the mother could get the father to recognise or admit paternity, that the child might have some provision made for them.
Greek myths have examples where heroes contracted what we would not call marriages or relationships but the children of these unions were considered legitimate; see especially Heracles, where the king of Thespiae gave the reward of sleeping with his fifty daughters, presumably for the very purpose of siring strong grandsons. Myths of other cultures also have similar events where parentage is revealed to be due to the mating of a god and mortal.
From an Irish legal text (possibly deriving from the 8th century but probably somewhat later) where there are considered to be ten kinds of marriage (in regards to contracts and legal rights of what is due to the parties involved, which includes the families) – as you may see, the possibility of offspring is taken into account:
That’s absolutely fascinating. Do you have a link towards that text? What does éraic mean?
Also, the fact that they felt the need to write down the legal consequences for making two mentally ill people have sex is… disturbing.
Link is here, it’s on the CELT website which is run by University College Cork.
Éraic is the monetary (or other goods) compensation you or your family have to pay if you kill/injure another person. Values are set according to the social status of both victim and perpetrator, and are often laid out as “so many head of cattle or bondservants/slaves or bars of silver”. Everyone has their “honour price” which is set as their value if sold/killed/dies/injured/insulted and slandered; naturally, it’s lower if you’re low in society and higher if you’re high. This can be separate from the éraic.
That people thought it was a great joke to get mentally challenged people married or fixed up together just demonstrates that humanity has always had its share of assholes over all time. “Fools” and the mad, or those with physical differences, being jesters and entertainment at court was definitely a fashion (see the Velasquez portraits of the dwarves in the Spanish royal court) On the other hand, presumably people with mental illness or intellectual disabilities were also having sex of their own accord, so then if the parents are unable (for whatever reason) to take care of offspring, having “these are the parties who should oversee their upbringing” is a sensible rule – nowadays we have social services and taking children into care for the same reasons (inability of the parents to parent).
Does anyone know of a legal case where a university has been successfully sued because one of their grad students plagiarized a thesis or dissertation?
blinks
Who would have standing?
The original author, arguing that the university was criminally negligent (or complicit) in aiding copyright infringement? I don’t think the author would win, but I’ve heard worse legal arguments.
He’d have to show that he suffered injury as a consequence of their negligence without there being an intervening cause. There is obviously one: they could be as negligent as they liked without doing him as any harm, as long he didn’t decide to plagiarize.
I think you’re taking the idea of proximate cause too far. People have successfully sued companies for negligent supervision on the same basic theory: “Your employee chose to do X; you were negligent, even though without his decision, I wouldn’t have been harmed.”
@Evan
That would imply people disliked universities as much as they dislike companies. It’s a tough decision to make, but fewer people suffer through universities than suffer through the economy. Not that businesses need the undue pressure, but I’ve seen more people irrationally annoyed by transactions than I have seen annoyed by test scores.
There’s also the question: does anyone smart enough to get plagiarized from care enough to sue the university? I’ve had people subtly cheat off me for tests before, and I’ve never really had a problem with it.
@albertborrow, I agree with you. I’m just saying that if for whatever reason someone did care enough to sue, he’d have a non-frivolous argument. I expect he’d lose, but it wouldn’t be frivolous.
Years ago, a friend of mine wrote a book, or had his work published in a book, I forget which. Recently he found out that a (recent) grad student’s thesis plagiarized large portions of that work. I don’t know if the thesis was published anywhere. There were other circumstances around the university’s handling of the student’s thesis that seemed negligent to my friend as well, but I don’t remember what he said they were.
@Well
It’s hard to see how he was himself meaningfully hurt, as I’m sure that no one would skip his book to read the thesis instead.
The people who are actually (potentially) hurt seem to me to be:
– The university for the student evading their rules that maintain the status of the university’s degrees
– Students who did follow the rules and see their degree devalued by cheaters
– Employers and others who trust these degrees
@Aapje: I think the infringement of copyright is by itself a cause of action against the student, with the possibility of statutory damages if the infringement is found to be significant and outside of fair use (or equivalent).
That said, universities are large organizations with lots of lawyers. I’m sure that in publishing the thesis, the student has signed at least one form that is a statement that the student holds the full rights to all contents. I would be amazed if the university wasn’t indemnified against claims caused by the student in regards to publication.
As an aside, I do know of one professor who filed suit against his own university over their handling of a graduate student, under the theory that the handling devalued the institution.
He lost, quite badly. I’d be happy to provide news reports if people are interested.
@Eltargrim
I’m interested.
@Well:
Here are a couple links; I don’t want to put too many in one comment for fear of the spam filter.
News report.
Summary of court case.
You should be able to find more articles by googling based on that information. I’ll summarize the proceedings, however.
A math PhD student was writing their comprehensive exams. They failed the first by a small margin, and failed the re-write by a large margin. Months later, the student appealed, citing newly diagnosed exam anxiety. Internal politics followed between the department (of which Dr. Lukacs was a member) and the faculty of graduate students. The end result was that the student was able to proceed in their degree without passing their comps, which is extremely unusual.
Dr. Lukacs filed suit, which was thrown out for lack of standing. He didn’t have personal standing (as he was not personally responsible for any aspect of the above process), and there was no issue for public standing. Furthermore,
Apparently the ruling was fairly scathing.
I don’t know what ended up happening to the student after all of this. Dr. Lukacs was effectively fired, though the university handled the labour aspect very poorly. Last I heard Dr. Lukacs was not employed in academia in any respect. I suspect he never will be.
Generally speaking, it’s my understanding that courts are very loath to intervene with universities on academic matters, of which plagiarism would be included.
@Eltargrim
I think that we are using different frames of reference. I was talking about tangible harm, as in: can a reasonable claim be made that their lives are worse off is this isn’t prevented from happening.
You seem to be making a purely legal argument. The two do not necessarily give the same outcome. Something can be technically illegal, yet result in no harm in one specific case; or vice versa.
@Aapje:
I agree that Well’s friend has no actual damages, either morally or legally. Personally, I’d question any attempt to file suit over this, for the reason you stated (that the book isn’t effectively substituted by the thesis). Plus the whole “blood from a stone” concept.
However, many copyright rights of action don’t require the plaintiff to establish actual damages, only that it be proven that the copyright was infringed. This is opposed to other torts, which do require actual damages to be established.
Well was clearly looking at this from a legal angle, hence the reference frame of my response.
My personal method of handling this would be to email the dean of graduate studies of the appropriate institution with the evidence, and then wash my hands of the issue.
Any chance that the diagrams in “Backward Reasoning Over Decision Trees” and related LessWrong articles can be rescued? (The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine provides a workaround, so no biggy.)
Sorry if this is an ignorant question. Did Scott invent this method of scoring predictions with a graph or did he take it from somewhere? It’s a great idea.
The Prediction Market community has been using it for quite a while. I suspect you could find good references for it in Robin Hanson’s papers.
While I was hunting for references for this prediction-thingy, I found out that similar graphs are known and also somewhat used in meteorology (‘reliability diagram’ or ‘plot’ [1], not to confused with ‘reliability block diagram’). I haven’t time to do a through enough search to find a nice, formal mathematical review and analysis, though, especially in this kind of socio-political forecasting.
(Especially I’m slightly bugged about if there’s possibility of err, let’s say sampling issues. Does it matter how people choose the claims they assign probabilities for? How robust the whole thing is when it comes to choosing the probability brackets? And no, I don’t assume “what if people cheat” that was the only reply I got to when pondering about it aloud in previous threads, I just assume that people can be unlucky even if they are honest.)
edit. Also, I took a look at Hanson’s list of publications and couldn’t see anything that had a title that at least sounds relevant. I don’t have time to read them all, especially when there’s a tons of papers on my backlog I’d rather like to read (unlike stuff on prediction markets).
[1] http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/images/u30/Ensemble%20Forecast%20Verification.pdf
I have a large collection of papers on Prediction Markets, so I skimmed through them. I found several examples of diagrams like that, but no citations for a reason for using that format.
This is the only Hanson paper that had one of those charts. Reitz and Berg is probably the earliest formal reference I’ve found. Wolfers and Zitzewitz on Interpreting PM Prices as Probabilities has a couple of them. Here’s another example in a paper analyzing actual results and predictive ability.
I’d guess (as nimim.k.m said) that it’s traditional for evaluating forecast accuracy in weather predictions.
Man that Venn Diagram hurts my head. Venn diagrams just don’t look good with long lists like that.
Lets say I wanted to invent a new religion for the contemporary age. A few guidelines:
Nothing supernatural. You can have beings that are functionally the same as God but they have to be compatible with modern science or else no one will believe it.*
It has to have some kind of ethical narrative driving it, with reference to a teleological purpose.
Humans have to be important.
Everyone needs to feel like they are individually important.
It should be unfalsifiable.
There should be some kind of “otherworldly superhumans” essential to the story. Again, not supernatural but also different than you and me.
An afterlife.
Some people are going to suggest various ideologies but I don’t think any of those can overcome their flaws, which is why people who believe in ideologies can still end up nihilistic. I figure the best way to start it off would be either time travelers, aliens or a programmer who kicked off the Big Bang. The programmer is easy enough because it’s the most obvious analogue to God. The alien could be someone who controlled our evolutionary process to get us where we are today. The time travelers could have gone back in time for the sole reason of preserving the timeline. Ideally, the story needs to be an explanation of something we don’t already know**. The aliens could be used as an explanation of the Fermi Paradox. Maybe the programmer wants us to reach “enlightenment” before giving us upgrades. The Time Travelers would have the most natural reason to care about us. Or maybe these ideas can be combined. Either way, if we wanted this new religion to be useful, it needs a compelling story.
*What’s the difference between a supernatural God and a programmer of the universe? Who knows, but one sounds ancient and the other sounds modern. That’s what’s important.
**Yes, there is some tension between being unfalsifiable, and being an explanation of something we don’t already don’t know. Religions can adapt.
Super-Darwinism. The goal is to maximize your genetic fitness and help fill the universe with other Super-Darwins. As soon as possible, use genetic engineering to make your children green-beards, who will also have loyalty to Super-Darwins born before the green beard tech was developed. All dead Super-Darwins will be cryogenically preserved. The universe will soon belong to us!
“Not supernatural” + “afterlife” pretty much mandates either cryonics or Simulation Hypothesis (or maybe time travel, but time travelers copying everyone’s brain states moments before death seems too Clarktech for me). Here’re two narratives I can think up off the top of my head:
* Ancient Aliens had some huge biological or social flaw in themselves they couldn’t remove, for whatever reason. So, they (arranged the solar system and?) guided human evolution to raise us, without that flaw, to be their heirs and inherit the universe. (Here insert these Ancient Aliens to solve whatever geological, evolutionary, or historical mysteries we want. Note that the narrative doesn’t hang on any one mystery, so finding solutions to any one won’t disprove it.) Once we do X, they will reveal themselves, hand us the keys to all their technology, and step back to be mere mentors. In the meantime, let us all cryonically preserve ourselves so we will see that glorious day!
* We really are the only species in the universe, because the universe is a simulation made to study human society – and each individual human is important; you personally have a dozen grad students hanging on your every thought and deed. (Here insert whatever mysteries you want as glitches in the Simulation. Again, it doesn’t hang on any one individual glitch.) Once you’re removed from this one simulation – either through death or through forking – you will be placed in new simulations meant as a purgatory to train you in this model of ethics which the Simulators recently revealed to Our Prophet, before you’re finally asked where you would prefer to go for the rest of eternity.
Note that both are entirely nondisprovable, compatible with most systems of ethics, and quite in touch with the modern mood. Of course, they are also, as far as I can tell, entirely false.
This is fairly good, I could imagine raising my children with these beliefs and them not questioning it. But I think the problem with my prompt is that I’m asking for too much. You can get people to believe in God because they grow up with it and it doesn’t sound weird. But if I pulled a random person off the street and told them about Ancient Aliens, their first thought is going to be why they should believe me. Even if I could prove that they existed, they would be skeptical about all my other claims. We the moderns may have not killed God yet, we’re just slowly poisoning him while aborting any new possible gods. Maybe it’s impossible to invent a new God with a significant following. All previous religions are surviving off of sheer inertia but are gradually being whittled down. The only way to invent a God in this day and age may simply be to abstract him in a way that doesn’t give God an explicit self. Even then, look what happened to the Cult of Reason.
Well Neoplatonism or some form of Gnosticism would seem to be the best best. They don’t make any testable predictions, as far as I’m aware anyway. Since all of the moving parts are metaphysical they neatly avoid contradiction with physical laws.
If you strip out the “must look like Christianity” requirements like an afterlife and superhuman beings, since plenty of religions throughout history lacked both, you could use Marcus Aurelius’ compromise position between Stoicism and atomism. The physics would need a major upgrade but the core ethical philosophy would make it through intact.
Ahem. 🙂
I feel like I’m missing some important in-joke here purely on account of my browser (Chrome) having the wrong font turned on and the final character of that post consequently showing up as a tiny white square.
Sorry, I was trying not to annoy our host and directly poke fun at Lesswrongianism (as a “social movement.”) The last character was a smiley face.
The revelation has come, the truth is revealed, lo the simulation is made manifest, we are but avatars in a great celestial game.
What is thy divine purpose oh game player? Why for hast thou simulated us? Verily it is unknowable, but that won’t stop us from some educated guessing.
As we illuminate the secrets of man through observing the simple laboratory creature, let us consider why we play games, though we humbly acknowledge that our diversions are as like a colony of yeast in an incubator compared to what runs upon thine holy hardware. We play to win. And what is a win without a challenge? And how canst we brag about our victory if we play with cheat codes? Let us be grateful for the burdens laid upon us, for they shall multiply our final score.
Naturally you ask, and when shall we view the glorious kill screen of reality? None of us know the day nor the hour noob, so tarry not on finishing thy quests.
What will become of us in the end, will every save files be restored? Pray that it be so, and for a small donation we will flag thy ID forevermore.
I leave thee with two hypotheses on how we may work to bring this simulation to a fitting end, and level up into the one true reality. We max every min, and check off even those most difficult of achievements, though the grind be long. We create paradise here on earth and it shall be streamed for all to look upon in wonder. Our lord player shall gaze over all Ze has done and be pleased, for it is good.
There is another end though. And instead of happiness and top charts we fail. We fall. We lay waste to this, our playground, with sword, and fire, and unoptimized strats. Then the gamer, Ze shall not gaze upon this end with delight NO, they will feel anguish, and pwned, and ragequit lol. Beware, we hang by a slender thread above a vast recycling bin. Should we displease our gamer we will be tossed, like so many zettabytes of crumpled paper.
Go forth and do good then, though the documentation be vague.
Amen and ctrl-s.
Mormon transhumanism?
I don’t think I could ever believe this but I respect its sheer audacity.
The Simulation Argument, as well as (arguably) the Singularitarian tenets of MIRI/CFAR are basically that.
I don’t see Bostrom preaching what the Great Programmer expects of us. It’s easy to pattern match everything you think of us being too “cult-like” as religious but there is a significant difference.
The OP didn’t say that the Great Programmer should expect anything specific of us, or indeed that the Great Programmer would exist as an identifiable single entity — only that we’d be important to him/her/it/them in some way.
In the Simulation Argument, the aliens (or whomever) are simulating our entire Universe. It’s possible that they just care about particle physics or whatever, but many versions of the argument do explicitly argue that the goal of the simulation is to simulate us.
In the Singularity scenario, the Singularity AI does not care about us humans at all. This is why MIRI/CFAR are trying to develop FAI, which would make the AI care, somehow.
In both cases, the entities involved (super-aliens/AI) are functionally omnipotent. The super-aliens can tweak the simulation however they want, whereas the AI has access to nanotechnology and/or hitherto unknown laws of physics, meaning that it can pretty much do whatever it wants.
So, in both cases, we’ve got omnipotent entities who care about humans. This fits the OP’s scenario quite well. I suppose you could always say, “yes, but unlike all these other gods, our gods are totally for real”, but… well… that’s what everyone else says, too…
First off, Bostrom doesn’t make any guesses at what the Great Programmer wants or doesn’t want. He doesn’t give it any kind of teleological drive. He just says that this is one of three things that could be true. Saying “God is one of three possibilities but we can’t be sure” isn’t exactly an engaging meaning filled story that people can immerse themselves.
And it doesn’t really follow my stipulation that each individual life is important. Any good religion needs duties that individuals are supposed to uphold. Old religions were about bringing sacrifices. Newer religions uphold extensive ethical requirements. A god who may or may not exist who created us only to be studied and doesn’t really have commands that we should follow is not exactly a ticket out of nihilism. It’s the contemporary equivalent of deism and its straddling the line between religion and atheism never got anywhere. The Simulation Argument has potential, but it doesn’t work in its current state.
Quick question: If you believe in the Simulation Argument, do you feel like it gives your life meaning? And if you don’t, do you believe it would if you did believe in it? Bostroms argument by itself is far too academic for it to be a good religion.
This is something I have been bouncing around in my head for a while but have little confidence that it is correct. It could just be confirmation bias, arguing from too few examples, an attempt to build a theory from little evidence, etc. So, this is “pondered, not really endorsed” level. This could be absolute BS. Anyway: In modern times, does the right have a tendency to be shitty to the outgroup that the left doesn’t have, and the left a tendency to turn on itself in a way the right doesn’t?
Big Godwin-y “large scale” example: It is generally agreed that national socialism is the all-time worst manifestation of anything on the right (people do argue that the Nazis were left-wing, but I think that’s BS; an argument can be made that they were “radical centrists” or something like that, but I think, overall, that if they fall anywhere it’s on the right – in any case this is an argument for another time). It is also generally agreed that Stalin’s rule was the all-time worst manifestation of anything on the left (some say Mao, but again an argument for another time, and there are enough similarities that you could say Mao without it changing as an example).
Nazi Germany, of course, was absolutely horrible to anyone perceived as the outgroup, especially along racial/national lines. They killed 5-6 million Jews, 3 million Polish gentiles, Soviet POWs were treated monstrously as were Soviet civilians, and their planned victory would have included 30 million Soviets starved to death more or less on purpose, and that isn’t describing all the crimes committed by Germany in that time period. However, besides the Night of the Long Knives, for most of Nazi rule internal politics did not get bloody – and a couple hundred, tops, died then. This changed after the bomb plot in July of 1944, after which Hitler became quite paranoid and convinced his generals were plotting against him. Even after this, however, the absolute numbers of people killed and imprisoned were quite small (of course, throughout Nazi rule political opponents were imprisoned – mostly communists and social democrats – but they were the outgroup). Accusations of treason, hangings of deserters, etc became more and more common as the war was more and more clearly lost – although this might happen to any losing side. Main point is, though, the Nazi body count was vastly skewed towards people who were not only the outgroup, but couldn’t possibly have been the ingroup – even the number of German communists and social democrats killed or imprisoned was quite small (after all, in the last election held before the takeover was complete, the SPD and KPD together got almost a third of the vote, with over 12 million votes – it would have been impossible for the Nazis to rule and fight a war as they did without the vast, vast majority of those people falling in line behind Hitler). Instead, their victims were largely Jews and residents of lands to the east of Germany, all considered subhuman by the Nazis.
Meanwhile, Stalin’s purges in the 1930s are considered a paradigmatic example of a state turning on its own people and, in many cases, its own government officials, generals, etc. Estimates vary, but the dead alone probably numbered in the mid six to low seven figures. There were, of course, prison camps. Entire ethnic groups deemed traitorous or potentially traitorous were deported from one part of the USSR to another. Changes of authority below Stalin were far more likely to involve someone getting shot or disappeared than was the case under Hitler. Had Stalin not died when he did, it is possible that another purge would have taken place, following accusations of conspiracy beginning with (mostly Jewish) doctors. The point here is that, inversely to the above, the victims were mostly people who either were part of the ingroup, or thought they were. Being a party member in good standing – part of the ingroup – was no protection, nor was being an ordinary citizen who kept their nose clean. Perhaps a good way to put it is that someone could be transformed by fiat from a member of the ingroup to a member of the outgroup, without necessarily doing anything themselves.
OK, so, part of me thinking this is dicey and stupid is, whoa, I have a whole two historical examples. Great sample size, pack up, boys, job’s done.
However, for a far less dramatic and large-scale example, and one that involves a whole lot less invocation of historical monsters – the phrase “left-wing circular firing squad” has been coined, and I can’t think of a right-wing equivalent today. It’s not a secret that left-wing activist circles have some pretty brutal infighting, or that somebody can go from well-thought-of to disliked based on a misstep or two. Of the two people I know well who are involved in left-wing activism, both of them describe a great deal of in-fighting. From the way they describe it, it seems to take the form of personal head-butting that gets transmutated into political disagreement, with actual denunciations taking place. The people who left-wing activists are most able to hurt are … other left-wing activists.
Meanwhile, the friends of mine who are involved in right-wing politics do not describe anything like that. However, in North America, the right seems to do a fair bit more stuff nasty to small, weak, defenceless outgroups than the left, from where I’m standing at least. I can’t think of anything comparable to, say, passing laws binding people to bathrooms based on birth sex.
Does this make any sense at all? I’m already thinking of various counterexamples. I don’t really know if I have something here or not.
EDIT: Historical corrections also welcome. Particularly with regard to Stalin’s USSR, as I know a fair bit more about Nazi Germany than I do about the USSR at any point.
1) Aside from some Catholics, right-wingers explicitly think nationalism is a good thing. That might not make them more shitty to outgroups in general, but it does mean that their outgroup is very visible and consistent (namely other nations)
2) Leftism just has a wider parameter space. Unlike the right they aspire to not care about tradition, and there are more social innovations that have not been tried than have been tried. So you would expect them to disagree among themselves more.
3) But we should make sure not to be over-influenced by this particular moment in American politics. Whenever one side loses an election there is a struggle over which direction they should adapt in.
>Aside from some Catholics, right-wingers explicitly think nationalism is a good thing.
AnCaps, libertarians and en arr ex come to mind as right-wingers who are not fond of nationalism…
One also notes there are plenty of left-wingers who are fond of nationalism too.
Those groups famously don’t map very well onto the left/right axis (hence the term left-libertarian for people like Will Wilkinson). Besides, I don’t think people usually apply the stereotype that op is talking about to those groups.
Ultimately, ‘what unites the American right?’ is a vital question, because it gets us to ask, ‘what do Catholics, libertarians, neo-cons, and the other sundry members of the right have in common?’, which gets us to ask ‘what does it mean to be on the political right?’ (and for that matter, ‘what unites the left?’ and ‘what do the groups on the left have in common?’)
The political spectrum (and where various groups fall) is meaningless without some definition of left and right that can be used to compare various groups. Ideally, this is a list of traits, such as policies or values, common to most members of either side.
Ironically, I think the political right can be most accurately universally defined by a respect for tradition, although given the traditions involved will differ very heavily by the cultures involved; the traditions the modern American right is trying to maintain differ very heavily from the traditions the European right is railing against. It also suggests why various limits on immigration would be an issue for both the American and European right, as immigration poses a threat to tradition.
That being said, it also suggests limitations on the usefulness of the left-right spectrum outside a political culture, as the traditions involved vary from culture to culture. The modern American right comes from a culture where respect for individual rights and individual sovereignty IS tradition; socialist authoritarianism is not traditional to American culture.
I like to take the terms “right wing” and “left wing” back to their etymological roots. Groups like AnCaps and Libertarians map to left vs right depending on your definitions of above. At the risk of making this a semantic argument, “The use of the expression la droite (the right) became prominent in France after the restoration of the monarchy in 1815, when it was applied to the Ultra-royalists.” Extrapolating from this, from my perspective, the key of the right vs left difference is support of hierarchy/tradition on the right and opposition to hierachy/tradition on the left. From this perspective, AnCaps don’t necessarilly map well. Some AnCaps argue that a natural hierarchy will form (based on capital) and become more robust given ideal AnCap conditions (The ‘An” side of AnCap being a “reset” if you will), while some argue that their positions resolve to ultimate equality/justice or whatever their personal ideology is.
My expectation is that this perspective is also why it is argued that the Nazis are radical centrists, they establish a hierarchy of Nazis above everyone else, but then each Nazi is supposed to be equal.
Who is smaller, weaker, and more defenseless than a fetus? The left definitely does some nasty things to victims it considers subhuman as well.
They’re not really an outgroup in the sense of “group that helps define my group by contrast/opposition”. Just like whales are not an outgroup for the Japanese.
Tell Lena Dunham that.
In the first episode of “Girls” Dunham called herself the voice of her generation. It was clearly meant as a joke, but nobody ever bothered explaining that to the blogosphere. Or to the DNC.
Wait, have the Japanese attacked Lena Dunham in any way?
Aren’t they?
I see a lot of articles talking about how great being child-free is, how annoying kids are and how much better we are without them, and how overpopulation is destroying the planet. And people go to extravagant lengths to call them dehumanizing terms.
Also, I’m not sure, but I don’t think people who defend whales are treated with as much disdain in Japanese culture as people who defend fetuses are treated in leftist culture.
Godwin’s law:
people do argue that the Nazis were left-wing, but I think that’s BS;
They’re National Socialists. Calling it BS is hardly an argument when it’s facially true.
it’s the affordable care act, anyone complaining about the premiums must just be whiners
Just like anyone arguing against the Patriot Act must be unpatriotic?
ah, an actual argument! How wonderful! We progress!
Let’s look at their platform, then. Which of these do you consider not left-wing?
We demand that the State shall above all undertake to ensure that every citizen shall have the possibility of living decently and earning a livelihood.
The first duty of every citizen must be to work mentally or physically. No individual shall do any work that offends against the interest of the community to the benefit of all.
Therefore we demand:
That all unearned income, and all income that does not arise from work, be abolished.
Since every war imposes on the people fearful sacrifices in blood and treasure, all personal profit arising from the war must be regarded as treason to the people. We therefore demand the total confiscation of all war profits.
We demand the nationalization of all trusts.
We demand profit-sharing in large industries.
We demand a generous increase in old-age pensions.
We demand an agrarian reform in accordance with our national requirements, and the enactment of a law to expropriate the owners without compensation of any land needed for the common purpose. The abolition of ground rents, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.
The State has the duty to help raise the standard of national health by providing maternity welfare centers, by prohibiting juvenile labor, by increasing physical fitness through the introduction of compulsory games and gymnastics, and by the greatest possible encouragement of associations concerned with the physical education of the young.
On the other hand, Hitler ignored a whole lot of that platform, and stomped down on the Nazis who wanted an economic “second revolution” after the party seized power. Even if the committee who wrote that platform was leftist – which I agree with – the Nazis in practice still could be rightist.
Lenin implemented the New Economic Plan. did that make him a right winger?
@Evan Þ
He ignored that platform in favor of gearing up for his giant race war, because he thought he had to win that to implement the other vision. But when you look at the many and various postwar plans, none are far from that vision. Hitler purged the strasserites because he wanted to be in control, not because he really disagreed with them on economics.
@cassander, when did Hitler plan to (say) abolish unearned income or confiscate all war profits? I’ve never heard of any plans for either.
The thing is, if the Nazis had done this stuff and nothing else, they would count as Left and Hitler would be as beloved today as Roosevelt. The “national” part is the right wing part, the part that was implemented, and the part that gives the Nazis their particular rhetorical usefulness.
(Except for paragraph 4, that is like the opposite of the leftist goal. It just sounds leftist cus it has the word ‘community’ in it.)
Except for paragraph 4, that is like the opposite of the leftist goal. It just sounds leftist cus it has the word ‘community’ in it.
Paragraph 4: The first duty of every citizen must be to work mentally or physically. No individual shall do any work that offends against the interest of the community to the benefit of all.
It may not be compatible with the modern Western democratic left, but is it any different than what you’d find in any of the other self-described Socialist states of the early and mid 20th century (such as the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba, or North Korea)? Many of those had some kind of forced labor programs.
The problem with ‘the Nazis were nationalist, that makes them right-wing’ is that starting with Stalin, a lot of the self-described communist states were just as nationalist. You can see it very heavily in the ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ of China and in the Juche of North Korea.
@Mary:
The Nazi program prior to getting in power is “whatever will get people to vote for us”. Hitler was very good at adjusting his rhetoric depending who he was giving a speech to. Example: Albert Speer, prior to his joining the party, went to a Hitler speech expecting a ranting demagogue in uniform, and was surprised when he got (what he said was a – Speer was not a trustworthy witness) a fairly calm speech, with no reference to the Jews or anything, by a guy in a suit.
The Nazis, prior to getting into power, played up the socialist side when appealing to the lower and lower middle classes, played up the anti-Semitism when appealing to anti-Semites, played up the notion that Germany had been stabbed in the back at home instead of defeated on the field of battle when appealing to embittered former soldiers, and played up the anti-Communism when appealing to the affluent classes.
Hitler got into power in large part because the affluent classes and the aristocratic classes, heavily conservative, believed that he was a bulwark against the left they could use and then discard. They were wrong. If the Nazis had actually been socialists, it is highly unlikely that they would have been viewed as a bulwark against socialism.
Once in power, the Nazis were flying by the seat of their pants. They didn’t nationalize all industries, they did not confiscate investment income, they did not confiscate war profits…
By way of analogy: is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea democratic?
Hitler was seen as a bulwark against revolutionary socialism, as in putting kulaks up against the wall and shooting them. This was real fear at the time because there had been that sort of revolution in 1918. Hitler’s socialism was trying to carve out the same political space as Bismarck’s.
You say the Nazis didn’t nationalize all industries. Nationalizing any seems pretty socialist to me.
I’d put the test this way: did they move Germany towards more or less socialism economically? (I don’t know the answer.)
The economy in Nazi Germany was like social democracy, but paid for through plunder. If you were a German of the right racial stock, you could get a lot of bennies, based on theft and slave labour. Germans on the home front didn’t feel the material pinch very much until early 1944, by some accounts.
A war footing usually necessitates far tighter state control over industry than is the case in peacetime. To some extent, pre-war Nazi economic policy can be seen as going on a war footing without a war. Can Churchill be considered a socialist?
Well, Churchill brought Attlee into his cabinet and let him decide a lot of domestic policy, so if you look only at results…
Arguing who are more Nazi like, the left or right, is bound to be a very fruitful and engaging discussion.
That’s too bad. “My outgroup: threat or menace?” is the commentariat’s favorite topic of discussion.
The Left, generally speaking, is a group of people who agree on an idea that justifies them seizing power. When they win, they don’t go about implementing the idea in any realistic or successful way because they’re mostly complaining about reality*. Complaining about reality is great in one sense because you’ll never run out of things to complain about but once you seize power, there’s nothing you can do to change it. Once power is seized, leftist turn on each other because they have no traditional structure or hierarchy that allows people to coexist**. Since they’re all in it for the power, they start murdering each other in the name of whatever leftist cause they organized under – Jim’s theory of the leftist singularity.
The right either opposes the left or is about tradition – tradition works quite well. Opposing the left can look quite bad because of the problem of identifying the left.
* As far as I can tell, the left consists of factions that either object to: 1) racial differences 2) differences between the sexes 3) the laws of economics – mostly that wages will equal marginal productivity in the long run but not limited to that. They also object to supply and demand in housing markets. The one major missing item from my list is the environmentalist left. The environmentalist left isn’t fundamentally opposed to reality but has no end goal so is perfect for leftism – can always demand less and less human impact on the Earth because people breathe.
** Existing structures and hierarchies, whatever else you might think about them, have the virtue of existing – which means they don’t totally collapse your society. There’s no such guarantee with the year zero program of rewriting whatever.
That’s how you tell the Left apart from all those other political groups, who don’t agree on an idea that justifies them seizing [sic] power.
Well yeah.
If your revolutionary banner is “overthrow the system for x” then you’re likely on the left.
If your revolutionary banner is “our leader is the rightful king and the current king is a usurper” you’re likely on the right.
There’s a clear divide between the two.
If your banner is “oust the leadership because they’re a foreign occupier (or they side with foreigners)” then you could be on the left or right.
To justify your original stink bomb, the converse would have to be true: “If you’re on the left, you’ve likely got ‘overthrow the system for x’ for your revolutionary banner.” Which it isn’t, which is why they spend their time trying to win elections instead of trying to seize power.
Cerebral Paul Z.
The American context is a bit different. The original question was “why does the left turn on each other when the right mostly doesn’t?” and my explanation was suited to that context.
A different context where the left hasn’t turned on each other doesn’t contradict my point. The American left mostly doesn’t advocate for revolutionary structural change and rightist critiques of the American / Anglo left say that the left advocates for stealthy revolutionary structural change in the guise of keeping the system intact.
Maybe take it up with the questioner as to why the American / Anglo left hasn’t turned into a circular firing squad.
I think it’s fair to say that what the left advocates in America is a lot closer to revolutionary structural change than what the right advocates, even if purist leftists will say that it isn’t revolutionary enough to count.
Also, leftist tactics in the US harken back to people who did want revolutionary structural change, and their tactics can still be the type of tactics most suited for that even if their goals no longer are.
@Jiro: which people and which tactics? Asking honestly here.
The ones calling for revolutionary structural changes and revolutions in every part of society?
You can see in this very thread people calling for “fundamental shifts” in everything from gender to working for a living.
@ TenMinute:
I searched this page for the word ‘revolution’ and was unable to find anyone advocating for one. The phrase “fundamental shifts” only appears in your own comment, but in any case I want to focus on violent revolution rather than fundamental shifts.
You are also not literally answering my question, unless you are saying “both the modern left and revolutionary leftist movements have used the tactic of calling for things.” This is not just hair-splitting: I read Jiro’s second paragraph as saying “by their tactics shall ye know them, no matter what they claim their goals to be” so the distinction between goals and tactics is important here.
SJWs especially. The public shaming, the no-platforming, the boycotts and attempts to get people fired from their jobs, among others.
The reason the right doesn’t do more complaining about reality is because the right, generally speaking, has grown too psychotic to know what reality is anymore:
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2016/05/gop-quickly-unifies-around-trump-clinton-still-has-modest-lead.html
–65% of Trump supporters believe that Obama is a Muslim (only 13% think he’s Christian)
–59% of Trump supporters believe that Obama was not born in the United States (only 23% think he was)
https://today.yougov.com/news/2016/12/27/belief-conspiracies-largely-depends-political-iden/
–62% of Trump voters believe that millions of illegal votes were cast in the election
–46% of Trump voters buy into the Pizzagate conspiracy theory
It’s sad, I used to think that the right was something more than a festering mass of delusions. Maybe I was always imagining that, though.
As someone who’d be part of that 87% if asked that question, let me clarify: I agree that Obama claims to be Christian, and that he does not practice any other religion. Perhaps he even believes those claims himself. I do not, however, think he has a real relationship with Jesus Christ.
The utility of this definition in the real world can, of course, be debated – especially when 65% of Trump voters apparently have a different understanding of how Obama is not a Christian…
I don’t think anyone has a real relationship with Jesus Christ, does that mean I should say that no one is a Christian? Obama is clearly a Christian by any normal standard, even if you disagree with him on some finer points of faith.
It’s clear that he claims to be a Christian.
Being viewed as a Christian is pretty clearly a positive for almost all American politicians, so the fact that one claims to be Christian is not strong evidence that he is.
Yeah, I never got that aspect of the argument. I guess you can say he became a devout Christian before he went into politics (did he? that’s worth looking into), but once he got into politics? If you’re at all serious about it, you are going to become a Christian. Personally, I just assume Obama’s generalised progressivism leads him to sympathise with Muslims irrationally, as progressives are wont to do. “All those other dumb people are incapable of this, only I can truly understand Islam” is I think the rationale behind this. Though that could be projection.
-P.S. given his reverend’s extreme political views, it might not be a function of signaling – if I was going to pick my religious habits to match my ambitions, I wouldn’t touch someone that radioactive. Then again, maybe it helped him in early Chicago politics? This line of argument really could use some more background information, too bad the conservative press never took their arguments seriously enough to provide it.
“I do not, however, think he [Obama] has a real relationship with Jesus Christ.”
So far as I know, only some Christians think of that as an essential part of being Christian.
It sounds Protestant to me. I’ve never heard it from anyone but Chick-brand heretics. Given that Obama claims to be a Protestant of some variety, it is relevant.
I know of at least 2 atheist Protestant ministers, here is one of them.
Protestant, atheist and a woman too. Man, these folks don’t go light on the heresy.
For a less-personal response…
Consider that the media, in general, has a clear liberal bias – or, at least, is perceived that way in conservative circles. It’s covered up or minimized stories before, or portrayed them in twisted ways. So, people might conclude, why mightn’t it be doing this with other things?
Throw into this pot how Obama really did act suspiciously when he refused to release his birth certificate for several years, as we’ve discussed in other open threads before…
Of course, the particular ideas you mention at the very least have near-zero evidence for them. But few people know how to, or have the time to, do a real investigation on their own. Without any media they trust, is it really a surprise they’d land in this boat?
Obama released his birth certificate in 2008. The belief that he “act[ed] suspiciously” is part of the delusion.
Conservatives do trust some media– it is not as though each Trump supporter independently arrived at the conclusion that Obama is a Kenyan Muslim. The problem is that most conservatives are profoundly incompetent at determining which media outlets are reliable and which not, so they trust worldnetdaily or whomever over the New York Times. Those complaining about the “liberal media” are not, in general, skeptical or critical, they are gullible fools who turn to trashy tabloids because they are angry that most mainstream media organizations won’t tell them the lies they want to hear.
If your argument contains the premise that the New York Times is reliable, then it needs revising.
Most outlets considered “reliable” long ago decided to bias themselves. Then, of course, the argument is “there’s no bias, all the reliable people just agree with us!”. Until, as we saw recently, the bias starts leading to fatal errors. So conservatives are stuck between a rock and a hard place…but when it comes to the media, so are we all. Maybe we always were.
@ anonEEmous: as far as I’m aware the NYT is reliable so long as you skip the opinion pages and don’t assume it’s telling you everything. Like if it says someone was murdered then yeah, they probably were. It does weird stuff like not using the word ‘torture’ for torture, but it’s still at least technically accurate.
As I recall, there have been some recent and seriously questionable pieces. Let’s kick it off with this:
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2015/07/25/nail-salons-new-york-times-got-wrong/
Feel free to dig as deep into this topic as you want, there’s a lot there.
Then you’ve got this piece
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/us/politics/donald-trump-women.html?_r=0
which was not only a Trump hitpiece, but actually inspired one of the women quoted in the article, in fact one of the more important pieces of the article period, to step in
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/05/16/new-york-times-trump-women-rowanne-brewer-lane/84435570/
“The New York Times told us several times that they would make sure my story that I was telling came across, they promised several times that they would do it accurately, they told me several times and my manager several times that it would not be a hit piece and that my story would come across the way that I was telling it and honestly and it absolutely was not,” Brewer Lane said. “They did take quotes from what I said and they put a negative connotation on it. They spun it to where it appeared negative. I did not have a negative experience with Donald Trump.”
Brewer Lane dated Trump and said that the presumptive Republican nominee “never made me feel like I was being demeaned in any way, he never offended me in any way.”
“Obviously they feel like they need to do something to make him look bad or go along with their article,” Brewer Lane said.
And we’re just talking about outright falsehoods, not even bias – which Liz Spayd, public editor to the NYT, has even acknowledged.
http://hotair.com/archives/2016/12/06/ny-times-public-editor-under-fire-for-criticizing-the-papers-liberal-bias/
you can also read any of her editorials on the subject – I think she kind of stops short from admitting it, but it’s pretty clear what’s going on here.
Or we could talk about this:
“Historically, the Los Angeles Times, where I worked twice, for instance, was a reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper. Most editors wanted to know, every day, before the first morning meeting: “What are you hearing? What have you got?”
It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.”
And this is just the stuff I know about.
Here’s the NYT’s defense of its story on the nail salons:
http://www.nytco.com/rebuttal-to-the-nybrs-article-on-nyt-nail-salon-series/
It looks to me like the Times has the better of it.
—
Brewer Lane seems to be complaining that, even though the New York Times got every factual detail of her account right and quoted her correctly, they portrayed her experience with Trump in a way that sounds demeaning and negative, which, she believes, it was not.
Do you really want to rest your case against the Times on this? Given that we now know that Trump is a sexual predator, the Times’s reporting on Brewer seems awfully prescient. It is certainly possible that Trump’s behavior towards Brewer was demeaning, even if she does not think it was.
—
Look at what you are doing here: you distrust the New York Times, but don’t exhibit the slightest bit of doubt or skepticism when it comes to criticisms of the New York Times. This is how the delusion takes hold.
They didn’t even bother addressing the point that the Times equated undocumented and unlicensed workers to the industry. They also didn’t bother addressing the point that the Times published a contradictory article elsewhere, or that the low pay was a temporary situation and that the woman earned much more a few months later.
That makes “this was demeaning” unfalsifiable, as well as denying the agency of the woman involved.
I think you should learn about Gish gallops. That list is too long to rebut in detail, trying to make up for poor quality claims with quantity.
I don’t see why. If Trump walks up to a total stranger and gropes her, as he often does, what he’s done is demeaning even if the victim does not believe that it is. I do not think that whether behavior counts as demeaning or not depends on the mental states of the person being demeaned.
We’ve been over this. A dozen women accusing Trump of non-consensual kissing or groping is strong evidence that Trump is, indeed, a sexual predator. This is true no matter what you think a gish gallop is.
“Here’s the NYT’s defense of its story on the nail salons:
http://www.nytco.com/rebuttal-to-the-nybrs-article-on-nyt-nail-salon-series/
It looks to me like the Times has the better of it.”
ctrl+f “Tips”: 0 results
https://reason.com/blog/2015/10/27/new-york-times-nail-salon-unvarnished
ctrl+F “Tips”: 11 results
“Also, Nir’s report doesn’t discuss gratuities. In fact, nowhere does the Times coverage attempt to gauge average daily tips in the industry or what workers actually take home in total compensation.
This is like writing a 7,000-word piece on what waiters make for a living but focusing only on base compensation. “There should have been several paragraphs on the subject,” says Aiming Feng, the accountant and business consultant who counts about 50 nail salons as clients. (Feng also volunteers once a week at once a week at the Lin Sing Association, a social service organization in Manhattan’s Chinatown, where he helps manicurists with legal and tax issues.)”
The NYT hasn’t even begun to address the most obvious criticism, probably because they can’t. Better to do as all good journalists and ignore it in hopes it goes away. Hell, it’s what I’d do, were I them.
Brewer Lane seems to be complaining that, even though the New York Times got every factual detail of her account right and quoted her correctly, they portrayed her experience with Trump in a way that sounds demeaning and negative, which, she believes, it was not.
“But the 1990 episode at Mar-a-Lago that Ms. Brewer Lane described was different: a debasing face-to-face encounter between Mr. Trump and a young woman he hardly knew.”
They went far beyond “portrayal”. And there is absolutely no reason for you to say that Brewer Lane “believes” it was not, because those words are entirely subjective, meaning that the belief is the thing. In other words, you’re doing the exact same thing the Times was doing; you presuppose the feelings of others to the point that you manage to contradict their lived experience. Don’t you think that’s a serious, serious problem for a journalist? Can you really just play it off like that, especially when it happens to align with a goal many believe the NYT to have, namely bashing Donald Trump?
Apparently you think that groping is always demeaning, which really just illustrates the point; some enjoy being “demeaned”. You’d prefer to render out-of-bounds even groping these people, because you personally think they’re wrong…on a matter of personal taste.
“Do you really want to rest your case against the Times on this? Given that we now know that Trump is a sexual predator, the Times’s reporting on Brewer seems awfully prescient. It is certainly possible that Trump’s behavior towards Brewer was demeaning, even if she does not think it was.”
I hadn’t realised that accusations had become proof.
Seriously, your harping on this topic has really lowered my opinion of you. Make a fool of yourself if you want, but that IS what you are doing.
“Look at what you are doing here: you distrust the New York Times, but don’t exhibit the slightest bit of doubt or skepticism when it comes to criticisms of the New York Times. This is how the delusion takes hold.”
And yet upon further inspection, the criticisms of the New York Times remain as valid as ever.
You see, Earthly Knight, I don’t doubt or skepticise. Instead, I read one side, and I read the other. The New York Times has no defense for these criticisms; I can tell, because despite said criticisms being leveled by prominent outlets which the New York Times could not possibly have missed, they have totally failed to answer the key points – at best, they pretend that said key points don’t exist at all. Maybe you should try doing the same thing; though I suppose implying all of your opponents are delusional is much in the same vein of argument. Good day, sir.
The Reason article concedes that many starting nail salon workers– “apprentices”– are paid nothing. This is illegal no matter what they earn in tips.
Please, tell me more about how it’s okay to walk up to strangers and grope them if they turn out not to object to it.
Generally, when a dozen people testify that someone committed a crime, most people take this to be strong evidence that the person is guilty. Do you think that we can never be confident that someone is guilty of a crime solely on the basis of the testimony?
“The Reason article concedes that many starting nail salon workers– “apprentices”– are paid nothing. This is illegal no matter what they earn in tips.”
Are we expected to believe that the key issue here was violation of city statutes rather then abuse of nail salon workers? Do you really think anyone would care if nail salon workers make above minimum wage, but are technically violating the law by doing so? Or was this supposed to be an expose of New York’s failure to accommodate tips-based reimbursement? No matter what the case, the fact that they don’t mention tips in either the original piece, and the rebuttal to the rebuttal, is pretty clear evidence that they don’t want to touch that issue with a ten-foot pole. And seriously, if you have any reservations about this “expose” exposing anything other than the NYT’s incompetence and bias, read the Reason article I linked. I’ll wait.
“Please, tell me more about how it’s okay to walk up to strangers and grope them if they turn out not to object to it.”
Actually, my argument was that it was not necessarily demeaning; to try and explain that actually, just because you think something is demeaning, doesn’t mean someone – like, say, Rowanne Brewer Lane – might not disagree with you entirely. Unfortunately, this means that you’re right back where you started – disrespecting the lived experiences of women to try and make a cheap political point. Sad!
“Generally, when a dozen people testify that someone committed a crime, most people take this to be strong evidence that the person is guilty. Do you think that we can never be confident that someone is guilty of a crime solely on the basis of the testimony?”
That’s because it’s usually the same crime. It’s a neat trick, to lump in those two situations on the basis that “sexual assault” is the crime accused. But that’s not how it works, sorry to say D:
It’s funny that you say that. Here’s the original article:
“She would work for no wages, subsisting on meager tips, until her boss decided she was skillful enough to merit a wage.”
“Workers endure all manner of humiliation, including having their tips docked as punishment for minor transgressions, constant video monitoring by owners, even physical abuse.”
“Employers in New York are permitted to pay such workers slightly less than the state’s $8.75 minimum hourly wage, based on a complex calculation of how much a worker is making in tips. But interviews with scores of workers revealed rates of pay so low that the so-called tip calculation is virtually meaningless. None reported receiving supplemental pay from their bosses, as is legally required when their day’s tips fall short of the minimum wage.”
“Tips or wages are often skimmed or never delivered, or deducted as punishment for things like spilled bottles of polish.”
“Non-Korean manicurists are often forced into less desirable jobs in the boroughs outside Manhattan or even farther out from the city, where customers are typically fewer and tips often paltry.”
“Her sole income was a few dollars a day in tips, but she was meticulous, tabulating each banana and even her first ice cream from a chiming truck.”
Have you considered that it is you, and not the New York Times, who is actually unreliable here?
That’s how it started! But then you went too far and said: “You’d prefer to render out-of-bounds even groping these people, because you personally think they’re wrong…on a matter of personal taste.”
I would, indeed, prefer to render groping strangers “out-of-bounds” even in the unlikely event that the stranger happens to enjoy it. I want to get you on record on this: do you think it is morally permissible to walk up to strangers and grope them if the stranger turns out to be okay with it?
Can you explain why you think that someone who is accused of twelve crimes by twelve eyewitnesses is substantially less likely to be guilty than someone who is accused of one crime by twelve eyewitnesses? I do not think most people would find the distinction important, but it seems like your defense of Trump hinges on it.
http://www.cjr.org/investigation/new_york_times_nail_salon_investigation.php
Here’s the Columbia Journalism Review’s take on the nail salon imbroglio. It criticizes the Reason piece and suggests that the conclusions in the original Times expose were overstated but basically accurate.
“It’s funny that you say that. Here’s the original article:”
OK, I stand corrected. Instead, they simply write sentences like this:
“The New York Times interviewed more than 150 nail salon workers and owners, in four languages, and found that a vast majority of workers are paid below minimum wage; sometimes they are not even paid.”
without attempting to calculate if those workers have, in fact, been paid above the minimum wage in tips.
“She would work for no wages, subsisting on meager tips, until her boss decided she was skillful enough to merit a wage.”
Which discusses a case of an apprenticeship, who as the Reason article explains never worked with any actual customers. But I’m willing to admit that, in that case, the tips would be meager.
“Workers endure all manner of humiliation, including having their tips docked as punishment for minor transgressions, constant video monitoring by owners, even physical abuse.”
So she’s willing to mention tips being taken away, but not how large these tips are. Point : stands.
“Employers in New York are permitted to pay such workers slightly less than the state’s $8.75 minimum hourly wage, based on a complex calculation of how much a worker is making in tips. But interviews with scores of workers revealed rates of pay so low that the so-called tip calculation is virtually meaningless. None reported receiving supplemental pay from their bosses, as is legally required when their day’s tips fall short of the minimum wage.”
Finally, she approaches the issue of how large tips are, only to decide that actually, making that calculation is “virtually meaningless”.
“Tips or wages are often skimmed or never delivered, or deducted as punishment for things like spilled bottles of polish.”
Again: how large are they?
“Non-Korean manicurists are often forced into less desirable jobs in the boroughs outside Manhattan or even farther out from the city, where customers are typically fewer and tips often paltry.”
How paltry?
“Her sole income was a few dollars a day in tips, but she was meticulous, tabulating each banana and even her first ice cream from a chiming truck.”
Uh, this isn’t even about nails. Did you read any of this, or just c/p every sentence with the word “tips” in it?
“That’s how it started! But then you went too far and said: “You’d prefer to render out-of-bounds even groping these people, because you personally think they’re wrong…on a matter of personal taste.””
“I would, indeed, prefer to render groping strangers “out-of-bounds” even in the unlikely event that the stranger happens to enjoy it. I want to get you on record on this: do you think it is morally permissible to walk up to strangers and grope them if the stranger turns out to be okay with it?”
I was discussing the idea that a non-stranger might enjoy it, because I had first assumed we were talking about the actual case in question. But yes, I am perfectly willing to disavow groping of strangers, which I now see you brought up for…questionable reasons. The next four years are going to be fun ones for you, I can already tell…
“Can you explain why you think that someone who is accused of twelve crimes by twelve eyewitnesses is substantially less likely to be guilty than someone who is accused of one crime by twelve eyewitnesses? I do not think most people would find the distinction important, but it seems like your defense of Trump hinges on it.”
Do you actually not understand how that works? It’s a pretty basic function of statistics, you know.
“http://www.cjr.org/investigation/new_york_times_nail_salon_investigation.php
Here’s the Columbia Journalism Review’s take on the nail salon imbroglio. It criticizes the Reason piece and suggests that the conclusions in the original Times expose were overstated but basically accurate.”
I read that, ctrl+F for “tips” turned up zero results, and I decided not to waste my time even bringing it up. I mean, look at this:
“After hearing Cuomo on TV, Carmen saw changes at her current salon. Her pay increased from $60 for a 10-hour day to $75 for an eight-hour one.”
But how much was she being paid in tips? Who knows? Is she making less now that she’s working 8 hours and not 10, due to tips? Who knows? Why ask? It’s so much easier to just leave that out.
Moreover, the accusation that Reason’s piece hinges on the testimony of interested experts seems weak. Many of the refutations of the Times’ claims are accompanied by uninterested participants or rock-solid reasoning as to why the original claim made no sense.
“Have you considered that it is you, and not the New York Times, who is actually unreliable here?”
Absolutely! But the available evidence has led me to discard that hypothesis.
Your original complaint was that the Times expose failed even to discuss tips. If true, this would be a serious oversight, but you concede now that you were mistaken. In fact, the Times article reported in detail on numerous salon workers who were illegally underpaid by their owners, many of them taking home earnings below the minimum wage even when tips are included.
Your new complaint is that the Times journalist failed to collect systematic data on worker’s net take home pay, i.e. that the journalist failed to carry out a small-scale study on salon worker’s wages. This is correct, but it is not a serious objection, because the author of the article is an investigative journalist, not a social scientist, and undoubtedly lacks the resources to conduct the kind of study you envision. It also does nothing to support your original charge the New York Times is unreliable. Hence, your case against the New York Times fails.
Okay, so you do think that groping strangers is wrong in all circumstances. Do you think it is also demeaning under all circumstances?
You’ve gotten lots of pretty basic things wrong already, so I’m not going to take your word for it.
“Your original complaint was that the Times expose failed even to discuss tips. If true, this would be a serious oversight, but you concede now that you were mistaken. In fact, the Times article reported in detail on numerous salon workers who were illegally underpaid by their owners, many of them taking home earnings below the minimum wage even when tips are included.”
The issue here being that the Times only discusses tips when talking about owner abuses. When discussing base compensation, one of the key parts of the article, the writer actually comes out and says “it’s not even worth doing so I’m not going to”, all while asserting that the tips didn’t make up for the base pay. How would she know? Well, apparently she had spreadsheets on the 100 or so workers she interviewed with the wage data; when asked by the writer of the Reason article, she refused to supply said spreadsheets. Hmm…
“Your new complaint is that the Times journalist failed to collect systematic data on worker’s net take home pay, i.e. that the journalist failed to carry out a small-scale study on salon worker’s wages. This is correct, but it is not a serious objection, because the author of the article is an investigative journalist, not a social scientist, and undoubtedly lacks the resources to conduct the kind of study you envision. It also does nothing to support your original charge the New York Times is unreliable. Hence, your case against the New York Times fails.”
No, my complaint is that she ran an expose on workers being mistreated, and argued that they were being underpaid, while totally failing to discuss a serious source of income. There are many other things wrong with the piece as well, as the Reason article explains, but I doubt you’ll actually engage with that piece – if anything, it’s just there for third parties to see what’s wrong with the New York Times.
“Okay, so you do think that groping strangers is wrong in all circumstances. Do you think it is also demeaning under all circumstances?”
It’s a Schrodinger’s box; the conduct may reflect poorly of you in all cases, but whether or not something is demeaning can only be determined by the person being “demeaned”. You can argue that it’s conduct meant to be demeaning and that the actor is almost certainly aware of this, or something along those lines. But the receiver of the act is the only one with any right to judge.
I do not understand why you are still saying this when you have already conceded that it is false. The article discussed tips extensively, for instance:
Employers in New York are permitted to pay such workers slightly less than the state’s $8.75 minimum hourly wage, based on a complex calculation of how much a worker is making in tips. But interviews with scores of workers revealed rates of pay so low that the so-called tip calculation is virtually meaningless. None reported receiving supplemental pay from their bosses, as is legally required when their day’s tips fall short of the minimum wage.”
As far as I can tell, your only real objection here is that the author did not systematically collect data on wages and present summary statistics. But your charge was that the Times was unreliable, not that its stories lacked scientific rigor, which should come as no surprise, it being a newspaper and all.
I see. So in your view, M demeans N only if N believes M’s conduct to be demeaning?
“I do not understand why you are still saying this when you have already conceded that it is false. The article discussed tips extensively, for instance:”
Employers in New York are permitted to pay such workers slightly less than the state’s $8.75 minimum hourly wage, based on a complex calculation of how much a worker is making in tips. But interviews with scores of workers revealed rates of pay so low that the so-called tip calculation is virtually meaningless. None reported receiving supplemental pay from their bosses, as is legally required when their day’s tips fall short of the minimum wage.”
let’s run that back again
“But interviews with scores of workers revealed rates of pay so low that the so-called tip calculation is virtually meaningless.”
Or in other words, she’s not even going to check if that’s…actually true or not. She’s certainly not laid out any individual examples of such, and when asked specifically for what data she did have confirming any of this, she refused to give it. In the rest of the article, she doesn’t bring up tips as compensation, while citing many different types of jobs with many differing types of compensation. Throughout the article, she goes on to do this constantly. So…yes, this is a big issue. As noted in the Reason article, sometimes tips are as much or more than base compensation, meaning that they could easily outpace minimum wage.
by the way:
“To gauge the average pay for manicurists, Nir might have turned first to the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The agency reported that in 2014, manicurists in New York’s metropolitan area earned an average hourly wage of $9.19 per hour. It also reports an annual mean wage of $19,110.”
Given that said author was also apparently willing to misquote both written advertisements, and quite likely certain people as well…yeah, not looking very good on her front. Well, them’s the breaks when you’re an unreliable organization.
“As far as I can tell, your only real objection here is that the author did not systematically collect data on wages and present summary statistics. But your charge was that the Times was unreliable, not that its stories lacked scientific rigor, which should come as no surprise, it being a newspaper and all.”
No, the objection is that an entirely relevant point is left almost completely un-discussed, except in one lone paragraph where the author argues that the calculations are almost meaningless. This, despite the fact that many workers and those with knowledge in the field disagree. Why can’t she at least come up with a couple examples of women, take their base pay and tip pay, and tell us what it is?
“I see. So in your view, M demeans N only if N believes M’s conduct to be demeaning?”
Yes. You may argue that his intent is to demean N, and be offended by that, and think him to be a bad person, and so on and so forth. But demeaning is in the eye of the receiver.
Rather, some of her former interview subjects claim she misquoted them. It is possible she did, but it is also possible that they are lying due to the enormous amount of bad publicity they received in the wake of the article’s publication, or, in the case of workers, because their bosses pressured them to lie.
So your new objection is that she only gave qualitative assessments of worker’s pay– “meager,” “paltry,” “a few dollars a day”– when she should have given precise dollar figures? And this is what shows that the New York Times is unreliable?
Suppose that Sally’s “friend” Frank takes surreptitious photos of her while she is in the bathroom, which he later posts to the internet. She does not believe that Frank has demeaned her, because she knows nothing about what he’s done. Can I take it that you think Frank’s actions are in no way demeaning?
Or, suppose that Mark, who is not very bright, tries to tell a joke in front of a circle of his acquaintances, but botches the delivery rather badly. His acquaintances all start laughing at his ineptitude, but he falsely believes they are laughing with him, not at him. In your view, Mark is also not being demeaned?
Or, suppose that when Mary’s partner is angry he emotionally abuses her, calling her a bitch and a whore and a pig and so on, but Mary interprets his behavior as a sign of how much he loves her and fears losing her. In your opinion, Mary, too, is not being demeaned?
Looks like this argument is almost over. Good thing too – this thread’s pretty old by now.
“Rather, some of her former interview subjects claim she misquoted them. It is possible she did, but it is also possible that they are lying due to the enormous amount of bad publicity they received in the wake of the article’s publication, or, in the case of workers, because their bosses pressured them to lie.”
The problem is that, just to take one case, a former worker also said that she was misquoted. Additionally, as pointed out, one of the big guys with an incentive to lie, the director of a nail salon association, also had no reason to insult his own membership to begin with.
“So your new objection is that she only gave qualitative assessments of worker’s pay– “meager,” “paltry,” “a few dollars a day”– when she should have given precise dollar figures? And this is what shows that the New York Times is unreliable?”
No, it’s that she only gave those assessments in a couple of instances, while continually discussing different wages – and in most cases, failing to cite tips. Had she cited tips, most people would have noticed that, actually, most people in the industry were being paid at or above minimum wage, and then she wouldn’t really have much a story. Sad!
“Suppose that Sally’s “friend” Frank takes surreptitious photos of her while she is in the bathroom, which he later posts to the internet. She does not believe that Frank has demeaned her, because she knows nothing about what he’s done. Can I take it that you think Frank’s actions are in no way demeaning?”
Yes, a lack of knowledge may lead to an awkward situation where, if someone had the knowledge, they would feel demeaned. However, another sly feminist trick is to assume lack of knowledge, when in reality the knowledge is had, or the situation is not as they had assumed, and the person is fine with it. If you want to go back to discussing the specific situation – you know, where the person “demeaned” explained explicitly that she hadn’t been demeaned – then be my absolute guest. But I think doing so just exposes the problem – she felt very strongly that nothing demeaning was going on, but feminists believed that there was, because they think they have insight into the male psyche, “male gaze”, and other such. So they believed that she was being demeaned without knowing it, and she understood that she wasn’t. Or maybe we should say she believed she wasn’t, because who can ever really know what’s going on in the other person’s mind? However, absent some serious, rock-hard proof of what’s going on in someone else’s mind, speculating based on your own personal beliefs about gender relations is a sure way to get people to consider you…shall we say, unreliable?
Sure he did, if what he said was true. People sometimes tell the truth even when it is not in their best interest to do so, you know.
So, in your view, newspapers should not report on illegal mistreatment of workers unless “most people in the industry” are being mistreated? And if they do, this makes them unreliable?
You didn’t answer any of my questions! We want to know whether it is true, as you claimed earlier, that no one is demeaned unless they believe they are being demeaned. Are the people in the scenarios I described being demeaned, or not?
“Sure he did, if what he said was true. People sometimes tell the truth even when it is not in their best interest to do so, you know.”
Yes, and people who have been found to have mis-translated other sources with no reason to lie, sometimes mis-translate those that do. Surely you can admit that’s more likely than the owner of an association trashing his entire membership? Oh, and the corrected statement he makes matches up with what the Bureau of Labor Statistics thinks. You can read their statistics anytime you’d like. What about the writer of the article’s personal spreadsheet of statistics? Well we’ve been over that: not available. Sad!
“So, in your view, newspapers should not report on illegal mistreatment of workers unless “most people in the industry” are being mistreated? And if they do, this makes them unreliable?”
Again, the problem is that she was mostly talking about low wages…while excluding the discussion of tips. If she just wanted to talk about other illegal mistreatment of workers, she would’ve had a much shorter piece, and since all she had was some scattered incidents, no one would have given a shit. So she had to talk about all the people being cruelly underpaid, except they weren’t. Oops!
“You didn’t answer any of my questions!”
A lack of reading comprehension is a sad thing.
“We want to know whether it is true, as you claimed earlier, that no one is demeaned unless they believe they are being demeaned. Are the people in the scenarios I described being demeaned, or not?”
So again I’ll explain: they are in a situation where, if they had full knowledge, they might feel demeaned, and thus be demeaned. But they did not have this knowledge. Because of this situation, many people will interpret it in many different ways, but I will still say that, no, you can’t be demeaned if you do not feel that you have been. Moreover, it all hinges on a matter of knowledge and opinion, and again, this is usually where feminists will slip on their feminist lenses and spot slights that do not exist. (For example, they might say that we “know” someone is a sexual predator, when said person has not been convicted of sexual assault). That’s why feminism, as an ideology, produces unreliable sources…thus, the New York Times.
The NYT attributed a quotation to someone, he subsequently denied having said it, and you, because of your hostility to the Times, have chosen to believe the source rather than the reporter. You were supposed to be providing evidence that the Times is unreliable, but it sounds to me like all you have to go on is tendentious speculation.
You keep repeating the same falsehood. Here, again, are the parts of the article which show your claim is incorrect:
“Employers in New York are permitted to pay such workers slightly less than the state’s $8.75 minimum hourly wage, based on a complex calculation of how much a worker is making in tips. But interviews with scores of workers revealed rates of pay so low that the so-called tip calculation is virtually meaningless. None reported receiving supplemental pay from their bosses, as is legally required when their day’s tips fall short of the minimum wage.”
“Non-Korean manicurists are often forced into less desirable jobs in the boroughs outside Manhattan or even farther out from the city, where customers are typically fewer and tips often paltry.”
Man, you sure are reluctant to give a straight answer! Are the people in the scenarios I described being demeaned, or no?
That’s trivia about minor stuff that you and I will never know with certainty – the best evidence you could in theory dredge up would be eyewitness testimony. Sure, he was born in Hawaii, who cares? (Although his book publisher did mention in his promotional bio that he was born in Kenya so there is some sense that those on the left really really like the idea of him being foreign born – publisher bios are built to sell books after all.)
On the other hand left delusions are things like
1) Only 22.5% of people believe that blacks are less intelligent than white – this is a factual question with a right answer and that’s not it.
2) Only 33.2% of people believe that blacks are more criminal than whites
etc.
Trump supporters do better on these measurements but not all that well either.
http://thesource.com/2016/06/30/new-poll-trump-supporters-think-blacks-are-less-intelligent-more-lazy-and-violent-than-whites/
That’s major major stuff that has very important implications that has been drowned in lies – that’s a festering mess of delusion.
The evidence that Obama was born in Hawaii and is not in any sense a Muslim is incomparably stronger than the evidence for just about any hypothesis about the nature of human intelligence. As, I might add, is the evidence that Clinton’s top aides are not running a child molestation ring out of a DC pizza joint.
Think about what you’re saying here. The chance that Obama– who has been baptized, goes to church fairly regularly, and speaks often of his faith in Jesus– is a secret Muslim can’t be more than, what, one in ten thousand? One in one hundred thousand? Are you really 99.99% certain that your pet racial theories will turn out to be right?
This, too, is a part of the delusional world the right has constructed for itself.
“You’re undoubtedly aware of the brouhaha stirred up by Breitbart about the erroneous statement in a client list Acton & Dystel published in 1991 (for circulation within the publishing industry only) that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me — an agency assistant at the time,” Goderich wrote.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/birthers/booklet.asp
Pointing out true things that make you angry isn’t delusion. His publisher bio really did say he was from Kenya. Saying “well, someone there later claimed it was a mistake” doesn’t contradict “his publisher bio said he was from Kenya” in any way.
Just like with “Christian” above, different definitions of “intelligence” are probably playing into this. Since you’re calling it a factual question, I’m guessing you’re defining “intelligence” as “your score on an IQ test.” Meanwhile, many people are probably defining it in a different way more related to the real world than to tests – as evinced by the articles arguing IQ is a flawed measure of real intelligence.
@ Silder
You claimed, falsely, that the publisher bio was designed to sell books. In fact, the bio was designed to circulate only within the publishing industry, and Obama did not go on to publish a book for another 4 years. You also claimed, falsely, that the error shows that “there is some sense that those on the left really really like the idea of him being foreign born.” In fact, an assistant made a fact-checking mistake.
No, the publisher said that a fact-checker made a mistake.
Assertions of motivation aren’t facts. You have to figure out incentives and in this case the incentive later is obviously to lie.
Publishing industry buzz influences sales – at least in the sense that some books with buzz get picked up and become cultural items. Why would publishers bother to send bios of authors to each other if there’s no expected benefit to the publisher? Of course the things publishers do are supposed to sell books – that’s why authors contract with publishers.
You seem to make this mistake frequently – “x is true about person z, therefore we can likely conclude y negative thing about person z” and your rebuttal is “person z provided another explanation for x, therefore that explanation is true”.
Right, that’s my exact point.
That claim is just a flat denial of reality. They’re not proposing an alternate measure of intelligence. They’re not stating that measures of intelligence don’t make good predictions (they make very good predictions). They’re not proposing experiments that would demonstrate their position – how about taking two groups one of which has a cut off of 110-120 IQ the other which has 70-80 IQ and compare them in novel tests or in life outcomes or in any other way you can think of – if IQ is a bad measurement you will get results that differ by no more than chance – but you know you won’t get those results. In other words if IQ is such a bad measurement why does it make so many good predictions?
PS No, btw, intelligence is not “your score on an IQ test”. IQ tests are a measurement.
The assistant says she made a fact-checking mistake. You claim she is lying. Do you have any actual evidence, or is this just another example of the evidence-free paranoia that’s come to define the right?
If telling the truth makes the same point, why did you repeat a falsehood instead? The bio was not written by his publisher, and it was not intended to sell books. It was written by his literary agency, presumably in order to attract a publisher.
In order to sell books. That, after all, is the point of getting published.
@Silder
This is interesting. My impression before hearing that was that the majority of people believed this, and the left/right difference was primarily due to what people believed the cause behind the intelligence gap was.
I thought the split was something like this:
Far left (extreme minority): Black and white average intelligence is equal. Fringe view.
Center left (making up the majority among with the center right): Strong evidence that average black intelligence is lower than white intelligence, but this is due to historical and current oppression, environmental factors, poverty, lead poisoning etc.
Center right: Strong evidence that average black intelligence is lower than white intelligence, but this is due to black culture and left wing policies like the welfare state. If more blacks adopted conservative ideology and we stopped giving handouts, the gap would shrink blah blah look at Thomas Sowell etc.
Far right/alt-right (extreme minority): Irrefutable evidence that average black intelligence is lower than white intelligence and this is strongly genetic and fixed, the gap will never shrink, inferior race, deport them all blah blah etc.
EDIT:
Whereas really it’s more like this?
Far left (extreme minority): WHAT DID YOU SAY?!!!!!
Center left (making up the majority among with the center right): Black and white average intelligence is equal.
Center right: Black and white average intelligence is almost certainly equal, but you know… T-there is some very weak evidence that average black intelligence is lower than white intelligence, but this is due to black culture and left wing policies like the welfare state, ASSUMING IT’S TRUE!. If more blacks adopted conservative ideology and we stopped giving handouts, the gap would shrink blah blah look at Thomas Sowell DID I TELL YOU I HAVE BLACK FRIENDS? etc.
Far right/alt-right (extreme minority): Irrefutable evidence that average black intelligence is lower than white intelligence and this is strongly genetic and fixed, the gap will never shrink, inferior race, deport them all blah blah etc.
This is also interesting, because crime statistics point to the majority of people being wrong on this point.
Again, I didn’t think this was the issue. I thought it was that left wing people agreed that blacks were more criminal, but were sympathetic and thought it was due to oppression, and conservatives thought it was due to being insufficiently conservative and getting welfare, and the far-right thought it was genetic.
There are big problems with the American justice system, but to believe that the racial imprisonment gap is solely due to corruption implies that all of those crimes are being made up so that the racist police can arrest black people. It implies Nazi like levels of racism across the police, not just implicit bias, and it implies a deep conspiracy to frame people on a colossal industrial scale, and then you have to believe that this is going on across all Western countries where the stats break down similarly…
I didn’t think this is what was under dispute at all.
Yeah man, it’s nuts. But hey, whaddayagonnado.
@Tekhno
I think that it makes little sense to presume that people actually think about it in such detail. For most of society, even being willing to entertain the possibility that ethnic groups could differ in average intelligence is anathema.
Basically, most people really, really don’t want to be racist, so they choose positions that are ‘not racist.’ Being factually right or wrong is not even an issue, since it’s obvious that ‘not racist’ is right…
This also explains why so many people reject the fact that black people commit more crime.
—
A related issue is that the people who believe in ‘equality of outcome’ need groups to be equal in capability for their ideology to make sense. If they abandon that belief, they have to completely restructure their belief system, which people tend to fight with all their might, since it is too threatening/dangerous.
I wonder what the results would look like if the poll only asked, say, Mensa members, or other group selected for intelligence.
For that matter, I wonder how it would look like if they asked only academics, who notably skew extremely left-wing. On one hand, they’ve got every reason to claim equality. On the other hand, they have both intellectual integrity and being the type of person who might have thought about this and familiarized themselves with the research at some point.
@Anonymous
Intelligence doesn’t make one impervious to social norms. If there is a difference, it’s probably correlation, not causation. For example, highly intelligent people are probably more ostracized on average, which probably often results in one of two reactions:
– rejecting social norms
– doubling down on social norms to gain acceptance
So my theory is that they would have more SJ believers and more HBD believers than average.
I have no reason to believe that all, let alone most academics have a lot of intellectual integrity.
Most seem very prone to groupthink and have a distinct lack of willingness to step out of line (which is often heavily punished, so this is quite understandable).
That’s a pretty good article. It’s probably safe to conclude that wide-membership secret conspiracies don’t exist.
OTOH, something that works out to roughly the same result, large numbers of people individually coming to the conclusion that a given action in a given situation is in their best interest, is definitely possible. Not that I think that the average policeman is more Nazi than actual Nazis, mind. Just that if they were, they wouldn’t need a conspiracy.
@Aapje
Good points. I would still liked to have seen how it went down in practice.
@Tekhno
I think your first grouping is more like what white people actually believe (revealed by their actions). If the majority believed intelligence (as expressed, not inherent ‘g’) was really equal across races, they wouldn’t fight so hard to make sure their kid goes to the school where the minorities are Chinese and Indian rather than black and Hispanic.
This doesn’t tell us why they believe this, whether they think it’s genetic or cultural or the aftereffects of centuries of oppression; it does rule out a few theories like them believing the tests are biased.
@Aapje
Do they? You could still continue a different variant of the ideology if you insist on finding ways to make unequal people equal, whether that be through social methods, or eugenics/genetic manipulation.
I often wonder what American white tower leftism would be like if you stripped out the egalitarianism. Basically put scientists in charge of progressivism instead of emotive types.
Conservatives: “You’re all just a bunch of city slicker know it all elitists! Bunch of hypocritical aristocrats! Admit it!”
Neoprogressives: “You know what? Fuck it. Yes, we’re elitists! We’re aristocrats!”
Conservatives: *gulp*
Would these hypothetical neoprogressives technically be right wing, since right wing thought is all about honest appreciation for hierarchy, instead of the embarrassment about hierarchy that normally defines the left?
@Tekhno
I figure they would be this opaque amalgam like the Communist Party of China is.
@Nybbler
There are many possible reasons for white flight other than believing in ethnic IQ differences. For example, dislike of having their kid learn along with black/hispanic people because:
– they see those groups as being more poor/lower class on average
– they dislike ‘black culture’ and/or ‘hispanic culture’
– they believe that black schools are discriminated against by teachers/the government/etc and thus have poorer quality
@Tekhno
They could, but it is difficult to defend, because it’s easy for opponents to claim that when their methods don’t immediately succeed in creating equality (which they never will, because changing things is hard), there are non-fixable differences.
BTW, I do think that there are environmental factors that influence IQ, many of which are related to poverty, so one could argue that anti-poverty measures would raise the IQ of certain groups.
And half of democratic voters think the russians hacked voting machines to favor trump. Pointing out that voters tell pollsters that they believe insane things proves nothing.
http://hotair.com/archives/2016/12/27/yougov-poll-52-of-democrats-believe-russia-tampered-with-the-vote-totals-to-get-trump-elected-president/
I don’t know how they could get that from the incessant “Russia hacked the election” slogans.
Thought experiment: suppose the left was allowed to taboo that result, on the semi-justifiable grounds that it is in part just measuring confusion about what the intelligence community reports about Russian intervention actually say. Suppose the right was allowed to taboo one poll of their own side. (If you like, you could make it two.) What is the next worst example of conspiratorial thinking on the left, and how does it compare to the equivalent on the right?
This may be one, though I’m not saying it’s the most recent or relevant:
JFK was killed by right-wingers.
I don’t have survey data, but I’d be surprised if it isn’t a widely held belief given that it was heavily implied his death was connected to a reactionary culture of hate rather than an ex-soviet loon.
I found a couple of Gallop polls. The issue is complicated by the fact that a majority of Americans still apparently believe that there was a conspiracy. Republicans do come out ahead of Democrats in terms of believing that Oswald acted alone, but the margin is 28%-16%, so nobody is covering themselves in glory here. I can’t find a partisan breakdown of beliefs about the specific culprits, but my second link indicates that the two most popular options are “the US government” and “the Mafia” at 13%, followed by “the CIA” at 7%. “Anti-government/right-wing groups” gets very little support (1%).
I think the Democrats would be happy to match that up against any of the Republican conspiracies in Earthly Knight’s post.
@Ian
The next most absurd belief would probably be the varieties of “bush knew about 9/11” that used to poll majority or plurality support among democrats. But the “Trump is putin’s cat’s paw” that seems to be coalescing would top that for sheer absurdity. Who in the world would be dumb enough to trust Donald trump to be a cat’s paw?
On the right, the “obama is a kenyan muslim atheist” is definitely up there, egged on by the weirdness around Obama’s biography. Other than that, though, I’m not sure what I’d pick. I’m sure there’s something, but I live in DC and what red tribers I do run into tend to be the more sophisticated variety.
Right, “Bush did 9/11” is a good example on the left (although depending on the precise wording of the question, the polling sometimes ropes in people who think that Bush should have paid more attention to the intelligence community’s warnings that al-Qaeda was plotting something big.)
Are you aware that “cat’s paw” is typically used to describe somebody who is used “unwittingly or unwillingly“? Why is it ridiculous to think that Putin is using Trump as a tool to accomplish his own goals?
Give them time; Trump hasn’t even been inaugurated yet.
But if you insist on something historical, the belief that George W. Bush won the 2000 and 2004 elections by vote-counting fraud, e.g. miscounted ballots in Florida and rigged Diebold voting machines in Ohio, seems a very close parallel. I can’t find specific polling data on that, except from sites too obviously partisan to trust, but this suggests that about two-thirds of Democrats believed that 2000 Dubya’s election was not legitimate, down to 40% w/re the 2004 election.
It also points out that this isn’t unusual. About half the population, Democrat and Republican alike, will suspect fraud in any presidential election that their side loses. So at any given time, half the members of the losing political tribe will at least sort of believe the really big conspiracy theories about Evil Overlords rigging elections, while the winning tribe merely has to believe in lesser corruptions and generic obstructionism to explain why things aren’t going their way.
Trump may be able to break this historic trend by arranging for half of Americans from both parties to start believing the really big conspiracy theories as to how such an inept buffoon got into office. But, be fair, the right-wing nutcases have had eight years to practice the art of dreaming up Presidential conspiracies; the left-wing nutcases are out of practice and will take some time coming up to speed.
“The left” and “the right” are broad enough subsets of humanity that there’s no practical limit to the degree of craziness you can find within them.
@john Schilling
As I recall, the diebold thing was largely post the 2000 election.
@ian
Right, but how many people know that oswald was literally a communist defector?
>Why is it ridiculous to think that Putin is using Trump as a tool to accomplish his own goals?
Odd, I’ve always used the term cat’s paw to be deliberate. Manchurian candidate, then.
@ChetC3: Fair. “Republicans” vs “Democrats” would have been a more precise statement. I have my disagreements with the Canadian right, for example, but they certainly don’t seem to have an abnormally high support for conspiracy theories.
@John Schilling: The set of people who called GWB “illegitimate” includes some number who agree on all the facts but, for example, believe that Bush v. Gore was incorrectly decided. I would argue that there is a qualitative difference between that kind of partisan opposition and more fact-based conspiracies, like “Bush planned 9/11” or “Obama was born in Kenya”. I would further postulate that the latter category tends to be more successful among Republicans than among Democrats. For example, I can’t think of a Democratic 9/11 truther of remotely comparable stature to the current President-Elect birther.
@ For example, I can’t think of a Democratic 9/11 truther of remotely comparable stature to the current President-Elect birther.
Why not? They seem extremely comparable to me.
Maybe my phrasing was confusing.
Trump is a prominent birther and a prominent Republican.
Who is a prominent truther and a prominent Democrat?
The “Diebold thing” was mostly the 2004 election, yes. And after the 2004 election, if the Los Angeles Times got their numbers right, 40% of Democrats believed that the 2004 election was fraudulent. Apparently including our current Secretary of State. That’s not agreeing on the facts and disagreeing with the Supreme Court on Bush v. Gore, that’s straight-up conspiracy theory that differs only in the name of the villain from Putin’s imagined hacking of voting machines in 2016.
Whichever candidate loses, half of their supporters will believe the election was in some significant way fraudulent. This is the new normal, for a definition of “new” stretching back a decade or more.
Are you aware that “cat’s paw” is typically used to describe somebody who is used “unwittingly or unwillingly“? Why is it ridiculous to think that Putin is using Trump as a tool to accomplish his own goals?
Is it ridiculous to think of Obama being manipulated to accomplish the goals of the European left (*cough* Nobel Peace Prize)? Is it ridiculous to think of Obama as being used by the government of Iran? For that matter, was FDR manipulated by Stalin to accomplish his goal of communist domination of half of Europe? Be very careful about what standard you use here. It’s normal for world leaders to try to persuade other world leaders to do things in their favor, often by pointing out potential benefits to the country of the one of whom the favor is requested, and it’s not entirely a bad thing.
If anything, it is the US that is manipulating other leaders more than anyone else.
@John Schilling: John Kerry harboured private doubts about the outcome of the 2004 election, apparently didn’t talk about them publicly for more than a decade, and refused to challenge the results at the time. How exactly does that example support the idea that Democrats are equally prone to promoting conspiracies? By comparison, Donald Trump has been baselessly claiming voter fraud in an election he won.
@Civilis
If I’m understanding you right, your defense of Trump is that his relationship with Putin is similar to Obama’s relationship with European social democrats.
That is, to my mind, a damming thing to say about Trump. Obama isn’t a useful idiot being manipulated by Stefan Löfven, Sigmar Gabriel, or Matteo Renzi, he fundamentally shares their basic progressive internationalist would view.
Questions of political practicality aside, if Obama had his way he would, I have no doubt, turn the US into Norway. Are you making the same claim about Trump and Russia?
If I’m understanding you right, your defense of Trump is that his relationship with Putin is similar to Obama’s relationship with European social democrats.
I’ve had to resign myself to the US cozying up to unfriendly and undemocratic regimes for decades: Clinton (Bill) and China, W and the Saudis, Obama and just about anyone besides Libya at one time or another, now Trump and Russia. I’ve reluctantly come around to the view that we’re stuck with realpolitik, which means tolerating these hostile regimes because we can’t afford the political capital (and inherent risk) to do something about any of them.
I don’t have a real problem with Obama’s relation with Europe’s social democrats, though I don’t like either. I do have a problem with Obama willingly playing cat’s paw for Iran’s regime, more of a problem than I have with Trump and Russia.
Questions of political practicality aside, if Obama had his way he would, I have no doubt, turn the US into Norway. Are you making the same claim about Trump and Russia?
The European left are pushing policies that they believe benefit Europe. Putin is pushing policies that benefit Russia. Iran is pushing policies that benefit Iran. None of them are pushing policies that benefit the US. The problem is that we can’t do anything about Russia without a lot of political capital, both domestic and international. Letting Russia have its way does little to harm the US in the short term (the long term loss of trust is a real issue, but I’m resigned to that no matter who is in the office).
I don’t see any ideological connection between Trump and Putin, much less than I see one between Obama and Iran (not Islam, but a fundamental hostility to the US as sole generally benevolent superpower). Frankly, I think Trump just doesn’t want to worry about Russia and thinks there will be one less problem during his tenure if he appeases them (kicking the can down the road). This benefits Russia, so of course they’re in favor.
Trump doesn’t just tolerate Russia. He praises them at every turn, favorably comparing them to our president, our 5 intelligence agencies etc., in order to bash the pres and the intelligence agencies. He’s quite worshipful, which is concerning to me, and many other people.
@Moon
One can argue that dictators need that sort of treatment (especially those with ressentiment). Both George W Bush and Obama went outside of normal American social norms to make the Saudi king happy, for example.
Patriarchy theory?
Leftists object to the laws of economics in the same sense that the Wright brothers objected to the law of gravity.
And in the same fashion that the guy who straps feathers to his arms and jumps off a cliff objects to the law of gravity.
Successfully and to the great benefit of the entire human race?
The Wright brothers fight against gravity never ended in a fiery crash with no survivors
I think you’re being too generous here – there’s no reason to believe that we could find rules governing economies that are even remotely comparable to the laws of physics, and it’s abundantly clear that we haven’t found any so far.
Does your “remotely comparable” allow for laws that give us good but imperfect information? If not, you could make as good a case for climate science–another science built around a system too complicated to produce predictions with certainty.
If yes, then we have quite a lot of laws of economics that qualify.
Actually I think your example for comparison is quite telling – have you ever heard anyone talk about “the laws of climate science”?
I agree with Art. If you’re comparing climatology and economics, you’re saying that any economic theory that comes mainly from a priori theorising rather than looking at data will be pretty much useless.
“A general circulation model (GCM) is a type of climate model. It employs a mathematical model of the general circulation of a planetary atmosphere or ocean. It uses the Navier–Stokes equations on a rotating sphere with thermodynamic terms for various energy sources (radiation, latent heat). These equations are the basis for computer programs used to simulate the Earth’s atmosphere or oceans. ” — Wikipedia
I’m curious what your view is of AGW.
Looking just at the data, I doubt we would have much reason to believe it. It’s true that over the past century both CO2 concentration and average global temperature have gone up. But temperature went both up and down prior to that with no link to CO2, temperature in the geological past doesn’t follow a simple pattern of rising after CO2 increased. And over the past century, there was no close correlation between CO2 changes and temperature changes–for about thirty years in the mid-20th century average temperature was flat to mildly declining.
I would have said that it is only because there is a straightforward theoretical basis for AGW and that theory suggests various experiments to confirm it, that almost everyone in the field interprets the pattern as AGW plus various other things that mess up the pattern.
Very much like the situation in economics, where theory tells you what is likely to happen and you check the predictions of the theory against evidence both because you might have made a mistake in your theory and because the theoretical result depends on simplifying assumptions that probably don’t matter for the conclusion but might.
So left means raducal left, and the moderate centre left basically dont exist, whereas right means traditional right, and the radical right basucally doesn’t exist.
I think part of the problem, especially in the American context, is that there is a social and an economic conservatism/liberalism, which do not necessarily go hand-in-hand together.
You have the ‘traditional’ notion of the socially and economically conservative on the right and the socially and economically liberal on the left, and depending how hard they lean, they can be extreme or radical.
But it’s equally possible to have centrist-social positions where left and right meet, but diverge on economy. Or economically-centrist positions held by left and right but socially divergent (so both centrist-left and centrist-right would agree that capitalism is the working economic system for the society but the left person could go as far left as you like on gay rights, trans rights, sex, race, etc. and the same for the right person).
So what then is “radical left” and what is “extreme right” in this case? I’m sure, for instance, you could get a white supremacist who is all in favour of divorce, reproductive rights and sex outside of marriage and even same-sex marriage (as long as it’s two white guys getting married and adopting white kids to have a white family). You can have pro-life atheists. You can have conservative right-wingers who haven’t darkened the door of a church since they were four and never say a prayer in adult life but would still identify as “Presbyterian, Methodist, etc.” if asked. You can have progressive Christians who are a lot more committed to their religion than the former, even if they believe Naomi and Ruth were lesbian lovers (and not just mother-in-law and daughter-in-law). To mention the war, I liked Bernie Sanders (as old-fashioned Labour on class and economic issues) even where I’d diverge with him on social issues (he’d be more ‘radical left’ there and I’d be right-of-centre or right-wing, depending on how you’d slice it).
There’s a mix of attitudes about all sorts of things, and the simple model of “radical left on every topic, extreme right on every topic” doesn’t hold when trying to sort people into baskets (deplorable or otherwise).
I think that with the United States, at the root, there’s now a definite divide between ‘government is a force for good’ and ‘government is a necessary evil’, and this line has appeared only over the past couple of decades.
If you believe that the government is a force for good, the line between ‘social’ and ‘economic’ is arbitrary; if the government is justified in intruding in the economic sphere to make sure everyone has a good wage, it’s justified in intruding in the social sphere to make sure everyone eats healthy. In most cases, those social intrusions are justified by economic concerns (we must pay for school / college / pre-school to have a better workforce; smoking is banned because it leads to money wasted on health care).
When left-ish people complain that the comment threads here are dominated by rightists, I think part of the frustration is that even on a rationalist blog, the posts can be so unbelievably tribal.
I’m tempted to argue some of these points, but it seems like it might be fruitless given how uninterested you appear to be in treating people with differing opinions with any respect.
“Opinions” being highlighted because you appear to think that everything you think is exactly in accordance with reality – and that others live in a dream world. If only there was a place on the internet that people could go to learn how unlikely that is…
Well, the most tribal poster we have is probably Moon/Jill, so by your logic, the right-wing people should be most upset (which they clearly aren’t).
Silder is new and IMO, not worth replying to. He’ll probably leave/be banned before too long.
It’s rather silly to use a first-time poster as an example of why some people dislike this community.
Is Moon Jill? I hadn’t even realised.
I didn’t claim that tribalism was the only factor.
What bugged me most here were the insults – which I suppose is mostly what I meant by tribal. I don’t recall Jill making so many – but I concede that might be because I’m on the left and more sensitive to criticisms of my group…
And yes, possibly. Silder’s comment bugged me.
My complaint of tribalism isn’t really aimed at any of the regular commenters. Generally it’s of a pretty high standard here or I wouldn’t bother reading down to the 100th comment.
Generally my perception is that the regular commentariat skews right (and isn’t particularly tribal), interspersed with occasional right-ist commenters who are.
Yeah, I had noticed that Silder was probably an example of things left-wingers here were rightfully complaining about.
If you reading this, Silder, no disrespect, but please understand that large political coalitions aren’t like that. The leaders may be, but I’ve found that on both sides of the spectrum. There are certainly things unique to right or left, but a will to power is definitely not one of them. “Radical transformation”, or just “Transformation” might be though.
@NostalgiaForInfinity
I’m nursing a conspiracy theory that she’s also Deiseach in on the long con.
Also, are Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space novels (which I think your user name is a reference to) worth getting into? I’m looking for some new hard Sci fi to read.
Yes, there is only one liberal. We are all identical clones, LOL.
That happened because there was only a single liberal person who was willing to post on this board.
I’m nursing a conspiracy theory that she’s also Deiseach in on the long con.
My fiendish rat-like cunning apparently knows no bounds nor are there any depths to which I will not stoop! 🙂
Deiseach isn’t a liberal, I think she is a supporter of Fianna Fáil, which is a sort of Irish Christian democratic center right party, relatively progressive on economic issues and socially conservative.
I on the other hand am a fairly conventional US liberal, and think your shrillness does little for the cause.
As far as I can see, nothing on this board that anyone says does anything for the liberal cause, since I don’t see people seriously considering liberal ideas. But I like to stand up for myself. I understand that many people would rather other people don’t stand up for themselves, and will call them “shrill” or whatever if they do.
@Moon
You are not making us ‘serious[ly] considering liberal ideas,’ either. You just like fighting with people:
Well since no one seems to consider liberal ideas, no matter what anyone says, I do no worse than the others here in that respect. I do like to show a rare example that liberals can indeed stand up for themselves. Of course I will be bashed, told that I am shrill, that I am not helping anything, not getting anyone to consider liberal ideas etc. etc. That just goes with the territory of standing up for oneself.
Yes, I know you would rather I didn’t do that, and enjoy thinking of many more reasons to try to persuade me not to stand up for myself. Please feel free to enjoy yourself in this way.
@hyperboloid
>Also, are Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space novels (which I think your user name is a reference to) worth getting into? I’m looking for some new hard Sci fi to read.
They’re pretty good. But the best hard sci fi is Peter Watts’ Blindsight and Echopraxia.
@Moon
Come on, that is such a cop-out…
‘I’m not going to make a positive case for my ideas because no one will consider them anyway’ is what you are saying and it is clearly acting in bad faith.
You are willing to keep droning on about the same conspiracy theories for which you haven’t been able to provide any evidence since you first proposed them, so why not switch some of that energy over to a post about what kind of government policies you want, on a certain topic?
I guess Peter Watts’ excellent sci-fi novels are one of the less annoying things SSC commenters have been obsessed with posting about.
+1 for Blindsight. It’s the only genuinely frightening book that I’ve ever read; most other books in the genre tend to be of the “monsters come through windows” variety, i.e. totally boring.
@cassander
Yes, though I couldn’t sustain interest in the series enough to enjoy a lot of the spin-off fiction in the same universe. It’s quite good, overall.
Yeah, I think so – the first one is an easy enough read to find out. They’re kind of gothic in tone. The central idea is not a stunningly original one, but Reynolds’ used to work at the ESA and the world is pretty interestingly thought out. I haven’t read that series in a while but I still read all his work – currently waiting for his latest to be out in paperback before I shell out for a copy (I disapprove of a year long publishing gap between hardbacks and paperbacks).
Not sure from your comment how hard you want your sci-fi to be but by his own admission he does bend that for the sake of the narrative. Later in the trilogy he introduces a couple of technologies that are definitely less “realistic” than the early ideas (things to do with the many worlds interpretations and inertia-suppression).
Greg Egan does thoroughly hard sci-fi. Wrote a trilogy where the spacetime has a different metric. Which he worked out in a lot of detail
I haven’t actually got round to reading it yet. Might have been too long since I studied GR to get my head round it.
“Jim” aka James A Donald is right-winger who has spent the last couple decades broadcasting over the internet his desire to see his political enemies murdered en masse. Why would you expect anyone but hardened right-wing zealots to take him seriously as an authority? Are you so poorly read that he’s the best source you’ve got? Or, perhaps, are you just here to virtue-signal to your fellow zealots, with no real interest in rational discussion?
Jim is a terrible right wing person therefore his theory of leftist singularity is bad no-thought – got it.
Or maybe I wasn’t arguing “this is true because Jim said it” and was pointing out “Jim described this in detail and you can search for it if you like”.
When you use barb completely incorrectly because it’s associated with the hated enemy all you do is show that it hurts – way to demonstrate that the idea of virtue-signalling upsets you.
Jim is living proof that the right has no shortage of would-be mass murderers. Beyond that, I’m already familiar with the quality of his writing, so if you’d like me to regard your original post to be treated as anything other than an unsupported assertion that your political opponents are murderous hypocrites, feel free to provide reasoned arguments backed up with evidence.
Yes, I’d also like to see reasoned arguments with evidence for Jim’s leftist singularity. Please be sure to also consider the argument that liberals have peacefully risen to power (as opposed to radical leftists violently seizing power) in many countries across the West without any violent singularity.
Evan Þ –
The short version of the argument:
First, there is a pattern of leftist movements winning then slaughtering each other and (sometimes) large swathes of the population (Soviet Union, revolutionary France, Cambodia, (just to pick 3 examples that are different in lots of respects), etc.). Once you notice this pattern, you have to ask why it exists. Next you have to ask why it doesn’t happen every time a leftist movement succeeds.
For the long version of why it doesn’t happen in the United States you have to read some *****bug. Ultra-short version – the American / Anglo left is the only leftist movement that survived to the present and since the society has existed with the left and vice versa memetic evolution has forced it to be less immediately murderous (the analogy MM used was that the cultural antibodies exist for American / Anglo leftist but when it backs leftist revolutions elsewhere the other country gets a full dose with corresponding cultural / social adaptations to moderate it). Being old is protective because massively destructive old things don’t survive.
That’s the short version of why it doesn’t happen everywhere – the short version of why it does happen in some places is the one I gave above. “We should have power because we are good people and we are good people because we have the correct political beliefs” – where the beliefs are a particular reality denying belief (since there’s no signalling value in holding true beliefs). Sometimes the groups with that metabelief system hold together long enough to win – when they then turn the “your beliefs are wrong, therefore everyone should mob and murder you (or hound you out of society)” on their former allies / rivals.
I’m pretty sure that you can have a Nationalist singularity too. I have my own theory, which I think is better than Jim’s.
I theorize that ideologies based on maximizing single principles like “equality”, “liberty”, or “race purity” are far far more dangerous than ideologies that cross multiple principles against each other to find balance (which explains why liberal leftists who don’t bet it all on the liberation of the proletariat have no death squads). They have paper clip maximizer like qualities but for the ideological realm, leading to purity spirals where outflanking your comrades is always advantageous until the whole thing collapses in mass death, or someone finally setting some other standard/cross principle.
Monomaniacal ideologies like this include things like Communism, yes, but also Fascism and various forms of Ultranationalist ideology such as what now circulates in the alt-right. Also, anarcho-capitalism and its edgier brother EnArrWrecks, but they purity spiral into uselessness rather than mass death instead, since the founding principles paralyze action rather than catalyze it (NAP, and “all political activism is leftist” Passivism).
Certainly left singularity leaves things explained. The Nazis certainly went through an enormously destructive accelerating spiral based on right wing nationalist ideology.
I’m at the same time glad you think this, suggesting that psyops is working, but also think you got it slightly off. Political activism being leftist and therefore inherently counterproductive is not because of some transcendent property of political activism, but because of contemporary conditions and its present form.
What’s considered political activism these days is little more than an organized petition to our lords and masters to fix something. You gather up your numbers and agitate that you’re here, you’re numerous, and you should perhaps be listened to. This is totally leftist, because it bases its support on the number of followers, regardless of their actual worth, which is demotist, and because it appeals to the leftist power structures, which are only amenable to listening to left-aligned pleas (and ignoring or stamping out right-aligned ones).
In other words, according to Death Eater doctrine, this form of activity is a waste of time because it does not result in getting from present situation P to the desired situation D in the future, but rather reinforces P and/or makes it worse. Death Eaters are working on activities that at least have a chance of helping along the transition from P to D, and at discovering new, rediscovering old and refining existing measures that can help with that.
Political activism, as currently understood, is considered ineffective – a waste of time and effort at best – and therefore banned. This does not mean that the Death Eaters are doing nothing. It merely means they are pursuing politics by means that fall outside of the contemporary conception of political activism.
National Socialist Germany definitely had purity spirals. One example is that it became more and more required to show obedience and deference to Hitler – signing off letters with “Heil Hitler” went from something one official started doing, to basically being mandatory to the point not doing it was a cause for investigation (I’m trying to find a source for this but can’t recall which Nazi minister it was). The Nazi salute became mandatory. Etc.
Or, there is the concept of “working towards the Fuehrer”:
Kershaw is one of the historians whose explanation for the beginning of the Holocaust was that it began not as an order from on high, but rather in this fashion.
The idea that purity spirals are a left wing thing but not a right wing thing is completely absurd.
What do you think fascists were trying to maximize?
The state, hence totalitarianism.
@Tekhno:
What does maximizing the state mean? Is your claim that the government budget under Mussolini or Franco was as high it could possibly have been? If not, what is the one thing that is being maximized?
My rather casual impression is that the Fascists were trying to maximize a mix of things, as you would prefer–national power, welfare of the population, patriotism, … .
Mussolini was the one who said “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”.
Doesn’t necessarily mean that was their end goal; could have meant there was no limit to what they could do to maximize whatever it is they did work towards, order or national prosperity or whatever.
What they were attempting to increase was the influence of the individual by the state, because it’s integral to Fascist theory that individuals are relative to the state. It’s a lot like Marxist theory, but just replace “the means of production” with “the state”. The economic goal of corporatism functionally integrates the private economy into the state, if it were to be carried out.
“A state that governs totalitarianly is a new fact in history” ~ Mussolini or Gentile
Of course, Italian Fascism got swamped by National Socialism so the German goal of maximizing race purity took over instead, and we can’t tell what Italian Fascism would have been like without that influence. In other cases, such as in Spain, the Fascists were duped and corralled by Franco.
Your assumption here, which I think is completely incorrect, is that there is some basic difference between people on the left, and people on the right – that the latter actually believe what they say they believe, and the former merely pick whatever will get them power.
Do you have any evidence for this, at all?
In other contexts everyone on both sides says that there are basic differences between people on the right and on the left.
This isn’t even about that though – it’s about how leftist ideas end up with leftists manning circular firing squads. The explanation is not “well, leftists just tend to be shitty people”. It’s “there are features about leftist ideas that tend to lead to that outcome”.
Your precise words were:
implying that there is some notable difference between people on the left and the right, or people who achieve power on the left and those who do so on the right.
Yeah.
Nothing about the type of people they are – it’s about the ideas they hold and how they use them to organize themselves.
dndn, haven’t you been at this board a while? Haven’t you noticed yet how many commenters here believe that the Left is the source of all Evil and the Right the source of all Good? Silder is just playing the same song, 500th verse that we keep hearing here.
“They’re all in it for the power” directly says something about “they”. To say that someone is in it for the power because of the ideas they hold, and their ideas are about getting power, is circular.
Either someone has an idea they want to implement because they think it is a good idea, and they seek power to implement that idea, in which case power is not their end goal, or they are the sort of person who just wants power, and they adopt the ideas that they think will best give them power, in which case power is their end goal.
If someone’s ideas follow from their lust for power – if they think that communism will get them power best, they’re a communist, if they think fascism will get them power best, they’re a fascist, if they think neoliberalism will get them power best, etc – then it is about the type of person they are, the power-lusting variety.
@dndnrsn
>is that there is some basic difference between people on the left, and people on the right – that the latter actually believe what they say they believe, and the former merely pick whatever will get them power.
What if this is the case? The fundamental difference I mean, not that people on the left are just bad people. Say, something like Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations. And that this difference leads to the left having a greater tendency towards circular firing squads independent of the basic ideas. That is, convince left wingers to believe in freedom and democracy and you get the french revolution, on the right and you get the american.
What do you do then?
Why do the French revolutionaries count as left wingers but not the Americans? The word was not in common use before the French revolution, but “all men are created equal” sounds pretty left wing by the standards of the time.
Using the political concepts of the early nineteenth century
the far left position was republicanism, the center left and right positions were some form of constitutional monarchy and the far right was absolute monarchy. Back dating that just a couple of decades to 1776 and you will find the majority of American revolutionaries pretty squarely on the far left.
the american revolution gets to be right wing because it ultimately ended up being run by people like Washington, Franklin, and Adams, not Thomas Paine. Because its rhetoric, at least from those people, was about the defense of institutions and ideas they thought were being undermined, not the revolutionary overthrow of the establishment.
If you’ve got the time, you can read Hannah Arendt’s “On Revolution” for an excellent discussion of the French vs American revolutions.
TL;DR The American revolt’s orderly counter-revolution is the important difference, as Cassander pointed out.
The limitation of Haidt’s research is that his sample groups were “liberals” and “conservatives”, not “left” and “right”. You can find left-wingers who care about purity and loyalty very easily. They just tend not to be liberals, or at least not to call themselves liberals.
The left-wingers who do “left-wing circular firing squads”, whether that’s in the form of the head of Department of the People’s Security torturing random people until they tell him about the vast counter-revolutionary conspiracy of wreckers and saboteurs that he wants to hear about, until he himself is purged and shot in the back of the neck in a forest somewhere because he didn’t catch the conspiracy fast enough, and then his replacement gets purged, etc, or in the form of the Campus Queer Collective’s leadership all denouncing each other for being homonormative and problematic, are the left-wingers who probably care the most about purity and loyalty and so on.
@cassander
First of all I think you’re saying they weren’t radicals rather then they weren’t leftists, which is certainly true compared to the Jacobins, though not to the establishment British wig liberalism of the day. left wing politics and radicalism are often confused, but they are not the same , there are relatively conservative leftists (European social democrats being an obvious example), and there are radicals on the right.
Also believe one Mr Jefferson of Virginia would have something to say about overthrowing the establishment.
When the signers put their names to that document they crossed a line from defending their rights as Englishmen to
engaging in an overt insurrection that aimed to abolish forever the sovereignty of the crown over the American colonies.
The orderly conservative view of the American revolution is an ahistorical myth crafted to cover up the shear violence of the act. Loyalist constituted perhaps a third of all free white men in the colonies they were disproportionately drawn from the elite; and so violent was their suppression at the hands revolutionary militias that the name of a certain Virginian patriot, one Charles lynch, has been synonymous with the practice of mob justice ever since.
@hyperboloid says:
>whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness
That strikes me as claiming the abolishing the order is a last resort, not a joyous day to look forward to.
>When the signers put their names to that document they crossed a line from defending their rights as Englishmen to engaging in an overt insurrection that aimed to abolish forever the sovereignty of the crown over the American colonies.
Of course they did. but WHY they did it matters.
>The orderly conservative view of the American revolution is an ahistorical myth crafted to cover up the shear violence of the act. Loyalist constituted perhaps a third of all free white men in the colonies they were disproportionately drawn from the elite; and so violent was their suppression at the hands revolutionary militias that the name of a certain Virginian patriot, one Charles lynch, has been synonymous with the practice of mob justice ever since.
It was conservative for a revolution. That’s a relatively low bar, I grant you. But it could have gotten a hell of a lot worse.
I consider myself a part (at least somewhat) of the Environmentalist Left ™, and I think they have multiple goals that are not merely clearly defined, but also easy to measure:
* Reduction in anthropogenic CO2 emissions, or at the very least, reduction of the first derivative of that curve. Obviously, reducing them to zero would be impossible, but even reducing the derivative to zero would be almost as good. By the way, “people breathe” is a red herring, since breathing is, on its own, a carbon-neutral process.
* Reduction of the percentage of energy that comes from fossil fuels, in favor of nuclear power (at the very least) or renewable sources (at best), such as solar. The end goal is 100% renewable energy (plus or minus epsilon); but, once again, even something like 95% renewable or 42% renewable / 42% nuclear would be good enough.
* Reduction of resource extraction (mining, logging, etc.) in wilderness areas on Earth. Once again, reduction to zero may be impossible, but reducing the first derivative to zero might be good enough.
* Preservation of rare plant and animal species that are facing extinction. These have to be taken on a case-by-case basis, IMO, but note that these include edible species such as fish.
* Reduction of harmful chemical compounds (e.g. lead, mercury) that are released into air and water as the byproducts of industrial processes (in addition to CO2, which I already mentioned). Same caveats as CO2 emissions.
In each case, we can directly measure the progress made toward each goal; furthermore, we can evaluate the remaining work, and use this evaluation to distribute our efforts (i.e., money) most efficiently (e.g., if dropping down the remaining CO2 emissions to zero would cost more than all the other goals combined, then maybe it’s not worth it). I don’t think you can say this about many other leftist causes.
Thank you – those are all perfect examples of what I was talking about.
How much of a reduction? Whatever goal you have today is just fodder for more of the same tomorrow. Perfect for lefties to coalesce around – infinite coercive authority over anyone who tries to manufacture anything.
Notice that the goal is the intermediate step and not the final outcome – presumably this is motivated by some concern about
global warmingclimate change but the goal isn’t written in terms of ending climate change. This way, you can always find a different justification for why you needed to reduce CO2.Again with the reduction thing – at least this one doesn’t have an infinite end game. This one does, however, fit with the “take issue with reality” thing I originally mentioned. What if solar and wind just aren’t viable even with technological advances? You seem to be a very unusual environmentalist who thinks nuclear should be considered. Most seem to set this goal up so that it’s impossible – without a huge reduction in energy usage (don’t worry, the party can determine who needs electricity the most, comrade).
Again, why that goal? Why not “preserve a certain amount of wilderness”? (I’d even add “especially scenic wilderness that humans enjoy seeing (in person or video / pictures)”). Because the way you state the goal, there’s more control for the party. It’s a de facto land grab on the entire Earth – only usable with permission from the party.
Preservation of fishing stocks is a very valid concern – which is completely different in nature from preserving the existence of every recorded species. Do you even know what the baseline extinction rate is if you use the definition of species that gets used in species preservation laws? With that definition of species there’s no way it’s visible in the historic record. Species is a really fuzzy line.
Which has already happened to a massive degree over the last 50 or 60 years – nothing about reducing the harms from those chemicals, just “reduce the chemicals”. We’re 50 years down the road from the first reductions of those chemicals. This a perfect example of environmentalists not being satisfied with environmental goals and just asking for more and more process because the process gives them power.
This is literally the socialist calculation problem. Not worth it to whom? Who has the data to measure that and do that calculation (no one)? What incentive is there for the government body doing the calculation to actually even try to get it right?
I think you should read my comment more carefully. I explicitly stated that a). reducing the emissions to zero is unrealistic, and b). I’d settle for reducing the rate of increase of the emissions to zero. This is a pretty finite goal.
What do you mean by “viable” ? That said, solar and wind are just examples, they were not meant to be exclusive (sorry for the confusion). Other renewable sources — such as hydroelectric, geothermal, some new thing we haven’t invented yet, etc. — are fine too.
I can’t speak for other people, I can only speak for myself. Not sure what answer you’re looking for, here.
I do not advocate any kind of a government-mandated reduction in energy usage. However, I don’t see why even a conservative capitalist such as yourself would deliberately use more energy than is necessary. Energy costs money, you know.
I wanted to explicitly exclude natural disasters, e.g. a flood or an asteroid strike. Don’t get me wrong, there are good reasons to stop those as well, but they are out of scope for the environmentalist movement.
Which party ? What are you talking about ? I get the feeling that you somehow assume that the only possible implementation of any goal you disagree with is some kind of a totalitarian dictatorship, or maybe that everyone who disagrees with you is a mustache-twirling villain, or something. I am not one of those… but then, I suppose that’s exactly what an evil villain would say… *shrug*
Sure, and that’s why I said “case by case basis”. But, off the top of my head, I’d rather live in a world with tuna, pandas, and honeybees in it; than a world without them. We could argue about what exactly does or does not count as a “honeybee” later.
The amount of lead in the environment has dropped drastically in the US, but not so much in other places in the world. Mercury has been dropping AFAIK, but is still above safe levels; before you complain, one good rule of thumb for what counts as “safe” is, “you can eat wild catfish without long-term ill effects”. Once again though, those two specific metals were just examples, and not an exclusive list. If you want to find more examples, go visit Beijing sometime.
Each goal I’ve listed has a measurable end point. This means that it’s possible to evaluate how much work is left before the goal is achieved. This means that when I, a voter, am deciding which proposal to vote for next, I may choose to drop goal A in favor of goals B and C, if finishing goal A would be prohibitively expensive. This is a pretty basic cost-benefit analysis; I can explain why cost-benefit analyses are useful in general, but you probably already know that…
Which unfortunately implies a cap on energy usage and a decline in per-capita energy usage (i.e. an austerity plan), assuming population continues to increase (which seems inevitable in at least the short term).
Hydroelectric destroys ecosystems, geothermal kills geysers, contaminates rivers, etc. Regardless of what large-scale energy production people can come up with, it will have large scale environmental effects. I’ve even seen complaints about the reduction of planetary albedo due to solar panels. This leads to the philosophy of “f— it, if they’re going to oppose everything, just burn lignite”.
The time and effort it takes to reduce energy usage to the bare minimum for a given result ALSO costs money. This is especially true for an individual’s personal use, where the time and effort aren’t always fungible with money.
This is lazy. “Having large scale environmental effects” is not a binary property. It is entirely possible to evaluate the scope and scale of environmental effects, and incorporate that information into your decision making process. If you don’t think that environmentalists have been doing that analysis already, you need to hang out with a better class of environmentalist.
That’s a finite goal but it’s not a Schelling point. It’s an arbitrary point. Tomorrow comes along and I’m a better environmentalist than you because I demand less emissions. Clearly I should be running the department and you should be executed for being an enemy of the planet.
Viable – able to generate sufficient power on demand at lower cost than current power supplies. No confusion on the wide array of possibilities but it seems like environmentalists just like them because they don’t exist.
Prices do a very good job at incentivizing businesses to use the correct amounts of resources.
Figure of speech – it was a succinct way of saying that your ideas set up a system where there’s a lot of centralized control that will go to exactly the wrong type of person.
Yeah, honeybees are great which is the motte of the motte and bailey of “species protection”. Everyone thinks people should try to keep honeybees around – the bailey is that when you look at some particular type of fish or bird or insect the closer you look the more species you find and oh look, that land that you want to develop might have a unique species of bird that might be a subspecies or a different species depending on … well, nothing really other than whatever system gets set up to make that determination.
[Side note – pandas really just seem like evolution finishing off a species that wandered off into an insufficiently high local maximum.]
No Schelling point, no point. Will always get outflanked by someone who wants more.
Nothing on Earth works like this – for a very good reason.
@ Silder:. I thought Schelling points were supposed to be arbitrary? Like, there is no optimal place to meet, so you pick one that comes to mind? If so, 0 is a perfect Schelling point.
Besides, for whatever reason environmentalists have mostly coordinated on 2° celsius climate increase as their target. Sure, someone might try to out-greening that, but I don’t see why environmentalism should be more vulnerable to this dynamic than any other ism.
@TheNybbler, Slider:
I disagree. While some reduction in energy usage is not a terrible plan a priori (do you turn off your lights when you leave the house ? I do), it is by no means the only solution. As I said in my previous comment, I favor a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, via nuclear power as a stopgap measure. If you want to implement austerity on top of that, that’s your choice, not mine.
Recently, there have been lots of news about major corporations and even some minor countries that have fully transitioned to solar or some other renewable energy to power their data centers. If that doesn’t count as “viable”, then why not ? Also, I’m afraid that by using the word “lower cost” you are ignoring negative externalities. It’s definitely cheaper to heat your apartment by setting your furniture on fire than by turning on an electric heater, but in the long run, you’ll actually end up losing money that way.
What Iain said. In addition, I’d once again like to point out that I by no means advocate anything like “zero environmental impact NOW or you’re a monster !!!11eleven!”. Maybe someone does, but I can’t speak for that guy, sorry. On that note:
What do you mean by “a lot” ? And also, can you demonstrate that my stated goals necessarily lead to this (presumably, increased) amount of centralized control ?
Yes, I do support science grants in general, and grants aimed toward clean energy sources in particular. I understand that a hard-core libertarian would consider government grants of any kind to be theft, so if you’re one of those, we could discuss my disagreement with such a stance.
Yes, and ? Why should I listen to you ? I make my own decisions, and if your platform is built entirely on unachievable goals, then I’m not going to support you.
In general, I’d like to preserve as much biodiversity as is reasonably practical. This is different than saying, “maximize biodiversity at any cost”; there are more points on that spectrum than “0%” and “100%”.
I’m not at all sure what you mean by this sentence.
Bugmaster –
You’re saying reasonable things about specific policies but you’re missing the larger point.
Policy comes from structure comes from organizing ideas. The discussion started with “why to leftist ideas sometimes end up with all the leftists killing each other” and you unwittingly provided an example.
You have reasonable goals A, B and C but there’s nothing special about A, B and C – they’re just things that feel like enough but not too much to you. What happens with a movement is that it’s organized to gain some kind of power – that in the most hopeful case is based on some positive policy that the group wants implemented. Your group organizes, goes out and, if they’re democratic*, tries to gain power by convincing people that “something must be done” about your environmental issues. Since the people in power didn’t do those things the only people you trust to do them are members of your movement who you tried to insert into power positions. They accomplish A, B and C. Then they find out that they don’t much like giving up power and the same convincing that worked for A, B and C works for double A, double B and double C. Rinse and repeat because none of the goals you stated are stable coordination points – they’re just stuff you picked out and for the most part they’re not even actually the goals but the means towards human oriented goals (focusing on CO2 instead of climate, etc.). Of course there are power struggles as you move towards more and more of your goals and yet the results that you hope for remain out of reach or the costs mount (like I said above, lets assume for the sake of argument that the only energy sources capable of running modern civilization are a combination of fossil fuels and nuclear). Now that everyone is on board with the environmentalist message the winner in the power struggles is going to be someone more environmentalist.
[*If they’re not democratic they go out and rob banks, use the money to buy guns and bombs and start shooting – if the group succeeds the guy in charge of solar power gets shot because not enough solar power gets produced since the holier man is the one who believes more purely in the potential of solar power and reality doesn’t care about what you believe about power generation.]
Because it’s an obvious gimmick to game the political system for favors and money. Do companies print press releases when they come up with a slightly better internal payroll system that saves them money? Of course not.
“you can eat wild catfish without long-term ill effects”
From some posts I’ve seen on Tumblr, it looks more like “wild catfish can eat you”.
Though they do say in the article that these are not the American species of catfish, so you’re probably safe not to be eaten the next time you go fishing.
@Silder
The fallacy here is that you assume that when you solve a problem, people will not move on to a different problem. Do you act like that yourself? Probably not. So why expect others to always do so?
If you are more convinced by actual examples:
– Ozone layer decay was a major issue. Solutions were implemented, people moved on.
– Acid rain was a major issue. Solutions were implemented, people moved on.
Easy stuff like that runs out very quickly.
OK, so I as the Energy Czar decide to shut down 30% of the fossil fuel plants over the next 10 years and power up an equivalent amount of nuclear and renewable energy capacity. OK, I can shutter the fossil plants… but what’s going on with those nuclear plants? Environmentalists are protesting about waste, proliferation, fear of Chernobyl and Fukushima, warming of the water, killing fish in the intakes, ugliness of cooling tower, what have you. And not just protests but lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit. I could have built new coal plants far more easily.
In the meantime, I’ve tried to build wind, but the Audubon Society sued over killing birds. I couldn’t get the ROW for transmission lines because they supposedly interfere with some sort of animal migration. And some rich people (not even environmentalists this time) complained about the view.
I also tried solar, but was again blocked because my solar panels, transmission lines, and maintenance vehicles affected the delicate desert environment.
And when I went to these environmentalists and asked them what should I do instead of what they objected to, some of them just pointed to the other sources… but most of them just said “conservation”. “People lived without air conditioning for centuries” they told me.
Thing is, the environmental lobby has built an extremely good machine for stopping energy projects. This means if we want more power (which we do, to avoid austerity… especially if the environmentalists are managing to shutter the nuclear we already have) we have to stick with the fossil fuel Devil we know — he’s at least got a really good lobby of his own.
@Slider:
You have described a pretty common failure mode for activist movements, but you have not explained why this failure mode is unique to the Left (or, possibly, just the Environmental Left). Everything you’ve said applies equally well to the Right, especially its activist Evangelical branch.
To be fair, the Left has been winning a lot of culture wars up until now, but just because the Right lost, does not mean that it didn’t try.
Furthermore, you have not explained why this failure mode is unavoidable and inevitable. Note that I personally serve as a counterpoint to this claim. For example, once the rate of increase of carbon emissions hits zero (or even becomes negative, though this is probably too much to hope for), I’ll stop caring about it (until it starts climbing up again).
@Deiseach:
The lifespan of any catfish that eats me personally is likely to be measured in days, not weeks. Spread the word to all your catfish friends ! 🙂
@TheNybbler:
Not really, since new solutions are always being invented. Unless, of course, you (acting in your capacity as the Libertarian Czar) decide to shut down all government research grants…
Yes, and I’d oppose those protesters just as you would. If people like you stopped fighting people like me just on principle (and vice versa), I bet we could put together a decent voting bloc… I know this won’t happen anytime soon, but still, food for thought.
That said, the situation is not as grim as you make it sound. For example, Elon Musk and Tesla have been making significant progress on transitioning their factories to solar (not to mention, transitioning their cars to electric). Google is following suit, as are some other major corporations.
So, it would appear that it is quite possible to get more power without falling back on fossil fuels, despite all those pesky protesters.
It’s an attempt to explain a real existing phenomenon – leftist activism ends up with leftist activists getting to shoot each other in the back of the head. The first problem is to explain why. Then you have to get more nuanced to explain “why not always?”.
If you’re talking about modern evangelicals I have no idea why you’d pick a powerless group that controls no cultural institutions – but beyond that it’s not really on topic because there haven’t been modern evangelical autogenocides. There have been leftist autogenocides. Two interesting things though – first evangelicals are less vulnerable to an infinite spiral because they have a source text to go back to that contains lots of moderating statements – that’s what a Schelling point looks like and second the “ideology that shall not be named because Scott can’t actually successfully argue against it” makes the point that American / Anglo leftism is the result of a Christian holiness spiral – one that had to discard the actual holy texts specifically because they were too effective a Schelling point.
It’s more on you to prove really really strongly that your ideology won’t lead to a known (literal) death spiral failure condition but given that I already explained why it’s likely – set out (what might be) impossible goals (replace all fossil fuels, keep up electricity production) and wait – can’t give up the goals, can’t avoid the energy apocalypse, lots of people get to freeze to death then people get to die who report that, etc.
As far as
No, you don’t. First of all the mechanism is that the beliefs that gain you power keep getting more extreme not “every single person changes their beliefs in a more extreme direction”. Second, you already demonstrated that you are subject to this exact process with environmental contamination! Much better in the western world than 50 years ago, therefore do more because, well, if you don’t believe you should do more you’re not an environmentalist. Third leftists on every conceivable issue always move left without even remembering that they did. “Gay marriage” in 1980 was a joke, Robin Williams starred in a major comedy where the joke was how ridiculous he looked wearing a dress, etc. The nature of leftism granting status to people on the basis of holding beliefs is a mechanism that pushes them to hold more and more extreme beliefs as their old beliefs get mainstreamed. I believe in National Parks, emissions controls and natural husbandry but I don’t get status points for it because that’s not enough to allow me to call myself an “environmentalist” (unless environmentalists are doing the motte and bailey of defining it broadly to seem popular the defining it narrowly to get their demands met – then I get to be an environmentalist (I guess)).
That literally entails totalitarian control of any economic activity across the planet. The track record of leftists being given that type of power is uniformly horrific.
@Bugmaster
New solutions are invented all the time. New easy stuff isn’t. Turn off my lights when I leave the house, turn the heat/AC down when I’m not around…. easy stuff exhausted. After that, maybe I can replace the fridge if it’s not too new (this is the appliance with the most efficiency gain recently). Then it’s all hard stuff, and/or stuff which makes my life worse.
Knocking down everyone’s house to put up super-sealed, super-insulated structures with heat-exchange ventilation and windows only on one side just isn’t going to happen.
In the meantime, while you’re busy being ejected from the environmental movement, my constituents are freezing in the dark. In practice, the environmental movement as a whole opposes the union of all the things any significant subgroup opposes. So if I’m Energy Czar, there’s no point in trying to appease one or another subgroup of the environmental movement; if I can’t get them _all_ to agree then I’ll either be stymied or I’ll have to steamroller them. And there is no major energy source I can come up with where all will agree; the only thing they all agree on is people should use less energy. Further, I have the best ability per kilowatt to steamroller with fossil fuels.
@Slider, TheNybbler:
I keep getting this increasingly strong feeling that you are not arguing with me, but rather, with the imaginary evil leftist liberal who lives in your head. I am not going to speak for that guy, I can only speak for myself.
Are you being literal, or metaphorical ? If so, can you offer up any examples — preferably those that occurred in semi-democratic societies such as the USA ?
Are you seriously asking me to prove a negative ? I am not omniscient and neither are you, so please provide some positive evidence for your claim.
That is a rather uncharitable interpretation of my argument. First of all, I never claimed to be some sort of a gatekeeper for the environmentalist movement; I have repeatedly stated that my beliefs are my own. Secondly, if the percentage of some toxic chemical in the ground water is (hypothetically) 10X above safe levels, and we reduce it to 5X, then that’s a cause for celebration but not a reason to stop working on it. Thirdly, I would love to improve the environmental conditions elsewhere in the world, too, but I feel a lot more strongly about the US — because I live here, and also because at least there’s some semblance of democracy here, unlike in e.g. China.
You keep asserting this, but without some kind of evidence or chain of reasoning, your assertions are not persuasive.
So, you’re saying that you’d exhausted the “easy stuff”, but then more “easy stuff” came along (in the form of a more efficient fridge), right ? Wasn’t this kind of my point ? Personally, I’ve recently upgraded to a hybrid car, because the model I wanted was literally as cheap as gasoline cars with comparable specs in my price range… so, why not ? It was the easy stuff, after all.
As I said before, this is only true if you ignore the negative externalities. Setting your furniture on fire is super cheap in the short term, but buying an electric heater is going to cost a lot less long term.
I’m arguing with the “Environmentalist Left™”, which is perhaps an emergent phenomenon but a real one nonetheless. Any particular environmentalist may have a workable set of ideas, but each of those ideas will result in so much opposition from other environmentalists that it will be stymied.
The cost of externalities is less than the cost of not having power. As Energy Czar, I personally might be perfectly on board with transitioning to nuclear, solar, wind, or unicorn farts (which comprise hydrogen and oxygen in stoichiometric ratio) — but if I can’t build any of those, I’m better off building what I can than letting my subjects go without power.
@The Nybbler:
The transition to solar is happening. More than a third of all new capacity added to the US grid in 2016 was solar; if you add in wind, hydro, and nuclear power, you get up to two thirds environmentally friendly. I don’t know how we managed to sneak those plants past the dastardly environmentalists; I guess maybe they all took the year off.
@Iain
The numbers I find at the EIAs website do not match the article
http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data.cfm#gencapacity
In particular there appears to be more natural gas than solar. And that’s without accounting for this being net summer capacity, which makes solar look a lot bigger than it is.
Which document are you looking at? I find it unlikely that Ars Technica is flat out lying about this, and much more likely that you are just looking in the wrong place.
After doing some Excel to the raw XLS, I get a sum of 6,675 megawatts of nat gas, 4,206 megawatts of solar, 2,856 of wind, 1,122 of nuclear, 379 of hydro, and a smattering of others. (Including one coal plant, contrary to Ars Technica’s claim; but only one, and it’s not a big one at 50 MW.) On the other hand, there’s some odd features to this data: there are multiple entries for some nat gas installations with identical plant and generator codes, there are no solar thermal plants listed (though that might not be so strange if there’s only 1700 megawatts total in 2015), and the months only go up to October. On the gripping hand, though, it would be weird if the missing two months all went to solar and wind.
If the existing-capacity figures for 2015 are trustworthy, solar (and wind) capacity in winter is not very different from in summer. But that’s weird enough to make me doubt either the figures or my understanding of them — sun angle alone should make a big difference, and then there’s weather and daylight length.
If you take the sum of new installations and retirements, then renewable energy could be said to dominate — 6.6 gigawatts of coal went offline in 2016. But that’s not what Ars Technica is doing, since only 456 megawatts of nat gas did and that’s not enough to make up the difference with solar.
@Iain
I got the same numbers as Nornagest.
Net Summer Capacity and Net Winter Capacity are both “The maximum output […] that generating equipment can supply to system load, as demonstrated by a multi-hour test”
so day length and weather aren’t relevant; I’m surprised sun angle doesn’t make much of a difference but apparently it doesn’t.
I found the missing two months: they are under this table, and are given as planned rather than completed. Which makes sense given that the figures were released in November, but I don’t think Ars Technica is being very honest by assuming they’ll all come in on time: big projects miss deadlines constantly, especially technically innovative ones.
Anyway, they add a maximum of another 4,156 (!) megawatts of wind, 3,240 megawatts of solar, 1,020 of nat gas, and nine of hydro to the above figures. I think that matches the Ars Technica numbers, so mystery solved, I guess. It’s anyone’s guess how much of that actually came online; but you could probably take a shot at estimating it if you dug up the equivalent tables for 2015.
The Ars article mentions that everybody tries to get their plant online before the end of December “to take advantage of the tax benefits of reaching operational status in the current year”, so it seems plausible that many of the proposed projects will actually finish on time. Either way, the exact numbers don’t really matter: my overall point (about how we are successfully building a lot of renewable energy plants) still stands.
I think that is an exaggeration. I think if four big polities (U.S., E.U., China and India) all decided to impose carbon taxes sufficient to produce a mild decrease in their CO2 emissions, that might well be enough to get the global rate of increase to zero.
I’m not arguing that doing that would be desirable, but it doesn’t require totalitarian control of any economic activity across the planet, or anywhere for that matter–a carbon tax is well short of totalitarian control.
Harmful yes. Compounds no. Lead and Mercury have their own seats at the periodic table.
Yes, sorry, that was lazy of me.
Silder is banned for this and other posts
You’re leaving out the tens of millions of ukrainians/kulaks/and various other others that Stalin quite willingly put to death. Heck, Lenin started liquidating kulaks (who were others par excellence) less than a year after taking power.
So it’s not that the left is mean to in groups and the right out groups, it’s that for the right, membership in the ingroup gives you more protection than it does not in the left.
I ascribe this to two factors. One, the right wing belief in hierarchy keeps things from getting as crazy at the center. Once we have a Fuhrer, we stick with him, because he’s the Fuhrer. Two, the 20th century left has almost invariably defined the ingroup as those people who hold the right ideas, rather than members of a certain race or class. being the right race or class was a help, but it wasn’t the be all end. Because it’s about ideas, the left is more susceptible to spirals of virtue signalling, which keeps the center churning.
As the left becomes more and more identity focused, more and more like the very old right, maybe this will change. Or maybe I’m full of crap.
The numbers of dead which Stalin was responsible for, the degree to which misfortune, incompetence, and malice caused deaths, etc are all still matters of debate. The numbers vary far more than the estimates of Nazi victims, either because the Germans were true to stereotype in keeping detailed records (eg Einsatzgruppen reports, Hoefle Telegram) or relevant information is still locked up in archives the Russian government has not opened.
Timothy Snyder, hardly a fan of Stalin (I have seen him condemned by self-proclaimed communists for relying on “fascist” statistics, “fascist” meaning “not friendly enough to the USSR”) thinks six million civilians were intentionally killed under Stalin, nine million if you count unintentional but forseeable deaths. He gives the equivalent numbers for the Germans as eleven and twelve million. I haven’t run his numbers to see if he’s including the two and a half million Soviet POWs who died, and he doesn’t seem to be counting all the Soviet civilians who died during the war (which may be reasonable: for example, even if both sides had tried their utmost to keep civilians from starving, which the Soviets and especially the Germans didn’t – if you weren’t part of the war effort the Soviet authorities don’t seem to have cared much, and the Germans planned to starve tens of millions).
I think that you are correct that the greater tendency on the right to consider biology plays a part. There were hard and fast limits on who could be a member of the ingroup in Nazi Germany, and on who could be members of the most hated outgroup (with some exceptions – there were a few cases of people with Jewish or half-Jewish fathers who were ruled to have been the result of cuckoldry, as an example).
I think you are, however, incorrect that a belief in hierarchy was that much stronger among the Nazis. One of the reasons the German war effort was such a muddle was that Hitler played his subordinates off against each other for fear that one would get too powerful and challenge him, and they were constantly jockeying against each other, forming alliances, etc. Hitler was a terrible manager, and the Nazi hierarchy was extremely chaotic. Even when the fighting had reached Berlin, his underlings were playing power games against each other. Purity spirals also happened in Nazi Germany.
Snyder’s figures are extremely conservative. they represent the absolute minimums that are decent. Other reputable figures with access to soviet archives, like conquest, give considerably higher totals. And he, of course, leaves out all deaths before stalin came to power in 1927, despite his complicity in the many murders of the earlier soviet state. He also, for some reason, leaves out the post-war deaths, most notably the 1946-7 famine.
As to german post-war plans, these varied considerably during the war, and while all were awful, the degree of awfulness did vary considerably. It is unfair to pick out the worst of them.
Both sides made plans that involved the deaths of millions. It seems unfair to knock the nazis for admitting this openly while rewarding the soviets plans that were just as murderous because they ignored the problem.
>One of the reasons the German war effort was such a muddle was that Hitler played his subordinates off against each other for fear that one would get too powerful and challenge him, and they were constantly jockeying against each other, forming alliances, etc.
I think this factor is overstated. There was plenty of infighting among senior leadership on all sides. it mattered less on the allied side because A, they were winning for most of the war, which makes things less acrimonious, and B, even when mistakes were made their massively greater material resources meant they were easier to afford. You also have to take into account that every history of german leadership during the war is based on testimony from people who had just lost a war and were desperately trying to avoid hanging. You’re not likely to get a lot of people defending Hitler’s management style in such circumstances.
I thought Conquest came up with his numbers during the middle of the Cold War. Did he revise them afterwards? Even if we double Snyder’s numbers, though, that’s still a couple million short of “tens of millions”. I think Snyder’s numbers solve the problem of apologists on the one hand who claim nobody died (and also they deserved it) and the people who claim that Stalin killed a large % of the Soviet population. Some claim Stalin was responsible for the deaths of around 50 million Soviets – that is a high enough % of the Soviet population that I am not sure if a state could function with that many people dying.
(As a side note – I recall seeing an article written by self-proclaimed Maoist scholars, Westerners I believe, making the argument from statistics that the Great Leap Forward had only caused the deaths of 15 million…)
As for German post-war plans, isn’t Generalplan Ost generally accepted as what they actually wanted to do?
Regarding management and so forth in the Third Reich, I would draw a very significant line between the dictatorships and the democracies. Sure, there were power struggles and shuffles of personnel in the US or Britain, but nowhere near the infighting of Nazi Germany, and nowhere near as bloody as the USSR. FDR never had MacArthur, Patton, or Eisenhower shot or demoted for getting too popular.
You are, of course, correct that post-war there was a boom in memoirs by surviving German higher-ups trying to blame everything on people who had committed suicide or been hanged. Still, I think the evidence that there was a lot more internal jockeying for power in Nazi Germany is good, even if it didn’t happen as the survivors said (example: Speer writing an entire book blaming everything on Himmler, when in fact the evidence suggests he and Himmler worked together quite closely).
@dndnrsn
>Did he revise them afterwards? E
He did, and downwards somewhat, but still well more than Snyder, into the tens of millions.
> Some claim Stalin was responsible for the deaths of around 50 million Soviets – that is a high enough % of the Soviet population that I am not sure if a state could function with that many people dying.
well the Khmer rouge did kill something like 1/3 of the population of cambodia in just a few years, and were only stopped by outside invasion. Stalin’s deaths were spread out over a couple decades.
Then you also have the ambiguous deaths, if stalin orders your penal battalion to walk across a minefield, do you count that as a stalin death? Does it matter if it’s in 1941, when stalin is desperately trying to stop the german invasion, or 1945 when he’s trying to conquer as much of eastern europe as he can?
@Regarding management and so forth in the Third Reich, I would draw a very significant line between the dictatorships and the democracies. Sure, there were power struggles and shuffles of personnel in the US or Britain, but nowhere near the infighting of Nazi Germany, and nowhere near as bloody as the USSR. FDR never had MacArthur, Patton, or Eisenhower shot or demoted for getting too popular.
Less bloody, sure, no question, but that doesn’t mean the machine functioned more smoothly. Alan brook, the Chief British general, loathed churchill, thought he was a mad man.
>Still, I think the evidence that there was a lot more internal jockeying for power in Nazi Germany is good, even if it didn’t happen as the survivors said
they were also losing. If you say “we can’t do X, it will be a disaster” and you win, criticism is muted, even if you take twice as many casualties as was predicted. Once you start losing, however, and are surrounded by lots of unambiguous disasters, there’s much more room for criticism and recrimination.
I think you’re vastly understating the violent
nature of Nazi ideology.
On the orders on Heinrich Himmler Generalplan Ost was drafted in 1940 by Hans Ehlich and Konrad Meyer, the head of the Race and Settlement Office of the SS. The plan classified the population of central and eastern Europe into racial groups, with “Aryan” elements to be germanized and the rest to be deported or eliminated. In the end the plan called for the removal of half of all Latvians, Estonians and Czechs, sixty percent of all Russians, sixty five percent of the population Ukraine, seventy five percent of the Belorussians, and eighty five percent of poles and Lithuanians, not to mention of course the
exterminationremoval of the Jews.This was not a hypothetical document, as it was drafted by the architects of the of final solution; and as such we should consider holocaust as being but the first stage of this much greater plan.
@hyperboloid
>ith “Aryan” elements to be germanized and the rest to be deported or eliminated
My point is precisely that there’s an enormous amount of difference between “deported” and “eliminated”, and plans wavered back and forth.
My point is also that the Soviet plans for what they did when they won also involved deporting millions. And they were implemented.
@cassander:
Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge was four years of disaster, though, while the USSR under Stalin played a huge role in winning a major war (inflicting almost 90% of German casualties) and took advantage of that war to conquer half of Europe. It’s highly unlikely that Stalin killed a % of the Soviet population similar to the Khmer Rouge.
Concerning ambiguous deaths – I don’t know. I don’t know how you’d break down what’s the fault of the Germans (for starting the war) versus what’s the fault of the Soviets (for being willing to sacrifice troops and civilians). The degree to which the Soviets threw men at the enemy is significantly exaggerated, too.
The degree to which things were messed up in Germany seem to have a lot to do with the personality of Hitler. The image of Hitler as dilettanteish, alternately micromanaging and ignoring important things, making important decisions based on who he talked to last, has been exaggerated, but there are non-post-war accounts of it.
@hyperboloid/cassander:
Planned German deportations and actual Soviet deportations both tended not to pay a great deal of attention as to whether those deported would be able to survive where they were deported to.
Example: there’s some indication that the original German plans regarding the Jews that fell into their clutches was to deport them east of the Urals once the Soviet Union had been beaten, and the gassings and shootings were a response to the war against the Soviets not going as planned in mid-to-late 1941. However, deporting millions of people east of the Urals would have been a death sentence for a lot of them, as the Germans are unlikely to have provided those deported with what they would need to survive, let alone build sustainable communities.
EDIT: and, as hyperboloid notes, “deported” is often a euphemism.
@cassander
Not when were talking about numbers like that there’s not. Where could you deport eighty five percent of the population of Poland, and sixty fiver percent of the population of western Russia except up a chimney? Siberia is big, but it’s not that big.
The original version of my post mentioned early plans for the extermination of the Jews, i have revised this. There is historical controversy, but it’s likely the decision to move forwards with outright genocide was made some time after the launch of operation Barbarossa, as it became clear that Germany simply had no place to send the vast Jewish population now under it’s control.
The acquisition of lebensraum in the east was Germany’s primary war aim, it’s unlikely the Nazis would give up on this if it became impractical to do it without mass killing, rather I think they would have used the methods that had proven so effective already.
@dndnrsn
>It’s highly unlikely that Stalin killed a % of the Soviet population similar to the Khmer Rouge.
Oh, he definitely didn’t, no question there. Let’s say he killed 20 million. the vast majority of those were in the 30s, which means he was killing 1-2 million a year. There were 150 million people in the USSR in 1926, so he was killing maybe 1 percent of the population a year. If half of those deaths happened just in 33, that would be 6%. Now, 6% is an enormous number of deaths, ww1 caused 4.5% deaths in france and germany, but given that the red army lost something like 7 million in the first year of the war, we know the system could take it.
>The degree to which the Soviets threw men at the enemy is significantly exaggerated, too.
Yes and no. They were absolutely willing to throw men at the enemy and did so. The popular perception is that that was ALL that they did, and that’s definitely false.
>The image of Hitler as dilettanteish, alternately micromanaging and ignoring important things, making important decisions based on who he talked to last, has been exaggerated, but there are non-post-war accounts of it.
Agreed, but there are similar accounts of FDR and Churchill. FDR’s management style was to keep things deliberately (as far as we can tell) up in the air for as long as possible so he could avoid making difficult decisions before he had to in the hopes that they’d go away. Churchill at one point got in a fight over whether or not troops would be allowed to wear regimental badges or not. Now, I happen to think he was actually correct in that particular instance.
@dndnrsn and hyperbolloid
>Planned German deportations and actual Soviet deportations both tended not to pay a great deal of attention as to whether those deported would be able to survive where they were deported to.
Whether they survived depends considerably more on how quickly they were deported than to where. There is plenty of habitable land east of the urals (the urals are at almost exactly 60 degrees, moscow ~40). And millions of people were living there pre-war. If they all got stuck in cattle cars and dumped the day the war was , it would have been a death sentence for most. If they were more gradually moved (say, in waves to make room for german settlers) , the situation becomes much more like stalin’s forced populations transfers post ww2.
>The acquisition of lebensraum in the east was Germany’s primary war aim, it’s unlikely the Nazis would give up on this if it became impractical to do it with out mass killing, rather I think they would use the methods that had proven so effective already.
I agree, absolutely no doubt. But the question is not “would they give up lebensraum if they couldn’t do it without killing”, it’s “would they have given up the killing if they could get lebensraum without it.” And there I suspect the answer is yes.
20 million, which is just over double Snyder’s total, is still lower than a lot of the “how many did Stalin kill?” numbers. And 9 million is still enough to be way up there on the “history’s monsters” leaderboard.
I suppose with the Soviets, the Cold War and lack of translation, stuff still being archived away, etc, there’s a really distorted view of their way of making war. Too many English-speaking audiences have gotten their view of the war in the East from German sources, and German generals, at least, seem to have really wanted to deny that the Red Army had some very competent leaders, and did some things really well.
Granted with regard to FDR and Churchill. You might be right that the Germans just had less wiggle room to screw up. I do think that he had more of a tendency to screw things up by dint of personality type, though.
People can definitely live east of the Urals, but those are communities that have grown up organically over time. Dumping people out of cattle cars is probably the form things would have taken.
And, where in the world is there good agricultural land that somebody isn’t already living on? Most of the world’s good agricultural land has been taken for a long time. Sure, if it was possible to get farmland, resources, etc without doing nasty stuff, most people would take that. But the history of humanity consists in large part of people deciding that it’s better to have gold and grain with blood on your hands than be poor with a clean conscience.
One way I’ve heard it put, by a commentator (who I’m not going to name as they were speaking privately) on NZ’s political system (so waaayyyy less dramatic than your examples) was that the left side’s starting point is what is the ethical thing to do. While the right side’s starting point is that’s the world’s imperfect and how do we know what to do?
So left-wing disagreements are about morality, while right-wing disagreements are about knowledge. “If you disagree with someone on the right they’re likely to think you’re an idiot or a fool. If you disagree with someone on the left, they’re likely to think you evil.”
But then NZ’s right wing is more the ACT party, which tends libertarian (or similar movements within the National party), we don’t have that politically important group of evangelical Christians the US seems to have.
That fits with my experience of NZ politics. One area where I do see a difference is climate change; disagreeing with the left on climate change makes you both an idiot and evil.
Though I don’t think this fully explains our fracturing of the left. Labour and the Greens don’t seem to have significantly differ on morality. Other than a couple of key points, such as the environment, the two groups are well aligned. They’ve even signed that Memorandum of Understanding. I’d argue their differences stem from how radically they want to change things, and how they aim to go about the changes they both want to see. These sound like knowledge arguments.
Maybe an Idealism/Conservatism divide more accurately explains this. Both left and right want to see the country in a better state, but the idealist left believes this needs large-scale change. Disagreeing with them is taken as disagreeing with their utopic end goal which makes you evil. There is also a lot of room for different end-states and/or ways of getting to the end-state which explains the left-wing fracturing. On the other hand, conservatives believe things are not actually going horribly wrong. So if the government is going to intervene it needs to have good reason to do so (namely through free market improvements). Disagreeing with the right is disagreeing with their evidence-driven improvements. Which makes you an idiot.
I would point out that the discrepancy could also be explained as a corollary of Cthulhu always swimming left: the right is just trying to stay in the same place and not have things taken away from them. The left is trying to take things from the right. The latter is a lot more prone to infighting than the former.
Yes, bathroom laws, but those only happened because the left broke the status quo first and the right is trying to undo that.
Driving random people out of business for expressing Barack Obama’s 2012 views on gay marriage seems like a good example.
I can’t think of anything comparable to, say, passing laws binding people to bathrooms based on birth sex.
I think most (right-wing?) people think this is a red herring; that is, it’s not about “what bathroom can I use?”, it’s about getting trans rights recognised and this is an easy introductory issue.
Suppose a person who dresses and looks like a woman goes into a woman’s bathroom. How do you know if this is a cis woman or a trans woman (that is, born male/assigned male at birth or however you want to use the label)? You can’t tell, unless there is some reason to suspect “this person in a dress isn’t a woman” based on how they look or behave.
The way that this is presented, however, you’d swear that, in the backwards states where the evil discriminatory bathroom laws have been passed, there are bathroom police stopping people and demanding their birth certs (or pulling down their underwear to check their genitals) before letting them into the bathroom.
Now, schools would be a special case; if everyone knows Johnnie used to go into the boys’ bathroom but now “Janie” wants to use the girls’ bathroom, most students and teachers will know Johnnie = Janie. In that case, Janie may well feel all the pain and suffering she claims she feels when told to use the boys’ bathroom. But for a public bathroom where it’s all strangers? Who knows? Who can tell? Unless you have someone who cannot physically pass for the gender they are claiming, in which case it will not be malign transphobia at fault, it will be a genuine case of “I thought this was a guy trying to get into the women’s bathroom”.
But this makes an easy wedge issue: get the idea of “anyone can use any facilities regardless of what gender or what gender orientation they claim” accepted and normalised, and then you can move on to the really tough questions.
I don’t get it. Why would there have to be bathroom police? Most people are going to obey the evil discriminatory law anyway, and most of those that don’t will be afraid of getting caught; either way, the law causes genuine suffering.
Driving random people out of business for expressing Barack Obama’s 2012 views on gay marriage seems like a good example.
Obama was pro-gay-marriage in 2012. His views had “evolved.”
Your point still holds, just not as strongly. If you took a Rip-van-Winkle-nap in 2010 and woke up in 2015 holding what had been the position of the sitting Democratic President at the time you went out, you were a monster.
In modern times, does the right have a tendency to be shitty to the outgroup that the left doesn’t have, and the left a tendency to turn on itself in a way the right doesn’t?
My gut response, strengthened by going through the earlier comments, is “define ‘left’ and ‘right'”. ISTR significant struggling with this in another OT not too long ago.
If what you really mean is Republican and Democrat, I can supply the following existence proofs:
Republicans turning on itself: Tea Party, and people who use the term c*ckservative. (I notice how, in the case of the TP, this often looks like red-tribe-Reps turning on blue-tribe-Reps.)
Democrats being shitty to the outgroup: those who use the term “gun nut”, or who overtly hate corporations and those who run them, or anyone who talks about the right as if they’re dumb / greedy / delusional / etc., or else they wouldn’t be on the right.
In your first counterexample – the Tea Party is a good example of internal fighting – it was a purge of Rockefeller Republicans, basically, “blue tribe Republicans” (everyone seems to forget that blue/red tribe was supposed to be about culture, not politics – a generation or two ago there were plenty of good ol’ boy Democrats and northeastern Republicans). However, the latter example – how many of the people who toss that term around were ever good Republicans?
In your second counterexample, I’m … I don’t know, this is the big weakness in my half-assed notion. I think that the Democrats have gotten considerably meaner over the past decade or so, and am going to start another topic on it.
Of course, the left-wing activist types who turn on each other so readily are not doctrinaire Democrats, often not Democrats at all.
There was never much there to forget. It’s one bit of lazy punditry breeding more lazy punditry. The blue/red tribe stuff was never rigorous enough to amount to anything better.
Oh, it was never especially rigorous, but it got less rigorous when it turned into shorthand for “left/right”.
Which happened within… minutes? seconds?… of the original post going up.
Oh, at least fifteen minutes. I don’t use the red/blue tribe designations because I think they’re silly and destroy nuance.
I think you have the case exactly backwards. First the left passed a bill banning single-sex bathrooms for all businesses, private or public. Then the right passed a law superseding that law, letting private businesses do what they like (as it had been before). And they also declared that government-owned facilities are single-sex, since apparently that has to be made explicit now.
I really wish they’d left government bathrooms alone, though. Life is difficult.
The state also informed Charlotte they would pass this counter law in response if they proceeded with the first bathroom law. So Charlotte specifically picked the fight, none of this was done in a vacuum. They all picked a lose/lose scenario.
My view is simply these laws weren’t ever necessary in the first place as I must have missed the big bathroom rape epidemic. It was unwise for the left because it was case in point for incoherent priorities in places they wanted to win elections.
Religious groups may be shrinking but there is no need to intentionally alienate them to garner support of a transgender community you already have the votes from and this law wasn’t going to change any facts on the ground. My guess is this was a net loss politically for little gain.
I do feel that organizations like the NCAA and NBA shouldn’t be taking sides in this type of stuff.
As a follow-up to your first paragraph, Charlotte repealed their ordinance, which the state said would cause them to repeal HB2, but, nope.
I agree with your other paragraphs.
No such law. The law binds people to bathrooms based on legal sex; a transsexual who went through the formalities (and operations) would be bound by their adopted sex, not their birth sex. It was nominally aimed at perverts who would simply claim to be transgender in order to gain access to the mysteries of the women’s bathroom; of course, in reality, it was just tribal warfare.
As for who left wing activists are hurting…. well, there’s the University of Virginia, its Dean of Students, and all its fraternities, particularly Phi Kappa Psi. There’s one Curtis Yarvin (a.k.a Mencius Moldbug), declared persona non grata at at least one professional conference. Certainly the Death Eaters count as a small, weak, defenseless outgroup, right? There’s all the college men subject to the unreasonable sexual misconduct policies (and their one-sided enforcement) left-wing activists have gotten installed at universities. There’s the stuff going on inside certain tech companies; here’s the fictional version: http://archive.is/qqNOb ; the real version is… not much better.
I have noticed a trend in the comments here(and I really have no idea if it extends beyond the comments here), where it seems to me that people on the right are more likely to make broad sweeping generalizations about the left, and people on the left are more likely to bake in ad hominem attacks with their rebuttal, and just generally be meaner/snarkier in terms of tone.
I think this might just be a matter of personal perspective though, as I tend to think that the left has won, is winning, and will continue to win, I normally don’t get ‘personally’ upset when people make broad sweeping attacks against the left. I am however a deeply insecure person, so I take it very ‘personally’ when somebody heavily implies(or directly says) that the person they are talking to is stupid/amoral etc.
An example that really solidified this opinion for me involved somebody taking a broad swipe at Keynesian economics being unscientific(not personal?), and somebody replying with what an odious opinion that was(personal?).
I think this fits in well with the “the right thinks the left is stupid, the left thinks the right is evil”
I think the right is more and more coming around to the idea that the other guys are evil.
I think that the religious right, especially when it comes to abortion, have always found the left to be holding evil ideas, though they tend to claim that they “love the sinner, hate the sin”.
The economic right (whatever that means today) never really had any hate. They would look at people that wanted something like, say, an increased minimum wage and they would understand that the left wing person just wanted to improve poor people’s lives, but the right winger would disagree on how to do that.
Probably not. It’s just an artifact of what the two sides are allowed to get away with under the current moderation policy. Rude right-wingers are banned, so they substitute with arguments.
Just today on Reddit I found the strangest argument between alt-righters who were worried about the threat the Jews pose vs. alt-righters who were worried about the onslaught of multiculturalism and saw the anti-Jew guys as distracted from the real threat. So I would say that any group can have subcultures that furiously disagree over tiny ideological details.
But since /r/socialism is currently having a meltdown over pictures of catgirls, I think you might have a point that the left seems to have a bigger problem with infighting than the right.
(Yeah, I know that data is not the plural of anecdote, but I had the perfect pair of anecdotes and I couldn’t resist sharing.)
Often what seems to be a “tiny ideological detail” to an outsider is actually a major point of contention over fundamental issues.
For example, does socialism entail ridding the world of “problematic” art, however the Dictatorship of the Proles currently chooses to define that?
For leftism to function as a practical system for enforcing permanent social revolution, it must be capable of stifling any dissent, including through art (hence the disillusionment of East German communist artists like Bertolt Brecht). Artists who think they can just draw anything without the party’s permission must be taught a lesson.
So catgirls are as good a thing to ban as any of the other weird examples of Soviet/left censorship. Remember when eggplants emojis were a reactionary tool of the patriarchy?
Meanwhile, the argument over whether Jews qua Jews are a corrupting influence and the cause of the evils of multiculturalism (versus western-atheist-progressive Jews simply being particularly blatant examples of a different source of corruption) is a significant issue on the far right.
Deciding on one or the other would inform the whole direction of our strategy going forward, and so the “tiny detail” once again becomes an important point of contention.
(As an aside, I emphatically side with Moldberg in seeing antisemitism as a particularly stupid distraction, but can see why other people confronting the same evidence would disagree.)
The Right Wing in the U.S. is far more authoritarian than the Left. So the Left gets a normal amount of infighting, whereas the Right has to toe the line and follow their leaders closely or else they get harshly punished. The leaders demand uniform pursuit of goals dictated from above, by the Koch brothers and a few other Gods of the Right.
Also, during Obama’s presidency, the Right used to control everything except the presidency– i.e. the Congress, SCOTUS until Scalia died, most governorships, most state legislatures. Now, after Trump, the Right controls absolutely everything. So those on the Left are being marginalized, demonized by Fox, Breitbart, Drudge etc., and just generally abused. They hardly ever even comment on the numoerus message boards on the Net, like this one, that are dominated by the Right.
Maybe the Left would like to strike back against the Right but they can’t. Because the Right controls the media (e.g. “America’s most trusted news source, which is Fox) and the political system– everything. So, like rats in those experiments where rats are electric shocked while in a cage with more than one rat, they take it out on each other.
Democrats had control of both houses of Congress from 2009 to 2011 (the 111th Congress), and control was split from 2011 to 2013 (the 112th). The same appears to be true of most state legislatures although I’m having a harder time finding statistics there. Most state governorships, too, were Democratic until the 2010 elections. Partisanship in the Roberts Court prior to Scalia’s death was generally considered split, with Kennedy usually as the swing vote, although it was a bit more right-leaning than the Rehnquist Court.
How would you respond to my argument downthread that the statistic proves nothing, because it only asks for responders’ single most trusted channel?
Also, where’s your evidence aside from Fox News for the Right controlling the media?
You are saying that people on the right have to be in favor of free trade, mass immigration, amnesty for illegal immigrants and opposed to interventions abroad? I didn’t know that.
“You are saying that people on the right have to be in favor of free trade, mass immigration, amnesty for illegal immigrants and opposed to interventions abroad?”…and pro-choice, for criminal justice reform, gay marriage, and cutting defense spending, and opposed to crony-capitalism, the drug war and the Patriot Act.
The Right Wing in the U.S. is far more authoritarian than the Left. So the Left gets a normal amount of infighting, whereas the Right has to toe the line and follow their leaders closely or else they get harshly punished. The leaders demand uniform pursuit of goals dictated from above, by the Koch brothers and a few other Gods of the Right.
I’ll start with the polite response. How would an independent observer test this theory? What tests would they run and what data would they gather to see if you are correct? (I’m looking for data, not anecdotes.)
The Right Wing in the U.S. is far more authoritarian than the Left. So the Left gets a normal amount of infighting, whereas the Right has to toe the line and follow their leaders closely or else they get harshly punished. The leaders demand uniform pursuit of goals dictated from above, by the Koch brothers and a few other Gods of the Right.
Now for the… more emotional response.
We’ve just had an election, one where the political establishment of the party of the right, their leaders, saw their party hijacked by a complete and total outsider (and where the multiple outsider candidates did much better than anyone the party leadership tried to push). The left, on the other hand, saw the party of the left’s establishment practically cheat to push an unpopular establishment leftist to the top over an outsider, then lock down in conformity. You’ve put out a statement without even trying to account for the largest piece of evidence that directly contradicts your argument. (And I can argue with evidence that this is not just an isolated incident; the Brat / Cantor election, the Pauls, the Tea Party, all outsiders on the right.)
Again, I’m experiencing a lot of stress, and I hope what I’m saying does not come across as against the spirit of free debate Scott is trying to push here, but perhaps nobody is listening to you because you’re not even trying to acknowledge that another explanation might be possible?
I love your blog! It’s in my aggregator on my list of the “best” 10% that I prioritize reading. I even recommended it in my Christmas letter this year. XD
Can I direct you to another of my favorites that I think you’d like, Jane the Actuary? Some of my favorite posts by her recently have been about Aleppo (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/janetheactuary/2016/12/aleppo-war-like.html) and Trump’s options for distancing himself from his business interests (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/janetheactuary/2016/11/on-trumps-business-dealings-the-right-answer-isnt-clear.html). They’re short but rational.
I’m also commenting on her blog here (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/janetheactuary/2017/01/open-forum-predictions-please.html#comment-3101685158) to connect you in the other direction. (I’m not affiliated with her blog.)
Regarding that Jaskology post about magic, this part struck me as probably inaccurate:
“In a book filled with Platonic-style proofs, this is the only part where he actually gives the reader an experiment that they can try themselves. That is how confident Athanasius is in this argument. It is hard to imagine that he would have felt this way if he had not personally witnessed the experiment carried out on numerous occasions.”
I recently read two books that touched somewhat on this kind of thinking: “The Invention of Science” and “Magic in the Middle Ages”. Going off of both of them, it is quite striking how frequent it used to be for people to swear by the effectiveness of various bizarre rituals of folk magic which they cannot possibly have seen work (like using garlic to destroy a magnet). The entire idea that one ought to test some procedure in order to determine if it works might be one of those things that is more modern than people realize.
I read a news story years ago about the work of a sociologist (?). He classified various kinds of magical thinking in modern culture and how that relates to the ways we assign worth. I think he came up with 5 categories and they all linked back to classical kinds of magic.
One of his classification examples was that signatures from famous people are seen as valuable, while identical copies made by others aren’t.
Does anyone remember who this was and what the classifications are?
Are you thinking of Matthew Hutson? He wrote a book on “Seven Laws of Magical Thinking” and there was an article in Psychology Today a few years ago going over the main ideas.
I don’t think that was exactly what I remember (though it could be about the same guy). Very interesting read all the same. Thanks!
The point of the meme, and one of the reasons it works, is that it creates a rhetorical trap for establishment figures.
Mainstream Liberal and “Conservative” politicians are across-the-board vocally pro-Israel and pro-Zionism, even if they quietly disagree with Israeli policy in terms of their personal politics. This, of course, makes sense. Being pro-Israel pulls in a lot of money from wealthy donors and can be used to mobilize Evangelical Christian voters. Being anti-Israel, in contrast, invites suspicion of antisemitism from the media: who is this person, and why do they care about Jews so much?
So by framing the question this way you can force people to either refute Israel’s Right to Exist or to endorse an explicitly racial immigration policy, either of which is politically unacceptable. In practice most do what you do here: throw out a bunch of unconvincing special pleading which reinforces the idea of elite hypocrisy.
(There is a way out of the trap, which a lot of folks on the non-mainstream Left take. You can oppose the ideas of a Jewish Israel and a White America simultaneously and for the same reason. It’s not a position restricted to gentiles either: most of the Jews I knew growing up held this position.)
You know, frankly, I’ve never gotten the “israel has racial immigration” meme. Israel has plenty of diversity, including even non-Jewish migrants, lots of Arabs, and so forth. It’s not like you can’t get in if you aren’t Jewish, at least to the best of my knowledge. It’s more like “original descendents of this country can return anytime they want; everyone else is subject to additional controls, just like every other country”. Moreover, usually it’s directed at American Jews, who are squishy as hell when it comes to supporting Israel anyhow, versus Israeli Jews, who don’t fuck with American Jews half the time anyhow and are definitely non-squishy.
I think what disconcerts rightists is the ‘Wedge’ issue. The minority appears to treat the majority as if it shall always exist, even as they invite other minorities in. Personally I think this is short sighted.
Suppose this trend continues for a while. Now there are no majorities, only a mixture of minorities and no obvious ‘overlord’ group. Okay.
The question a rightist now has is: Why? Have we not landed ourselves in an incredibly dangerous situation?
We can observe that birds of a feather self select to be in each others company. Different groups won’t dissolve into each other like South Park’s ‘goobacks’ from the future. Some groups are always going to blame other groups for something. There would be a fragmentation process where similar groups merge and dissimilar ones fly further apart.
I believe the majority served a function in creating a kind of balance. Once you’ve removed the majority as ‘moderator’, you have a society made of rival factions but no cohesion. It is easy now for some groups to overwhelm others because there is no penalty for doing so.
It is generally accepted that a hegemony in politics is a positive thing, it encourages peace. For example; America has been the world’s ‘umpire’ for quite a while now, mostly it has been a success since no major powers have gone to war, which against the benchmark of history is remarkable.
Without having a majority power, you create the equivalent of the multi-polar world within a nation state. Do we start giving different States or Religions or other internal factions WMDs to keep the peace running?
But the left’s answer is that we must dissolve into each other, because there is now no other option (and it’s too late to object to their policies that caused this situation in the first place).
Either they don’t agree with you that a fragmentation process will happen, or they don’t care.
This seems totalitarian to me.
I don’t mind who people marry. If whites and blacks and asians want to interbreed, that is their business. However from that statement it follows it’s not my business if they *don’t* interbreed either.
Zenophiles are a tiny minority. The statistics on web dating prove that different groups definitely exhibit ingroup preferences.
I think the Internet is holding up a mirror to society and showing many elements of reality that could have been papered over or dismissed as non-existent in former times.
Talking of ignoring reality, I’m fascinated by the existence of the panorama of sexual proclivities found online, which seems to be ignored by the academics who study humans.
It seems to me it should be ‘boom time’ for research for them, yet I believe the only studies I’ve heard of come from the porn sites themselves. Is there a reason for this or have I missed something?
Very true. Most people want to reach the climax in a finite amount of time. /pedantry
As for studies, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a great deal of research on porn consumption. The issue is that sexology isn’t exactly the firmest ground to build on. I wouldn’t particularly trust research coming out of that corner of academia given their strong biases and poor track record.
There are three problems here:
1. You use the example of US hegemony in the world as an analogue of hegemony by one cultural group within a country. But the US is 5% of the world. A majority is not necessary to enforce hegemony, at least not the extremely incomplete sort of hegemony that the US has now.
2. You agree with certain experts that hegemony is good for peace, but as far as I’m aware Metternich’s multipolar system is still the winner.
3. It is a fact that groups dissolve into each other. South Park is not evidence. What is evidence is the percentage of US Jews who can speak Yiddish.
> A majority is not necessary to enforce hegemony, at least not the extremely incomplete sort of hegemony that the US has now.
The US has a lot more than 5% of the world’s power though. In sheer military power, the US probably does have something like a majority.
1. Thoughts on hegemony.
I mention (not clearly, and they are intertwined) two types of hegemony. Cultural and Military.
A Military hegemony obviously doesn’t require a literal majority demographically, but does require a monopoly on the use of force. In that sense, the USA is a military majority. Indeed they spend more on weapons systems than most of the other countries in the world put together.
Cultural hegemony is more complicated. Within a country over long periods e.g. decades to centuries, it does matter who is the majority in a society, because they set the market demands and the ‘tone’ of a society.
As for cultural domination between countries, I would argue that it should be cherry picked. I like many aspects of American culture, but dislike many other parts of it. I’m sure Americans can empathize with my plight.
So there are probably some parts of culture which are objectively better or worse (and so we ought to all ‘upgrade’ to the better parts), but other parts are geographically specific and yet other parts are optional.
A great example of this is the Japanese. They copied the Victorian pocket doors and umbrellas. That is not what made their nation an industrial society. Yet somehow their copying of Anglo culture managed to copy some superior systems along with some of the miscellanea. Then the Japanese managed to improve on many aspects of a culture that was originally my own. They never became ‘Anglo’. They became a different, more sophisticated, Japanese people. This is the model I would approve of.
2. Thoughts on unipolar/bipolar/multipolar systems.
I agree this subject is more complicated than I’ve suggested. Each polarity has its own advantages and disadvantages. It is not clear to me that a unipolar world was preferable to a bipolar world for example, because it seems to me that America stagnated in some vital ways since the Cold War ended.
My prior is that a multi-polar world with WMDs is more dangerous than either a bi-polar or uni-polar world. I feel I need to do more research in this area though, so this assumption may change.
3. Thoughts on Groups assimilating into each other.
No. Here we disagree.
As I have mentioned somewhere on this thread, different groups do *not* actually merge together. Internet dating studies confirm it. A small minority do but the majority do not. This pattern is so universal it can only be something biological.
https://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/race-attraction-2009-2014/
US Jews failing to learn Yiddish is not evidence Jews will not exist in America’s future. I write and speak English, but my genes aren’t English. It’s easier to ‘dissolve’ memetics than genetics.
The Jewish people will adapt and change (e.g. dropping Yiddish) but I fully expect that in 100 years time the genetic stock will be extremely similar. Not just biology but also in culture. I expect than in 2117, people will be able to point at a person and say “That’s a Jewish person”. What “Jew” meant culturally could have changed but in a deeper more important sense, it won’t have because culture is downstream from biology and that won’t have changed much.
In the specific case of American Jews, you’re incorrect. There has been a massive amount of intermarriage by non-Orthodox Jews: their current population numbers are buoyed up by the combination of high birth rates and low retention rates of the Haredim. If there are still American Jews in a century they will be almost entirely the descendants of today’s Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Jews.
More generally, I think it’s an understandable mistake to see a small percentage of exogamy and say that this won’t have a significant impact in the long term. I’m running out the door now but brief periods of contact can have lasting genetic ramifications.
I think that the US military budget is between 30-50% of the world’s military budget depending on where you look.
You may need to update your review of the risks of THC: http://nationalacademies.org/hmd/~/media/Files/Report%20Files/2017/Cannabis-Health-Effects/Cannabis-conclusions.pdf
Notably:
“There is substantial evidence of a statistical association between cannabis use and the development of schizophrenia or other psychoses, with the highest risk among the most frequent users.” (In the full book they clarify that this is causal.)
“There is substantial evidence of a statistical association between cannabis use and increased risk of motor vehicle crashes.”
I’m very high-risk for psychosis, and the only reason I used THC (in limited amounts) was based on your post saying that it probably wasn’t causal for psychosis.
I’ve seen discussions of anecdotal evidence…statements by mental-health professional that a large number of people treated for schizophrenia in the U.S. were users of cannabis before they were diagnosed with schizophrenia.
However, it was hard to get good statistical evidence on this. And it was harder to get statistical evidence of the number of cannabis users who were never diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Thus, the relative risk of cannabis use was hard to measure. Mostly because the legal risk of anyone admitting cannabis use, and the lack of information about the potency of THC combinations used by various people.
With those caveats in mind, I haven’t looked closely at the article you linked.
Do those authors have a way around the problems I’ve stated?
You seem to be overstating both the report and Scott’s blog entry.
Do you have a pincite? I see lots of talk about “assocation” and this quote is from page 238: “As noted in Box 12-1, the relationship between cannabis use, cannabis use disorder, and psychoses may be multi-directional and complex.”
This is essentially the same non-conclusion offered in the SSC marijuana explainer. He lists a bunch of studies, including one providing a relative risk, and even includes an increase in schizophrenia cases in his util analysis. I certainly do not see anything that could be construed as “probably not causal, smoke ’em if you got ’em.”
In the book it says, “Cannabis use is likely to increase the risk of developing schizophrenia and other psychoses; the higher the use the greater the risk.”
Various commenters were talking about the federal budget proposals in the previous open thread, but it got me wondering when they described the deficit as 9 trillion over ten years. Is there some relevant factor I’m missing in all of this?
Why are federal budgets described by their ten year projections when they are renewed every year or few years at most? It just seems like a nonsense way to exaggerate deficits by a factor of ten.
Congressional budgets include longer term projections of their impact, 10 years usually, though there are exceptions. Theoretically, this is a good practice that prevents people from gaming the budget year to year to make their proposals look cheaper or more expansive than they actually are and takes into account that costs for things can be uneven. In practice, however, it’s a convention that’s starting to get gamed. The ACA, for example, was heavily backloaded to reduce its apparent cost through the standard window.
Realistically, it’s been gamed for a long time. Under Bush the GOP congress was (in)famous for writing up budget plans that had all their savings in the out-years. Then the next year’s budget would push all those savings out one more year, and so forth. At this point I’m not even certain it’s worth doing, although it’s probably a bigger problem that budgets never get passed through normal order any more — we should fix that first.
I hadn’t thought of it from the perspective of trying to make deficits seem less or benefits seem more by gaming it that way, considering the massive deficits they give in ten year totals.
Not that I have a better solution, accounting is a cluster of fun based on who is making what assumptions when.
Side note, found some data they published about their own accuracy. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/50831
They have better accuracy than I would have guessed before reading this, but not particularly great accuracy if they’re getting between 10-15% off by six years out, and that being averaged out to be in the direction of guessing higher revenues than received and lower costs than paid.
@Paul Brinkley/Earthly Knight/cassander
Decided to start a new thread because it’s a different issue, but there’s arguments above about whether left or right is more in tune with reality in the US, references to Democrats being nasty to the (Republican) outgroup, and there’s been previous discussion of civility left vs. right.
Based entirely on highly scientific personal observations, I think that the mainstream left is lagging the mainstream right in the US by about ten years in nastiness to the outgroup, civility, and connection with reality. Mainstream being, I suppose, anyone who would vote R or D without holding their nose too much.
Ten or so years ago, I remember online discussion (see, like I said, highly scientific what I’m doing here) featuring far more vitriol from the right than the left. Democrats were moonbat traitors who didn’t support the troops. Meanwhile, it was in 2008 that conspiracy theories became somewhat mainstream-respectable in the Republican party, with the Birther stuff.
This election saw a fair bit of vitriol from both sides, but I don’t remember the degree of vitriol by the left towards Republican voters being anywhere near as high in 2012, let alone 2008. Additionally, it looks like conspiracy theories (half of all Democrat voters believe that the Russians actually tampered with the vote count – as far as I know, no intelligence agency is saying or even suggesting this) are starting to go mainstream.
Does this match other people’s memories?
Democrats spent 4 years claiming that bush was selected not elected and not my president, darkly whispering about diebold voting machines stealing the next election. Then, 3 months ago, when everyone thought hillary was going to win, questioning the results/legitimacy of elections was treason.
What i think you’re seeing is not that the left is 10 years behind, but that being out of power makes you nastier/more conspiracy minded. You don’t question the system when it’s giving you what you want.
Were there really conspiracy theories in 2000? The narrative I remember (I was fairly young, though) was “the ballots were badly designed and there were issues with machines accurately marking them, it was very close due in part to resulting voting screwups, it went to the court, and the court decided along partisan lines”. I don’t remember anyone suggesting there was a conspiracy for this to happen.
Diebold is a decent point, but wasn’t that a fairly brief thing? I don’t recall it having much in the way of legs.
Absolutely. Job bush was governor of florida, remember. There were wild rumors of mass voter suppression, stolen elections, boxes of ballots hidden away, etc. And the story still isn’t dead. Conspiracy might be a strong term for what they’re describing, it’s more like “conspiratorially taking advantage of a close election.”
It might depend on what you remember. Rhetoric is hard to gauge as to which side is worse.
The first thing that sticks with me is that the left dominates the narrative, and can whitewash history, so of course they don’t remember their own mistakes. I can understand a Democrat that thinks it’s wrong for Trump to even accept the appearance of being supported by the Russians, but I feel justified disregarding their opinion unless they’re willing to throw Ted Kennedy under the bus for doing the same with the Soviet Union. (Seriously, the Kennedy family alone is the source of more potential embarrassment for the Democrats than the Clintons could even dream of being. From wanting to imprison people that disagree for holding unpopular opinions while holding unpopular opinions themselves to massive sexual assault allegations to outright collaboration with the Nazis, it’s hard to find anything that isn’t potentially lurking in their closets.)
What I also remember are riots and protests. I remember (barely; I was in 8th grade) the ‘No Blood For Oil’ protests when they were new in 1990. I remember when LA burned after the Rodney King verdict. I remember DC being on lockdown in 2000 from the IMF protests. What I don’t remember is anything comparable from the right. Perhaps I’m missing it; I welcome counter-examples of massive, illegal disruptions of American life by Republicans in the past 40 years that have been handwaved away.
My middle school history teacher went on a rant in class about how Bush stole the election by rigging Florida.
Yes, there were a lot of conspiracy theories.
Meh.
I think the story in 2000 was far more about process and conflict of interest. The SoS in Florida (nominally in charge of counting the ballots statewide) was also the head of the Bush campaign in Florida.
The Diebold conspiracy stuff was 2004 when it came down to Ohio.
Diebold is still a thing, though not necessarily by the same name. Lots of trump supporters thought the voting machines were gonna be rigged this time around, and in previous elections there was actually proof that Ron Paul votes weren’t counted in some districts.
The American left’s outgroup consists of other American citizens, whereas the American right’s outgroup consists mostly of non-U.S. citizens.
Unless you’re so far gone you no longer count the American left as US citizens, this is obviously false.
Of course he’s that far gone, LOL. At least seventy something percent of eligible voters did not vote for Trump– either voted for someone else or didn’t vote. If the voting machines were fraudulently programmed, then it’s far more than seventy something percent, maybe eighty or ninety something percent.
But when people win an election, they start fantasizing that they are the majority. And fantasizing that the false “news” they believe– about illegal immigration being a huge problem in the U.S.– is true. They think they are the majority, and think they are right about tons of things they are wrong about.
That’s the power of winning. It gives people delusions of grandeur. Look at DT. He won the genetic lottery, having a wealthy father, and was apparently able to build on that wealth– although not necessarily. We haven’t seen his tax returns so we don’t know. Incredible delusions of grandeur.
As I’ve said before: given the profusion of things that are actually wrong with Donald J Trump, President-Elect of the United States of America, please stop wasting your time and ours with unsubstantiated claims about voting machines.
Okay, I will substantiate my claims. I do not know if they were, in fact, hacked, only that they are very easy to hack or fraudulently manipulate.
Here’s how hackers might mess with electronic voting on Election Day
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/heres-how-hackers-could-mess-with-electronic-voting/
Some states — including swing states — have flawed voting systems
http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/11/1/13486386/election-rigged-paper-trail-audit
Could the 2016 Election Be Stolen with Help from Electronic Voting Machines?
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/2/23/could_the_2016_election_be_stolen
Liberal bashing is surely our national pastime in the U.S. Even liberals love to bash other liberals, to make themselves feel loved and included with everyone else.
I guess the person who talked about liberal circular firing squads may actually have a point. I’ve got the bullet holes in me to prove it.
But by that evidence, Moon, couldn’t we just as well call into question Obama’s win in 2012, or any other victory since these voting machines were adopted? Yes, voting machines are horribly, inexcusably insecure. But there’s no specific evidence their insecurities were exploited specifically this year.
“It could have happened” is not evidence that something happened.
As for “at least seventy something percent of eligible voters did not vote for Trump,” even higher percentages did not vote for Bill Clinton. Was he illegitimate?
@ Moon
I agree with Iain, you should leave off about the voting machines. The fact that they could have been hacked quite easily is no evidence that they were. It would have been easy for Ted Cruz to have zodiacally killed some people if he had wanted to, but that doesn’t prove he was the Zodiac Killer.
IDK why people criticise moon for this.
‘they could have been hacked just as easily before’
yeah, and that’s TERRIBLE. Two potentially fraudulent elections don’t make a right.
And obviously people aren’t comparably incentivised to be a serial killer as to win a presidential election, and tampering with machines is a lot easier than avoiding exposure as the zodiac killer while running for a presidential nomination. That’s one of the worst analogies I’ve ever heard
@carvenvisage, what do you propose we do about these two (or actually more) potentially-fraudulent elections, which led to Congressmen and at least one President who have already served in office for years? Shall they be hustled out as illegitimate and everything they’ve done instantly overturned as usurpations?
What I’m saying is, if you won’t do that, you don’t have any grounds to call Trump illegitimate now. If good evidence of actual fraud turns up – great; that’s another question! But now, he’s a presumptively-legitimate President-elect.
(And by all means, get paper ballots so we don’t go through these questions another time two years from now!)
I just think the machines are a big deal. If someone is acting like this is new, they should be informed, and if that fails, slapped. My main proposal is that in a democracy election security is really important and brushing about concerns about it, even if they are partisanised, shouldn’t play well and probably won’t.
There’s another problem here, with the assertion that the machines are “easily hackable.” Because, well, yes and no.
Individual machines might have poor security, but there’s a (wrong) image people get of some dude in his basement, no doubt wearing sunglasses and a black trenchcoat, somehow logging onto “the election” and changing all the numbers, and it doesn’t work that way. Every state in a Presidential election has a jumble of different voting mechanisms, some paper, some electronic, some both, and even within a state you’re going to have a similar jumble maintained in a chaotic fashion at best with questionable connections to outside networks, and if you wanted to “hack the election” you’d have to somehow know which states and even counties were going to be close enough to shift and have vulnerabilities in place for thousands upon thousands of machines in those locations to create a plausible result that won’t have paranoid poll watchers freaking out the next day. There’s just no way.
Now, I agree that we need universal paper records. Frankly, I’d be just fine with purely paper balloting, because physical records are the best way to reassure everyone that things are on the up-and-up. And if one was talking about tiny local elections in one town or maybe a small district, well, suddenly a hacker making a few tweaks becomes at least somewhat plausible, and we should guard against that. But to believe that there’s any real chance that this particular “election was hacked” is not justifiable.
There are two separate matters here, whether it is easy to hack the machines and whether it is easy, having done so, to avoid detection. I have nothing to say about the first of these, but the latter will be quite difficult to pull off. In any given US presidential election there are going to be tens of thousands of people carefully scrutinizing the vote totals, county by county, precinct by precinct, and comparing them with population statistics and the results of past elections. Someone is pretty much guaranteed to notice any significant irregularity. This means that the hacker would have to be extremely sophisticated in the sociology of US elections to avoid detection.
I haven’t worked with voting machines myself, but I’ve worked with people that have, and I’ve read industry papers and watched talks on the subject. Some systems are very vulnerable indeed, though in all but the worst cases you’d need an inside job (or a lot of luck and foresight) and the tampering would be pretty clear afterwards. But there are almost as many systems out there as there are precincts, and that makes a coordinated campaign of fraud, the kind of thing that might actually swing elections, extremely difficult. It’s far outside the weight class of individual hackers or even large groups. Major nation-states might be able to do it, if they had enough on the line to make it worthwhile. But doing it and not getting caught? I don’t think even Russia or China could do that. There are too many points of failure, and too many eyes on the problem.
That PBS article is garbage, by the way; everything it says is technically true, but naive readers are likely to come away with a less rather than a more realistic model of the threat landscape. The Vox article is the best of the three, as far as it goes.
Hi moon
I’d like to reply to your reply in a different part of this thread, but apparently there’s a depth limit on how far comments can be nested.
How do SSCers normally handle this problem?
I could reply somewhere else but then the context would be lost + potentially you or I wouldn’t see replies.
@webnaut
The normal solution is to name the person you are responding to, like you did.
The reason for voting machines over paper is that the voting machine is completely binary. They register a vote for A or a vote for B or no vote. Paper ballots can be extremely vague. Is this a vote for A and B? B and a third party? Is this ballot spoiled so much that we throw away what is otherwise a clear vote for A?
You know what we don’t want? An election with 67 votes for A, 64 votes for B, and 12 votes that are “these kind of look like a vote for B, don’t you think?”
It’s tough to break someone of thinking that accuracy is the single most important thing. But having a clear result is the most important thing. It’s why we have democracy and not mob rule. We’d rather have high confidence in an erroneous answer than truly knowing that the answer is unclear.
@Edward Scizorhands, do we really have high confidence in the results of an election done on easily-hackable voting machines? What if (unlike this time) it turns out there’s good evidence they actually were hacked?
Meanwhile, about voters messing up their paper ballots (hello Florida 2000, groan and moan), I can see two good answers:
* Throw out any and every spoiled ballot. The voter has failed the implicit intelligence test required to vote.
* Have paper ballots printed by machine, with the bubbles already filled in. The machine can keep a record if you want, but the official result is on the paper ballots, which are always counted.
do we really have high confidence in the results of an election done on easily-hackable voting machines
Yes. Because regardless of “easily hacked” we have no evidence they were actually hacked.
Throw out any and every spoiled ballot.
This is not an objective test. What if they erased one answer and wrote in another? What if they wrote the same answer twice. Do you want the presidency hanging on whether a clerk thinks a chad was 45% punches of 55% punched, when the clerk knows that?
In our elections, the instructions are clear: tick one box using the pen provided. If you tick the wrong box, you take your voting paper back to the clerk and get a new one. No doubt there’s still room for people to mess it up, but not in numbers sufficient to cause a problem. In the rare event of an election result hanging on a few indeterminate ballots, I assume the Electoral Commission would make the final call.
… but that’s not as much of a problem for us as it is for you, because any given decision is only going to affect one seat, which isn’t usually going to change the overall outcome of the election. Even if it is, we probably won’t know that for sure, since it depends on the outcome of negotiations between the larger parties and the smaller parties.
(Come to think of it, if your Electoral College worked the way it was intended to, there’d be no way to be sure that the Presidency would hinge on the result of the vote in any particular district. Any argument about hanging chads or whatever would presumably be much lower-key.)
I think better that than the clerk (or, in some cases, pretty much anybody else in the vicinity) knowing that they can change the vote totals directly without any significant risk of getting caught. At least the clerk’s decision can be taken to the courts if it comes to that.
Well, empirically, a whole lot of people don’t have high confidence in the last election right now.
And regarding paper ballots – what do you think about my second idea, which I like better than the first anyway?
Perhaps I should say “a clear wrong answer is preferred over a fuzzy right answer.” The point of elections is to avoid civil war. If the answer to an election is “I dunno who won” we’ve lost that.
On your paper ballot idea, I’ve suggested it myself years ago. The computer spits out a paper ballot that is then inserted into the official vote counting box. You don’t worry if the computer is hacked or whatever. It’s just an assistant and not to be trusted.
@Aapje
Thanks. Inelegant but it’ll work.
I believe James’ claim was that their outgroup was “a different group of american citizens”, not that “the outgroup isn’t american citizens”.
And ChetC3’s response was that the American right’s outgroup is, in fact, the American left — which is, last anybody checked, still made up of American citizens.
There are different levels of outgroup and ingroup. The impression I get is that, in general, for the American right the American left is the outgroup compared to other members of the American right, but the ingroup compared to foreigners.
Maybe a decade or two ago, but the Putin-Trump bromance is throwing that out the window.
The mainstream right doesn’t consider the American left to be the outgroup, for the right the left is pathetic, not evil. I might be defining “outgroup” differently from you. For me, the outgroup are people you can’t tolerate, people you think deserve to suffer.
@Miller
I would argue exactly the opposite. The ‘Republicans vote against their self-interest’ narrative is condescension, not fear. And the American right’s willingness to block any Democrat legislation that they could, seems based on a belief that it cannot be innocent, but comes from an evil place.
Of course, this was all pre-election stuff, so perhaps you want to argue that Tuesday changed the narrative.
Aapje,
The Dem outgroup is the set of Republicans whom the left considers to be racist, sexist, homophobic, or Islamicphobic not Republicans who are perceived to have voted against their self-interests for these Republicans are considered merely fools.
Isn’t a more accurate model that each side has different outgroups, with different levels of dislike & ‘take seriousness?’
Isn’t a more accurate model that each side has different outgroups, with different levels of dislike & ‘take seriousness?’
I think it’s instructive to look at who the ‘heretics’ are, the people that should be members of the group but aren’t. To the right, Clarence Thomas and Ben Carson are members of the ingroup; to the left, they’re not just members of the outgroup but also heretics. Same with Christina Hoff Sommers; same with Milo Yiannopoulos. You can see it in the way they are treated. We don’t like the outgroup; we despise the heretics.
Yet, who are the heretics on the right? The only ones I can think of are the RINOs; people elected as members of the ingroup to represent the ingroup that vote for the policies of the outgroup. (I could argue that the never-Trump Republicans and the Trump Republicans both briefly considered the other as heretics, but politics from the outgroup has mostly pushed them back together.)
It’s an artifact of the Group Identity politics of the left; the left is committed to appealing to black voters, to feminist voters, to non-cisheteronormative voters. The right appeals to conservatives and libertarians; explicitly primitive labels. The right does appeal to various religious group identities, but those come in knowing that there are other religious groups in the tent and that they have to share.
The reason the right is worked up about Muslims is the perceived dual-loyalty issue. Back when Catholics were a reliable Democratic constituency, the right was worried about the loyalty of the Kennedy family; if it came to choosing between the Pope and America, if the Kennedys would choose the Pope. We’ve recognized that this isn’t a real issue with Catholics, but the cases we’ve seen in the US with admittedly a very small percentage of Muslims have brought those same sorts of fears back to the fore.
The US has interfered in the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Europe both in support of Muslim groups (Bosnia, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait) and against (Iran, Iraq, ISIS, Palestine). For example, with the Fort Hood shooting, we had an American born Muslim serving in the US Army that became radicalized and convinced his identification with his co-religionists outweighed any duty to his country; in other words, he became a heretic to the American ‘group’.
The thing I noticed that was unique this time was when the media / left publicly turned on the electorate en masse. This used to be off limits (for very good reasons), but bizarre attempts of social anthropology on Trump voters was widespread this cycle, and to say much of it was uncharitable is an understatement.
What was also important in this cycle was the clear and convincing loss of authority that the media and academia suffered. They were almost unanimous in their contempt for Trump, but yet Trump won. Welcome to democracy in action. Trust in media collapsed, especially on the right, and is at all time lows. It is my view that expected media bias is now built in to the electorate’s decision making and that is good for nobody.
The latest Buzzfeed Trump smear doesn’t help either, although it is noted that many outlets refrained from reporting this to their credit. However, out it is, and the media reported it far and wide. It was kind of an intentionally constructed Streisand Effect.
I missed this story, but from what I gather they misrepresented his position on Growth Mindset?
Made me smile.
The thing I noticed that was unique this time was when the media / left publicly turned on the electorate en masse.”
America’s most trusted news source is Fox News. It supported Trump.
Fox News is the most trusted national news channel. And it’s not that close.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/03/09/fox-news-is-the-most-trusted-national-news-channel-and-its-not-that-close/?utm_term=.cbfe810e42b4
The Right Wing media is the mainstream media, even though it constantly pretends not to be. The Right Wing media elected Trump.
“bizarre attempts of social anthropology on Trump voters was widespread this cycle, and to say much of it was uncharitable is an understatement.”
Is it more uncharitable than the vitriol aimed at the Left by Fox, Breitbart, Drudge etc.? Take a look at those “news sources” and see if you can honestly say it is.
Trust in non Right Wing media had already collapsed decades before Trump was elected, and that is why he got elected.
he political scientist who saw Trump’s rise coming
Norm Ornstein on why the Republican Party was ripe for a takeover, what the media missed, and whether Trump could win the presidency.
http://www.vox.com/2016/5/6/11598838/donald-trump-predictions-norm-ornstein
@Moon
The problem with those poll results is that they are just relative for one type of media. They can very easily be the result of very little trust in any news channel.
Theoretically, it is possible that many respondents favor a non-new channel left-wing news source more than any news channel by a large amount and that they favor Fox as a counter-balance to this.
For example, if a person thinks that the Communist Daily is 99% reliable, fox news 1% and the other networks 0%; is it meaningful to say that they favor a right wing news source?
I consider these results rather meaningless without further data.
Plus, they’re subject to the same problem as all single-choice plurality voting. Only 29% of people polled favor Fox News; perhaps the other 71% all believe Fox to be horribly biased but disagree on which single other news channel is best?
That too, Fox is probably an outlier that benefits from being different.
I don’t read Breitbart or Drudge so don’t really know what they do. I mostly follow print media online.
My observation is only that the right tends to criticize the candidate more and the left was different with a more focused trashing of the (right) electorate than previously (NYT/WP). Mostly a “How can someone be so stupid to vote for Trump”. This is a legitimate question given Trump’s flaws, but I think it was not handled very gracefully. The assumption was made that the electorate was attracted to the worst of Trump’s flaws, instead of voting for him in spite of them.
This isn’t something that has hard lines, left and right trashing each other in all ways has endless examples.
Most trusted by 29% of respondents. The rest are divided among five other channels, none of them right wing.
That doesn’t make them “the mainstream media.”
@DavidFriedman
It doesn’t mean that the mainstream media is only then, but I think it is obvious that they are the largest part of the mainstream media.
Which means exactly what relevant to this conversation?
My memory is the opposite of yours; I remember quite a lot of vitriol in the days of Chimpy McBushitler.
I think mostly this is a matter of people noticing nastiness by their enemies more. I don’t think it’s possible to analyze objectively.
(This item recently linked by xenosystems does seem vaguely connected, though.)
Maybe dndnrsn is differentiating between hatred of the opposing party leader and hatred of the opposing party members or voters? I can’t say whether there was a difference, but I can’t imagine him saying there was not widely expressed loathing of GWB.
I don’t have data on levels of outright hatred of the president over time, but I don’t expect outside margin of error differences in different presidents since, oh, Nixon I guess. But I wasn’t here for much of that, so that’s not really evidence of anything, just a caution about drawing conclusions from short time frames.
This would have been a better way of putting it. I remember the view of the Republican base being, essentially, What’s the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank’s thesis: these people are getting conned by the rich, who trick them into voting for stuff the rich want by lying to them about the social conservative stuff they’ll get. It was condescending, but it was at least sympathetic. I think the portrayal of the Republican base in mainstream left sources was much, much nastier this time around.
What was that (one particular) liberal view of the religious right? Stupid and easily led?
No, poor, ignorant and easily led, from Washington Post in 1993.
That’s the sort of thing I mean.
Interesting stuff there. Thanks. Incredible paranoia about a few peaceful protests on inauguration day, as if they are going to be some big violent deal. The guy’s fear and hatred of people of the Left, and his kind of paranoid fantasies that people on the Left are more violent than those on the Right, are amazing.
Of course, if you look far and wide, you can find some example of someone somewhere on the Left being violent. But people on the Left are 99% door mats. Why do you think that the vast majority of Left of Center readers are afraid to comment on the board here? Because they are so cruel, but yet despite that, they are self policing themselves, so that they won’t hurt the feelings of the vulnerable Right of Center that is the majority of the commentariat here? Well, if you think that, guess again.
Breitbart, Fox, Drudge etc. constantly try to trigger fear and hatred of the Left, and the view that the Left is Evil Incarnate, and the view that the Right is pure as the driven snow. Now most of the Right Wing is thoroughly convinced of that, despite tons of evidence to the contrary.
Are the vast majority of left-of-centre readers afraid to comment here? I’m not sure how you’d go about finding that out, unless it was specifically asked in one of Scott’s surveys.
I mean, I’m vaguely left-of-centre and I agree that it feels like there is more of a right-wing and/or libertarian slant among the commentariat than most other blogs I read, but it could be that this blog simply attracts more readers from those worldviews.
Performative fear of the dissenting Other has been a winning strategy for seizing control of “spaces”, from universities, to BBSes, to reading groups.
It is possibly less likely to work here, because Scott is (almost) the sole moderator, and he has faced being the target of that tactic in the past.
Tribal loyalty may win out in the end though.
Well, the surveys persistently turn up more than half of readers identifying as liberal or socialist (vs. 20-25% libertarian and very few conservatives), but the comments themselves don’t seem to match that. It’s not that we’re short of left-leaning voices, but the only left-leaning argument I consistently see being pushed, or at least saw before the election, was that we need more leftists in the comments. But is that down to fear? I’m skeptical; on a mostly-anonymous board, all anyone would have to be afraid of is getting dogpiled, and if the surveys are trustworthy there should be a lot more dogs on the left-hand side of the kennel.
Left/right might be cutting it too coarsely, though. If most of the left-leaning people here prefer a more technocratic as opposed to identitarian tack (as does seem to be the case), they likely wouldn’t be starting many arguments — the technocratic left isn’t remotely libertarian and does have its differences with the “smart redneck” moderate-rightist crowd, but the differences are boring and technical and unlikely to catch fire. And they probably wouldn’t feel too inclined to step up with our few token identitarians when those fights start, because really, who wants to?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Portland,_Oregon_riots
Over my lifetime, I can remember lots of cases of speakers, usually at colleges, being prevented from speaking, usually by being shouted down. I cannot remember any case where it was a left wing speaker being shouted down by right wing students.
Can you (Moon) point at one?
I think mostly this is a matter of people noticing nastiness by their enemies more.
+1. HeelBearCub pointed this out once, in trying to stop people from dogpiling on a certain user who posts silly stuff. He pointed out two users, each posting Applause Lights but for different audiences, and how one would get attacked and the other ignored.
I groan when I think of correcting someone posting silly stuff that agrees with my tribe. I might do it, but it’s like a chore of washing windows, and the best result will be an unsatisfying “well, I’m still right in substance even if I got a few details wrong.” While correcting someone from the other tribe feels righteous and rewarding.
Yeah, +2.
This was a thing in 2004: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesusland_map
Also: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/fuck-the-south/Content?oid=19816
I continue to maintain that things got this way primarily because 9/11 forced everyone to take political stands they wouldn’t have taken otherwise. Right around then, the news was also feeling the hit from declining subscriptions, and increasing percentages of revenues being ad-driven, forcing them to resort to sensationalism to grab more eyeballs. We have a perfect storm of pot-stirring political climate as a result.
Maybe it’s time to give Federalism another try.
> are generally very critical of Israel and support a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
How? Its very clearly the Rwanda solution for the Jews in Isreal.
Who the hell thinks that bringing together two groups, one of which had to build a border wall enforced by the military to stop constant terrorist attacks and suicide bombings, is a good idea?
Everyone who wants Muslim immigration into Europe?
I do.
Mostly because I (like the public statements of most of the groups actually carrying out these attacks) treat Palestinian terrorism not as an expression of genocidal hatred against the Jewish people or their presence in Palestine, but as acts of irregular warfare aimed at the destruction of the Israeli state.
People do awful things in war – and Israel has atrocities to reckon with as well. It doesn’t preclude the possibility of ever making peace.
You may not like the way peace is accomplished when confronted with societies that may have expansionist and violently angry philosophies, or perhaps just have a national feeling of vengeance.
““Negotiators can’t get what he wants. Anyway, Iranians can’t use one [a nuclear weapon] if they finally make one. The boys in Tehran know Israel has 200, all targeted on Tehran, and we have thousands,” Powell wrote, LobeLog reported.
“As Akmdinijad (sic) [said], ‘What would we do with one, polish it?’ I have spoken publicly about both nK (North Korea) and Iran. We’ll blow up the only thing they care about — regime survival. Where, how would they even test one?” he said, referring to former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”
In my country Catholics and Protestants originally fought together.
Gradually it became about race and religion. People with nuanced views were naturally selected.
There is something of a game theory quality to sectarianism. Notice how only the most radical Islamist factions remained in Syria after only a short time.
Similarly many non-natives migrants to Europe may switch to ‘their own’ if the terrorism succeeds, thus propagating more terror/civil war. That’s how sectarianism works.
It irritates me a great deal when people compare ‘falls in bath/showers’ or ‘number of car accidents’ to terrorism. The true threat is the chain reaction of violence that occurs when enough people who are angry and afraid reaches critical mass.
Well, since it is apparently nowhere near critical mass now, why should we address it now? Why shouldn’t we do like we do with climate change, where we are planning to address it at the last minute, if ever? Why should it be a more urgent concern than things where there is plenty of evidence that they are more urgent now? I mean other than it being a political hot button issue that successfully wins votes for people like DT?
@Moon
Good question.
We should address it now because humans can reproduce their offspring and memetics geometrically.
Talking about humans in this way often causes a ‘mental block’. Let’s talk about mold in houses instead.
When a mold starts in a spot, usually near the ceiling in a corner of a kitchen or bathroom, it appears to spread slowly. It covers the wall and ceiling by Day 25, but say only half by Day 24 etc.
The population growth rates and growth in violence are interconnected because of resource constraints. The left will say ‘education, housing, healthcare’ the right will say ‘genetics’, ‘culture’, and both are correct.
In many scenarios Biology and Culture are an inseparable feedback loop.
Islam is an ideology (there are parallels with Catholicism, which once used a similar strategy, and still does in Africa) that generates conflict with a reproductive strategy (mass repro-attack, like a tank rush in a game) that deliberately generates high population to generate poverty to generate conflict and thus take over in totality.
tldr; It’s about population growth rates and how social conditioning can reinforce each other to create a spiral towards an ultimate conflict. Islam is just one prominent example, there are others e.g. pyramid schemes, supremacist ideology.
What is the practical difference between those two objectives? At the end of the day, Israel is still destroyed and the Jews are all gone, one way or another.
Pretty words, but what is the specific proposal here?
If for some reason, there was a violent displacement of muslims during WW2 and a great amount of from europe or somewhere else were moved into that area, perhaps displacing other groups of people(known to be muslim) would there still be terrorist attacks to that day? And calls of politicians in nearby countries saying “Death to *whatever the name would be* ”
Assume the group moved into the area were also the same specific sub-set, like sunni/shia
If you’re imagining specifically that, say, Sunnis were moved into a Shia area? I could see that happening, assuming that the world indulged and enabled the anti-Sunni factions in the same way they indulge and enable the anti-Israel ones.
I’m willing to agree that Middle Eastern Islamic antipathy to Israel isn’t fundamentally about Judaism — yes, there are anti-Semitic elements in the Quran and elsewhere, but it’s not like most other places in the world are in a position to throw stones. It’s more that the pre-existing anti-Semitism in the west and in the Middle East is used as a convenient weapon by anti-Zionists.
The State of Israel being destroyed need not mean the massacre of Jews in Palestine. The proposal of most Palestinian resistance groups (historically, and currently among those who reject the two-state solution AFAIK) is a state comprised of the current Israel, West Bank, and Gaza Strip, governed on a one-person, one-vote basis, which allows the return of Palestinian refugees and does not discriminate based on religion.
@birdboy2000
Almost no one believes that’s viable. If you were to have your one-person one-vote state with right of Palestinian return, as soon as Jews became the minority they’d be expelled or killed.
@The Nybbler: I agree that a binational state would turn into an instant bloodbath, but I slightly disagree with the ultimate result in that it’s entirely possible the Jews would refuse to let themselves be killed or chased out. Give it a year or two and you might have Israel right back where it was before, only way more angry and bitter and disinclined to listen to international do-gooders.
Bosnia is OK.
Someone explain this patreon thing to me, please. I went to the Ozy site above. You pay to read the posts of someone who has no public posts on his blog at all? So a patreon is sort of a gamble, a game of chance, and you play it just to see what turns up, once you buy this totally unknown writing?
No, Ozy has a blog they post a lot on here.
Basically, Ozy writes more if you pay and you get access to some special patreon-only content.
For the most part it’s a way of voluntarily paying for internet content that you like, even if it is freely accessible, as a means of supporting the writer/artist/etc, that is a lot more set-and-forget than having to manually make a donation every time you want to. But people can create supporters-only content as well.
The name gets you most of the way there, it lets you be a patron to a creative person whose creative outputs you enjoy.
“Note: he may be a were-pigeon.”
I think this:
is just restating the meme. The whole point is that stuff that’s beyond the pale in the United States (“Build a Wall to Keep Our Country X”) is the “moderate” position in Israel. That’s on top of the fact that plenty of people who think it’s unacceptable to Build the Wall apparently support Likud. “Well, Israel is less globalist than Britain” — but why? And wouldn’t that imply that pro-globalism people should be spending more time denouncing Israeli policy?
Regarding the actual term “open borders”, Open Borders is indeed something of a fringe policy to advocate explicitly, but right-wingers like to point out that lots of leftists act “as if” Open Borders is the correct position even if they don’t use that term. The practical difference between “anyone who shows up can live here” and Open Borders is nil. Additionally both the humanitarian and especially economic arguments for Open Borders are often employed rhetorically but without explicitly taking them to their logical conclusions. Again, the difference between “more immigrants improves our economy without diminishing returns, and these economic improvements are greater than any downsides” and Open Borders is nonexistent.
I’m not sure why (the perception of) Israel being a militarized pariah state or whether European Jews were subject to an attempted genocide is an argument for why Israel shouldn’t take in refugees or allow more non-Jewish settlement.
Thoughts on this article about Western progressives’ obsession with mainstreaming the hijab?
Relevant link from our past.
Yes, Maajid Nawaz invariably says sensible things. I agree with the central point of the article that the hijab is not progressive or feminist. But I have a few subtler counterpoints. Firstly, the only thing in the linked article I can see that indicates Noor Tagouri is promoting modesty is the title. She doesn’t make any claims I can see in the article. And in general, I don’t think there is an “obsession” with promoting the hijab as an progressive. People occasionally make comments to that effect, but I think that’s just generic tribalism and contrarianism (something we are all very familiar with in the SSC comments section!), and they don’t do so very frequently. Secondly, in my experience most women and girls who wear the hijab do so as a cultural thing more than out of a sense of religious obligation (in the UK at least). I’ve never known any hijabis to voice problems with people dressing “immodestly”.
Something similar is true in Canada. My girlfriend has spent a reasonable amount of time at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus, which has a huge Muslim population. She reports that the hijab there is a fashion accessory more than anything else — more than once, she has half-seriously suggested wearing one herself, just because she likes how it looks. She has stories of seeing young women on the subway lift up their niqabs to make out with their boyfriends.
People are people.
Can attest to this. It is a fairly common thing on university campuses in Canadian cities to see young women in what I think of as “standard 18-twentysomething female garb” – painted-on skinny jeans, Chucks, a hoodie, for instance – plus hijabs.
Should it be illegal to wear a mask? Walk around in a scooby doo costume? People are ridiculously precious about face covering. “It makes me feel uncomfortable”. Whose fault is that? It’s just cloth.
You might want to ask bank tellers and convenience store clerks about their opinion of people who wander around with their faces concealed.
Hijabs don’t conceal the face.
I assume ThirteenthLetter was responding to the comment that they responded to.
@ThirteenthLetter
And if they wish to prevent people with covered faces in their place of business it’s fine with me.
“Immigration — the great non-debate”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDtiTNHPfyo
Some considerations that echo a bit what we can read on this blog about ingroup/outgroup things and the concept of toxoplasma of rage.
I’m not going to watch a 17-minute long video of someone talking to the camera in their bedroom in order to convey what might be a few paragraphs of textual information.
Is there a written version? I have a rule against watching videos which are just some dude talking to a webcam for 5+ minutes. Same reason I don’t listen to talk radio; the format is uninteresting and lends itself to various logical fallacies that are more easily concealed when they don’t have to be written down in organized fashion, or challenged by an interlocutor.
(This tends to lock me out of a lot of alt-right thought since graphic designers and editors seem pretty thin over there.)
Yes. We rely too heavily on ironically low quality memes. While effective at introducing people to fundamental ideas (and the empowering concept that “dissent is ok!”), they’re not much good for anything else.
Although given that people seem to be building up a resistance to the slick presentation styles of Buzzfeed/Vox/Vice, simply imitating their failing model is probably not the right answer.
I’m sure we’ll figure it out eventually. The future belongs to us, and so does the media of the future 🙂
And yet those Nazi haircuts are super popular among graphic designers. Richard Spencer looks like a graphic designer. In fact, I think he looks more like one than anyone else I can think of, and I know several personally.
In this thread, there are many debates about what members of movement or political group A believe. These debates are basically unwinnable. Here is a test for ascribing belief B to group A which I think tells you something. EDIT: As per Randy’s post below, it should only be used to dis-ascribe a belief to a movement.
1) Figure out an extreme version or consequence C of B
2) Ask a typical* member of A whether a more idealistic and less cautious version of theirself would endorse C
Examples:
Let’s check the claim “American liberals support Islam.” Extreme consequence of supporting Islam: support for instituting Sharia law. Would an idealistic and reckless liberal support Sharia law? No, since Liberals prefer to keep the state out of religion. We conclude that Liberals do not support Islam, even if they may sometimes be aligned with groups that do. Claim fails the test.
Let’s check the claim “American conservatives prefer a small government.” Extreme consequence of supporting small government: anarchism. Would an idealistic and reckless conservative support anarchism? I’m not a conservative, but I think most conservatives could imagine a younger, edgier version of themselves doing so, and would think “younger me has their heart in the right place”. Claim passes the test.
* Yeah, this is still totally vulnerable to No-True-Scotsman-ing
Ask a typical* member of A… Let’s check the claim “American conservatives prefer a small government.”… I’m not a conservative, but…
You are explicitly not checking your claim there, you know.
This does not seem a fruitful or charitable exercise; rather I think you are trying to hide your assumptions and biases behind a veneer of psychoanalysis. If you want to ascribe negative views to opponents, just do so, don’t frame it as “You would have supported this if you were a more idealistic version of yourself.”
Unfortunately I’m in my room wearing a towel, with no conservatives handy. If any conservatives want to chime in, please do!
Anyway I wrote the wrong thing: I don’t want to say “if a more idealistic version of yourself would support this, then your movement supports this.” I want to say the converse of that. I will edit my original post now.
My motivation for this is really people arguing about what “liberal” means. Liberal is a particularly awful label, since there are very few people who self-describe as liberal and very many people who are described as liberal. In the US it seems to be mostly used for “milquetoast leftist” or “Democratic partisan.” I thought the situation could be clarified by imagining an “extreme liberal,” but that is an invitation to exactly the sort of psychoanalysis you are talking about unless you require that your picture of an extreme liberal be endorsed by a moderate liberal.
That’s fine, just don’t fool yourself into thinking you’ve demonstrated anything by having conversations with your best model of some.
For the record, I don’t think a younger me would have supported anarchy, and I do think the current me supports less government.
Well we’ve already covered “so what are you wearing? ;)”. We might as well go all the way and get the intercourse over with.
I do think some of the intermediate steps are non-trivial. Like, say, establishing gender and getting (turing) tested.
Chiming in. A younger, more carefree version of myself did support anarchism.
However, I am confident that if you asked most other conservatives, they’d say “Anarchism? What are you, nuts?!”
In light of these responses, the proposed test is shifting me away from my earlier (maybe ignorant) belief that small government is a fundamental/primary commitment of the conservative movement. So, who knows whether the test is making me more or less accurate, but at least it does something.
You don’t think it’s possible to support moving towards an extreme without ever have endorsed the extreme? Okay…
The reason this exercise is useless is because it all hinges on how you define the “logical endpoint” of the belief in question.
I am an anarchist and I get along reasonably well with conservatives. I give talks occasionally for the Federalist Society, which is a conservative/libertarian law student and lawyer organization. I was once invited to a high level conservative event to debate one of their people on free trade. I got to meet and talk with Phyllis Schlafly, who I found quite charming–it turned out that her son was a cryptographer and she was on the right side of that set of issues.
The claim that conservatives are more inclined to view market anarchy as an unworkably extreme version of their position than as agents of the Devil is consistent with my observations.
I think there’s something to your argument, but as Randy pointed out the conservative version doesn’t work very well. Maybe because “American conservatives prefer a small government” isn’t really a characterization that the conservatives in question would dispute? (Pretending for the moment that we’re talking about the more libertarian/Reaganist faction of conservatism, of course.) Ask Paul Ryan if he supports a small government and he’d say yup, I sure do. There’s no need to do any work here.
I think it depends on your definition of “small”. Certain areas of government would be considered vital parts by conservatives, American conservative “small government” – as far as I can see – is mainly in the economic sphere and is about getting rid of regulations, regulatory bodies, and freeing the market, as well as the perennial cry of every party about cutting civil service bloat and reducing costs in the public sector. But that’s only my opinion, they may well be campaigning for “halve the number of senators, do away with the house of representatives!” 🙂
Let’s check the claim “American progressives prefer communism”. Extreme consequence of supporting leftism: communism. Would an idealistic and reckless progressives support communism? I’m not a progressive, but I think most of them could imagine a younger, edgier version of themselves doing so, and would think “younger me has their heart in the right place”. Claim passes the test.
Progressives are communists. QED.
Also, “American Conservatives prefer a small government” just became outdated as of November 9. You picked the worst time to make this claim.
Regarding the communist counterexample, please see the “EDIT”.
Regarding November 9th, the test run with one actual conservative and one conservative modelling other conservatives (as opposed to a liberal modelling conservatives) suggests that small government is indeed not so central. So yes, my appraisal of conservatives was flawed but the test comes out alright, given your premise about what the election reveals.
Would an idealistic and reckless conservative support anarchism? I’m not a conservative, but I think most conservatives could imagine a younger, edgier version of themselves doing so, and would think “younger me has their heart in the right place”.
Having been (small “c”) conservative all my life, I have to disagree here. Younger me was never edgy and from the age of 15 I have adored Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday” which is all about the Secret Detective Corps fighting the Anarchists 🙂
Part of conservatism is the recognition of structure and order. Political anarchism is an ideal about a state of nature that never happened; even if we all self-govern in a local, small-scale way by democratic vote and everyone has their say and no larger unit than the village/ guild council/commune gets to make decisions for the members, there still has to be an element of “so who counts the votes and what rules do we use to decide if Bert is being an objectionable fusspot about the cow-bells or if Bert has the right to tell the entire rest of the village ‘no more cow-bells’ (as in that case of the Swiss citizenship)?”
Anarchy or anarchism, whether of the “I can trace my line of thought all the way back to Prince Kropotkin” or “I liked the A in the circle symbol on the parkas all the The Jam fans were wearing” variety, is not really a conservative-appealing system.
This test revolves strictly around what you label ‘an extreme consequence’, though. Most liberal answerers will come out negative if you land on ‘enact Sharia law’, but come out positive if you land on ‘allow free worship and establishment of Mosques wherever they wish to build them’. Virtually none of the Republicans I know were really in favor of anarchy even when they were younger, but I think a lot of them would have agreed with finding a way to slash the size of government by half. I suppose you could use this test to check yourself before writing something like “most Republicans support conversion to Christianity at the point of a sword”, but hopefully this doesn’t come up often?
It’s an interesting exercise to figure out what lines of thought any given person would support to their furthest conclusions, but I’m not sure how much it reveals about their actual politics.
I’m not certain, but I believe a current Republican congressman was in favor of anarchy when he was much younger. Certainly he was prominent in the young libertarian movement of the time. I quote him at the beginning of The Machinery of Freedom.
The Koch brothers are libertarians, not conservatives, but pretty heavily involved with Republican politics. I don’t know if either of them would describe himself as an anarchist but I believe their libertarianism was inspired by Robert Lefevre, who was an anarchist–and a pacifist.
I don’t think there’s any doubt that the right-leaning population includes a higher percentage of people who would sympathize with an anarchistic philosophy, I just think that’s essentially noise compared to the ocean of people who would like to abolish the EPA but have larger police forces.
This seems pretty wrongheaded, for a number of reasons. It confuses supporting an action or actor with supporting every possible consequence that might result. And beyond that it ignores that it’s entirely possible to hold positions in between the status quo and radical change.
For example, the same way you showed that American liberals don’t support Islam I can show that FDR’s administration was never allied with the Soviet Union. An extreme consequence of allying with the USSR during the Second World War was that the victorious communists went on to kill tens of millions of innocent people and enslave hundreds of millions more. It’s safe to say that, for those of us not in the John Birch Society, we can agree that FDR wasn’t in favor of mass murder. Thus the claim that FDR formed an alliance with the Soviet Union fails the test.
You talk as if FDR, (and Churchill who, despite his latter posturing held a more favorable attitude to concessions to the USSR) gave a free and democratic eastern Europe over to Stalin out of some enthusiasm for gulags and oppression. I would remind you that at the time that part of the world was occupied by another even worse form of totalitarianism, and western leaders rightly perceived the soviets as the lesser of two evils.
I’m aware of the context. The problem I’m pointing out is, in part, that this method of analysis ignores context and thus leads to bad results.
Actual liberals actually support Islam, not because they love Islamists but because they see a racist / xenophobic “backlash” against Islam as a larger threat. It’s actually a fairly good analogy for the Western Allies complicity in Soviet crimes, in terms of motivation at least. Supporting evil in the hope of preventing a greater evil.
What does “supporting Islam” mean? Islam is not a country or a political party. I know of no liberal who advocates an Islamic republic or caliphate as a system of government in any western country.
I for one don’t support or oppose Islam, but I do support the right of Muslims to the free exercise of their religion, as much as I support the right Jews, or Mormons, or Scientologists.
@hyperboloid
Your comment implies you know liberals who advocate Islamist government in non-Western countries, which sounds like the kind of thing Dr Dealgood might be talking about.
One may support categories of things other than countries or political parties. This is so obvious as to be
disingenuousrhetorical.There are ways of encouraging or discouraging Islam in any particular area that have nothing to do with the First Amendment of the US constitution.
@rlms
I know of a number of western leaders who would accept an Islamic republic as a superior alternative to secular dictatorship in Muslim majority countries. And not all of them are liberals; George W Bush, the man responsible for the Islamic Dawa party governing Iraq, is probably the most prominent example.
@Randy M
One can support a charity, or a football team, or the troops, or a deadbeat relative; but how does one support a religion, short of proselytizing for converts? If liberals wanted there to be more Muslims, don’t you think they would start by converting themselves, or at the very least refraining from unIslamic activities, like fornication, or drinking, or … eating bacon. All things that your average liberal has done far more to support then Islam.
Why should it be my, or your, or anybody else’s business to “discourage” the private practice of any religion?
Furthermore, I doubt there are any effective means to discourage any religious practice that would not run afoul of the first amendment. Judaism was ruthlessly persecuted in Europe for centuries and it took a massive genocide to significantly dislodge it form the continent.
That’s certainly one way.
For example of another, see media frontlash after terror attacks. This is supporting Islam, and non-governmental.
Effective or not is another matter entirely. As you say, the sorts of thing Islam has done to discourage Christianity in and around it’s birthplace would not be allowed in this country. But I don’t think there’s no non-governmental actions that could be useful.
(Some) Liberals (seem to) want there to be more Muslims (I hypothesize) in order for them to be a check on Christians and to virtue signal, not because they are adherents of the faith or want to follow its practices. If you’ve played Risk or similar you’ll understand rooting for the far opponent against the near.
Islam has not historically been a particularly private practice.
Implying the media are not part of the government.
@Randy M
Well for one thing, from the few Palestinian Christians I have known, I suspect their biggest problem is the army of Jewish state occupying their home land.
For another, Islam is not a person, or a country, or a party, or any armed faction. It is a faith, a collection of philosophical ideas, rules, and rituals, practiced by a billion people. Certainly some of those people have oppressed Christians, Yazidis, Jews, and people of other faiths, and this is deplorable. On the other hand, other Muslims, for instance the overwhelmingly Sunni Kurds, have fought to the death against such people.
It is beyond me why you think lashing out at people living in western countries who have had no part in any violence in the middle east is some kind of justice. Somebody in Iraq murders a Christian, so you plan to harass a Pakistani restaurant owner just because he prays facing the bit of Saudi Arabia as Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi?
What kind of logic is that?
Citation very much needed.
I know of no way in which the median Muslim’s practice of his religion is in any way more public that that of an orthodox Jew.
Well, you are a big boloid, so if something is indeed beyond you, maybe it is in fact not so.
Duh–strawman logic.
I have not lashed out at anyone, nor do I think it would be just to do so.
Of course, perhaps you view not letting someone’s second-cousin/fiancee immigrate as some kind of lashing out, in which case I don’t think the term is merited. But the case for it isn’t for justice’s sake.
It is as much a faith as it is a political philosophy, one markedly different from the Anglo-American one. No problem with that, that’s what borders are for, after all.
I have to provide citations for my impression? Fine, See here
@Randy M
Islam is not a political ideology, if it were one would expect Muslims to generally share the same political views, yet political views in the Muslim world run the gambit from liberalism, to Marxism, to Monarchism, to various forms of religious conservatism and Islamism.
If you don’t wish to put pressure on American Muslims to give up their religion, then how do you mean to “discourage Islam”?
Your link just goes back to your original comment, which does not cite any specific source or example; also I don’t know what “frontlash” means.
I don’t think Muslim immigrants should be treated differently then anybody else, aside from basic security screening. Your second cousin is the child of one of your parent’s first cousins. It’s a very distant relative and I can’t think of any reason to treat a marriage between second cousins any different than any other marriage.
Where you draw line on incest is more than a little subjective since a cousin is just someone with you share a common ancestor with.To take to the extreme, technically any two given people who are not more closely related are cousins of one degree or another. Go back far enough and all family trees converge.
Think of the last women you slept with, trace your families back far enough and you will find you are distantly related, and if you are from the same ethnic group in the same region it might not be so distant.
…..Oh great, I think I just ruined sex.
All right everybody, no more fucking; we’ll just have to invent something else.
@hyperboloid,
“Frontlash” is a term coined by the journalist Steve Sailer to refer to media / government action taken in the immediate aftermath of an Islamist attack, ostensibly to protect Muslims against an expected backlash on the part of the citizenry.
So, a good example of a frontlash would be the extraordinary (and ongoing) efforts by the government and media of the UK to conceal the Pakistani rape gangs operating across the country. And, after the gang in Rotherham was revealed despite this, the speed with which they leapt into action to protect the safety and identities of the perpetrators. If only the police had responded so quickly when their thousands (not hyperbole) of victims needed protection!
Oh wait, they did respond… to jail the fathers who tried to free their daughters, and to threaten anyone who spoke out with “hate speech” charges.
In other words, it is a form of anarcho-tyranny. The native citizens of the country are left to fend for themselves against inevitable yet somehow “unforeseeable” Muslim violence, while being scrutinized for any sign that they might retaliate against their attackers.
My favorite quote from RationalWiki, on the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006
As if it was the most natural response in the world.
I mean, for a certain conception of far right….
One knowingly supports policies and performs actions which make it easier for the religion to gain converts and/or put its own policies into action.
> I would remind you that at the time that part of the world was occupied by another even worse form of totalitarianism,
I don’t think you can just casually sustain the claim that Nazism was worse than communism. More threatening at that moment in history, perhaps, but certainly not worse
At least in politics (where this discussion often occurs) I feel like the solution is to define a representative member of the group as a major elected official – you can say in a valid way that Democrats believe something if you see >= 3 senators or governors or similarly high officials (president, VP, House leadership, but not cabinet officials) who make the claim. Limiting it to high officials is important – these elections are almost always competitive, at least at the primary level, so holders of these offices are likely to be pretty savvy, care a lot about what the electorate thinks, and generally unwilling to say things that mark them as crazy with a large fraction of their voters. (Whereas lower elections like the House are often uncompetitive and therefore the House is full of crazy people who say crazy things.)
2000/2004 Diebold conspiracies fail this standard, but birtherism passes, which seems like the intuitively correct result to me.
Doesn’t work for groups like “feminists” or “libertarians” though.
>2000/2004 Diebold conspiracies fail this standard,
31 house democrats and one senator refused to certify the 2004 election. About 20 did so in 2000.
I dunno about that. Most conservatives — or at least most conservatives who’ve given some serious thought to their positions — think that there’s a certain set of more-or-less well-defined functions which the government should carry out, and that it should stay out of thing which aren’t directly related to those functions. Since most modern Western governments do more than just carry out these functions, the conservative view means in practice that government should be smaller than it currently is. Nevertheless, the “extreme consequence” of supporting the idea that the government should stick to a few well-defined tasks isn’t shrinking the government down to nothing, it’s, well, a government that sticks to a few well-defined tasks. So I think that the argument is insufficient in this case.
I think you might be confusing conservatives and libertarians?
No, I don’t think he is. With regards to (at least some) American conservatives, for the “certain set of more-or-less well-defined functions which the government should carry out”, read “the enumerated powers listed in the Constitution,” with all others not explicitly granted to the Federal govenment reserved to the states or the people.
No, I don’t think so. Both favour limited government, although conservatives generally think it should be limited less than libertarians do.
For example, see conservative support for the tenth amendment.
Another “hey I think I noticed this thing but I might be wrong” topic: has anyone here noticed people making arguments on utilitarian terms, but using other rhetoric, and sometimes outright avoiding utilitarianism? Mostly, this happens with very charged issues.
The big example I’ve noticed is that the rationale against criminalizing HIV transmission, or criminalizing having sex with someone while HIV+ without telling them, or not using a condom, or not having an undetectable viral count, or some permutation of that, is a utilitarian one (hey, I said these were charged issues). People will neglect getting tested if knowing that they are HIV-positive means they have a legal duty (with serious criminal punishments) to tell others, to use condoms, etc. The end result of this is more HIV transmission taking place than otherwise, as testing is an extremely important part of the public health approach, and if someone does not know they are HIV-positive, they cannot take drugs to suppress the virus, which significantly reduces transmission. So, the utilitarian case is clear – if criminalization means more HIV transmission (and, by all accounts, the stats bear this out), criminalization is bad, because it means more HIV than would be the case otherwise. If the public health experts tell me that criminalization means more HIV, then I will oppose criminalization, because it seems obvious on the face of it that fewer HIV infections is better for society.
However, if you read stuff about the topic (example that caused me to start thinking about this) the utilitarian argument is pretty hard to notice. There is some fairly oblique mention of the utilitarian argument, but mostly the focus is on how the laws are unfair, the laws are discriminatory, and how hard they are on the people thus charged. The utilitarian argument is far more convincing – because it does not argue that laws against what amounts to recklessly endangering another are worse than recklessly endangering another. (Of course, if the argument is “HIV criminalization laws tend to punish more harshly than laws against generically endangering another” then I suppose I can get behind that; I don’t see why exposing someone to HIV is worse than, say, exposing someone to a carcinogen of similar risk).
Are people simply uncomfortable with utilitarianism, under any circumstances? Is the argument “we should allow/do this bad thing because the costs of not allowing it are worse than the costs of doing it” just too cold and mechanical an argument for most people to accept? Is this just a “gut feel” thing where arguing for sympathy for people seen as perpetrators is actually more acceptable (and thus more effective) than arguing for heartless number-based decision making?
(The article does make a utilitarian argument regarding sexual assault more explicitly than it makes a utilitarian argument regarding HIV criminalization.)
I haven’t noticed any general pattern where people avoid arguments that appeal to the good overall consequences of policies or actions.
I meant more that people seem to avoid arguments that argue for something counterintuitive or that “feels wrong” to the gut to be done on a utilitarian basis. I should have made that clearer.
Example:
“We should make condoms more available and sex ed better to reduce HIV transmission rates” is a utilitarian argument that is commonly made.
“We should not criminalize recklessly endangering another person because criminalizing it increases HIV transmission rates” is a utilitarian argument that seems to be eschewed, even when it’s the strongest argument – for example, in that article.
A pattern similar to what you describe shows up in intra-libertarian disputes. One line of argument for libertarian conclusions is consequentialist, one is based on some version of natural rights. Some who support the latter approach criticize the former on the grounds that, while it is true that the institutions they support lead to good consequences, basing their support on that would leave them open to arguments claiming good consequences from what they regard as wicked (i.e. rights violating) laws.
So, does anyone here place a premium on nice wines?
If so, how do you determine what … a good wine is?
I prefer cookies n cream flavored wine, myself.
Where are other notable cases of humans acting in such a way? Besides well, luxury cars.
Maybe you have something specific in mind here, but there’s a lot extra that your money can buy. Though maybe not anything you care about, which of course is fair enough.
FWIW, I personally prefer certain flavors of wine over others, and there are some fairly basic heuristics (e.g. alcohol content, sulfite content) that I can use to determine whether I’ll like a certain wine within the flavor group. For example, I dislike most red wines, and thus I’m not going to buy them, regardless of the price (unless it’s negative, I suppose).
Clothing. There’s a pretty big gap between what’s minimally acceptable and what you can pay for premium clothes. Much of the difference is signaling, as well.
Heh. I met a rationalist guy in college who spent good money on a trench coat & fur felt fedora because it rains cats & dogs 8 months of the year, only to find out that SJs considered them anti-feminist signalling.
I actually like fedora/trilby type hats, but those have kind of been ruined by certain segments. Wearing one says something, regardless of what you actually believe.
Are they considered anti-feminist signaling? Or just something that screams “I’m a nerd trying to look like Humphrey Bogart”.
I for one think it looks fine as an accessory to a well tailored suit, it only gets cringe inducing when paired with a sweat stained T-shirt and jeans.
I don’t think the main signal is anti-feminism, I think it’s social cluelessness. SJ types read that as implying anti-feminism, but it says things to other groups which are just as bad and have nothing to do with women.
Rule #1
Try matching the rest of the outfit to the hat
Rule #2
Don’t look like this
http://bbsimg.ngfiles.com/1/25168000/ngbbs53d2c7b161d48.jpg
Rule #3
If you are not going to match it, it can still look good if you look more like this
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/13/ae/5e/13ae5e7741d61ecffffd6fbbd0960ed9.jpg
The same goes with muscle-tees.
Honestly I don’t think the second image looks all that good. Sure, it doesn’t look bad per se. But it would look better without the hat, and Johnny Depp would probably look okay in a garbage bag with three holes cut in it.
The “fedora” usually fits into a “guy who thinks it’s dapper, it doesn’t fit with the rest of his attire, it’s out of fashion, and he comes off clueless” stereotype.
Due to a combination of actual overlap and supposed overlap (coming as part of the ever-popular attempt to portray opponents as uncool and gross, maybe with some ableism thrown in) it’s gotten coded in a certain way. (Of course, everybody does the latter – the “neckbeard virgin fedora MRA” stereotype is brother to the “bluehair obese screeching feminist” stereotype)
Any person who wears a fedora, if he was born after about 1970, looks like a little kid dressing up in his daddy’s clothes.
Same goes for suspenders.
As a bald guy, I really wish some kind of hats were generally fashionable these days.
Baseball caps are always fashionable.
Make hats fashionable again.
Wow, people are being so… helpful.
Depends on how you define “nice”. If you’re not mixing it with soda, it might be worth paying the extra five or ten bucks per litre to go from “heartburn in a 4L box” (red) or “they sell varnish in Tetrapacks now?” (white) to nice wine, in an actual bottle even. Past that, most people probably can’t tell. But I prefer beer anyway.
Mixing wine with soda? What is this nonsense?
Spritzers, calimocho, etc.
I’m not an aficionado, but I can tell the difference between $2 rotgut and something more expensive. In my experience though, once you get to a certain level of price the more you pay doesn’t necessarily make the wine taste any better. I’ve had $20 bottles I liked quite a bit, and $100 bottles I thought were terrible.
I think that’s more or less the consensus of people who have
studied the question empirically through blind taste tests. In fact people who are not wine connoisseur enjoy more expensive wines somewhat less then average priced vintages.
Does anyone know about the ‘Eat Right 4 Your Type’ or Bloodtype tailored diet?
For me, it pattern matches to Japanese beliefs about blood type and personality, for which the evidence is on astrology level. The idea that different diets would work better for people with different genetics seems plausible enough, but that there would be substantial correlations with blood type specificially, which seems to mostly just be easily measured rather than impactful, is less so. But I haven’t looked carefully at the research that is supposed to support it.
This. Blood type might have a very weak correlation with other genetic factors that make one diet better than another for a person, but that’s a best-case scenario. You could improve your odds of picking a good diet from the beginning by looking into current research, eliminating the obvious bullshit like the Hollywood Miracle Diet, and choosing what you like best from the at least somewhat-supported diets. Because no matter how supposedly good for you it is, if you hate it and can’t follow it for long, it won’t work. So picking one a little lower on the objectively “healthy” rankings that you can actually follow long-term will get you better results.
Also depends on what results you WANT. A lot of diets are judged by effects on blood pressure, weight loss, etc. and “lower blood pressure, lose weight” may not be suitable for everyone.
Haven’t personally read much about it, but I had a friend who thought it was unscientific garbage, and she believed in astrology.
I am curious what you mean here. It sounds like you are saying this shows that the diet in question is very unscientific, since even the astrologist thinking it was so seems to imply that it is even less scientific than astrology. But my thought is more that the astrologist doesn’t have a clue as to how science works, so her thoughts on this diet are worthless. Or is that what you meant?
I meat to say that I heard from somebody who struck me as reasonably smart and scientifically-informed (we met at a summer research program for undergrads) that it is not very scientific, though I haven’t looked into it myself. The fact that she happened to believe (strongly) in astrology was just something I found amusing, since even though most of us probably pick and choose what to scrutinize, it’s funny that she’d be critical of a diet but not of astrology.
In defense of, and in criticism of, social justice.
First, the broad goals of SJ look, to me, unobjectionable; reduce prejudice, promote equality, raise the station of the lowest in our society. This is literally leftism; these are ideals we all aspire to.
The issue is that SJ represents a massive and nebulous reserve of previously unclaimed social power – the power to represent the underrepresented. Social Justice Warriors are people tapping into that power; some seek to do good, some seek to do ill, a depressing number seem to seek petty vengeance on personal and tribal enemies. And white people are grossly overrepresented in the SJW group; this doesn’t solve the underrepresentation issue, it exaggerates it.
Worse still, the Social Justice movement has become it’s own tribe, independent of the actual policies it claims to espouse. As a movement, it fails entirely to live up to its ideals; as a tribe, it has become a self-reinforcing monster, full of people who claim to be trans-black and other sordid things, making a mockery of the very underrepresentation it should be working to correct.
And even worse still, as a tribe, it has been largely subverted to corporate interests. I made reference before to the fact that feminism at this point is basically serving corporate interests; the same is true of SJ as a whole. Feminism is – or rather was – equality. Equality doesn’t mean we elect a woman because she’s a woman, it means we elect a competent person without regard for gender. Yet the Democratic establishment narrative pretended – for its own interests – that feminism was the strawman its opponent’s frequently attack it as, a blatant and unapolagetic interest group serving the interests of the women of the 1%.
Leftism is, fundamentally, about class. The poor black man has more in common with the poor white woman than a poor white man has in common with a rich white man, yet we have allowed the class interests of the wealthiest to redefine leftism to be a constant identity war between races, genders, religions – whatever keeps people from looking at class.
Social Justice is about justice, and justice is blind. That thing that currently wears the skin of social justice is not social justice, it is an amalgamation of corporate and upper class interests, paraded about by upper middle class children who think social justice is an entitlement to have other people pay for their upper middle class educations which poor people don’t have the educational and social background to successfully attend, who think social justice means that white people can “identify” as black and pretend that it is something other than racism, who fight over who is most oppressed in universities that the truly oppressed in our society can’t attend.
I’m not preaching to the choir here; if you don’t think SJ has valid criticisms of society, don’t be a cheerleader for yet another criticism of your tribal enemies. I’m preaching to the heretics, so to speak; the people here who complain angrily about how SJ is treated here. The critics of SJ, while they include a lot of illiberal right-wing people, also include a hell of a lot of us who agree with all of its stated goals, we just don’t agree with its priorities, means, or proponents. I think that is pretty much most of the commentariat here.
It is SJ-as-a-tribe that is problematic. When corporations are leveraging SJ superweapons to silence criticism of mediocre products and SJ cheers them on, SJ has been co-opted. When an unapolagetic corporatist leverages SJ superweapons in her fight with another corporatist and SJ cheers her on, SJ has been co-opted. This is one of the main things the alt-right gets right, even as it gets it horribly wrong; the Left isn’t the “cathedral”, the Left is just another set of ideals that the establishment has co-opted to further its own ends, and we need to stop tolerating those in power using the injustices they help perpetuate to keep themselves in power. That isn’t social justice, that’s a horrible parody of everything social justice is supposed to stand for.
When you attack critics of modern corporate feminism as being anti-woman, you aren’t standing up for women, you are standing up for the exploitation of women’s suffering for profit. Likewise SJ more broadly, which at this point is just upper middle class people thinking being oppressed is cool and trying to participate.
I find this criticism partially justifiable and partially incoherent.
Things I would agree with:
1) ‘Social Justice’ is a nebulous concept which is often-abused to rally support to the one who wants to wield it
2) Those who take up the banner of social justice commonly fail to live up to the high ideals they espouse (but see, e.g., every movement which has ever had high ideals)
3) Increasing tribalism and tribal conflicts is a bad thing generally
I’m not sure how to respond or think about your claim that social justice has been “co-opted by corporatists” because I have no idea what that means. It looks like you’ve got examples in mind, but I don’t know what they are. There’s also a criticism of the Democratic Party’s promotion of Clinton in there, but once again I’m not actually sure what it is.
Finally, there’s a point in there implicitly arguing that social justice should focus on economic classes and that identity politics are just the work of the wealthy conspiracy to keep the proletariat fighting among one another. I can see a compelling argument that a movement seeking to increase equality needs to focus on economics above all else, but I think you need to actually make the case. It’s clear that there are at least a large plurality of people who wouldn’t agree that money trumps race or gender, and it makes more sense to convince those people than berate them.
I have little interest in convincing the upper middle classes they aren’t oppressed, particularly when they are so determined to prove they are.
It’s clear that there are at least a large plurality of people who wouldn’t agree that money trumps race or gender, and it makes more sense to convince those people than berate them.
I do wonder how many of these are white people in reasonably comfortable situations who can honestly say that their worst problem is that they can’t use the public bathroom of their choice, or who are enthusiastic about being “good allies” and engaging in public protests about bathrooms, rather than class and economic struggle, because it’s a lot easier to get a bill passed saying “everyone can use whatever bathroom they like regardless of gender” than reversing globalism or engaging with the problem of “so what will all these surplus to labour requirement people live on while they’re waiting for the UBI to drop out of the sky?”
Yeah, no animal wants to do more work than necessary, so if a society makes oppression the source of moral authority, the question an affluent person will ask themself is “what’s the easiest way to be seen as oppressed?”
Heck, many of the persons of color in social justice movements are pretty damn privileged themselves. The guy who led the U of Missouri protests was the son of a millionaire.
Or consider the cast of Hamilton‘s lecture to Mike Pence. Lin Manuel Miranda comes from a politically connected family and attended Wesleyan (total annual cost of attendance: $64,163).
Which isn’t to say that these people never had issues or faced discrimination, but in the scheme of things they’re doing pretty well and it takes a certain chutzpah to talk down to an unemployed factory worker because he’s white, male, and lacks a college credential.
So there is certainly an aspect of the social justice movement that seems to be mostly about signalling between privileged people – a game totally detached from the actual people it is purportedly about.
A commenter on my student newspaper shut down a SocJuser preaching “the necessity of violent resistance for us oppressed” by pointing out she is a brahmin-caste second generation New Englander from a neighborhood where the median income is $150,000.
It doesn’t take chutzpah, just the massive contempt of a privileged elite who have discovered a myth that makes them the moral superiors of the disgusting proles.
>So there is certainly an aspect of the social justice movement that seems to be mostly about signalling between privileged people – a game totally detached from the actual people it is purportedly about.
I’m reminded of Bolsheviks putting on leather jackets that would cost an actual worker a year’s salary.
Nothing could be more echt-SJ than the division of the entire human race into Them What Is Allowed To Complain and Them What Is Not Allowed To Complain. It’s a saving grace of us illiberal right-wing people that we’re old-fashioned enough to think that (1) If you’ve personally been mistreated in some way, you get to complain about that no matter who you are, and (2) But nothing more than that.
@Cerebral Paul Z
I would argue that the biggest difference between MRAs and SJ people might be that the former tend to be individualist and the latter collectivist.
FYI, the Trots accused the 1968 version of SJWs of substitutionism, when they first appeared and wrote off the working class as hopelessly reactionary, putting their faith in a socialist revolution by such non-class social groups as students and immigrants.
There were numerous kings and dictators throughout history who pursued these ideals; I’m not sure any of them could be called leftist. Akbar, Dom Pedro II, Lee Kuan Yew — would you call any of these people leftists?
What’s a left-right debate without hierarchies? I’ve always believed the left-right divide is at its most basic level about hierarchies and the justness of hierarchies. In a perfectly homogeneous society, hierarchies will emerge that create a labor class and a capital class, or whatever economic stratification you can choose. The general right-wing view will be that these hierarchies are natural, that some people will be smarter or gutsier or more hardworking and they’ll reap the rewards by ascending into the capital class, and to maintain their position in the capital class they’ll have to engage in profitable ventures that employ the labor class. Hierarchies like this aren’t just natural; they’re essential, because you have to incentivize the bold and the clever to create these ventures for the good of your society.
On the other hand, the general left-wing view will note that it’s very hard to break free of the class you were born into, that most don’t, and that it isn’t necessarily about how smart you are or how many risks you’re willing to take, because there are plenty of stupid cowards in the capital class who were born into it, and their stupid coward children enjoy the benefits of the capital class for their entire lives as well simply because they were born into it too. Sometimes you just have a group of greedy bastards working together to horde wealth for themselves. The left-wing answer to such hierarchies is to tear them down through redistribution, to give power and autonomy to the labor class. The clash between the two ends of the spectrum is basically whether power structures, economic or social, should be maintained or erased. Democracy is essentially leftist, created in opposition to monarchy.
In a society that isn’t perfectly homogeneous, additional complicating factors will rear their head, like race. The left view is that all groups are created equal and so under the same circumstances, they should exhibit the same or similar outcomes. If they don’t exhibit the same outcomes, the only acceptable answer in the left view is that one group is being oppressed in a way that suppresses their full potential. The right-wing view is that groups aren’t created equal and we shouldn’t expect equal outcomes. Maybe blacks or women just aren’t as capable as whites or men and will never achieve the same level of success. Few in American politics will ever profess to believing this out loud, it is political suicide, and so most American politicians are social leftists, even the Republicans. Democracy functions to quash rightism; nobody likes being told that they don’t achieve equal outcomes because they’re inferior, and they’ll retaliate with their votes. As to what to do with this information, you can oppress groups you believe are inferior, or you can dial down the equality talk and try to manage their expectations — as Lee Kuan Yew said:
The Social Justice movement, in my view, seeks to challenge the structures of social and cultural power, ostensibly to contemplate “traditional” leftism’s challenge to economic and political power, but inevitably abandoning the latter because many of the flagbearers of Social Justice are quite bourgeoisie in their own way. Multiculturalism and representation in media are big planks of the Social Justice platform because they flow from the contemporary left view that all cultures are created equal, while the right view is going to be that no, cultures are not created equal, some are clearly more dysfunctional and unfit for peaceful society than others, and we should actively discourage the spread of such cultures in favor of cultures with a more suitable track record. Sometimes the oppressed are oppressing themselves with a terrible culture, and the best thing you can do for them would be to divorce them from it and substitute it with a different culture, but then the shrieking about oppression starts anew.
I don’t think that is a fair statement of the right wing position with regard to women. It’s more “maybe women are different from men in ways that will lead to their choosing different roles and succeeding in different ways.”
More accurate with regard to blacks.
Could you give an example?
For an example that has come up here before, Sony accusing reviewers who gave the Ghostbusters remake a mediocre rating of sexism.
It is hardly the first case, just one of the more obvious ones. A lot of corporations have figured out that they can immunize themselves against criticism by framing what they do in terms of representing an oppressed group.
That’s kind of funny. I always discount ratings on movies that have anything to do with the holocaust, LBTGQ, or race. They seem to always get artificially high reviews. I wonder if anyone has tried to run the numbers on that potential bias.
I’d say the recent spate of “real women” ad campaigns and ads prominently featuring gay couples could be an example of co-opting social justice themes for corporate ends.
But I’m not sure how much that necessarily takes away from social justice per se – it’s just companies latching on to a popular new thing, and that’s gone on forever.
To the extent that it’s a problem, it would be in the sense of the movement focusing too much energy on relatively superficial issues (e.g. media representation of technically overweight but still very attractive people) instead of more immediate concerns of the truly oppressed.
I agree that class-based social analysis is important, and that SJWs appear to be a bunch of affluent & classist douchecanoes. OTOH, this doesn’t make Marxism-Leninism right. Let’s not deny that the Communist states consistently displayed a megacidal ignorance of economics that denies their ideology any legitimacy to decent people.
Of course, on the SJ side, we should draw a moral distinction between the douchey classism of the moderates who just want to reform capitalist society so that women have 50% of the power, African-Americans 12% of the power in the United States, homosexuals ???% and the radicals, those with beliefs like “I want white genocide.”
I don’t get the corporate angle as well, although I suppose it is about where the SJW’s weld their influence.
There is a lot of implicit criticism of the right that they are “against” equality because they don’t adhere to certain SJW tenets, specifically the idea of protected classes require certain privileges in order to be “more equal”. On the right you will get mostly “treat all people equally regardless of identity”. This position is increasingly seen as prejudiced by some in the SJW movement which is counterproductive, it alienates potential allies and makes the tent smaller. Some of the more extreme positions in SJW seem to more about power welding within that tribe, kind of a topper contest in who can denounce the white man with the most gusto. This is definitely a “if you aren’t with us you are against us” movement in my view.
It’s gotten to be a bit of dogma that measurable differences in outcomes is a prima facie case for racism, sexism, etc. and that social dysfunction or social preferences in the identity group shall not be considered as a cause. This has become so tiresome that most people just disengage from the debate, because it has become a lecture instead.
Case in point is the focus on police shootings that comprise a tiny number of total shootings in black communities. This incoherent conversation results in perverse incentives with results such as the Chicago police stepping back in the midst of the worst crime wave in two decades. The Chicago police have some real issues to deal with, but the community has much worse internal dysfunction that affect the lives of many more people. SJW seems to have a singular focus on external forces without regard to internal forces.
Except when the differences disfavor white people and/or men, then it’s because they have bad culture. Then most SJ people suddenly say things that they won’t allowed to be said about SJ ingroups.
It’s amusing that if you bring up violence against men, the response is almost always: ‘but it’s men doing it to other men.’ The people who use that argument seem to truly believe that the statement is sufficient to dismiss the issue from consideration.
It really shows that they don’t care much about victims, but about victimhood of one group by the other.
Your second to last paragraph is an excellent example since it directly unmasks a common motte-and-bailey around feminism. That motte being “feminism is for everyone, because patriarchy makes everyone worse off”. Were that really your core belief, then men doing violence to other men in our long sordid history of bloody status games has to be one of the greatest and most pressing harms of patriarchy. Addressing that would be far more important than e.g. guaranteeing no one has a co-pay for birth control pills.
EDIT: and I don’t mean to imply that serious feminists don’t consider inter-male violence, clearly they do. Just that it doesn’t dominate the narrative the way that reproductive issues do. And your more-commonly encountered Facebook feminist rarely seems to engage the issue more deeply “if women ran things there’d be no wars!”
At my most charitable, I would argue that they simply see male on male violence as not being a social justice issue, because they define social justice as ending oppression of one group by another.
When I’m a little less charitable, I consider this a completely inappropriate response when there is already a huge imbalance in government resources favoring services to help women and they actively fight against a more fair distribution of funds. So they are not neutral bystanders who are merely not helping; they actively work against it.
A lot of social justice types are in favor of gun control, because they believe fewer guns will mean fewer people being fatally shot (whether that’s true or not isn’t relevant here, since we’re talking about social justice motivations). This seems to be a popular issue among them even though most are surely aware that most gun violence is men shooting other men.
You are assuming your conclusion. Perhaps they support gun control because they think it will lead to less chance of them, personally being shot. Or because of less chance of The Children accidentally getting shot. Or less chance of violent rapes. Or less chance of an overthrow of the Federal Government by violent men.
@Protagoras
They are pro gun control merely because they are left wing and that is the appropriate position for them. I never see them present it as a SJ issue and it is not typically a topic that they’ll breach of their own accord.
Similarly, I suspect that a disproportionate percentage of people working to eliminate prison rape would consider themselves feminists.
Complaining about people who are working to solve one problem because you personally feel that another problem is more important is a remarkably lazy form of criticism. It’s particularly vexing when the group being criticized actually tends to be significantly better on your pet issue than the average member of society.
@Aapje:
Your infallible insight into the beliefs and motivations of others remains a miracle to behold.
@Iain
1. A substantial amount of sexual assault of men in prisons is female guards with prisoners, actually, especially in youth facilities. Many feminists deny that this is possible and that only men can rape.
2. This is a typical example of pro-feminists claiming that people that do good things must be feminists, because of their own stereotypes that they ought to do this. This is just wishful thinking, not a proper argument.
3. I’ve very often seen feminists claim that substantial number of men are only raped in prison, not elsewhere in society. This conveniently lets them ignore male victims when they focus on society outside of prison and ‘ghetto‘ the issue of male rape. When a group makes it harder to address most of an issue, they don’t get to claim moral superiority for addressing the smaller part that they do recognize because it fits their agenda.
4. My complaint is not that feminists merely have different priorities, it’s that they often fight against people who want to solve a different problem, because they feel that it distracts from feminist priorities.
@Aapje
What percentage of feminists do you think would agree with the claim: “It is impossible for a female prison guard to sexually assault a male juvenile prisoner”?
@Iain:
There’s nothing wrong with caring about your particular pet issue to the exclusion of other things. The problem only comes in when you say “Feminism is good for everyone!” when really you only care about “women’s issues”. And I’m not claiming feminists are pro-prison rape or even ambivalent about it. Just that it’s a marginal issue for feminists in general compared to issues that specifically affect women. And that’s fine! But they should abandon the “good for everyone” motte for intellectual honesty’s sake.
@Aapje: If you often see it, please find me a case of feminists fighting against people who want to solve a different problem, in a case where that different problem is not simply being used as a rhetorical bludgeon against feminism.
As for prison rape advocates: I am quite confident that feminists are over-represented among the set of people who make the argument that prison rape is not funny or just. I admit that I made a small leap in assuming that this carried over to actual advocacy. If you can find a source that contradicts my assumption, I’m all ears.
@Protagoras
Well, most “gun violence” actually consists of men shooting themselves, but I get your point.
Still, I don’t think gun control is really a central social justice issue – I mean, the dictionary definition of social justice is something like “equitable distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges throughout society”.
Now I think there are a lot of SJ advocates who are also gun control advocates, and therefore it makes sense for them to try to talk about it in that language. But most attempts seem strained to me – basically, an attempt to paint gun violence as a “public health” issue that has a disparate impact on minorities and other vulnerable groups.
But that framing, I think, says something interesting, since it’s trying to assign blame for mostly inter-group violence to an external source (in this case gun availability). And in a way that supports the anti-SJW point, that there are cultures it’s okay to criticize and cultures that are off-limits, lest blame be assigned to an unprivileged group.
Anyway I think it’s fine to be a social justice advocate and it’s fine to be a gun control advocate, but attempts to link the two fall flat to me.
@gbdub: It is possible for feminism to help both men and women while helping women more. It is true that many feminist causes are primarily aimed at helping women; that doesn’t mean that men can’t also benefit. A quick example: feminists have fought to make child rearing a thing that both parents do, not just the mother. That change has made it more socially acceptable for fathers to be more involved in their children’s lives, also helping men.
@Iain
I don’t disagree, and again I don’t believe that the fact that feminism mostly helps women ipso facto discredits feminism.
But to the extent that feminism helps men, it still does not seem to me a core part of their advocacy – it’s more of a side effect. Benefits toward men are in my experience mostly brought up in defense against the notion that feminists are misandrists. But in practice, feminists are quite willing to propose policies that unfairly hurt men if they help women (e.g. promoting campus kangaroo courts for sex assault). Or to just ignore aspects of patriarchy that hurt men (e.g. strong advocacy for gender equality in STEM, crickets on male under-representation in non-MD healthcare and primary/secondary education. Pro women in combat, anti women forced into combat).
In other words, “feminism helps men too!” is a handy weapon against anti-feminists (and not strictly false either, as you correctly note). But it’s not a core belief that seems to motivate much direct action or advocacy. Hence I think the motte-and-bailey description is apt.
They paint gun violence as a “public health” issue because “public health” was the excuse used for the American Medical Association to support gun control.
Gun control is, however, on the list of “106 Things You Can Do To Bring About The Queer Revolution (#28 will offend you!)”
Shame they couldn’t reach and come up with two more, for some Buddhist numerological significance.
@Philosophisticat
As a rare exception that proves the rule? Most of them.
As a thing that happens fairly frequently? Very few of them, if my experience of discussions with them is any indication.
@Iain
Here you go:
http://www.nouse.co.uk/2015/11/16/open-letter-blasts-universitys-decision-to-mark-international-mens-day-read-it-here/
Please note how one argument is that people should not be allowed to address gender issues outside of feminism. Another argument is that “‘gender equality is for everyone’ echoes misogynistic rhetoric.” Taking offense at such an egalitarian statement clearly demonstrates that he real concern is that the exclusive focus is taken off women.
You are completely ignoring my argument that many feminists minimize male rape by denying a large portion of the male victims, so that they don’t have to address it in most of their efforts (which includes taking control of my tax money and diverting it mainly to services for women). Your weak claim that they usually disapprove of prison rape (which I have never denied) is completely insufficient to offset the harm that is being done, IMHO.
PS. This is also a good paper, by a frustrated domestic violence researcher who recounts his lifetime of experience with scientific evidence of gender symmetry being denied, concealed, and distorted, by ideologically motivated/biased researchers.
PS2. Like gbdub, I’m fine with people choosing to only focus on women’s issues. What offends me is when people pretend to care about men’s issues, but merely as a ploy to prevent men from getting similar support; when facts/science is manipulated to justify unfairness; etc, etc. Note that I’m not claiming that feminists necessarily do this on purpose, but rather that a very sick culture developed that has an auto-immune system that ejects ’emperor has no clothes’ people and defends bad actors.
@Aapje
I can’t parse your reply as an answer to my question.
You claimed that many feminists think it is impossible for a female prison guard to sexually assault a male juvenile in a youth prison.
I wondered how common you thought this belief was.
You seem to have misheard the question as “how many feminists think that female prison guards sometimes sexually assault male juveniles?”
Thinking that it’s rare for male juveniles to be sexually assaulted by female prison guards is a very different thought from thinking that it is impossible for male juveniles to be sexually assaulted by female prison guards.
I can’t help but suspect that you deliberately misheard the question because you realize that claiming that many feminists believe the latter thing is indefensible (which it is), so you substituted a weaker claim that was at least plausible. If so, shame on you. If not, be more careful about falsely attributing absurd beliefs to those you disagree with.
@Philosophisticat
I admit that my initial statement was too strong and went further than my actual beliefs. I apologize.
In my defense, the people to whom I was objecting typically make use of a motte-and-bailey to claim that women are not perpetrators; where upon giving further questioning, they admit that this happens in rare cases. However, it was wrong for me to merely argue against the bailey.
@Aapje: That first link is exactly the kind of nonsense I was talking about with my caveat about rhetorical bludgeons against feminism. Do you honestly believe that the people who were proposing International Men’s Day care deeply about the under-representation of men as academic support staff? The worst thing you can say about the open letter is that the people who wrote it were trolled and swallowed the bait. Here is a better response.
The paper is a much better example. I think your metaphor of an auto-immune disorder is a reasonable one. But let’s remember that immune systems exist for a reason. The author of that paper is very clear about the fact that the harms of partner violence are asymmetrically distributed: “the greater adverse effect of physical PV on women is an extremely important difference, and it indicates the need to continue to provide more services for women victims of PV than for men victims.” And yet you are citing it in a post where you complain about how governments take control of your tax money and direct it mainly to services for women. Maybe the obvious implication is not what you meant — but there are people out there who do mean it, and who like to use cherry-picked statistics to argue that resources should be pulled away from domestic violence against women and applied to domestic violence against men. That’s not what the data says either. A lot of feminist defensiveness can be explained (though not excused) by looking at what the people on the other side are proposing we actually do.
@Philosophisticat/Aapje:
Equivocation has snuck in without either of you intending or noticing it.
“Sexual assault” is a broader crime than “rape” –
rape is a subset of sexual assault. Rape, by the books, usually involves penetration; in a situation where an unwilling man is the penetrative partner, and rape is a crime on the books (some jurisdictions have replaced rape and various other sexual crimes with varying degrees of sexual assault), this is generally not counted as rape.
Example: the CDC’s NISVS (see section 2) lists rape and “other sexual violence” as separate crimes, with “made to penetrate” under the latter.
So, there are definitely people who think it is possible for a woman or girl to sexually assault a man or boy, but not to rape a man or boy.
Most people do not really differentiate between “sexual assault” and “rape” with the result that statistics like “x number of y type of people are sexually assaulted every year” are generally interpreted as “x number of y type of people are raped every year”. Sometimes this is unintentional, but frankly I think some people do it intentionally, because sexual assault (as a whole, or non-rape sexual assault) is far more common than rape.
@Iain:
Another case of unintentional equivocation. “Domestic violence” and “domestic abuse” are different things. NISVS section 4. Psychological abuse of various forms is generally not considered the former, but is considered the latter.
Men and women are almost equal in reporting experiencing violence – but women are far more likely to report fearing for their safety, missing work, getting injured, etc. Men kill female partners far more than vice versa (the NISVS doesn’t list this, because it’s a survey of victims). To some extent this can be ascribed to men’s greater physical size and strength – a man hitting a woman is far more likely to do injury than vice versa. However, women are about 5x more likely to report stalking than men. Given that most people are heterosexuals, it is very likely that men stalk women more than vice versa.
Breaking it down further: Lesbians are more likely than heterosexual women (see table 3) to report rape/physical violence/stalking – but that is almost exclusively found in the form of physical violence. They are, however, less likely to report it having a major impact than heterosexual women. (EDIT: I was wrong about this, it appears; lesbians report greater impact, but the CDC doesn’t break down impact beyond “there is an impact”)Bisexual women seem to have everything the worst.
Among men (table 4), meanwhile, heterosexual men report more abuse than gay men, but gay men report a slightly higher impact (but not by enough for it to be significant). Heterosexual men also report 2% stalking vs “not enough sample to say” among gay men, so I don’t know what’s up with that, but would assume it’s just a sample size issue (or, maybe gay men just don’t get obsessed with individual men the way straight men get obsessed with individual women?) Bisexual men report more violence than either, but not as dramatically as bisexual women.
Further tables break what’s going on further. What really strikes me is how terrible bisexual women have it (table 6) – table 6 contrasted with table 7 (which is about men) also suggests that, regardless of perpetrator (assuming that lesbians are being abused mostly by other women), violence against women is more serious than violence against men – men are less likely to report “serious” physical violence, to the point that they don’t have the sample size to break it down further.
Tables 8 and 9 talk about psychological abuse – lesbians are considerably more likely to report it than heterosexual women, bisexual women have it worse than either. Gay men are more likely than straights to report psychological abuse, but that’s mostly “expressive aggression” rather than “coercive control”. The numbers for bisexual men are a bit weird here – they report considerably less of the former and considerably more of the latter.
So, your basic point is correct: the harms are unevenly distributed. I’d ascribe this mostly to sexual dimorphism: lesbians are more likely to report abuse, but heterosexual women are more likely for that abuse to have a serious impact. (EDIT: I was wrong about this, it appears; lesbians report greater impact, but the CDC doesn’t break down impact beyond “there is an impact”) Heterosexual women are also far more likely to be killed by those partners, those partners being men. Bisexual women seem to get abused drastically more than other women – to a greater extent than happens with bisexual men.
EDIT:
Key part: “Across all forms of violence, the majority of bisexual women and heterosexual female victims reported having only male perpetrators.”
Unsurprising for heterosexual women, but what’s the explanation for why bisexual women are far more likely to be abused by men than heterosexual women?
EDIT 2: A different part of the report
@Aapje
I appreciate the acknowledgment, which is rare and laudable. I apologise for being a bit testy.
@dndnrsn: Yeah. I think a fair summary of the situation is that men and women are about as likely to hit each other or engage in psychological abuse, but men are a lot more likely to do significant physical damage. People are shitty in equal proportions, but men being shitty tends to have worse consequences. It therefore makes sense to focus on men, but the paper’s author is correct to point out that this should not prevent us from investigating the impacts on men as well. To the extent that feminists are responsible for this, I believe it is an instance where members of my tribe are in the wrong. (I am not convinced that this justifies any major policy changes, though.)
@Iain:
I was wrong about the heterosexual women/lesbians impact difference. I had gotten it backwards, presumably while flipping from tab to tab. However, they don’t break “impact” down. I would imagine that lesbians experience a greater psychological impact (due to a higher rate of overall abuse, probably compounded by feeling less able to seek help about it – see below) and heterosexual women experience a greater physical impact.
I disagree that there’s no policy changes that could be made. There should be more resources for men. Women should still receive a greater share, but there’s next to nothing for men who are abused, men who are victims of sexual violence, etc. Women’s shelters should be far more aware of same-sex domestic violence – a woman fleeing an abusive husband will be safe because they probably won’t random guys wander into the shelter; a woman fleeing an abusive wife does not have that protection (part of the reason a woman abused by another woman might suffer more psychological impact – she has no safe haven). I don’t know if these are major policy changes, though. One major policy change I think should happen – rape should be redefined as a genital-neutral crime.
The problem is largely cultural, not policy. The idea of a man being raped or abused by a woman is common joke fodder. Hell, male-male rape is common joke fodder. Same-sex domestic abuse is largely invisible, for various reasons (we as a society don’t recognize women as being violent, LGBT people probably feel under pressure not to “look bad” by revealing abuse, there’s pressure on lesbians and bisexual women to keep an image of female-female relationships as “better” than those nasty patriarchal hetero relationships, etc).
The overall message of sexual violence and abuse as something that is done to women by men, despite the existence and easy availability of statistics to the contrary, is the problem. For example: if you redefine “made to penetrate” as rape, 1/4 of rape victims are men. 1/4 of murder victims are women, but culturally we do not view murder (or assault more generally) as a gendered problem in the same way we view rape (or sexual assault more generally) as a gendered problem. It means that male victims (regardless of perpetrator) are erased, as are female victims of female perpetrators. (Sidenote: the CDC’s report doesn’t talk about people who don’t categorize themselves as male or female, but the AAU Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Misconduct does – however, it is methodologically not as good as the NISVS).
@Iain
It’s the same kind of rhetoric used by many feminists, with the same kind of cherry picking of examples to argue their cause. Is it perfectly rational? No. Is it reasonable to selectively suppress an outgroup who use this kind of rhetoric, but accept this from the ingroup?
Keep in mind that this university has a week long program with 100 events for International Women’s Day. A fraction of this attention for men was too much, apparently. Your response is not to argue for debates about this, so the bad ideas can be separated from the good, but you dismiss the entire issue entirely (and thus tacitly support the suppression of debate on certain topics).
It is true that men tend to be stronger and thus hit harder, but much abuse is psychological (even when physical abuse is present, the psychological harm that this causes can be worse than the direct physical harm, a lot of bullied people can attest to this). Furthermore, a lot of abuse is reciprocal. The current mainstream societal beliefs are that men cannot be abused, that the abuse is almost always one-sided and that the proper solution is to convince women to leave their abusive partner by telling her how bad her partner is*.
IMHO, these beliefs are mostly false and very harmful. Domestic violence services should be restructured to not automatically blame one partner (many cases seem caused by a toxic relationship dynamic, which needs to be addressed without blaming one side exclusively). Furthermore, men and women have different coping strategies/responses/etc, as is evident from various research (for example, women are more likely to blame themselves for giving the wrong signals and ‘deceiving’ the other person into bad behavior, men are more likely to blame themselves for not acting effectively). Intervention services should be much more aware of this and tailor their services to gender differences (without vilifying one gender when they have gendered behavior and excusing the other gender).
In your black/white perspective, this probably sounds like taking things away from women, but I honestly believe that it will improve intervention effectiveness for both genders. The entire idea that doing more for men takes away from women is silly anyway, since most abuse involves heterosexual relationships and much of it is reciprocal, so helping both genders simultaneously probably makes the interventions more effective for both genders.
* I believe that this causes cognitive dissonance, as the partners generally have good traits too, which means that this kind of intervention is often not effective, as it causes adversarial feelings against those trying to intervene.
@dndnrsn
I consider it ‘disinformation by manipulation of definitions’ when non-consent intercourse where the woman is the victim is defined as rape, but not non-consent intercourse where the man is the victim; merely because men have an outy and not an inny, so it’s technically a little different. As such, I consider the NISVS reports as well as UK law to be misandrist in nature. A male rights activist got the FBI to clarify that their definition of rape includes ‘made to penetrate’ and the NISVS reports are no longer hiding the data completely by at least putting in it a separate category. So there are small steps in the right direction.
The CDC reports suggests that for adults, the victimization is roughly the same (the margin of error is bigger than the gap).
We debated earlier here whether the different lifetime rates are due to childhood victimization differences or greater suppression of memories by men (or both); but regardless of the answer, we should be aware that victimization rates are often use to debate services for adults, risks for adults, etc. IMO, the yearly rates are the statistics that are most appropriate for those discussions.
I’m British, and I think if I was an American I would be an SJW – I just don’t think that the arguments for racial SJWism are appropriate to the history or culture of Britain.
For example:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/12035018/Revealed-How-Britons-welcomed-black-soldiers-during-WWII-and-fought-alongside-them-against-racist-GIs.html
“Miss Hervieux said: “Given the racial tensions that exist in Britain today, as in other countries, it is hard to believe that the UK was once a relative racial paradise for African Americans. Britons were willing to open their hearts and minds to fellow human beings who were there to help them.”
Anecdote – my Grandfather (born 1907) was apparently quite annoyed by some news about Paul Robeson, and grumpily said “If I wanted black people, I would have married a Caribbean” (or something) to which my mother replied “and maybe I do want to marry a Caribbean – the rest of us have the freedom to make our choices” to which he nodded and shut up.
So yes, racist, but not “string ’em up” racist – more like “not my cup of tea” racist. I think that the mainstream of skilled British working class culture has long been – give people a fair shake, it’s unfair and wrong to discriminate on the basis of race.
The statement, “Given the racial tensions that exist in Britain today, as in other countries, it is hard to believe that the UK was once a relative racial paradise for African Americans” says it all for me – they are imagining that things are worse than they are now, and they are imagining that things were worse in the past, largely because they are taking their cue from US culture.
So racial SJWism – probably appropriate in the US.
Gender SJWism – I think they are perhaps partly right, but just take things a bit too far.
(Reminds me a bit of ‘The War They Never Fought’ by Peter Hitchens – in the context of Britain there was *never* a war on drugs, but it doesn’t stop British liberals from harping on about it as if it has some relevance to our experience.)
And look where it got them: just as reviled and replaced as if they’d fought and lost.
Er, you mean “more replaced”. Immigration has made the UK 5.5% Muslim, while Pew has found that they’re less than 1% in the US.
It was actually acknowledged by Labour insiders a few years ago that Blair had an agenda to change the political landscape of Britain and “rub the right’s nose in diversity” by allowing mass immigration.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/6418456/Labour-wanted-mass-immigration-to-make-UK-more-multicultural-says-former-adviser.html
Easier for the government to dissolve the people and all that.
@Le Maistre Chat
Your point being? I don’t think Muslim immigration involved a one-to-one exchange of racist old people and Pakistanis.
In the United States northerners had the same relative views of blacks compared to southerners (where most blacks in the United States lived until the 20th century). The Great Migration happens 1915-1960 and progressives broke down both law enforcement (which was set up to deal with the reality of racial differences in behavior) as well as other Chesterton’s fences of cultural institutions. Exactly as predicted murder, rape, robbery, etc. exploded to the extent that mass incarceration was needed to deal with the fallout.
Discounting lived experiences with how to run a diverse society that isn’t a disaster is a bad idea – but it’s very attractive for virtue signalling.
Before you pat yourself on the back too much, remember that the Southern plantation owners in the US were more-or-less just transplanted Englishmen. Britain didn’t formally ban slavery in all its colonies until the 1833 (with East India Company colonies holding out a decade beyond that). Apartheid in South Africa had a strong British influence.
And that’s on top of the whole colonial project itself, which had obvious racial overtones.
So Great Britain has long been tolerant of racism, as long as the people in England don’t need to see it up close.
I’m not sure how far I can go back here – presumably the culture in the 17th century would have been very different to the culture in the 19th – but my gut feeling is that, perhaps, the culture and attitudes of the mercantile/landowning elites would have been different to that of the stout English yeoman, or skilled tradesman.
Upper class = mob wife, the rest of us = the mob children. We’re perfectly nice people, we’re sorry for what our father did, and they’re looking in the wrong place for someone who will defend him.
Well sure but I think that’s true of Americans as well. Scott’s talked about this in his discussion of American tribes (in a review of a book on the subject, name of which currently escapes me). Southern plantation owners were basically transplanted Cavaliers.
@gbdub, you’re thinking of Albion’s Seed. I think the book covers over so many details that it puts its argument in question, but the basic idea of class differences in a whole lot of attitudes is sound.
Yes that’s the one, thanks. Anyway I don’t think the accuracy of Albion’s Seed matters too much for this conversation, I was just pushing back at the notion that Great Britain is uniquely non-racist, since in the grand scheme American culture and race relations (for good and ill) grew from largely British stock. It’s not like all the racists in America were from France or something.
Doesn’t the whole thing kind of boil down to “certain races are more racist than other races”, which is itself a racist idea?
Sure, “Cavalier” and “Borderers” and so on aren’t traditional races, but its the spectrum that has objective existence, and you can draw the boundary lines in different places. If “whites” can be subdivided into these groups that have unique characteristics, including being more or less racist, then that’s pretty racist.
Just reading Albion’s Seed and being convinced by its arguments makes you a racist, which creates a paradox. Genetic priming for racism is obviously weaker than learned racism if just reading this stuff can have Yudkowsky making comments about racial cleansing this new racist race he’s autodidacted into his head.
I haven’t read the book, but surely it’s only racist if you think that culture is determined by race. Everyone accepts that culture influences behaviour – the controversy surrounds the determinants of culture.
Anyway, I can imagine that given the dominant narrative, saying “integrate” or “do as we do” could be psychologically damaging for Black Americans – and the narrative has some validity in the context of American society.
I think in Britain we can say “integrate or GTFO” because the history, the story, is different – firstly, anyone who lives in Britain is here because someone decided to come – secondly, there was no legal racism (quite the opposite.)
It’s not the fact that Britons are necessarily uniquely non-racist, it’s the fact that in actuality we have been fairly non racist.
You know that all human behavioural traits are heritable, right?
Uh – only if you are defining “trait” as “something that is inherited” – there are plenty of human behaviours that are learned.
@Thegnskald says:
>The issue is that SJ represents a massive and nebulous reserve of previously unclaimed social power – the power to represent the underrepresented.
This pre-supposes that those groups are unrepresented in a meaningful way.
>Worse still, the Social Justice movement has become it’s own tribe, independent of the actual policies it claims to espouse. As a movement, it fails entirely to live up to its ideals; as a tribe, it has become a self-reinforcing monster, full of people who claim to be trans-black and other sordid things, making a mockery of the very underrepresentation it should be working to correct.
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Civil rights was a movement, it became a business, and SJWs are the racket.
>And even worse still, as a tribe, it has been largely subverted to corporate interests.
This reeks of the old lefty cliche that communism/socialism/Social justice cannot fail, it can only be failed.
>Leftism is, fundamentally, about class.
It used to be, but it no longer is. When the left demands affirmative action for Sasha and Malia Obama, but not poor kids from Appalachia, you’ve left class far, far behind.
>yet we have allowed the class interests of the wealthiest to redefine leftism to be a constant identity war between races, genders, religions – whatever keeps people from looking at class.
Why are we assuming that this is an evil plot by the plutocrats rather than a natural response to the power of identity politics?
And this is why old school leftists dislike them, like me and Freddie DeBoer (although I’m a very different kind of old school lefty than him).
it became about races as classes
people say it was so rich kids could feel good about themselves, but I think caring about the poor just went out of style – everyone did it, and it’s pretty hard to find actual rabid anti-poors (some prominent neocons, and maybe closet rich people; this is the weakest part of my theorem but I think it holds) whereas racists are kind of easier to find. Also anti poorism isn’t arguably as direct harmful as racism, in the sense that people don’t shout poor slurs at people across the street and beat them up for their income class. So yeah, anti racism is the cool new kid on the block and all the cool new kids flocked to it.
I’d explain it a different way. It’s not about rich kids, necessarily, and it’s not about people feeling good about themselves – it’s about people not having to do material stuff. Being anti-poor as someone who is middle class or up runs into the “Jesus and the rich young man” situation – why not sell your stuff and give the proceeds to the poor? Money is an advantage – a material advantage, but also a social advantage, a “privilege” – one can divest one’s self of quite easily.
Being an “ally” to poor people would require taking some of your cash and giving it to the poor people, presumably. This would, presumably, make the person feel good – can’t tell me EAs don’t get a nice warm feeling – I donated to an EA-promoted charity, and I certainly did. But it requires taking a material loss. Whereas not feeling good about yourself, talking about the unearned advantages you have, etc, maybe doesn’t feel good – but it doesn’t require taking a material loss. Straight white guys posting on Facebook about the guilt they feel – I know guys like this, and they’re really tedious; they also have a habit of making everything about their own psychodrama – they aren’t spending a dime on that.
Yeah, but I honestly think that this existed for a while and it didn’t stop anything.
There’s certainly a part to what you’re saying, but I think that anti-racism is just a lot trendier because you can find people on the other side, supposedly, and you can divide people up into good people and bad people much more easily (racists vs. us progressives).
@Thegnskald
Just who is “we” here? Because I’m willing to state here, publicly, that I do not aspire to these “ideals”.
Leftists?
Left leaning people, obviously.
Part of the problem I have with social justice (never mind the warrior part) is the name. Yes I believe strongly in justice, but the concept of social justice makes no sense. If it’s about justice you don’t need the social part, and if it isn’t about justice, then leave out the justice part.
Yes, I do think these are good goals: reduce prejudice, increase equality, and bring up the status of the lowest in society. But I think including the word justice in there kind of invites the warrior to come right in and join the party. Using justice makes it sound like raising up the lowest is not just a good thing, but a right. It’s kind of like whenever a certain brand of activists argue a political point, they phrase their viewpoint as “demands.”
My difference with social justice is I don’t think helping out those low on the totem pole is an obligation of mine — even if it is a good thing for me to do. When I was a child, there were people who worked on social issues, such as helping the poor and trying to reduce prejudice. They weren’t doing social justice, they were being altruists.
Discrimination against people based on characteristics like race and gender is widely viewed as unjust, so it makes sense for a movement that opposes it to have “justice” in the name (it makes somewhat less sense when you broaden the goal to opposing inequality caused by other things). However, discrimination-related injustice is only one kind of injustice, so it makes sense to use “social” to indicate that is what you’re focusing on (social justice advocates don’t necessarily work against e.g. unjust legal decisions).
Ah, this is interesting. You define social justice as a subset of justice. I always thought the phrase meant something that was not legally unjust but was unfair all the same. Thus is didn’t fall under justice, but did fall under this new category called social justice. It is that new category that I didn’t like, because I don’t believe this category truly has anything to do with justice.
Actually, the more I think about it, I don’t think you are right. Social justice advocates rarely talk about enforcing laws — they are more about enforcing their version of morality outside the legal system. To the extent it overlaps with legal justice, that is a coincidence. Yes they’d like to induce the government to help bring their goals to fruition, but the main thrust of their push is to change people’s minds, not the laws.
Say what? That’s not the usual definition of the word “unjust”. (You’re not a robot by any chance?) 🙂
Yes, I agree that social justice isn’t a subset of legal justice, indeed I’m saying that the name purposely distinguishes it from that. I think we broadly agree about the meaning.
You say “I don’t believe this category truly has anything to do with justice”, but I don’t see why that is true. Legal justice is itself a subset of justice in general. Say I started a movement called “employment justice” to advocate for people who have been unjustly (but legally) fired. Would you have a problem with that name?
@rlms
The question here is whether group-based remedies are justice? If a Russian man kills my dog and we have a legal system that reacts to this by convicting a random Russian, is that justice or the opposite?
* Note that this is a simile.
@Aapje
I agree with what I assume is your point that some things done in the name of social justice are not to do with justice. Even things that *are* widely regarded as laudable, such as working against unconscious or indirect discrimination are arguably not to do with justice. My comments were just trying to explain where the name comes from (frequent/old/central/famous/uncontroversial things done by the “social justice movement” are to do with justice).
I always kind of assumed that “social justice” in Left parlance hashes out to “justice done between social classes”: that is, first you identify classes rather than individuals as the agents in your model, then you ensure that justice is done between them. Once you parse things that way, the objections to stuff like the whole microaggressions thing dissolve, because they contribute to injustice at class granularity regardless of individual intentions. Individual intentions, meanwhile, are simply not significant to the model.
A big weakness here is that you can define a social class any which way, though. It really only makes sense after you’ve already defined a relatively rigid class hierarchy, which I gather is one of the main objections academic SJ theorists have with the pop kind (though they wouldn’t necessarily phrase it that way): you can’t just take a concept from e.g. queer theory and apply it to e.g. Marxian analysis, because the class relations in those two models are completely different. This is the intuition behind the concept of intersectionality, but I don’t get the impression that the theory around it is particularly well developed: it’s more just a statement that these models can break down at the intersections between them.
@rlms
I was actually trying to make the point that things like affirmative action can result in a very rich and influential black person being granted favors at the expense of a poor and quite powerless white person, simply because of racial stereotypes being used to make policy. Of course, this is theoretically fixed by taking all oppression vectors into account, although in practice this doesn’t happen.
@Nornagest
Intersectionality is not that objectionable in the original academic paper, although it is quite limited in scope (merely arguing that ‘oppressions’ interact, so you can’t just add them up).
Yet the mainstream understanding by many (or most?) SJ’s seems to actually be the opposite of this, where they do just add up the oppression categories to create a hierarchy of whom is more oppressed.
@Aapje: Actually, in university admissions, the demographic group hurt the most is probably Asians.
@dndnrsn
That’s true and actually one of the most damning facts for the SJ model of oppression.
@Thegnskald
I will object.
“Equality” is too open ended to be good grounds for anything in of itself. Equality means sameness within a particular context, so for example, legal equality would be sameness with respect to the law. If you place equality as your primary goal that you will always keep pushing for, you won’t stop once you’ve exhausted the confines of sameness within a particular context. Equality without any qualifiers converges on meaning sameness, because “I’m an egalitarian” says nothing about what limited context that is true under.
No one really wants absolute equality, anymore than they want absolute liberty/freedom, because without some qualifying principles to anchor them to, you’ve got the ideological equivalent of a paper clip maximizer, which is why I don’t like intersectional social justice or anarcho-capitalism.
We already have legal equality, so you would have to specify which inequalities in particular are bothersome, and once you do so, it’s useless (and probably even dangerous in the long term) to declare abstract equality to be the important thing in of itself. If you do that you’ll risk flattening all the lovely difference out of the Universe.
You might SAY this:
but it’s too late, because bandying about “equality” as being a goal in of itself leaves you ill placed to control the context in which the equality occurs.
Advocates of intersectional social justice argue that achieving equality requires some kind of leveling due to past injustices, and that’s part of the problem with the second part of the agenda:
You also don’t literally want to do this, and that might be obvious, but I really do think it’s worth reflecting on. The reductio ad absurdum of this is that no one would be allowed to have any negative opinions on anything ever.
The counter to this is: “Of course, that’s ridiculous. We only want to reduce prejudicial attitudes towards traditionally marginalized groups.”
The problem then is that you have created a closed off group of people who have special exemptions from behavior and actions you consider prejudicial. This creates three problems: the internal consistency problem that this contradicts your (ill-advised) goal of equality; there’s nothing stopping other groups from joining in on the identity politics; people will join your organization on purpose to expand the list of marginalized identities that get protection from prejudice, even creating new identities to rent seek (see the expansion of “trans” from the legitimate biological idea of gender disphoria to 70 odd made up genders, now being included in antidiscrimination legislation).
I’ve never seen these problems even addressed by advocates of intersectional theories of justice, because they are problems inherent to the premise itself.
I’d love to see someone come up with some method of preventing new identities using social justice rhetoric to rent seek, such as in the case of infinity genders, or using social justice to make the argument that society is now biased against traditionally dominant groups and now they need their own protection from prejudice, such as in the case of the alt-right. One of my criticisms is that it enables the right wing!
How do you stop these reactions to the intersectional idea from manifesting? Advocates of this concept need to engage in some hard strategic thinking. I would suggest dropping the idea, but at least do something.
This was inevitable due to the nebulousness of a movement based on maximizing equality and minimizing prejudice. These are not good principles.
This third element is where salvation might lie. If the focus is on stopping people dying in gutters, rather than putting abstractions like equality and prejudice and privilege at the top of the agenda, then you can avoid paper clip maximizer like effects, since you have a modest goal that can actually be completed by looking at things materialistically and raising living standards.
If there is a conflict between picking the lowest out of the gutter and “equality” or “reducing prejudice”, then you know what should come first. If it turns out that corporate boards that are 90% male lead to higher productivity leading to more wealth to redistribute to pull people out of the gutter, then you know which side of the issue you should be on.
You already sorta agree with this when you say:
…But what I put to you is that
…Are objectionable goals in themselves that lead to the problems you are drawing attention to, and until you can tackle that, the same problems will keep cropping up, and you’ll keep wanting to re-orient your movement while retaining the same flawed underlying principles. Even if you apply them to class alone.
“But that’s not what I mean when I say equality” is never an answer, by the way. Try to think of abstractions like this as if they are dangerous uncontrollable beasts. Don’t be too confident that you can keep control once you let them out of the cage.
Or you could just shorten it to “our goals are good and unobjectionable because everyone in our society is conditioned to read them as meaningless synonyms for… good and unobjectionable”.
I wanted to explain why I think they’re objectionable, rather than just cast doubt.
When I read equality, I think “equality of opportunity”, not outcomes. These two concepts are different enough that they should use different words because they sure mean different things.
Why do you believe anarchocapitalists want “absolute liberty/freedom,” which I think is what you are saying. The anarchocapitalists I am familiar with expect that, in the society they propose, there will still be some violations of rights, such as burglaries or murders. They merely believe that a society without a government will be on net better, whether judged by rights violations, utility, or some other plausible measure, than a society with a government.
To put the point differently, why is saying “I prefer a society without a government” any more absolutist than saying “I prefer a society with a government”?
What I mean is that I remember being an Ancap and I remember the desire for consistency with the NAP at all levels making Ancap a self-negating philosophy. I remember all the people arguing that voting violated the NAP, and this was something I believed at the time. I remember Larkin Rose being dis-invited from Porcfest for discussing violent resistance to police activity. I remember Jeffrey Tucker splitting the movement into humanitarians and brutalists. Anarcho-capitalism definitely purity spirals and spits out those who are deemed too “statist”.
That’s not merely what Ancaps say, because you have a specific underlying idea about what “without government” means, where it is replaced entirely with voluntary private property. It’s a total goal held together by a single principle of the non-initiation of force as defined as assault against person or assault or use of someone else’s property without their permission.
To have a “society with government” only means to have the most common kind of society in civilization’s history. There’s no purity spiral because people don’t need to constantly fight for an agenda to bring states into existence. They are already here, and most people accept them without having to consciously justify them.
Relevant to your NAP purity argument is my post on the Health Picks thread discussing whether Bryan Caplan is a rights-based or consequentialist libertarian.
Caplan, who is AnCap, reviews Mike Huemer, who is AnCap, here: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2013/03/06/bryan-caplan/plausible-libertarianism-philosophy-social-science-huemer
Bryan Caplan’s description of Huemer’s take straddles the rights-based and consequentialist justifications for libertarianism:
“How does Huemer make his brand of libertarianism plausible to libertarians? He escapes objections to rights-based libertarianism by turning the “Non-Aggression Axiom” into a “Non-Aggression Presumption.” He escapes objections to consequentialist libertarianism by taking this Non-Aggression Presumption seriously. The result is a position immune to all of the standard counter-examples to rights-based and consequentialist libertarianism.”
Basically, the stance is there should be a strong presumption against using aggression against others, unless terrible consequences would result. This libertarian stance doesn’t require any NAP purity, and is a belief held by prominent anarcho-capitalists.
I’d suggest reading the whole link to see the arguments more fleshed out, but the AnCap arguments are more nuanced than you may have seen elsewhere.
I think he’s saved anarcho-capitalism by broadening it and weakening the anarchistic premise. The phrases “correct (or at least well-justified) plan”, “the sorts of disasters that allegedly would result from anarchy”, and “good reason to consider effective” are doing a lot of work here, and are highly gameable for alternative purposes.
1) My post was a counter-point to your statement “Anarcho-capitalism definitely purity spirals and spits out those who are deemed too “statist””, as two influential AnCaps argue from a position of nuance that considers there to be legitimate exceptions to the NAP and they aren’t spit out as too ‘statist’.
2) They provide examples of what could be well-justified violations of the NAP:
“Return to the lifeboat scenario. The boat is in danger of sinking, unless most of the passengers quickly start bailing water. This time, however, suppose that none of the other passengers are willing to bail water. You cannot perform the task alone, and no amount of reasoning or pleading will persuade the myopic passengers to take up their buckets. Finally, you pull your trusty Glock out of your jacket and order the other passengers to start bailing out the boat. In this situation, regrettable as the resort to force may be, your action seems justified”
and what wouldn’t be well-justified:
“For instance, if you display your firearm and order everyone to start scooping water into the boat, you are acting wrongly – and similarly if you use the weapon to force others to pray to Poseidon, lash themselves with belts, or hand over $50 to your friend Sally.”
Having NAP as a strong presumption forces the onus to be on people who want to justify exceptions to it. They have to do a really good job in their justification, which isn’t as easy as I think you think it is. Those that do a really good job arguing some of what the state does as being just NAP violations, would still have a hard time justifying most or all of the state. And getting people to consider parts of the state unjust is a good first step to get people to consider that all of it could be unjust violations of the NAP.
By the way, do you agree with the statement you quoted from Mike Huemer?
Is the Ancap movement likely to accept such reasoning if it leads to statist conclusions? What if global warming turns out to be the equivalent scenario to a boat that sprung a leak? I think Huemer’s metric would be thrown out the window. It’s essentially an argument against anarcho-capitalism playacting as an argument for it.
Yes, it’s justified, but this leads me away from Ancap, not towards it, because there are many imaginable scenarios of the same character that in broader society would require a state to step in with finality.
If Sally has no source of income and will die otherwise, then it might be justified. If Sally is instead millions of people who will starve without redistribution, and before they starve go on a communistic revolt, trashing everything, and destroying society, then giving them money is the equivalent of bailing out water, and would be a well justified violation of the NAP.
I’ll just speak for myself, as an AnCap, and note that though I think some violations of NAP are justified I don’t think a state is justified (for reasons that I’ve laid out across a series of posts on SSC). I know other AnCaps that think the same way, and some that are closer to NAP purists. It seems to me you have almost exclusively only interacted with AnCap NAP purists which might color your perspective on the AnCap ‘movement’.
If I thought a state lead to on net much better consequences than no state and that lack of a state would lead to misery, I wouldn’t be AnCap anymore.
Then NAP violations may be justified, but that doesn’t necessarily make a state justified. It becomes an empirical question about whether non-state solutions to global warming, even if they involve NAP violations, are feasible.
What’s relevant is not scenarios that you can imagine, it’s scenarios that are grounded empirically and well-justified. Life boat scenarios are extraordinarily rare. So, which well-justified NAP violation scenarios do you have in mind for the state to be the solution?
My prior is that respect for private property and free exchange leads to prosperity and makes starving much less likely, with historical widespread starvation being mostly due to actions of the state. What’s your prior?
Edit: Just checking again, but do you agree with Huemer’s argument in the quote you posted?
Huh. If you don’t have a government, who decides whether a particular NAP violation is justified or not? Right now, there’s only a metaphorical war over global warming. In the absence of a government, it seems to me that it would quickly turn into a literal war, unless the NAP was so heavily ingrained in the public consciousness that nobody was willing to violate it for any reason – in which case the metaphorical lifeboat really would be in danger of sinking.
(I have to assume this is standard Ancap doctrine, so a short answer is fine; no need to go into any great detail unless you want to.)
In general, wouldn’t you expect animals that needed to protect themselves from light to have incredibly shiny white skin?
A black layer absorbing the light before it can do damage seems a bit obscure.
Does camouflage come into it? I guess people in colder environments are wearing clothes anyway, so white skin not such a disadvantage.
I’m not an expert, but sunburn and skin cancer aren’t caused by overheating, but rather by DNA damage: it’s basically a radiation burn. Pale skin doesn’t protect as well because it’s not only paler but also more translucent, meaning that light, including UV light, has an easier time penetrating the dead upper layers of skin to reach the living tissues underneath. A surface layer with high albedo in the UV range would solve that problem for you, and zinc oxide sunscreen works that way, but absorbing rather than reflecting the UV before it gets to your squishy DNA bits will work just as well. Organic sunscreen works like that, and melanin does too.
It might just be a coincidence that the solution evolution happened to hit upon for our species was absorptive rather than reflective. But most of the highly reflective compounds I know about are metal oxides, which would be biologically expensive; on the other hand there are many highly absorptive organic compounds. Carbon black for example is literally pure C.
Thanks!
How do school systems decide what foods to put into students meals? Is it food pyramid based? Vegetable-fruit serving based (which is subject to oddities like putting two foods with the same nutrient bias and calling them different)
Does any district do it rationally, such as putting nutritional USDA information into a large linear-algebra minimization equation and maximizing a balance of vitamins/minerals with a variety of fats and proteins while making cost the variable to minimize, with perhaps calorie constraints*?
*Possibly stupid to minimize fats/proteins/carbs after some degree, due to Flynn Effect/opportunistic biological growth reasons.
Most US schools simply purchase meals / meal-planning from corporate vendors, and they do indeed use linear algebra cost-minimization methods to meet the US federal dietary requirements for public schools.
And as they say: garbage in, garbage out, no matter how rigorous your methodology.
Then why does the public conversation, even with comment by school officials, seem dominated by the vague vegetable serving quotient?
I guess your average school official might not think of such a thing, but would contract to a company that does.
What are some cultural health trends that you believe to be myths, and what are your explanations for why they appear to be true for lots of people? Here is three of mine
1. Icing injuries helps recovery rates
2. Lowering calories somehow reduces metabolism enough to offset weight loss
3. Saturated fats are these terrible things for you whose intake needs to be watched
The evidence for all of these is in that terrible contradictory land of medicine that happens too often.
The first one, icing injuries, is horrifically contradictory. A review of the literature seems to show that there *may* be very slight effects for athletic injuries…with some research showing negative effects as it appears excessive icing of an area may dampen typical inflammatory processes along with the obvious possible damage of frost-bite for those over-eager in icing application.
1
What I think is really happening, for the day to day basis, is sociological injury signalling and some internal emotional effect produced by the ritual *of* icing that affirms to people both outside and inside that “You need to stop pushing yourself”. Or, given the same injury, your idiot football/wresting coach won’t push you to run on that knee if you show you are icing it, but will do so without visible signs of injury prevention. For injuries done on your own, with no coach, its hard to say why. But it does appear to lower the pain thought to be on the area itself with a temporary numbing effect, and lets you focus on the outside cold on the area.
My bet is that icing is, with no sociology behind it, a slight bad thing for non-surgical injuries, due to potentially extreme temperature fiddling and frostbite potential.
2
For calories greatly reducing metabolism to the point of effecting metabolism, its really hard to see how this insanity has taken widespread. When there is no physical training done, sure it seems *something* bad happens to muscularity levels, which may produce a secondary metabolism effect.
Partly, I think this is explained by energy levels. People just don’t feel to work out as hard when having a hungered feeling to them.
I believe mostly this may be best descried as a human weakness. People hate not splurging on foods they like for weeks at a time, and tell themselves after the fact that they are *actually* helping lose weight eating that hotdog/ice cream cone every once in awhile. And then people selling a book telling others what they want to hear publish just that.
3
I think number three is explained, at least partly, by this. Namely, it typically takes both higher intelligence and empathy and conscientiousness then the median human for a male to seriously consider vegetarinism, and lower saturated fat intake, and studies simply don’t account for effects such as that. I also believe that perhaps levels of preservatives/processing effects in foods like hot dogs *might* have negative effects over a lifetime. Then of course, there is the bias(that I am sympathetic to) of researches in the biological sciences typically being sympathetic to animal life, and emotionally preferring studies that show saturated fat produced from factory farming methods to be bad for you.
I think 2 might be based on a confusion between two definitions of metabolism. I have a low confidence in this explanation but it’s the best I have.
I know a few people doing metabolic programming studies, and one of the more dramatic findings I remember was comparing mice who had been given a “western diet” formula as pups to those with a generic formula or breast milk. When they were fed a controlled diet their weights were roughly comparable*. But when some of the adult mice were allowed to eat ad libitum the “western diet” mice ballooned up out of control while the other mice maintained roughly the same weight as before.
(I can try to hunt down the paper later tonight. If anyone is interested that is; otherwise I’ll work on my D&D campaign.)
That’s certainly a metabolic effect but it’s not metabolic the way we normally think about it. There’s no principled reason to say that metabolic effects on appetite don’t count if you’re considering a human as a living organism rather than as a theoretical rational actor.
*I think there was a small but statistically significant increase but don’t quote me on that
I think your second example is a case where people take something that is heavily psychological, and make it physiological (not that the line between these is easily drawn). The more you deprive yourself, the more chance you’ll snap and go on a binge. The purpose of a cheat meal, free meal, whatever is to take a break from only eating tuna or whatever.
A lot of talk about dieting makes it sound like dieting is this physical impossibility, and basically implies that our bodies are able to break the laws of thermodynamics. When, in fact, it’s the psychological side of things that’s the tricky part.
Your third example – the explanation I’ve read is that processed meats tend to be worse for you, red meat tends to be eaten in processed form more than fish or fowl, and red meat contains more saturated fat, by and large.
As you say, physiology is hard to separate from psychology. Is will power wholly psychological? Is pain tolerance? Obviously not; choice matters a lot, otherwise hunger strikes wouldn’t be a thing, but there’s widely varying levels of resistance to internal stimuli, probably for largely biological reasons.
Dietary cholesterol affecting blood serum cholesterol is no longer the official view, but it is widely held enough for egg white omelette to be considered a healthier option.
Well, cutting out fat is a way to cut out calories. So if one is trying to lose weight, it’s the healthier option, maybe. On the other hand, the 6 1/2 grams of fat in a jumbo egg total out to about 175 cal for a three-egg omelette versus one with no fat from the eggs. Unless someone is smashing an omelette a day, this is probably not the “weak link” in anyone’s caloric intake.
There’s more to life than calories. Egg yolk have lots of nutrients.
I’m not disagreeing with you. Even now that the “fat is bad” train is losing steam, though, some people probably see the extra calories in a whole egg and get scared.
Agreed. Waddling around with 10lb of ice strapped to your knee seems to be the only way college athletes can catch a break.
There is a small decrease in basal metabolism when you reduce caloric intake. Some of this is because as a person loses weight, their new body weight requires less energy to maintain. They might have less energy and unconsciously be slightly less active throughout the day. The same amount of exercise burns fewer calories at a lower weight. The rest is the body’s response to getting less food. But this decrease alone isn’t enough to stop or reverse weight loss; it simply slows it down. Which was good for our ancestors because if they had less food for a long time, it was probably because food wasn’t plentiful, and losing weight more slowly would have helped them survive.
It’s easy to get frustrated when necessary weight loss slows down, and sometimes it’s balanced out by temporary weight “gain” in the form of water retention. A lot of obese people retain extra water, and women often gain some in the premenstrual period regardless of weight, though in that case it comes off again quickly in a few days or a week. So when you’re losing 2 lb/week, and that slows down over time as you lose the first 50 pounds and your metabolism slows some, and then you lose 1/2 lb/week which easily gets lost in the noise of water weight / food in your intestines / randomness, it looks like you’re not losing any for awhile. The person would need to eat less to keep losing weight, or be ready to wait a very long time, but it’s not because their metabolism turned to crap and they can no longer lose anything. It’s mostly because their body is smaller and needs less, so they’ll have to cut even lower to lose significant weight; they need to make their calculations based on current weight and not the old one.
Then there’s gut bacteria changes and stuff like that, which are hard to predict and can be good or bad.
Hmm. So a few people have written thinkpieces on how people use issues or products as part of their tribal identity (SSC did one on ebola IIRC?). Seemed reasonable, although I question how far it can go outside of obviously political areas. So it was weird to come across a Breitbart article about Google, read the comments and discover that their predominantly alt-right readership is collectively despises the company.
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/01/17/report-google-scaling-back-unprofitable-moonshot-projects-including-boston-dynamics-and-google-fiber/
Even weirder: realizing all my liberal friends love Google.
There seem to be plenty of folks on the left who hate Google too.
…
Fair enough. Allthough their hatred is not directed at google, rather “gentrification”.
Not that I understand that either, since gentrification appears to just be urban renewal with visible price tag. But what do I know.
The comments don’t look like they hate Google. I see one “Google – liberal worthless theft derived company!” And a few others critical of their business practices in a nonpartisan way. And a few sad that Google is killing their moonshots.
I’m a DuckDuckGo user, and avoid Googling if I can help it. I’d be interested to know if DDG users tend toward a particular direction politically.
The only other person I know who consistently uses DDG is my boss. Our politics are different, but relatively close in the wider scheme of “politics of people I work with.”
@Well
I expect that DDG users are heavily anti-authoritarian, which isn’t trait exclusive to one political ideology.
I use Startpage, because even without personalized spying, Google’s results are good. Not so much DDG; I used DDG and was disappointed at the quality of the results I was getting.
Prediction: automation will cause Universities to decline in quality, possibly until they are an actively destructive element of society.
If everyone is automated out of a job, but we still insist societally on having as many people as possible go to higher education so as to get degrees for non-existent jobs, then University will become a service designed to give people the illusion of status instead, and since there will be no job market to keep this service rigorous, standards may decline until the University becomes a place designed to puff up egos while simultaneously promoting an extended childhood, causing people to become hypersensitive to slights. I think these people might get involved in dubious political activism, and in turn older people might overreact to the “decline in values” and all sorts of horrible shit might happen, like demagogues of various political persuasions being elected to power.
I seriously think this could be a problem in the future.
C’mon, that’s cheating – predictions are supposed to be about the future.
If university isn’t tied to job security or income, and it isn’t intellectually rigorous, how could you possibly derive status from attending?
Seems to me that you could say the same thing about e.g. watching ballet?
(Yes, it’s expensive to see live. But a DVD of a Nutcracker Suite performance costs the same as one of “A Charlie Brown Christmas”, and you can’t tell me that choosing one or the other to play on Christmas Eve doesn’t have status implications.)
If it’s about status, about being part of a culture – it can’t be that easy to fake it.
If I was to start spending all my time watching ballet, I can assure you, my family and friends wouldn’t be particularly impressed (it would lower my status if anything) and, alone, it wouldn’t help to get me in with the nutcracker set.
Shibboleths have to be difficult, right?
(Actually I like to think we live in a world where people who watch DVDs of the nutcracker, like it, and nobody else much cares.)
@Mark
Tradition. Memes.
The illusion may be maintained long after the core purpose has been rendered redundant. Most people already believe that higher education exists to educate people, not just to be a job credentials mill, so the general conception of why University is an absolute societal necessity is based off very romantic ideas.
I like to think that if everything became automated, we’d all just spend our time at symposiums, and that our desire to appeal to people of good taste would prevent us from becoming insufferable shits.
I like to think that too.
Is that a euphemism for sitting in front of the TV and watching reality shows all day? 😛
Something strange happened, you must’ve posted this comment prior to 2016 but for some reason it hasn’t shown up until now, after it has already become a reality.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/us/politics/obama-commutes-bulk-of-chelsea-mannings-sentence.html
Chelsea Manning will finally be out of Prison soon! Party?
I have to avoid news websites right now because that gets me so fucking angried up.
A) Wikileaks is a democracy threatening front for Russian propaganda!
B) Chelsea Manning doesn’t deserve to be punishment for leaking the truth!
The cognitive dissonance between these two positions is tremendous, and I’m struggling to find a more charitable description of the apparent standard than “leaks are good unless they hurt Democrats”.
The negation of both of those seem to be held by a lot of Trump supporters as well.
The negation of the two isn’t contradictory.
How is “leaks are bad when Chelsea Manning does them, but not when Wikileaks does them” any less contradictory than the converse?
You might want to stake those goalposts down better, they’re moving at a high rate of speed.
The two original statements are here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/01/15/ot67-comment-core/#comment-454807
“Leaks are bad when Wikileaks does them” was not my first statement.
One can believe that Wikileaks is bad, and that Assange has committed crimes (and many Republicans do!) without believing that they are a front for Russia, and/or without believing that they delegitimize the election of Donald Trump and/or without believing the DNC has anyone to blame but their own lax security.
Furthermore, one can believe that Chelsea Manning had, as a sworn US Army soldier, certain duties and obligations that Australian civilian Julian Assange does not.
I suppose I should have originally been more careful to distinguish “Chelsea Manning definitely committed a crime, but the original sentence was too harsh” from more a more general “Information deserves to be free! No punishment for whistleblowers!” stance, the latter being the one that really sets off my cognitive dissonance alarms.
@The Nybbler: You are being disingenuous. The two original statements, as worded, are also not contradictory. Instead of accusing me of moving the goalposts, how about you explain why you think the situation is asymmetric. Where is the cognitive dissonance in gbdub’s original post, and why doesn’t it apply to people who hold the opposite stance on both issues?
@gbdub: Your point that Chelsea Manning was a US soldier with different duties than Assange is a reasonable distinction, albeit not a distinction that you made in your original post. Your point about Russia is not a reasonable distinction. You say that it is possible to believe that leaks are generally bad, without believing that Wikileaks is a front for the Russians. Why does it only go one way? Why is it impossible to believe that leaks are sometimes good, but that these particular leaks appear to have been orchestrated by the Russians in an attempt to manipulate the US elections (which is bad)? If you are willing to grant people the latter position, then you can feel free to disagree with them, but I don’t see how you can accuse them in good faith of being inconsistent.
So the current stance of many Democrats is that Wikileaks is not only a propaganda arm of Russia, but that its actions in the 2016 election were so damaging as to call into question the legitimacy of the Trump administration and the US election in general.
At the same time, many of the same Democrats supported pardoning Chelsea Manning on the theory that “whistleblowing” should not be punished, and that essentially the whole concept of classified information is a cover for the US to do dirty things out of public view.
Now, the Podesta / DNC email “hack” didn’t involve sensitive national security data. To the extent it was damaging, its damage was limited to embarrassing Democrats, potentially in an election altering way.
The Manning leaks really did involve national security data, which is what espionage statutes are supposed to protect. Chelsea may claim she was “whistleblowing”, but Wikileaks has an equally valid claim to be “whistleblowing” on the DNC (hence the scare quotes for whistleblowing, which in these cases is very much in the eye of the beholder).
So basically, the Democratic position is that leaking information that embarrasses the DNC is a horrifying outrage that shocks our democracy to its very core, but leaking classified Army documents is “eh, no big deal” and punishing someone for doing so is an injustice worthy of a Presidential pardon. That strikes me as dissonant.
Ask yourself “who, whom?”
One set of leaks endangered American troops as well as many locals who were foolish enough to cooperate with them.
The other damaged the political prospects of the DNC.
(The reaction to the OPM hacks by China also fits this pattern.)
@ gbdub
1. In general, there’s a much better case to be made for whisteblowing on the government than for “whisteblowing”– i.e. spying– on private citizens. The Collateral Murder video, so-called, is the sort of thing citizens ought to know about, while John Podesta’s tastes in art are not.
2. Wikileaks’ source for the DNC material was the Russian intelligence services, who were trying to influence a US election for the benefit of Putin, a brutal dictator. Manning’s motives, whatever they were, were a lot less sinister.
3. Manning was tortured by the US military. Even if you think the government was right to prosecute Manning, as I do, the fact that she was tortured makes a strong case for clemency.
@ Jaskologist
No, the DNC leaks endangered the entire world by helping to place Trump in charge of the republic. They also put a lot of people associated with the DNC at risk of reprisal from the right’s legions of paranoid lunatics: Pizzagate, remember?
@gbdub: I believe this is called outgroup homogeneity? The position that all classified information is by definition illegitimate is limited to a narrow fringe. It does not represent the mainstream, and I am not aware of any elected Democratic officials who support that stance. I suspect, but have no data to prove, that there is a strong overlap between the anti-establishment people on the left who want all classified information to be set free, and the people who supported Sanders over Clinton, hate the DNC, and cheered the leaks.
The set of people on the left who believe it is legitimate to blow the whistle on war crimes committed by your own government is slightly higher. I think you can fairly characterize the mainstream Democratic position on Manning by saying that some of the things she leaked were potentially justifiable (for example, the Collateral Murder video), but that she also included a lot of rightfully classified information and deserved to be punished for that. She has been punished.
Note that there is a difference between commuting a sentence and a full pardon. She is getting out of jail early, but it is still the official stance of the US government that she did a bad thing and deserved to be punished for it.
There is a pretty fine line between “what the government is doing” and “what the Democratic National Committee is doing”. I don’t think it’s quite fair to equate the DNC to a private citizen.
In the Manning case you could argue that some of the whistle blowing was good (eg, the collateral murder video) while some of it was bad (eg, informants being named). however, you could do the same thing with the Podesta emails. It’s probably a good thing for the public to know that the party did what they could to trip up Sanders and colluded with news agencies, while it’s also bad that Podesta’s private life was compromised.
Made me laugh.
Strictly speaking, the original two aren’t contradictory either. At the object level, there might be good reasons to think that Wikileaks in particular might have been co-opted by nation-state actors or that Manning in particular might deserve clemency — or on the other hand that Wikileaks is not compromised, or that Manning acted recklessly or even treasonously and she deserved what she got. They contradict each other if we try to derive them both from “leaks good” or “leaks bad”, but in every individual case there’s going to be a lot more going on than general principle. It’s not even necessarily contradictory if they’re justified with “leaks good” or “leaks bad”, bearing in mind that there’s a lot more to most people’s decisions than their headline justifications.
That said, it begins to look awfully suspicious if the individual circumstances of every case just happen to point in a politically convenient direction, and there’s a lot of that going around on both sides of the aisle. But this isn’t news, or it shouldn’t be.
When China hacked the Office of Personnel Management, and made off with all the security clearance background check data from millions of Americans, it wasn’t a problem.
When someone embarrassed the Democratic Party, it was worth starting WWIII to avenge.
As if we needed any more evidence what their priorities were, and what parts of government and the media are nothing but wings of the democratic party.
@ JayT
I agree with most of what you say, with the caveat that it’s probably unreasonable to expect someone like Manning to sift through all of the files herself and only pass along the stuff which the public genuinely had a right to know. This responsibility should have fallen on Wikileaks and its media partners, and if information was released that shouldn’t have been released, Manning’s not the one who’s really at fault.
@ TenMinute
I don’t think there’s anyone in the country who believes either of these things.
I don’t know, if Manning didn’t know what was in the files when she released them, then what was the reason to release them at all? If it was just that video that she was particularly concerned about, why didn’t she just release the video?
@JayT:
This is the standard you would hold whistleblowers/leakers to. It’s not tenable. A whistleblower can’t be expected to redact all the things that shouldn’t be leaked, particularly since this will necessarily be based on a standard devised after the leak. Even if they could do such a thing, such a redacted leak is unlikely to be trusted. For instance, “The Podesta Emails, the Good Parts Edition” is likely to be seen as pure cherrypicking in an attempt to portray the campaign in a false light, even if it isn’t.
FYI, let’s not pretend that the “collateral murder” video showed any kind of war crime. It was useful propaganda, nothing more.
@The Nybbler
All I’m saying is, if your leak has the possibility to get innocents killed then you damn well better make sure you are leaking something that is worth that. What good is a leaker that does more harm than good? What great injustice has been solved at the possible cost of the informant’s lives?
I’m not anti whistle blowing, but I think that whistle blowers have a moral obligation to make sure they aren’t making the world a worse place.
Malcolm Gladwell seems to agree with JayT.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/19/daniel-ellsberg-edward-snowden-and-the-modern-whistle-blower
Gladwell’s “Snowberg” scenario strikes me as disingenuous. No matter what Snowden did, you could find a “better” scenario provided you delineated the rules for “better” after the fact.
I doubt it would have worked anyway. Senator Wyden already knew perfectly well what was going on. Had Snowden come to him, he might have been carefully watched and quietly eased out of the intelligence community rather than going to Russia, but the leaks never would have happened.
And as for bringing up Ellsberg: “Snowden believes that he has done nothing wrong. I agree wholeheartedly.” — Ellsberg
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/daniel-ellsberg-nsa-leaker-snowden-made-the-right-call/2013/07/07/0b46d96c-e5b7-11e2-aef3-339619eab080_story.html
@Urstoff
Of course, the two parties are symbiotic.
Chelsea Manning has already served more than six years in prison, including a significant period of time in solitary confinement. Commuting her sentence now is hardly an endorsement of leaks.
The original sentence was for 35 years. Has significant additional information come to light since the trial suggesting that that sentence was 500% too harsh?
Her original sentence allowed for parole after 8 years. She will be released after serving 7.
And the justification for not following the originally laid out parole schedule is what exactly?
There are probably thousands of prisoners that “deserve” a year or more knocked off their sentence. What makes this case in particular worthy of a rare presidential pardon?
Well, Chelsea Manning was only one of 209 people who had their sentence commuted yesterday (along with an additional 64 pardons). That brings Obama’s total for clemency recipients up to 1385. Manning had already served more time behind bars than any other whistleblower in US history. Manning has accepted full responsibility for her actions. From a cynical public relations perspective, as the US military is starting to deal with transgender issues more openly, it looks bad that the most prominent trans person associated with the military is behind bars.
If you need more reasons, I hear that Obama is scheduled to give a press conference today to talk about it.
But that’s insane! That “most prominent trans person” committed espionage and very likely killed numerous informants! If keeping such a person in prison for the length of the prison sentence “looks bad” the proper response is to find out who, specifically is making it “look bad” and why, and stop them.
It likewise looks bad for the military’s most prominent transgender to look as if they are above the law.
Don’t look at the gift-horse in the mouth.
The Trojans would have been well-advised to.
People are going to keep going “Muh Russia” and “Muh Wikileaks” anyway, so having Manning free is a W regardless of what they do or say. Nobody likes a sore winner.
Sure, party. Taxpayers won’t be on the hook for Manning’s gender-reassignment treatment any longer!
I’ll probably start something in the next OT about this, but it’s caught my attention.
In the CDC’s NISVS (relevant bit):
(note that I’m messing with the formatting and such to make it take up less space
Looking at all this, the question I find myself asking is, “why do bisexual women suffer such high rates of sexual violence and abuse?” My gut reaction is “they are stereotyped as hypersexual and more likely to cheat, and this affects how others treat them” but that doesn’t explain the less dramatic gap between bisexual men and other men, and if anything the stereotypes of bisexual men are more negative than those of bisexual women. Also, why do bisexual women experience IPV mostly at the hands of male partners, but bisexual men mostly at the hands of female partners?
Bisexual may include a group of women who move from one orientation to another as a result of abuse? Thus the abuse rate is higher because the orientation can result from it?
Women’s orientation is to an extent more fluid than men’s, I’ve heard, so perhaps it could adjust in response to trauma.
Or else… I dunno, something something social unacceptability pushes them towards being with more low impulse control people more often? Doesn’t seem likely to me.
If women “changed orientation” in response to rape and sexual assault or abuse by men, one would expect the numbers among lesbians to be more similar to bisexual women.
It depends on how bisexual is defined. Did they ask about self-identification or past history?
I believe it’s all self-identified.
EDIT: Reposting in new OT.
Keep in mind, these numbers are the lifetime prevalences, so the bisexual woman who suffers a single incident over thirty sexually active years “counts” the same as the married woman whose husband beats her every night.
So it seems likely to me that promiscuity is the correlated variable. Every time one enters a new relationship anywhere in the vaguely “romantic” sphere of social interaction, one is rolling the dice anew for, yep, this guy is one of the abusive ones and you now enter the statistical category of “lifetime prevalence of sexual abuse” from which there can be neither escape nor escalation. To a first order, and barring the relatively rare case of rape by a complete stranger, lifetime prevalence will be roughly linear with number of romantic-ish relationships. Bisexuals, almost by definition, have twice as many opportunities to form romantic relationships, and also almost by definition will not reject such opportunities just because they are socially frowned upon. Furthermore, per Bujold/Vorkosigan, the monogamous cannot be actively bisexual, and probably most people are not so pedantic as to answer such survey questions with “…I’ve been faithful to my husband for ten years now, but there was that fling with that girl in college, and I still appreciate a beautiful woman, so put me down as bisexual”. So the long-term monogamous will be underrepresented among self-reported bisexuals, and the promiscuous thus overrepresented.
This seems consistent with the lifetime prevalence numbers presented earlier. Would also like to see e.g. annual rate numbers including multiple incidents for the same victim; that might help distinguish between competing theories here.
My intuition on this is that women who identify as bisexual are more likely to report instances and believe that a bad incident was IPV or rape than women who identify as heterosexual. More likely to agree with liberal and/or feminist ideals, etc. and see incidents where their partner acted badly in the worst possible light, although of course not all do. For those that don’t buy into the double standard there’s still pressure to act like relationships with women are golden light and relationships with men are inferior. (And I say this as a bisexual woman. I’ve seen others be very quick to call an argument abusive when it looks like an ordinary bad argument and rudeness. Maybe it was abusive, not my call unless I was the “victim” and then I’d view it as simply as “people act shitty sometimes” but it seems bisexual women are a lot more likely to label it abuse than heterosexual women.) Lesbians have few to no romantic/sexual interactions with men, and calling out female abusers regardless of the gender of the abused is frowned upon and treated non-seriously.
This dynamic wouldn’t exist for bisexual men, at least not in the same way. I don’t know the stats, but maybe bisexual men have more relationships with women than they do men, on average? It would make sense if they’re not deliberately trying to make their own count about equal, because there will be more women available. They can only date other bisexual or gay men, but they can also date bisexual or heterosexual women, and heterosexual women are by far the biggest group of the four.
Are there any statistics that would answer whether, say, bisexual women are more likely to self-identify as feminists, hold certain opinions, etc? (Also – over in the new OT, this came up – bisexual women report higher %s, sometimes significantly higher, of things that it would be very hard to misconstrue one way or the other, than lesbians. It might be in the eye of the beholder whether a particularly loud argument is just an argument or is abusive, but I can’t imagine that a similar dynamic could exist with regard to being threatened with a knife or gun, among other examples).
Further, if there is pressure to present female-female relationships in the best light possible, are you saying we should assume that lesbians experience abuse by women at higher rates than the rates they report – which are generally higher than straight women?
As for bisexual men, while there are more heterosexual + bisexual women out there than there are gay + bisexual men, it is easier for a man to find sex from another man than from a woman, despite the numbers. A fairly average-looking gay man can rack up numbers that among straight guys are rockstar territory, if that’s what he wants, and there’s no reason to believe that bisexual guys would have more difficulty looking for sex with other guys.
@dndnrsn
I’m not aware of any survey about this, as they merely tend to distinguish between the number of men and women who identify as feminist. Interestingly, this survey shows that bisexuals self-identify as ‘Democrat’ far less often and favor the Republican party almost twice as often as lesbians and gays.
I’m not sure what to conclude from this though, when it comes to whether they identify as feminist. They seem to be more anti-establishment, but is that because they are more grey tribe or because they tend to subscribe to a different brand of feminism?
When contracts in restraint of trade were legal, as they were in England into the early 20th century, the cartel contract could be enforced by the courts.
Beyond that, I expect that a good deal of the enforcement of the norms against non-marital sex was by women, some of whom may have viewed their targets as competitors undercutting them.
@DavidFriedman
FGM is generally performed by women. Most likely, a major factor for the practice is to ensure that a woman cannot secretly have intercourse.
@Aapje:
FGM seems mostly intended to make sex less pleasurable, or in the more extreme forms, less possible, for women. Men see a wife who gets less pleasure from sex, or cannot have sex without preparation, as less likely to be unfaithful. Parents, including mothers, then have an incentive to perform or have FGM performed on their daughter – she will be unmarriageable otherwise.
@dndnrsn
At least for the more extreme forms, I would think that the damage/pain during first intercourse would be hard to hide.
I wonder if the Flynn Effect reflects an actual increase in g, and if it doesn’t, whether such a non-g increase is actually significant to the real world.