This is the twice-weekly hidden open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever.
AISafety.com hosts a Skype reading group Wednesdays at 19:45 UTC, reading new and old articles on different aspects of AI Safety. We start with a presentation of a summary of the article, and then discuss in a friendly atmosphere.
The COVID-19 Forecasting Project at the University of Oxford is making advanced pandemic simulations of 150+ countries available to the public, and also offer pro-bono forecasting services to decision-makers.
Altruisto is a browser extension so that when you shop online, a portion of the money you pay goes to effective charities (no extra cost to you). Just install an extension and when you buy something, people in poverty will get medicines, bed nets, or financial aid.
MealSquares is a "nutritionally complete" food that contains a balanced diet worth of nutrients in a few tasty easily measurable units. Think Soylent, except zero preparation, made with natural ingredients, and looks/tastes a lot like an ordinary scone.
Support Slate Star Codex on Patreon. I have a day job and SSC gets free hosting, so don't feel pressured to contribute. But extra cash helps pay for contest prizes, meetup expenses, and me spending extra time blogging instead of working.
Giving What We Can is a charitable movement promoting giving some of your money to the developing world or other worthy causes. If you're interested in this, consider taking their Pledge as a formal and public declaration of intent.
Jane Street is a quantitative trading firm with a focus on technology and collaborative problem solving. We're always hiring talented programmers, traders, and researchers and have internships and fulltime positions in New York, London, and Hong Kong. No background in finance required.
Dr. Laura Baur is a psychiatrist with interests in literature review, reproductive psychiatry, and relational psychotherapy; see her website for more. Note that due to conflict of interest she doesn't treat people in the NYC rationalist social scene.
The Effective Altruism newsletter provides monthly updates on the highest-impact ways to do good and help others.
Seattle Anxiety Specialists are a therapy practice helping people overcome anxiety and related mental health issues (eg GAD, OCD, PTSD) through evidence based interventions and self-exploration. Check out their free anti-anxiety guide here
.
Norwegian founders with an international team on a mission to offer the equivalent of a Norwegian social safety net globally available as a membership. Currently offering travel medical insurance for nomads, and global health insurance for remote teams.
Beeminder's an evidence-based willpower augmention tool that collects quantifiable data about your life, then helps you organize it into commitment mechanisms so you can keep resolutions. They've also got a blog about what they're doing here
Metaculus is a platform for generating crowd-sourced predictions about the future, especially science and technology. If you're interested in testing yourself and contributing to their project, check out their questions page
Substack is a blogging site that helps writers earn money and readers discover articles they'll like.
80,000 Hours researches different problems and professions to help you figure out how to do as much good as possible. Their free career guide show you how to choose a career that's fulfilling and maximises your contribution to solving the world's most pressing problems.
B4X is a free and open source developer tool that allows users to write apps for Android, iOS, and more.
Is it wrong to be really frustrated with Bill Gates? He has clearly identified the control problem, he has endorsed it publicly and has recommended Superintelligence. Why doesn’t he just drop a billion dollars? He could have a massive positive impact. I can’t help feeling that he cares more about his public image than about actually doing the right thing.
This might sound ridiculous given how much he does for other charity, but still, why not fund AI safety research? I just… it’s so frustrating to look at how much money he has, at the total budget of organizations dealing with this problem, and the fact that he doesn’t do anything.
Just looking for other thoughts here.
A commercial liquid thorium salt reactor would be a great thing too. But just throwing billions at the problem won’t necessarily get you that. At a minimum you have to figure out who to throw them at.
A.I. risk seems to be gradually turning into what amounts to a rationalist jobs program. “I’m smart and I care about this — throw money at me or you’re immoral/hypocritical!” Who says the current pipeline can make better use of a billion dollars than a pile of “position papers”?
Combine this with Roko’s Basilisk and you’ve essentially recreated Medieval indulgences.
It’s easy to spend money. Who do you throw the money at? The Usual Suspects? The new kids on the block? You could shower a billion dollars on a variety of organisations and at the end have found 999 ways that didn’t work. That is a help, but you still have no idea what is the 1000th way that will work.
I have a feeling that if AI is coming down the road, it will be from a direction none of the present groups are expecting. Some team or organisation doing commercial/military research who want to find out a way to make Thing That Will Do This For Us, and don’t care too much about the philosophy of it. And by that time, it’ll be a bit late for hand-wringing over “how do we get friendly AI?”
Well, you could start with a 5kk$ donation to Miri and FHI and maybe another 5kk$ split among the remaining relevant organizations. Watch how well they scale and look where to spend money next year. Obviously you don’t just give 1kkk$ to a random person.
I don’t buy the money doesn’t help argument. At all. I feel like this is what Yudkowksy is talking about here: https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154981483669228
As for your claim that the first human level AGI will be created from an unexpected direction – okay if that’s true, it might not matter what we do, but why is that likely? Why would a military program be faster than Google?
What does “watch how well they scale” mean in this context? If it means to watch the growth of MIRI, FHI, et al, how does that help? I suspect that one or more of these organizations may be charlatans, or more charitably that they may be well-meaning fools whose only real talent is soliciting donations from a more passive class of well-meaning fools. I donate and “watch how they scale” to guide next year’s spending, am I not then just donating to the most efficient charlatans or most enthusiastic fools?
If there were a way to actually measure the effectiveness of MIRI et al in preventing unfriendly AI, that would be most helpful. But I do not believe such a thing exists.
Find someone reliable who has looked into their publications and knows what he’s talking about.
Something like this could help:
http://effective-altruism.com/ea/14w/2017_ai_risk_literature_review_and_charity/
Watch how well they scale means look at how many results they produce relative to their budget.
Mark Zuckerberg tried to help Newark’s schools with $100 million; that money mostly evaporated without doing a damn thing. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/19/schooled
I think that Gates is going to be leery about dropping large sums of money. It’s really hard to evaluate the performance of an organization with tenebrous goals, and even hard metrics can be missed for reasons totally outside the organization’s control (or can be easily gamed to appear outside of their control).
“how many” results, implies that results are discretely countable, and the count of Friendly AIs produced by any of them is zero. So presumably you mean “results” in the form of papers, or papers in high-impact journals or citations or something like that, and the gameability of those metrics in academia is sadly well understood by now.
The friends of a charlatan will have looked into his publications and know what he is talking about, but they won’t warn you against squandering your money with him. And if there’s some honest informed observer who would, how do you distinguish them from the other sort?
From the outside, the current AI risk community looks like a small and incestuous group, with most of the mainstream AI community saying “these guys are charlatans” and/or “…mean well but don’t understand what they are talking about”. For someone who doesn’t have both the time and expertise to independently dig into the matter, that’s a high risk for the community as it is being a money pit.
And if it isn’t now, it certainly would be under your scenario. Seriously, a half-billion-dollar donation to an organization with a staff of fourteen and an annual budget of $1.7 million? That doesn’t result in half a billion dollars of high-quality friendly AI research and development, that just results in the handful of (we’ll postulate) honest and competent people at MIRI being swamped by the horde of fools and charlatans who will come seeking a piece of that billion-dollar pie.
If Bill Gates were to devote a billion dollars to the task of AI risk mitigation, the only smart way to do that would be to use his technical expertise and more importantly his expertise at building and managing large institutions to put together his own billion-dollar AI risk team. Which in its first year would probably leave everything EY has ever done in the dust. And which might not want or need to advertise or self-promote, so how do you know he hasn’t?
But there’s no way Gates or anyone else can put a billion dollars into AI risk mitigation without either A: leaving a billion unguarded dollars lying around with basically just a sign saying “fools and charlatans please stay away, for serious AI risk mitigation only”, or B: devoting a huge amount of their own time to project management. And Gates, at least, seems to want to spend his time helping the poor and sick and hungry people who definitely exist now and are suffering now, so that’s going to be a hard sell. Even harder to spin as some deficiency of character or judgement on Gates’ part.
What are your favourite metaphors folks? Even in the loosest sense e.g. the invisible hand. Do any one you use metaphors to guide your life decisions/assess costs and benefits?
I think (almost) all productive human thinking is by metaphor and analogy – it’s how minds work. To extend your example, it’s not just the “invisible hand” that’s a metaphor, our talk of “markets” is almost always a metaphor too. And metaphorical thinking is doubly necessary when spreading ideas and building off other people. Hence why I’m extremely unimpressed by “The Worst Argument In The World.”
But if we think in metaphors, it follows that the choice of metaphors has tremendous social power. Even the hoariest of all metaphors, the “ship of state” still carries with it all sorts of connotations – that the ship has a common destination, that deference is due to the captain, that we’re better inside the ship than outside it, etc – that many would challenge if made explicit. However, they’re particular to their time and place. For instance, the metaphors underlying Keynesian economic thinking (“circular flow,” “kick-starting,” etc) originated in a time when industrial engineering was dominant. As the economy has changed, these metaphors have lost much of their power – I bet most people who use the phrase couldn’t tell you what “priming the pump” means.
In my view, it’s best if we think carefully about the metaphors we use, and the effects they have, but accept we can’t step outside them. My own favourite, and one I do try to live my life by, is “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
Isn’t that a simile?
No.
A metaphor is when you refer to an object with a non-literal description or reference. “We are all in the same boat.” “America is a melting pot.”
A simile is when you compare two things of different kinds. “He’s as cool as a cucumber.” “I slept like a log.”
So “Sunlight is the best disinfectant” is a metaphor.
My education strikes again!
Thanks for the info.
Edit: I was taught some version of ‘simile = like or as’ and I conflated that with is to my peril.
But looking at this definition, non-literally description, seems wrong. Sunlight(The higher frequency bits) is in some sense a literal disinfectant, I thought?
Hopefully you can clear this up as well!
It’s a treble metaphor.
Maybe sunlight is in some weak sense a disinfectant, but it is not the best. Better than Dettol? It’s not meant to be a literal description of sunlight. But “sunlight” and “disinfectant” are also being used metaphorically here. It is intended to communicate something like “dodgy dealings can’t survive open scrutiny” which is decidedly not the literal meaning.
I’ve started to become unironically fond of “the cloud.” When you can board a plane, go to another city, check in to your lodgings, and order dinner, all because you’re carrying around the right bits of information on your phone, you really start to feel like you’ve got this invisible cloud of data following you around.
In a very loose sense, I’ve benefited a lot by trying to think about nearly *everything* as boundary-less spectra rather than distinct categories. It’s tough to remain in that mindstate for long, but it’s very helpful when thinking about things as diverse as mental health, poverty, stress, alertness, skill, political alignments, strength-of-belief, etc.
There *are* threshold effects in real life for various things, but they’re a lot less common or important than most of our speech and behaviour would indicate, I think. (examples of real threshold effects: certificates like college degrees, statute compliance, the state-of-being-awake, protein-immune response, etc.)
Life is hard and then you die. Though I suppose that’s not a metaphor as such.
Been reading/listening to Thomas Sowell lately (not that I hadn’t before) because he’s in the news a bit for retiring from his column. Thought this particular bit was especially striking.
What really hit me most of all was his description of life in Harlem during his youth: most people could not afford a TV, so those who could would leave doors unlocked and let neighborhood children in to watch. He contrasts this with today, when most poor people have two TVs, but no one dares leave their door unlocked, or sleep outside, as he did then.
This clearly shows that it is neither the absolute level of poverty or discrimination which causes crime and violence, since blacks were obviously poorer in absolute terms and subject to more discrimination then as compared to now.
Sowell blames “liberal policies,” though I’d also put a lot of blame on the drug war, typically endorsed by Republicans at least as strongly as Democrats. Regardless, something has to be different, and it can’t be the more right-wingish view that HBD destines blacks to higher levels of crime and violence, either (my personal view on nature vs. nurture is that nature has a bigger role in deciding whether or not you have the potential to be a physicist, but nurture determines, to a large degree, whether or not you fulfill your potential. Most people of all races are not born with the IQ to be a physicist, but I think very few of those people will become criminals if raised well).
So what do we attribute this to? Drug war? Welfare state? Victimhood culture? General societal breakdown? If the contrasting pictures Sowell paints are at all accurate (and I think there is an extent to which he is only allowed to paint it in the mainstream at all by virtue of himself being an old black man who lived it), they seem to cry out for explanation of the sort most of the traditional ones cannot provide.
a lack of social cohesion
who knows why but I think it has deeper roots than anything you said besides ‘general societal breakdown’ because I believe it’s happening to more than just black people
Sowell has previously written about how the War on Poverty destroyed African-American culture in the US by removing incentives for positive, middle-class behavior traits and adding concrete incentives for negative lower-class behaviors. He doesn’t name the source for his data — and quick Googling around isn’t finding me anything online prior to 1977 when the Census Bureau started taking periodic economic surveys — but Sowell claims that:
Note that though African-Americans are usually held up as the poster children for the destructive effects of welfare dependency, the worst effects really seem to be in lower-class whites in economically devastated areas where legacy industries have died off and not been replaced. J.D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy is a grimace-inducing portrait of a subculture that doesn’t usually get the same attention as the inner city ghettos but displays most of the same self-destructive tendencies, providing a strong indication that the problems affecting black Americans aren’t really about race, but about characteristics of poverty in modern society.
Given that our modern underclass culture really traces its roots back to the 1960s, I’m in agreement with Sowell that this is a problem with the incentive structure created by the welfare state. It’s severely harming those it was meant to help by removing both the incentives and means for people to be self-sufficient.
This reminds me of the one good argument I have heard against gay marriage, which I read somewhere linked on SSC (though, to be clear, I still support gay marriage), namely: “it sounds ludicrous to you, oh, upper-middle class, college-educated, agnostic white person, that the sanctity of someone’s heterosexual marriage would be threatened by the very idea of a same-sex marriage, but you’re not the people we’re worried about; rather, it’s precisely the marginal, edge cases–the poorly educated people whose only job options are pretty crummy and who are not super-inclined to take responsibility for getting their girlfriend pregnant–who need that extra bit of social sanction/pressure the normative idea of marriage can offer.”
Same basic argument: “it sounds absurd to you, oh, upper-middle class doctor, lawyer, PhD, engineer, that you would just quit your job and do nothing all day if the welfare programs supporting such a lifestyle were just a bit more generous, but, again, it’s not you we should be worried about; rather, it’s the marginal cases–not just the people in any group with lower IQ or intrinsic motivation, but whole populations, be they inner city blacks or rural whites, who just haven’t, for whatever reason, developed the same degree of reverence for education and work, whose work opportunities are not as appealing or lucrative, and for whom, therefore, the prospect of roaming the streets or staying home all day drinking is not nearly so out-of-the-question as it seems to you.”
This looks more like an argument against no-fault divorce than against gay marriage, no?
It’s not particularly hard to turn it into an argument for gay marriage. Marginal edge case guy sees a large class of people who are forced to choose between non-marital sex or simply totally denying themselves a basic human need, which erodes his respect for the taboo against premarital sex.
The fact that the institution of marriage is not there for everyone is a point against it in the mind of anyone who hasn’t been convinced that homosexuality isn’t real. (Which is something that I’ve seen claimed, but with arguments unlikely to be convincing to people who are actually straight rather than being deeply closeted.)
(a) What makes you think that the institution of marriage should be “there for everyone” in the first place?
(b) On grounds do you speak for “anyone who hasn’t been convinced that homosexuality isn’t real”? I don’t remember electing you as my spokesman.
Because it is normative. Because part of the “institution of marriage” – the most important part to @onyomi’s theory, in fact – is that it is sinful to have any kind of sexual relationship without being married.
And if it’s not there for everyone what are we even talking about? My whole argument is centered around people thinking “if it’s not for everyone why should it be for me” – it not being for everyone is certainly a reasonable position to hold, but that also suggests anyone is entitled to opt out of it. You can’t force it on everyone if you’re not willing to let everyone have it. (Not without defining those people out of existence, anyway) And onyomi’s argument is that some people consider it very important to force it on people and not allow them to opt out of it.
If you in fact support the institution of marriage as defined in this discussion (i.e. both “normative” – no-one’s allowed to have non-marital relationships – and exclusionary of same-sex relationships) this implies that you believe that those people can/should choose to settle down in straight relationships. I.e. you do not believe homosexuality is real.
If you’re going to attack people for “speaking for you” for pointing out the logical consequences of a set of beliefs, you could at least do a better job of acting like you actually hold those beliefs.
Societies are quite capable of distinguishing between different types of sexual behaviour, and of having different norms surrounding them.
Even if it did, “Homosexuals should settle down in straight relationships” in no way implies or equates to “Homosexuality doesn’t exist”, and I seriously doubt that you’re arguing in good faith here.
@ Creutzer:
Restricting sex to marriage only makes sense if we see sex and marriage as primarily about having and raising the next generation of children. Gay marriage is incompatible with this notion, and thus any acceptance of gay marriage must necessarily be accompanied by an acceptance of extra-marital sex.
@The original Mr. X
Is it OK for infertile people to have sex out of marriage then?
What’s that got to do with anything?
I said “can/should”, and it’s the “can” part that implies homosexuality (as contrasted to bisexuality) does not exist.
If you take homosexuality to mean that homosexuals literally cannot have sex with members of the opposite sex, then maybe. But I’ve never seen any evidence that this is the case for any non-negligible proportion of homosexuals.
ETA: Plus, recall your original claim:
Now, LGB people are less than 2% of the population to begin with; the number who literally cannot have sex with members of the opposite sex would be smaller still. I’m seeing no evidence of “a large group of people” large enough to seriously erode anybody’s respect for the taboo against premarital sex.
@The original Mr. X
“Restricting sex to marriage only makes sense if we see sex and marriage as primarily about having and raising the next generation of children. Gay marriage is incompatible with this notion”
If gay marriage is incompatible with the notion of sex/marriage being primarily about procreation (because gay couples can’t procreate (disregarding adoption for whatever reason)) then so is marriage of infertile couples (who also can’t procreate).
Yes, which is why infertility and inability to consummate are and were both grounds for annulment.
Adoption isn’t a form of procreation.
Post-menopausal women getting married is just as incompatible with having children. Nobody’s getting worked up about that.
If there is a strong argument against same-sex marriage that does not ultimately rely on the axiom that homosexuality itself is wrong, I’ve never seen it.
@The original Mr. X
Stop playing games with semantics. It means that they cannot have a sexual relationship with someone of the opposite sex that will fulfill the basic human need for companionship. Someone who can is called bisexual (or heterosexual, but that’s not who we’re talking about).
You see percentage points, I see multiples of three million (in the US alone). That’s large enough for me.
It’s true that there are a lot of assumptions inherent the adoption argument, some of which you may disagree with: that children are better off adopted than left to fend for themselves or cared for by state employees; that encouraging adoption is therefore a worthwhile public policy goal; that children are better off having two parents than having (say) a financially stable single parent; that even so there’s not a sufficient supply of financially stable would-be single-parents; that children are not particularly better off having two opposite-sex parents than having two parents of the same sex. Are there any of these in particular that you have objections to?
Related is the question of whether same-sex married couples will be encouraged to at least one of them [perhaps both if they intend to have at least two children] procreate (with a surrogate providing genetic material, and the pregnancy itself for gay male couples), as compared to being forced to remain unmarried, and whether this is sufficient to align gay marriage with a supposed public policy goal of encouraging procreation. What are your thoughts there?
@The original Mr. X
But nevertheless, infertile people can get married (it’s just that they can annul the marriage). So the logical consequence would seem to be that gay marriage should be legal, but can be annulled at any time. You might argue that actually infertile people can’t get married, since annulment retroactively voids the marriage. But annulment in civil law based on infertility (at least in England) is an option for the participants, not mandatory. You can’t take two strangers to court and forcibly annul their marriage even if you have solid evidence that one of them is infertile. Roman Catholic law (if you were referring to that) might differ, but it is not relevant to discussion of the (civil) institute of marriage (if you want to argue that neither gay nor infertile people should be married by the Catholic church I am happy to accept that).
@ Iain:
There’s nothing inherently impossible about the idea of older people having children, and indeed women do sometimes (albeit rarely) conceive even when they’re thought too old. Conversely, a man is never, ever going to impregnate another man.
@random832:
Either you worded yourself very poorly in your initial sentence, or you’re shifting the goalposts like crazy. Either way, I’m not taking responsibility for your problems putting across a decent argument.
Whereas the people whose lives are screwed up by bad sexual choices, either their own or other people’s, aren’t worth bothering with because…?
It’s got nothing to do with the assumptions you list, and everything to do with the definition of “procreate”. Dictionaries are your friend here.
@rlms:
Annulment doesn’t “retroactively” void anything; rather, it’s a recognition that the marriage was void in the first place.
Sure, if you ignore the fact that it is a lot more intrusive to determine whether someone is fertile than whether someone is a man.
Also, I’d bet a lot more women believed to be infertile have conceived than women who were exclusively homosexual.
I disagree. People argue for strengthening marriage and for restricting sex to it on the grounds that it supposedly increases societal stability, gives young men perspectives and a reason to contribute to civilisation, and fixes various issues in the dating market. Whether the these benefits would be worth the cost is another matter, but I don’t think you can say that these arguments just don’t make sense. Personally, I find them much more compelling than anything based on the need to raise the next generation.
@ Creutzer:
From what I can tell, people who argue for marriage on the grounds of social stability don’t tend to have much of a problem with pre-marital sex.
And if marriage primarily for social stability, then you need to heed the argument that we need gay marriage because gays men need the institution to civilize them as much as straight men do, or however that runs.
I don’t know. Don’t they also want to move the age of marriage back to the early twenties? Having some sort of stigma against premarital sex seems instrumental in this.
As for gay marriage, I think it’s almost orthogonal to these arguments because the numbers are too small for them to matter and at the same time, as someone pointed out upthread, humans are perfectly capable of viewing gay relationships as fundamentally different, for the purpose of social norms, from heterosexual relationships. That makes the argument for it rather weak. But indeed, I can’t see how that sort of approach would give you any argument at all against it.
Against literal premarital sex, of the sort that leads to babies being born seven months after the wedding, not so much. Even the most traditionally conservative societies often seem to nod and wink at that. Sow your wild oats as you must, just keep in mind that the bedmate du jour needs to be someone you would be willing to spend the rest of your life with because that might happen.
Amarital sex, between people who are absolutely not going to marry each other, whose offspring will surely be aborted if they manage conception through a condom, over decades and with multiple partners with at most a vague notion that when they are on the brink of geezerdom they will settle down with someone, that gets rather more pushback from social conservatives. And rightly, or at least consistently, so, because that pattern of behavior doesn’t promote social stability.
I’m not sure what you’re getting at here, because the whole point of gay marriage is that we should treat gay relationships as exactly the same as straight ones.
@The original Mr. X
“rather, it’s a recognition that the marriage was void in the first place.”
Yes, that is a retroactive effect isn’t it? A non-retroactive voiding would mean that the marriage changed from being valid from [date of marriage] to the future to being valid from [date of marriage] to [date of voiding] and invalid afterwards. But as far as I know, annulment changes it to being invalid at all times, even in the past. In any case, it’s not really relevant to the rest of my point.
@Randy M
Why are intrusiveness and likelihood of procreation relevant? As I understand it, you can marry an infertile person in full knowledge of their infertility, it’s just you have the opportunity to annul the marriage later if you want. I am saying that you should be analogously allowed to marry a person of the same sex (in full knowledge of that), but have the opportunity to later annul it. If you disagree with the latter, you should logically also disagree with letting knowingly infertile people marry.
What I mean is that if one’s argument for taking marriage seriously is social stability, then how you treat gay marriage almost doesn’t matter because the numbers are so small that they don’t have much of an influence in the larger scheme of things.
The annulment doesn’t change the status of the marriage, retroactively or otherwise. The marriage was always invalid, and would have been even if the annulment tribunal had never looked into it.
@X
Does that come with the requisite social shaming for all the premarital sex?
Just kidding.
It matters for enforcement and to explain how the norms evolved. One’s biological sex is public knowledge; thus, two men getting ‘married’ is an open rebuttal to the obvious purpose of marriage, and thus wasn’t commonly considered a possibility until the meaning of marriage shifted from ‘family formation’ to ‘romance recognition’. It is not usually known that someone is infertile until well after marriage, was in the past impossible to determine before, even now may be wrong, and by it’s personal nature does not openly declaim the procreative purpose behind marriage.
A law defining marriage as a union between a fertile man and a fertile woman would be significantly harder and more intrusive to enforce in practice then just asking making sure the gender of each are different.
Are you just asking me to personally say the analogy holds, or asking for reasons why it is different in practice? Having done the latter, I won’t shirk from the former; if I die and my infertile wife ‘remarries’ that relationship is fundamentally different from the one we have now.
(No, you cannot say that we aren’t currently married because of the infertility, because the purpose of marriage is lifelong commitment for the purpose of raising children conceived over the course of it. There’s other benefits in support of that purpose.)
@The original Mr. X
I don’t think that’s correct. See here. If you practice bigamy, incest, or underage marriage it is true that your marriage is void regardless of what you want. But if it wasn’t consummated, or you didn’t consent to it, or the woman was pregnant by someone other than her husband at the time of marriage, it is merely voidable — it is only invalid if you decide to annul it.
@Randy M
“if I die and my infertile wife ‘remarries’ that relationship is fundamentally different from the one we have now.”
Yes, I agree that there is a significant difference (and that a gay marriage would be more different still). But even if you think that the relationship is essentially distinct from a normal marriage, it is a normal marriage in most ways that matter (for instance legally). I don’t think there are many gay marriage proponents who not only want gay marriage to be legal, but who also insist that it is more similar to normal heterosexual marriage than infertile heterosexual marriage.
Just to reiterate since this thread got kind of long: this wasn’t “the onyomi argument against gay marriage.” I was just repeating an argument I read somewhere which I thought was the only good one against gay marriage I had seen.
I, personally, am in favor of gay marriage, because, a. I hate the form of argument which says consenting adults can’t enter into whatever voluntary agreement they want because it might be detrimental to society and b. yes, the same argument works that it might be the marginally accepted gay person who needs the sense of legitimacy marriage provides in order to feel like they are adulting correctly.
I’m aware of this and hope I haven’t given impression to the contrary or misled anyone. With my initial reply, I just wanted to prompt you to explain why you thought it was an argument against gay marriage worth taking seriously. My impression is that maybe people made this argument because they wanted to argue against gay marriage, but that it’s worth taking seriously only as an argument for a different conclusion. Maybe that’s what you had in mind anyway.
Isn’t this just a long-winded way of saying “economics works on the margins.”
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-gay-marriage-suicide-20170221-story.html
Here’s a different category of marginal case– suicide attempts by gay and bisexual students dropped as gay marrige became legal.
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-gay-marriage-suicide-20170221-story.html
The stastics should probably be checked, just because it’s hard to pull trends out, but this doesn’t sound implausible.
One of the things about marriage being normative is that this has a bad effect on people who can’t marry, or can’t marry honestly. (When there was a lot of pressure to have a heteroxexual marriage, there were marriages between homosexuals and heterosexuals– this could be very rough on both partners.)
Marriage being normative is about sex, but culturally speaking, it’s also evidence that one is doing adulthood correctly.
Cypren, it might be worth looking at whether the War on Poverty was the only destructive thing that was going on. For example, the war on drugs– with a high rate of imprisonment– was taking productive people out of the community. The war on drugs didn’t just targent addicts, nor do people remain addicts indefinities, nor are all addicts incapacitated by their addiction.
Another argument is that stronger drugs became available, though I’m not sure about the timing on that one.
There’s also a matter of how welfare was structured, in particular the man in the house rules, which meant that women and children could only get welfare if there wasn’t a man living in the hourse. This broke up families. I’ve heard it was aggressively enforced against black people, so it would be worth checking if the same happened to white people.
Of course, there is the hypothesis that that too is actually a result of the War on Drugs.
(Side – I like their choice of photograph. As a general musical instruments nerd and, while not an aficionado of cocaine as such, definitely keen to wind down the War on Drugs in favour of a public-health-oriented legal regulation regime, I have the simultaneous reactions of “What a waste of a perfectly good ukulele” and “What a waste of perfectly good cocaine”)
As (if?) marijuana continues to be legal, I wonder whether there will be a rise of classic/heirloom marijuana which comes from plants that aren’t optimized for maximum THC.
@Nancy Lebovitz
One would hope not just for health reasons.
One of the cliches of the post-80s drug war was “this isn’t the pot that you [meaning Baby Boomers] grew up with, it’s much more powerful!”. That ignored the fact that pot smokers generally choose how high they get by how much they smoke, so higher concentrations mean less smoking. With other means of ingestion like edibles the “chef” chooses the concentration, which can easily lead to over-doing it, but mostly for reasons of ignorance on the part of first-timers.
I don’t think it’s just about health, any more than liking wine and beer ove hard liquor is just about health.
One person told me that the reason pot had gone downhill (tending to produce more paranoia) was that the people sampling pot to see whether it was worth smuggling became less able to appreciate the more subtle good effects of pot.
No, no, no.
That is the wrong metaphor to use here.
@Nancy Lebovitz
That argument would make more sense if there were now a small number of cultivars bred only for potency. But in fact there is a huge amount of variety that includes differentiation based on subjective effects, that starts with the setiva/indica contrast and goes on from there. Growers are aware of the propensity for strains to cause different effects and cultivate with that in mind. In the “old days” what you got was much more of a crap-shoot, because often the choice was between “weed” and “not weed”. Now when you go to a supplier you can hear about all of this until you are very, very bored.
[I should mention that for me this is book knowledge. Most of my personal experience is with psychadelics. I have heard a number of such spiels, though.]
The man in the house rule was ruled unconstitutional in 1968. It is an example popular with both sides.
A fast google doesn’t turn up anything about how long the man in the house rule was in play (apparently varied by state) or how much it was enforced.
I think this is just one part of a general trend towards lower social trust, as a separate thing to the increase in crime. Social trust seems to have decreased across pretty much all groups. I would speculate that this is just due to increased population density and mobility — it’s easy to leave your door unlocked if there are only tens of people who are likely to walk past it, most of whom you’ve known since birth.
I loaned out my copy to a friend, so I don’t have quotes or citations on-hand, but Stuntz’s The Collapse of American Criminal Justice (my frequent go-to on many topics in this area) definitely seconds the view that “urban anonymity”, modern mobility, and population density changes are definitely one of the factors.
Harlem probably isn’t denser than when Sowell was a child. Manhattan has substantially fewer people than in 1890 when the subways opened. Density being correlated with crime is a recent development.
Why does it have to be attributed to one thing? The drug war clearly did a great deal of damage. So did poorly-designed social welfare programs that created bad incentives. You don’t have to pick one.
An interesting result from Rasmussen polls: Democrats Think Muslims Worse Off Here Than Christians Are In Muslim World
Particularly when you compare, say, FBI hate crime statistics showing the primary victims (57% in 2014) are Jews (Huffington Post), and The Guardian’s interactive map of the top 25 most anti-Christian countries.
The perennial question that comes to mind whenever reading results of any broad public poll: how does this happen?
Clearly, from all of the beatings and murders of Muslim-American immigrants that make the news on a regular basis here in the US.
…okay, to be less snarky, it’s partisan filtering at work. Following reports of persecuted Christians in the Middle East is a Red Tribe thing and most of the information sources will be Red Tribe-affiliated (and hence untrustworthy propaganda organs of the Enemy, from the Blue Tribe perspective). Meanwhile Blue Tribe media is guaranteed to report every incident of a woman being harrassed for wearing a hijab (and unlikely to give much attention to the ones that turned out to be hoaxes, afterwards).
This is fairly similar to how people who mostly follow Red Tribe media probably think the “hate crime” is entirely an invention of the Blue Tribe, since the only hate crimes they’re ever likely to read about are those exposed as hoaxes.
Red Tribe media actually reports on two types of hate crimes: those that have been exposed as hoaxes, and those that haven’t been exposed as hoaxes yet. You definitely get some called shots along the lines of “the Mainstream Media is reporting this hate crime, who wants to bet it’s fake like the last hundred times”.
Actually three, I guess. Muslim hate crimes get reported too.
“it’s partisan filtering at work.”
Indeed. At yet here, on a “rationalist” site, we’ve had people defending building “bubbles” and “filters”.
Well, another possibility is that, when asked about Christians in Muslim countries, they are thinking of Christian immigrants to Muslim countries, even western or US Christian immigrants, rather than native minority populations. I’m assuming that these immigrants have fewer issues than local minorities.
So, filtering is in place, for sure, but there is also an implicit use of a “typical” example which is flawed.
Any statistics on how common this kind of immigration is? Is it limited to businessmen in Dubai & oil workers in gulf states?
@Randy M:
No clue.
I certainly immediately thought of the oil company workers that are bound to work in the various gulf states.
It doesn’t actually matter how many there really are, though, does it? Rather it matters whether this is what comes to the median person’s mind when asked about “oppression of Christian’s in Muslim countries”.
I ask because it would be a way to gently suggest typical mind fallacy. When I think of Christians in the middle east, I think of Egyptian Copts and Lebanese, not immigrants, because immigration into the middle East from Christian nations is not something I think happens much at all, with the slight exception of temporary workers.
I suppose Philippine domestic workers might be another category I have heard of, but I don’t think they are treated particularly well either.
Ah, wait, you mean the reason they think of that isn’t because it’s something they are aware of, but because they are pattern matching “Muslims in the US” and in that case think of “Christians in the M East” as the reverse of them? Possible, I guess.
@Randy M:
Correct.
But also, I think this a mistaken use of a central example. I see this as a variant of the non-central fallacy. The central example of a Christian in the U.S. is white-evangelical-protestant. This is not the central example of a Christian in the Middle East, but many people won’t make that leap.
I still find it interesting that either most American Christians don’t seem to feel much solidarity with persecuted Christians in other parts of the world and/or concern with persecuted Christians doesn’t become a big topic in the media.
And it may be evidence of a filter bubble that I haven’t seen anyone saying “I’m an American Christian and this is what’s going on about the lack of reporting”.
Maybe it’s just that this is a hidden open thread with a new one starting soon, and I should bring the topic up again on the next public thread.
Those who care (me among them) get our news from other sources. There are several organizations (Voice of the Martyrs, Open Doors) which advocate for that group of Christians. Most churches I’ve been at have showed their videos and handed out their literature every year or so. At least among the target demographic for stories of persecuted Christians, there’s plenty of knowledge, at least on an abstract level, and it’s very easy to make that concrete if you want to. Go to the relevant website, and sign up for the mailing list. (This is how a lot of information is shared in the Church. Everywhere I’ve gone generally does a spotlight on some ministry each week, and gives a website link in the bulletin.)
American Evangelicals do feel solidarity with their oppressed brethren and discuss it frequently amongst themselves. You may simply not know enough of them to hear about it. We’re lousy at pushing such things into the broader narrative, and deep down, we kind of suspect that lefty media centers don’t really oppose the way Christians are treated overseas.
I’m not an American, but I do share stuff about persecuted Christians. For which, incidentally, I’ve been criticised for some of my more liberal friends, because apparently it’s impossible to care about the plight of Christians without also thinking that the plight of Muslims is unimportant, or something.
And it may be evidence of a filter bubble that I haven’t seen anyone saying “I’m an American Christian and this is what’s going on about the lack of reporting”.
Here’s a link covered in an Australian news story. And another. This one. Another story.
These are all from one particular blog which covers things from the Episcopalian/Anglican side.
Why isn’t there more on this in the mainstream press? I have no idea.
they are thinking of Christian immigrants to Muslim countries, even western or US Christian immigrants, rather than native minority populations
I’d imagine that’s a large part of the problem: the perception, fed by movies, that Christianity is an alien imposition on the Middle East because The Crusades, and that prior to that there were happy Muslim native populations living in harmony with Jews – no pagans, because there’s no historical knowledge, it’s all of a piece with “colonialism! missionaries making the Polynesians wear shapeless cover-up garments!” The idea that (a) Islam is younger than Christianity (b) North Africa and the Middle East had native Christian populations before Islam came in with the conquerors (c) that the Muslims were conquerors and not just locals doesn’t enter their heads much, if at all.
So of course there can’t be persecution of Christians in the Middle East because (as you say) they’re thinking “Christians = foreigners, probably Westerners, moving there in modern times”.
The plight of Christians in many countries – not just Muslim countries, either, as there is violence against Christians in India and persecution of Christians who are too independent-minded in China, etc – is often invisible in the western world, as western countries tend to have Christianity as culturally dominant. It may have gotten more visible recently, but I remember it coming as a surprise when I learned it in a class – and I had been studying religion in university for a few years at that point!
I’ve wondered about the lack of media emphasis on the serious persecution of Christians in various parts of the world.
My guess is that the mainstream media doesn’t like Christianity very much, and the non-mainstream-media Christians would rather focus on the ways they feel mistreated in the countries where they live and which aren’t that bad.
It is bizarre, though, that even organizations like the Catholic Church don’t seem to take that part of the situation very seriously. The Pope quite publicly took in some Muslim refugees in the Vatican, but Christian ones? Not so much.
They do, it just doesn’t get reported very much because the media, by and large, doesn’t care.
My guess is that the mainstream media doesn’t like Christianity very much, and the non-mainstream-media Christians would rather focus on the ways they feel mistreated in the countries where they live and which aren’t that bad.
To be fair to the media, I think it’s not so much this as worries about stirring up hate against Islam and non-Christian foreigners in general at home.
The logic goes something like this: Everyone knows ISIS and Boko Haram are doing horrible things. Everyone knows that China has a spotty record on human rights. Pointing out what they are doing specifically to Christians won’t change those things. What it will do is fire up the people on the right against Islam and foreigners, and they’ll go on to do horrible things here.
I’m on the right, so I don’t agree, but it seems defensible based on the way I think the blue / left looks at the red / right. Personally, I think we could generate some reforms in many of Islamic cultures with some outside public pressure and that this would not be a bad thing, but it’s something we’d need the will to carry out, which is questionable whether we possess enough to succeed. Trying and failing may make the situation worse than not trying at all.
What form do you see this “outside public pressure” taking? The more explicitly you put America behind, say, Christians in Nigeria, the easier it is for Boko Haram (literal translation: “Western education is forbidden”) to paint them as tools of Western imperialism.
What form do you see this “outside public pressure” taking?
The issue is a minefield, and every couple of months the situation has changed so completely that anything I’ve previously thought has to be reworked, so take anything below as a quickly thrown together start of a plan rather than a finished product.
We’ve got two options. One is directly supporting countries like Nigeria in operations against Boko Haram. This means putting (more) US troops in harms way, and it means a greater risk of collateral damage. We can sustain only so much of each before public pressure cuts things off, and it depends on how much media coverage our failures and their successes get vs how much coverage our successes and their failures get. However, that’s only part of the battle.
Option two is direct pressure on the cultural climate ultimately responsible for terrorism, the idea that ‘we don’t like it, but the people they’re doing it to are apostates or blasphemers or people that aren’t us, so we’re not going to stop it, because they might come after us’. As long as the repercussions for their co-religionists acting against others poses no risk to them, they have no reason to reform.
A while back, a US pastor got completely dog-piled in the media for planning to publicly burn a stack of Korans. My first response was to agree with the criticism (certainly I wouldn’t be so uncouth as to burn someone else’s holy book), but on thinking about it, he was able to get the media’s attention. Why not use that? ‘You’re right, burning holy books is bad. I’ll swap these Korans for some of the Bibles the Saudi government was about to shred. Perhaps, Mr. Saudi Ambassador, you’d be willing to make the trade in front of the media as a demonstration of good faith?’ Yes, it puts pressure on the government of Saudi Arabia and increases the risk that they’ll be overthrown by extremists, but as long as our support for the Saudi monarchy is unconditional, they have no reason to try to contain their more vehement fundamentalists.
The public, visible reminder that a good portion of the American electorate has real reason to object to what goes on in Saudi Arabia and Turkey and Pakistan serves as a counter to the objections to what preachers in those countries have to say about what goes on in the west.
Source of one of my favourite autotune the news remixes.
I think you are concentrating too much on whether the US could sustain these efforts, and too little on whether they would do any good. It’s a complicated situation. Like all counter-insurgencies, being effective at killing people only gets you so far. This article is a reasonable summary of some of the complexities.
First, given the certainty of blowback from doing this in public, this seems like a clear situation where it is better to lean on Saudi Arabia privately than publicly. (And how do you know we don’t already do that?) Second, and more centrally: there’s an implicit assumption running through your post that America has the power to make whatever changes it pleases in the world, and simply lacks the will. I think this is naive. Foreign governments have many motivations and constraints, relatively few of which are under US control. The US is powerful, but far from omnipotent.
Consider: the Washington establishment undeniably has more power over small-town America than it does over Saudi Arabia. Although the establishment has a poor understanding of the mindset of the white working class, it’s still closer to that mindset than it is to the average Saudi Arabian. Despite all that, the establishment failed to convince the white working class to vote for Clinton, and many of its attempts to sway them backfired.
Why do you expect the American government to be better at swaying Saudi Arabians than it was at swaying Trump voters?
I think you are concentrating too much on whether the US could sustain these efforts, and too little on whether they would do any good. It’s a complicated situation.
I’m well aware it’s a complex situation. While I don’t like the idea of propping up countries that commit human rights violations, at some level we’ve admitted that we’ll work with bad regimes against more horrible ones (from partnering with Stalin against Hitler to partnering with Saudi Arabia now). Our ability to work with these regimes isn’t a factor of what they do so much as how the public perceives what they do.
First, given the certainty of blowback from doing this in public, this seems like a clear situation where it is better to lean on Saudi Arabia privately than publicly. (And how do you know we don’t already do that?)
I’m almost certain we’re doing that privately, and it’s had some dividends. But I’m not worrying about persuading governments so much as persuading the Muslim public, and that’s not something that’s best done by the US government (or Western governments, as Europe definitely has a stake here), but by the Western public in the form of the media. You can’t persuade masses of individuals privately, because there are no private channels to reach them. Yes, influencing their government is a start, but as you’ve pointed out, it has risks.
Right now, as the subject of this thread, we’ve pointed out that the US media doesn’t really cover Islamist atrocities against the west. There are many potential reasons why, and the answer is likely some combination of all of them. Meanwhile, the western media has much less of a problem covering reported atrocities against Muslims.
This is one thing the red tribe right gets partially correct. The media won’t do anything that would make potential Islamist terrorists mad at the media; they have no problem making potential Islamist terrorists mad at the West in general. They’d rather have the red tribe right public mad at the media and the Islamists mad at the Western public than have the Western public mad at Muslims. I honestly don’t think their motives are primarily evil, but the result is horrible for everyone involved except the Islamists.
I think you are seriously overestimating the degree to which Muslims in foreign countries make decisions based on their perceptions of the opinions of Americans.
I reiterate: what makes you so confident that we can correctly diagnose the right way to “persuade the Muslim public”, when we have so much trouble changing the minds of Trump supporters right here at home?
(Also, “the US media doesn’t really cover Islamist atrocities against the west” is not a good summary of the current discussion. For starters, the Christians whose persecution is purportedly under-reported are not Western.)
I think you are seriously overestimating the degree to which Muslims in foreign countries make decisions based on their perceptions of the opinions of Americans.
We’re told that we had multiple riots with fatalities in several countries because a guard at Guantanamo Bay was reported to have dropped a Koran in a toilet. We had a gruesome mass murder based on political cartoons in a French newspaper. It doesn’t take much convincing to believe that what happens in the West, or more specifically what makes the news in the West, influences what happens in the Middle East.
We know that in both Palestine and Syria groups manipulate the Western press for propaganda purposes, often with the knowing connivance of the Western press. They believe what makes the news in the West is important.
I reiterate: what makes you so confident that we can correctly diagnose the right way to “persuade the Muslim public”, when we have so much trouble changing the minds of Trump supporters right here at home?
I’m not at all confident, but it has to be less painful than any of the alternatives. Right now, various Islamist groups are poking several very vicious tigers. Because the Western media hides just how angry those tigers are, they have no idea how close they are to getting mauled. We’ve already gone from ‘relatively benevolent US shock and awe’ to ‘forceful Russian make the rubble bounce’ intervention against ISIL, and polls suggest that the US public would support much stronger restrictions on Muslims in the US than Trump proposed and the courts blocked.
Much better to have the West tell them to knock it off and behave like adults now than to have to try to do it at the same time we’re cleaning up after the next major blow-up when we have to restrain our own baser instincts.
(Also, “the US media doesn’t really cover Islamist atrocities against the west” is not a good summary of the current discussion. For starters, the Christians whose persecution is purportedly under-reported are not Western.)
True. I probably could have phrased it better. They’re not truly Western, but they’re groups the Western public, especially on the right, can identify with more than anyone else in the region. As long as both sides are equally foreign, we don’t have a dog in the fight. As soon as one side is less foreign… perhaps because we share a religion, for example, we have a dog in the fight.
Allow me to rephrase. I think you are seriously overestimating the degree to which Muslims in foreign countries make decisions based on their desire to please Americans. All of your examples involve pissing people off, which is generally pretty easy; convincing people to do what you want is much harder.
Compare: there were lots of things that Hillary Clinton could do to piss Trump supporters off, but relatively few things she could have done to win them over. There is no reason at all to expect Muslims in the Middle East to be more pliable. What specifically are you saying America should do? What would happen if Washington (or the Chinese government, if you prefer — the metaphor is imperfect) used equivalent tactics in an attempt to convince the Republican base to abandon Trump?
To be clear, I’m not suggesting any moral equivalence between Trump supporters and Islamists. I just think they are a useful model for considering interactions between distant powerful forces and people who neither like nor trust them, because right now it seems like you are not doing a good job of imagining the likely responses of actual flesh-and-blood people in the Middle East.
PS: As I posted in another branch of this discussion, there has actually been quite a bit of coverage of coverage about Christians being persecuted in the Middle East; even limiting ourselves to Coptic Christians in Egypt, the NYT has published at least a half-dozen articles in the last few months. Given that the information is out there, but not prominent in the public consciousness, your hypothesis (that the existence of a “less foreign” side will galvanize public support) does not seem to be bearing fruit.
I think we’re arguing at cross purposes here, so I’m going to answer this out of order.
Given that the information is out there, but not prominent in the public consciousness, your hypothesis (that the existence of a “less foreign” side will galvanize public support) does not seem to be bearing fruit.
Right now, the left doesn’t want mainstream public opinion to turn against Muslims (and they have a point in this matter), so the leftist media minimizes stories which might be spun into ‘Muslims hate Christians’ by the right as much as possible. The left doesn’t have a monopoly on the media, so the right finds out about it anyways, which gradually shifts public opinion against Muslims and at the same time, makes the right angry at the media and shifts the public more towards the right. We’ve seen this in the increasing public distrust of Muslims and support for Trump’s policies and increasing distrust of the media. True, at the moment this sentiment is confined mostly to the right, but at some point there will be enough to trigger a preference cascade among those that generally don’t pay attention to the news, most likely because something will happen which will be so newsworthy they can’t avoid it (think 9/11).
At the same time, the left doesn’t have a problem with mainstream public opinion being anti-right, underestimating the degree with which this can come back to bite them because what they do colors the opinion of the entire west, so they maximize stories which make right-leaning institutions such as the American military look bad, and this plays to both domestic and foreign audiences. This has the side effect of both making the west look both weak and evil to the Muslim man in the street and making the Islamists look like the good guys. Yes, the Muslim man in the street doesn’t subscribe to the New York Times, but somehow all those stories of toilet Korans and political cartoons make it into the public eye in the Islamic world. The thought leaders in the middle east, the people with the ability to manipulate public opinion do pay attention to the Western press, and considering how much success they’ve had manipulating the Western press, to think they’ve had less success manipulating their own press is laughable. The problem is that their eye on the West is the Western press, which isn’t an accurate view of what the west thinks.
What’s important about the above is that the West looks weak, not that it looks evil. The fact that we gave in on burning that Koran because they were rioting and killing each other is ‘proof’ that they’re stronger.
What would happen if Washington (or the Chinese government, if you prefer — the metaphor is imperfect) used equivalent tactics in an attempt to convince the Republican base to abandon Trump?
Think of it as a trade. What can the Washington establishment trade the Trump supporters in return for not voting for Trump? They’ve failed to keep their end of the bargain in every previous deal, so offers that aren’t immediate and irrevocable don’t work. The establishment also can’t threaten the Trump supporters, as they’ve already been abusing the laws against them, so that won’t work. Likewise, China has nothing to offer or threaten the Trump supporters with to get them to change their minds.
It’s not that way in the middle east. Back in Jefferson’s day, the trade was ‘you stop attacking our merchant ships’ and ‘we won’t invade Tripoli again’. There’s also the more modern ‘you don’t invade our allies’ and ‘we won’t wreck your military’, and ‘you don’t hijack or blow up civilian airplanes’ and ‘we won’t try to kill you’. Right now, what we want is ‘don’t support terrorism’ and ‘Islam behaves under the same set of rules as other cultures/religions’; we need to decide on what we can offer in return, like ‘we won’t blow you up’ and make sure it is communicated.
No, you missed the point.
You are claiming that Muslims in the Middle East would do what we want, if only we were willing to threaten violence against them. Even setting aside questions of international law, that is psychologically implausible. If Washington or Beijing made the same threats against Trump supporters, how do you think Trump supporters would respond?
This is not a question about whether the army would obey orders, or whether America could repel a Chinese invasion, or anything like that. This is a basic intuition pump, designed to get you to stop thinking of people in foreign countries as emotionless chess pieces. If you don’t think sending in the army (or threatening to do so) would decrease support for Trump, why do you think it will be any more persuasive to foreigners?
And yet, countries do change their behaviour based on threats.
Do you have examples of threats against a country successfully changing that country’s culture (in the direction that the threatening party desired)? If not, I don’t see how that’s at all relevant to the conversation we are having. We’re talking about persuading the public, not the government.
German and Japanese culture seem to have substantially changed since the 1930s, and in almost exactly the direction Americans wanted them to.
This is the claim that Civilis and I were discussing. I admit that the definition of “outside public pressure” has been somewhat unclear, but I very much hope that if Civilis were proposing a world war, a decades-long military occupation, and a new Marshall Plan, it would have been slightly more explicit.
I don’t know if it counts as a “threatening”, but South Africa ended apartheid largely due to international pressure, and several countries abolished slavery for similar reasons. Even if we only change government policies, this often has cultural effects downstream. If we managed to get the Saudis to stop promoting Wahhabism abroad, for example, this would reduce the relative influence of one of the most fundamentalist sects of modern Islam, and hence impact the culture of the Islamic world as a whole.
Christians are being persecuted in China. China has about 1.35 billion people, of which around 31 million are christian. They also have a terrible overall human rights record. How much of a typical year’s worth of articles in say a Chicago paper should be about human rights abuses in general? Human rights abuses in China? Human rights abuses as it relates to Christians in China?
I certainly get the fact that some devout Christians want to read about Christians, I have similar news reading habits for groups I’m a part of, but I don’t think the fact that some media outlets don’t cater to that desire requires a malicious explanation.
Except that in a lot of cases, groups persecuting Christians do get covered, just not for persecuting Christians.
Take that #BringBackOurGirls thing, for example. The girls in question were Christian, kidnapped by Boko Haram as part of its ongoing jihad against Nigeria’s Christian community, which had already been going on for some time. The western media, as far as I can tell, played down the religious angle almost entirely, instead presenting it as some sort of patriarchy vs. women thing. The rest of Boko Haram’s attacks, which are harder to fit into the leftist narrative about how evil men are, have been almost completely ignored by comparison.
Or again, ISIS started persecuting Christians almost as soon as it came to power, but nobody really gave a sh*t about their actions until they started targeting the Yazidis, when there was suddenly a huge media uproar about how awful this was, how we really ought to do something, etc. Even then, Christians were hardly ever mentioned, except as “We need to help the Yazidis!!! (Oh and some Christians too, I guess)”.
It would be one thing if the MSM just didn’t bother covering foreign atrocities. But when they cover foreign atrocities in such a way that persecution of one particular group always seems to get downplayed, that starts to look very much like bias.
There was a fair amount of outcry regarding the Trump immigration EO and “Religious tests at our borders” due to the order’s favoring of minority religious refugees once refugee intake was restarted. I’ve seen this interpreted as clearly an anti-Muslim measure.
But religious persecution is a real thing, and certainly if you’re going to limit the total number of refugees it makes sense to take those at the highest risk. It’s unquestionable that e.g. Christians and Yazidis are facing an elevated risk from ISIS.
The fact that this ongoing religious persecution is undercovered makes the “anti-Muslim” misinterpretation of the minority-religion favoring refugee policy more likely, which makes it harder to have a reasonable discussion about it.
Here’s a simple test case:
Russia recently passed a law restricting Christian evangelization efforts. Did you hear about it?
Right around the same time, they also passed a law restricting gay evangelization efforts. I am confident you did hear about that.
Similar laws, same time, in a country our media has no problem attacking. Only one was given exposure. Do you have a better explanation for why, beyond the fact that our media only care about the victims of one of the laws? I honestly think that’s the case, especially since we see them do the same for stories around the world.
@Jaskologist
Which media outlets do you pay for? Do you think more gay people or more evangelical Christians have paid subscriptions to the New York Times? Just as you want to hear all about how Christians are being oppressed and by whom, gay people want to hear about how gay people are being oppressed and by whom.
Why would the New York Times, which as Trump likes to point out nauseum is having financial problems, cater to people that don’t subscribe and in fact only ever go to the paper’s website in order to quote mine for jeremiads against the “east coast liberal media elite”.
The attitude towards the so-called mainstream media on the right is totally unreasonable. Where is the bootstrap mentality when it comes to that? Why don’t devout Christians go publish their own daily newspapers with news bureaus in 100 countries? Why didn’t the Koch brothers or one of the other conservative billionaires start CNN instead of Ted Turner? How many very intelligent, well educated, young right wingers are willing to sacrifice the potential for lucrative careers in order to work in journalism jobs with long hours, an uncertain future, and only moderate pay? Hey, don’t everyone speak up at once!
I hadn’t heard about that anti-evangelism law. But the article is a bit vague about whether it is about non-religious people being able to crack down on Christians of all stripes, or whether it is basically about Orthodox Christians being able to persecute Protestant Christians (presumably with a neutral-sounding wording so that the law isn’t explicitly favouring one church over another).
Not that it isn’t bad behaviour either way, but if it is the latter, it at least makes it a bit difficult to put such a coherent narrative on, because if you don’t have any reason to be attuned to the subtle differences between two different versions of the same religion, ‘persecution of Christians by Christians’ is going to sound pretty narcissism-of-small-differences-ey compared with ‘persecution of religious people by atheists’. Do you know which of these is closer to being the case?
@Brad,
“All the news that’s fit to print.”
If you take that seriously, the idea that journalism isn’t just another facet of the entertainment industry but a truth-seeking endeavor, then the failure to cover atrocities committed against Christians is disgraceful.
Personally, I share your cynical attitude to the role of the media. But most aspiring journos don’t: just talk to a journalism student sometime if you don’t believe me. By their own purported standards, what they’re doing is inexcusable.
That’s a really weird complaint, given that the whole point of the attempted #FakeNews crackdown was that there were far too many right wing news sources available now.
Today there are huge numbers of conservative bloggers, tons of right-wing radio hosts, a handful of conservative newspapers and one right wing TV network. You’ll notice that the closer you get to “real news,” AKA the MSM, the more effort has been put into pruning away conservatives.
You can’t blame it on a lack of effort: clearly the demand is there, as is the supply of would-be journalists. It’s just that supply has been artificially restricted by the current media cartels.
@Brad:
Aren’t Fox and Breitbart just that?
@Dr Dealgood
This argument strikes me as similar to atheists that endless quote scripture at Christians in an attempt to convince them that they are doing Christianity wrong. The charge of hypocrisy is simply not that compelling when it comes from a hostile outsider.
Anyway, no paper has infinite resources, which would be required to meet the uncharitable spin you’ve put on the Times’ motto. Maybe you should subscribe so they’ll have more money to cover more topics.
What’s the mechanism of restricting competition? Attacks from incumbents towards new entrants happen in every industry. That’s not cartelization.
The WSJ exists. The Post exists. Fox exists. How did they get past this prohibitive cartel?
@dndnrsn
Somehow they aren’t sufficient to counter the idea that there’s an east coast media elite liberal conspiracy. Don’t know why, you’ll have to ask the purveyors of that argument.
@Brad:
Your argument doesn’t seem to be that the so-called “mainstream media” rightfully belongs to the left and can reasonably be expected to report only on issues important to the left. Is this really what you’re trying to say?
This is somewhat circular, as if they have a political slant, that will affect their subscriber base. Even still, given that gays are ~3% of the US population and evangelical Christians are ~30% , I suspect their potential market is not as skewed towards the former as you assume.
@The Nybbler
I’m making the conservative bootstrap / free market argument. If you don’t like what the so-called mainstream media outlets are reporting on then by all means start your own media outlet or patronize ones that are more to your liking. I don’t spend a lot of time writing rants about McDonalds, I just don’t go there.
I don’t see how the Times has any obligations to cater to the preferences of people that don’t subscribe and actively encourage hatred against them.
I also don’t think that their coverage of Christian persecution abroad is objectively unreasonable given the limited space they have. Again, I can see why some would want that topic to get special treatment but I don’t see any reason the Times’ should cater to the desires of non- and anti-customers.
@Randy M
The Times subscriber base isn’t uniformly distributed across the United States. Nor would or should anyone expect it to be.
@ Brad:
It’s not about “catering to the preferences of people that don’t subscribe”, it’s about giving people who do subscribe an accurate picture of what’s happening. If the newspaper systematically ignores the problems suffered by people who don’t look like its subscribers and focuses on the problems of people who do, it’s giving its readership a distorted view of the world around them.
Brad, of course it isn’t, but is it skewed enough to overcome 10 to 1 ratio? You can’t ignore baserates.
People seem to be taking it as gospel (hah, wordplay!) that the NY Times isn’t covering Christian persecution in the middle east.
That seemed unlikely to me, and lo:
Is This the End of Christianity
in the Middle East?
@The original Mr. X
Again no newspaper can report on everything and if they did no one could read it all. Running a news outlet inherently involves picking and choosing, and that picking and choosing quite reasonably takes into account the tastes of the audience.
Do you also think the so-called mainstream media doesn’t report enough on the plight of the Rohingya in Burma, the Uyghurs in western China, and the Azeris in Iran?
To amplify Brad’s argument, the standard of “did X report on Y” and “did you know that Y (because of X’s reporting on it)” are very different. I don’t get the NYT in paper form and I certainly don’t read the whole website every day. What I know as a result of NYT reporting is largely the result of amplification, which is partly specific to my interests and who I interact with. It’s certainly true that it’s also partly affected by what the NYT chooses to make a big deal about with page or site placement, but I suspect that placement is largely driven by economic concerns, and therefore the preferences of the readership.
So, did the NYT report on the proselytization ban on page A28 or it’s equivalent? I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Do you know? Would it surprise you?
It seems relevant that the NYT actually did report on this law, which covered a lot more than just public evangelism:
Given the total level of coverage given to this law, it does not seem like there is a disproportionate lack of focus on the anti-church content.
Unless you read the NYT daily, your perception of what the NYT covers is going to be heavily influenced by the subset of articles that are widely shared in your social circles.
ETA: Seems like we’ve got a bit of a ninja infestation going on in these parts. *shakes fist*
Interesting. That breaks my model of Russian politics, sketchy though it was. Do we have someone here that can comment on how it fits in?
@Nornagest
The following is a third-hand guess. I don’t have intimate knowledge.
In America we tend to think of the various flavors of Christianity as, well, flavors. Basically the same thing at the core, and on the same side for any politics we care about.
This isn’t true everywhere. Russians don’t think of themselves as Christian, they think of themselves as Russian Orthodox. Evangelical/Pentecostal (overlapping but not identical groups) missionaries are foreign, and a threat. Their converts are taken from the churches of the dominant sect.
The converts/missionaries in turn tend to see the dominant sect as dead on the inside, going through the motions without any true relationship with Jesus. They see the Orthodox as being in need of saving, which is to say, effectively being another religion that needs missionaries sent to it. And the converts do tend to be much more zealous, for the obvious selection reasons.
This happens in Latin America as well, although there it’s Catholic vs Protestant. Ecumenism is recent and unusual.
@ Brad:
According to our trusty friend, Wikipedia:
Now, whilst I agree that newspapers don’t have the space or resources to cover everything equally, the persecution of Christians is an order of magnitude larger than any of the groups you mentioned, so I don’t think your counter-examples are particularly valid here.
@HBC:
As far as I can tell, nobody argued, and nobody made any argument requiring, that the NYT has run literally zero pieces on persecuted Christians.
@The original Mr. X
I’m not sure I trust the ex-Pope or the World Evangelical Alliance to be particularly unbiased sources on the subject, but even if Christians face the most religious persecution of any religious group in the world, that still wouldn’t justify your conclusion.
The Azeris in Iran (15 to 27 million people) face persecution unrelated to their region. Apparently the media outlets you choose to patronize completely failed you since you were unaware of this. By your logic after every seven articles about Christian persecution you should have seen one about Azeri persecution.
Or you can abandon this silly line of reasoning that suggests that there’s some objective representation function that every news media ought to follow, give up the unjustified chip on your shoulder about the so-called mainstream media, and read the outlets that cater to your tastes while leaving in peace outlets that cater to the tastes of others.
What would be a sufficient number in your opinion? Per year, say?
@ Brad:
So how big does a persecution have to be before the media has a duty to report on it? If the NYT had refused to report on the Holocaust because “Most people aren’t Jews, you can’t expect Gentiles to care about what happens to a bunch of Jews in Germany”, would you still be defending them? What if they’d reported on the Holocaust, but in such a way as to imply that the Nazis weren’t particularly targeting Jews for extermination?
ETA: Not to mention, the Middle East is one of the most important and sensitive geopolitical regions in the world right now. Given that most of the west is made up of democracies where voters’ opinions have at least some influence on what happens, it’s at least somewhat worrying if a large proportion of the electorate are getting a skewed picture of what’s happening there.
@The original Mr. X:
“Is this the end of Christianity in the Middle East” seems like a phrase that would indicate that people do, in fact, give a shit.
You are trying to have it both ways, here.
Or else I’m just using normal idiomatic English, in which people can use terms like “nobody” without meaning “literally zero people”. That’s also a possibility.
I gave you evidence that “liberal” media outlets do in fact care about religious persecution of Christians in the Middle East. I assure you this is not the only article in non-conservative outlets to talk about the issue.
For another example, NPR frequently mentions that Boko Haram is forcing conversion to Islam on the people it kidnaps. The imposition of their religion on others is clearly a part of the story when they report it.
@Mr. X
You still haven’t told us how many articles, column inches, words, whatever are acceptable. We haven’t been told how what the proper formula is for media outlets to carry out their supposed duties. Maybe it is one of those “I know when I see it” things?
All we know is that some Christians are pissed off because there isn’t enough coverage of Christian persecution in media outlets that they choose not to subscribe to. And apparently don’t have similar concerns about the coverage of the Rohingya in Burma, the Uyghurs in western China, and the Azeris in Iran.
If you think you can do a better job at putting out a daily paper with broad and deep coverage in the current advertising and subscribing environment I strongly encourage you to try.
@ HBC:
You gave me evidence that one liberal media outlet has printed at least one article about persecuted Christians.
@ Brad:
If you’re seriously going to claim that people aren’t allowed to notice media bias unless they own their own newspapers, I don’t think there’s much point carrying on this discussion.
Out of curiosity, I just googled “coptic christians nyt”. Seven of the first eight hits are explicitly about violence targeted at Coptic Christians in Egypt; the eighth mentions it in passing. Five of those articles were written in the last three months.
The ninth hit was this article praising the NYT’s coverage, with all the signs of being written by a person with extensive knowledge of the situation.
If you don’t think the NYT covers violence against Christians in the Middle East, please consider that this might just be a fact about your belief, and not about the NYT.
For what it’s worth, I’ve heard a fair amount about Boko Haram forcing the girls to convert to Islam, but I didn’t remember that they were originally Christian. I don’t think the latter was mentioned much if at all.
I can’t speak for Jaskologist, but my guess is many more evangelical Christians. A smaller percentage but of a much larger number.
There are about 92 million American Evangelicals. Compare that to about 7-11 million gays and lesbians.
As I said to Randy M, NYTimes subscribers aren’t uniformly distributed. Pew claims that 9% of the people in the NYC metro area are evangelical.[1] That’s still significantly larger than the LGBT percentage, which according to Gallop[2] is 4%, but again, within metro area residents NYTimes subscribers aren’t uniformly distributed. There are four major dailies in the city (plus Newsday on LI) and the Times occupies the middlebrow / left wing quadrant.
I’ve managed to convince myself that I don’t know the answer, but I don’t think it is obviously evangelicals.
[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/29/major-u-s-metropolitan-areas-differ-in-their-religious-profiles/
[2] http://www.gallup.com/poll/182051/san-francisco-metro-area-ranks-highest-lgbt-percentage.aspx
I can’t find numbers, but my impression is that the Times is widely read and available for subscription outside NY.
Maybe I’m misreading it, but that poll seems to compare the binary “are they persecuted or not” question and notes that a higher proportion of Democrats answer “yes” to Muslims in America than do “yes” to Christians in the Islamic world. Which doesn’t measure the severity of the persecution, which is what I think of when I see “worse off.”
It’s definitely interesting and highly distressing that only 47% (a minority!!!) of Dems believe Christians are persecuted in the Islamic world, in comparison to 56% of Dems who believe Muslims are in America, but it’s possible that enough of them also acknowledge that the persecution Christians face in the Islamic world is far worse than what Muslims face in America, isn’t it? I’d certainly love to see a poll about that.
I do think all the hysteria about hate crimes in the USA is likely a major factor in causing this trend among Dems. There’s almost a disdain for science when it comes to this; things like Southern Poverty Law Center’s listing of hate crimes based on submissions are held up as evidence that proves the prevalence and increase, without any comparisons to a base rate or the numbers in equivalent time periods in the past. And that’s when isolated (and often unverified) incidents aren’t just used outright as evidence of a larger culture at play. It reminds me a lot of the 1/5 campus rape hysteria. I wonder how different political groups in the US would answer polling questions centered around that issue, actually…
This is way short of hate crimes, but I’m seeing a lot more anti-Semitism– not mentions of anti-Semitism, but material by people who are apparently anti-Semites– on facebook. I haven’t been looking for it. (Well, mostly not– when someone linked with moderate approval to a piece blaming way too much on Zionists, I read another article on the site which started off being about what’s wrong with education and went quickly to blaming Jews in the textbook industry)
Anyway, if I saw any anti-Semitism on FB before the election, it was so little that I don’t remember it.
I find no reason to disbelieve you, but the issue is that your individual experience in this should move the needle just about zero in terms of whether or not there was an overall increase in antisemitism on FB or anywhere else. Your perception of an increase in antisemitism in your FB feed is decent evidence of an increase in antisemitism in your FB feed, but weak evidence of an increase anywhere else.
Now, if we took a sufficiently random and large sampling of people’s FB feeds, we might have something (ignoring, for now, the question of whether FB feeds at all indicate anything about real-world trends). And obviously we’d want multiple such studies from independent sources that all point in the same general direction before we’d be justified in making any sort of semi-confident claim about the trend in antisemitism.
But the general message seems to be along the lines of, “I saw a swastika on the train, Trump’s America, everyone! This is just more proof that his election has emboldened neo-Nazis to come out of the shadows!”
Additional data point.
I grant that more samples would be good. However, I’m not talking about someone saw swastika griffiti. I’m talking about a person posting a bunch of anti-Semitic material in Robert Anton Wilson facebook group, of all places.
I think I’ve got evidence that a norm against being publicly anti-Semitic is breaking down.
@Iain
Isolated data points (i.e. anecdotes) add pretty much zero to our understanding of the world or even just the US. The graveyard incident would need to be accompanied by information about the background rate of similar graveyard incidents before we could consider it as any sort of evidence regarding a trend in antisemitism.
Notably, the waves of bomb threats that are also mentioned in the article is something I read about previously and something that I think does indicate an increase in antisemitism – the article I read noted that no such events had taken place in a similar time frame in the previous year. This isn’t slam dunk proof, but it’s evidence pointing in that direction, for sure.
And if all or even most complaints about an increase in antisemitism referenced only that as evidence, there would be precious little to complain about. That is partly what makes the current hysteria so galling – if we look, we can find actual evidence of increase in antisemitism without having to claim that non-evidence actually counts. And I think it’s that hysteria that’s responsible for the highly suspect perception of persecution of Muslims in America vs. Christians in Islamic world indicated by that poll.
@Nancy Lebovitz
Yes, I understood what you were saying about your FB feed. It’s still incredibly weak evidence of overall increase in antisemitism – it’s only strong evidence of increase in antisemitism on your FB feed. We have no way of knowing if other FB feeds had equal or greater decrease in antisemitism.
My personal intuition is definitely that it reflects an actual increase in antisemitism, but I think we all know that human intuition is an absolutely terrible guide for determining reality, especially when it comes to trends in populations of hundreds of millions.
It’s also worth considering the exact wording of the questions:
If the question is whether Christians in the Islamic world are ever discriminated against, the answer is clearly yes. If the question is about whether most Christians in the Islamic world are treated unfairly, you have to stop and think for a bit. Christians are doing pretty well in Lebanon. Christians in Syria tend to be treated worse by the rebels than by Assad, which makes it hard to score. Overall I think it still comes down in favour of “most” — especially once you take Indonesia and Malaysia into account — but “the Islamic world” includes a diverse array of countries, and I don’t think the answer is trivially obvious. You’re talking about countries containing roughly a fifth of the global population, here, many of which are very sparsely covered in the media.
If we use the “doing pretty well” metric, clearly most Muslims in America are also doing pretty well.
If your definition of “unfairly” counts a violation of standard liberal values, the sort of thing that counts as unfair in the case of Muslims in America, the answer is that all Christians in any seriously Muslim country are treated unfairly.
Under Islamic law, for instance, it is legal for a Muslim man to marry a Christian woman, illegal for a Muslim woman to marry a Christian man. It is legal for a Christian to convert to Islam, illegal for a Muslim to convert to Christianity.
According to (I think) three of the four schools of law, the diya, the money damages for killing someone, are higher if the victim is a Muslim than if the victim is a Christian.
There are lots of other examples if we take “the Islamic world” as places where traditional Islamic law is taken seriously, although admittedly there are Muslim majority countries where it isn’t.
Milo resigns as a Breitbart editor.
http://thehill.com/homenews/media/320495-yiannopoulos-resigns-from-breitbart
Never thought I’d find myself defending him, but unless there’s a side of this story I’m missing, this seems wrong.
Victims of sex abuse (such as Milo) will now be fearful of talking about what happened to them because if they don’t claim that the abuse destroyed their life they can be accused of promoting sex abuse by minimizing its consequences.
I find Milo’s antics generally childish and disgusting, but watching the full clip of the video that caused the outcry (not the selectively-edited version), it seems to me he’s making pretty sensible and reasonable points.
There’s not some magical biological line at age 18 when children suddenly become adults and it’s morally okay to have sex with them. This is entirely a social construction and not even uniform in the Western world (or heck, even in the 50 US states!), much less the rest of the world. People who are defending that bright line like it’s been handed down on stone tablets from heaven make me very suspicious of ulterior motives.
I can’t claim credit, but I think this sums it up “When you live your life as an edgelord, sometimes you get cut.”
I don’t think the fallout is entirely fair, but it’s kind of like trying to get worked up about the problems in OJ’s armed robbery case.
Seconded.
Nah, fuck that. OJ deserves justice and not to be framed by the system, and so does Milo. When you live your life annoying powerful people, sometimes they use their power to smear you as a pedophile, but that doesn’t mean we should approve of it. Milo didn’t even murder anybody.
Agreed. “When you live your life annoying powerful people” then your protection serves as a forward defense for the rest of us, and your treatment shows the rest of us what the powerful do to their enemies.
It doesn’t sound like that’s what happened at all.
@Well…
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2017/02/operation-destroy-milo.html
I think what I find most upsetting about this is not even so much that the media and deep state dig up and hold onto damaging material in order to release it with optimal timing (Access Hollywood tape). I already knew that.
What I find a little bizarre is the extreme swiftness with which e. g. CPAC will uninvite you or Simon and Schuster will cancel your book given the slightest whiff of scandal. Not that I don’t understand why one might do this (though I am more forgiving of a private company than an explicitly political organization like CPAC), but maybe wait… I don’t know, a week to see when the inevitable new information comes out?
@onyomi
The good and powerful people on the left and right declared Milo a witch. This, and not anything Milo might have done, was probably why CPAC and Simon and Schuster had to disavow Milo.
Yeah, the moral equivalency of someone brutally stabbing two people to death with a rusty knife and a “edgelord troll” who says mean things and may have doxxed an illegal alien is pretty disturbing.
It’s not really a moral equivalence, it’s an analogy. No one here’s advocating for sending Milo to prison.
To be fair, he was provoked.
If you’ve managed to disturb yourself by hostilely misreading one of my comments, perhaps it is time to log off and have some chamomile tea.
This is show business, of course it isn’t fair.
It’s really sad to see how well corporate power these days can effectively silence people – what does he have left to get his messages out? Make the few with power mad and it doesn’t seem to matter how much people want to hear what you have to say.
Hope he recovers even though I find him obnoxious as hell and disagree with almost all of his views. (Maybe this will REDpill him on capitalism but I wouldn’t get my hopes up.)
He can have a blog complete with audio and video podcasts. He can self publish his book. There has never been a time when the ability to get one’s message out to those that want to hear it has been more democratized.
If those that supposedly want to hear what he has to say won’t overcome the barrier of going from twitter or breitbart to his own website, well I guess they didn’t want to hear him all that much to begin with.
This. He’s significantly more “famous” than Tom Woods, for example, who has gone fully independent and seems to do be doing well enough for himself with books, podcasts, etc.
Thanks for the pointer to Tom Woods. I’m currently listening to I Shouldn’t Write Off the Left Altogether and liking it.
It does remind me of an idea I’ve been having that the SJW has had a corrupting effect on the right.
Microaggression analysis– what I call the habit of thinking “this made me feel bad, what might be the malevolent motive behind someone saying that, a whole bunch of people must hate me”– is incredibly seductive and can be applied to any identity.
Now, microaggression analysis isn’t total nonsense because sometimes people’s identities are being attacked on a large scale, but at the same time, it’s a huge energy drain and hostility builder.
It seems to me that I’ve been seeing right-wingers get thinner skinned and more prone to generalize.
In general, I seeing a lot of arguments whose style I would mentally categorize as “1980s crits” coming from people arguing right wing positions on the internet. It’s fairly bizarre.
@Nancy Lebovitz:
I’d say it did something different. The response of many right-wingers to the concept has been to embrace needless offense. That was Milo’s shtick, after all. Say something nasty, and when people react to it, giggle and say “ha ha their reaction proves me right!”Some on the left do this too, but I’d say it seems more common on the right, and those on the left who do it tend to wrap it in more intellectual rationalization/justification.
@Brad:
I don’t know what this means? Google suggest Critical Legal Studies, which I don’t think is what you meant?
@HBC
Yes, critical legal theorists, critical race theorists, gender theorists, postmodern critical theory (literature) and allied professors in psychology, philosophy and other departments used to go by the nickname “crits”.
@Brad:
Ah, OK. Those are all ?far? left takes on their various domains, correct?
Are you saying that the right is doing the wrap-around thing where they start to sound like the extreme end of the spectrum of their ideological adversaries?
Yep, that’s was my basic point. Sorry it was unclear.
@Brad:
No, it makes sense. I just didn’t get the reference right off.
Just out of curiosity, what parallels do you see?
Critical theory tends to come from a leftist perspective, and it has a lot of Marxism in its DNA, but I feel like calling it “a far-left take on its domains” rounds off a lot of what makes it unique. Frankfurt School types are basically engaged in a sort of academic trolling.
Non exhaustively:
Above all a focus on the social construction of truth (talking about narratives is dead giveaway). Also–hostility towards institutions, a belief in self organizing conspiracies, Marxist derived analysis of group interests, and an inconsistently applied moral relativism.
This strikes me as the same phenomenon as right-wingers quoting Saul Alinsky, and they’re employing one of Alinsky’s own rules: “make the enemy live up to its own book of rules”. It’s an attempt to use the language, tactics and logical follow-through of left-wing thought to expose the beliefs as hypocritical or at least highly selective.
Personally, I think it’s a mistake, and completely ineffective to boot, since left-wing ideology tends to be much less grounded in objective rules and far more in subjective judgment for individual cases. Accusing a left-winger of treating a wealthy white man with different standards from a poor minority is usually just going to be accompanied with a shrug and “so what?”
The implication here seems to be that the left-winger is not principled in this, but as I understand it there are plenty of principled ways to think about the world that allow you to treat people of different races or economic levels differently, and they are hardly exclusive to the left.
Throwing in economic levels is a distraction; there certainly are plenty of principled ways to think about the world which allow you to treat people of different races differently (ignoring trivia like sunscreen recommendations), but they tend to be BAD principles according to most.
I feel like calling affirmative action racism and trying to lump on the bad association there, was one of the examples expressly used in the ‘Worst argument’ essay?
He has the whole Internet, for one, and all the same privileges as any rando on the street (and obviously a lot more because of his following). Canceling a book deal because you’re a troll who finally stepped in it is not being silenced by corporate power. Publishers are not obligated to give anyone a book deal. I am not silenced by corporate power because Penguin refuses to give me a book deal.
The caption is true, but misleading. Milo resigned so that the rotten image he cultivated wouldn’t keep getting mentioned in the same sentence as the word Breitbart. He says it was his choice; maybe so maybe not…if I was Breitbart’s CEO I wouldn’t want Milo associated with my brand. Easily misinterpreted sarcastic pedophilia apologetics are a train wreck. Branding poison.
And he’s not being silenced either; he plans to start his own media company and do a speaking tour.
The great thing about Milo’s speaking tours is he can do them from home. He just announces them, there’s riots, they’re cancelled, and he doesn’t have to do anything. Not sure how he makes money off of that though unless he manages to get his book published.
Self-publishing isn’t all that difficult these days, and sufficiently popular writers (I think Milo qualifies) can make a living that way.
Self publishing is fine if you can get your book distributed. If Amazon won’t touch you, you’re probably SOL. Amazon may not be as bad as certain other companies when it comes to this kind of stuff, but they DID jump right on the ban-the-Confederate-flag bandwagon, so they might well reject Milo.
Vox Day has said he will publish Milo and if Amazon rejects Milo, Vox has the capacity to sell a Milo eBook. I don’t think Amazon would risk rejecting Milo because it would give such a huge marketing opening to someone like Vox who would gleefully grab it.
I think you’re all overestimating Milo’s popularity, and underestimating how utterly toxic anything remotely connected to pedophilia is. This is not something that’s easy to bounce back from, especially when your entire shtick is “lol u mad” and all of a sudden you have to be sincere for the first time in your professional life.
Pedophilia’s only toxic if the Powers that Be want it to be; consider Lena Dunham.
Lena Dunham was never trying to be popular with the Right. Neither was Roman Polanski, to take the other obvious example.
Your misplaced cynicism notwithstanding, there are people who actually care about pedophilia per se, and aren’t just using it as an issue to destroy their enemies. There are people who stir up witch hunts against suspected pedophiles who are political nobodies and not symbolic of any political faction. There are people who sincerely, deeply care about pedophilia, and not in a good way. Tens of millions of them in the United States alone.
Almost all of them on the conservative side of the political spectrum. Pedophilia is toxic on the right even if the Powers That Be don’t want it to be, even if it is one of their favorites sons that got caught in the act. And unfortunately for Milo, the right is the only place that his act can grow beyond the lunatic fringe. So, while the people laying this accusations may be cynics who only yesterday were defending Roman Polanski, Milo has been neutralized. And it is the sincerely-held beliefs of people who would otherwise be on Milo’s side that will probably keep him neutralized.
In addition to Dunham and Polanski, there’s the segment in The Vagina Monologues that positively portrays a lesbian relationship between a girl and a significantly older woman. In the original version the girl was 13 and the segment ended with the line “it was a good rape”. That didn’t get much pushback (and certainly didn’t preclude the work’s massive popularity among campus feminists) until conservative critics picked up on it.
Another aspect to consider is that “all gay men are pedophiles” is basically the Blood Libel of male homosexuality, so Milo adding credence to that would get let-wing pushback even if he wasn’t otherwise odious to them.
FWIW the SJW segment of my Facebook feed isn’t so much criticizing Milo for his statements as taking the position “well he deserved to get axed for something, might as well be this” / “he’s been hoist by his own petard”. To their credit they noted he’s a victim of abuse and his behavior is consistent with one way people deal with that, but I did get one person saying “well, maybe it’s poetic justice for him making life harder for other victims”.
I don’t think it actually works that way. Riots don’t happen because Milo announces a speaking tour, riots happen because the Berkeley College Republicans announce a Milo speaking tour. And the Berkeley College Republicans are far more likely to invite an outspoken conservative to speak on their campus than they are an outspoken conservative pedophile.
I know of the people you’re talking about; they were actually my first introduction to what are now considered typical SJW tactics; they claim one should not employ a pedophile, not do business with them(not even so much as sell them groceries), etc. And they have a very wide definition of pedophile (not quite “anyone who thinks its OK to have sex under 30”, but not far from it). I don’t think there are tens of millions of them however.
There are tens of millions who are really, really disgusted by pedophilia, but whether or not this makes a difference depends on whether or not the smear sticks. A conservative college group who isn’t put off by Milo being flagrantly homosexual isn’t necessarily going to be put off by him saying a sexual relationship between someone over the current age of consent and someone under it isn’t always harmful.
While a lot of people right-of-center seem to have developed a misplaced loyalty to Milo, for the Alt Right his ejection over this is a huge positive.
A genuine populist movement cannot include those who would prey on our people’s children. Pedophiles and their apologists need to be stopped, period. Losing sight of this obvious fact is exactly the reason the establishment needs to be destroyed.
This isn’t an issue of him saying something unPC. His belief that gay men have the right to attack American boys is barely any less hostile to our society than those of Islamist rape gangs in Europe. There is no hypocrisy or weakness in this stance: quite the opposite.
European rape gangs aren’t Islamist.
I haven’t read any of this because frankly I don’t need that mess, but can anyone tell me what age range Milo was talking about re: minors?
17 year old? 9 year old? There is a difference. People get very hot under the collar about statutory rape when “but they’re nearly legal age, why shouldn’t they be considered able to consent? how is it rape if it’s a 19 year old and a 17 year old?” and then get equally hot under the collar about “he had sex with a minor!” when the minor is 17.
Just to clarify, I don’t think 40 year olds hitting on 17 year olds of whatever gender is a good thing, but is Milo saying “Hell yeah it’s fine for a grown man to have sex with a 12 year old” or is he saying “Hell yeah it’s fine for a grown man to have sex with a 15 year old?”
Because the British original version of Queer As Folk had exactly that, including a scene where he drops him off to school the morning after their one-night stand, and we were meant to take the older guy as one of the admirable lead characters standing up to homophobes and bigots, and nobody (including the boy’s mother) was one whit concerned that her son who was not of legal drinking age was hanging out in the nightclubs in Manchester’s gay area drinking and hooking up with older men. Just to clarify, age of consent in the UK is 16 and at the time it was 18 for gay couples, so the lead character was committing an offence – there were complaints but in general the show got rave reviews. The writer, Russell T. Davies, then went on to revitalise “Doctor Who” and create “Torchwood”.
I suppose the 90s were different?
I seem to recall a similar bit in The Vagina Monologues, not exactly a frothingly right-wing piece. It is a fairly old one, though, so maybe “different in the ’90s” has something to it.
The BBC has had a bit of a pedophile problem itself, and is a full participant in the culture wars in favor of the gay community. Which itself has a large problem providing cover for predators.
So a BBC series about “gay issues” which normalizes sex with children is, sadly, just something to be expected. We have a similar problem ourselves with Hollywood.
I only saw the video once out of morbid curiosity, but IIRC, Milo mentioned the age 14. I think he was explaining it in context of that he had a sexual relationship with a man 2x his age when he was 13-16 – in which he described himself as the predator in the relationship – and that he thought such a relationship could be a good thing. I don’t think he was condoning 30 year olds preying on prepubescents.
Daryl Davis is a black man who befriends KKK members, starting from a premise of trying to understand how people can hate him without knowing him, and also meeting people where they are.
He’s got about 30 KKK robes which were given to him by people who left the KKK.
There’s been a book by him for a while, but now there’s a movie, available on the PBS site until 2/28.
Do *not* watch it at Film Lush, they’re scammers.
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/videos/accidental-courtesy/
That guy gets my vote for man of the decade.
Here are a couple of reasons (beyond the obvious– that Davis is doing extraordinary work) to watch the movie.
One is that I suspect he’s doing something subtle that I’m not seeing. Most of what people say is at least somewhat predictable, but when Davis is talking with KKK members or neo-Nazis or whatever, what he says is normal and reasonable, but I couldn’t predict the particular points he would make.
The other is that this man who can turn KKK members was getting no traction at all (or none that I could see) with BLM members. Now, it’s possible that he’s starting a slow but effective process, or that the BLM conversation that was filmed was under less favorable circumstances (like being filmed), but I suspect that Social Justice is better armored against his sort of approach than old-fashioned racism is.
Could be that the fact that hes black is actually a disadvantage with BLM activists. With KKK members, maybe his biggest asset was the ability to give a sympathetic example of a black man.
For example, one theory of why gay rights came so far so fast is that once gay people became more open, they started being personal examples for people they knew.
My guess is that a non-angry middle-aged black man telling angry young black men to be less angry and confrontational with white people gets pattern-matched to Uncle Tom. KKK guys don’t, afaik, have a negative stereotype that’s convenient for dismissing a friendly, intelligent, respectable black guy.
It’s odd to me, but Davis may have more in common culturally speaking with racists his own age or older than with the BLM guys. For example, Davis can bond with older people by being quite a good jazz pianist, but I’ve gotten the impression that there are younger black people who have literally never heard jazz. (This comes up on NPR when a black person talks about discovering jazz as an adult.)
KKK members have handy stereotypes for dismissing *all* black people. Davis manages to undercut use of the stereotypes some of the time.
I really think the BLM argument was Davis not operating according to his principles– he wasn’t looking for common ground or meeting people where they are. It wouldn’t surprise me if he finds a way to talk to BLM members.
Well, I mean, with the KKK guys he’s going “why don’t you sit down and talk with me“, whereas with the BLM guys he’s going “why don’t you sit down and talk with them (white people)”. In the second case he’s not part of the outgroup he’s encouraging his interlocutors to make peace with, so he can’t be a living example of why their preconceptions are wrong.
What was he trying to convince the BLM members of?
To stop wearing hood(ie)s?
You could watch the movie, you know. The BLM bit starts at about 1:05. The time marker doesn’t work if you slide it (ends the movie), but you can estimate about 2/3 of the range and drop it in place.
He was trying to convince them to talk with white people (including white racists) instead of having a completely oppositional stance.
He was talking with two black men who thought he was wasting his time on white racists instead of directly helping black people. And when I say “wasting his time”, I mean making a serious mistake that he should be blamed for.
The conversation blew up. This is the only one where Davis lost his temper.
If you watch this, I hope you also watch more of the movie to see Davis in his element.
@Nancy,
Neargroup/fargroup again…
Appropos of the talk above about raising native birthrates: does anyone living in Denmark have any comments about how well this is doing?
Cypren, here reminds me of something I’ve wondered about. How do competent bosses get their information?
Formal survellance seems to dispirit people and take up their time and is at risk of being gamed.
Good bosses get their information somehow, but I’ve never seen this discussed.
More people naturally open up to those who are genuinely open or caring.
People naturally feel confident in telling them.
I think I’ve been a good boss over several previous positions. I dealt with the need for accurate information with a three-pronged approach. Listed in order of descending importance:
1. Make good hiring decisions, and be very choosy at this step. Good choices here will require far less supervision later, while bad choices might lead you into a trap without any good options.
2. Be kind, transparent, and reliable to your employees. You don’t need to be their friend, necessarily, but you should show reasonable compassion, keep your promises, and be open to them about their performance, their chances of promotion or pay increase, the structure of the company, etc. People respect this, and are likely to be pretty open with you in return, as well as being “kind” to your own goals by working hard, keeping promises, etc.
3. Informal surveillance. Least important of the lot, but does play a role. Be aware of what people do-but-don’t-say, through third party social contacts, official email logs, random “hey-how-ya-doing” desk drive-by visits, and by sharing their overall workspace (ie, no private office).
I mostly just ask my staff. What are you working on, how is it going, what are the biggest problems, what support do you need? Repeat once a week. So long as nobody is overtly lying to me, the biggest issue is someone being too shy or insecure to ask for the support they need, which fortunately isn’t a problem with my current staff. On my end, that’s the most important question to ask, and I need to come through with the support they ask for if I want them to keep being open about it.
I also ask the customers (broadly speaking) how things are going from their perspective, and whether they are getting the support they need. If the staff were outright lying to me, this is where I’d catch it. More generally, if the customers are happy, my staff is almost by definition doing their job.
If employees lying to me was a major problem, I’d be looking for a different set of employees or a different job. I do understand that the economy as a whole depends on being able to get useful work even out of people who really rather wouldn’t and are willing to lie in the name of shirking; that’s not my corner of the economy, and I don’t know how managers on that side do it.
I’ve generally found that the most important thing is to cultivate friendly relationships with people on the ground level of your organization. In any large company that has multiple layers of management, the ladder-climbers have a strong tendency to advance (as I outlined in that post) and it’s very difficult to create a system that successfully selects against socially-skilled but ethically-challenged people gaining status and power. (Just like politics!) As a result, information that filters up to executive management will frequently be full of lies and half-truths designed to make the various managers in the chain seem like heroes and shift blame for anything going wrong elsewhere.
But the worker bees on the ground know what’s going on and who’s responsible, typically; if a project is failing, people are working long hours, or product requirements are shifting every other day because manager X isn’t actually leading and is just taking every piece of feedback as the new gospel, the workers know about it. The key is to get that information out of them in a way that they feel comfortable telling you and not like they’re risking their own careers.
Social activities help a lot here. If your division has a soccer league or a foosball night, the VP should definitely play alongside the workers. Go out to dinner with them. Make it clear you’re all in the same team so that they’re comfortable talking to you and don’t see you as some Sauron-like figure hovering over the heads of their captains and warchiefs. You learn more that way than you’ll ever learn by reading the reports of your middle management.
Somewhat relevant to Trump’s “last night in Sweden” speech. True, a couple of nights ago nothing happened, but this night in Sweden there was a (possibly) immigrant riot in Rinkeby, Stockholm.
SVT: Riot in Rinkeby, the police fires warning shots, one officer lightly wounded. Cars burning, shops looted. Emergency services too scared to enter the area. Google Translate.
Then the police updated their statement: “They weren’t warning shots, we are just lousy shoots.”Translate.
SVT is the BBC of Sweden, so naturally the article does not mention that Rinkeby is predominantly immigrant area. Assailants were masked.
Precognition or time-travel? Discuss!
Everybody already knows Rinkeby is a predominantly immigrant area.
Someone theorised about Trump being a time traveller in a previous open thread, so this is just further confirmation of that.
Make America’s future great again!
Listen, Donald Trump has come unstuck in time. Donald has gone to sleep as a octogenarian grandfather and awoken as a young man on his wedding day. He has walked through a door in 2017 and come out another one in 1968. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1983. He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the moments in between.
Let’s hope he can get Planned Parenthood defunded before the guy who grows up to lead the rebellion against Skynet gets aborted.
That friend’s name? Kyle Reese
DUN dun dun DUN DUN
Trump isn’t a time-traveler, he’s simply the protagonist in the simulation game that is this universe. Everything is going implausibly well for him because he’s the main hero; all the rest of us are simulated personalities that exist to make it a rich experience for him.
What would Thiel be, in this scenario?
Proto-morlock. It’s only a matter of time before his thirst for young blood evolves into something a hunger for something more… meaty.
Thiel is Thiel, only tweaked to support Trump. Everybody is the same person they are in real life, only copied into the simulation and warped to whatever degree necessary to ensure that Trump has the best experience possible.
I think this actually some sort of politics-themed tabletop roleplaying game. Trump is a min-maxer, who’s taken all sorts of negative traits (Buffoonish, Inarticulate, Orange) to boost his stats in Charisma, Luck and Political Cunning.
That’s terrible optimization, though. You want to have negative traits that affect abilities you aren’t planning to use much; Inarticulate and Buffoonish penalize Charisma rolls!
Maybe he had to roll on a chart for disadvantages in return for extra starting wealth and connections?
@ nimim.k.m.
Then the police updated their statement: “They weren’t warning shots, we are just lousy shoots.”Translate.
I would suspect hacking somewhere around the Translate process.
I don’t see this quote, and I’m not sure if nimim.k.m. intended it as a literal quote. The article says – Det stämmer, de första uppgifterna var att det var varningsskott, men poliserna sköt mot stenkastarna men missade, säger Tony Lagerkrantz, stationsbefäl vid Solnapolisen. — which seems to translate to ” – That’s right, the first information was that it was warning shots, but the police fired at the stone throwers, but missed, says Tony Lagerkrantz, station officer at the Solna police. ” I don’t actually know Swedish, but it’s similar enough to English to pick out words like “warning shots” and “missed”.
The translation is completely accurate.
Yes, I was paraphrasing for the effect, not quoting literally. The updated statement says that they also shot at the people throwing stones and missed, not just warning shots (presumably in the air and meant to miss) as previously reported. In other words, the situation could have ended far worse (rioters dead) than the initial reports suggested.
I want Trump to go on TV right away and praise that cancer cure they discovered last night in Sweden.
Today I saw Crystal Pepsi for sale, and I bought a bottle just for the hell of it. It tastes pretty much the same as a normal Pepsi or Coke (tasted a little odd to me, but that’s probably because I’m used to the taste of diet cola). Aside from the novelty of a cola that looks like a 7Up or seltzer there’s really not much to it, and I can see why it failed the first time around.
Of course it uses the ’90s Pepsi logo and it’s being sold for the nostalgia factor. Next to it there were a few bottles of Diet Pepsi with the ’00s light blue label, advertised as having the “classic sweetener” since current silver-label Diet Pepsi has switched from aspartame to something else. Nostalgia may be lapping itself.
But reading up on the product is where things get interesting. Coca-Cola responded to Crystal Pepsi with Tab Clear, a nasty cinnamon-flavored diet soda. According to one executive interviewed years later, it was an intentionally unattractive “kamikaze” product meant to tar “clear cola” with the uncoolness of Tab and diet drinks in general. Nobody was supposed to like Tab Clear, and the hope was that they’d associate it with Crystal Pepsi and make it fail too. I don’t know how well this strategy worked versus how much Crystal Pepsi just failed because the novelty wore off, but I’ve never heard of a company trying this before.
(Contrast New Coke, which despite the rumors was not meant to fail so Classic Coke would bounce back more strongly, nor was it a distraction from the replacement of cane sugar with HFCS in the formula, which happened a couple of years earlier. It was a blunder, plain and simple.)
I’ve heard that the “craft-style” beers put out by Budweiser and Miller serve a similar purpose: they’re intentionally made to taste bad so that people will not be tempted to switch to microbrews. I don’t know if that’s true.
Wouldn’t that strategy only work if retailers are willing to stock the kamikaze product, and enough customers purchase it such that its horrible taste becomes known to the public in general?
How exactly does Coke convince Wal-Mart to go along with something like that?
I never heard of “Tab Clear” in the first go-round; when I think of clear beverages of that era it’s Zima (which somehow became popular despite the terrible taste) and Crystal Pepsi.
I don’t think the major brewers craft-style beers are intended to taste bad. Blue Moon isn’t notable for being terrible, nor Killians, for instance.
An ad for Tab Clear. For me this slips into Poe’s Law territory – you can’t tell if they sincerely thought this would make people buy their soda or they were trying to make clear cola seem ridiculous.
The “kamikaze” explanation comes from Sergio Zyman, who may have just been trying to make himself look good. He was the man behind two other big flops out of the Coca-Cola Co.: New Coke and OK Soda. (On the other hand, he also came up with Fruitopia. There’s a thought for a nostalgia campaign – maybe they could bring back a ’90s product people actually liked during the ’90s.)
There’s a celebrity endorsement available for that one too!
One thing that I didn’t consciously notice until you made this comparison, even though it was true the first time around… it really doesn’t look like 7up. It is (and was) sold in a clear (uncolored) bottle. Clear sodas otherwise tend to be sold in green bottles, even though most other sodas are sold in clear bottles. A clear liquid in a clear bottle, nothing else looks like that except water. EDIT: Or some brands of cream soda, I guess. (which weakens the point)
Not sure whether it means anything, just something that might have affected how it was perceived (people expecting it to taste even more “clear”?)
Seltzer comes in clear bottles, but it’s almost never drunk straight out of the bottle.
Tonic water as well.
The other odd thing is, while most sodas that come in green bottles (not all of which are clear – squirt is cloudy white and mountain dew is green) are citrus flavored, not all are lime flavored (squirt and fresca are grapefruit flavored, mountain dew is nondescript but contains orange juice)
I also remember one of the ‘uncanny valley’ aspects of the alternative 7-up flavor “dnL” was that it was green and was in a clear bottle.
I doubt there’s a deeper meaning to any of this, just weird unspoken cultural assumptions about how products are packaged.
My best guess is that most people don’t have a strong desire to have children. It was good enough for evolution that people like sex and are mostly willing to raise such children as they’ve got.
Until recently, the lack of large scale support for old people meant that there was a practical reason to have a lot of children. (It doesn’t matter whether the support is government programs or pensions.)
Also, the desire for grandchildren may be stronger than the desire for children. When adults were in closer contact with their parents, it was easier to apply effective pressure.
Of course, the big deal is availability of birth control.
One added pressure against having children these days is parents competing with each other for how much time and money they can put into their children.
I’m not sure what can be done– getting back to the discussion above, perhaps more can be done to teach parents how to have good relationships with their children. I think a fair amount has already been done along those lines– my impression is that the younger people I know are much less likely to hate their parents than people from my generation, and more likely to have good relationships.
In the bad old days, it was just considered normal for parents to use their children as emotional dumping grounds. There were limits, but they were pretty wide.
However, it’s plausible that the good relationships make life better, but just with one or two children.
It’s possible that the human race is going through a bottleneck– people who want children, whether for genetic or memetic reasons– are going to outbreed people who don’t want children. There could be a second demographic transition, but this time towards larger families.
My best guess is that most people don’t have a strong desire to have children. It was good enough for evolution that people like sex and are mostly willing to raise such children as they’ve got.
Could it be that the change is that now there are other desirable options that are not as readily available once you have children? In the past you might not have had options for entertainment that would have given you a reason for putting off children. It might also explain why people are having children starting later in life; they’re starting to get to the point where age and maturity is starting to limit what they can do, so having a child blocks off less options.
The friends I know who have kids are now limited in choice of entertainment by their children’s schedules. It’s also worse now in that you are expected to be constantly supervising your children when they are not at school to a far greater extent than when I was growing up. It also might be that there’s a point when enough of the people around you have children that having children yourself opens up more options than it takes away.
There are a bunch of changes, though I believe the tremendous increase in entertainment for adults happened after the big drop in the birthrate.
It’s possible that fewer adults having children– and adults having fewer childrne– is part of what drove the increase in entertainment for adults.
Well it is obvious that the genes of people who want children will be selected for in future generations. I don’t think there is any possibility of humans dying out for lack of interest.
For the record, I have kids and I can’t imagine going through life without having kids. I find it hard to believe that a majority of folks don’t feel pretty much the same. And I think most people do have kids, and with the effectiveness of contraception these days, I think that shows that most people do want kids.
“Well it is obvious that the genes of people who want children will be selected for in future generations.”
But what else is selected for with that desire? To quote a different post on the topic from the blogger I linked earlier,
There is an interesting article on how recent campaigns, in particular the Trump campaign, have used the tools provided by social media and the internet more generally, to get the process of targeting ads down to the individual level. The approach uses information about individuals relevant to what sort of argument will persuade them, largely obtained via Facebook, and feedback at the individual level, seeing what worked with someone in order to decide what to try on him next.
The author is concerned with the effects of the technology on democracy, partly perhaps because the current cutting edge work seems to be being done mostly for conservative clients, but it isn’t clear that it changes much from the older and cruder technologies used for similar purposes.
The same technologies have obvious implications for commercial advertising.
I had a blog post on it, thought people might be interested in discussing it here.
Interesting. It seems like a few short months ago I was questioning the notion that Hillary’s campaign was clearly better at using data while Trump was relying on the crude dark arts of “persuasion” and various individuals here were insisting to me that this HAD to be the case, because silicon valley leans liberal and such….
Re “What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing?:
For perhaps the first time in my life, I have felt viscerally offended by someone online stating a theoretical position: the Roman Catholic Church, saying my parents’ marriage is invalid because my mother (who was baptized as an infant in the Roman Church but left upon adulthood) neglected (years later, after coming back to Christianity and joining a Protestant church) to ask Rome’s permission to get married in a Protestant service. This does follow from their premises, and it’d have near-zero practical consequences; in the astronomically-unlikely instance that either of my parents joined the Roman Catholic Church, I’m told marriages can be “convalidated” as a matter of course.
But still, I feel extremely offended.
Can Catholic commenters clarify if the RCC thinks all non-Catholic marriages are invalid? Otherwise it doesn’t seem a very consistent position, if that is the only reason given.
That said, I don’t see why a non-Catholic would care.
From my reading, they say that if you’ve been baptized Catholic, you need to get married in a Catholic church or go through the process and get a dispensation. If you haven’t been baptized Catholic (e.g. me, baptized Protestant), they don’t care as long as you marry one person of the opposite sex.
And I’m not totally sure why I care. As far as I can tell, it’s because they’re just close enough to me that I consider them heretics instead of outgroup… but even then, when they say contraception is a sin and second marriages after divorce aren’t valid, I don’t mind. Maybe it’s just that I don’t get offended on behalf of Hypothetical Future Contracepting Self, or on behalf of the divorced members of my extended family?
To me it seems like trying to have it both ways–if they can require Catholics to get married in a Catholic service, then is a $CatholicMarriage or regular marriage?
It’d be like saying, if you have been baptized, you need to have confession to be saved, but if you are not Catholic you are saved automatically or just by dint of feeling remorseful after major sins.
Also, if someone is no longer practicing, indeed has converted to another sect, then why do the Catholic requirements still apply?
But still, it’s of an intellectual disagreement; I don’t see any reason to get “offended” by it any more than a vegan accusing meat-eaters of murder.
You’re logically right; I should be offended by both or neither.
But – as far as I can remember, for the very first time – my emotions refuse to cooperate, and I am indeed offended.
I mean, you’re talking about sacramental validity, right? Protestants don’t get Catholic sacraments, I don’t see why you think they should. The opposite position also offends people, like when Mormons nonconsensually posthumously baptize people. I think on the whole it is better if people keep their sacred rites within their own communities of worship, and providing an easy method of sacramentalizing your marriage when you convert seems like a good compromise.
I mean, all western religions seem to have some concept of which sexual relationships between people of other religions are “marriages” and which are living in sin. The claim seems to be that an ex-Catholic* who has a non-catholic marriage is not married and therefore will go to hell for fornication**, not merely that they don’t have the magic Catholic pixie dust.
* in this case it’s someone regarded as having been catholic on the basis of a baptism but no adult practice of the religion, but I’m not sure it’s important.
**a status that does not apply to other protestant marriages
Just leaving the Catholic Church is enough to send you to hell though, right? In principle, though of course the ways of God are mysterious? When you convert to Protestantism you’re turning your back on God’s grace, that’s a big nono. And if you do reconvert obviously you’re going to realign yourself with God. Does it really matter if you go to hell for fornication or for mockery of the Holy Eucharist?
Sure, because there’s still the question of which level of Hell you land on. The lustful just get blown around by wind a lot. Mockers of the Holy Eucharist might land on levels 6 or 8, which are way worse. l2Dante
Right, so the main problem is being Protestant to begin with, not any bureaucratic oversights regarding your marriage. Although I am fairly confident that The Divine Comedy is not actual Catholic doctrine.
You can’t prove a negative, so you can’t prove that Divine Comedy is not Catholic doctrine.
I understand intellectually the complaints about Mormons posthumously baptizing people, but it’s also pretty interesting in that unlike a lot of other religious restrictions it’s sort of forced inclusion instead of exclusion.
Being an atheist and thinking that I simply cease to exist when I die, but not being 100% certain about this, I can’t help but feel that I’d prefer a theoretical world where all religions were really into this posthumous baptism thing. It gives me a chance to have my cake and eat it too. Then again, my vague thirdhand understanding of Mormon theology on the afterlife is that it’s rather nicer to nonbelievers than most Protestant sects already…
@ quanta413
If Mormons are the only ones offering cake after death, that’s one situation. But if others religions do it too, that could make for some interesting competitions on the Styx. Oh dear….
Thanks, but I think you’re confusing a few points. As I understand it, if I got married tomorrow to another lifelong Protestant, and converted to Catholicism next week, they’d receive me as married without any convalidation required: two Protestants got married, no problem. Conversely, if I got divorced in the meantime and then converted, they’d say I was still married: marriage between two Protestants (or any other non-Catholics, for that matter) is a very real thing.
The difference is that if someone got baptized Catholic as an infant and then got married outside the Catholic Church, suddenly the answers to both these scenarios change: they would need to get their marriage convalidated, and if they got divorced, they could remarry because the first marriage (in Rome’s eyes) wasn’t even real.
Was she confirmed? I’m not a Catholic, and really don’t know much about their traditions and laws. But what you claim seems unlikely just because of a baptism-as-a-baby. It seems likely it would also take an adult, freely chosen, confirmation.
This happened to my wife and me, so I can tell you my story here.
My wife was baptized as a Roman Catholic soon after she was born, apparently to please her father’s mother. However, her mother was a Baptist, and her father didn’t practice, so she was raised Baptist, but was never enthusiastic about it.
I was raised Lutheran, and still am actively Lutheran. So, when we married, we were married by a Lutheran pastor. Twenty years and four children later, my wife converted to Roman Catholicism (apparently Lutheranism is a gateway drug). While undergoing the requisite conversion classes, she learned that since she was baptized a Roman Catholic, the Roman Catholic church would not consider our marriage valid, since it had not been officiated by a Roman Catholic priest (a “canonical impediment”). As a consequence, communion was withheld from her until this could be rectified.
Her parish priest told us that the thing to do was to have our marriage officially recognized by “renewal of consent”. That is, he would marry us, and our marriage would be officially recognized by the Roman Catholic church from that time forward. My position was that our marriage was already valid, and if the Roman Catholic church couldn’t recognize that, it was the Roman Catholic church’s mistake and not ours. (Fortunately, my wife understood, and really agreed, although she would have been fine with just doing what the priest wanted to do and move on.)
The priest would have simply left it at that, but I figured even the Roman Catholic church can’t be that bone-headed, so I went and looked through the canon law on the subject myself. That’s when I found out about “radical sanation”, in which the bishop (apparently even the pope himself may be necessary in extreme cases) can revalidate the marriage “by reason of consent formerly given”, and then the marriage is considered valid ab initio. It required paperwork and witness statements and the assistance of a canon lawyer, but essentially we went over the parish priest’s head, and the deed was done. (Fortunately, that priest has since been reassigned, and the current priest is much better.) I joke with my wife that she’s stuck with me now, since she can never get our marriage annulled now that a bishop has officially recognized it, and I have the paperwork to prove it.
Thanks for sharing your experience, that’s interesting.
Thanks for that information!
Immigration restrictionists: Can you think of any set of criteria such that, if a potential immigrant meets all those criteria, they should be allowed to immigrate?
Motivation: part of what makes immigration regimes seem unjust is that they are arbitrary by design – lots of lotteries and quotas. I’d like to know what a restrictionist agenda would look like that sets clear criteria for admission which are under the control of the individual.
My guess, but I’m not a restrictionist and I suspect I’m off:
(a) pass a language exam e.g. 90 on the TOEFL
(b) no criminal record
(c) pay a one time fee equal to a year of median income, either to pay for government services or just to prove you have the skills needed to make money
(e) Publicly spit on a selection of holy books to show you are not a fanatic
I don’t think (e) will work. Fanatics aren’t that stupid. They’ll justify it to themselves just like they justify going out to see strippers before committing terrorism. And you left out (d).
(a) will never work because of children, family reunification, etc. Some limits should be put on extended family family reunification, but that’s a problem in Europe and I don’t know enough about European immigration problems to really make suggestions here.
(c) may help but is completely impractical because of refugees. Perhaps what you need are two separate sets of restrictions, one for economic immigrants and one for refugees.
(d) was deliberately inflammatory so I deleted it.
And (e) isn’t?
Never claimed to be consistent!
I would fight to the metaphorical death against any regime that includes (e) and interprets it to always include the immigrant’s own holy book. I would be blocked by that standard, as would millions of my fellow Christians (and millions of Muslims and Jews too) who would never do anything remotely like terrorism. There’s far too much collateral damage.
Also, I’d be extremely reluctant to impose (c) as a requirement to immigrate. For citizenship several years after immigration – or even for permanent residency – it might be fine. But as it is, you’re asking the prospective immigrant to earn $50,000 disposable income while living in his old country… and in a lot of countries with lower standard of living, that’s basically impossible.
All this said, I like the idea of a more predictable system with requirements under individual control. But you’re going to need to change the requirements a whole lot.
Playing off hog^5’s comment above: Immigration less-restrictionists, but not open-borders advocates, what immigration restrictions do you support, and more importantly, what enforcement mechanisms are you okay with using?
Motivation: Many people seem to agree The Wall won’t be particularly effective, but at the same time deporting anybody who’s not a convicted serial killer gets a ton of negative coverage. Basically I’ve noticed some wishy-washiness: Democrats aren’t pushing for open borders explicitly, or even substantially loosening legal immigration restrictions, but they do want to make it increasingly difficult to prevent illegal immigration or the current population of unauthorized immigrants.
I know there’s a lot of distrust on the restrictionist side regarding amnesties, and I think that distrust is somewhat justified. Nonetheless as a non-open borders but generally pro-immigration person I think any solution has to involve a distinction between the stock and the flow.
While I think a literal wall is simply not very cost effective, I have no problem with a more reasonable version of the same. And I think it would be very reasonable to couple some sort of earned legalization for the stock with much more effective enforcement against companies that utilize black and gray market labor. Dry up the jobs and you dry up the flow.
I’d also like to see things like crackdowns on the H1B body shops that everyone agrees are a problem except their clients, the enforcement of affidvaits of support, more scrutiny of bogus asylum claims, and similar.
I’m all for an expansive immigration policy — including the unskilled labor that we clearly need, the high skill labor that increases the size of the pie, and a humane and generous refugee policy. But I want it to be orderly, not have winners be whoever can lie, cheat, or steal their way in. I realize that a strict application of those principles would suggest deporting the stock too, but I think that is neither practical nor humane.
I agree there needs to be a distinction between the “stock” and the “flow” in a practical sense, but there seems to be a push to treat anyone who gets a foot down as “stock” and to treat efforts to enforce existing law strictly (even for new immigrants) as racist. See “sanctuary cities”. How do we avoid that, and the obvious consequence of that policy, serial amnesties?
The wall is somewhat attractive in that the border itself seems to be the one place Democrats are comfortable enforcing immigration law.
I’m not sure that your characterization is fair, at least not beyond the fringes. Cubans had a wet foot / dry foot policy exactly as you describe — one foot in and you were home free. Obama eliminated the policy and for the rest turned a lot of people back at or near the border. Those people at or near the border were counted as deported and then there was a whole debate about whether that was accurate, but I don’t think anyone disagrees about the underlying fact that Obama was not slacking as compared to GWB at the southern border.
As for sanctuary cities, I think there’s two issues.
One, immigration policy really isn’t a city’s problem. The federalism thing works both ways. If you don’t think a city should have to enforce the nation’s drug laws, why should they have to enforce the nation’s immigration laws? At the local level there really are trade-offs in terms of cooperation from the communities. Let the federal government hire people to enforce federal law.
Two, stocks and flows. ICE isn’t making a distinction. Cities might be more willing to cooperate if it was about drying up flows than they are if they are being asked to go after people embedded in these cities for long periods of time.
—
As a general note, I find your comments such as “seems to be a push … racist” and “the one place Democrats are comfortable …” as examples of unhelpful and inaccurate sweeping generalization about the left that occurs here with some frequency.
I’m not intending to make sweeping generalizations of the left – in this case I’m strictly limiting myself to what appears to be the consensus view of the Democratic Party and their immediate supporters, as I’m exposed to them (less so here – which is why I’m seeking a more nuanced response precisely among this forum!)
Do you deny that “opposing illegal immigration is racist (or ‘lacks compassion’ or ‘is against American values’)” is a common Democratic talking point? I really don’t want to paint with an overbroad brush, but pretending that’s not part of the ongoing rhetoric is also unhelpful.
I’m aware of the wet foot / dry foot policy, and that Obama stopped it. That this (and his border enforcement that got tracked as deportment) went off largely without comment supports my statement that Democrats are largely more supportive of border enforcement than deportation from the interior.
I buy the federalism argument for sanctuary cities to some degree (though I do think there’s a line between “not actively cooperating” and “actually obstructing” worth talking about).
But I’m not interested in sanctuary cities per se so much as what policies you’d support that would make them in your view unnecessary. (In this case “you” applies to anyone who thinks our current policies are too restrictive but open borders are not restrictive enough).
EDIT: I’ll admit I was potentially overbroad on “stock vs flow”. So where do you draw the distinction? How long must someone be here before they are “stock” (presumably deserving of amnesty in your view) vs. “flow” (those you’d be okay with deporting, if I’m reading you right)?
Fair enough. I’m making an attempt to point these things out regularly and calmly instead of rarely and nastily.
I don’t agree. I think suggesting that all the illegal immigrants already in the country be deported is branded with ‘lacks compassion’ or ‘is against American values’ along with something like wanting to cut the number of refugees. Xenophobia may also be thrown in there.
Racism, in my experience, seems to be reserved for those that want to focus in on Mexicans as if they were the only illegal immigrants and imply or outright state that Mexicans in general or Mexican illegal immigrants in particular are pervasively or uniquely terrible people.
I was alive in 1986, but I wasn’t politically aware. Clearly the law that was supposed to couple an amnesty with effective controls going forward didn’t work. Was it foreseeable at the time that it wouldn’t work? Is it a problem with the law that was passed or the way it was enforced? These are questions I don’t know the answers to, but am interested in.
Nothing we do is going to stop all illegal immigration, but I think we could do a lot better. In particular, I think we could do a lot more to dry up the demand for off the books labor. Companies and company owners have a lot more to lose than a poor desperate illegal immigrant trying to cross the border. Send some farmers, restaurateurs, and landscaping moguls to prison and you’ll see their fellow business owners sit up and take notice.
Exactly who in the current stock should be able to take advantage of earned legalization is a tricky question. I don’t have a good solid answer I can defend. The dreamer that was brought here as a two year old and just got admitted to Harvard, yes, the guy caught 100 miles from the border he crossed last week definitely no.
Likewise what we should do in the steady state about people that do manage to enter under the new regime and stick around for long stretches of time is another thorny question. I would hope we’d be talking about a much smaller number, but it wouldn’t’ be zero.
If you take nothing else away from this exchange, I’d hope that you’d take away that “build a wall” pushes people away that are open to the idea of trying to stop people from illegally entering the U.S.
And what about sanctuary cities that don’t want to comply with enforcement?
What about them? It isn’t NYC’s job to enforce federal immigration law anymore than it is Seattle’s job to enforce federal drug law.
If you want to abolish the federal system, get rid of the Senate and the Electoral College and go to unitary system, well I’ll certainly keep an open mind to any proposal you might offer.
Instead of playing chicken with the economic engines of the country why don’t the Republicans make E-Verify mandatory already? Or issue a social security card that has more security against duplication than a typical library card?
So you would be ok with states not enforcing labor or environmental laws? What about a state that decided not to recognize gay marriages? It cuts both ways.
I don’t think states enforce federal labor law. At least not to any great extent. And I’m fine with that.
I’m not sure about environmental law. I think there’s some kind of thing where states can have their own rules instead of the federal rules but have to submit them for approval? To be honest I don’t remember the details or never knew them in the first place.
But anyway, yes I’m fine with a strict interpretation of the anti-commandeering doctrine. If federalism means anything it means that city cops answer to the agenda of the mayor, not the president. Doesn’t mean that they can themselves violate federal law, but they aren’t federal law enforcement. If we need more FBI agents, then we should hire more FBI agents not draft the NYPD.
I want you to keep this in mind the next time a conservative state decides not to enforce a federal rule because I honestly don’t believe this is a principled stand on your part.
The rules that conservative states might not want to enforce, e.g. environmental protection or gun control, are rules where the federal government has already taken over the bulk of the enforcement. I don’t think there is any parallel to the situation where the federal government e.g. bans marijuana but doesn’t immediately arrest anyone running a dispensary.
@John
How convenient for Brad.
I believe you had a late edit in regarding gay marriage. I don’t remember seeing it there when I replied originally. Between that and your more recent comment, I think perhaps you don’t understand the anti-commandeering doctrine and how it differs from nullification. If you hadn’t accused me of lying about what I believe I might elaborate, but as it stands you can do your own research.
I don’t think you’re lying. It’s the same way that people who complained about Obamas golf sessions but are silent about Trumps weren’t lying then. It’s just that principles tend to be forgotten when it’s “my side” doing something.
For what it’s worth, I’ll concede to conflating nullification and anti-commandeering.
@Wrong Species
My take is, I don’t believe it’s a principled stand on anyone’s part (but the conservatives shot first). Some laws are good and should be enforced, others are bad and should not be enforced, and anyone who cares about some law being enforced or not will take what they can get on who’s doing the enforcing/obstructing.
If you don’t believe that (marijuana / illegal immigration / gay marriage / guns / the environment) is actually good or bad, then what’s the point of obsessing over what size unit of government has authority over what area?
No-one who supports sanctuary cities was supporting Arizona’s extralegal immigration enforcement games, or vice versa, because they care about the issue, not about state vs federal. State vs federal has been nothing more than a smokescreen since 1865.
(deleted my old comment because it was stupid and duplicative)
When someone you don’t like is elected President, that’s when you really want “we are ruled by law, not ruled by man.”
But we can’t have “rule by law” if laws are ignored when inconvenient.
I know most people flip on issues regardless of the law. They should not be celebrated nor encouraged. We need to get more people into the “rule of law” camp, not abandon it. Remember, some day you might really hate who is President!
(You don’t have to accept that all laws are just. But when you weaken the rule of law in your favor, you are also weakening the rule of law not in your favor. See of course A Man For All Seasons.)
I guess I’m more deontological than I thought.
(About federalism)
It may depend on what you mean by a principled stand.
You can be in favor of “innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” even though you also wish a particular criminal who is going to get off under that standard would be convicted and punished.
Similarly here. You can believe that having decisions made at the state level whenever the decision of one state has most of its effects on inhabitants of the state is a good policy because, on average, it produces better outcomes, even if there are particular cases where you prefer the outcome of having the decision made at the federal level instead.
Answering hog^5’s question: Certainly anybody who did all those things should be allowed to immigrate, but they seem pretty over the top.
I’d be fine with anyone (with no upper limit) with a demonstrated ability to produce income / not be a burden on the state, placed on a say 5-year probationary period, at the end of which they’d be expected to demonstrate familiarity with US law etc. and that they’d integrated into the community (the last part is fuzzy, but I basically mean “aren’t an itinerant hobo”, and have the recommendation of some naturalized citizens). Also that they’d been employed for the majority of the time (or lived with a head-of-household who was), were not delinquent on their taxes (or maybe their private debts as well), and had not been convicted of any felonies. During the 5-year period they’d be ineligible for most benefits (but their kids could attend public school).
At any point during the 5 years they get one free-return: we’ll ship you back to your home country at low or no cost to you, but if you try to re-immigrate you have to wait 5 years and start the process over.
Jus soli would not apply to any child born to the probationary immigrant. Deportation for those failing probation would be humane but strict. We would enforce the border and visa overstays more strictly as well.
I will summarize my favorite idea from your response to make sure I understand:
“Rather than making the immigration bottleneck be getting a green card, make the bottleneck “graduating” from green card to citizenship, put a hard time limit on “graduation”, and don’t apply jus soli for children of green card holders to avoid hacking.”
(Note that this could result in a large number of foreigners with no real intention to assimilate.)
Basically that, yes. I would structure the requirements as much as possible to encourage assimilation, though I’m personally fuzzy on what that would actually look like.
I should also add that I’d favor much stricter enforcement of employment laws, and harsher punishments for offending employers.
What if their country of origin has Jus soli and this would make the child stateless?
Most countries do not have birthright citizenship. What is the way they handle this?
The usual alternative to jus soli is jus sanguinis, though a number of countries (including the US) have a mixture of both.
“Jus soli would not apply to any child born to the probationary immigrant.”
Jus soli is part of the Citizenship Clause of the 14 Amendment, and would require Constitutional amendment to remove:
(See also US v. Wong Kim Ark.)
Didn’t claim it was practical or easy, but the so-called “anchor baby” is a problem. Taking the parents away from a child is always going to be a tough sell. Changing or re-interpreting the 14th Amendment (there’s the “under the jurisdiction of” hook in there to play with) is probably easier.
To random832’s question, how many, if any, states are exclusively jus soli? I can’t think of any offhand. Most children would be citizens of wherever their immigrant parent is from.
This is silly. If you deport alien parents with a citizen son or daughter, the obvious answer is that they take their son or daughter with them and raise them in their home, not that you split them up. Then, assuming we retain the silly current interpretation of birthright citizenship, he can come back when he wants to seek his fortune in the land of his birth.
Note that, AFAIK, Randy’s system is the one currently in force.
(Alternatively, if the citizen child has non-illegal-immigrant relatives in the US, he can stay with them. Which is also a good thing.)
That’s one solution, but is going to get spun as deporting a citizen, and there’s the potential difficulty of the home state not re-accepting the child (but it’s likely the child would have jus sanguinus status there). Personally I still think them getting automatic citizenship rights when they come of age is still going to encourage a lot of baby tourism (and inevitable begging for “family reunification”), which is a negative. But yeah, probably easier than changing the 14th amendment overall.
The big problem is that it’s unjust to discriminate against someone on the basis of ethnicity, which becomes innate in early childhood, yet ethnic groups are cultures that vary in crime statistics, work ethic, etc.
Also, the native working class may have real grievances against a “reserve army of labor” even if the immigrants are as law-abiding and industrious as themselves. One can, I think, empathize with this without accepting the ridiculous racism it can lead to.*
*See “… Chinaman sitting on a railroad fence, trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents.” Curse those thrifty Chinese laborers!
There’s no easy solution to this, even in a better world where we didn’t have to deal with the specific problem of Muslim immigration.
While I agree with you, part of the game is to figure out “what can convince me, a person who believes that Arab Muslims are disproportionately likely to blow something up for nonsensical reasons, a Vietnamese is particularly likely to out-compete me, and a Frenchman is particularly likely to fatally corrupt Western civilization, that this particular Arab Muslim/Vietnamese/Frenchman is good to be around?” I think there should exist practical answers that can convince even true xenophobes.
When you view these ‘deep philosophical and ethical’ debates as simply a network of simulated machines trying to estimate a function with severe collinearity (i.e. what you noted with ethnic groups and cultures varying together), it really kills lots of the ‘profound insights’ behind ethical philosophy.
It’s also awkward when you think about how it takes more work to disentangle phenomena, and different people vary on dimensions of both IQ/ability, and time/interest to research. For some it’s ‘Muslim immigrants’ for that same view, but refined at a higher IQ level, it’s a cultural clash between liberal Europeans and North African Muslims. The more time you invest, the more you can refine and sharpen your view.
If I was chosen as one of Trump’s New Founding Fathers*, I’d probably use a two-pronged approach to citizenship as follows:
A. A genetic test to show that you’re a member of one of the major demographics present in 1776 (English, Scots-Irish, Dutch, German, African-American freedmen) or a native American / Alaskan / Hawaiian / etc. Then pass a basic test of English literacy and American civics, plus a background check. Finally, pledge allegiance to the flag and obtain citizenship.
B. Honorable discharge from any branch of the US Military or a (revived) Civilian Public Service unit.
*Not so sure about his 28th amendment though…
28th Amendment? Are you referring to any specific proposal?
It’s a reference to this movie series.
Is the possibility that who I let in my home is arbitrarily decided make it unjust that I don’t let in everybody? There is no right to enter the country. It isn’t in the Constitution. If we decided that not a single other person should be allowed to immigrate to this country then that’s our prerogative. Now we do want immigration, at least to some extent, but we don’t need to justify ourselves.
And if we decided we needed x thousands upright young new citizens, and there are 100 million people who are interested in filling those positions, we are going to end up with some arbitrary rewards, no matter how objective we try to make the criteria.
Auction them off.
That would be a perfectly fair solution, but seems like it would rub progressives the wrong way. No more accepting poor and huddled masses, huh? Picture cartoons of the statue of liberty with overflowing bags of gold demanding the widow’s mite.
I don’t need to believe that there is a right to enter the country, in order to believe that it would be more just if our system were more responsive to the actions of the individuals whom it affects. In fact you can believe as a matter of meta-ethics that rights don’t exist, and live in a failed state with no constutional rights, and still believe that some states of affairs are more just than others.
I have no idea what that has to do with immigration.
Nothing. I’d have the same response to any argument of the following form:
You actually need to make that case though. Why should a 3rd party consider your preferred state of affairs “more just” than any other?
My only intended claim so far has been that, all else being equal, a law is more just if the consequences for the individual it affects are somehow related to the individuals’ actions, rather than to a lottery or to the actions of demographically similar individuals. That is a non-obvious claim and people can disagree with it, but I’d rather save that for future meta-jurisprudence thread rather than an immigration thread.
@hog
Do you think it is unjust that who I let in my home is arbitrarily decided?
@Wrong Species
Yes, actually.
As a matter of fact I doubt it is arbitrary – probably you let your friends into your house. If there is not much room at your house, due to a party for example, probably you are more likely to let in your better friends, or the ones who enjoy parties more.
Furthermore, if you didn’t act this way, I would consider it suboptimal bordering on immoral. Someone who rolled dice on January 1st to figure out which friends to ignore that year would widely be considered a jerk (all else being equal, of course: maybe she’s running a controlled experiment).
Ok so I decide to throw a party. I throw an invite and 100 people RSVP, even though I don’t know all of them. I only have room for 30 people and only personally know 10 of them. Let’s assume that I have good reason to believe that none of these people are significantly better than the others.
So just to be clear, if I decide to leave the other 20 positions up to chance, you think this is an unjust situation? I’m sorry but that’s dumb and I don’t really see why I should care. In fact, you never even tried to justify this line of reasoning in which case I don’t see why anyone should agree with you.
We have three options. We can let in nobody. We can let in literally everyone except those who have obvious defects. Or we can have limits that are going to exclude people in a way that seems arbitrary. I don’t see any reason to believe option three is less just than the others. Let’s say we let in anyone who’s white and forbid anyone else. Is that more or less just than the arbitrary option?
Your example shows that sometimes it is hard to discriminate justly. I agree! It does not show that we shouldn’t attempt such discrimination when we can do so cheaply. Just like in the criminal justice system, there is a trade-off between accurate justice and cost, and you will probably lean towards higher accuracy in high-stakes situations, and lower accuracy in low-stakes situations.
Now you might claim that accurate justice is
impossiblenecessarily prohibitively expensive in immigration policy, but now the burden of proof is on you, not me.You haven’t even shown that what I said is unjust. You’re just asserting it. I don’t feel like I need to prove that what I’m saying is ok. The fact that it’s my property means I can invite whoever I want for whatever reason. Almost everyone agrees with me so it’s really you who the burden of proof is on. If you disagree then I guess there is no where else to go in this argument.
I think you misunderstood my position. I agree that you can invite whoever you want for whoever reason, but I also think that it is better to act in some ways than other. “Should” does not mean “must.”
This is particularly important when we are talking about sovereign states: states don’t have to do anything. But there are still some things that they should do and others that they should not do.
EDIT: I suspect I’m still misunderstanding you; maybe it would be better if we assume for the sake of argument that you are an American citizen like me, and that we are talking about American immigration policy. Then “America can let in whoever she wants” is not a relevant point, since both of us are America. If two Americans are trying to come to a consensus about the optimal immigration policy, they need to appeal to widely accepted norms of behavior like “increase average utility.” One widely accepted norm of behavior is that you should treat other people according to how they act, rather than by rolling dice. Again, you can deny that norm, but then we’re talking meta-ethics, not immigration policy.
@hogX5:
Agreed on the language exam and the no criminal record. (c) is not really necessary, and (e) is silly.
I would add: an IQ test, a strict Western culture, politics, and values literacy test, and a background check to screen out spies, dangerous political extremists (e.g. Communists), and Muslims. Over time, this process will be streamlined by keeping good statistics on the characteristics of immigrants who assimilate well and contribute to society and those who do not.
I also want a lengthy delay on immigrants’ right to vote and deportation of immigrants who cause problems.
Additionally, the total number of immigrants must be low no matter the individual characteristics, as assimilation is paramount to avoid changing our culture, politics, values, and institutions and risking Western civilization itself. Both the actual and potential downsides of mass immigration greatly outweigh the actual and potential upsides.
I’m not sure I agree on “no criminal record” as such. Any such record is going to be under the control of the country they came from (assuming it has a functioning government at all), which presents problems in both directions.
This is a good point, but the IQ test helps here, and soon there will be genetic testing available for criminality. Deportation of immigrants who cause problems also helps here. I would also make exceptions for crimes that are not crimes in the West to allow in political dissidents who meet the other criteria.
This presumes a level of cooperation from repressive regimes in categorizing their political dissidents’ crimes that I am not willing to grant.
Then either there’s a better way to let in political dissidents, or they stay out. I’m okay with it if it’s the latter.
Keeping statistics on an individual level of which immigrants do well seems smart. I wonder how far the Feds could do that with current green card holders (or to what extent they already do)? Social science goldmine right there.
What defines someone as an “immigration restrictionist”?
I’m a Canadian, and I think the Canadian immigration system is pretty good. Our biggest problem is that the way we take in refugees/asylum seekers is a real mess: the system is underfunded, the courts are hugely inconsistent, and it’s full of bad incentives. If the refugee system worked better, we could admit more refugees – I think we should fix it so we can; saving people’s lives is a worthy cause.
Am I an immigration restrictionist because I’m not an open borders advocate, or am I not, because I think immigration is necessary, and good if done properly, and am in favour of allowing refugees into the country?
I intended immigration restrictionist to mean “anyone opposed to open borders.” Really I just want to see what people think about immigration without getting hung up on “more versus less”: since quotas and lotteries are against the rules of the game, the player is required to figure out what specifically makes a stranger safe and profitable to be around.
Well, in that case, I’d say, the Canadian system seems like a good model. Most immigrants are chosen based on criteria that prioritize people considered a good bet to contribute to the economy, and not cause problems (criminal record usually keeps you out). A smaller number are sponsored by family members who already have Canadian citizenship or permanent residency. Third place in numbers are refugees.
The Canadian systems works pretty well. The biggest problem with the non-refugee bits of the system is that it’s a little arcane: figuring it out requires too much clicking around on a government website (which, in my experience, are badly designed). The refugee system, like I said, is the weak link. If it was fixed, we could easily take in more.
The US system seems like more of a shambles than the Canadian system, on many levels.
I would like a test selecting against pro-monarchist/nobility inclinations.
It’s the closest thing to a pro-egalitarian/pro-liberty stance I can think of that is fully supported by the legal documents of the USA. And thus should not be too hard of a sell.
Caveat: I’m nearly in favor of open borders.
Restricting immigration from the Commonwealth realms?
As necessary, yes. They are the group I have historically been most leery of.
It’s bad enough we have our own, home-grown monarchists and nobilists. I don’t favor Downton Abbey: https://tinyurl.com/p4p87zz
I’m not quite sure what the relevance of that article is, but I suppose that historically speaking, allowing large numbers of Britons to immigrate had negative effects on the existing population.
He’s an immigrant from Australia. He created a Downton Abbey-like situation where his wife took on a major role for the corporation he heads (but didn’t found), but she has no position in.
This is a major tenent of aristocratism (nobilism) in my mind.
Oh dear … did the “useful faggot” stray too far from the reservation?
For whoever in the earlier thread that asked what the Overton window had to do with all this, this may be a pertinent example.
As it happens, I asked a question about the Overton window a couple threads ago, but I have no idea what your comment is in reference to.
Milo is in the news today. (Link picked at random among many.)
Basically, a particular earlier period of “edginess” of an inconvenient kind is coming back to bite him from the side he makes his livelihood from.
I found this blogpost to be the best commentary on Milo I had yet read–the only one that actually takes a close look at what he says rather than just rising to his troll bait.
It feels even more correct to me now that this new scandal has arisen. After all, for someone whose top two priorities are “be edgy” and “defend the Catholic church,” in that order, what could better fit the bill?
*Updated to add: now Milo is saying that he was a victim of pedophilia between the ages of 13 and 16 and that he only used “gallows humor” to try to deal with it (which is certainly not to say that being an abuse victim means it’s okay to publicly defend abusers, but it certainly puts it in a different light). I can’t claim to know what he really thinks about this (beyond his explicit statements), much less what happened to him as a teenager, but I am sympathetic to his claim that the people responsible for digging this up care 100% about using it to destroy him and 0% about him somehow encouraging pedophilia or harming abuse victims.
And if you actually watch the interview with Rogan, you will find this claim to not match at all what he actually he said.
He actively defended the concept of sex between 14 year old boys and priests and said that he (Milo) was the “predator”.
I dislike that people can’t seem to distinguish between pedophilia and statutory rape, but its probably expecting too much to ask that the US to make the distinction.
Milo now claiming “I was a victim” is particularly rich. It’s not that he was not the victim, but that it doesn’t in any way excuse all of his various statements, and it is the kind of thing he is particularly attuned to attack in others.
Well, looks like I’m back here again. To any and all: I am indeed AnonEEmous. I’ll see how I can go about regaining that nickname, but looks like a site change has stripped me of it.
Anyways: what I see clearly is that Milo wishes to argue that sexually active young boys or young men, as you’d have it, who chase older partners, should be counted as consenting adults, or at least something close to it, and therefore these relationships are not a problem, even if between, say, a 13-year-old and a 29-year-old.
I don’t agree with this belief but I don’t condemn it either. Sadly, it seems as though most others would, which is a shame since it is his true belief. Apply this filter to his statements, pair it occasionally with the filter of his sexual abuse making him think sexual abuse wasn’t a big deal, and everything he’s said makes sense. Even his apologies do, because they are incredibly vague; he says he worded certain things poorly and never says what they are. Probably because he can’t – he expressed his true views. And actually, I’m OK with that, because it actually seems pretty consistent with another view that many people hold and I disagree with.
Basically, many people believe that a young teen – say, thirteen years of age, or perhaps a bit older – who scores with a hot teacher has lucked out and is to be envied. Now, those same people may or may not believe that the teacher deserves punishment (and apply double standards based on gender), but let’s get real: if the teen is really to be envied, then how can the teacher have done anything criminal or more than slightly immoral? They might consider the teacher to be a loser or to lack decorum, but criminal? In other words, the teen consented – in fact, initiated – so what the teacher did in response was perfectly acceptable, if to be frowned upon.
Now, my personal belief is that this young teen has actually experienced sexual abuse and, though he and others may not realise it, it will harm him down the line. Which is why I don’t agree with this view. Then again, maybe Milo believes that he is one of a few for whom this will not occur. If he’s right, then there’s at least potential there for something, though I have a feeling he’s not. In his press conference today, he certainly seemed to believe that his sexual abuse led to him acting out in his twenties – though he could just be saying that. (Arguably, his entire public persona could be an extension of this type of trauma, if you want to play armchair psychologist). Of course, Milo knows that any case of this type would have to be examined on an individual basis to see if the individual could really consent, and that could never work under the law, which also explains why he thinks “the consent age is fine where it is”.
Anyhow, I hope this somewhat uncharacteristic post doesn’t cause anyone to think that I’m not really who I claim to be. Hoping for some good answers to this post, because I’m not going to be able to talk intelligently about this issue anywhere else.
Though he seems maybe to have edited it a few times since I read it, he made a statement on his facebook page which seems a perfectly reasonable and consistent position to me. To summarize, it was roughly “I was sexually abused by a Catholic priest between the ages of 13 and 16. That was wrong and bad and traumatic. This, I wrongly felt gave me license to make flippant comments about sexual abuse of 13 year old boys. I had a relationship with a 27 year old man when I was 17 that was good and empowering and not wrong in my eyes, nor in the eyes of the law, since the age of consent in the UK was 16 at the time.”
Again, I don’t know what he really thinks or what really happened, but this seems reasonable to me: I don’t think it’s possible for a 13 year old boy (or girl) to have a psychologically healthy sexual relationship with anyone. I do think it’s possible for a 17 year old man (or woman) to have a psychologically healthy relationship with a 27 year old man, as Milo claims he did (though I think it’s also possible for a 17 year old to have a psychologically abusive relationship with an older person as well, depending on the emotional maturity level and the specific details).
There’s been recent news about Milo Yiannopoulos advocating for sex between children and adults and getting into trouble (losing a book deal and a speaking engagement) as a result.
The thing is, while I believe Milo is malicious and destructive, I also believe that our laws about age of consent aren’t well-grounded. As far as I can tell, the laws are some combination of “feels right” and who can yell the loudest.
What I’d like to see is a big survey of adults about their history of sex before age 18. What sexual experiences they had, how they think it affected them, age of partners, who initiated, consent…. There are probably some other good questions, and a project like this should probably start with open-ended interviews to figure out what survey questions would be good.
It’s possible that there should also be a survey of teenagers about their experiences, though since the arguments against early sex are to some extent about long run effects, surveying adults might be more relevant.
The effects of illegality can be explored because the age of consent is different in different times and places.
(If this seems familiar, it’s because I also posted it to facebook.)
I don’t really care about the merits of his “case” given his normal occupation. “Useful faggot” of course stands in relation to “useful idiot”. Milo spends all day every day in an effort to a) make money and get publicity with the effect of b) increasing the political power of people who, disproportionately to the rest of the population, view him as a gross partial-human. When he got too prominent, the latter faction started working against him. Now he’s pretty much hoist on his own petard, complete with making the sort of victim claim he has consistently mocked.
To those who pursue this line of work: be more careful.
@Nancy Lebovitz, There has been research on this. Some studies have reported that the long term effects of underage sexual activity are, on average, not nearly as severe as widely believed, and that they are in particular smaller to non-existent in many cases when the underaged individual perceives themselves as having consented. But these were of course social science studies with the usual problems. There are, for example, very few studies which bother to investigate whether the underage participant perceived the encounter as consensual (since after all we know the underaged can’t consent) and as always it’s precarious to draw conclusions from a tiny number of studies. Some also seem to have used extremely expansive definitions of what counts as child sexual abuse (I think showing a 17 year old pornography qualifies in some jurisdictions, for example); presumably if very mild cases are included, and especially if they then turn out to be the majority of cases, the data from the mild cases may swamp the effects from more severe incidents and produce misleadingly sanguine results. So I am disinclined to draw any firm conclusions. However, further research in the area has certainly been hindered by the fact that any study which indicates less than horrific effects from child sexual abuse tends to lead to the authors being accused of being pedophile apologists.
Relevant: Rod Dreher quotes an anonymous e-mail about the Milo mess.
The whole thing is worth reading, and makes some of the same points as Protagoras.
Part of his shtick has always been: “your attempts to tar me as a racist nazi won’t work because I am a gay, Jewish man with a black boyfriend.” I don’t see how “you can’t tar me as a sexual abuse defender because I am a sexual abuse victim” is very much different.
If this succeeds in taking him down where other smears have not, it will only be because pedophilia hasn’t lost its sting the way racism has, due to its overuse. What does it say about a supposedly increasingly enlightened society that we have to dig deeper and deeper for ever more odious accusations, given that the old ones no longer work?
From what I can tell, the people leading the charge against Milo at the moment seem to be mostly liberal-leaning people who hate him anyway. I’m not sure what you mean by “people who, disproportionately to the rest of the population, view him as a gross partial-human” (I assume you mean religious conservatives here) “working against him”, given that they’re not actually the group trying to bringing him down at the moment.
It’s not quite that simple. There’s the added complication of the fact that the pedophilia attack was designed to damage his credibility with the right while the racist/homophobic/xenophobic charges were obviously general “deplorable” stuff that the right is used to hearing and no longer takes any stock in. The point of this latest round of attack was to get him dis-invited from CPAC. Calling him a racist ain’t gonna do that. And all the people who are saying “Well he’s no worse than Roman Polanski” are missing the point. The right hates Roman Polanski too, and he ain’t speaking at CPAC any time soon either…
The topic is muddled as Protagoras’ comments indicate by lumping together very different age groups and very different activities. It’s pretty much the best example of the Worst Argument in the World, as Scott dubbed it, where negative affect of brutally raping young children gets used against those guilty of quite obviously lesser crimes, or vice versa. And of course because of that it is dangerous to try to make a principled stand based on subtle distinctions or free speech rationale.
@onyomi
You will probably like Ace’s take:
I think it is important that people acknowledge that the current surfacing of Milo’s remarks was not done by the left.
After he was invited to CPAC, many people on the right started objecting.
@onyomi
No, if this scandal succeeds in taking him down, bit will be because the issue too much offends the side he has allied with.
I love the neutral way this discussion is proceeding in these threads. In two weeks I expect people to be referring to how “the left” brought down Milo and how terrible they are for it, and why can’t they be understanding and open to free speech like the right is …
A group on the right released the edited video. People on the right tweeted against his participation at CPAC, and it was those tweets that got publicity. CPAC rescinded the invitation. Threshold Editions, S&S’s conservative imprint, rescinded the book deal.
He’s not being attacked by the side he’s allied with. He’s being attacked by the “NeverTrumpers”, probably in a strange-bedfellows alliance with the establishment (not SJ) left.
Well, then as a jester he should have paid more attention to his court’s internal politics.
Gotta add a bit to what HeelBearCub said here:
1. There is an argument to be made that not all sexual contact between adults and minors is abuse ipso facto. Milo says this was his point; and that further, contact between adults and minors is fairly common in the gay community and can be an important part in the development of the minor partner. This point has been made before by less controversial figures.
For my part I think for all its imperfections, the idea of an age under which minors cannot legally consent to sexual contact with adults is a very, very good one. I’m far more worried about a lack of Romeo and Juliet exceptions to statutory rape charges, and teenagers being prosecuted as sex offenders for sexting each other than I am with the idea that some hypothetically-mature-enough-to-consent 14 year old cannot legally consent to sex with an adult. Ick.
2. Current Affairs argues that The Right tolerated Milo’s homophobia, misogyny, racism etc. but has excommunicated Milo for talking about the complexities of gay sexual life: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/02/what-well-tolerate-and-what-we-wont
3. Rogan (rightly) pointed out the victimization multiple times, and multiple times Milo not only denied being a victim, he went further and said he himself was preying on adult men at 14, perhaps helping perpetuate the dangerous myth that it’s ok to have sex with minors. Maybe now Milo realizes he was victimized, as he claims here:
https://www.facebook.com/myiannopoulos/posts/852600161544547
but it seems difficult to take him at his word. He has a completely reasonable defense–he was processing his abuse in a non-PC but fairly common way–if I could believe his sincerity; but I can’t. This is the danger of being a professional troll: you can’t gear shift down into serious when the road gets rough, and you were driving 15,000 mph to begin with, flipping everyone off as you went.
4. All the above aside, this seems like a pretty clear example of a coordinated media attack; calculated to destroy the chosen hate-figure of the day.
Some in the thread have said being associated with pedophilia is a death sentence, but Milo seems fairly Teflon so far; much like Trump. He may bounce back yet (more’s the pity).
Valiance, aren’t your #1 & #2 there in conflict? It’s not the “complexities of gay life” that got Milo in trouble, it’s for saying things like he was lucky to get molested at age 13.
Current Affairs’ argument fails on the grounds that, like pretty much anyone on the left that attacks Milo, they don’t actually prove that he is any of the things they claim, except transphobic and possibly fat-phobic.
So, there’s that. Personally, I doubt that if evidence of Milo’s being bigoted equal to the evidence of him being pedophilic surfaced, that he could get away with it. Though obviously, not having defenders on the right doesn’t help – when you’re being attacked by the outgroup, it’s a lot easier than when you are being attacked by the ingroup, since the outgroup still hates you and will pile on.
@Valiance
The Current Affairs piece is precisely what I was thinking: the right can tolerate a gay provocateur slamming feminism and Islam, but they can’t tolerate a gay man talking openly about the complexities of gay male adolescence. After all, I don’t see George Takei‘s mostly left-leaning fans denouncing him in droves. I don’t even necessarily see this as hypocrisy on their part, except insofar as they’re using it to denounce Milo, because typically it would be the left who is more open to hearing about the complexities of gay adolescence.
And if it turns out it was a ploy on the part of the Bill Kristols of the world and not so much the progressive left per se to hit Milo where it would finally hurt him with his conservative base, well, that to me is about as good as saying “don’t get mad at Beelzebub–this one was Satan himself!”
Speaking of which, looking into what 4chan has to say on this subject has given me slightly more sympathy for the “Trump has emboldened evil Nazis” claim: many of these people seem really sick: here Milo is basically the most mainstream voice for their reactionary views and many react by saying, essentially “good riddance, (((fag))).”
Put another way, those saying “don’t blame the left! This is the work of the never-Trumpers on the right!” may not understand how deep that rift is and, how much, from my perspective, Bill Kristol is basically Woodrow Wilson.
Put yet another way, the Milo affair gives me plenty of reason to be depressed about everyone.
@onyomi
The actual neo-Nazi part of the alt-right has been anti-Milo for a long time. The ironic neo-Nazi part will say that kind of stuff whether they mean it or not. The Trumpers are still with Milo, as are the ants, and _American Spectator_ posted an article in support (if not an enthusiastic endorsement).
The _American Spectator_ article has me thinking he’s not out yet.
The article you’re talking about is, I believe, by Stacy McCain, which may or may not change that (I actually don’t know, but just putting it out there).
And yeah – he had an elegant narrative, but the more obvious narrative of “being ostracized by ingroup is worse than being ostracized by outgroup” fits the facts a lot better. In case the AntiFa riots and multiple outlets calling him a “white supremacist” weren’t enough to puncture holes in it already.
Oh yeah – it’s worth noting that parts of the alt-right, the real hardcore parts, do not have the ability to exercise tactical caution. The things they hate are bad and they will attack them even to their long-term detriment. Milo’s talked about that before, of course.
It’s certainly possible, but what’s the evidence on which you base your belief?
At only a slight tangent, H.L. Mencken mentions in something he wrote that he lost his virginity at fourteen with a girl of the same age who, he adds, is now a very respectable grandmother.
Modern America is unusual in how high it sets the age at which sex is legal, relative to our own past, other developed countries, and past societies.
Why do you think that? People vary a lot in how mature they are at what age. Is it your thesis that every woman who married younger than 14 had a psychologically unhealthy relation with her husband?
Under Rabbinic law, a woman was legally an adult at twelve and a half. She could marry earlier than that, but only with parental permission.
Or is your thesis limited to our society, in which case what are the relevant differences?
“Pedophilic” meaning “willing to defend sex by adults with minors”?
My first reading of what you said was that you meant he had confessed to committing pedophilia, which as far as I can tell he hasn’t done. The problem is that the the “phil” in the former reading is doing double duty.
@David Friedman
Though I may go too far in saying “impossible,” I do think it’s highly unlikely in our society for anyone to have a healthy sexual relationship at age 13, though I imagine a relationship between a 13 year old and a 14 year old is much less likely to be traumatic than one between a 13 year old and a 27 year old, due to the difference in power dynamics.
As for why, in our society, it is highly unlikely that any 13 year old is ready for a sexual relationship when, in fact, many past societies and probably some existing ones think that is plenty old enough: I do think it has to do with expectations: children today in the developed world are not raised with the expectation that they will take on adult roles and responsibilities at the age of 13, Bar Mitzvah notwithstanding (though the existence of the ritual clearly shows how earlier societies had given thought to the question of how to quickly get a 13 year old ready for adult roles and responsibilities, and they were probably better at it).
In a world where life expectancy is 40, people get married at 14, and take over the family business at 18, children and parents are spending the first 12 years of the child’s life in cognizance of that fact. If you have a daughter whom you expect to send off to live with her husband’s family at age 14, and expect her thereupon to hopefully soon get pregnant and start raising children and helping to run that household, the way you raise your daughter from ages 1 to 13 is going to be very different than if you are expecting her to go off college for a liberal arts degree at 18 and maybe settle down with a nice man some time in her late twenties.
I’m still frankly a little skeptical that, even with preparation, it wasn’t pretty traumatic for many 13 year olds to be married to an often much older, often pretty unfamiliar man and start having a sexual relationship with him right away. But having expected and prepared for that for as long as you can remember plus having a new socially sanctioned role to fit into has got to help a whole lot. The vast majority of 13 year olds beginning a sexual relationship in our society are not going to be doing so as part of the beginning of a new, socially sanctioned role.
I’m also a bit skeptical about a 13 year old boy being very actively “mentored” in sexuality, but it’s got to have been a lot better in the age of Socrates when socially sanctioned and structured in some way than today when it is almost certainly done in secret with the result of children feeling guilty, shameful, etc.
I do think Milo is right to draw a distinction between pedophilia of the, to be blunt, “Michael Jackson” variety (i. e. sexual activity with prepubescent children) and pederasty or very young teenage sexuality (that is, sex acts with a sexually mature, albeit still very young by our standards individual).
Sex with teenagers has been the norm throughout human history and only recently have we decided to draw somewhat arbitrary (if still maybe necessary for legal clarity) lines determining where consent begins (though I personally would be in favor of some level of prosecutorial-type discretion to allow for the difference between 18 year old and 17 year old have sex versus 40 year old and barely-pubescent 12 year old have sex; the former is prima facie not abusive, the latter, at least in our society today, almost certainly is).
Sex with prepubescent children, however, I think has long been considered deviant in every culture I know of. And of course, it makes sense biologically: if life expectancy is 40 and infant mortality high, it may be worth it from a societal perspective to mildly traumatize everyone’s daughter so that they can get started producing offspring at 14. There is no reproductive benefit, of course, for sex with the prepubescent.
I definitely see it as very bad that these two categories are now being somewhat intentionally blurred, because I think they are just very different for all kinds of reasons. The problem may be, as Milo found out, one doesn’t win any popularity contests by splitting hairs about pedophilia. This is a problem, though, because teenage sexuality is frankly a part of life (as is pedophilia, unfortunately), and being unable to talk openly about it doesn’t seem to serve much useful purpose (whether we’re talking about sex with teenagers or pedophilia, I highly doubt anyone is going to be inspired to become a pedophile just because some public figure talked about it; on the contrary, more open conversation might inspire less fear of seeking professional help).
@Randy_M
Sure, 1 and 2 conflict. I believe 1, I just thought 2 was an interesting perspective.
@onyomi @DavidFriedman
I can’t find the graph now but I just read something in the past few days which seemed to show that age of first sexual experience and age of ones partner have no correlation with ones perception of how good that experience was.
@onyomi @DavidFriedman
ok dead open thread but necroing to note I found those charts showing that those who lost their virginity before 18 to an adult view the experience no less positively than same age couples:
https://twitter.com/sentientist/status/834003079997571073
If I’m unable to post a comment, and haven’t been banned, what’s the relevant etiquette? I tried resubmitting the comment, but it again failed to show up. I am thinking of trying to edit the comment to get rid of things that might be potentially problematic (links, potentially banned phrases) but I want to avoid a situation where all of my failed submissions show up at the same time and spam the comments section.
I don’t think blocked comments get approved later. If you refresh and don’t see your comment, it is probably safe to resubmit it. Correct me if I’m wrong.
When did nice take on a bad meaning?
I’ve read numerous pieces online about how being nice isn’t a good thing, e.g. “nice guys”, “be kind, not nice” I remember countless messages in pop culture about how you should be nice, or how being nice was a good thing. Does anyone know when this transition happened?
Nice is a compliment of last resort. It’s what you say about someone when the best you can say about them is that they’re inoffensive. So calling someone nice is damning by faint praise.
Beyond that, “nice guy” has a very specific meaning. It’s not so much a Mensch but a schmuck: someone who is taken advantage of because he plays by the rules and observes social niceties. Listening to the “countless messages in pop culture” about being nice is his weakness, not his strength.
I don’t think this is new.
What comes to mind is the stock overbearing mother phrase “You should call him/her. Such a nice boy/girl”.
It’s a bland sentiment, and those tend to easily fall into a sort of uncanny valley where they are performed, rather than sincere.
Can you explain this? I’m not sure what you mean exactly.
If as I am going through a door, I briefly glimpse back, see someone right behind me and pause half a second so that they can catch the door before it swings closed, it’s just a sort of politeness.
If I realize someone is behind me, open the door, smile warmly and say “Pretty day out there!” it’s actually nice. It’s really an outward social display of my own self-confidence and ability to be both social and magnanimous.
If I half mumble “Have a nice day” while awkwardly bobbing my head, that’s the uncanny valley effect. You are close to it enough to be off-putting. Anything that’s not either confident, socially appropriate, or actually magnanimous.
It’s because people hate nerds but it’s difficult to justify bullying someone who is nice to you. So they make up this epidemic of “nice guys” who are actually more sinister.
Yes, the implication is that the “nice guy” is not nice out of a genuine, heartfelt desire to be kind to others – but that he is deliberately planning and perpetuating a fraud, wherein he masquerades as nice solely to obtain some sort of benefit for himself (typically female affection).
TBH I suspect self-identified “nice guys” are often (not always) not full of a hearfelt desire to be kind more than anyone else, and use “nice” to mean something more like a passive “not mean”. Thing is, “nice” and “mean” are not perfect opposites and you can easily be none of them.
Of course, implying that people are secretly pretending is uncharitable in the extreme.
Neither of the linked articles read that way.
Well, if you’re looking at specifically feminist condemnation of “nice guys”, their actual argument is more like Dr Dealgood’s “compliment of last resort” above – that the stereotypical Nice Guy complaining that women want jerks and won’t go out with him does not in fact have much in the way of actually desirable qualities, and “nice”, aka “inoffensive” is the best that can be said of him.
This is a common belief, hence the choice of label, but its not really true. Nice guys are failing socially in a couple specific ways and in fact might have quite a bit to offer, even their derided “niceness”, if only their errors were corrected. Many “nice guys” can gain the ability to sleep with, if not have a functional relationship with, women after going through some of the training provided by PUAs. Of course such a choice by them probably doesn’t do much to counter the idea that they are secretly entitled assholes. Misguided is perhaps the most positive description of people involved in “The Game”.
To steelman pick-up artistry, granting that there are techniques or attitudes that can increase attraction, someone who would otherwise be a good mate is doing a disservice to their partner or potential partners in not maintaining sexual attractiveness.
In other words, pick-up artist techniques are only negative if either used carelessly (as those who devise them probably do) or if there are some inherent negative trade-offs to using them, in which case one would have to get down to the object level to hash out.
But all that aside I don’t think that’s where nice gets it’s perjorative connotations from.
A Nice Guy is a guy who complains that he is so nice but girls only date assholes and not him. The implication of the capitalization and trademark symbol/quote marks is that he is really an entitled jerk expecting his mercenary niceness to equate to a sort of sex currency he can trade in for female attention/affection. The nice guy is often assumed to have no attractive qualities aside from his affected niceness. I was arguing that that is not the root cause of his issue. My example being the very blech skills taught by pick up artists that allow a Nice Guy to get laid. Therefore its unlikely he has no good qualities. Its more likely he lacks knowledge of the natural, not morally objectionable skills that are perverted by pick up artists and used to manipulate women.
Just some general points about Nice Guys– the original definition was a man who hangs around a woman he’s attracted to. He never makes it clear he’s attracted because he’s afraid she’d dump him.
Instead, he spends years listening to her complain about the awful men in her life and keeps hoping she’ll notice that he isn’t awful.
After a while, he starts complaining that women are only attracted to awful men, instead of someone nice like him.
In the real world, *some* women are attracted to awful men. The Nice Guy seems to have a filter which prevents him from seeing women who are attracted to men who treat them well.
Then some women notice the pattern, get annoyed by it, and give it the unfortunate name of Nice Guy.
Humans are a nervous bunch, and men (many of whom don’t fit the whole pattern) start wondering if they’re being attacked for behaving decently. Women get defensive about being blamed for being angry at something that gets on their nerves…..
If I weren’t more or less a materialist, I’d be blaming the whole thing on demonic intervention, but it’s probably just Murphy.
Now that I’m looking at the behavior of the Nice Guy I described at the beginning, I think he’s depressed. He doesn’t have the initiative to think “I’m attracted to this woman, but she isn’t interested in me and listening to her complain about other men is no fun”, and then either spend less time or no time with her.
He’s desperate for some sort of companionship, even not very good companionship, and unwilling to take the risk of seeing if he can do better.
She’s not very clear-headed about getting good relationships, either.
I blame parents who aren’t good at raising children and who have bad relationships themselves, but that might just be my filter.
Now, let’s get to niceness. What I grew up with (female, 1950s/60s, middle class, northnern Delaware) was superficially that being nice was being considerate and virtuous. What it actually meant was behaving as though my desires were less important than other people’s.
It’s a complicated matter because people do need to give way to each other to some extent to live well with each other, but giving way isn’t an absolute virtue.
Girls get (got?) more niceness training than boys, but we can assume some overlap there. It’s not as though unassertive men get noticed a whole lot.
Well yes. The problem is the definition has vastly expanded and is quite often used as a personal attack. We live in a descriptivist society linguistically. What the concept was originally conceived to mean is mostly irrelevant.
@Nancy
A complication is that a fairly common feminist narrative is to complain about men who initiate. I’ve seen a decent number of feminists give advice to men that is basically grooming ‘nice guys:’ be yourself*, get to know her first**, wait for signals***.
* If the guy is shy, that means no initiating
** Invest a lot of time in her, expecting a chance at romance
*** If the guy is bad at reading signals, that means waiting around forever, until he gets upset over nothing happening
Basically it’s a recipe that is completely wrong for some personality types & mostly based on expecting that successful strategies for women also work for men, which due to gender norms is often not true. So it tends to fail and result in a slow building up of frustration. When that is vented by expressing disappointment, it is taken as proof that the guy is an asshole and thus doesn’t deserve anyone, rather than that the advice is misguided.
Actually, a lot of it seems to involve miscommunication. For example, a common narrative that you hear from men in this situation is that the woman makes statements like ‘why can’t my boyfriend be more like you’ or she calls him ‘nice’ and then later complains that there are no nice guys to date.
A strong cultural narrative is that most men (who are not George Clooney) are inherently unattractive and thus merely desired by women for practical purposes. So many men don’t understand that there is a lack of physical attraction at play, so those previous statements should actually be parsed as: ‘why can’t my boyfriend be more like you, except not unattractive?’ or ‘where are all the nice guys who are also hot?’
This lack of understanding is why a (simplistic) concept like ‘friend zone’ can be eye opening to these guys.
They should obviously be interpreted that way, which raises the question: am I crazy to think that saying such things is actually really rude?
Personally, I suspect there’s a pretty strong inverse correlation between male attractiveness and attentiveness to female needs for very good reason: men who are naturally attractive don’t need to be attentive and polite to women in order to attract them, so most don’t ever learn to be. We are all ultimately creatures who respond very strongly to incentives, and the incentive structure here is to only learn courtship behaviors to the extent required to obtain your objective.
For many men, the objective is simply sex, not romance or a long-term relationship. So the answer to, “why can’t my boyfriend be nice like you?” is really simple: “because you sleep with him anyway.” As the classic saying goes, “why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?”
The corresponding female gripe is about how airheaded women with lovely figures can attract men while intelligent and successful but less attractive women struggle for dates. And the trope of the desperate girlfriend who is trying to cater to her man’s every whim at the cost of her own individuality or identity (because she’s terrified of losing him to a younger or prettier woman) is a pretty strong parallel to the pathetic loser “nice guy” who spends his days as a shoulder for women to cry on when their asshole boyfriends dump them.
Aapje, those are fair points, especially since feminists don’t explain what is plausibly a signal, though they do talk about what isn’t a signal.
@John Nerst
My first example is obviously rude, but the second is merely implicitly so, which seems fine to me.
But my point is more that giving only compliments can easily be misconstrued. Imagine a boss that only gives you compliments, but never gives you a raise or promotion. Wouldn’t that be really confusing to most people?
So this was supposed to be in response to Cypren but I think comments were nested too deep and I couldn’t reply to the below comment:
Cypren:
Berkson’s Fallacy explains why handsome men are such jerks:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/how_not_to_be_wrong/2014/06/03/berkson_s_fallacy_why_are_handsome_men_such_jerks.html
In short, Cypren you’re exactly right:
http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/how_not_to_be_wrong/traingle-of-acceptable-men.jpg.CROP.promovar-mediumlarge.jpg
It does depend what you mean by “nice”. As regards the complaints about “nice guys”, I think that’s because the stereotypical example of that is someone who says “Why won’t [Object of Interest] go out with me? I’m a Nice Guy!” and then segues into ‘why do women like the bad guys’. The answer to that is nobody is obligated to return your romantic interest, no, not even if you’re Nice. Being nice is basic human courtesy and decency, you don’t get a reward for not behaving like a jackass, just the same as you don’t get a reward for “hey, today is the 1,000th day in a row I didn’t murder anyone!”
The larger context of “be kind, not nice” is that niceness is seen as a social construct, a fake politeness that is meaningless, and with the craze for “authenticity”, fakery is seen as bad. So therefore niceness is seen as bad, it’s seen as false, as not costing and therefore not meaning anything, whereas being kind involves genuine effort.
I tend to disagree with that second view, I see nothing wrong with niceness as social ritual keeping the gears of human interaction lubricated so they don’t grind against each other and break down.
The problem with the whole “nice guy” who whines that girls only like assholes is that the “nice guys” are sort of correct. Girls don’t only like assholes in the sense that ice cream doesn’t cause rape but the correlation is there and its pretty strong. Unfortunately modern culture operates under the utterly ridiculous assumption that social skills will be gained automatically totally unlike regular skills which we teach in school and clubs. Thus people who fail to naturally intuit how to obtain social success haven’t got much of a chance.
This results of course in all the MRA/PUA nonsense because when faced with a choice between having no way to learn to achieve romantic or sexual success, which is a massive part of status in modern society, and using shady “dark arts”, which are not only morally problematic but also about as useful as a degree from a sketchy for profit university, people choose the latter because its not really a choice if you only have one clear option. This is actually a major reason why Trump received so many votes from certain classes of people. He was a shitty choice but he was functionally their only choice.
Are there such things as social lessons? It feels like that should be a thing.
I would definitely pay to go somewhere where I could have myself recorded in various social role-play situations, and then get feedback and advice on what is happening.
Is that a thing?
Well therapy is often one way you can learn this stuff. Couples therapy, special needs targeted therapy, and others. We often have some vague morals based learning, and in the old days of course you learned the proper behavior for traditional gender roles. Um, there also used to be stuff like charm school for women. There has probably never been a low level, broad material, secular school or section of a curriculum that dealt with this issue, though.
“Don’t point, it’s rude” and “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” are social lessons. If there are full-on curriculum to teach advanced topics or catch up late bloomers, its news to me, but the social skills most people pick up at home and through observations tend to work passably.
Passably depends on your definition of success. If 20% of men, or women, fail to organically learn the skills needed to achieve romantic or sexual success, even with people in their own “league”, that suggests that something can and should be done, especially given the value of those things both culturally and psychologically.
I’ve heard that the Dale Carnegie course offers something sort of like this.
There are some corporate versions of this. One company I know of had new managers go to a class where they roleplayed various situations – e.g. “I’m an employee who has seemed distracted at work lately. You are my manager and you want to discuss the situation with me,” followed by feedback.
Oh, sure, by all means; my point wasn’t that everyone is well served at the moment but more that there is in fact passing on some knowledge and not everyone is just winging it at every moment.
The social skills necessary to avoid offending peopleand making them angry, e.g. your “don’t point” example, are very effectively passed on because of the immediate negative feedback for getting it wrong.
Building a positive social life requires a different set of social skills, and those aren’t so readily learned by trial and error because failed attempts put one in a sort of uncanny valley that garners worse feedback than staying quiet.
If you are one of the people who was taught or managed to otherwise learn that latter set of skills, then you may find yourself in a world that consists of some people who are your friends and lots of people who manage to not annoy and offend you and so conclude that social skills generally are being efficiently taught. This is incorrect. Only the “how to not make people actively angry at you” social skills are being efficiently taught. And since one of the things the socially inept do learn is that complaining about their loneliness gets them labeled as Creepy Nice Guys and otherwise offends people, they generally don’t complain and you generally don’t notice they exist. Which is great for you, not so much for them.
People blindly assuming that this is a solved problem and that positive social skills are being passed on to everyone who wants to learn, that offends me. So please don’t do it any more.
Is this to me? Because “Are there social lessons” and “Does everyone have adequate social lessons” are two different questions that I would have answered differently.
Social skills ARE learned automatically. The problem with this is you learn the social skills appropriate to your position in the status hierarchy. If that position is “buttmonkey” or “pariah” (and these positions have to exist), those are the skills you learn. And that’s the position you’ll have anywhere you go.
No I’ve seen people taught, mostly by friends, better social skills who then improved their lives. Scott himself admitted to being a nice guy for ages. Now you’re just some random right wing nobody on his blog.
I don’t think this is true. There are a lot of guys who are nerds and then learn how to talk to women and suddenly gain social status. It’s like having career related skills. Some people are naturally better than others, but people can usually improve from where they are at.
In roughly the same sense that there are a lot of people who are poor and then learn how to get jobs and make money.
Quick, let’s dismantle all the social welfare programs, poverty is a solved problem. Anybody who is still poor, it’s their own damn fault for not learning how to get a good job.
@John
I certainly don’t believe anything like that. My point was just that social skills don’t perfectly correlate with potential social status. Imagine a guy who was friendly, charismatic and helpful being considered for a retail job. The only problem is that he doesn’t take showers and doesn’t understand how badly he smells. He could be a good worker but this one issue is going to be debilitating.
He’s also a figment of your imagination, as is the corresponding hypothetical of the man who would in every way be a good lover except for one debilitating quirk. The cases where all we need for a happy ending is one piece of good advice are trivial, uninteresting, and sufficiently rare that when they are invoked I tend to suspect someone is trying to avoid dealing with the hard problem.
In the real world, the person who as an adult can’t get a job or a date is probably deficient in dozens of ways, any one of which might be small and easily corrected but as a package are damnably hard to address because the feedback for fixing 75% of the problems is the same as for fixing none of them – “shut up and stop bothering me you loser”.
If you have never met someone who was generally a normal person but was not good with women then you need to talk to more people.
I’m pretty sure that’s not what he’s saying. You seem to be acting as if the majority of people are completely fine except for one fatal yet superficial and easily fixable flaw – when that’s pretty much not the case. A lot of people who struggle to form relationships do, in fact, take showers and dress reasonably well. We’re not really talking here about the people where you can readily identify one fixable flaw – we’re talking about people who when you meet them, they seem “just a little bit off” and they make you uncomfortable for some vague reason that you can’t quite put your finger on. You couldn’t even explain to them what they’re doing wrong even if you wanted to, because you don’t quite know yourself – you just know that it’s something.
I never said anything about easily fixable. If someone can’t get laid, then obviously something as simple as “take a shower” is probably not going to help. But if they can get a women’s attention then they’re fine. He said that anyone who can’t get dates is “deficient in dozens of ways”. There are plenty of guys who struggle with that issue even though it’s not obvious when you first meet them.
I forget who it was that said that “nice guys” are just men who take what feminists say too literally, but this seems like a good example of the phenomenon. If you accept all that nonsense about rape culture, patriarchy theory, and the like, being nice and non-threatening towards women *is* an achievement.
Not to mention that the attitude of “I didn’t murder anyone, so why don’t I get to have a girlfriend?” does not exist in a vacuum. It usually is accompanied by a lifetime of watching guys who do murder people obtain numerous girlfriends with little difficulty – AND a lifetime of listening to women openly, loudly, repeatedly declare that “nice” is the one primary attribute they desire.
I’ve had two ex-girlfriends who dumped me for what were (in my opinion) rather trivial complaints about my personality, who also stayed with literal punch-you-in-the-face-if-dinners-not-ready abusive boyfriends for several years (one before dating me, one after). So while intellectually, I know that I am not entitled to anything and that women have a large variety of preferences and it is not my place to judge them – it’s definitely hard to watch something like that and not feel like you’ve somehow been wronged by the universe.
It’s hard NOT to become a male chauvinist when you have to reconcile your brain to things like “Sure, he may beat the shit out of her, have no job, be addicted to drugs, and cheat on her constantly, but one can hardly blame her for choosing him – after all his butt looks better in tight jeans than mine does.”
And the hard truth is, there is still no automatic entitlement to companionship (romantic or sexual), friendship, pleasant work colleagues or the like simply because you yourself behave like a decent human being.
Joe the Jerk is an abusive asshole? Yes. But he still gets the girls? Yes. And I don’t? No. No more than “Joe the Jerk stabbed three guys and he managed to get away with it when his lawyer did a plea bargain, why can’t I just give this guy a bloody nose?” Joe’s bad behaviour does not mean you are entitled to “but at least I’m not as bad as he is, I should be doing equally as well”.
I don’t know what to tell anyone other than “life is not fair”. There’s an online acquaintance currently sobbing her heart out (and that’s not a metaphor) because she has just broken up with her boyfriend – or rather, he’s broken up with her. She’s asking why is she so terrible and what did she do to deserve this.
The plain, hard, truth is: she’s not terrible, she didn’t do anything to deserve this, and he’s not a louse (at least there’s this much: nobody is blaming him or calling him names), sometimes you get your heart broke because that’s how love and sex works. The person you are into is not into you, or is no longer into you. She’s no more entitled to keep him as a boyfriend than a Nice Guy is to get a girlfriend ‘just because’.
“And the hard truth is, there is still no automatic entitlement to companionship (romantic or sexual), friendship, pleasant work colleagues or the like simply because you yourself behave like a decent human being.”
Of course there is. A society where people aren’t entitled to friendship and companionship is a sick society. Especially, if we’re going to make a big song and dance about those same people being entitled to something relatively unimportant, like tv. Or bread.
Nah. You’re entitled to the pursuit of companionship, not the thing itself. Even moreso than bread, because friendship and love depend upon the spirit in which they are offered. The most we could guarantee, if we were okay conscripting the labor to do so, is time with a therapist or prostitute.
Of course there is. A society where people aren’t entitled to friendship and companionship is a sick society.
No, you’re not entitled. Mark, imagine someone coming up to you and demanding “Be my friend! Do all the friend things friends are supposed to do! I’m entitled to a friend, I want you as a friend, and you have to be my friend!”
Would you feel inclined to befriend a clingy, demanding, entitled person? If you and he/she have common interests or meet and strike it off, that’s one thing; but someone declaring they are entitled to friendship and they’ve decided they want you, with no input or choice from you – how would you like it?
There are a lot of lonely and friendless people out there. If there is an automatic entitlement, are you going to go out right now and seek them out and befriend them? You’re telling me it’s a civic duty and a right, so?
There’s no entitlement without an inverse responsibility.
That said, maybe we’ve got a solution to the under-employment problem. UBI + randomly assigned mandatory friends. What could go wrong?
It could even be staged. For every 25,000 in taxes, get one friend. For every 100,000, one mistress.
@Randy M, I remember a story with a concept called the public service, basically regular people providing sex to the public. With safety controls. Involved a lottery as well. Possibly I first heard about it here?
Also we do have paid for friends. Therapists. In fact we also have paid for sex therapists as well. Presumably the government could provide social interaction welfare for money. Though you’d probably start with friends rather than sex since sex is such a touchy subject.
Therapists are not your friends. They “hang out” with you once a week to talk about your bullshit and never do any other kind of activity. Can you imagine Snapchatting your therapist?
“There are a lot of lonely and friendless people out there. If there is an automatic entitlement, are you going to go out right now and seek them out and befriend them? You’re telling me it’s a civic duty and a right, so?”
I think the fact that I’m not doing that says something about my lack of character. Yes, of course we have a duty to make the lives of the lonely more bearable.
Of course we have a duty to be kind and considerate to those around us. (Even if they smell a bit funny.)
No, they don’t have the right to eat all of our chocolate biscuits without asking – but we can make some sacrifices.
[I’ve always tried to be kind to the isolated/friendless, in my experience they’re normally not that interested in spending time with me…]
Therapists allow you to vent. They provide advice, and according to Scott the advice is about on par with what a friend could tell you a lot of the time, and a couple other things. They aren’t perfectly equivalent to friends but they do fulfill some of the rolls.
I went to a therapist and I didn’t really like it.
It’s not like a friend, because therapists are too interested in listening to you talk about yourself.
If you hired a friend, it’d just be someone who sat in the same room as you while you watched tv, and occasionally cracked some jokes.
@Deiseach
To advocate for the Devil, you can be entitled to friendship without being entitled to a specific friend. Consider the idea that people have a right to food and healthcare. A strict libertarian would disagree with that idea, on the basis that it seems odd to call something a universal right if it was impossible to universally fulfil for the majority of history. But (to the extent I agree with rights-based ways of looking at things, which is not very much) I think it is possible to say that people nowadays have a right to things like food and healthcare that can easily be provided.
Applying the same logic to the right to friendship (or sex), I don’t think you can say people nowadays have that right on the basis that it isn’t practical to supply everyone with those things. But in a future where improved technology has made many jobs redundant and there are many people willing to work as a companion (either platonic or Firefly) for reasonable wages, I might agree that people have the right to friendship and sex.
Alternatively, if you interpret “people have a right to x” as “it would be *very nice* if all people had x” (which means it makes sense to describe people in the 14th century as having a right to food and healthcare) then I would also agree that people have a right to friendship and sex.
But if you interpret “right” as “it’d be very nice if…”, then that throws out most of our protection against the government infringing on free speech, free press, etc. Maybe you could construct something along the lines of SCOTUS’s “strict scrutiny” standard?
A hooker fulfills the roll of letting me have sex with them that a girlfriend provides but it doesn’t mean I’m bringing them back to meet my parents.
I think you can say that some situation is unfair without any particular person involved acting unfairly. Consider, for example, being unable to get a job for years on end because, although you’re well-qualified, have a great work ethic, etc., it just so happens that for every job you apply to somebody slightly better also applies and ends up getting hired instead. Nobody involved is wronging you in any way, but I don’t think it would be inappropriate to describe the situation as unfair in some sort of general, cosmic sense.
@Evan
I think there can be a distinction between positive rights to do or have things, and negative rights for people not to interfere with your things and actions (or possibly two other similar categories). One category of rights (mostly negative rights) *can* be guaranteed regardless of how advanced farming/medicine is, so you can call them universal. Others (mostly positive rights) can only be guaranteed with a certain level of technology.
@ rlms:
Maybe not a right to healthcare, but I’d say they had a right to food in that if, e.g., some nobleman had plenty of food and the peasants didn’t, he’d have an obligation to give the peasants enough to live on, and would be wronging them if he refused.
ETA: And of course the “Is it OK for a starving man to steal food?” question was discussed in medieval philosophy, the general consensus being IIRC that it is.
I think that when a social situation is unfair, we have a duty to recognise that social situations are a product of people interacting, and can be changed.
I dunno. We acknowledge a general sense that people who are advantaged economically bear some sort of moral obligation (and in many cases, an outright legal requirement) to help out those who are economically disadvantaged. Putting aside the issue of taxation for a moment, a greedy billionaire who gave nothing to charity would be condemned as a selfish jerk
I see no equivalent for this when it comes to social skills. If someone is socially disadvantaged, the general response in society seems to be to mock them. There is no push for people with great social skills to go out of their way to befriend people without friends. No army of NGOs attempting to ensure the friendless have “basic access” to healthy human relationships.
Why not? If you’re short, tall people are expected to reach things off the high shelf for you. If you’re poor, rich people are expected to give you their spare change. If you’re stupid, smart people are expected to tutor you in math. Not individually of course, but generally. Not enforced at the point of a gun (usually), but through social expectations. Why is it only the socially awkward who are told, “Life isn’t fair, get over it?” Why isn’t the guy with lots of friends considered to be the moral equivalent of Ebenezer Scrooge for not befriending the lonely guy at work?
I mean there are certainly times when that’s worked out pretty well.
For one of the parties at least.
Well, yeah. It’s a catch-22. If those without social skills could get people to help them, it’d be evidence they had social skills and don’t need such help.
@Matt M
“Why is it only the socially awkward who are told, “Life isn’t fair, get over it?””
Because of how primate status hierarchies work? Darwinian selection in action for a social species? And because life really isn’t fair?
“If someone is socially disadvantaged, the general response in society seems to be to mock them.”
And so? If I may be allowed to play devil’s advocate for the moment, how would you answer a contention that social ineptness is a thing inherently deserving of mockery? That those sufficiently poor at acquiring social skills in the usual manner really do constitute an inferior sort of human being, and thus it is only right and proper that they be treated as such?
I fail to see why that couldn’t just as easily be applied to the unintelligent or whoever. You’re right that life “really isn’t fair.” I don’t disagree with that at all.
But it seems particularly cruel to work tirelessly to make it as fair as possible in all areas except one and I’ve yet to see anybody really attempt to justify that (or even to generally acknowledge it as a thing that does, in fact, exist)
You want a really dark answer to that? Because there’s only the one status hierarchy, the one mediated by social skills. Those at the top of it work actively to either destroy (as with intelligence or strength) or bring into line (as with wealth… to a degree) the value of all other things which might give rise to competing hierarchies. So we have welfare, not to help the poor, but to make sure those who are good at making a living can’t get too far ahead and challenge those who are good at the “people stuff”. We have special education and taboos on making fun of the less intelligent not to help them but to prevent intelligence becoming the basis of an alternate hierarchy. We have rules requiring disputes to be settled by appeal to authority rather than by strength not to keep order or create fairness for the weak, but to keep those with authority on top rather than the physically strong.
You’re not entitled to anything, nobody is going to get for you what you won’t get for yourself, and anybody who says differently is selling something.
That said, any society where engaging in prosocial behavior does not bring with it the overwhelming likelihood of friendship and sex is indeed a very sick society, and probably not long for this world.
@The Nybbler
This could only happen if high social skills people could overcome collective action / free rider problems and coordinate to achieve this.
They can; that’s part of being highly socially skilled.
@Matt M
A society where all forms of cruelty have been abolished is probably too boring for humans to bear. I don’t think we really want a complete all conquering consistency and scouring of human foibles.
We want free bread and safety from violence, but we still want to be able to dislike people and say bad things about them. Even movements that try to narrow the acceptable range of groups it is okay to dislike and say bad things about just end up transferring the cruelty to new outgroups.
I don’t even really think it’s possible to be completely free of the belief that some people are inferior to others, because even if you proclaim that belief you end up believing that people who don’t believe this are inferior.
People who suck at social interaction are kind of the ultimate outgroup (or maybe far group when they are the loner type rather than the mocked nerd type), since they are alienated from other humans on the lowest level most basic thing possible rather than on a high level as with things like politics. A progressive and a conservative can get on as long as they avoid politics, but someone with an unlikeable personality can’t get along with anyone on the most basic level of interaction. They are the ultimate universal inferior.
@Nybbler
But if they don’t want to…
I see no reason to believe that high social skills correlate with a lack of selfishness. If anything, in my own life I’ve become vaguely suspicious that people who are really socially skilled are more likely to successfully screw me over to benefit themselves… but I’m probably just paranoid.
No – the fundamental social unit is the family, and it doesn’t work as you describe it. You are in a family and you are entitled to love from your family. And if you don’t get love, you have a shitty family – it’s not like some market decision – “hmmm… should I love little Timmy, well… his dancing doesn’t please me sufficiently…. so I’m only going to give him 6 love points”
Social bonds that matter are not based on market decisions – they are based on duty. What people are talking about here I would call a “fair weather friend” – a useless friend, only out for what they can get.
That’s a losing strategy socially – families beat loosely connected networks (if those loosely connected networks are all you have).
And, it can also be somewhat true for the larger networks – networks based on ethnicity, religious loyalty – some duty to a certain set of people rather than social decisions based upon individual attractiveness – can also successful.
Society as a whole works because we have a duty to not steal, lie, cheat. The societies with the most universal conception of duties have been the most successful, because they are able to become bigger.
So, yes, we can talk about entitlement and duty.
People who suck at social interaction can do fine as long as they aren’t reliant on the kindness of selfish strangers.
@quanta413
Perhaps they are just better at it…
That’s often been my general feeling as well, based largely on my professional experience, but I think it’s selection bias.
People with poor social skills typically don’t play political games because they are very bad at them, and aren’t rewarded for it. Instead, they have to focus on producing quality output for the organization in order to succeed. People with high social skills can use those skills to achieve status within the organization in excess of their actual output by shifting blame for their mistakes, taking credit for other people’s work, and so forth.
Many people have these skills without abusing them, but because climbing a corporate hierarchy is a competitive endeavor, those who are willing to use their social skills to undermine their competitors and inflate their own perceived value will usually climb faster and shut out those who are unwilling to do so. As they ascend and face competitors who were also willing to do the same, the politics get more vicious and there’s more collateral damage among the peons, until you eventually get to an organization like Uber where most of the senior management seem to spend more time figuring out how to crush each other than they do competitors.
As a result, you’re likely to notice that if someone betrays you, backstabs you or undermines you at work, it’s usually someone with high social skills — because they (correctly) believe they can get away with it and use it to advance their own career. It’s not that there weren’t plenty of other good-natured and socially skilled people around; you just don’t notice them because they aren’t playing the game of thrones like the evil ones, and therefore aren’t negatively impacting you.
@Mark
You’ve convinced me, and I retract my snark from yesterday.
I was thrown because typically the language of rights and entitlement is only used in reference to the government.
@Cypren
My previous boss told me not uncommonly, “Perception is everything,” meaning it doesn’t matter if you accomplish things if you aren’t known to do so. That wasn’t only about social skills, but where professional rewards limited, they could well be a deciding factor.
There is no push for people with great social skills to go out of their way to befriend people without friends. No army of NGOs attempting to ensure the friendless have “basic access” to healthy human relationships.
Well, I have to say, I’m one of those low social skills persons with literally* no friends and I don’t particularly care (this is probably because I don’t much like people, anyway). If there were an NGO which attempted to ensure “the friendless have basic access to healthy human relationships” and their Official Caretaker signed me up on a mandatory course to teach me How To Make Friends and alloted me a timeshare Best Buddy, with exercises every week I would have to do and provide evidence of doing (e.g. this week you must join a local club or society for a hobby or pastime!) I would loathe it with the passion of the galactic core going supernova, would baulk like a mule, and sulk my way through the entire miserable course and do as little as possible to get away with the mandatory “socialisation exercises” and as for my Best Buddy, if they were found floating face-down in the local harbour I have an alibi and you can’t prove anything, copper!
So y’know, tastes differ and I have no feeling that I am owed friendship or that someone is obligated to be my friend or that I must have one of these particular social relationships everybody else is having. And I absolutely, positively reject all notions that I owe or am obligated to be a friend/romantic interest/what have you to anyone else. (Civic duty as a member of society is something different and I do accept that citizenship involves responsibilities as well as rights).
Now, if you want to say that society owes me a million quid, my bank account details are… 🙂
*I mean that ‘literally literally’, not ‘metaphorically literally’.
Deiseach:
I’m not too familiar with most NGOs, but I was under the impression that they don’t coerce (or even have the power to coerce) the objects of their charity. Like, is the typical NGO going over to impoverished people and forcing them to accept bed nets or food at gun point, regardless of whether or not they express desire?
When I think of concepts like “everyone is entitled to food/housing/healthcare,” it doesn’t at all imply that any given food-maker/homeowner/doctor must provide food/housing/healthcare against their will.
Of course, that’s easier to arrange for commodity goods like food and housing than personal services like education and health care. A universal right for e.g. health care does run into the problem that at some point there’s a whiny obnoxious hypochondriac that no doctor wants to treat at any price society is willing to pay.
You are in a family and you are entitled to love from your family. And if you don’t get love, you have a shitty family
But Mark, this attitude is so very much out of fashion today! The old-fashioned notion was “you have a duty to respect and honour your parents as the authors of your being, even if they’re opposing some of your wishes”.
Now it’s “I don’t have to love my mother, she was a horrible person, and telling me I have to love her is saying I deserved all the abuse. I refuse to accept that I have to love someone who didn’t love me”.
Both attitudes can be taken to harmful extremes: you have to obey and not alone obey, but force yourself to feel positively towards, someone who may be cruel or indifferent to you, and you can unilaterally cut off all connections because you feel like it, regardless of what the other person feels.
You can be entitled to love from your family, but that’s not saying you are going to get it. There are bad parents, ungrateful children, drifting away, cold relationships – we have social services for the worst cases.
The ideal is the happy, loving family. The reality is that not all families are like that.
The ideal is that each one of us is a happy, successful, popular person who wants friends and who has friends because other people like us, who want sexual/romantic partner(s) and gets them because we have sufficient appeal, possibly a family of our own. The reality is not such. Some people want and can’t get, because they’re too weird/ugly/have mental and/or physical problems etc., some people don’t want one or the other or any of it.
I would as much hate having a state-mandated compulsory ‘friend’ as I would hate being a state-mandated compulsory ‘friend’.
And a sex lottery doesn’t seem to me to solve the problem, either: if what you want is the ideal of romantic attraction and someone who cares about you because they are attracted to you, find you interesting and funny and worthwhile, how satisfying is it going to be to get someone who is only laughing at your jokes and letting you put your arm around them because they’re paid for it/it is part of state-mandated civic duty? You know that when they say “And I really care for you, too, Bob” they’re acting?
Well, toadies and sycophants have always had a niche and there’s no shortage to this day of the rich and successful who like a clique of hangers-on fawning over them. But for someone who wants “genuine, real, like those other people get” emotional warmth and attachment, is it going to be enough if you know you didn’t get it on your own merits but because you were allotted it, and it isn’t real liking (because state-mandated friends/lovers are going to have their preferred, chosen, real friends and lovers that they spend time with when they’re not ‘on the clock’ performing their shift of being with you).
Automation may be the solution, where if it’s a sex bot and friend bot, at least it’s real fake emotion 🙂
Online interactions don’t count? I would have said that you have a fair number of friends here. Certainly a lot of people who both like you and respect you.
@Deiseach
It’s important to establish the ethical principal before addressing the awful reality. There are people who can’t distinguish between the two, and who almost lack the language to do so.
Perhaps you question the state as a moral authority, but, if there were some moral authority that you could recognise, and it were necessary for you to be a “friend”, you would be one despite the difficulty of the role.
We have a duty towards others – if you find it exceptionally hard to deal with other people, it may well be that there is someone better placed to provide others with companionship. That doesn’t change the fact that *if necessary* we should be prepared to take up the ethical role.
How satisfying is it when your mother tells you she loves you because she is your mother? I think it’s a sick distortion of normal human relations to imagine that we can only take satisfaction from affection that has been *earned*.
You can’t pay families, because the moment you cease paying them they would stop being your family.
That isn’t how relations work. It really isn’t how any normal relations work.
“Oh, she was paid, she didn’t *really* love me, for me”
Yes, she should just love you for you, without payment, and without *you* being a payment, either.
I have a duty towards people because they are human. How much satisfaction can they derive from that fact? Quite a lot, I would imagine.
People have been trained to believe that everything must be a transaction, and therefore believe that caring for others must be difficult.
For modern man, without any particular material pressures, caring for others is as easy as anything else. As easy as caring about any of the things their Facebook feed tells them they should be caring about, certainly.
The interesting thing is that the thing you quoted is wrong. That’s part of the problem. Nice Guys are arguing that not only do you not get rewarded for not behaving like a jackass, but that you in fact get rewarded for doing so. That’s the whole point of “girls only like assholes.” The problem is that Nice Guys sort of put asshole behavior and arrogance in with confidence. In fact many women do as well.
To use rationalist terminology, the incentives are not in line with the stated rules. Women do not react to stimuli the way they say they do. Men don’t either of course but this specific discussion is about how to have success with women. As a monolith. Obviously different people are different but for this topic we necessarily need to generalize.
Being a selfish, narcissistic person, which is essentially synonymous with being an asshole is an advantageous trait in romance/sex related activities. This is especially true when most people have their formative experiences, from ~12-21. In face I believe research has recently come out saying narcissism is an adaptive trait GENERALLY around those ages. Now as I mentioned in another comment this is similar to the famous correlation/causation example you probably all had in intro sociology. Increased ice cream consumption tracks increases in rape very well. Of course the truth is that both of those stats track a separate third thing which causes both of them to rise. Similarly with being a jerk and getting laid/getting a girlfriend. Its a bit more complicated than the ice cream but the general theory is the same.
There is a clearly observable correlation between romantic/sexual success and some of the behaviors that are displayed by jerks/assholes.
@axiomsofdominion
“Women do not react to stimuli the way they say they do.”
Isn’t the answer to this to internalize “actions speak louder than words” and “revealed preferences” and adjust accordingly?
I mean that’s what a lot of people in the manosphere/puasphere do. Though they take it too far the other way. Some people may lack the ability to pull themselves up by their social skills bootstraps, though, hence my suggestion that we teach people a wide variety of social skills as part of the education system. Just like knowing that cutting back on my sugary drinks will lose me weight doesn’t mean I can easily just yell “Bam!” and then make healthier life choices, knowing at an abstract, non-detailed level how to act to get girls doesn’t mean people who struggle in that area can just magically get over shyness, fear of embarrassment, and years of believing in their heart that women like jerks. If you are viscerally uncomfortable asking girls out or flirting and trying to interpret subtle cues as indications of interest you can’t just magically internalize effecting romance skills. Plus the early phase where you are not very practiced will be filled with rejections in many cases.
If I tell someone how to get a date, that doesn’t mean they will successfully execute the first couple tries. Showing someone the proper form for throwing a baseball won’t make them Greg Maddox.
See also, from our esteemed host.
Okay, I’m flinging down the gauntlet: what’s a Nice Woman? Or a Nice Girl, as it’s more generally put?
Because I am possibly jaundiced by too much Elizabethan, Jacobean and Cavalier poetry that boiled down to:
(a) I wanna fuck you
(b) Why won’t you let me fuck you? Are you some frigid bitch that gets off on treating guys mean?
(c) Okay, so I persuaded you that you don’t want the reputation of being a frigid bitch, so you’re finally down to fuck. But before we do, a few conditions:
(d) I don’t want you to have fucked other guys before me, because ewwww you slutty whore
(d) And I don’t want you to fuck other guys after me if we break up, because ewwww you slutty whore
(e) And if we break up, it’s my decision not yours – if you decide to break up with me, see (b) above
(f) And if you let me fuck you, that doesn’t mean I’m gonna hang around or not fuck other women, see (e) above
The “Nice Guy” has a long pedigree 🙂
Though Suckling at least is witty and recognises men can be as fickle:
Sir Philip Sidney has a great Nice Guy’s Lament:
Yeah, I like her but she doesn’t like me back, that’s not because nobody is obliged to return affection, it’s because she’s proud and vain and likes having attention and people in love with her but makes fun of the
nice guyshonest lovers and pretend it’s ‘virtue’ when it’s selfishness that she won’tfuck mereturn my love.Taylor Swift literally sings songs that are the female version of the nice guy thought process. Feminists get immensely pissy when they is pointed out. Also: https://www.reddit.com/r/Nicegirls/
Are you even trying to find examples? No. You literally could have cracked open google.
A “nice girl” is a much simpler phenomenon; it’s someone your mother would enjoy helping shop for baby clothes.
Nice is inherently more feminine. A “Nice girl” with average or better looks will probably not have trouble finding offers of companionship, though she may not deem them suitable.
An analogous situation to a Nice Guy would be if men told women that what they really wanted in a mate was an assertive woman who conquered the workplace and didn’t concern herself with appearances, then got upset when men were hitting on the barrista with the flirty smile.
In that case @RandyM something like 50% of feminists are “Nice Girls”.
Yeah, the parallel was intentional, but are feminists pursuing a rewarding and empowering career (lets call it) in order to get sex or male companionship, or because they want a chance to change the world or earn lots of money?
In the end they make the same complaint, “why don’t men/women find this socially-lauded, non-regressive behavior alluring?!” but the motivation may be different.
I wonder how many “assertive women who conquer the workplace” are single?
I work for a fairly elite firm in a glamorous industry. I’m pretty sure none of the women in my office are single. Of the various partners/boyfriends I’ve met, all seem fairly desirable. If they had to make trade-offs in terms of relationships for the sake of advancing their career, they certainly aren’t readily apparent….
(The same is true for the men, by the way. Having to study hard, work long hours, volunteer, etc. hasn’t seemed to have stopped them from finding beautiful wives and having kids, etc. I’m legitimately concerned that bachelorhood may put me in the outgroup and may significantly harm my chances of promotion)
@MattM, its a fairly common complaint among career women. Maybe your office is anomalous?
Can you direct any of these complaining women my way?
I have no particular reason to assume my office is anomalous. Many similarly successful women I went to grad-school with were either in relationships or clearly single-by-choice. I really can’t think of any women I know who have been involuntarily single for longer than a few months at a time.
I think the point of the complaint is the claim that people who do behave like jackasses get the reward. Not merely that being nice isn’t an adequate qualification for romance but that being not nice is.
Whether that’s true I don’t know, but I think it is the claim.
Its the claim and its true. Scott has given us eloquent testimony on that from his own life. The thorny problem is what to do about it. Personally I advocate for teaching people, of both genders since this problem exists within both of them, the things that a moderate majority of people successfully learn on their own. You probably can’t help everyone but a difference between 20% of people who fail at achieving romantic/sexual goals vs 10% or even 5% would still be a major benefit to overall happiness of humanity.
@axiomsofdominion
“The thorny problem is what to do about it.”
*puts on devil’s advocate hat*
Why do we need to do anything about it at all? Why isn’t “nothing” an option? Sure, some of us get the short end of the stick. Sucks to be them, so what? Life isn’t fair, some people are simply doomed to a miserable existence, life’s a b**** and then you die, that’s just the way it is, suck it up and deal with it.
For the same reason we help people with disadvantages in other areas?
Because helping them causes a net increase verses not doing do?
It would arguably be cheaper to cause a significant improvement in the social lives of 10-20% of the population than it is to keep millions of cancer patients alive for 1-10 relatively painful years of existence.
Training in social skills would also help the ~40% of the population who could do better even though they sort of muddle through currently.
A typo, but also a pretty neat unintentional indictment of “point-of-view-of-the-universe” metaethics.
Also, positional goods matter here. It’s (plausibly mostly) not about being faster than the bear.
Anyway, the real answer to Kevin’s questions is something like “kinda, but also noblesse oblige”, but I’m pretty sure he already knows that.
Careful with this though. It can end up being a zero sum game. Do expensive SAT prep courses help poor minorities get into Harvard? Maybe in theory. But in reality, it’s mostly rich white kids who will be taking those courses and getting an even bigger advantage than the poor.
Nerds fell for this scam with online dating. They saw it as the ultimate equalizer. Finally, a way for the introverted and socially awkward to meet women away from the loud noisy bars with the aggressive jocks. Then the aggressive jocks all signed up too, every woman ended up with 500 new messages a day, and ended up picking based on appearance and witty one-liners, just like at the bar. Rather than an equalizer, it just served as a productivity enhancing tool for the already successful.
Not JUST that, but that being nice is also the nominal qualification.
It’s like applying to a job, seeing that they list a bachelor’s degree as a requirement, interviewing, and then not only not getting the job, but noticing that a high school dropout was given the job instead.
Have that happen to you a few dozen times in your life and see if explanations about how employers technically have a right to hire whoever they want and that you aren’t entitled to a job satisfy you.
On that analogy, being a “nice guy” romantically is like being the very punctual employee. It might help you advance, or at least might help you avoid one reason to be fired, but it sure isn’t going be the thing to get your resume a second look.
Then again, it might make it look like you have nothing going on.
I think Brad’s comment got to the root of the majority of the issue. Most Nice Guys probably haven’t asked out many girls. And in our society men are usually the initiator. Asking less than 10 girls out who are in your league should be a requirement before you are allowed to complain.
Except for the part where I see absolutely zero evidence that being nice helps one advance romantically, and plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest the opposite is true, that it harms your chances of advancement.
Perhaps because they are regularly told that being aggressive isn’t a thing “nice guys” do.
Matt M, I guess that depends on what exactly nice looks like in practice. Things that make a nice but unattractive acquaintance seem creepy might work okay for a hot boyfriend. Just like being punctual might help, so long as you are completing assignments that make the company money, but otherwise you’ll be laid off like the rest.
That would be correct. Being socially and sexually aggressive is a benefit but often the signal is sent that it isn’t.
@axiomsofdominion
“And in our society men are usually the initiator.”
Not just our society. We’re placental mammals, with all the implications vis-a-vis Bateman’s Law and Triver’s sexual selection rules that follow thereby.
“Being socially and sexually aggressive is a benefit but often the signal is sent that it isn’t.”
So just ignore the (false) signal.
@Randy M
“Things that make a nice but unattractive acquaintance seem creepy might work okay for a hot boyfriend.”
Three rules: Be handsome. Be attractive. Don’t be unattractive.
> Being nice is basic human courtesy and decency, you don’t get a reward for not behaving like a jackass, just the same as you don’t get a reward for “hey, today is the 1,000th day in a row I didn’t murder anyone!”
You can say that if you like, but there are a great many people out there that are not nice, so clearly, “niceness” isn’t really any kind of basic quality at all. There are cheaters and deadbeats and wifebeaters and murderers and rapists and all sorts of terrible people out there, and many of them even manage to maintain relationships, and yes, it is unfair that horrible people get to have happy relationships while there are lots of nice people who don’t get to have relationships at all, and it’s ridiculous to blame people for their loneliness. It’s the flipside of conservative free-market ideology that asserts that the only reason anyone could be poor is because they’re lazy.
> The answer to that is nobody is obligated to return your romantic interest, no, not even if you’re Nice.
Well, no, nobody is individually obligated to solve other people’s relationship problems, any more than they’re obligated to personally rescue people from poverty out of their own pocket, but at the same time, poverty and inequality are still problems and just blaming them on the lazy poors is a callous and unproductive attitude to take.
Well, no, nobody is individually obligated to solve other people’s relationship problems, any more than they’re obligated to personally rescue people from poverty out of their own pocket, but at the same time, poverty and inequality are still problems and just blaming them on the lazy poors is a callous and unproductive attitude to take.
Money is a thing. Unless you are telling me you are sexually and romantically in love with money, it’s a material possession (or even an abstract concept). I wouldn’t like someone to take a brick out of the wall of my house, but I wouldn’t feel the same way about it as if they cut off my finger. I may grouse about the government taking social insurance contributions out of my paypacket, but it is not the same as if they literally wanted a pint of my blood.
Emotions like love, friendship, liking etc. are corporeal, they’re expressions that are literally embodied in our bodies. Forcing or requiring us to give these expressions to someone for whom we do not feel that is an imposition in a way that taking money is not.
I am not saying “if you can’t get a romantic partner, that’s your fault and you deserve to be treated like shit”, I am saying you cannot make people feel things that they don’t feel and don’t want to feel, and that includes feeling friendship or romantic attraction.
“We’re doing it for the money. When the money arrives, we’ll be doing it with the money.”
That can be refactored into “you don’t get a punishment for behaving like a jackass” which sounds less obviously justified. I think this is closer to what is being complained about.
No, I think the complaint is that behaving like a jackass is rewarded with sexual success (for certain values of sexual success); which it is. See Ozy’s anti-heartiste FAQ hosted on this very blog: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/20/ozys-anti-heartiste-faq/
Ozy comes up with an interesting reason this might be so:
I suppose it’s a tricky matter of interpretation. What a general statement like “behaving like a jackass is rewarded with sexual success” actually means in real terms is unclear if there are internal differences in the things being described.
I seriously doubt being a jackass is beneficial on average, but it clearly seems to work for a subset of people.
And I did say “closer”, I don’t disagree with you, really – it’s just that I think the “women like assholes” narrative is significantly overstated and a softer version might be more accurate.
It is tricky! But I think it’s clear that “behaving like a jackass is rewarded with sexual success” is true where you define behaving like a jackass as possessing dark traid traits/high big 5 disagreeability, and sexual success as a high number of sexual partners. So I would say Deiseach’s and your original statements don’t go far enough.
Not sure if being a jackass is on average beneficial. I can imagine situations in which it isn’t. For example, if attractiveness correlates with both dark triad personality traits and sexual success (however it’s defined) then you have a confound with these negative personality traits. You think bad personalities explain sexual success but it’s just good looks! I can see good looks predisposing one to narcissism… And this is just one made up confound. Maybe the data on sexual success and personality traits controls for looks, but I can’t recall offhand.
So, “women like assholes” seems to me clearly true, as per Henry in Radicalizing the Romanceless. And I would agree that most super players (tons of good looking women, high sociosexuality) are likely assholes.
But I’d disagree for example with “women only like assholes.” I see too many non-asshole men do well with women to credit this. I think Ozy was on to something; this PUA stuff seems to ignore low sociosexuality individuals, or lump them all into the “beta male” template. Sexual success defined solely as physical attractiveness or number of sexual partners doesn’t seem to accord with the principles by which most men want to pick their mates.
I dislike ‘nice’ people because to me there is something a bit passive aggressive about ‘niceness’. “Oh! He’s such a ‘nice’ guy” Normally means that he isn’t genuinely kind, but that he engages in superficial displays of kindness as a form of politeness.
I like my politeness a bit more low key.
That said, I love genuinely friendly and kind people.
Actually, I think when ‘nice guys’ complain about not getting women they are saying “I haven’t killed anyone recently or broken any laws, give me a girlfriend, now.” Which, to me, is a fairly reasonable position to take.
I assume you meant “fairly unreasonable position” there at the end? If so, I think Scott’s alternate translation makes more sense: “I didn’t think I deserved to have the prettiest girl in school prostrate herself at my feet. But I did think I deserved to not be doing worse than Henry.”
No, fairly reasonable – I think that being a normal decent human being should be rewarded with sex.
I just don’t think that being “nice” should really come in to it.
I didn’t kill anyone today – or do any other of the numerous anti-social things I could have done – that’s enough.
I want the option of sex, please, or this society thing is not a good deal for me. There’s only so much food and shelter a man can take without sex.
I don’t think Scott got this right or you are. Many of the people that are enraged about their lack of sex don’t make reasonable efforts to have sex. They either don’t ask for it at all expecting to somehow drop from the sky, ask for it only rarely and only from one particular very attractive person which they fixate on one at a time, and/or don’t take extremely basic steps to make themselves more attractive such as showering and brushing their teeth.
Above all the biggest problem is not asking. The first girlfriend I had, had to literally invite me to sleep in her bed before I finally made a move. And I could imagine a slightly different version of myself not even getting the point then (“oh she must just not want me to have to sleep on that uncomfortable couch”).
I think it is somewhat unreasonable to expect a girlfriend without even having to ask. Though to be fair women do get something like that deal, though they have other things they have to deal with.
Okay, Brad, what efforts would you consider reasonable?
(And please don’t say “hire a prostitute.” Moral issues aside; in this context, at least half the time, “sex” is synecdoche for a romantic relationship.)
Brad, you have pretty much listed one of the major issues. The only real helpful thing PUA teaches you is to ask lots of girls. That is one of the things I think we could teach people in social skills classes. There are many, many other things as well not even related to dating.
One of the reasons assholes seem to get more girls is that not only do they ask girls to go out with them or have sex with them but they are less limited by the word no so they will often not only make the initial ask but push on passed resistance. Sometimes its resistance expressed for cultural reasons and pushing on results in a consensual interaction, sometimes they are being aggressive and pressuring girls/women which can still result in success for various reasons. But that is most of the explanatory power.
Its sort of like the human tendency to perceive a bear or other dangerous animal more often than one exists.
You have a couple situations:
There may or may not be a sign that a girl would say yes if you asked her for something.
There are, at a high level, four options:
There is a sign and you go for it.
There is not a sign and you go for it.
There is a sign and you don’t go for it.
There is not a sign and you don’t go for it.
People who either have more false positives than false negatives or who just don’t care are going to do better romantically/sexually than people who have more false negatives than false positives.
The system incentivizes seeing signs. And acting on them. PUA teachings basically cause you to act like a person with more false positives even though you naturally aren’t.
Of course ideally you would always actually know whether there was a sign or not. But humans suck at that and for other reasons women are incentivized to be ambiguous. Men sort of are also though not as much.
The other major issue as you mentioned is fixating on people out of their league.
Welfare? Poor man, why do you worry about eating? You haven’t begged to 300 people today for your supper. You should be ashamed of yourself.
The expectation that people are entitled to sex must come first – then you can work about the particular cultural details.
@Mark
But presumably you agree that people are also entitled to not have sex with specific other people. So practically speaking you have to balance the two.
[Marriage.]
I guess really I’d like a system where everyone thinks “yes of course incredibly ugly people are entitled to sex” just as a general idea in society.
I don’t like the thought that if you can’t have sex, buck your ideas up and be more attractive. Sounds very tiring for everyone – just chill the hell out and help those ugly people find a partner.
Best example of this is the tv show “the undateables”. That’s the world I want to live in.
You remind me of an incident when I was about fifteen, involving a girl I was very much attracted to but not in a romantic relationship with. She said something which, looking back at it, I suspect was an invitation to kiss her.
But that interpretation didn’t occur to me at the time.
David, there was a SUPER relevant r/askreddit thread about that a few days ago. Some were very relateable and some were like, how could you not see what was going on? r/askreddit is like 95% crap but the good ones are pretty fun to read.
@Evan Þ
I’m far from an expert or an arbiter of objectively reasonable.
There are probably people out there that have terrible situations they couldn’t do much about no matter how much effort they put in.
But there’s another group of people that could brush their teeth, shower, put on deodorant, get a haircut, wear clean clothes, and ask some women out on dates. And not only women that look like models, are super smart, and tons of friends — though by all means give them a shot too.
I can’t give any guarantees that will work, but if you are in my company and start moaning about how woman are bitches that only date assholes, I’m going to be much more likely to give you a pass and a sympathetic ear if you’ve tried and failed than if you haven’t.
I think that being a normal decent human being should be rewarded with sex.
Do you see the weasel word there? “Rewarded”.
Mark, I don’t know your orientation or with whom you would prefer to have sex, but let’s imagine Person Of Gender You Aren’t Attracted To comes over and is fairly pleasant in a normal, casual, two strangers passing the time of day way.
Then they make a pass at you, which you decline because they seem like an okay person but you’re just not interested.
And then they go “Hey, I could have punched you in the face and when you were stunned, held you down, pulled off your clothes and raped you! But I didn’t, I was Nice! You should reward me for being Nice!”
See the problem there with “being nice should be rewarded with sex”? You are still making it a matter of compulsion: if L does not like P in that way, too bad: P behaved in a civilised human manner and therefore should be rewarded.
We coax children with bribes to learn and to behave, but after a certain point we expect them to behave without the expectation of a reward. If the Nice Guy/Gal is stuck on the six year old level of “i won’t do it unless i get a cookie”, too bad for them, but it’s even worse for society to force everyone to give them their goddamn cookie or else they’ll murder you.
As for “ugly people are entitled to sex”, that is a different matter if we’re talking of sex only – that’s why there is such a thing as prostitution. Again, I wish there was some clarity – does the Nice Guy want sex, romance, both? Do they want a relationship or do they just want to stick their dick in a breathing woman? If option B, I am led to believe there are several ways of setting up an exchange of cash for services.
And finally, if it really is a case of “I’m gonna behave like an asshole unless you let me fuck you”, then I set aside my objections to Punching A Nazi and firmly believe every man, woman or other is fully entitled to behave like an asshole right back at them, which may include anything from “Lay a finger on me and I’ll get my three brothers to beat the shit out of you and put you in the hospital” upwards. Whiny baby in the office is going to hang around your desk and moan that you didn’t want to go out on a date with him? Staple his balls to the desk.
I don’t know if I believe every detail of that story about the woman who worked at Uber that is making the rounds, but if her example is correct, this is why Nice Guys are seen as pests – her new boss emailed her about his open relationship, pestered her for a date/sex, and when she went to HR they admitted he would give her a bad performance review for not sleeping with him but there was nothing they would do about it.
And I’m sure he thought he was being a Nice Guy, sending her a polite email being open and honest about having a girlfriend and in an open relationship, and that he was flattering her with his attentions and that he was attracted to her, and that he wanted to have sex with her. She should have rewarded him for that, right? For being nice?
We expect them to behave without the certain expectation of an immediate reward. We still expect that behaving well will tend to lead to happier lives for most people. Socially proscribed behavior should lead to most people having what they want most out of life (at least if we’ve stopped believing in rewards in the afterlife, honor, things like that) or else they won’t do it and will be right to.
This isn’t all a nit-picky tangent. See discussions like”men on strike“–when men don’t feel like hard work and social conformity will lead them to a likelihood of female attention, they aren’t going to work hard professionally and personally.
Exactly. In most circumstances, if society is set up such that pro-social behaviour leaves one worse off than anti-social behaviour, we consider that there’s a problem with society, not the people trying to act pro-socially.
ETA @ Deiseach:
Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. We have no way of telling one way or the other, nor do we have any way of telling how common this sort of mindset actually is among people who get labelled “Nice Guys”.
@Randy M
“We still expect that behaving well will tend to lead to happier lives for most people.”
Do “we” really? And are “we” right to expect that?
“Socially proscribed behavior should lead to most people having what they want most out of life”
I think you made some sort of error in phrasing here; the definition of “proscribe” is: “To forbid or prohibit; to denounce; to banish or exclude.” I think you may have wanted to say “socially prescribed behavior”.
“at least if we’ve stopped believing in rewards in the afterlife, honor, things like that”
Maybe that’s the problem, then.
“or else they won’t do it and will be right to.”
How would they be “right to” refuse to do the right thing? It’s right to do the right thing and wrong to do the wrong thing — or refuse to do the right thing — pretty much by definition, yes? If the “socially prescribed behavior” is the right thing to do, then it’s the right thing to do, and those who “won’t do it” most assuredly won’t “be right to.”
By definition. Otherwise, to quote Michael Bluth, “I’d like to think of it as an imposition.”
Quite, thanks for pointing it out. My fingers typed what my brain told them to, so it wasn’t a typo, but a mixing up of the two similar words.
Well, sure, but consider the venue.
Two possibilities–either there is objectively correct behavior, in which case you follow it regardless of consequences and enjoy your reward in Heaven, or “right behavior” is defined as that which tends to lead to better outcomes for the most individuals, and if it isn’t doing that, your defection will be a social signal that it is time to change the social conventions. (Also, of course, both may be true for different sets of actions).
@Randy M
“By definition. Otherwise, to quote Michael Bluth, “I’d like to think of it as an imposition.””
So what if it’s an “imposition”? What’s wrong with impositions, and why can’t the right thing be an imposition? What about “impositions” like the duty to respect and obey one’s parents and elders, which is pretty much universal to human societies? You don’t choose your parents, after all. Life itself is an imposition; nobody chooses to be born.
“Two possibilities–either there is objectively correct behavior, in which case you follow it regardless of consequences and enjoy your reward in Heaven,”
What if you believe in non-consequentialist ethics, “right and wrong” to be followed regardless of consequences, but not in a “future state of rewards and punishment”, as it were? That there exists objective right things to do that result in negative consequences with no afterlife or karma-based-reincarnation to “balance the scales”?
One might reject that such a view can be meaningful, but to do so is to imply thereby that all non-consequentialist (non-realist) moral systems are dependent upon the reality of a “just” afterlife or reincarnation. But note that appealing that one should do the right thing because of “reward in heaven”, then you’re arguing it’s the right thing to do because of the outcomes of the action, and thus arguing consequentialism. So first, this view would constitute arguing that consequentialist ethics (where “consequences” can include post-death states) are the only possible ethics. Second, it would imply that non-consequentialist (at least with regards to earthly consequences) morals are dependent upon belief in a future state of rewards and punishment, and thus that atheism and irreligion mandate consequentialist ethics. I’m sure there’s at least one philosopher or ethicist out there with arguments against this (I admit I’m not well-read enough in that field to name one off-hand). I’d also dispute this due to my (many) reasons for rejecting particularly utilitarianism, and consequentialist ethics more broadly.
I think “nice” has long been ambiguous and problematic in various ways, as others have implied. I remember a scathing Bertrand Russell essay about nice people; it didn’t have much to do with the current complaints about niceness, except to the extent that one of the problems he accused the nice people of being guilty of was hypocrisy. I don’t recall the publication date, but obviously written while Russell was alive, so at least half a century ago.
Being “nice” is sometimes just submission to the other person’s will. IE, “Tell me what you want me to be and I will be it.” Normal people don’t want their romantic partners to be mere supplicants. That explains why most women would reject this overly-submissive “niceness.”
Are there “nice women” IE female supplicants? Sure there are. Their existence would explain why asshole guys get girls. The asshole dude is a narcissist who likes nothing more than a supplicant girlfriend. Are there “asshole women”? Sure there are. But they behave differently from asshole men and/or they are less prevalent and/or they are less recognized.
(And then there are healthy men and women.)
So we can divide everyone into supplicants, narcissists, and healthy people. If we assume:
– Healthy people are most likely to pursue or accept other healthy people
– Supplicants are more likely to pursue unhealthy people, and most likely to be accepted by narcissists
– Narcissists are least likely to pursue or accept narcissists
…then most supplicants will find that the people they pursue are ending up with narcissists by virtue of simple math. Moreover, a supplicant who becomes a narcissist (a la PUA) would improve their chances with supplicants, worsen their chances with narcissists, and do little for their chances with healthy people.
Women in your system would have an inherent advantage because of the cultural dating roles for genders. That is, men propose and women accept. Being a supplicant is functionally identical to being healthy for women. Again I’m assuming that your classification system is properly descriptive.
Being a supplicant male is much harder because the pool or women who initiate is much smaller. Also, healthy women are much more likely to end up with narcissists. Healthy confidence and narcissism are often not immediately apparent.
@axiomsofdominion
“Women in your system would have an inherent advantage because of the cultural dating roles for genders. That is, men propose and women accept.”
Again, this is more biological than cultural (evolutionary theory applied to sexual selection says so).
When I tell my wife that she is too nice, it is not a good thing. But I am using a meaning of the word that survives, outside of my usage, only in the phrase “nice distinction.”
Re: Trump’s Sweden comments – I wake up this morning, check the news, and it seems as if Trump has made some big mess-up by referencing some non-existent terrorist attack in Sweden, he has admitted his mistake and states he got his info from some (faaaake) Fox news story.
Real story – Trump was referencing a Fox news story about immigrant crime in Sweden.
I like this guys take:
Angry Foreigner
Eh.
Trump was most likely referring to an terrorist attack which was referenced on Tucker Carlson’s show the previous night but took place in 2010.
The real issue is that Trump does not care about getting his facts correct, so he does not bother to check things. He said he was surprised, that it was “unbelievable”, but this does not prompt him to make sure the information is correct.
He didn’t mention terrorist attacks in Sweden, though. He said –
“The President has the right to keep people out if he feels it’s not in the best interests of our country… we’ll be doing something over the next couple of days..we don’t give up… we never give up. We had a court that I disagree with bigly…
Here’s the bottom line – we’ve got to keep our country safe. We gotta keep our country safe. You look at what’s happening in Germany, what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden! Who would believe this, Sweden! They took in large numbers now they are having problems they never thought possible. You look at what is happening in Brussels. You look at what is happening all over the world – look at Nice. Take a look at Paris….”
It’s pretty clear to me that he is saying there are problems with immigration (mass sexual assualt in Germany/ rape in Sweden / lack of integration in Brussels / terrorist attacks in France) and that as President he has the right to restrict immigration where it might not be in the country’s interest.
Has to be a pretty uncharitable reading to get “Trump invented a terrorist attack in Sweden” from that.
The criticism seems to have mutated into “well, he gets all of his information from television” now. Still seems pretty uncharitable to me.
Trump is talking about the ban he put in place, which he says is to specifically stop terrorist attacks, and lists several place where terrorist takes have taken place.
It takes a very charitable reading to say that Trump wasn’t indicating that something had happened “last night.”
And perhaps reading Trump very, very charitably is the only way to make his actual words make sense as a general rule. But given there had been a program on the previous evening where a terrorist attack in Sweden had been referenced as happening recently, it’s not a stretch at all to believe he was referencing that.
Again, the big issue is that everything he says has to be interpreted to get to what he might possibly be referring to. He clearly does not care about precision when claiming things are facts.
I think it’s a conversational style – like if I said “Hey – did you see the Second World War thing last night?” it’s perhaps not the best way to phrase things, but it’d be a bit of an odd response to call me an idiot for not knowing that the war ended 70 years ago.
It would also be a bit odd to pedantically insist that I rephrased my statement as “Hey – last night I watched a TV show about the Second World War – did you see that?” – in normal conversation people often phrase things somewhat ambiguously – we manage to get by because we interpret their words in ways that make sense.
The thing that makes most sense is that Trump was referring to generally bad things associated with undocumented immigration (he has form – bad hombres/rapists/ etc.) and specifically to a TV show he watched the night before (which is what he has said he was saying) rather than him imagining a terrorist attack.
I take this as evidence that his critics are uncharitable and pedantic.
The difference is that “second world war thing” can reasonably refer to “a TV program about the second world war” and requires no excessively charitable reading to be so. There is no such meaning available for Trump’s words. He talks about something happening last night, and the emotional content of the message is definitely that something happened recently (not six years ago) that people should be concerned about. This last point removes the validity of a pedantic “yes, a TV broadcast is a thing that happens”.
I take it as evidence that this is the response their words are designed to provoke, just like how Kellyanne Conway “misspoke” about the “Bowling Green massacre” and then it later turned out that had been carefully rehearsed.
I’m not pedantically insisting on anything.
Yes, but if you say “Dieing in a fire is horrible. That thing with the Branch Davidians, and can you believe what happened last night in Dresden? So many people who died in that fire.” People are going to be confused.
And, if your buddy says “What the heck are you talking about?” You should not get huffy at them.
When the President of the U.S. says something happened in Sweden last night, no one should be surprised when people hear that for the plain meaning of the words and wonder what in the heck-fire he is talking about.
And that is all that is happening. Donald Trump does a Donald Trump thing and people are pointing it out.
@Mark
“last night in Sweden” implies something happening last night in Sweden, not that you saw a programme about something in Sweden last night. The correct comparison would be “hey, there was a Second World War thing in Germany last night”, which does sound odd.
random832 – I think you’re wrong.
I would say Trump was saying “Look at (the TV), (showing) what is happening, (oh yeah it was on) last night, in Sweden.
I think we can know that this is what he means because of his use of the words “is happening”. If I was talking about something that happened in Sweden last night, there is no way I’d use the words “is happening” – it doesn’t make any basic sense – “Look at [the terrorist attack] that is happening in Sweden last night.”
I think you’d have to be a non-native speaker or George Bush to say something like that.
It’s not the emotional content of the message that makes it sound as if something happened recently – it’s the grammar that tells us it’s something that is still occurring, and that “last night” must be referring to something else.
I don’t know – I think I’m just finely attuned to Trump’s manner of speaking – that supposedly indecipherable comment he made that was doing the rounds a while ago made perfect sense to me – and yeah, it could always be some kind of planned controversy.
@Mark:
But Trump could just as easily have said in a speech the day after Orlando “and look at what is happening last night in Florida” and it would still have parsed correctly in your view.
In other words, if you already know what Trump is talking about, you can understand what he probably means.
@rlms
I don’t think this is nearly a strong enough claim. The correct comparison is more like “nazi thing in Germany last night” – the fact that it has enough surface plausibility that almost certainly many people walked away from the rally thinking there was a real thing that really happened last night and never saw any of the fact-checking (or, if they did, they assumed it was more left-wing media lies) is important to the analogy.
@Mark
But that’s because you already know the facts. Without it, it sounds like “what is happening” is just “too many refugees, causing problems”, which would justify the present tense, and “last night” something went wrong in a specific way related to that (i.e. a terrorist attack, or maybe riots or something).
And if someone had told me, in the comments here this morning, that there had been an incident in Sweden last night, I would have believed them. I would also be very angry with them after I googled it and found nothing, but my point is, it’s certainly plausible for me, just as for everyone at his rally – basically anyone who doesn’t watch 24/7 cable news – to have not yet heard about a real incident that had happened so recently. And that goes double for his supporters who are constantly being fed a narrative about the media suppressing and refusing to cover terrorist attacks.
So you can only understand the sentence if you already know exactly where the blanks are and how to fill them in properly?
Looking at that in context, it seems to me that talking about the Sweden thing is a bit of a red herring. Sure, it looks like Trump goofed up there. But the rest of his examples, and the overall point he’s trying to make, are still clearly right.
@Mark
This reminds me of the “fake but accurate” meme during the Bush administration. Every time I hear a plea to take Trump seriously, but not literally, fake, but accurate comes to my mind.
probably because it makes sense though
like, it’s no fun that Trump is this easily fooled by news shows. But he’s clearly correct about Sweden in general. It sucks that we need to have someone like that in power just to address these basic issues that we should’ve already addressed, but clearly we do or he wouldn’t be here.
It isn’t clear, listening to the speech, that Trump was fooled by news shows. The alternative interpretation is that what he meant was “what we heard about last night that has been happening in Sweden” not “what we heard about that happened last night.”
Or as a sort of more emphatic “currently”, though I’d only give him benefit of the doubt here if he is talking extemporaneously.
I hadn’t actually heard or seen the quote before. The fact that he brings up Nice and Paris, where attacks obviously did happen, seems relevant. And seems to expose that the media is being deliberately uncharitable here. His point is “lack of immigration restrictions leads to terrorism.” In proving that, he cites 3-4 examples, all but one of unquestionably happened. By ignoring those and focusing entirely on “HE SAID SOMETHING HAPPENED IN SWEDEN BUT NOTHING DID LOL WHAT AN IDIOT” it seems as if they are ignoring his greater point entirely. Not having a constructive debate on the issues, but engaging in pointless partisan “gotcha” journalism.
There is and has been plenty of coverage of Trump’s idea that stopping immigration from these countries would stop terrorist attacks. This is not a new claim of Trump’s.
But they call it “news” for a reason.
There also is, and has been plenty of coverage of Trump saying weird things that have little bearing on actual facts.
“Trump says thing that, under normal interpretation of English, would seem to be totally wrong, but can be defended if interpreted a certain way by people generally sympathetic to him” is a story that we’ve already seen 500 times in the last year. That’s not “news” either.
But a statement that strongly implies an event in Sweden last night is new. Him mentioning Sweden at all is new.
That’s going to get noticed and commented on. People have to figure out what the fuck he might mean, depending on whether today is the day he is being serious or the day he is being literal.
I mean, if something actually did happen in Sweden and people didn’t go figure out what he was talking about, Trump would be all over that too.
Yeah, and it took about five seconds for people here to tell you exactly what he meant. It’s fairly obvious. The constant harping of it does not come from some genuine desire to inform the public, but from an ideological desire to harm Trump.
@Matt M:
I didn’t bring it up.
Look, in the 12 to 24 hours after he says that, people are going to note that he said something about Sweden, point out that nothing happened last night, try to figure out what he meant, report what they think he meant, ask for official clarification and try and figure out if the official clarification matches the new thing he said. Slightly more time because it was over a weekend.
And then it goes away, unless people try and bring it up as an example of how he is being mistreated by the media.
ETA: Remember, my original thesis was simply that he needed to be more precise about what he says and make sure it matches what actually happened. Not that it was a very big deal that he said it.
I think this is pretty easy to overlook – when people started pointing this out, they didn’t know about the Fox News thing. They just knew Trump said something in Sweden last night, and nobody knew what he was talking about.
Also, two of his staff members had already been caught repeatedly referring to (separate instances of) attacks that didn’t happen, which is going to lead people to noticing a pattern.
(And I actually do think the pattern still sort of lines up, since the Bowling Green thing was also likely a case of ‘misunderstood something I saw on TV, didn’t bother to check, made myself look dumb/dishonest’.)
Or the fact that they have to provide enough coverage of something for people not to conclude “there was a real attack and the media refused to cover it, just like Trump and Conway are always saying they do.”
The piece you’re missing is that people hearing the Trump speech, and people seeing this coverage of it, don’t already know that there was no incident in Sweden last night, let alone already knowing that there was something on Hannity about a 2010 attack in Sweden.
If he mentioned placenames where historical (in this context “did not happen last night, happened some time before”) attacks occurred, using the formulation “what is happening in – ” and mentioned Sweden in the middle, that does lean towards the interpretation that what he meant was “all this list of examples where countries that took in large numbers of migrants had problems with crime and rioting”, rather than “and something happened last night in Sweden”.
I haven’t seen anybody taking him to task for saying “what is happening in Germany/in Brussels”, even though at the time there was nothing happening right then – but they did jump on “last night in Sweden”, which does seem to be looking for any stick to beat the dog.
I know people like to say Trump is dumb, but this and the thing alleged about his lack of focus – he could be ADHD and quite smart, but his mind jumps from one link of the chain of thought to another in a fast, unstructured way so he leaves out the intermediate steps in “And another example is something I saw last night on the TV about similar trouble in Sweden” and “this is happening in Sweden also”, so you get “happening last night in Sweden”.
@Deiseach: “Is happening” is generally used to mean “Has been happening in recent times,” because unless Trump is a clairvoyant, he’s probably not describing an incident which is happening right this very instant. “Last night,” on the other hand, is usually used to mean “last night.” It takes a tremendous amount of charity to interpret it any other way, and it’s unreasonable to say that the people who took it literally are just looking for trouble.
Because obviously, a reasonable, virtuous person would have spent the evening looking through the Fox News archives to find out what he meant, right? That’s the natural thing to do when you’re told about an event last night in Sweden, and anyone who says otherwise is just trying to smear him.
And it takes a significant amount of chutzpah to decry the media for reporting statements that, while truthful, might give listeners the wrong impression, but to defend statements by Trump that, even if you twist yourself into pretzels to show how they aren’t really lies, are definitely going to give someone the wrong impression.
Mark,
Your claim seems to be that the phrase “last night” modifies “You look,” rather than “what’s happening in Sweden.” There’s no way to reach that conclusion from the syntax. So, in order for your claim to be true, we must interpret/reject syntax in the context of the sentence’s presumed meaning.
To some degree that is a reasonable and normal thing to do in conversation. But, in order to give someone the benefit of the doubt in that way, there has to be some common ground of discourse. Trump’s administration has become known for “alternative facts,” which run the gamut from competing interpretations to provably false statements. It is hard to tell how much of this is carelessness and how much is tactical (as they are so hostile to the press), but either way, the common ground has undeniably been eroded.
With no common ground to rely on a priori, and when he so tortures the syntax, there is no basis for deciphering his statements. We can only restate our logical priors – exactly what everyone has done. Charity demands we acknowledge that Trump’s statement is simply unclear.
I do agree that his sentence does not imply a terrorist attack whatsoever. Even the most syntactically-strict reading is merely that something happened last night in Sweden.
The news spin is implying that he referenced a specific event and conflating it with the earlier Bowling Green gaffe. But while he did refer to “last night” he otherwise said nothing about a specific incident (or even say that whatever “last night” referred to was a terrorist attack).
I am seriously in full on pox-on-both-their-houses mode. Trump is awful, but the press is in such a lather that they can’t help feeding his narrative.
But “last night” strongly implies a specific incident!
In the grand scheme of things, this particular malapropism is nothing. But as part of the pattern where Trump and the administration repeat confusing bullshit statements over and over?
At some point you just have to admit that you can’t believe there is objective meaning in any particular thing he says.
So you have to read over-charitably to get a non-BS reading out of the statement.
But you have to read under-charitably to get “Trump made up a Swedish terror attack that didn’t happen!”
I’m just sick of the cycle: Trumps says something exaggerated/dumb -> media battles to see who can make most uncharitable overreaction -> Trump calls out media. Media tells their audience Trump is a liar and buffoon, Trump tells audience media overreacts and is against him, both audiences pat themselves on the back for their views being vindicated (and they’re both partly right!). It’s tiresome.
What else is the media supposed to do? The “they suppress coverage” narrative makes silence a losing option, so if there’s no story about a real attack, there has to be a story about a fake attack, otherwise large numbers of people will walk away believing there was an attack and the media didn’t cover it.
Run the quote and say “it was not clear what specific event, if any, Trump was referring to”. Run some stats on Swedish crime if you want to spin it whichever way. Anti-Trumpers will still get it.
He never said anything about an attack in Sweden, just an amorphous reference to last night and “problems they never thought possible”, so I’m not sure why a terrorist attack is the only possible conclusion. In any case, more people are probably hearing about the quote because of the negative coverage than they would with a blander story about the speech. Hell, there are probably way more people associating “terror attack” and “Sweden” now than if the media had stayed silent!
That’s even worse! That implies that there could be multiple events that “last night in Sweden” refers to!
If there was no terror attack, then you shouldn’t hedge and say “maybe there was a terror attack, maybe there wasn’t.” It’s not virtuous to create uncertainty where none exists. Say “There was no terror attack last night in Sweden, and it is unclear what Trump was referring to.”
Well, there’s your problem.
But yeah this doesn’t seem particularly notable. Another day, another MSM #fakenews story.
The genuinely interesting question is whether Trump will actually do anything to “keep our country safe” or just keep tweeting. His performance so far has been disappointing: rolling over meekly for the courts instead of ignoring their illegal rulings, letting the rogue intelligence community take out his people one-by-one rather than going after them, etc. I’m still trying to suspend judgement until his first 100 days are up but he’s quite got a lot of work left to do.
Say what? The courts are the ones who decide if something is illegal or not. Not Trump. The President doesn’t get to ignore court rulings he doesn’t like, that’s not one of his powers.
(Yes, yes, Jackson got away with saying “The court has made their decision, now let them enforce it,” but that’s not a strategy you should encourage. In general, ignoring the federal courts is how you get the US Marshals sent after you.)
Hardball answer: Marbury v Madison was illegitimate, since the court can’t interpret the power to interpret the Constitution into existence. The Supreme Court and lower courts have no power to overrule an EO except on Constitutional grounds.
Softball answer: If the courts abandon the Constitution, they lose their legitimacy. A “living document” isn’t law, it’s ideology and thus rulings based on it have no legal force.
Either way, as a practical matter as long as Gen. Mattis backs him up, it doesn’t matter what the courts say is legal or illegal.
You are literally saying Trump should use military force to override the legal system.
If you’re wondering why people keep calling Trump supporters fascists, this is why.
But judicial review was clearly anticipated as early as Federalist #16:
There’s a lot to dislike about judicial review, especially how it’s devolved into the executive and legislature leaving the Constitution completely up to the courts to determine. But, it’s pretty clearly in there.
@Dr Dealgood
“Hardball answer: Marbury v Madison was illegitimate”
Marbury v. Madison was over two hundred years ago. You can try to argue that America’s been doing Constitutional jurisprudence wrong for ~94% of its existence, but it will be quite a hard sell even on the American Right, let alone the Left, particularly those in government and law with the most say on this issue. (Add in Evan Þ’s reply as well.)
“Softball answer: If the courts abandon the Constitution, they lose their legitimacy.”
But the courts haven’t abandoned the Constitution, they’re closer to it than anyone, the same way a ventriloquist is the closest to his or her dummy.
“A “living document” isn’t law, it’s ideology and thus rulings based on it have no legal force.”
It seems to me like most people disagree with this; they accept that a ““living document” is indeed law, and they certainly act as if the resulting rulings have legal force; again, particularly among those in law and government.
“Either way, as a practical matter as long as Gen. Mattis backs him up, it doesn’t matter what the courts say is legal or illegal.”
First, there’s a whole power structure with plenty of layers between Gen. Mattis and the (purportedly) Trump-loyal rank-and-file. What if he were to “side with Trump” in these sorts of action, and then his subordinates defy his commands as “unlawful orders” (which they are supposedly required to disobey), and help with his arrest for sedition, or whatever the appropriate charge under US law is for those attempting a coup d’état?
Second, you do seem to be at least strongly implying here that for Trump to “win” against the bureaucratic establishment and the “deep state”, he’ll indeed have to carry out a sucessful military-based auto-coup and massive “purges” of the federal government, said purges one can pretty much guarantee will not be bloodless (at the very least due to resistance from those to be “purged” and their supporters). This comes pretty close to the “Trump: Caesar or Romanov” and “helicopter rides” view I’ve criticized here before. And as beleester illustrates, promoting such a position invites significant escalation from the Left to prevent that “fascist takeover”.
FYI:
“The court has made their decision, now let them enforce it.”
or more commonly
“John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”
Is believed to be apocryphal. Though it probably does reflect Jackson’s general attitude.
“ignoring their illegal rulings”
And how would this work? After all, recall that Trump simply gives orders; it’s up to the people (nominally) under him to do the actual defying. And can a court ruling be “illegal” anymore, given how, in the way our system actually works in practice (rather than the theory from which it has significatly diverged), the courts get to decide what the law “really says”, and so decide what is “legal” and what is “illegal”?
“going after them”
How exactly would Trump “go after” the “rogue intelligence community”? Give them more orders to ignore?
And look at how bad the screaming about fascist dictatorship and auto-coup are, and the talk of the need for pre-emptive violence to “defend” against having to “be hiding Anne Frank in their basement a few years from now”, and so on. What would it be like if he did do any of things you’d like him to? Would it be days, or just hours, between his taking that sort of action and Congress beginning the impeachment proceedings?
Not to mention, there’s Chuch Schumer’s comment from early January:
The Intelligence Services are a branch of the executive which means Trump has the authority to fire them if he so pleases.
“Trump has the authority to fire them if he so pleases”
So people say, but see my previous comments about how it takes years to actually remove a Federal employee who resists their firing, particularly a “politically motivated” firing. And that’s before the courts get involved. So when Trump says “you’re fired”, and they reply “no, we’re not” and keep on coming to work, and the court eventually agrees their jobs are still theirs, what then?
The people of the Executive Branch work for, answer to, and can be fired by President Trump in theory. As we are seeing, it looks like the reality is quite different.
It’s not really a problem of authority, but one of practicality: how are you going to find the leaks when the majority of the senior members of the organization hate you and aren’t going to actually cooperate? They’ll feign cooperation and then do everything in their power to make sure you pay for crossing them, and you can’t fire them all without bringing the agency to a halt.
Fighting the bureaucracy in Washington is a sisyphean task and almost always going to fail catastrophically. This goes doubly so for the intelligence community, who have access to all kinds of information to undermine politicians from sources both legal and illegal, as Mike Flynn found out.
I mean, technically you can measure any interval in any unit of time. Days, let alone hours, are an odd choice, given the 2018 election is in 623 days.
Trump does tend to bring a lot of these problems on himself, you have to admit. There was no need to muddle up the immigration order in a way that created innumerable camera-friendly victims at airports, or to start picking fights with the bureaucracy before he had his Cabinet in place, or to have Administration spokespersons wandering around saying random crap without even thinking about it. Yes, yes, the media are partisan jerks will spin everything in the worst possible light anyway, but that doesn’t mean one should make their jobs easy, does it?
I watched the first 5:33, and it was very informative. This doesn’t change the fact that the refugee and immigration system the US has/had prior to Trump’s inauguration isn’t comparable to Sweden’s. And Trump is being disingenuous by implying it has to change to prevent a Sweden-like state.
My take is that
1. Reading him charitably, I can accept he wasn’t claiming there had actually been a terrorist attack the previous night and was instead referring to the Fox thing (though I agree with HBC that the reference read at surface would have suggested some sort of specific incident and I suspect most people hearing the speech would have assumed that too)
but
2. But if we accept this, he said ‘what’s happening last night in Sweden’ meaning ‘what was claimed on a show I watched last night’ and expected everyone to understand what he meant. Which means that
a. POTUS is getting his understanding of foreign affairs (and justification of hasty and radical action at home) from watching random things on Fox
b. Almost more worryingly at a psychological level, he seems to think that because he saw it last night, everyone else saw it too (or that it just ‘happened’ last night in some fundamental sense). This is to me a quite bizarre way to see the world (except for small children). It’s like he doesn’t quite grasp other people have different experiences to him. Unless constantly watching Fox is actually a quality of all Republicans, I guess.
If Trump just doesn’t have much of a theory of mind, it would explain a lot. Compare the thing where Abe told him the photographer said “look at me”, so he looked at Abe.
That one is a stretch. I watched the video, and I think most people would have been just as confused at that point.
It’s a bit of a stretch, but I think “weak theory of mind” explains a lot of both Trump’s weaknesses and strengths (he’s much better at the type of mass social interaction, like rallies, that doesn’t rely on theory on theory of mind). I don’t think there’s strong evidence for it, just enough for it to be considered a plausible idea.
Would a “weak theory of mind” make someone better at rallies than another person, or just less worse at them? I don’t see why it explains his strengths.
It wouldn’t make him bad at rallies, unlike most potential explanations of his weaknesses.
Spoken English does not usually include quotation marks, so the listener cannot easily distinguish between “The photographer said ‘look at me'” and “The photographer said look at me.”
It’s true that the latter ought to be “The photographer said to look at me,” but spoken English isn’t always that precise.
Not to mention that it’s entirely reasonable, in context, that the photographer might want a photo of Trump looking at Abe, rather than at the camera.
As a result of the ACA, some people have more access to medical insuarance and care, and other people have less.
What I’ve seen is that when less access comes up, someone will say that it wasn’t Obama’s fault, he tried as hard as he could to get care to be more generally available, but Republicans blocked him.
It seems to me that the wrong question is being answered, but I’m not sure what the right question is. It just seems like a fast skid to go from bad situation to who should be blamed, with very little attention given to how the situation could be improved.
Thoughts?
I’m not sure what exactly you mean by “less access to medical insurance and care”. Can you be more specific?
The cost of insurance has gone up for them. Sometimes they’re getting a worse plan which costs more money, sometimes they can’t afford insurance at all.
This has some discussion of people losing jobs due to the cost of the ACA– in particular, legal support staff. It seems odd to me that the job loss would be so concentrated, but not impossible.
“The cost of insurance” can be a misleading category, for one thing. But it is the case that the young are paying more for policies than they would have. Over a lifetime, you make that up on average, though.
Healthy people are paying “more” for policies than they would have as well. But, given that one can transition from healthy to not so, it’s not clear to me that we can count this as less access to care. Pre ACA, there are many things that could take you from “paid up health insurance customer” to “uninsured and uninsurable”, if you were in the individual market. Making a health insurance policy so that it actually covers the cost of the cancer treatment it purports to (annual/lifetime caps are no longer allowed, policies can’t be dropped when they get too expensive) makes things more expensive now, but it’s not actually because access to care is reduced.
But the linked piece looks like it might be a case where they are in a state that did not expand Medicaid. Household income of something like 15K should be Medicaid eligible under the ACA. Obviously that’s not a designed piece of the law. (ETA: assuming it’s Pennsylvania, they did expand, but in a non-standard way. But they still should be eligible, I think).
As to the employment piece, that seems more like a well documented trend pre-ACA. Health insurance costs were rising all of the time pre-ACA, and companies were constantly getting tipped from “this employee is profitable” to not, based on the cost of health coverage. My guess is that there were some one time accelerations of that trend, as well as price adjustments based on the annual/lifetime cap piece. The ACA makes a good scapegoat here, but “the insurance companies” were the scapegoat before.
Healthcare inflation was the real enemy there. And the numbers seem to show that the ACA is doing good work on that front.
The employee based health insurance system in the US is not how most anybody else does it. You can’t really fault the ACA for the intrinsic flaws in that system, when the ACA didn’t create that system. There was simply recognition that you can’t eliminate once it’s in place.
You’re right that the issues with employer-based insurance started before the ACA, but my big beef with the ACA is precisely that it largely entrenched the flaws with that system further. Now employers are mandated to provide insurance (incidentally causing a lot of employees to lose hours since there’s a huge incentive to cut your full-time employees if you’re near the cap). Insurance is still not portable between jobs or between states. It further encourages insurance as pre-paid care rather than actual insurance.
Basically the ACA seems to have resulted in more nominally insured people (mostly through Medicaid, both by expanding it and by encouraging a bunch of already eligible people to actually sign up) at the expense of making everyone else’s insurance somewhat worse.
It really sucks if you’re young, healthy, and make too much for a subsidy – the plans are all very high deductible (and usually don’t cover anything until the deductible) which would be okay if the premiums were cheap, but they aren’t because ACA mandated zero copay coverage of “preventative” care that’s mostly a benefit for old people (and oh yeah, it capped how much more you can charge old people – yet another wealth transfer to the older and wealthier).
Frankly my new post-ACA insurance is the opposite of what I want. I’d rather pay a co-pay or out of pocket for routine care (which is relatively cheap and predictable, and anyway being relatively young and healthy I don’t use often) and have lower deductibles for unexpected emergencies (when I can’t shop around). But that’s illegal now. Instead I’m stuck with a higher premium and a literally 10x increase in potential out of pocket costs for a serious injury. I liked my plan, but I wasn’t allowed to keep it.
@gbdub:
I feel like you are doing something akin to “I like the guaranteed coverage but we should get rid of the mandate”. You have to evaluate the whole package, not complain about only the things you don’t like.
The trend to higher and higher deductibles was on-going before ACA. My sense is that almost everyone (including the insurance company actuaries) agree that higher deductibles are one of the things that lead to lower inflation in the healthcare sector.
Primary/preventative care is not where the bulk of healthcare costs go. If you have some data that says this is what is driving health insurance costs rises under the ACA, I’m interested. But I think you are overestimating how much of your premium is paying for low/no copay everyday services.
Was it at all conceivable regardless of who won the last election that the ACA healthcare system was going to be in place for the rest of the lifetime of young people being overcharged under it?
ACA was designed to broaden coverage it did little to nothing to deal with the cost crisis. Which meant that some other dramatic change would and will need to be done no later than the next decade or so.
The life cycle excuse for a regressive funding mechanism just isn’t very compelling.
HBC,
What do you expect is going to happen with the health insurance markets given this?
I feel like this hasn’t gotten nearly enough coverage. If accurate, it essentially means that Republicans don’t have to do anything, and that Obamacare will simply get more and more expensive until nobody even wants it anymore, yes?
@Brad:
The ACA has specific design elements which are intended to slow healthcare inflation. Current metrics are in line with and slightly ahead of the predicted pace of slowing. Maybe we won’t see that bear out, but it’s to early to say it doesn’t address cost growth, and definitely false to say it had no intention to do so.
@Matt M:
That just means this years policy at the IRS will be the same as last year’s.
I do think the ACA can be greatly damaged by the Trump administration, moreso in states that don’t control their own exchange. We will see how that plays out.
What do you expect is going to happen with the health insurance markets given this?
Reading that article and speaking as a minor bureaucratic minion, I think that the IRS has seen the light with the people at the coalface processing the forms yelling that “if we refuse to process the forms without the box ticked, half the forms won’t get processed and people will owe tax and won’t be getting their refunds and then they phone up and yell at us so hey, management, give us a decision here: can we or can we not accept the form even if line 61 is not filled in?”
It sounds like a typical ‘ruling from above’ that was meant to make people take out insurance plans, else they’d have to pay the penalty or not get their tax affairs straightened out. As any of the staff dealing with the public directly could have told them, it wouldn’t work like that. And it sounds like the IRS have discovered this, and have had to revise their methods accordingly in order to get back to normal levels of processing tax returns.
Besides, it’s not the job of the IRS to chase after health insurance in the first place, and it was dumb to include that as part of the rule.
@hbc – I’m not saying “keep the coverage but nix the mandate”, I’m more saying that, if employer-based coverage was part of the problem, there should not have been an employer based mandate.
My ideal version of the ACA (not necessarily ideal health care plan in general) would have been something like individual mandate, but only for catastrophic coverage, no employer mandate, shift tax credits/deductions for health insurance from employer to employees. The people currently getting employer-provided coverage are wealthier and healthier; they’re the ones you want in an individual marketplace to keep it solvent.
I don’t know how much of the overall increase in health care costs are due to routine care. But for most people it’s most of their spending in a given year, and now it’s all been rolled into your insurance premiums + additional overhead. And on top of that nixing co-pays encourages overuse (it’s use it or lose it, after all), and “preventative healthcare reduces costs!” is based on bad statistics. It basically has to increase costs. Even if it’s not the main driver, it’s a definite knob in the wrong direction and a better law would have avoided it.
Yes, but that happens regardless of whether the IRS enforces the individual mandate. The individual mandate is $695/adult + $347.50/child up to $2085/family, or 2.5% of income, whichever is greater. An average Obamacare bronze plan for a single 30-year-old is $3734. So, if you’re healthy and poor, even if you’re going to have to pay the mandate, it’s probably still better than paying for the medical plan.
@HBC
The most important cost measure, the Cadillac tax, was headed for repeal the moment the bill was signed. It would have had the same fate as the donut hole and for much the same reason.
The other grab bag of nothing-burger programs were never going to bring health care cost growth in line with the rate of general inflation. And indeed if you look at national healthcare expenditures every year since ACA was signed each year it grew faster than the rate of general inflation.
Cost growth is a crisis. It the underlying cause for basically all the unhappiness by insured people with health care system in this country since the 80s. The HMO, the giant deductible, the drug formula, the doctor that runs in and out of the room in 30 seconds, and so on are all traceable to the cost growth. ACA didn’t fix the problem, and even had the Cadillac tax not been DOA, didn’t really have a chance to. Bending the cost curve slightly was never going to be enough.
Why exactly Obama and the Congressional Democrats decided to tackle access before cost growth is a bit of a puzzle to me. But clearly they would have had to go back if they were still in charge.
So I just don’t buy the claim that the regressive cross subsidies scheme selected to fund the exchanges would all have worked itself out over the course of decades.
I’m just curious here though. How is it that both sides of the aisle have regularly stood up and loudly declared that the ACA cannot exist viably without the individual mandate, while it seems to be no particular secret that the individual mandate shall not be enforced?
What was the point of all the time, expense, and drama of a supreme court case over whether or not it was legal if the IRS has no intention of enforcing it anyway?
This strikes me as a partisan-flipped version of sanctuary cities. We don’t like what the law says so we’ll just ignore it. But the right complains pretty loudly about sanctuary cities. Why isn’t the left complaining about this?
If “the left” complains about this now, people will see the left as specifically demanding that the government impose massive fines on poor people who don’t have any good options. The optics are much better if the complaining is delayed until the ACA either collapses or is replaced with something with a Republican label.
Cynically, the ACA was designed to work tolerably well during Obama’s administration and self-destruct under his probably-Republican successor for precisely this reason.
That’s the cynical interpretation of it.
I’m curious to get a left-leaning person who likes the ACA’s thoughts.
Isnt HBC a left leaning person who likes the ACA? I’m very left leaning, sort of, I campaigned for Bernie Sanders. He and I both think the ACA is a horrible mess and it never should have happened.
@brad:
C’mon, man. That is a bulllllshhhitttt argument. We didn’t immediately drop health care inflation to the CPI? Please.
What we have done is spend far less on healthcare overall than predicted.
Apparently not in 2019 either. In this theory that the law fixed the crisis, when exactly was health care cost growth supposed to converge with general inflation? Because that green line doesn’t look like it is converging with anything.
ACA didn’t solve the cost catastrophe and it had regressive elements to boot. Don’t expect me to fall to my knees and sing its glories just because it’s probably better than whatever Paul Ryan is cooking up.
With regard to the Reason story on the IRS not enforcing the mandate …
Is this any different, legally speaking, from Obama not enforcing the rules against illegal immigration on a specified subset of illegal immigrants? In either case, the underlying principle seems to be that the people enforcing a law have discretion on how hard they try to enforce it–which seems reasonable, given limited resources.
@HeelBearCub: Claiming that we’ve seen reduced healthcare costs since the ACA passed is true but extremely misleading. National healthcare spending did indeed grow at a rate of 4.2% over Obama’s term in office, compared to 7.2% over GWB’s term. However, the drop did not happen when Obama took office, but in the final year of GWB’s term, coincident with the financial crisis. Using the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services data (see table 1) year-over-year cost growth dropped from 6.5% (2006-2007) to 4.5% (2007-2008). It then dropped to 4% (2008-2009) and went as low as 2.9% (2012-2013), though that one year was an outlier. So the initial drop in spending happened before Obama was elected and well before the ACA was passed; crediting it for the reduction in costs is quite self-evidently false.
The ACA baseline estimate for cost growth was set at 6.5%, which was where growth sat prior to the recession. This was reasonable, given that no one knew how long the recession would last, but it means that comparing the actual growth in costs during a recession with an unprecedentedly slow economic recovery to a baseline estimate that assumed no recession makes the ACA appear to be a magic pill.
Additionally, one must recall that the ACA was designed in such a way as to game the CBO numbers by front-loading all of its revenue-generating provisions and back-loading its benefits so that most kicked in starting in 2014; this provided 10 years of revenue generation for the CBO scoring window but only 6 years of full payment of benefits, making it appear to cost much less than it did. And indeed, from the CMS data, we see that the healthcare year over year increase rate jumped from 2.9% in 2013 to 5.3% in 2014 and then 5.9% in 2015.
In sum, the claim that the ACA has slowed healthcare spending growth is extremely dubious and the weight of the evidence is against it. Claiming that costs are well under the ACA projected baseline is true, but the projections were overestimated and the decline in the cost trendline happened before the ACA passed and only held while its spending provisions were yet fully in effect.
My impression was that the ACA was sold as making things better for all health care recipients (with the possible exception of some young and healthy people), not just slow down the rate of things getting worse.
Why not, for those people? Nancy isn’t claiming that ACA provides less health care for everyone, or for the average someone, or integrated over society as a whole.
Pre-ACA, there were policies being sold to healthy adults that cost $X per month and would cover them for all reasonable medical expenses after a deductable of $x including those that might occur in the future when they became really sick – without requiring them to pay more than $X/month even after becoming sick. I used to have one of those policies.
Now, policies that cover all reasonable future medical expenses cost $2X and have deductables of $10x. This is the only way to make the insurance industry even remotely viable when the rules change so they have to sell insurance to people who are already sick. But it means that the people who are A: healthy now and B: foresightful enough to buy insurance when they are healthy and C: can afford to budget only $1.5X for insurance or $3x to cover deductables, receive absolutely less health coverage under the ACA than they did beforehand. Less coverage now when they are healthy, less coverage in the hypothetical future when they are sick. Before, they could have insurance policies that covered them when they were healthy and when they were sick. Now, they have nothing – or they have policies whose deductables are so high that they’ll be broke before they receive a penny in benefits.
If I am trying to determine whether there are people who receive absolutely less care or coverage under the ACA, I only need to consider the parts of the package that affect those people. You may want this to be an argument over whether the benefits of the ACA to other people outweigh the harm it does to e.g. young healthy people, and that might be an argument you could win, but arguing that there are no people who are harmed at all is much tougher for you and it does not require the opposition to integrate over all aspects of the program.
John Schilling, thank you for this explanation and for various other times you’ve been accurate about what I meant.
I think it’s really bad for supporters of the ACA to tell people who are worse off that, in effect, the most important thing is that Obama shouldn’t be blamed.
I’m definitely not saying everything is peachy keen.
But I am saying that when you buy health insurance, it should actually insure you. It’s all well and good to pay for health insurance and have it then pay for your yearly physical and your prescriptions. But you can pay out of pocket for those (yes, at a higher price, but still probably less than your premium). And yes I understand that there are many doctors who won’t accept if you don’t have insurance. And that definitely sucks.
That cost isn’t what determines your cost of insurance though. The individual market wouldn’t let you pay less in the premiums than they shell out for the every day stuff.
You have insurance for the overall package, and especially if you need high dollar care.
So if you paid all that money in premiums, and you don’t get really sick or need some sort of high dollar care, that’s great, because you aren’t sick. But having the insurance didn’t prevent you from from getting sick.
And if you do get sick, and they cancel your policy or you reach your limits for whatever reason, then how much care did you actually buy?
Under the old rules, you were always a bad day away from losing all access to health insurance. And you have to include the chance of that happening in to your calculation.
That would seem to eliminate the point of insurance qua insurance.
I’ve frequently seen the claim that insurance companies reneged on their contractual obligation by canceling on some excuse if someone got sick, but I have never seen any evidence of it and it is inconsistent with my very limited observation.
I can believe that it happened at least once. I can also believe that someone deliberately misrepresented his condition when applying for insurance, got caught, and then blamed the insurance company for canceling. But does anyone have actual data showing that fraudulent cancellation was common enough to be a real problem?
@David Friedman:
Rescissions were common enough to affect tens of thousands of people.
And that doesn’t get into the issue of whether your insurance policy was guaranteed to be renewable.
I believe that even if they didn’t rescind your existing coverage, they could deny your renewal.(Most coverage renewable, see below). In addition, if an existing policy pool was small enough, they might just stop offering that product altogether.Any of which would leave you without insurance, and therefore looking for new coverage with a pre-existing condition.
ETA:
Here is a good overview of the pre -ACA marketplace. One of the biggest issues for people with existing coverage were how the company composed the underwriting pools. If they wanted the lowest cost product possible, it would be comprised of only new-enrollees, and then closed to new members. Adverse selection then takes its toll, causing the insurance pool to be more and more composed of only the members most in need of care. Premiums for those who are in need of care aren’t supported by those who are not. Premiums rise each year to levels which cannot be paid.
Well, if you reach your lifetime limit of $1 million or whatever, I’m going to make an educated guess and say you actually bought $1 million worth of medical care.
If by “a bad day” you mean the insurance company going bankrupt or exiting an entire segment of the market, sure. That risk hasn’t exactly gone away under the ACA, if you’ve been paying attention.
Otherwise, as David Friedman has already noted and you have belatedly discovered, continued coverage was pretty much guaranteed by the law and market. Yes, “tens of thousands of people” were affected by rescissions – out of a market of tens of millions.
I did, back when I was a customer in the individual market. From my experience and from my research at the time, the vast majority of the people who purchased pre-ACA health insurance while they were still healthy, got exactly what they paid for and without paying an exorbitant price – an insurance policy that actually covered their health care expenses even if and when they got really sick and started costing the insurance company $bignum.
Those people today, if they can get that sort of insurance at all, have to pay far more to get it. They are, absolutely, worse off under Obamacare. And they are not some tiny fringe population. If I didn’t presently have an employer that insists on buying me more insurance than I know what to do with, I’d be one of them.
Tell me that I’m subsidizing a greater good, and I might believe you. Tell me that I haven’t lost anything, and I no longer believe you are even trying to argue in good faith.
Comparing recision counts to the number of paying customers makes no sense. At a minimum you have to compare recision counts to the number of patients over the time-span who have become unprofitable.
Part of the pre-ACA problem that has gone underaddressed by its opponents is the number of cheap “insurance” policies that were structured to only provide routine care and were purchased by people who simply didn’t understand that. They were happy with their insurance because the hadn’t happened to have run into a serious problem, but would (it was pretty obvious) be counter-factually very unhappy with it had they done so. A portion of the “I want to keep my plan” people had the medical equivalent of dental insurance.
I saw the same thing to a lesser extent with normal policies and coverage hassles. Lots of tech programmers were convinced that because they were Masters of the Universe, that universe must have provided them with gold-plated health insurance. But then some (not all) of the people who ran into problems would have trouble getting coverage for things they needed because their plans were pretty much the same off-the-shelf entities as most people got, with the tweaks being mainly in the monthly charges and deductibles. (HR departments are presumably aware that the graveyards of the world are filled with indispensable people.)
Do I really need to do the math to show that the number of health insurance customers whose costs exceeded their premiums was much more than a hundred thousand?
I get that you and HBC and far too many others want to paint the entire pre-ACA insurance industry as nothing but a bunch of con artists who took people’s money and found excuses not to pay their medical expenses. It ain’t so. Those of us who were there at the time and did do the research, know there was much more to it than that, and that most of it was pretty damn good.
We know what we have lost. We know how much we are paying to subsidize your guy’s master action plan to Make Health Care Great Again, and we know – we have known from the start – exactly how it was going to collapse in ruin even if Saint Obama had been anointed president-for-life to try and hold back that tide. In the interim, between the creation of the ACA and its inevitable demise, it has helped some people. You get to share credit for that, at least. But don’t try claiming that it helped everyone, or that it came without a real cost even in the era when it was doing some good.
No, you don’t, but some math to determine how much more than that would be helpful, given that a 5-10% effective recision rate would still be entirely unacceptable.
@John Schilling:
As I already pointed out, rescission was an issue, but not the big one. Did you read the article I linked?
To reiterate, the biggest issue was how the underwriting pools could be structured. If you are healthy, every time you go the market, you get quoted a very affordable rate. Everyone in your pool is also healthy.
If you get sick, then you are locked into that pool (because you can’t go out and get another policy). As that pool naturally bleeds people, it becomes more and more comprised of only sick people. This causes premiums to rise each time you renew. The rising premiums incentivize the healthy people in the pool to get a different policy. The risk pool goes into a so called death spiral.
That’s adverse selection at work, and it absolutely was a feature of the old market. Not ALL policies, but many of them.
This isn’t a false critique of the pre-ACA market. It’s not complaining about very small numbers just to make one’s own case look better. It’s a simple recognition that actors in the market are going to look for a way to price their product to new customers as inexpensively as possible, while protecting themselves from the risk of that low price.
Fine. Quick and dirty only. Average annual health insurance premium (including employer contribution) for a covered adult in 2009, $4526. Fraction of insured with more than $5k in claims, eyeballing the graph here, 15%. Fraction of health insurance policies subject to rescission in 2009, 0.37%. Fraction of health insurance policies subject to rescission for reasons other than a medical condition diagnosed to the insured at the time of application, 0.019%.
If you bought pre-ACA health insurance when you were still healthy, and kept up the premiums, you were 99.87% certain of still having insurance that paid your expenses when you started costing the insurance company more than you were worth in premiums. 97.5% certain even if you were diagnosed as chronically ill when you bought insurance.
And, HBC:
Would it be too much trouble to ask you what fraction of insured consumers in 2009 were being priced out of the market, or even above current ACA levels for equivalent coverage, by these “many” policies?
Not that it matters, because while you are correct that this didn’t affect ALL policies pre-ACA, it does now. Adverse selection is being applied to the entire Obamacare customer base, as healthy people find themselves better off going without insurance (and even paying the ACA mandate penalty), than paying the excessive prices for the low-coverage, high-deductible policies that are the only ones allowed under the new order.
In the name of your perverse refusal to admit that SOME people actually were better off under the old rules, you have had to back off from your prior claim that rescission was the thing and are now reduced to invoking a type of cost growth that affected some but not all customers then and all customers now.
But show me your numbers anyway. Defend, with actual math, your claim that Obamacare is better for everyone.
@John Schilling:
If you want me to admit that people who are relatively healthy, and stay that way, would be better off under the old system, sure, I admit that.
I don’t that gets us much of anywhere, but there you go. And I imagine that you will be annoyed by this answer, but it is not meant to be annoying.
I also admit that the ACA makes the landscape different. People hate change, so they will certainly perceive this as a negative. I also admit that, on the margin, there are people who were actually better off under the old system who are worse off now.
But I also submit that many people who perceive that everything was fine pre-ACA simply had been lucky enough not to encounter the problems of the market pre-ACA. When you run the clock forward, you can’t say for certain that any of those individuals would stay better off under the old regime.
Take as an example the couple that Nancy linked to earlier, who had health insurance through the wife’s employer. The ability to simply cover your spouse, at low cost, had been going away before the ACA. Or if that spouse lost her job pre-ACA, they might have been on the individual market with pre-existing conditions.
Maybe I will come back later with a more math based approach.
My own version of this sentiment is that of course some people are worse off under the new arrangement. The ACA architecture is redistributive. To the extent that [in my view] Obama can be criticized for “you get to keep your old plan”, it’s that plan features were no doubt going to change, and did. It was never plausible or meaningful that people would get to keep their plans at the same price — prices were changing constantly (upward) before the ACA anyway. The hope, realized or not, was that prices would level off, not that they would be fixed at the inception cost.
As for people suffering under the yoke of the ACA now, what is their situation? Have they become actually deprived, or is the issue just a reduction to a living standard that an outsider would have trouble recognizing as substantially different? Must the fundamental organizing principle of society be loss aversion?
The larger issue with the ACA are not the individuals whom it negatively impacted (a significantly smaller set than the number of people who gained coverage through the law), but the fact that it completely destabilized the individual market into an unsustainable trajectory.
The exchange market as a whole has been losing money every year since its inception. You can cherry-pick individual insurers who made profits, but someone else was always taking a larger loss to compensate. The Obama Administration was able to make under-the-table payments (the so-called “risk corridor transfers”, which were eventually ruled illegal expenditures) to compensate insurers and keep them participating for a while, but those were heroic efforts and couldn’t sustain the program long-term. Obama’s goal was simply to keep it on life support long enough to replace the Republican Congress so they could rewrite the law.
“It would have worked if only we’d been able to pass a law that was totally different from what we actually passed” is not a justification or an excuse for the disaster that was the ACA. Neither is “but look at all these people it helped who were uninsurable” when the insurance they’ve got is going to be gone shortly as the market collapses.
I’m deliberately biting back a long and angry rant here about people who claim healthcare is a “fundamental right”. But whether or not you think it’s a right, the fact is that if you want universal healthcare, there has to be a sustainable funding mechanism for it. And Obamacare wasn’t and isn’t one, as evidenced by the rapidly collapsing exchange markets and the pullout of insurers both large and small.
It’s very nice that ACA proponents wanted to bump all of the coach cabin customers up to first class. But if the weight of the plane is now unbalanced and it’s crashing into the ocean as a result, you can’t really make the argument that people’s lives have been substantially improved.
But it’s not just the people who are relatively healthy and stay that way. The pre-ACA system was also better for people who were healthy and then got very sick, provided they had the foresight to buy insurance when they were healthy and keep up the payments.
Not every single one of them, because you are correct to note that some insurance salesmen were frauds or nearly so, and some people were hornswoggled by them. But not all of them, not most of them, and I’d be surprised if you could show it was more than 10% of them. Mostly, when healthy people went to insurance companies and asked to buy insurance that would cover them if they were sick, insurance companies sold them policies that were a better deal than they can afford to offer under the ACA and they mostly kept up their end of the bargain without cancelling the policies or jacking the premiums into the stratosphere or whatnot. Those people, even the really sick ones, were better off under the old system.
…are not present in this debate and you are not arguing in good faith when you go there. Everyone you are arguing against here, has been careful to be clear that they are asserting only that some people were better off under the old rules, that some harm was done by the change. This is in no way an assertion that “everything was fine”, and to claim otherwise makes me doubt the sincerity of your handwaving attempts at minimizing the harm of the present system or the benefits of the old.
If someone says “here is a loss that we should factor into our moral calculus”, they are not demanding that the fundamental principle of society be loss aversion. If you aren’t willing to meet them in the middle and address the magnitude of that loss and the benefits you wish to weigh against it, you are taking up the burden of proving that there is no loss.
@Cypren:
Risk corridors were designed into the original structure of the ACA, and their current problems have a lot to do with the fact that the Republicans added in a new requirement that they be cost-neutral as part of the 2014 omnibus bill. “It would have worked better if some of its mechanisms hadn’t been deliberately crippled” is a meaningful defense. It is not hard to see why risk corridor payments not being made in 2014 and 2015 might have a deleterious effect on insurance premiums in 2016.
To put it in perspective: paying out the risk corridor transfers to date would cost $8B. That is a lot of money by most standards, but not by the standards of the US government’s healthcare spending, which was $980B in 2015 (and that’s not even counting tax expenditures). The generally accepted number for people who gained insurance under Obamacare is 20M; at $8B, that’s $400/person. For comparison, national health expenditure per capita in 2015 was $9,990.
Nobody’s saying that the ACA is perfect, but your airplane metaphors are pretty overblown.
Re risk corridors: they weren’t illegal, under-the-table payments, but part of the ACA as originally enacted (section 1342 if you have your copy handy). Congress subsequently defunded them but the Court of Federal Claims recently ruled that the government is still liable to pay.
@John Schilling
To be clear, my point was that much of the resistance to the ACA’s re-distributive aspects don’t seem to be driven by arguments over levels of effective taxation — whether explicitly through taxes or in virtue of regulation, but by the reaction to the increase in cost by those who are on the loosing end of the redistribution. In that light it doesn’t seem to be so much about who should be paying as about “I had this and now I don’t have this”. Hence, specifically, “loss aversion”, which is at least arguably a cognitive distortion.
I actually gave a specific example which had actually been brought up by Nancy in this debate. I’m pretty tired of you accusing me of arguing in bad faith.
I was not my intention to argue that all insurance companies did recission or that they all composed risk pools subject to adverse selection. I just said that it was an issue pre-ACA and that it affected a significant number of people. I linked to a very detailed write-up of these issues.
But, even given a great company and a good plan, if you had insurance and got sick pre-ACA, especially a chronic illness rather than an acute, you could be locked into the individual policy you had (or, if it happened when you had insurance through an employer, locked out of the individual market). You also could run through the annual or the lifetime cost cap. I imagine you probably would have been constrained from moving to different state.
These are all benefits that accrue to everyone under the ACA, the mitigation of these risks. You can’t just discount them because the risk is not a certainty for any given individual.
Certainly the sick and the less well off benefit more from the ACA (especially as designed, rather that what happened after the SCOTUS ruling). In strictly monetary terms, higher income people may end up paying more.
And yeah, some people who would have health insurance in a given year under the old plan won’t under the new. There is very little in life that is unalloyed good. If it sounded like I was arguing against that, it was not my intention. I don’t know how many of these people there are, but they certainly exist.
@skef:
“Loss aversion” isn’t “people don’t like losing good things”. That’s just the nature of “good” and “losing”. There’s no cognitive distortion here. And your example is about people paying more for the same thing; they have less of a good thing (money).
“Loss aversion” is the asymmetry between how humans react to the chance of a loss vs. the chance of a gain of equal value—we seem to need about twice as big a gain as the possible loss to view the situation as balanced. That’s assuming the phenomenon exists, which, it being in the field of psychology….
How else could it be enforced though? Filing a tax return is pretty much the only thing that all citizens are required to do. It seems like this is basically the only option besides having roving policemen randomly stop people on the street and demand to see their proof of health insurance…. not exactly good optics for a Democratic regime in power.
As a rider to this, is everyone aware of short-term insurance?
Superficially they are intended to compensate for gaps in coverage by “real” policies. They do not satisfy ACA requirements, which sounds like a bad thing, except as near as I can tell what that actually means is that they can discriminate against preexisting conditions. Which, as a healthy insurance shopper, is desirable.
Given that the mandate likely won’t be enforced, I decided to risk it. It means a difference in yearly premiums of $4000 (bronze-tier obamacare plan) and $600 (with better deductibles!). Both provide zero coverage for my normal level of usage, but of course the question is if the coverage is actually comparable in the situation that I incur real expenses.
It seems to me that without the personal mandate the ACA has effectively zero power to correct for the market. People paying more than their actuarial share will leave.
During the last OT, the topic of battleships came up, and generated some interest. Therefore, I will continue to talk about it until it’s apparent that nobody is listening.
For the sake of context, I’m a volunteer tour guide at the USS Iowa in Los Angeles. I’m not former military of any sort, just a naval geek, specializing in battleships. But I do know a lot about them, and have a lot of books on the subject.
Battleship Lesson of the Thread – Introduction & History:
The word ‘battleship’ originates in the phrase ‘line-of-battle ship’, the line of battle was the formation used during the Napoleonic wars and earlier. It refers to a capital ship whose primary weapon is big guns (with some exceptions, which I’ll deal with elsewhere). A capital ship is defined as the biggest and most important vessel in the fleets of the major naval powers. These days, the title is held by either aircraft carriers or nuclear submarines, depending on who you ask. There are no battleships in service today. The only ones in service since 1960 were the Iowas, which we are getting to. Anyone who refers to an active ship as a battleship is wrong.
Another term often used is ‘dreadnought’, sometimes incorrectly spelled ‘dreadnaught’. This comes from HMS Dreadnought, the first all-big-gun battleship. Before Dreadnought there were pre-dreadnoughts, which were usually armed with 4 big guns (usually 12″) and something like 12 smaller guns (6″). All of these guns were part of the main armament, and intended for use against other battleships. Longer battle ranges and improved armor metallurgy made the smaller guns much less useful, and in 1905, HMS Dreadnought was laid down with 10 12″ guns and no other guns intended for use against other battleships. She was built in a year, in an attempt to signal to the world that Britain could maintain her former superiority, despite Dreadnought making every other battleship in the world obsolete.
The all-big-gun pattern was adopted the world over, with the picture being dominated by the British and the Germans during the decade leading up to WWI. During the war, the opposing fleets mostly sat at home, the Germans trying to defeat the British in detail and the British hoping to catch the Germans at sea. The main fleets met only once, at Jutland. The battle was indecisive, the British losing 3 battlecruisers and the Germans one, with a few other ships also lost. (The battlecruiser was a battleship-sized ship which traded armor and/or weapons for speed. It does not usually refer to a smaller, faster ship.) It did bring about a revolution in battleship design, as it was fought at a much longer range than had been anticipated pre-war, and that meant that ships needed better deck protection.
When WWI ended, the various navies were in different states. The German fleet was scuttled to keep it from falling into the hands of the allies. The British had a large fleet, but it was mostly older ships. They’d stopped building during the war, and had cancelled the ships they had planned to make sure the new ones reflected the lessons of Jutland. The Americans had a big fleet and a large building program, and had managed to figure out the lessons of Jutland in 1911, before the battle. The Japanese had a smaller fleet, but a very big building plan, as they had not had to stop during the war. (The Americans had, but later than the British.) Another arms race seemed to be brewing, but the Washington Naval Treaty stopped it, with a 5-5-3 ratio established between British, American, and Japanese fleets. All battleship construction was stopped for 10 years, except for two ships for the British, and a few ships the Americans and Japanese were allowed to complete.
The restriction was extended another 5 years by the London Naval Conference. Battleship building eventually resumed in 1936.
I think that the tale of the treaty battleships will have to wait for Wednesday.
As an aside, this is actually installment two of this series. The first one was on fire control.
I would like to know whether you think lasers will revive the era of the battleship.
I wouldn’t call our hypothetical laser warship a battleship, but it could lead to a revival of the surface warship as opposed to air power. Not sure it will help deal with submarines.
the trouble with lasers is short range. they don’t bend, so they can’t hit targets that are over the horizon, which is ~25 miles or so (on the surface). Lasers on modern warships are far more likely to be defensive weapons than offensive, shooting down aircraft and missiles, not other ships.
Railguns might bring back something like a battleship, but even there I doubt it. As weapons get more accurate, and thus more dependent on sensors, armor becomes less and less useful. Having a ship that you can’t sink is no good if knocking out its radar antenna takes it out of the fight. In battleship fights, that sort of sensor damage was unlikely (the sensor was relatively small and weapons were very inaccurate). Today, the sensors are often the biggest targets for things like anti-radiation seekers. I don’t think you’ll see any ship armor besides some ballistic protection.
Right, but if lasers are a good enough defense, what’s the offense? What good is e.g. an aircraft carrier, when any aircraft or air-launched missile gets slagged as soon as it crosses the horizon of a Big-Ass Laser-Armed Warship?
One answer is submarines for the win, but that opens a whole new barrel of interesting technical questions. If we limit the discussion to surface ships for now, the winning move would seem to be launching a missile salvo too numerous for the enemy’s finite number of lasers to shoot down before the surviving missiles cross the distance from horizon to target.
That might well place a premium on ships that have lots of defensive lasers, lots and lots and lots of vertical-launch cells for antiship missiles, and are tough enough to take a few hits from missiles that leak through their defenses. Such a ship probably wouldn’t be called a “battleship”, but it would fill approximately the same function.
>Right, but if lasers are a good enough defense, what’s the offense? What good is e.g. an aircraft carrier, when any aircraft or air-launched missile gets slagged as soon as it crosses the horizon of a Big-Ass Laser-Armed Warship?
The same thing that’s been the real weapon of sea control since 1955, the submarine.
>and are tough enough to take a few hits from missiles that leak through their defenses.
the real trouble is that “tough enough to take a few and keep fighting” gets harder and harder as time goes on. But that’s not even the real trouble. The real trouble is that you can armor the lower parts of a ship, but not the upper parts, so your super structure, which holds all your C2 and sensors, can’t be protected, so even if you build a very strong hull, it does you no good, because unlike in battleship days, it’s just as easy to hit your radar/deckhouses as it is your hull. If everyone had armored hulls, everyone would use anti-radiation missiles or missiles like the javelin, which quickly makes the armor useless. they might not sink an armored ship outright, but they’ll put it out of action, and that’s just as good.
Will lasers be effective against artillery fire? My understanding about current laser development projects is that they’re all intended to work by overheating and destroying sensitive missile / aircraft components.
@cassander
Why can’t the C2 be in the lower, armored part? This isn’t WWII, where the radar waveguides force us to add control positions high in the ship.
Not necessarily. Phased arrays can use special operating modes to make at least some types of ARMs think they’re somewhere else. And making your ship physically tougher means that you’re inflicting virtually attrition on your enemy. If the missile needed to sink you has to be twice as heavy, it’s likely that the bad guy has only half as many missiles to shoot at you. And ASMs in large numbers are expensive.
@Civilis
Some laser programs have been specifically aimed (no pun intended) at artillery projectiles.
Hit, yes, but phased-array radars can be integrated with an armored hull and designed to fail gracefully. Optical sensors can have multiple redundant sensor heads with the electronics under armor.
Conventional anti-radiation missiles use fragmentation warheads which might not work so well if there’s a few centimeters of kevlar and ceramic over the array. Anti-tank missiles like Javelin use shaped-charge warheads that make very narrow holes, which will destroy one emitter element out of a thousand of so in the radar.
N00b followup question to this:
How big/expensive *are* ASMs, anyway? Like how many salvos/engagements could a boat reasonably be expected to carry enough effective ASMs for?
N00b bias for context: I was under the impression that longevity was a factor in the carrier’s favor since aircraft weapons are smaller than ship-to-ship ones (but work as well or better due to better guidance). This could be *completely* wrong and I would love to be corrected if so.
The US Navy’s standard antiship missile is the AGM-84 Harpoon, which about five meters long, weighs about 750 kg, and costs about $1.5 million. Most of our surface combatant warships carry eight of them, but that number could be increased substantially at need. In particular, a US navy destroyer carries a 96-cell vertical launch system of which each cell can carry one long-range surface-to-air-missile, one land-attack cruise missile, one anti-submarine missile, or four short-range surface-to-air missiles. Only by historic accident can that launcher not launch Harpoons, and we could fix that. So if naval warfare were dominated by saturation missile barrages, 40-50 missiles per major surface combatant would be a reasonable loadout.
On the other hand, if you expect people to be burning your missiles out of the sky with lasers, you might want to use anti-ship missiles that minimize their exposure to such fire by virtue of being blindingly fast. We don’t have any of those, except insofar as our antiaircraft missiles have a secondary anti-ship function, but the Russian-Indian BrahMos is a pretty good example and it comes in at four times the weight of a Harpoon. The Indian navy seems to be able to fit eight of these with their launchers and support hardware into a 4,000 ton frigate, and could probably double that if they really needed to.
Unhelpful answer:
Depends on the size of the boat.
Helpful answer:
There are a couple of classes of ASMs.
The smallest are things like Penguin and Sea Stuka, and are for shooting at small boats. Next, you have stuff basically intended to sink destroyer/frigate sized targets. Exocet, Harpoon, Styx and Silkworm are all of this family. They’re 600-750 kg apiece, and will mess up the upperworks of an armored ship, but not pierce the hull. You will occasionally find claims that Exocet will go through Iowa’s belt, even from otherwise reputable sources, but it’s just not true.
Then you get big missiles. Almost all of these are Russian and intended for use against American carriers. These are in the 5-10 ton range, and are usually supersonic. They’re also much more expensive.
How many missiles it takes to take out a target depends on how heavy the defenses are. The Soviets used to believe that it would take 4 missiles to get one hit, which is why their missile boats carry that many. That was back in the 60s and 70s. AEGIS changed the game immensely. These days, the answer is that it’s complicated, but you’re looking at needing at least a dozen to have any chance of getting through. Lasers might double that, if not more.
Well, if we take Harpoon as the US standard, the air-launched version is very similar to the ship-launched one. The big advantage of air-launched weapons (and the reason why Harpoon has been disappearing from the US fleet) is that over-the-horizon targeting is a very difficult problem, and in today’s environment, there’s too much risk that your ASM will lock onto a passing container ship instead of the intended target. Airplanes generally can see the target before they fire.
It does seem like lasers should work against artillery shells. Artillery shells come in slower than the faster missiles, and so would actually be in some ways easier to target, and being hit with a laser could easily make shells detonate prematurely, or just alter their flightpath (the further away they are when first hit, the more they could be deflected from their target, and a laser could hit them quite far away). I don’t know about the programs bean mentions, but it just seems in general artillery shells would be an easier problem than missiles, not a harder one.
@Protagoras
No, shells are a harder problem. They’re smaller than missiles, and built a lot more ruggedly to withstand the shock of firing. Also, they’re pointed directly at the target, and will hit if they aren’t blown up or deflected. Yes, a non-detonating shell is better than a detonating one, but it’s not particularly pleasant. A missile is going to miss you if you shoot it down, and it has a lot more moving parts. Also, most missiles aren’t supersonic, a situation unlikely to change soon.
No, shells are a harder problem. They’re smaller than missiles, and built a lot more ruggedly to withstand the shock of firing.
And presumably a railgun projectile is both faster and more rugged than a conventional shell. I would suspect the more you focus on missile defense, the more viable a railgun-armed warship becomes (if you don’t want to build a submarine).
In the short run, how do guided and range extended artillery rounds change the picture? On the one hand, it makes warship gunnery more viable at range. On the other hand, you no longer need to build a dedicated platform for a 16″ gun when a 5″ gun has the same effective range. For the cost of a battleship, you could send out a destroyer flotilla, put up some stealthy drones with laser designators to give you over-the-horizon targeting, and pepper the target’s vulnerable superstructure with 5″ rounds.
Interesting question… what’s the comparative effective range of a laser designator vs an anti-missile / artillery laser? Obviously, if you have a sci-fi ‘kill anything in line of sight’ directed energy monstrosity, anything over the horizon is fair game, but in the real world, we still have power and atmospheric refraction issues. A tiny, state-of-the-art stealth drone with a camera and designator is going to have a lot lower radar cross-section than even a stealth combat aircraft. Could you put a laser designator on a satellite?
If they’re guided, then they’re pretty much by definition not more rugged. If unguided, then about the same. Going faster helps against lasers, but has mixed effects if you’re facing projectile defenses. The projectiles have to get farther out, but can use your own speed against you.
Naval guided rounds have generally not worked that well. They seem to fall into a bad compromise between naval guns (cheap, low payload, not that accurate) and missiles (expensive, high payload, accurate).
The words ‘stealthy’ and ‘laser designator’ do not belong in the same sentence here. Shining a laser on someone tends to tell them that you’re there. If they have a much more powerful laser, then they respond by shooting back at you.
Depends heavily on your tech. Not particularly helpful, I know. This is probably the best place to start.
In principle, yes. In practice, I wouldn’t want to try. It’s either going to be very far away, and you’ll have a very big beam (bad) or it’s not going to be available very often. If we assume that you need a 1 m beam, and that you’re lasing at 1 um with a beam quality of 1, then if you’re in geosync, I get an 87 m diameter mirror. If you go for 300 nm (about the highest frequency which can penetrate the atmosphere), then I get 26 m.
But let’s assume we stick it on a sattelite in LEO, instead. I’ll use 1000 km for my math this time as an approximation of the typical slant range. For the same parameters as above, I get a diameter of 2.44 m for 1 um and 0.73 m for 300 nm. All of these are pretty big, probably too big for the roles they would need to fill.
The words ‘stealthy’ and ‘laser designator’ do not belong in the same sentence here. Shining a laser on someone tends to tell them that you’re there. If they have a much more powerful laser, then they respond by shooting back at you.
I’m just having fun bouncing ideas off of someone that knows what they’re talking about, so if these ideas are silly on the level of mirror-drone, feel free to ignore them. I’m a gamer, so when presented with a seemingly overpowered tactic, my gut instinct is to ‘how would I counter this?’, in this case adding ‘besides submarines’.
Presumably, with modern satellite imagery and long-range electronic sensors, the other side knows generally where your surface ships are at all times, so a true surprise attack is out of the question. If you know the ships are out there, you could be attacked at any time. Getting lased in a warzone is a signal ‘I’m being attacked now; fire up the countermeasures’. Are modern laser detection systems good enough to pick out where the beam is coming from with the targeting accuracy you’d get from an active radar?
I can see the tactics now, at least well enough to write a Tom Clancy level technothriller blurb. Have a stealth drone with passive sensors over your destroyer flotilla to extend their range. When ready, fire the volley, then active laser ping the target while the shells are in flight. Based on quick calculations, if you do the active ping at the top of the shell arc, you’ve got 45 seconds to hit the drone (and hope the shells haven’t got you targeted already) and that’s going to be hard to do if you also try to maneuver your ship to evade the volley or try to take out the shells as well in their ballistic arcs.
Probably not that much more difficult than trying to deal with supersonic sea-skimming cruise missiles coming from multiple directions, but a system capable of handling both is going to be more complex and expensive than one optimized for just dealing with low-flying targets, so it might be worth forcing the other guy to make the investment. You can always justify the cost of the gun turret and drone for onshore fire support and blockade interdiction purposes, if nothing else.
Presumably the best attack plan is to pull a Midway. Launch shells and missiles in a coordinated attack, so if his defensive lasers concentrate on the sea-skimming cruise missiles coming in low, his upper superstructure (including the defensive lasers) gets wrecked by the shells coming in from above.
Not a problem.
Not as much as you’d think. There platforms (TerraSAR-X, IIRC) that are capable of doing non-cooperative recognition from orbit, but the data is usually delayed at least 7 hours.
I don’t know offhand. I’ll try to check when I get home.
Why ping that early? It’s not at all uncommon to launch something like a Hellfire blind, and then designate when it’s getting close to the target. And I know for a fact that they will ripple-fire them, designate one target, then switch to another after the first hit. I wouldn’t expect this to be the future of naval warfare, but it’s not impossible, either.
Sea skimming usually means you’re coming in slower, but this is true overall.
That’s what the gun is almost certainly for. There’s also the unguided rounds for putting shots across people’s bows. Missiles are really bad at that. Actually the balance between cold war systems and hot war systems is one of the perennial problems of naval planning.
I’m a bit late to the party here, but the Russians are the ones that made those supercavitating rocket torpedoes too, right? What is it about Russian doctrine that’s causing this emphasis on speed?
@bean
>Why can’t the C2 be in the lower, armored part? This isn’t WWII, where the radar waveguides force us to add control positions high in the ship.
You can put the people there, but you need the antennas higher up if they’re going to have range. The best C2 in the world is no good if you can’t transmit or receive.
>Not necessarily. Phased arrays can use special operating modes to make at least some types of ARMs think they’re somewhere else.
Sure, but then you’re using electronic wizardry to defend yourself, not armor, and thus aren’t really a battleship.
>And making your ship physically tougher means that you’re inflicting virtually attrition on your enemy. If the missile needed to sink you has to be twice as heavy, it’s likely that the bad guy has only half as many missiles to shoot at you. And ASMs in large numbers are expensive.
that’s only worth it if the cost to you in extra weight of armor is less than the cost you can make your enemy pay extra in weight of missile. you know full well how much a cost heavy deck armor imposes on a ship.
@john schilling
>Conventional anti-radiation missiles use fragmentation warheads which might not work so well if there’s a few centimeters of kevlar and ceramic over the array. Anti-tank missiles like Javelin use shaped-charge warheads that make very narrow holes, which will destroy one emitter element out of a thousand of so in the radar.
You’re conflating the method of guidance with the warhead. Anti-rad missiles are mostly used to blow up AA sites and javelins for going after tanks, and have warheads appropriate for those tasks. But nothing stops you from pairing that sort of guidance with a warhead suitable for sinking ships.
@Cassander:
I believe you separated antennas from C2 in your comments. And what about things like Cooperative Engagement? Those antennas are, IIRC, pretty small and quite rugged.
So does the fact that the Iowas were fitted with SLQ-32s in the 80s make them not really battleships either?
I do. But you’re still missing the point. If I make my ship tough and that means you can only buy half as many missiles, then I have already cut in half the number of missiles headed my way. Is the armored deck cheaper than buying twice the air defense capability? That’s a job for analysts, but it’s not a question with an obvious answer.
What kind of warheads would those be? Shaped charges are bad against antennas. Frag warheads can be armored against. There’s no free lunch here.
bean says:
February 21, 2017 at 2:24 pm ~new~
@Cassander:
>I believe you separated antennas from C2 in your comments. And what about things like Cooperative Engagement? Those antennas are, IIRC, pretty small and quite rugged.
Ah, I see where you were confused. I meant “the antennas for your radars and your C2”.
>So does the fact that the Iowas were fitted with SLQ-32s in the 80s make them not really battleships either?
They still had great big slabs of armor. The distinguishing feature of the battleship is hte combination of big guns and big armor, not the absence of EWAR.
>I do. But you’re still missing the point. If I make my ship tough and that means you can only buy half as many missiles, then I have already cut in half the number of missiles headed my way. Is the armored deck cheaper than buying twice the air defense capability? That’s a job for analysts, but it’s not a question with an obvious answer.
It’s not just dollar cost though. A ship of a given size can only hold so much stuff. Adding armor requires either giving up something, e.g. speed, firepower, other defensive systems, or sensors, so while armor cuts the enemy missile number, it also cuts numbers for your own defenses, or some equally valuable commodity, for a given size of ship.
>What kind of warheads would those be? Shaped charges are bad against antennas. Frag warheads can be armored against. There’s no free lunch here.
In the case of a Javelin-esque missile, I’d assume a massive shaped charge. I’m not sure what would be best for taking out antennas. Maybe some sort of explosively formed projectile?
I’m still somewhat confused by your objection. If I’m using EW techniques to dodge ARMs, how does this make me not a battleship if I meet all the other definitions.
I read books on warship design for fun. I’m well aware of the tradeoffs involved, and am not advocating armor as more than a possible solution to the problem that should be looked at. Merely listing the things we’re trading against isn’t going to impress me.
EFP would be better than either frag or shaped charge against phased arrays, but I think the array could be designed to be survivable against even hits by those. The big worry would be fire in the superstructure.
bean says:
>I’m still somewhat confused by your objection. If I’m using EW techniques to dodge ARMs, how does this make me not a battleship if I meet all the other definitions.
It doesn’t. It’s a question of emphasis.
>In the case of a Javelin-esque missile, I’d assume a massive shaped charge. I’m not sure what would be best for taking out antennas. Maybe some sort of explosively formed projectile?
>EFP would be better than either frag or shaped charge against phased arrays, but I think the array could be designed to be survivable against even hits by those. The big worry would be fire in the superstructure.
EFP’s move at about mach 6, at that speed, the EFP has as much kinetic energy as 2-3 times its weight in TNT. I have a hard time imagining an array that is both light enough to be mounted high and strong enough to take that sort of impact. and if you spread out the array, or use multiple small arrays, to avoid that, you make any sort of physical armor even less of a possibility.
No, it doesn’t. Mach 6 is about 2 km/s. TNT equivalency is 3 km/s. An EFP is .44 TNT, not 2-3.
The EFP is a penetrator (obviously). You design the array so that it’s distributed and can be penetrated without being put out of action. I don’t need to keep all the damage out, just stop it from being critical when it happens.
@bean
>No, it doesn’t. Mach 6 is about 2 km/s. TNT equivalency is 3 km/s. An EFP is .44 TNT, not 2-3.
KE=MV^2. mach 10^2 is 100, a little over 3^2 is 10. At mach 3 you have about 1/10th the KE of mach 10. At mach 6, you have triple the KE of mach 3. The rod from god weighed about ~10 tons and hit with an impact of ~11 tons of TNT. I suspect you’re using a more precise definition of mach than either I or sources I’m quoting, but I’m definitely not off by that much.
>The EFP is a penetrator (obviously). You design the array so that it’s distributed and can be penetrated without being put out of action. I don’t need to keep all the damage out, just stop it from being critical when it happens.
It can’t be armored, distributed, and light weight. At best, it can be two of those things. And if it’s not light weight, it can’t be high enough to be useful.
What do you mean by “taking” that sort of impact? An Explosively Forged Penetrator, as the name implies, penetrates. It makes a hole in something. A radar antenna with a hole in it still works pretty well as a radar antenna.
Nobody is suggesting that the antenna be so heavily armored that an EFP or a shaped charge can’t make a hole in it. We mostly don’t care if the enemy makes a hole in the antenna, we just need him to not tear it completely apart or put a thousand holes in it. And those are things that EFP and shaped charge warheads aren’t good it.
We are accustomed, if you recall, to putting physical armor over pretty much the entire hull and deck of a warship, and with e.g. casemate ironclads the superstructure as well. But maybe some math will help.
An antenna from an SPY-1 radar, as used on Aegis-capable warships, has a surface area of roughly 12 square meters. Covering that with 10 cm of radar-transparent(*) Kevlar and boron carbide would add about two and a half tonnes of topweight per face, or ten tonnes for the complete system. For a system that already has twenty-five tonnes of topweight.
That stops the fragmentation effect of a typical ARM, which would otherwise disable the radar by riddling it with a thousand holes. Your notional EFP antiship missile will punch a hole right through it, which will have a negligible effect on its performance if the software has been set up to compensate for arbitrary holes.
And for a hypothetical future battleship, we can provide multiple redundant antenna sets for each (heavily armored, below-decks) radar system.
* You have to play some classified or at least proprietary tricks at the interface for that, but it’s a known art.
ETA: Since we seem to be arguing the point, the speed of sound at sea level is 340 m/s. Mach 6 is 2040 m/s. The specific energy of a mass at Mach 6 is 0.5 * 2040^2 or 2,080,800 joules per kilogram. TNT equivalency is defined as 4,184,000 joules per kilogram. A notional mach-6 EFP is roughly 0.5 x TNT equivalence, not 2-3x.
Which doesn’t matter, because whatever the TNT equivalence is it will in this application be mostly wasted in the form of a blindingly fast penetrator coming out the back side of an antenna it has just punched a small hole through.
I’m an aerospace engineer. I know how KE is defined.
Doing well so far…
No, you just screwed up the math. The standard unit for TNT-kinetic equivalency is the Rick, which is defined as 3 km/s, or 4.5e6 J/kg. I think the value they use for nuclear equivalency is 4.18 J/kg, which is close enough for government work. Mach 10 is theoretically 3.41 km/s, so the article checks out. But the EFP is going at 60% of that speed. .6^2 is .4, which is, astonishingly, the Rick value I assigned to your projectile.
Do you know what the term ‘metacentric height’ means? Because I sort of doubt it, and until you do, I’m not sure this discussion can be continued productively. This is a quantitative question, and you’re making unsupported assertions on that issue. Yes, the size of the array is a limit on how high you can mount it. But do you even have an idea how much modern arrays and their armor will weigh?
(Edit: John appears to have answered this one already.)
Probably not. My big book of naval weapons is surprisingly silent on the subject (or at least I can’t find it, as it’s a very big book), but when even the manufacturer’s blurb gives an accuracy of 7.5 degrees I don’t think we’re going to get into FC accuracy soon.
@john
>Nobody is suggesting that the antenna be so heavily armored that an EFP or a shaped charge can’t make a hole in it. We mostly don’t care if the enemy makes a hole in the antenna, we just need him to not tear it completely apart or put a thousand holes in it. And those are things that EFP and shaped charge warheads aren’t good it.
I was envisioning something more like this. There was an effort in the 90s to develop an EFP warhead that could form multiple shapes depending on the target profile. Obviously you don’t want to use a rod penetrator on 10cm of kevlar. But as I originally said, I’m not sure what type of warhead would be ideal for the target profile, I’m just bet there’s something very good you can pack into the 1000-2000lbs payload of your typical anti-ship missile.
>An antenna from an SPY-1 radar, as used on Aegis-capable warships, has a surface area of roughly 12 square meters. Covering that with 10 cm of radar-transparent(*) Kevlar and boron carbide would add about two and a half tonnes of topweight per face, or ten tonnes for the complete system. For a system that already has twenty-five tonnes of topweight.
That’s a very large increase in weight.
>And for a hypothetical future battleship, we can provide multiple redundant antenna sets for each (heavily armored, below-decks) radar system.
No, you can’t. First, antennas below decks are no good, they have no range. Second, the radiating elements in a modern AESA radar are expensive. I’d bet that they’re the most expensive part of the radar, not counting software.
@bean
>No, you just screwed up the math.
You’re right, I was off by factor of 10, my bad.
>Do you know what the term ‘metacentric height’ means? Because I sort of doubt it, and until you do, I’m not sure this discussion can be continued productively.
Yes, I do. it’s the point vertically on the ship that, once over the center of buoyancy moves past it, the ship starts to roll the other way. Its effects, and the things that affect it, are….complicated and numerous.
So? We’ve already forced you to escalate substantially in terms of missile size over the much smaller warhead found in your typical ARM. This is what virtual attrition means. How many HARMs did you give up to get that P-270? I only had to increase the topweight by 40% to force you to spend a lot more.
Also, I have some doubts about advanced EFPs. There’s lots of cool papers, but no actual hadware. It’s possible it was lost in the defense budget squeeze of Iraq and Afghanistan, but I still have doubts.
He obviously meant that the radar control electronics are below-decks, not the antennas. And given the record of your previous bet, I don’t have that much faith in your judgement on these matters. SPY-1 has a belowdecks weight of 2.5 times the above-decks weight. The correlation between electronics weight and cost isn’t mentioned in my big book of naval weapons, but I think that assuming all of the expensive stuff is topside is a bit premature. (OK, I’ll admit that it’s not an AESA.) BBoNW does mention that the modules for APAR are reported to be $500, which is quite cheap. Buy in greater bulk, and that could come down. (Yes, the array does take 3,424 modules, but that only comes to $70 million all four on a ship, which is pretty cheap by naval standards.) It also says that you’re looking at 2 tons per array, and a total system weight of 20 tons.
That’s not a very good definition. It’s the number you use to characterize stability, and the things that go into it are underwater hull shape and weight distribution. Hull shape is pretty much constant, which just leaves weight distribution.
I had thought that in contrast with anti-tank weapons with all their tricks (and the corresponding tank armor tricks to try to defeat them) the usual pattern of anti-ship missiles was just to carry a big bomb and count on the big explosion doing a lot of general damage, with the additional bonus that unless the hit was at the very limit of missile range, the missile’s remaining fuel would also splatter all over and likely start a bunch of fires.
That was the pattern for a long time. Some more recent missiles do have multi-EFP warheads, although they’re radial rather than axial. I believe some versions of the C-802 do, at least. You’re right about the fires. However, I would point out that you’re still well out of ARM territory with those warheads. A typical ASM warhead weighs as much as an entire AGM-88.
The warhead of a typical antiship missile is 400-800 lbs, not 1000-2000 lbs. The warhead of a typical anti-radiation missile, which is what you were talking about before, is less than half that. If you make the warhead arbitrarily large, certainly you can get whatever effect you want out of it. But 1000+ lb warheads, coupled with the sort of supersonic antiship missile that could hope to penetrate advanced missile defenses, add up to 5-10 tonne behemoths that even a heavy cruiser could only carry a dozen or so of.
In which case, mission accomplished – because the question at hand is, what sort of warship dominates in a hypothetical future where advanced air defenses will shoot down ~95% of the missiles launched against a first-rate warship. If you concentrate your attack on a small number of heavy missiles, the target concentrates its defensive fire accordingly and probably none of those missiles get through. If one of them does get through, the figure of merit is not, “can this missile destroy a radar antenna?”, but “can this missile mission-kill an entire warship?” If the warship is 20,000 tons of hardened and redundant systems, it almost certainly can’t.
It’s a 40% increase in topweight. If you’re trying to shoehorn an Aegis system onto a 4,000 ton frigate, yes, that’s a lot. On a 20,000 ton “battleship”, not so much.
It isn’t the antennas that go below decks, it’s everything else. An SPY-1 radar system weighs just over 83 tonnes, of which 60 tonnes goes below decks, below armor, and if necessary below the waterline. The 23 tonnes up top, on even a cruiser-sized ship you could almost certainly armor, then duplicate, then armor the duplicate. On a battleship, you could then duplicate all that including the below-decks part.
And I’ll take your bet about the antenna being the expensive part, because the antenna is just solid-state T/R modules that are mass-produced in lots of ten thousand or more. Also, we very much are counting the software. If a next-generation warship is viewed as a mobile computing platform for the “win battle now” software package, and that software is the expensive part, we might want to look into redundant I/O and other peripherals for the hardware we run it on.
@bean
>So? We’ve already forced you to escalate substantially in terms of missile size over the much smaller warhead found in your typical ARM. This is what virtual attrition means. How many HARMs did you give up to get that P-270? I only had to increase the topweight by 40% to force you to spend a lot more.
The relevant comparison is to your average ASM, not ARM. You haven’t cost me anything yet in terms of size, you just made me switch types of warhead and seeker.
>Also, I have some doubts about advanced EFPs. There’s lots of cool papers, but no actual hadware. It’s possible it was lost in the defense budget squeeze of Iraq and Afghanistan, but I still have doubts.
.
>He obviously meant that the radar control electronics are below-decks, not the antennas.
That’s not obvious at all given that it is already done as much as possible to minimize top weight and protect the combat systems.
>And given the record of your previous bet, I don’t have that much faith in your judgement on these matters
Now you’re being unnecessarily, and undeservedly, snarky.
>SPY-1 has a belowdecks weight of 2.5 times the above-decks weight.
I’m surprised the number isn’t higher. I guess it’s excluding power generation.
>The correlation between electronics weight and cost isn’t mentioned in my big book of naval weapons, but I think that assuming all of the expensive stuff is topside is a bit premature
Which is why I didn’t do that. In fact, I said the opposite, that software, which is mostly below, is the most expensive thing. But the arrays aren’t exactly cheap, particularly when you include development cost, not just replacement cost.
>That’s not a very good definition. It’s the number you use to characterize stability, and the things that go into it are underwater hull shape and weight distribution. Hull shape is pretty much constant, which just leaves weight distribution.
“A number” is not a good definition either. And while Hull form for a ship remains constant, it can interact with weight distribution in non obvious ways, especially as you burn consumables.
No, it isn’t. Previously you could shut down my radar with a small ARM. Now it takes an ASM to do. This is better for me. Particularly as you no longer are shooting that ASM at my waterline.
You lost your last bet. I think it’s reasonable to point out that this shouldn’t fill me with confidence on your current one, particularly when you’re saying ‘I bet’ instead of making any effort to provide numbers. And when you doubled down on the last one after I went to the trouble of getting said numbers.
Well, yes. Of course it is. Power comes from the ship.
Software cost? That’s a complete red herring. Software is the cheapest part of buying another system. It’s expensive to write, and free to duplicate. If you’re not buying the radar system ‘retail’, then ‘free’ is the correct value to apply to cost. Likewise, development cost of the antenna is not particularly relevant.
Would you care to give a source on this?
At this point, I’m not really going to take you seriously until you do. You doubled down after I made a good-faith effort to find numbers. This is not the first time I’ve seen this sort of behavior.
That is pretty much how they do things, AFAIK, although it’s called a ‘development contract’ and separated from the hardware procurement. In extreme cases, one company handles the hardware, another the software. It’s not a consumer product. And it’s certainly not like you’re buying off the shelf. If you order twice as many units, the software cost gets cut in half if it’s part of the hardware in the first place. The re-design for damage tolerance is probably trivial. They re-write half the stuff every couple of years anyway. Old copies of Friedman’s World Naval Weapons Systems are not expensive, and an astonishing view into how this stuff works.
The calculations are not straightforward when done with a slide rule. The calculations are straightforward when done with modern computers. D.K. Brown is a better source for the actual mechanics of designing a ship.
Back when I was studying physics, kinetic energy was
(1/2)MV^2
Mirror drones!
A swarm of mirror drones!
Consider a battlegroup of several smaller ships with laser weapons. With mirror drones directing their fire, they could engage multiple targets with high flexibility, or they could concentrate fire on a single target.
Flying in a spherical formation! With lasers bouncing off them! And then the music starts!
o/` In the Navy! o/`
Would it be possible to extend the range of a laser by having a mirror on a high pole and bouncing the laser beam off it?
Or, to get more exotic, a mirror on the bottom of an airplane?
Theoretically, yes, but aiming like that is very hard, and the other guys will just shoot the airplane down. Tall poles on ships don’t work well. They move a lot, and topweight is always a problem. Expect the mirror to be high, but not a lot higher than the tops of current ships.
A computer-controlled drone hovering above or near a ship might be able to offer effective mirrorage.
http://newatlas.com/astronomy-telescope-technique-stops-star-twinkling/15966/
This isn’t solving quite the same problem, but it suggests to me that the problem is solvable.
Not much point extending the range of a laser. It’s a defensive weapon, you can wait for the missile/drone/plane to come to you.
Similarly, if you are immune to long range shots, you don’t need need high-quality long range sensors. Small cheap ones in a drone work fine.
The question is, can you get to the point where your lasers can safely take down a full volley of anti-ship missiles fired from over the horizon? That does seem plausibly doable if you have a ship with say 12 lasers and missiles moving at only mach 10 or so.
With that assumption, the only way to get a kill is to get close. And the only way to get close is to have defensive weapons strong enough to get close.
The resulting ship looks something like a Star Wars star destroyer, except with a modern targeting computer (and no ‘deflector shields’), every turbo-laser shot is a dead X Wing.
Hey, what’s all this talk about lasers being useless past the horizon?
On the ocean, you typically have layers of air of different temperatures (the lower stuff affected by the water temperature), which are nicely-separated and make good waveguides for visible and near-visible light. We take advantage of that to make our optical sensors work beyond the horizon.
It seems to me that with either some compensating optics, or massed beams, we should be able to effectively hit things over the horizon with lasers.
(Failing that, we could mount some on sharks….)
I don’t think that’s a reliable method to get past the horizon. And if it does, how far? For that matter, it allows the other side to shoot back, too.
I don’t think that we do. First, we rarely use optical sensors beyond about 10-20 km, preferring radar for long-range work. The days of putting the sharpest-eyed young men on your ship high on the mast with a big pair of binoculars to scan the horizon are about as far in the past as the sextant and the slide rule(*). Second, the extra range provided by atmospheric refraction at visual wavelengths is in the single-digit percentage, IIRC. Third and most importantly, in these contexts we define the visible and/or radar horizon to include refractive effects, because we have no reason to care about a purely geometric definition. When stated without qualified, “horizon” refers to how far you can see without the slightly-curved rays of light being blocked by intervening land or sea.
And for microwaves, as opposed to visible light, the effect is significant, about 15-20%. So it will be possible to launch salvos of missiles at the hypothetical laser-armed battleships of the future without the launch or targeting platforms being immediately destroyed by laser fire.
* And yes, you’ll find those binoculars in a cabinet on the bridge of any modern warship. Right next to the sextant, and if the captain is a traditionalist neither one will be dusty, but neither will they define or limit the performance of the ship.
I’d argue that the US figured out the lessons of jutland in 1911 with the design of the Nevadas and the standard type battleship, specifically all or nothing armor, but otherwise I like it.
That was what I meant, actually. I picked 1914 because I was working from memory, and I think I got commissioning and design dates confused. Edited to fix.
“The word ‘battleship’ originates in the phrase ‘line-of-battle ship’, the line of battle was the formation used during the Napoleonic wars and earlier.”
And if I remember correctly, the term ‘cruiser’ originates in the Age of Sail as a lighter ship (frigate) optimized for independent operations. ‘Destroyer’ definitely originated as ‘torpedo boat destroyer’, said ships being overgrown, long-range torpedo boats designed to protect capital ships and convoys from other torpedo boats.
Now a question… who the heck created the trope that pre-WW1 to WW2 naval terminology was the right one for starships in SF?
I’d have to look up where ‘cruiser’ came from, but that sounds right. ‘Cruising’ was the term for roaming around hunting for enemies, usually done by frigates. I’m not sure why ‘frigate’ fell out of english-language use. You’re spot on about destroyer, although to nitpick, it was only the fleet, not convoys. Torpedo boats were short-ranged, essentially defensive vessels, and wouldn’t be able to threaten convoys (if convoys had been part of doctrine then, which they weren’t).
I’m not sure about who started SF naming conventions, but it is a good point, and one I’ve made in other venues.
I’m going to go with Doc Smith, Gene Roddenberry, and a few others of that (broad) vintage. A fair number of whom, Roddenberry included, were WWI or WWII veterans. Smith wasn’t, but was something of an otaku for his day.
But it’s worth noting that while SF writers seem to have settled on the WWI classification sheme, real navies seem to change the names every few generations just to mix things up. “Frigates” used to be the largest class of independent cruising warship, then they briefly became the line-of-battle-ships of the post-ACW era, then went out of style altogether, then came back as the smallest class of oceangoing escort, then got promoted to something roughly equivalent to a WWII destroyer.
And here in the 21st century, however much it may make purists scream, the largest class of general-purpose surface combatant that isn’t a cold-war relic long out of production, the closest thing any navy has to a “battleship”, is the destroyer.
By the time we put actual warships in space, we will have a completely different terminology for them. And almost certainly mission-based classification that won’t map to historic naval ship classes, because Space is Not An Ocean. Between now and then, I do so very much want some SF writer to have the audacity and imagination to give us a Space Galleon, because it’s at least as likely as a Space Battlecruiser and a lot more fun.
Not true, at least not in British practice (the US was busy neglecting its navy during the 15 years after the ACW, and whatever we were doing doesn’t really count).
One thing I suspect is that you won’t see escorts in space. Escorts for main combatant units have only ever existed to deal with threats that are orthagonal to the main means of combat. Destroyers came about to deal with torpedo boats. Later split to deal with airplanes and submarines, too. There are no analogs for torpedoes in space (that can’t be used by the big ships, too, at least), and you and I are part of the pact to beat anyone who brings up space fighters or (especially) space submarines.
(This is where a Napoleonic analogy works well. The line of battle didn’t have escorts. Escort at the time was of convoys and the like, which is obviously different.)
Star Wars did have Star Galleons. And a very inconsistent classification scheme. But that’s more an artifact of the authors being all over the place than of any master plan. I once tried to make sense out of it all. (Star Wars was what I did in high school before I discovered engineering.)
My readily-accessible references are probably less comprehensive than yours, but I believe the Royal Navy of the 1860s and 1870s classified its oceagoing ironclads as “armored frigates”, not “ships of the line” nor “battleships”. Likewise the French and other Continental powers. Yet these were the ships which would have actually mattered in any major fleet engagement. In the 1880s I see a lot of ships that seem to have been referred to just as “ironclads”, or sometimes “turret ship” or “ram”, and not until the 1890s does “battleship” enter contemporary usage.
Were there any armored “ships of the line” ca 1870, or any armored ships actually capable of standing in the line of battle but called something other than “frigates” in the language of the day? I genuinely don’t know, but I’ve never heard of any.
This is what I get for working from memory. You’re correct. The reason for the classification was that the ships in question only had one gun deck. Interestingly, though, the pre-ironclads of at least the RN may have been called battleships, although I’m not sure if that’s contemporary. I’ll check when I get home.
Naval tactics at the time were very confused. So far as I can tell, the ironclad’s arrival removed the multideckers from service, and that had previously been the dividing line for line-of-battle ships. I’m not even sure how well line tactics survived the arrival of the turret and better steam power.
(Most of my knowledge of that period comes from D.K. Brown, who is coming from a design perspective, and may be taking terminological liberties.)
It appears that it was not contemporary. My references classify them as ‘steam two- and three-deckers’.
I’m finding a number of references asserting that “battleship” was officially introduced in a British naval reclassification in 1892, but nothing I would consider a solid primary source. It is at least plausible, which leaves a three-decade gap when there was no clear terminology for state-of-the-art capital ships. “Armored Frigate” seems to be the most common contender at least in British usage.
Which means that over the course of a single century, “frigate” has meant the largest and most powerful sort of oceangoing warship, very nearly the smallest and weakest, and just about everything in between.
My sources suggest that “Armored Frigate” was a term specifically used for what is also called the broadside ironclad, basically a ship that was shaped like a traditional sailing warship with armor. The 1886 Brassey’s (the first, unfortunately, but predating the 1892 redesignation) uses a number of different terms, but none of them is ‘armored frigate’. It and Conway’s both call Warrior and the like broadside ironclads. I’m not sure anyone had a clear understanding of capital ships at the time.
And it hasn’t meant ‘aircraft carrier’ only because the Japanese chose to call them ‘helicopter destroyers’ instead of ‘helicopter frigates’.
Actually, I had an early run-in with the term, which I still look back fondly on. I was reading a book from the early 60s, which referred to the nuclear frigate Bainbridge. I was very confused.
(To explain, the modern usage of frigate was for small escorts. The USN pre-1975 used it to mean what we would now call cruisers. A nuclear cruiser makes sense. A nuclear frigate (escort) is a weird thing, although I do think there was a proposal to do that.)
>the closest thing any navy has to a “battleship”, is the destroyer.
I would say the nuclear submarine is that, from a mission perspective. the battleship was built first and foremost to contest control of the seas. Any ability to affect things on land or in the air was purely secondary.Today, almost destroyer or frigate of more than a couple thousand tons is going to devote most of tonnage towards AAW. the submarine, however, remains an almost pure creature of sea control, with some secondary land attack functions.
Nuclear submarines are smaller, and not particularly designed to take hits; like most modern combat units, the emphasis is overwhelmingly on destroying the enemy before they can score any hits on you. Anything not designed to take hits is to my mind too far from the classical battleship to count, and as you said above it isn’t really feasible to design modern warships to take hits given the realities of modern weapons and tactics.
@Protagoras
He was speaking of the nuclear submarine being the mainstay of sea control from the sea, which it is. In that respect, it is the spiritual successor of the battleship. In other ways, not so much.
There is a sf/fantasy series by Melissa Scott in which the spaceship terminology is lifted from naval terminology in classical antiquity.
You mean types of -reme and galley? How on earth does that work?
There was a system of labeling ships by numbers–a three, a four, a five. It’s conjectured that it represented the number of rowers at an oar position. A trireme had three banks of oars with one rower at each oar, so was a three. A single banked galley with three rowers would also be a three. A five would be a big trireme with two rowers on each oar in two banks, on rower on each oar in the third bank.
There were also ships whose label translated as “fifty,” on a different scale–I think smaller than triremes.
Scott uses the same labels–I’m not sure if she ever explains what characteristic they represent.
No, I know that, I meant how on earth do you apply an oar based system to space ships?
I don’t remember her ever explaining it, although it was pretty clear that the relative strength of the spaceships corresponded to the labels. But I read the series some time back, perhaps should reread it–it was pretty good.
If you wanted to justify it, you could have some propulsion device of which more powerful ships carried a larger number.
I don’t remember her mentioning anything to correspond to the Ptolemaic Forty.
Honestly, we’re not entirely sure what all the names of the classical galleys meant. The records were often unclear, and in some cases the obvious interpretations would be structurally impossible. It may have been an early version of the numbers they use in the names of cars, where sometimes they stand for one thing, sometimes for another thing, but most often they’re just for marketing purposes and don’t really mean anything.
As O Kapia put it, “F– it, we’re doing forty oars!”
Now a question… who the heck created the trope that pre-WW1 to WW2 naval terminology was the right one for starships in SF?
Well, who decided that space vessels would be called star ships in the first place? As for the naval terminology, I think Heinlein (ex-Navy and never quite got over it) is responsible for a lot of it, at least in post-war American SF – and see L. Ron Hubbard’s use of military/naval slang and terms for how Scientology is organised, also due to his family and personal background (father was an officer in the Navy, he served in the Navy during the Second World War). And since Hubbard also wrote prolifically for the pulps, he contributed his share to the SF terminology.
In fairness, the broad outlines of the naval model map well onto a hypothetical space future. You have vessels with crews of hundreds taking deployments of months or years. In practice, it probably won’t look like that, as they won’t start from scratch, and existing organizations will evolve into the relevant roles. We’ve been over this here before.
Relevant link.
Historically, the OED puts the first use of “spaceship” in 1880, and claims that it is by analogy with “airship” (first attested in 1817).
I think there’s a historical case for “ship” being used for any large vehicle with multiple crew. For instance, early tanks were known as “land ships”. This is partly because the committee which developed them- called the Landships committee, headed by the Admiralty’s Director of Naval Construction- started with plans for much larger vehicles comparable in size to actual ships. But even some of the actual tanks were given names starting with HMLS for “His Majesty’s Land Ship”.
Now that you mention it, why don’t we have much larger vehicles comparable in size to actual ships? Is it just too hard to shift all that weight without the aid of buoyancy or what?
More or less. Moving things at sea is relatively much easier than moving them on land. Ships have some fairly strong economies of scale that don’t apply to land vehicles, either. Also, there aren’t trees on the ocean you have to fit between.
One particularly big limit on land vehicles is that making them bigger consistently means more strain and wear on whatever kind of wheels or tracks or whatever you’re using. All of the methods of compensating for that have limits. One of the big ways of reducing the wear, of course, is to only operate your land vehicle on artificially flat and smooth surfaces, but relying on that means it can’t be any wider than your roads will permit. Otherwise, you need to make it slow to reduce the problems, and probably put up with it breaking down a lot (tanks, for example, require extremely frequent tread repair if they’re covering any significant distances), and even so you’re not going to get close to even a fairly small ship.
Not just wear and tear on the vehicle, but wear and tear on the roads. High weight vehicles are murder on a road.
As a rule of thumb, road damage rises with the fourth power of the axle weight.
More emotional than informational: Can you explain the charm/mystique of battleships (or naval warfare more generally)?
I mean, when I was a kid I thought being a combat pilot was the one Cool Thing*. Then when I was a teenager, I started thinking of infantry as the Cool Thing (in the style of Band of Brothers). And it seems like there are a lot of people who get pretty excited about battleships, but I’ve just never been able to really get it.
*Not meant to diminish the hardship of the people involved. Just to describe the glamour it can have.
If I could, it wouldn’t really be mystique, would it? I can’t explain why I like battleships more than carriers or even fighter jets. I just do. The closest I can come is to say that they’re almost entirely comprehensible by normal people (my FC spiel is long, but it’s nothing compared to what you’d have to do to explain how (say) modern electronic warfare works), and that there’s something really elegant about the engineering involved. Also, they’re obsolete enough that none of the fun stuff is classified. A few bits that Iowa had in the 80s are still secret, but they’re easy to ignore. And you have big guns.
From a storytelling perspective, warships have the advantage of often being sent on missions of global importance, even in peacetime (see “gunboat diplomacy”), but before ubiquitous radio had to carry out those missions – and respond to an adversary’s – on the captain’s initiative alone. A frigate/cruiser captain was maybe second only to a King in the ability to change the world in a dramatically exciting way without being expected to ask someone’s permission every step of the way.
Insofar as this has given us countless stories of captains Hornblower, Aubrey, Kinnison, Kirk, Picard, Harrington, et numerous al, I’m not going to complain too much about the liberties some of the relevant writers have taken with history or SFnal plausibility.
The overlap of ‘dreadnought battleships’ and ‘no radio’ is basically negligible. They had telegraphs everywhere of serious importance by, what, the 1880s at the latest? Yes, there was Emden coaling at Diego Garcia in October of 1914, but that was a weird exception. Jackie Fisher practically invented strategic naval C2 to help keep the cost of trade protection down in the noughties.
WW1 era battleships had radios, but they were unreliable, especially for anyone who who wasn’t british and who thus couldn’t use the global telegraph network as a backup in wartime. Long range radio required a network of beacons that just didn’t exist, and what did exist was mostly british controlled. Just look at how much trouble the zepplins often had with communications.
The radios weren’t that unreliable. Airplane and ship communications, while not totally unrelated, are differentiated even today by the fact that a big ship’s communications system weighs more than a typical airplane. Zeppelin experience is not particularly relevant. And only the British had the worldwide responsibilities that meant they needed long-range radio in the first place.
Still, Cassander is right that the radios weren’t that great early on. And even in WWII and beyond, militaries were sufficiently paranoid about their communications being intercepted by the enemy to go to considerable lengths to use the radios they had as little as possible. With good reason, of course; indeed, they mostly seem not to have been paranoid enough, but they did worry about this a lot and they did try to minimize their radio use to minimize their vulnerability.
The British were paranoid, and to some extent still are. The Germans, not so much. In any case, it has very little bearing on my original point.
I don’t think it’s necessarily the isolation that matters for storytelling, so much as the fact that a single warship is big enough to change a battle all by itself. Warships can be “heroes” with names, and backstories, and anecdotes about that one time she almost sank but got away by the skin of her teeth, in the same way a person can.
(The existence of Kantai Collection, a show about personified Japanese warships, demonstrates this in the most literal way possible.)
I have read that radio really helped Japan in the Battle of Tsushima of 1905. The Russian navy also had radios, but they were imported from Germany and not well integrated.
It told Togo which side of the straits the Russians were coming through, but didn’t help him when he split his force into two divisions during the battle itself. My source is silent on Russian radio, but AIUI, the problem was that all radio at the time was Morse-only, which is great for strategic messages, but not really fast enough for tactical signalling. The Russian problem appears to have been insufficient scouting, not bad radios.
This persisted all the way up to WWII. Even the Iowas have a Signal Shelter on the 03 level with 2-3 inches of armor, specifically designed to keep signallers safe near the flags and signal lights because they might be needed in battle. A report I have on possible future battleships suggested that this was now unnecessary on account of improved voice radio (TBS) and shouldn’t be incorporated to new battleships, but that it wasn’t worth removing. And it’s still there.
BIG GUNS! HEAVY ARMOR! CASTLES OF STEEL!
Yes, modern warfare with radar and missiles and stealth has its own charms, but if you want massive machinery, guns that crater the ocean when they fire, shells as big as a man and loading mechanisms the size of a building, there’s no substitute for a battleship.
And I think Bean also has a point – WWII technology is right there on the border between “Simple machines” and “Computer-processed deep magic,” where the weapons are amazingly complicated marvels of engineering, but the underlying principles are still simple enough to comprehend.
As much as we romanticize battleships, there have only been around 20 direct confrontations between battleships: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_naval_battles_between_battleships
So? We romanticize nuclear weapons (or at least I do, and I recognize that I may be a bit weird), but only two of those have been used.
It’s not a knock. It just seems low for ships that were the pre-aircraft carrier force projectors. Maybe naval engagements are just rare in the first place.
It’s generally very difficult to replace your navy if it gets sunk — more difficult than it is to replace losses from your army, for example — so perhaps admirals are just generally cautious about getting into big battles.
@Urstoff:
They are, by and large. There were only something like five major naval battles during the Napoleonic Wars. WWI did have an unusually low number, mostly because of the ‘fleet in being’ thing the Germans were doing. The Pacific war was unusual in that it was by and large a naval war, but the problem was that air power was so dominant that only fast ships could be used in the Solomons (where most of the surface naval battles took place) and the fast battleships on both sides were too valuable to risk there very often. Also, the US slow battleships were all in the yards after Pearl Harbor.
I’ve often considered the reputation of the battleship in a counterfactual world where Halsey didn’t take them with him at Leyte Gulf, and the Battle of San Bernadino Strait took place instead of Samar. There may not be that many times you need battleships, but when you do, you really do.
@The original Mr. X
That’s a big part of it. Not a single proper capital ship laid down after the relevant country’s entry into WW2 saw combat. Alaska and Guam were December of 41 and January of 42, but that’s why I said ‘proper’.
bean, you’re not counting carriers as capital ships? Certainly I’d say the Essex class at least deserves that designation, and several of them laid down after 1941 (e.g. the Wasp and Hornet) saw significant battle.
Not exactly. I was thinking of gun-armed capital ships, although that wasn’t clear. Not surprisingly, carriers are cheaper and faster to build than battleships.
@bean
>Not exactly. I was thinking of gun-armed capital ships, although that wasn’t clear. Not surprisingly, carriers are cheaper and faster to build than battleships.
Part of the reason for that is that the USN decided to prioritize carrier construction over battleships by the end of 42. And I don’t have figures handy, but I’d bet you that the midways cost more than the Iowas. And since they’re both about the same size, that feels like a fair comparison of cost.
Yes, but carriers also don’t have heavy armor or big guns. Those both take a long time to build. Take, for instance, Vanguard, basically patched together to make use of old turrets because they couldn’t get the new ones in time. Whereas carriers are, in principle, simple enough to be built by a new shipyard on merchant lines.
I’ll take that bet. Midway cost $85 million. The best source I have on hand for Iowa is wiki, which says $100 million, while other sources give numbers up to 125 million. I’ll have to check my books when I get home to be sure, but all of these sound plausible. The issue is that a lot of stuff is provided by the government separately from the main contract, so it’s actually slightly tricky to figure out the exact cost.
@bean
>I’ll take that bet. Midway cost $85 million. The best source I have on hand for Iowa is wiki, which says $100 million, while other sources give numbers up to 125 million. I’ll have to check my books when I get home to be sure, but all of these sound plausible. The issue is that a lot of stuff is provided by the government separately from the main contract, so it’s actually slightly tricky to figure out the exact cost.
Yeah, I have to figure out modern defense documents for a living. It’s a nightmare. But I’ve seen 70-80 million quoted for the essex class. I have a hard time imagining that the Midways, which were 15-20,000 tons heavier and had 60,000 more SHP on their propulsion plant weren’t more than 80 million.
Sorry, but I made a good-faith effort to solve the problem, and took the first numbers I found, from a source that I think most would agree is pretty reasonable. At this point, the burden of proof is on you to find other numbers and defend them, or you owe me the invisible trophy that we bet.
And seriously, this makes no sense. The propulsion plants for Midway and Iowa were the same. Hull steel is pretty cheap. Armor steel is not, nor are big guns. Where did the extra money that would make Midway more expensive go?
(No, the answer is not ‘air group’. We’re discussing shipbuilding resources here.)
I went and looked. Oddly, I struck out with Sumrall, Dulin & Garzke, and Friedman, but I found in Muir a figure of ‘about $125 million’. I’ll take that as my working figure right now.
@bean
What costs? Arresting gear, elevators, the armored deck, more com gear, more and more expensive radars.
Big gun mounts are also large piece of hydraulic machinery.
Really? How is a 3.5″ deck more expensive than a 6″ deck? And a belt. And the turret armor. And the conning tower…
I suggest you check the relative electronic outfits more carefully. The Iowas were set up as flagships, too.
@bean says:
Big gun mounts are also large piece of hydraulic machinery.
>Really? How is a 3.5″ deck more expensive than a 6″ deck? And a belt. And the turret armor.
I didn’t say each one of those things alone was more expensive than the Iowas, I said all of them together. And I’d have to check my Friedman, but I’d bet that the midway deck covered more area than the Iowa deck armor.
>I suggest you check the relative electronic outfits more carefully. The Iowas were set up as flagships, too.
As flagships, yes, but not as air traffic control for of several dozen aircraft.
@cassander
So far as I’m concerned, the matter is closed until and unless you can turn up sourced cost numbers for one or both ships. I made a good-faith attempt to answer the question by finding numbers. Your attempts to refute it have been based on vague and unconvincing handwaving.
@cassander, Midway class does not seem to have armored the entire flight deck; only part of the deck (the part over the most important structures below, of course) had the 3 1/2 inch armor (indeed, my quick research seems to suggest that this was usually the case for carriers with armored flight decks). So you may be wrong that the armored deck area was larger for Midway than for Iowa, and in any event it certainly was not as much larger as you imply.
I have nothing to contribute, just want to say that posts like this is my main reason to frequent the open threads; the chance to learn stuff that I would never have stumbled upon otherwise.
Thanks.
You’re most welcome.
Seconded. Very interesting thread.
I’ve heard a lot about WWI era ships “being already obsolete when they come out of the shipyard” – could you elaborate a bit on what “obsolete” means as regards to naval vessels?
Does it just mean “we know how to make better ones and would never commission the USS Justfinished again, shame it took so long to build”? Or, especially in the case of Dreadnought, does it mean that HMS Currentlyunderconstruction could literally beat up any other ship on the market (say, 95%+ odds)? If the latter, how many pre-dreads would take to take down Dreadnought? Does “making every other battleship obsolete” mean that Dread’s armor was so thick it could take on virtually every other ship at the time and (ignoring ammunition) beat all of them?
I believe “could literally beat up any other ship on the market” is the usual interpretation, but “obsolete” ships are hardly useless.
Dreadnought in particular was faster and better armored than her contemporaries, with numerous other technical advantages, but her big departure from previous designs was that she mounted “all big guns”. The entire main battery consisted of large (12 inch) guns, with no smaller guns intended for use against other large ships (she did have numerous small guns for e.g. shooting at torpedo boats and eventually airplanes).
Previously, battleships mounted both large and medium size guns, all of which were intended for use against other battleships. But the medium guns were useless at the longer ranges battles would likely take place, and in any case could not penetrate the armor battleships carried.
For “how many ships would it take to sink one”, tough question, since it depends on so many other factors, but consider that no Dreadnoughts were actually lost at Jutland, and also consider how tough the Bismarck in WWII proved to be, only eventually succumbing after losing all maneuverability and being surrounded by a fleet with vast numeric superiority (even then, she was incapacitated and scuttled, not actually sunk by enemy fire).
WWI-era ships? Which ones? If you’re hearing about the last pre-dreads, then basically they mean “well behind the current design standards”. They weren’t totally useless, but their usefulness is greatly diminished compared to what came after, and even the latest of them were in secondary roles by the outbreak of war.
More the latter. They didn’t immediately get rid of all previous ships, and even the British finished Lord Nelson and Agamemnon after Dreadnought commissioned. The precise answer depends heavily on the circumstances of the battle, but at a guess, you’re looking at a 3-1 ratio in ship equivalency, which is slightly greater than you’d expect from gunpower alone. 4 guns is not enough for proper shooting.
Edit:
I should point out here that Dreadnought was originally introduced in an attempt to keep the British defense budget down. She was cheaper than an equivalent amount of naval power spread among pre-dreads. Of course, it didn’t work very well when the dreadnought race started, but by then the British had figured out how to pay for it anyway.
Dreadnought’s armor was actually thinner than that of the relatively contemporary Lord Nelsons. The big change was in turbine propulsion, which allowed more speed, and even more importantly allowed high speed to be maintained (reciprocating steam engines have very definite limits on how long they can be run at max power), and the switch to all-big-gun armament which allowed more effective shooting at long range.
Ahh so if the Dreadnought had a captain that (to put it in mongrel language) knew how to kite, it could win basically any fleet engagement single-handedly (at its time of launch, anyway). Aye?
Definitely not. “More powerful” is not the same as “invincible” in this context. Dreadnought was, in many ways, an obvious development of things that were already happening. The US and Japan both designed all-big-gun ships before Dreadnought was revealed to the public, and from a gunnery standpoint, the US effort was actually better. The British didn’t believe in superfiring turrets (one turret shooting over another) as they thought it would interfere with the lower turret if they shot straight ahead. The US tested it and found that it didn’t really, so we introduced it on the South Carolina.
Anyway, back to the point. Dreadnought’s guns were actually the same as the main guns on the Lord Nelsons, so if we remove their 9.2″ guns from consideration, it comes to 8 vs 8 for broadsides if both of the Nelsons are there. (Dreadnought had 10 guns, but 4 were in wing turrets, limiting them to 8 on a broadsides). The improved spotting made possible by the 8-gun salvo would help, but I’d give the two combinations roughly even odds, given that it’s two hulls against one, which always helps. The Nelsons also had 9.2″ guns, which would probably tip the odds in their favor. The big difference is that Dreadnought, for about 10% more money (according to R.A. Burt) is easily better than either one of them alone. Against something of the Majestic vintage or earlier, with 6″ secondaries, it’s easily equal to any two, and for a relatively small amount of extra money in exchange for that capability.
I hope I’ve sufficiently confused you. If that’s not enough, I’ll bring up the Maximum Battleship.
Honestly, I’d think two late model pre-dreadnoughts could take down dreadnought, if somehow there was a slugfest with exactly those ships involved (and dreadnought didn’t just use its superior speed to get away). But they quickly built a lot more dreadnought style ships, and if you’re comparing a large fleet of dreads to a large fleet of pre-dreads, it starts to become important that you can’t pack your ships too close together without them getting in the way of one another. As a result, having two to three times as many big guns (the only guns that matter) on the dreads means much more concentrated firepower. There probably isn’t any way to overcome that with just greater numbers of pre-dreads. The extra numbers will just make you even more spread out, which means the extra ships won’t be able to participate in the battle until all the ships you lose to the concentrated dreadnought barrage start making room for them. And good luck keeping your fleet organized enough to bring in those replacements in a timely and effective matter.
Just watched the 1984 cult classic “Repo Man”. What a ride.
What are the best absurdist comedies of the past 20 years?
Starship Troopers?
Maybe. I need to rewatch that.
EDIT: Rewatching now. Forgot that NPH was even in it! It’s really pretty excellent.
Speaking of Verhoven, Robocop (1987) is another grossly underrated/misunderstood comedy film.
Underrated? It’s at 88% on Rotten Tomatoes, which sounds about right to me.
@Nornagest
Repo Man is 98% (!) on RT, but only 6.9/10 on IMDB. Likewise Robocop is only 7.5/10 on IMDB. I think a lot of satire flies over the head of a lot of people.
the sequels are generally miserable, but the third movie does have one redeeming feature.
TIL that the Starship Troopers movie had sequels. I’m having very ambivalent emotions about the eventual end of the human race right now.
w-what did I just watch
Oh, so that’s what boy bands would look like in a warmongering fascist society. TIL.
If you mean capital-A Absurdist, like the philosophy, then I have no idea.
Otherwise I’d go with the Big Lebowski for the top slot. I had to look this one up actually: I thought the film was much older, but since it was released in 1998 it just barely squeaks in under your twenty year limit.
A lot depends on how we’re defining “Absurdist” but Tropical Thunder and Anchorman are the two titles that immediately spring to my mind.
I enjoyed don’t mess with the Zohan, but that might just be because I’m Israeli. Zoolander and Dodgeball would also be on my list.
Zohar was a funny movie. But it totally fails at its goal. If I recall the story correctly it’s basically a funny tough isralie special agent who is super Zionist, then after cutting hair and hanging out with a Palestinian chick with huge tits, decided they aren’t so bad.
I bet you not many actual Palestinians appreciate the “other tribe” deciding they are okay, after fucking their most busty women lol.
It was funny though.
Man, in retrospect the Capulets were probably pretty mad about Romeo and Juliet.
They’re more than 20 years old, but Soapdish and My Cousin Vinny are still classics IMO.
Less than 20 years old, but very niche (it’s Finnish, with subtitles), is Rare Exports. It’s our go-to Christmas movie.
Back to “obstructionism”:
Is it only obstructionism if you refuse to go along with things you otherwise would?
Given some definition we can all agree on: what’s bad about it?
And if it is bad, why can’t we rely on the voters to discipline their representatives for obstructionism?
(I don’t pay much attention to politics because it never seems to make much sense, or when it does make sense it turns out everyone’s lying their respective asses off. So I’m sorry if these questions sound naive.)
It’s mostly cheap partisan rhetoric that doesn’t work because everyone sees through it as cheap partisan rhetoric. It’s meant to strongly imply that people are refusing to go along with things they otherwise would – but in the vast majority of cases it is plainly obvious that this is not so.
I think the basic definition most people would agree on is what Matt said – when politicians refuse to go along with a proposal they would support, were they not engaging in a specific stratagem of blocking it to hurt the other party.
An arguable example of this is Merrick Garland – Obama picked him specifically because he was a candidate Republican Senators were known to be favorable toward, to the extent that, when Elena Kagan was nominated, Orrin Hatch remarked that if Obama had simply picked a consensus nominee like Garland, the Republicans in the Senate would have confirmed him without hesitation.
Or consider a counter-example – when Trump first came into office, Bernie Sanders said he’d love to work with Trump on infrastructure and trade, because Trump is closer to left-wing on those issues than he is to anything like an orthodox conservative. But the Democratic base started screaming for Sanders’ head over that – because even if Trump passed a big old New Deal style infrastructure bill and old-school lefty protectionist trade policies exactly like a lot of them want, his successfully doing so makes it more likely that he will A) get reelected, and B) have political capital to succeed on other things.
So Trump could come out with a trade bill that is word for word identical to something Sanders would propose, and the Democratic base would demand that every Democrat in Congress oppose it.
(And to flip back to the past few years, McConnel gave multiple interviews where he was very up-front that this is exactly the logic that informed the Republican stance on Obama. It didn’t matter what he proposed, their mission to was to ensure he had no political victories, even if the things he proposed were things they wanted.)
The reason voters probably aren’t punishing this the way you might expect is that voters in this country seem to be becoming polarized to a greater extent than the historical norm in America. Each party wants their representatives to halt the opposing party’s initiatives at all costs, even if it means passing on proposals where in theory both sides agree, because granting a victory to the party in power is considered too dangerous.
>(And to flip back to the past few years, McConnel gave multiple interviews where he was very up-front that this is exactly the logic that informed the Republican stance on Obama. It didn’t matter what he proposed, their mission to was to ensure he had no political victories, even if the things he proposed were things they wanted.)
This is not precisely accurate.
I was actually thinking of this piece – https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/strict-obstructionist/308344/
It doesn’t have any quotes as pithy as the famous (and misleading) one about making Obama a one-term President, but it does have this bit – “We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals,” McConnell says. “Because we thought—correctly, I think—that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.”
It also lays out how when the Republicans were in the minority, they still filibustered even the things that would ultimately pass with a bunch of Republican votes, just to apply drag to proceedings and make even the most trivial business eat up valuable legislative time, which seems like a lesson the Democrats learned and are now applying as well.
>It also lays out how when the Republicans were in the minority, they still filibustered even the things that would ultimately pass with a bunch of Republican votes, just to apply drag to proceedings and make even the most trivial business eat up valuable legislative time, which seems like a lesson the Democrats learned and are now applying as well.
They filibustered and then they got shut down. The 111th congress has, if not the most, close to it, cloture motions in the history of the senate. that’s proof of an overwhelmingly strong majority, not a successfully obstructionist minority.
@cassander:
Obstruction takes many forms and you don’t seem familiar with all of the ways that senators can prevent things from occurring.
For instance, one frequent tactic is putting a “hold” on a nomination. Individual senators can prevent certain nominees from receiving a vote, and they can do so indefinitely.
Or, take what the Democrats are dong right now, which is forcing many votes to take up all, IIRC, 30 required hours of debate. Given the number of positions that require Senate confirmation, the Democrats could consume roughly the entire calendar in this congress just on nominees.
You can’t prevent every single thing you don’t want from occurring, but you can gum up the works and force the majority to consume the resource of time. That has an effect on the total number of things which can be done in a given Congress.
They filibustered and then they got shut down. The 111th congress has, if not the most, close to it, cloture motions in the history of the senate. that’s proof of an overwhelmingly strong majority, not a successfully obstructionist minority.
Just the opposite is true. Another quote from the linked article:
“Reporters underestimate how powerful the calendar is,” says Jim Manley, the former communications director for Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate leader. “Say you want to break a filibuster. On Monday, you file cloture on a motion to proceed for a vote on Wednesday. Assuming you get it, your opponents are allowed 30 hours of debate post-cloture on the motion to proceed. That takes you to Friday, and doesn’t cover amendments. The following Monday you file cloture on the bill itself, vote Wednesday, then 30 more hours of debate, and suddenly two weeks have gone by, for something that’s not even controversial.” All of this has slowed Senate business to a crawl.
Every single one of those cloture votes was performed solely for delaying purposes, and they worked. The reason there were more cloture votes than ever before isn’t (just) a sign of a dominant majority, it’s a sign of a minority party that is using the filibuster more than has ever happened in the history of the Senate, because it’s an effective stalling tactic even if you can’t halt legislation. (And if you stall enough, that halts legislation in and of itself.)
I expect that we may see the Democrats try to break their record now.
@bean
>No, it isn’t. Previously you could shut down my radar with a small ARM. Now it takes an ASM to do. This is better for me. Particularly as you no longer are shooting that ASM at my waterline.
Let’s remember how we got here. You said you could force up the size of my ASM with armor. I said no, you can just switch to attacking your radars instead. At no point were we talking about using standard sized ARM missiles against your ship, we were talking about using anti-rad seekers on normally sized ASMs with warheads designed to do maximum damage to arrays.
>You lost your last bet. I think it’s reasonable to point out that this shouldn’t fill me with confidence on your current one, particularly when you’re saying ‘I bet’ instead of making any effort to provide numbers. And when you doubled down on the last one after I went to the trouble of getting said numbers.
Forgive me for not having time to immediately track down rival numbers to win an internet debate.
>Well, yes. Of course it is. Power comes from the ship.
If your radar needs X amount of power to operate, and you expect to operate it in addition to all the other things the ship is doing, it makes sense to include that power generation capacity as part of the weight calculations.
>Software cost? That’s a complete red herring. Software is the cheapest part of buying another system. It’s expensive to write, and free to duplicate. If you’re not buying the radar system ‘retail’, then ‘free’ is the correct value to apply to cost. Likewise, development cost of the antenna is not particularly relevant.
It’s only free if you think that raytheon charges a few billion for the first ship the software goes on, then gives it away for free to all the others. That’s not how they do things. the cost of writing the software is amortized over the units sold. And, presumably, we’d need new software to deal with antennas re-designed to minimize damage from physical attack.
>Would you care to give a source on this?
I don’t have a specific page number, but I know that friedman mentions in at least a few places ships with metacentric heights that were unexpectedly, or problematically, high or low. Perhaps someone simply screwed up the math, but I presume from that that the calculations are not always straightforward.
The reason voters probably aren’t punishing this the way you might expect is that voters in this country seem to be becoming polarized to a greater extent than the historical norm in America.
I don’t even think it’s this. It’s just glaringly obvious that both parties engage in this behavior whenever they’re out of power. So it makes no sense to punish one party or the other for something they both would do in the same situation.
The parties didn’t always do this, though – the voting records of both Republicans and Democrats have become much more ideological than they used to be, as have the voters’ view of the issues.
http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/
There are lots of contradictory theories as to why this is, but the fact that it is happening (both on the left and the right) seems fairly uncontroversial.
“the last two decades” is a small sample size in American politics
The parties now are ideologically coherent at a national level in a way they haven’t been before, though.
It truly is different now.
It’s not *that* small, considering most of the Eras for the American political system span roughly 30-40 years. The exception being the Post-Depression 5th/6th Party System which is still too contemporaneous for there to be historical consensus on the dividing line.
You didn’t define within this era. You said, basically, “more polarized than ever,” then linked to an article that says “most polarized since 1994”
I’m inherently skeptical of these sorts of claims, because they serve to benefit both parties and help them stay in power – and because they are inherently hard to measure (voting records doesn’t cut it, because voting records are manipulated for the express purposes of gaming various people who track votes for various reasons).
It’s a bit cliche to go back to the Adams/Jefferson negative campaigns, but worth pointing out. Political polarization has always existed. We have a recency bias that is fueled by various interests who stand to gain by feeding said bias. I’m not saying it’s impossible that your conclusion is correct, just that I see no particular strong evidence for it.
I’m not sure if this is directed at me or not… if so, you’ve got some wires crossed with who you’re talking to.
I should have been more explicit in my previous post, but what I was trying to imply is that it’s entirely possible the past 2 decades represent a shift in the political tectonics and we’ve come back around to a “new” era that is much more ideologically driven than the era that preceded it.
FWIW, you’re right that polarization has always existed. On the grand timescale, I would wager that the (post-)WWII era is the anomaly in having less polarization (if it even did, I’m not old enough to remember that age. For now will take HBC’s word for it) than normal due to its unique circumstances. The Cold War is over and we don’t have the ICBM of Damocles omnipresent in our minds anymore, so we can “safely” descend into bickering amongst ourselves again. Lovely perk of being the hegemon.
“Use of procedural hurdles to impede change in or action by the government, in ways not intended by the designers of the system of government”.
US example: any use of the filibuster is obstructionism. (Speculation: I think it also results in this weird dynamic where the government does not respond at all to small majorities, resulting in those majorities getting frustrated and more extreme.)
Another installment in the popular series, “Things Machina ex Deus Doesn’t Get”:
I keep hearing that “it’s impossible to prove a negative.”
a) What does this even mean? What makes a proposition “a negative”? Just having “no” or “not” in it? Then I can turn any proposition into a negative. And I’m pretty sure there’s at least some proposition that can be proven—that is, it’s not true that no proposition can be proven.
b) If it does have an intelligible meaning, why should I believe it? Isn’t it telling me it can’t be proven?
I think it means statements of the form “there are no cases in near-infinite set X such that Y”. It’s easy to disprove that — just find a counterexample. But you’re never going to be able to prove it by exhaustive search.
Of course, there are situations where you have more powerful tools than search available — anything to do with math, for example. But real life’s often messy enough that those tools are impractical.
In context proving a negative comes from a James Randi talk and means something for which there is no evidence (like, I claim to be a time traveler, or I am telepathic, or Machina ex Deus is literally a machina ex deus, now prove me wrong). It’s a claim for which there is no evidence either for or against, but since I made the claim first, I can demand you prove me incorrect (which is impossible).
Thats “burden fslls on the claimant” or “extraordinary clsims require extraordinary evidence”?
I like this, but it gets tricky because “extraordinary” is a subjective issue. Take the case of Trump claiming three million illegal aliens voted in the election. The media treats this as equivalent of a lie, regularly pointing out that “the administration has offered no evidence of this claim.” They consider it to be an extraordinary claim requiring detailed proof.
But to Trump and his people, the notion that a huge number of illegal aliens wouldn’t vote is the extraordinary claim. So their response is something like “Well you haven’t proven that it didn’t happen” and then we get dragged into this “proving a negative” argument.
Is there a difference between undocumented and illegal aliens in this case? I saw something today about undocumented immigrants paying taxes but they can’t get the benefit of them, plus ICE now has their addresses.
So if an undocumented migrant can pay tax, can they vote? Would it be possible for them to register to vote? Might they feel they were entitled to vote, if they’re working towards becoming legal and paying taxes?
I’m thinking of the likes of the “I’m an undocumented migrant student in Berkeley and Milo speaking there had me scared I’d be deported” article in the Berkeley student newspaper – surely that guy would be out there voting for Hillary as hard as his little heart could go – and this article about Obama’s amnesty. Is this where Trump is getting the three million figure from?
Feck it, if I had a driver’s licence and a Social Security number and I was paying taxes, I’d feel sure that I could register to vote!
Undocumented is code for illegal. They pay taxes when they are hired for jobs using fraudulent SS numbers, and in sales tax. The “can’t get the benefit from them” means it is probably referring to the SS taxes, as they get access to public roads, emergency services, schools, etc. pretty much the same as any citizen, minus mostly ungrounded fears of interacting with authorities for fear of being referred to immigration enforcement. They can show up to vote and vote provisionally or under someone else’s name, I guess; opinions differ on how severe a problem this is, but it is unconnected to having a SS number to paying taxes.
Fun fact: that same undocumented student is well aware he can’t vote.
“Undocumented” means essentially the same thing as “Illegal” in this context, just one step up the euphemism treadmill. Most undocumented/illegal immigrants will have at least some documents, just not a proper visa or residency permit (“green card”), and will pay most of the taxes a legal immigrant or citizen would.
It would be illegal for an undocumented migrant to vote, but if they sign a voter registration form declaring that they are a citizen, nobody will check. And given the enthusiasm of some of our get-out-the-vote campaigns, it is likely that many such people have registered in good faith because the nice volunteer told them it was the right thing to do and all that anglo fine print made their eyes glaze over. And then there’s the intersection between no-questions-asked drivers’ licenses for illegal immigrants in some states, and automatic voter registration via drivers’ license rolls.
How many “undocumented migrants” actually do go cast ballots, is a subject that seems to never be adequately researched.
I had always understood it to mean sales tax and (indirectly) property tax, which unless you live in one of the states without sales tax and you’re squatting are impossible to avoid.
The benefits here are Medicaid and food stamps, which you have to apply for in person and they have to check your documentation, a fake SS card isn’t going to cut it.
I mean, I guess it’s conceivable that someone could have enough paperwork in order to satisfy the IRS, the DMV, the board of elections, etc., but not enough for the SSA or ICE, but I’m not totally sure how.
Yes, “undocumented” is just the euphemism treadmill term for “illegal”. Because “no one is illegal” and “people aren’t contraband”, you see. (To be fair, referring to the category as simply “illegals” is often done in a manner that seems at least slur-adjacent. But “illegal immigrant” is precisely descriptive, and labeling it a slur is annoying)
Anyway, non-citizens, whether in the country legally or not, are not allowed to vote in any federal US election.
Most documents that you can use (usually a drivers’ license) to register to vote establish residence, but not necessarily citizenship. In theory you can be convicted of a crime for attempting to register to vote as a noncitizen, but this seems rarely enforced.
A paper in Electoral Studies reached the conclusion, via polling, that a single digit percentage of non-citizen immigrants do in fact register and apparently successfully cast ballots. (Problems: the surveys were from 2008 and 2010, and the actual number of illegal voter responses (<50) was small. So there's some potential for error/lizardman constant).
"3 million illegal immigrants voted" is an extraordinary (and probably false) claim. But "Zero (or statistically zero) non-citizens voted" is also an extraordinary claim (and probably false).
Right. I agree with this sentiment completely.
Which is why I generally roll my eyes at any media outlet who wants to blast Trump for “providing no evidence” for his claims, while simultaneous refusing to give us what they think the number of illegal votes actually is. Because it’s presumably more than zero…
Fun fact: that same undocumented student is well aware he can’t vote.
I applaud his honesty, but looking at things, if he wanted to vote, I don’t see any strong barriers in the way preventing him from registering and if that is accepted, casting a vote.
If he’s eligible under the DACA Act (which he would seem to be), he would get a temporary Social Security number and a renewable work permit. Governor Brown of California has signed into law permission for young undocumented immigrants to get driving licences. With a driving licence and a Social Security number, could he not register? Particularly as he is in a Democratic enclave where stringent enforcement of voter registration laws and checks is seen as disenfranchising the people and a sinister Republican tactic to harass, oppress, and deprive of their vote minority voters?
Looking at the form to register to vote, the one big hurdle is the question “Are you a citizen of the United States of America?” That is the one question where a non-citizen would have to lie. All the rest they could fill in honestly:
Even the date of birth question isn’t too tricky, because they can’t apply or check up your birth certificate themselves; if they had any queries (as to “is this guy a citizen?”) they would have to ask you to provide a copy – and as I said, where being strict on voter registration is seen as the devil’s tool to help the Republicans, would they really be that rigorous?
@Deiseach:
Well, by registering to vote they would be committing a federal felony. Also, if my memory is correct from when I implemented it, the SS number check that was implemented post HAVA includes a flag for citizenship.
Someone on DACA might register to vote, but that is a really good way to stop being elegible for the DACA program.
Yes, and buying a gun for your boyfriend is also committing a federal felony, but I distinctly recall being told we can’t expect the average thug’s girlfriend to know that or hold her responsible because nobody can keep track of all that legal trivia – even when it’s specifically printed on the form right next to the question.
Here in California, anyone who applies for a drivers’ license is automatically registered to vote unless they opt out. And California explicitly grants drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants. California conspicuously does not make their drivers’ license application form available online, so I can’t see how clearly the relevant sections are labeled, but it seems quite plausible that the average migrant may not understand that we are giving them the drivers’ license even if they check the “no I am not a citizen box” and that we are going to throw them in jail if they check the “yes I am a citizen” box.
Also, we’re not actually going to throw them in jail if they check the “yes I am a citizen” box.
Maybe not California, but Texas just did. Eight years: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/02/11/republican-green-card-holder-who-voted-illegally-in-texas-gets-8-years-in-prison/
Per the article, Texas averages about six such prosecutions per year, and usually when there is organized fraud going on rather than confused immigrants checking the wrong box on a form. I’m going to guess that California comes in an order of magnitude lower on immigrant voting fraud prosecutions.
So, a lottery where 99.99% of the time nothing happens and 0.01% of the time you go to jail for eight years, for checking the wrong box on a form that isn’t labeled to indicate that it’s eight-years-in-jail important to get this one right, probably isn’t the way we want to handle this one. What is the right way to handle this one?
Note that national ID cards and citizen databases were too controversial to implement even before we had a POTUS that has us wondering whether we might have accidentally elected Hitler.
If there’s 60 or 600 or even 6000 ineligible people a year voting, the right way to handle it is probably doing pretty much nothing.
If Trump thinks it’s in the millions let him provide evidence. If it is in the millions I’d be all for taking measures to bring that down. A national ID card is fine with me. You can even give me the one with the ID 666.
OK, what’s the best way to get a reasonably accurate number?
Probably the best bet would be intense audits of some tractable number of randomly selected polling places. I don’t think you’d need government authority to do it, though it might help.
Florida tried purging non-citizens from its voter rolls in 2012.
This link says that they eventually removed 85 people. At the time this Globe and Mail article was written, only one person was actually charged — a Canadian citizen. (Six other cases were still under investigation.)
At some point, absence of evidence becomes evidence of absence.
@John Schilling
The page for the form doesn’t link to it, but they do have a non-fillable sample
Section 6 is all about voter registration (it mentions an attached form that’s not in the sample), and doesn’t mention citizenship – on the one hand meaning it may not be clear to someone that they will get in trouble for checking yes, but on the other hand not leaving the impression you’re suggesting that they won’t get a license if they check no.
This page contains more information on the voter registration forms. It looks like the process isn’t quite as automatic as has been suggested here.
EDIT: The VRC itself contains a declaration of citizenship.
Yeah, “motor voter” just says that they have to ask if you want to register. You then fill out the registration at the DMV. Your partial SSN is verified with SSA. That partial SSN verification system was implemented by SSA as part of the implementation of the bill.
I worked on the system that automatically transfers that information, included the scanned registration card, from DMV to the BOE in my state.
Do we think that the paid DNC operative who is standing outside the taco truck with the explicit goal of “sign up as many new voters as possible” and who kindly helps people fill out the form gives a single lick whether they are perjuring themselves or not?
I have to imagine that most people are given the form and simply told “This is for you to register to vote. Sign here, initial here, check yes in this box” and they just do so.
@random832: Your link is to a 2006 CA DMV form; California explicitly changed their “motor-voter” registration system from opt-in to opt-out in 2015. The statute is hard for me to decipher as to who provides what information and how; a literal reading (see 2263 para K) suggests that the DMV is required to tell the DOS that every drivers’ license applicant has attested that they are a citizen, even if they explicitly tell the DMV otherwise. But it doesn’t seem to me that they can still be using the 2006 form that starts with “Do you want to register to vote? If so, fill out a separate form”. I’d like to believe the current form is clear about who may and who must not register to vote and how to go about it, but their inability to write a clear statute does not inspire great confidence.
@Matt M:
Are there illegals who have submitted registration cards? Sure.
Would someone you went through the ICE process to gain DACA status be much less likely to do that? Again, I think the answer is clearly yes.
@John Schilling:
Attestation to citizenship is still required under the new law:
@HBC: Paragraph K, requiring an attestation of citizenship, is part of section 2263, listing things the DMV is required to provide to the State Department, not things the applicant is required to provide to the DMV. Unless I am missing something, the statute says that the DMV shall provide such an attestation for each person who applies for a driver’s license.
Taken literally, that means that the DMV is either prohibited from accepting drivers’ license applications from noncitizens, or required to itself create a false attestation of citizenship for anyone who says “I just live here, I’m not trying to vote, I just want to drive a car”. I am reasonably certain that the bureaucrats in charge of implementation weren’t so daft as to actually do it that way, but I am far less confident in any guesses I might have as to what they did do.
@John Schilling:
Given that the legal status of voter registration for non-citizens has not changed, the Sec. State would be in dereliction of duty if the registered people for whom they did not have a valid attestation.
I really, really doubt that Sec. State is willing to take the fall for a process that simply ignores citizenship.
And this still doesn’t change, to my knowledge, the federal law around motor vote which requires that you establish that you have a valid SSN which matches your name and DOB, and again, from memory, that electronic check included a flag for citizen.
Of course the system has holes – it’s made of humans after all. I’m nearly certain that somewhere in America there’s an illegal immigrant with a (falsified) birth certificate on file at a state public records office, which they used to get a legitimate SSN and passport from the respective federal agencies.
The question then becomes, how would ICE know to deport them?
(Also, California Vehicle Code § 12801.9(d) requires some way to tell a license issued to an illegal immigrant from a license issued to anyone else. Which means the DMV has to be keeping track of who showed proof of citizenship/visa status and who didn’t. Which in turn means if illegals are getting registered to vote en masse through motor voter, it should be possible to track them down.)
Prove that prove the Affordable Care Act doesn’t legalize sharia law.
Obviously it doesn’t, but there’s no positive bit of evidence you can offer to that effect, you just have to read the whole law to note that it never says any such thing.
This is not a good example at all. What the heck?
If you read the entire law and observe that it doesn’t legalize sharia law, then you have, thereby, proved that it doesn’t… “it is quite possible to in fact read the whole text of the law; here it is, and in searchable text format, even; as you can see, nowhere in here is anything about sharia law” — that’s the proof.
Nornagest’s formulation is correct.
I don’t think that’s a proof, because a law may have implications that are not immediately obvious.
Consider the 14th Amendment. It doesn’t say anything at all about the first or second Amendment. But courts quite a while back concluded that it implied that the First Amendment, which as written applied only to the Federal government, applied to the states as well. Much later they reached the same conclusion with regard to the Second Amendment.
The point is that the Affordable Care Act legalizing Sharia Law is clearly absurd, whereas a non-zero number of illegal immigrants voting is not clearly absurd. They are not at all comparable.
The rest is philosophical posturing of the kind we all know and love from first-year philosophy class. How do you REALLY know anything is real… what if a malicious demon is controlling all your perceptions like Descartes postulated? What if the Loch Nes Monster is sitting right behind you now? You didn’t check, did you? I’m not losing any sleep over these, and I know you aren’t either. They don’t invalidate the idea of science or rational inquiry.
How is “the Affordable Care Act legalizes Sharia Law” clearly absurd? This sounds like the “it’s true, because I disagree with the alternative” argument.
I can even see a narrow reading that is correct; all that would be necessary would be to show that ACA mandates or permits practices that are also mandated or permitted by Sharia law. In other words, the two systems overlap. Given that both systems are quite large, this is plausible to me, as someone who knows a little about ACA and a little less about Sharia.
One conclusion I could see myself drawing if I were to look deeper is that there are parts of Sharia which are actually quite reasonable by Western standards. Meanwhile, I can safely say that ACA probably does not mandate or permit everything treated similarly by Sharia, but that, too, is a very narrow reading.
Instead of playing games with arbitrarily narrow readings, consider the range of meanings that “allows/legalizes/mandates Sharia Law” actually means when said by Western commentators. At the very narrowest end of the range of meanings, it’s “allows parties to voluntarily choose mediation/arbitration that follows the principles of Sharia for civil dispute resolution” (theoretically with protections against being coerced into accepting such terms, but the real world isn’t so simple)
nowhere in here is anything about sharia law
Said, I’d be more convinced by that if it weren’t the same argument some religious left types use about homosexuality/gay marriage: “If you look in the Bible, Jesus says nothing about gay sex/gay marriage! That proves he’s okay with it! (Because if he weren’t, he would have deliberately said so!)”
If the Affordable Care Act has not one line in it saying “Sharia law is not to be legalised”, then that proves the ACA supports legalizing sharia law 🙂
Well, now, Deiseach, hang on. The two cases aren’t identical.
“Does the ACA legalize sharia law?” is a question about whether a law does a specific thing. A specific law does what it does; there’s no sense in which we can talk about whether that particular law has views on things that aren’t in the law. “What are the ACA’s views on sharia law?” is an incoherent question.
Meanwhile, we certainly can intelligibly talk about whether a person has views on a thing. That’s a perfectly intelligible think to speak about, quite apart from any particular thing or things that person may have said on the topic of that thing. That is, “what were Jesus’s views on gay marriage?” is a quite intelligible question to ask—it’s not incoherent or anything.
Which means that “we read some stuff Jesus wrote, and now we’re attempting to deduce his views on gay marriage from these things he wrote” isn’t fundamentally nonsensical. (Now, maybe your attempt is flawed, maybe your conclusions about his views are unwarranted, fine, but the point is, you’re asking a perfectly intelligible question.) On the other hand, “we read the ACA, and now we’re attempting to deduce the ACA’s views on sharia law” is incoherent. The ACA is not a person, it does not have views on anything, it’s just a body of text. It either contains certain things or it does not.
So, no, it’s really not the same argument at all!
Basically what it’s saying is that proving a “there exists” (positive in this sense) statement is harder than proving a “for all” (which is basically a negative “there exists”) statement. It’s not using perfect formal logic language because people don’t think in that language.
The reason this is the case is because one example can prove an existential, whereas you need a different strategy to prove a universal.
Yes — the intended meaning seems to be is that you can’t (at least not easily) demonstrate a universal statement IRL. (Or “prove” one, whatever that means.)
Why existential statements are taken to be “positive”, so that universal statements are “negative”, is unclear. Regardless it’s a terrible statement that has just led to lots of confusion. One has to wonder what whoever came up with this idiom would make of statements with alternating quantifiers…
I feel like, in the wild, the “can’t prove a negative” phenomenon generally occurs when someone makes a claim that X exists, and someone else thinks that’s ludicrous and X does not exist. Like, how would you ever prove the nonexistence of the Loch Ness Monster, or UFOs, or any other supernatural/alien/etc entity?
Right — those are universal claims. The negation of an existential is a universal. (In classical logic, anyways!)
The classic example would be “there is no God” which cannot be proven because absence of proof is not proof of absence.
Proving the existence of God is conceptually “easy” in that God showing up and making the sun stand still is pretty conclusive proof of his existence.
Absence of evidence can however be evidence of absence, I think there is a Eliezer post about that on LW.
In this context, “positive” and “negative” refer to statements “There exists X such that P(X)” and “There doesn’t exist X such that P(X)”, where P(X) is some other statement. Typically in such usage, P(X) itself doesn’t use quantifiers (words like “exists” or “for all”). The word “negative” comes from the fact that the negative statements start “there DOESN’T exist X…”.
Statements “there exists X such that…” are called existential, while statements “for all X it is the case that…” are called universal. The quantifiers “exists” and “for all” are more than what’s strictly needed (by design), in the sense that one of them can always be translated to the other with proper modifications. In particular, “for all X it is the case that P(X)” is equivalent to “there doesn’t exist X such that P(X) is false”, and is therefore negative in the sense above. So a statement like “All balloons are red” perhaps doesn’t seem negative at first glance, but when converted to an existential form, it runs “there doesn’t exist a balloon that is not red”, and is therefore negative.
Normally the possible X come from some sort of “universe of discourse” (people, numbers, buildings, countries, what have you). Now, proving a positive “there exists X such that P(X)” is “easy” in the sense that it is enough to demonstrate one X that has the property P. Proving a negative “there doesn’t exist X such that P(X)” is “hard” in the sense that at least the straightforward way of doing so involves checking every possible X for whether P(X) or not. Since universal statements “for all X it is the case…” are negative, it is often difficult to prove them. When it is possible, such proofs usually involve some properties of the universe of discourse that hold for all or many X, rather than looking at every particular X.
Example: “I’ve lied in the past” is a positive statement that can be formalised “there exists a past utterance of mine that is a lie”. It can be proved by demonstrating such an utterance, and proving that it is indeed a past utterance of mine and a lie.
“I’ve never lied” is a negative statement that can be formalized “none of my past utterances are lies” = “all of my past utterances are not lies” = “there is no past utterance of mine that is a lie”. To prove it in a straightforward manner, we’d have to examine everything I’ve ever said, and it is difficult.
On the other hand, suppose that you’re able to show that I’m a robot who’s infallibly programmed to tell the truth. That would indeed prove that I’ve never lied, without examining each and every thing I’ve ever said. But it relied on other universal (=negative) statements taken on faith or proved somehow in their turn, like “robots who run this program never lie”. Entities in the real world (people, countries, budgets, crimes) are often joined in ad hoc categories that are messy and fuzzy and come without reliable universal statements about them. Therefore it is often difficult to prove a negative about them.
“it’s impossible to prove a negative.”
It’s possible to prove or disprove a positive, e.g. “Machina ex Deus writes comments on SSC”, because we can see whether or not that’s true – yes, there is/no, there isn’t a commenter by that name here. Machina ex Deus doesn’t even have to tell us “Yes, indeed I do comment on SSC”.
It’s harder, even impossible, to prove or disprove a negative, e.g. “Machina ex Deus is not a woman” based on the evidence we have – the rest of us could debate it until we’re blue in the face, but unless Machina provides credible evidence one way or the other, in the end just going on what we have here (“the writing style is that of a woman!” “no, the analysis says it’s male!”) we can’t know for sure so we can’t say “Machina ex Deus is not/is not not a woman”.
But it’s equally impossible (or possible if we have evidence) to prove/disprove “Machina ex Dues is a woman”.
Thank you for all your responses. My conclusion:
1) “It’s impossible to prove a negative” is stupid, for two reasons:
a) They don’t mean “impossible”, they mean “really hard”.
b) They don’t mean “negative”, they mean “universal”.
2) A more-accurate reformulation would be:
“It’s really hard to prove a universal.”
3) An even-more-accurate reformulation would be:
“It’s really hard to prove a universal, except when it isn’t.”
(For an example of the latter: “I’ve never written a comment on SSC with more characters than there are atoms in the Solar system.”)
4) A more-honest (as opposed to more-accurate) reformulation would be:
“C’mon, man! You can’t expect me to prove a universal! You lose the argument!”
5) Whenever I see “It’s impossible to prove a negative,” I will mentally replace it with the reformulation from (3). If possible, I will refrain from (visibly) rolling my eyes.
6) We should restrict the ability to coin rules of argument to philosophy majors who took a lot of logic classes (like, say, me), as magicians seem to be bad at it.
7) I need to take a closer look at the ACA, especially any parts that deal with mediation or arbitration, to see if it promotes sharia law.
At least in my social circle, 4) is the way the statement is used.
It’s not stupid to use language in an inexact manner in ordinary conversation. Don’t be an asshole.
a) “You can’t prove a negative” doesn’t come up in ordinary conversation—it comes up in arguments.
b) I don’t care that it’s imprecise; I care that it’s misleading as hell. Confusing “won the vote” with “won the majority of the vote” is imprecise; confusing “negative” with “universal” is just…. words fail me. It’s as idiotic as “steer into the skid”, or “you can never put too much water into a nuclear reactor”. We’d all be better off if people used one of the translations above.
c) Don’t worry: I’m not trying to horn in on your territory.
Hey everyone! In light of recent discussions about how political news is propagated, I thought some of you might be interested in a side project I’ve been working on.
Tripartisan is a news aggregator (similar to HackerNews, Reddit, or Voat) focused on politics. The key difference between Tripartisan and other aggregators is that it asks users to identify their political stance on signup. Users choose between three broad categories: left-leaning (i.e. blue tribe), right-leaning (i.e. red tribe), and neither (i.e. gray tribe + anyone else). This makes possible a number of features which don’t exist on other aggregation sites. For example:
1) You can see not just the number of votes a post or comment has received, but what the partisan distribution of those votes is.
2) You can sort posts by partisan affiliation, or use the “best” sort, which prioritizes posts that received votes from across the political spectrum.
3) For a given post, we can show the top comment from each of the three “tribes” directly underneath.
4) When viewing a user’s profile, you can see both the partisan distribution of the people who upvoted that user, as well as the partisan distribution of the posts/comments which that user upvoted.
These are just a few examples of the features that such a partitioning of users makes possible. I’m hoping that this framework could help prevent the echo chamber/hivemind problems suffered by other political news aggregators like r/politics or voat. Even if you don’t consider yourself to be politically neutral, I think (and I would assume many of you here agree) that it’s important to be exposed to what the “other side” thinks is the important news of the day – if only so that you know how best to refute their claims. I know that when I read particularly politicized articles, I often think to myself “This seems convincing to me, but what would a reasonable member of [other tribe] think of this?” My hope is that a news aggregator like Tripartisan might make it very easy to answer this kind of question.
At the moment Tripartisan just a prototype, but I’d be interested to hear peoples’ thoughts on it (both the concept and the implementation).
I like the concept and I hope the website gets big.
Two questions about the implementation: First, do you think it’s likely that in practice the website will end up being popular only among one tribe, like how e.g. voat has a reputation for being right-leaning? What do you plan to do about this if so?
Second, if you weren’t going by blue/red/grey tribes, how would you have split it? I think the 3 tribes thing is an interesting idea from Scott but I’m a bit skeptical of it. (This isn’t the place to go into details but essentially: most of USA fits into blue and red but the tiny lesswrong diaspora gets its own third colour?)
Thanks!
Regarding the first point: it does seem possible that the website will be more popular among one tribe than among others. However, I think that at least part of the extreme polarization of places like r/politics and voat is due to their design. Once a certain “tipping point” is reached, it’s very hard for your voice to be heard if you don’t belong to the ideological majority, and so any remaining members who doesn’t belong to that majority are driven out. I’m hoping that by making it easier for users to see posts/comments with broad partisan appeal or that appeal to their particular tribe, ideological minorities will be more tempted to stick around. So even if there does end up being an imbalance, as long as it isn’t overwhelming (say 50/30/20), the ranking system can be tweaked so that posts/comments popular among the minority tribes will still see the light of day.
On the second point: I actually think that blue/red/gold (I use gold rather than gray for the third group, just for aesthetic purposes) is a decent split. It’s true that from my perspective (libertarian-ish), most of the US tends to seem either blue or red. But I think that a lot of the people that I would classify as blue or red would classify themselves as neither. I think this is borne out a bit by the party identification surveys. If most of the people who identify as independents place themselves in the Gold category, we’d have a pretty good balance.
Do you have any thoughts to what might happen if one tribe becomes predominant and then starts “registering” as the other tribe to mess with things?
I’m a pretty far right guy. What’s to stop me from saying I’m a Democrat, but then upvoting all right-wing stories and down-voting left-wing stories in order to make it look like “even democrats agree with this ‘trump is the greatest president of all time’ story from Breitbart!”
Yeah, this concern has been raised by other people I’ve showed this to, and I agree that it’s the biggest potential flaw in the design.
My current plan is to see how often this occurs in practice. If it turns out to be a major problem, I will have to try and identify “false flaggers” by their voting behavior and then either ban them or force them to change affiliations.
I’m hoping that as long as the majority of users are truthful about their categories, that will provide enough signal to make automatic identification of deceivers possible. But if we reach a point where the majority of users lie about their tribe, then I’m not sure what could be done.
I think an easy solution would be to include a separate score in which you assign political affiliation considering how an user votes instead of what they are registered as. For example, if you upvote red articles and downvote blue ones you belong to the red tribe regardless of what you consider yourself. Trolling would imply having a blue account that occasionally votes red and it’d be much more cumbersome.
One suggestion I might have is to ask a more specific question – such as “Who did you vote for in the election?” and use that for sorting purposes. While people could still lie, it’s more direct and a more obvious lie that eliminates people who are simply deluding themselves (i.e. the guy who genuinely believes he is an “independent” despite having voted exclusively for one party in every election in his life).
This also gives you a clear frame of reference to see whether your site is representative. If you end up with 30% of your site identified as Gary Johnson voters, you know that either something you’re doing is appealing to libertarians specifically, or that a lot of people are lying about having voted for him.
@pedrodegiovanni Yeah I think that’s a good idea. It would be difficult to implement something like that at this time since there’s not much data so far. But if the site gets bigger, I’m definitely going to explore automated detection of users’ affiliation.
One issue with this tactic is that it still requires some sort of ground truth. So even if we set users’ affiliations based on whether they tend to upvote red or blue articles, we still need a way to categorize the articles as red or blue in the first place. I was anticipating that users’ self-identification would be the ground truth, but if we instead infer user affiliation from their behavior, we’d need a new ground truth.
Though now that I think about it, that isn’t necessarily true. If I just clustered the users into three groups based on voting preferences, without attaching any partisan labels to either users or posts, it might turn out that the three groups correspond nicely to the left, the right, and some independents/neutrals. Of course, it might also turn out that the groups correspond to something completely different, or don’t cluster nicely at all. In any case it’s something that I’m eager to try when I have a bit more data to work with.
@Matt M That’s an interesting thought. Based on what some other commenters have said, I’m thinking about implementing a quick political orientation quiz on signup – a handful of questions to try and gauge which group people should belong to.
I see your point about using something concrete (voting record) to tease out people who might be in denial about their true orientation. But I also think that voting behavior – particularly in this past election – might not give the clearest signal. For example, there are a significant number of #NeverTrump conservatives, who didn’t vote for Trump but who I would nevertheless like to end up in the right-leaning group. Also, focusing too much on the U.S. election might alienate users from other countries.
@mrbodoia You can do high quality automatic classification of users even with a very low quality, sparse signal for ground truth, if the number of votes reaches a reasonable threshold. You can use a recursive algorithm similar to PageRank. There’s a clever aphorism by Cosma Shalizi that’s relevant here: “One man’s vicious circle is another man’s successive approximation procedure.”
An example of a sparse signal would be simply a short list of known partisan websites. You can bootstrap from there. Instead of a hard classification into three clusters, it’s better to make the algorithm emit a probability distribution (three numbers), and use that instead of the hard clustering whenever possible.
Of course this fails if the near-majority of your users do creepy things like using many dishonest votes on unimportant comments just to mislead the algorithm. But then you are in trouble anyway.
If you use red, blue, and “gold”, you are imitating the colors of Pokemon Go factions. You may wish to do this anyway, but keep it in mind.
(I was getting ready to post a snarky comment about the gyms in my area all being occupied by Team Mystic, but wasn’t sure enough people would understand it.)
To be fair in the original post Scott didn’t have grey as a full fledged tribe. He called it something like a half formed offshoot of the blue tribe. It was commentors that ran away with it.
Well, he said blue tribe was his outgroup, so ….
And the red tribe his far group, so that leaves only 1 ingroup…
I think Scott meant that the red tribe is so far away that it’s not even the outgroup.
Someone joked that the tribes are: grey – who are right, blue – who are wrong, and red – who are incapable of making moral decisions. It’s a joke but I think it gets at something. I often see grey people addressing the blue tribe in writing and criticizing them. I never see greys addressing the red tribe. The red tribe is treated as some kind of irrational mass that responds to stimuli from the other tribes and can be used as a tool, but is not something worth criticizing.
On a side note, I think the tribe theory has made some wrong predictions. Last year many argued that while Trump is saying a lot of seemingly right-wing things, he is a successful New Yorker so he must be blue tribe at heart. He was just saying all those things about Muslims and Mexicans to get the red tribe behind him, then he would implement centrist or even liberal policies. Can we agree that has turned out to be completely false?
Btw, tell me if I am posting too much in this thread.
I don’t know if the interpretation is that Red is incapable of making moral decisions – it can seem* like Red are capable of making them, and deliberately make the opposite ones. For example, “Whenever you complain about Trump doing something terrible, republicans are filled with glee that you’re miserable”.
*I don’t think this is actually true, but it’s an impression that’s easy to get, especially through internet interactions.
Suppose we were talking about emos or goths instead of greys. (I may be dating myself here.) Wouldn’t it make sense to say that the mainstream blue tribe was their outgroup while at the same time saying they are part of the greater blue tribe rather than a full fledged independent tribe?
I can’t speak for anyone else, but my early political writing largely consisted of a column in The New Guard, the magazine of Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative student group. I was the token libertarian.
A good deal more recently, but still a while back, I attended a high up conservative get together to debate one of their people on (I think) free trade vs protectionism. I had the opportunity to meet, and be positively impressed by, Phyllis Schlafly.
And I debated encryption with Ed Meese, but that was back in 1997.
@shakeddown: Interesting point, but this is not something I see the typical internet libertarian write about. Maybe Trumpism appears so trivially evil that it’s impossible to write a biting and intelligent critique.
@Brad: I’m not sure, weren’t there emos and goths in red country too? I’m not convinced of the whole red/blue dichotomy. I would say emos and goths were a reaction against general mainstream suburban family life, which have aspects of both the red and blue tribe.
@DavidFriedman: Thank you, it’s good to see that libertarianism has not be completely consumed by Trumpism. There was definitely a time when the grey tribe criticized conservatism, back when the prime online topics were creationism, DVD-decrypters, gay marriage and marijuana. It just feels like those days are gone.
I consider myself one of the members of the “gray tribe” and Scott’s description of them in that essay was one of the first times that I’d heard anyone really identify the niche where I so often found myself.
Culturally, I’m a Blue in most ways. I work in a high-status profession, eat Blue foods, travel the world and have friends in many other countries, read a lot of books that get talked about at Blue dinner parties, watch Blue TV shows and movies, and so forth. If you met me at a party in Los Angeles you’d probably think I’m just a typical person in the entertainment industry.
But politics and policy-wise, my intuitions are polar opposite of almost everything held sacred by the Blue Tribe. I’m strongly anti-authority and hence anti-government, believe that holding “diversity” as a meta principle is not just non-helpful but actively harmful, strongly disagree with affirmative action and identity politics, and believe very strongly in equity (defined as systemic rules which treat all individuals equally with no consideration of identity or special exceptions for favored groups), finding “equality” not just misguided but abhorrent as a moral precept. All of these things make me persona non grata to the Blue Tribe.
But I also believe that abortion is an unpleasant but probably socially beneficial thing given the enormous downsides of reckless procreation, that people have the right to sleep with whomever consents and society should butt out of it, and that religion is a very, very dangerous foundation for public policy. All of these things put me directly at odds with the Red Tribe.
And on top of that, I think foreign interventionism is sometimes necessary and justifiable both for humanitarian reasons and for proactive defense against looming threats. (Better to nip some things in the bud than wait until they’re at your gates.) And I think that markets have discrete failure modes and that coercive monopolies are sometimes the lesser evil to protect both economic efficiency and individual rights. These principles put me at odds with libertarians.
So the “gray tribe” — culturally Blue, lifting some ideas from the Red Tribe and with some sympathies towards libertarianism without accepting it wholeheartedly — seems like the best label I can use. Judging by the reactions around the web since the essay was published, I’m not the only one in this odd niche, either, though I’m sure it has slightly different meanings to different people.
I interact with the Blue Tribe every day of my life and am completely surrounded by them. If I ever interact with Red Tribe members in the real world, it’s only likely to be service workers with whom I’m not talking politics and am unaware of their views. I know exactly two people in real life who believe that abortion is infanticide, and neither one self-identifies as a Republican. I know no one who believes that prayer should be in schools or that the Bible should be displayed in a courtroom.
The Red Tribe is a “fargroup” for me because I don’t interact with them and hence there’s no real emotional urge to criticize them. It’s not agreement; it’s disinterest borne of inattention. They’re not doing anything to irritate me on a regular basis in my personal life, they’re just a bunch of weirdos somewhere else in the country holding different beliefs, some of which overlap with mine and some which don’t. On the other hand, there’s a pretty good chance that if someone says something horribly intolerant or offensive to me in a given day, it’s a Blue Tribe member. So I’m a lot more inclined to rant about them since they’re causing friction for me every day, if not in overt comments then simply in the groupthink assumption that everyone who doesn’t believe their “religion” is an evil fascist.
Judging by Scott’s posts, he seems to be in a similar situation, and I’m guessing his rationale for directing most of his criticism at the Blue Tribe is similar.
@Cypren
I just don’t see that the tribe concept works for what you are describing. Yes, you have different politics from the majority of people around you. But we already have words to describe people’s politics. If the tribes are redundant with that, what’s the point?
The thing that really struck me about the essay Scott wrote about the tribes was the concept of dark matter. How many of us move through the world and never come into sustained contact with someone from the other tribe. That’s what makes him and you Blue Tribe no matter how much you loathe the politics that most of us have.
The Grey Tribe isn’t a real tribe because it doesn’t have to the critical mass to achieve this isolation, at least not yet and not in most places. Someone that works at MIRI or something, might seem to be to the contrary, but even they probably don’t have sufficient isolation. And when you start to talk about really tiny bubbles it doesn’t make sense to define an entity at the same top level as blue and red.
If we wanted to extend the metaphor to a third tribe, Black would make a lot more sense than Grey. It wouldn’t include all African-Americans, but there are large-ish groups of black people that have a distinct culture and no regular or deep interactions with white people.
@Brad: On the whole, I think you make a good point. But let me offer a counterargument: the reason I can coexist with the Blue tribe is specifically because I disguise my politics. Political ideology is at this point fairly central to tribal cohesion; if I were to say what I really think at Blue parties, I would become a social reject in short order, if not be hounded out of my job and career for CrimeThink.
To wit: I’m only a member of the Blue Tribe so long as I’m play-acting the part of being one. It’s not that I wouldn’t happily stay a member despite my disagreements; it’s that they wouldn’t have me. So I don’t think I’m really a “member” so much as an “infiltrator”: good enough at impersonating actual members to avoid being thrown out.
Maybe everyone is secretly hiding massive philosophical differences with the tribe that would get them socially ostracized, and the pressure for ostracism is entirely a construction of preference falsification. But I doubt it; I think most of the Blue Tribe are sincere in their beliefs and really do consider my real viewpoint to be objectively evil.
@Cypren: Most people are hiding something when socializing. I think the tribe around you only appear homogeneous because everyone is hiding thing to fit in.
@Cypren If you want to describe your exact connection to the blue tribe as complicated, that certainly makes sense to me. My (quixotic) project is a continued objection to the concept of a grey tribe. It doesn’t seem to carve reality at the joints.
l think that it is difficult to determine the political views of people by watching how they act within a specific group. I think that most people will soften or mute their unpopular beliefs in response to what direction they think the wind is blowing.
I would guess that there are even groups where the majority actually hold a certain belief but keeps it to themselves. This is similar to the reason that figuring out how many people oppose governments which punish dissent is so difficult and revolutions can appear to come out of nowhere.
One has to admit that tabooing the expression of particular beliefs (along with perceived dog whistles) is a very effective way of preventing people who hold the beliefs from coordinating in meatspace.
I actually get where SJWs are coming from here. It’s not just that they find certain beliefs morally repugnant and want them obliviated, what they really fear that if the -ists are able to publicly express these beliefs without suffering huge costs, one of (if not the biggest) hurtles that prevented them from being able to publicly coordinate will collapse.
@Megaflora:
I agree with what you’re saying here – preventing people from coordinating is part of the point of some things being acceptable to say and other things not be – but one quibble:
“Say” and “act” are different. I know white people who will rail against racism, condemn other white people as racists, etc, but have friend groups that are noticeably disproportionately white, etc. More than once I’ve had the surreal experience of hearing racism loudly condemned at all-white parties (not, like, the theme was “only white people! 50s attire!”, but somehow only white people showed up…)
Even in environments that are quite diverse – I went to a university that is under 50% white, for example – there’s rarely punishment for white people who act racist in lowkey and relatively unimportant ways. The white person who only has white friends is unlikely to get any flak – nobody really says anything openly about it. If they were in charge of university admissions and let in disproportionately white students, heads would roll, of course.
@dndnrsn
Only the most extreme of the extreme try to police the racial diversity of other’s personal friends. That’s a good thing. Do you really think it’s racist to have friends whose racial mix doesn’t mirror the larger group you’re in? It seems to me that this is pretty natural as a result of non-racist factors. One, de-facto segregation; most people will have met their friends in groups which did not look like society overall. Two, culture (which is correlated with race); most people are going to be better able to make friends with those from similar cultures.
@The Nybbler:
I’m not proposing anything of the sort. It’s not racist to have a friend group that has different demographics from society at large. It is a wee bit interesting, however, when the (white) people who are the most frothing-at-the-mouth about the general iniquity and racism of (other) white people have a friend group that is infinitely (in the literal sense of the term) whiter than their immediate surroundings. I’m not objecting to people having nonrepresentative friend groups. I’m gesturing at likely hypocrisy.
I liked the idea of Violet Tribe (an off-shoot of the Red Tribe in the same way that Grey Tribe was an off-shoot or sub-set of greater Blue Tribe culture) – culturally/by inclination of Red Tribe background or values, but with cultural interests or living/working/assimilated into Blue Tribe spaces. You know, you can like hunting and opera, or yes sure you’re a Bible basher but you’ve also read Dostoevsky or Tolstoy kind of thing.
That never seemed to get anywhere, though 🙁
You sure can.
@Machina ex Deus
I was thinking of a different reference.
And I of yet another.
Scalia liked hunting, and was opera buddies with Ginsburg.
You’re gonna get three (or fewer) echo chambers, because eventually everyone’s going to filter by tribe and only delve into the other tags for point-and-laugh/quote-mining purposes. There is so little cross-tribal trust right now that downvotes from the other tribe may well be taken as a positive incentive, far from encouraging bipartisanship; see for example the main political subreddits.
Also, if the proportion of committed Gray/other people is small enough compared to the left or the right, the “other” category is going to end up being dominated by identitarians who for whatever reason don’t want to identify as such — maybe they’re ideologically heterodox, maybe they e.g. think of themselves as “leftists” and you called the category “liberal”, maybe something else. Depending on details and initial conditions you might even end up incentivizing lying about your views; if that goes far enough you’ll end up with a monoculture, just one where some percentage of the posters are concern trolling or playing Simplicio. Maybe there’ll be a few posters of other political persuasions staying on as court eunuchs, but that doesn’t really matter.
I don’t think these are solvable problems as long as you’re using a karma system and relying on self-reports for partisan tagging. A more robust method might involve using some kind of clustering algorithm to identify natural categories.
I agree that trying to avoid echo chambers is basically an uphill battle against human nature.
However, I think there is an important difference between the subreddit framework and the framework for my site. For one thing, the front page of Tripartisan is explicitly designed to make sure that posts which are popular among all three types of users float to the top. So it’s true that people can choose to sort by e.g. left-leaning posts only, but the default is guaranteed to show a mix of all three.
Comments are ranked the same way. This means that even if the vast majority of commenters on a post are e.g. right-leaning, a post which gets a small number of left-leaning votes will still rise to the top. So it isn’t really possible for any number of voters from one side to drown out the voices from the other side.
That being said, the second problem that you mentioned – false flagging, or lying about your affiliation on signup – is definitely not overcome by this framework. I’ll have to try and make sure that there isn’t a strong enough incentive to do that, but it may not be possible.
I do like the idea of using a clustering algorithm – that was actually the original idea. But I figured I would try something with more explicit categories first and see how that worked. If false-flagging turns out to be too great of a problem, then I will investigate the clustering idea further.
Why not start the registration with a questionnaire made up of political discovery questions?
The user is then presented with a scale (or in this case maybe a point on the inside of a triangle, each vertex representing a strong political persuation) – this does the coarse-grain allocation to a political “bin”. Then the user is free to navigate within a political subarea of the scale or triangle so they can fine-grain their views.
This could also act as a speed-hump in the middle of the signup process to disincentivise false-proclamations.
+1
It’s trivially easy to get those questionnaires to say anything you want them to, but I suppose trivial inconveniences are not to be underestimated.
Ehhhhhhh
In addition to the other problems (e.g.: left-leaning and right-leaning don’t mean a lot in terms of actual ideas), let’s be careful; that’s not what those terms mean. In particular recall that Scott’s “gray tribe” is a subset of his “blue tribe”, not something altogether separate.
I might be using the tribal labels a little loosely here. I was using “gray tribe” to mean something like “futurist libertarian”, which is a group that I see a lot of around the internet and that seems distinct from the blue tribe, but rereading Scott’s original post about the tribes it seems that he is indeed referring to a subset of the blue tribe. And you’re right, it looks like his definitions of “red tribe” and “blue tribe” are a little bit different than what I was remembering. So I’m going to retract my comparison between the groups on Tripartisan and the “tribes”.
Anyway, my goal is not so much to get people to group themselves according to the specific groups that Scott identified. The point was more to try and get users to cluster themselves into three groups which are likely to have somewhat similar up/down-voting behavior, so as to extract more signal from each user’s votes. I figured that the groups people would find most intuitive were left-leaning, right-leaning, and other. But I’m also open to suggestions here. If you had to divide all participants in current political conversation into three very rough groups, how would you do it?
In case you’re wondering why I picked three groups specifically, it seems to me that three is the right balance between too few groups (in which case we end up with large in-group ideological differences) and too many groups (in which the strength of the signal from each group is lost). But if you think there is a reasonable partition into more or less than three groups, I’d be interested to hear that as well!
Use the good old Political Compass and divide people into four groups? That’d roughly be Conservatives, Liberals, Libertarians, and (in the old European sense) Christian Democrats.
Are you saying the top-left quadrant is Christian Democrats?
The weird thing for me with that grouping is that I somehow come off on the right in both subcategories despite being firmly in the left.
@rlms, pretty much. People like (I imagine) Deiseach, who both vehemently oppose abortion and vigorously support welfare. Not sure how common they are over on this side of the ocean, though.
I think I agree that those kinds of people are in the top-left (when I filled out the Political Compass test trying to answer like I thought the Pope would, that’s where I ended up), but there are also quite a lot of non-Christian authoritarian leftists. So I think there is another distinction to be made.
Plenty, at least below the eventual wall.
Yes, the most obvious (to me) missing piece of the classic political compass is the lack of a third Conservative/Progressive axis.
@ Evan Þ: I think this is a good idea. The original Political Compass test is a bit long and might discourage people from signing up. But I’m considering offering a watered-down version to people who don’t immediately know which group to pick.
I would be willing to expand from three groups to four if it looks like each group provides a strong signal. However, I’m not convinced that there are enough Christian Democrats out there to justify them getting their own group (Not to mention the fact that “Quadpartisan” just doesn’t have the same ring to it!). If that’s the case, then I’ll probably just lump them together with the Libertarians in the Gold group.
I realize that imposing these broad partisan categories glosses over a lot of important differences between individual users’ views. But it seems to me that by far the most important divide in contemporary politics is between the left (Political Compass Liberals) and the right (Political Compass Conservatives). My thinking was to give each of those contingents their own category, and then include a catch-all category for everyone else.
Even if I do stick with three groups, I’m definitely going to change the name of the third category. The people that I’m expecting to end up in that category usually have strong and considered political opinions, and I imagine it’s not very gratifying to have those opinions summed up by a button that says “Neither”.
I’d urge you to at least keep track of all four (or more?) on the back end, even if you lump everyone into three groups in practice. Who knows; maybe a couple hundred Christian Democrats will sign up, and you’ll be able to split them pretty soon. That’d also get past the problem of the “Neither” button.
Good point. In fact, the best solution would probably be to just save everyone’s answers to the political orientation quiz. That way I could experiment with different ways of dividing people up based on how they answered, and pick whichever partition seems to provide the best signal.
I have a notion that there should be a way for people to develop new groups, either on their own or with moderation.
Maybe people can design their own logo (if you’re using stars, then choose color of star, maybe allow multi-colored stars), then see if a group accretes to the new logo.
@ Nancy Lebovitz: It’s an interesting idea, but I would probably want it to be carefully controlled. What I like about the current system is that you can see at a glance what kind of partisan support each post/comment received (since there are only three user groups). With more than three groups, and particularly with no strict limit on the total number of groups, this feature would be less useful.
A variant of this idea which came up somewhere else in the thread is to retain the current division into three (or possibly four) groups, but allow the members of each group to divide themselves into subgroups. So both social justice types and Marxist types would be part of the Blue group, but they could have their own subgroup and a corresponding shade of blue. Similarly, both libertarians and Christian Democrats would belong to the Gold group, but they would have their own subgroup and shade of gold.
If I went down this road, I would likely display a simple blue/gold/red vote tally on each post/comment as I’m doing now, but clicking on the tally would trigger a popup with a more detailed breakdown of the votes by subgroup.
If you had to divide all participants in current political conversation into three very rough groups, how would you do it?
Discounting everyone on here but based on what I’m seeing elsewhere:
(1) Shrieking Termagants Of Every Gender
(2) Head In The Sand Obstinate ‘All Is As It Should Be’
(3) The Disgruntled Majority For Whom The Eschaton Cannot Come Fast Enough
The first two don’t necessarily line up neatly with parties; Head In The Sanders (but nothing to do with Bernie) can be found in both parties, where they and theirs have done nothing wrong, their candidate(s) were perfect, they have no need to re-evaluate policy or direction, they wuz robbed by the Russians, the machinations of the Other Lot, the Gnomes of Zurich, etc.
Ditto for the Termagants. “Burn it all down!” comes from the extremes on both sides.
tag urself. Im Shrieking Termagant
I’d be really interested to see a “Head in the Sanders” party that does have something to with Bernie.
I’m mainly Disgruntled, but with a strong inclination towards Shrieking betimes 🙂
It feels like a good idea but I’m skeptical it’ll work as intended. Are the affiliations of people who comment displayed in some way? That’d probably make things worse, as you tend to interpret someone’s words based on who they are and what side they represent, i.e it might just make it easier to identify who you should ignore.
Even if not, three groups aren’t enough, IMO. You could get a lot better data by having more categories (something like old left, new left, liberal, libertarian, conservative, nationalist etc.), or even allow several labels and different category schemes.
And try not to reinforce the “tribes” = “political parties” idea. Red vs. blue tribe is a social and cultural model, not a partisan one. The tribes exist in other countries as well even where the political situation is different.
Yes, the political affiliations of both post authors and commenters are displayed (your username is colored either blue, red, or gold to indicate affiliation). I agree that this could potentially make people more disagreeable. But I also think that there’s something to be said for “wearing your views on your sleeve” so people know where you’re coming from. In addition, my goal with this site is not so much to get different sides to agree with each other, but more to give each side an equal voice in the same space. If a user wants to ignore comments made by the other side, that’s unfortunate, but it’s at least an improvement over the old model where minority viewpoints get filtered/downvoted out of the conversation entirely.
The question of exactly how many groups to have is a good one. My thinking for using three was that left vs right seems to be the most salient divide in politics today, but since there are a lot of people that don’t strongly identify with either side of that division, there should be a third “catch-all” group. It’s certainly true that we could achieve more in-group ideological homogeneity by increasing the number of groups. But I worry that with more than three, it will become difficult for people to keep track of what each group means. Perhaps a good middle ground would be to keep the three current groups, but create subdivisions within the groups (e.g. the left-leaning group could have old left, new left, and liberal subgroups).
You’re absolutely right about the “tribes” != “political parties” point. My intention in referring to the tribes was to capture the idea that the left and right groups on Tripartisan are more broad than just liberal/conservative or Democrat/Republican. For example, old-school conservatives like McCain or Romney are quite ideologically distant from Milo and the alt-right, but they also both seem to be part of larger category that is often referred to as the “right”. However, as both you and Sniffnoy pointed out, this isn’t the idea that “Red Tribe”/”Blue Tribe” is meant to capture – the tribes are more about social and cultural characteristics. So I take back my comparisons between Tripartisan’s groups and Scott’s tribes.
This is not a serious contribution, but when you say Gold do you mean metallic, or just a dark/rich yellow/orange color. Because I think the desire for a Gold name, if you mean metallic/shiny, might mess with your sorting.
It’s just a sort of dark yellow. You can see it for yourself at tripartisan.io! I wanted to pick a color that was visually dissimilar to both red and blue.
I know your post isn’t meant to be serious, but it’s funny because I actually had a similar thought when I was picking colors. I originally chose green as the third color since it’s easily distinguishable from red and blue. But then I worried that green might seem too “positive”, so I went with a more neutral yellow.
I see your point about “wearing your views on your sleeve” but I don’t think declaring for one of three groups is a good way of doing that – it “rounds off” far too much and reinforces the destructive idea that there are a small number of “teams” and that each person represents their team. It’ll likely make some bad behaviors more common, like seeing other people as avatars of an ideology and not real people, demanding they defend views they don’t hold etc.
I know this isn’t what you’re looking for, but I’d be interested in a model where people’s up-and-downvotes could be used to group them, and then posts and comments could be sorted based on support across groups, i.e something would wind up on top if it was upvoted by people who normally don’t vote the same way.
Yeah I agree that forcing people to publicly declare allegiance with one of only three groups might lead to bad behavior. Currently, the way that I’m mitigating this is by allowing people to choose a short tagline that gets displayed alongside their username. So for example, if you’re in the right-wing/red group but want to distance yourself from Trump, you could write “Never Trump” or something like that.
Another idea which has been developed elsewhere in the thread is to allow users within each of the main groups to divide into subgroups. If these subgroups were given recognizable “flairs” that also displayed next to people’s usernames, this might help the problem of “rounding off” too much of one’s politics.
The reason that I want to force people to declare a group is so that I can do exactly what you suggest: “posts and comments could be sorted based on support across groups, i.e something would wind up on top if it was upvoted by people who normally don’t vote the same way.” Under the current implementation, the highest-ranked posts are those which received support from all three groups. It’s true that with only three groups, there is bound to be a wide variety of viewpoints within each group. But the main distinction that I’m interested in for the purposes of this site is left/blue vs. right/red, since that seems to be the most important split in contemporary politics.
The idea of inferring groups based on voting behavior rather than explicit declarations is interesting. It’s definitely something I want to explore eventually, but unfortunately until there are a lot more users, it will be hard for me to get any meaningful signal out of the data. However, with enough data I could do exactly what you suggest: cluster people based on voting behavior and then prioritize posts which get cross-cluster support, without bothering to try and label the clusters.
Tripartisan looks like an interesting idea, and I will try it for a while. I suspect it will fail horribly but I cannot say how, and that must a good sign. Maybe the independent group will end up aligning to one of the sides. Or maybe one of the sides will end up with people who are not at all representative of that side.
Thanks!
It’s certainly an open question how the group affiliations will play out in practice. I don’t think it would be a huge deal if the independent group turns out to lean one way or another. The bigger problem is the second one – if one of the sides gets hijacked by people who are not representative, or perhaps even actively deceptive about their views. That could indeed cause Tripartisan to fail horribly, and I’ll have to be on the lookout for those kinds of dynamics.
Can people’s affiliation change? And if so, how is this change recognized and parsed in their past interactions and future interactions?
Has anyone shrilly alleged that the name is a reference to the Tripartite Pact and therefore you are secretly a Nazi who should be punched, yet?
Well Sanders used to pass tri-partisan amendments when he was in the house and according to Dianne Rehm he is a secret Israeli citizen so I’m not sure anyone could effectively equate the word tri-partisan to Nazis.
This is a good idea.
I’d stick with a two-category system. Maybe my ‘murca is showing, but everyone is either left, right, lying to themselves, or too special to matter. Besides, the big communication barrier is between left and right. (Of course then you need a new name.)
I don’t think something like this will be able to compete with memeorandum unless big stories reliably appear there quickly. Some light bot-posting might be needed for takeoff (maybe the most popular story of the day from LIST. Not sure how best to compile LIST.)
Like most other online things having to do with politics, it will likely consist disproportionately of users who have a social/community orientation. With disproportionately few loner-, or loner-sympathetic oriented people.
I don’t know that anything particular can be done to encourage us to integrate into such fora, but would still be interested in anything that breaks us out and analyzes us separately from the larger aggregation. I’d guess that, in general, we’d fall more strongly on the non-authoritarian axis than average (regardless of political “tribe” leaning), but I may very well be wrong about this.
What do anti-immigration people make of the claims that the crime rate in Sweden has decreased since the beginning of large-scale Muslim immigration to that country? See eg this page. Everything is down except sexual assault, which seems to be confounded by changing definitions.
(article also notable for worst graph labeling scheme ever in the first picture)
One counterargument might be that Muslims are only about 5-10% of the Swedish population, so their effect should be small compared to any random fluctuation in the crime rate for native Swedes. But this still seems incompatible with the massively elevated Muslim crime rates claimed eg here.
That page only goes through 2013. When did large scale Muslim immigration start? The Wiki page on Immigration to Sweden says that in 2013 immigration reached its highest level ever, so it’s possible that the bulk of Muslim immigration as been over the last few years.
I’m neither pro- nor anti-immigration, but do follow the debate in Norway and Sweden. In both countries the muslim population is clustered in a few cities, so while looking at the national stats should reveal *something*, I think having some numbers for individual cities (Oslo in Norway and Malmö and Stockholm in Sweden) would help a lot.
When it comes to sexual assault, there’s some interesting data in a 2010 report by the Oslo police called Rape in the Global City. As far as I can tell it’s only available in English, but doing a search for “Figur 9” will take you to some pie charts showing which continents the suspects/indicted are from. “Midt-Østen” means middle east and the rest of the labels should be easy to understand for English speakers.
Lacking relevant context about the demographics of the city to interpret that link
In 2016 32.6% of the population in Oslo had another ethnic background than Norwegian (this number includes immigrants and Norwegian-born to immigrant parents).
Of these, 40.1% had a background from Asia or the Middle East, 17.1% an African background and 38.1% a European background.
You can get more detailed information here. The first link underneath “Landbakgrunn” on the left (Innvandrerbefolkningen etter landbakgrunn, kjønn og alder) means “Immigrant population by country, sex and age”.
As David Friedman suggests, there was a massive spike in immigration since 2013, given the 2015 European Migrant crisis.
A Mother Jones article with the very enticing title We Should Practice Truth In Statistics, Even When It Hurts states the following about Swedish crime:
Given the 2015 European Migrant crisis, immigration has gone up considerably after 2013.
Mother Jones published an article with the very enticing title We Should Practice Truth in Statistics Even When It Hurts in which it claims the following about crime in Sweden:
“On the other hand, preliminary figures show that crime against persons was up 7 percent in 2016, including a 13 percent increase in reported rapes and a 14 percent increase in child abuse.”
http://m.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/02/we-should-practice-truth-statistics-even-when-it-hurts
Immigration rates have definitely gone up since 2013 given the 2015 Migrant crisis.
Mother Jones published an article with the very enticing title We Should Practice Truth in Statistics Even When It Hurts (by Kevin Drum) in which the following claim is made about crime in Sweden:
(For whatever reason, I can’t include the link in my comment, because it makes the comment disappear.)
Wikipedia is a good source when the topic is something that isn’t politically contentious: nobody is going to spend time systematically biasing articles on families of RNA binding proteins. But it’s worse than useless for looking at any claim a large number of people are willing to lie about. I’m not just talking about PC: the Hinduvata stuff that pops up all over the place is a good example.
Beyond that, we have no reason whatsoever to trust Swedish government statistics unless they are against interest. European governments have consistently and brazenly covered up crimes by Muslims, as well as actively trying to hide the actual numbers of non-Europeans being imported. Why should anyone trust them?
(I’ll note that the linked article wasn’t very convincing either. A chart based on data from an article published in a language you can’t read isn’t evidence of anything other than chart-making ability. In the absence of trustworthy information, my evidentiary needle doesn’t move in either direction.)
I thought those charts were sketchy too. “Here’s a chart I made, here’s a link to the original, and PS the original is in a language you probably don’t speak” makes me dubious, and when it’s combined with stuff like links to a Daily Mail story about how one guy totally swears a cashier at a Tesco refused to ring up bacon…
Citation needed.
I think that ‘consistently’ is too strong a claim, but there have been cases where crimes were clearly covered up.
One example is Rotherham. Another is that in the German city of Kiel, the police were ordered to specifically reduce investigations of small criminality by refugees [link in German], like theft.
But what seems more common is simply that there is a strong anti-extreme right bias where people play down facts that support the anti-immigrants agenda, for example [link in English]:
Sweden Democrats are the anti-immigration party in Sweden.
The German press code [link in English] explicitly states that the ethnicity of criminals should not be reported unless relevant to the crime, to avoid feeding prejudice:
I would argue that this is seen as a cover-up by some people (and not by others).
I’m not sure if this actually supports your claim. It’s possible, for example, that they were previously investigating such things out of proportion with how often they were committed by refugees vs citizens.
Thankfully there are some British prosecutors willing to ignore “over-sensitivity to political correctness and fear of appearing racist” and prosecute Muslim sex traffickers.
@random832
That is not the argument by the leader of the police union, who said in the article that it saves a lot of administrative burden. A member of Merkel’s political party argues in the article that the police is no longer investigating crimes like this at all, due to a lack of resources.
So it very much seems like the directive is intended to prevent registration of crimes to cover up the low rate of solving them.
The article does say that the order to the police was directed at ‘refugees without a clear identity.’ I do know that in The Netherlands we currently have a problem with criminal gangs of mostly N-Africans [link in Dutch] who enter the refugee procedure, without any actual chance of getting refugee status, but who take advantage of the free room & board and supplement their allowances with crime.
The most generous explanation that I can come up with is that Kiel has the same issue (the Dutch article does say that most of these gangs come to The Netherlands from Germany) and doesn’t want the police to spend time on these gangs that will stop receiving benefits when their refugee request is turned down and who then most likely travel to another EU country to do the same thing there. However, even this fairly generous explanation involves hiding statistics of crime that is actually happening, with actual victims.
PS. The main victims of these gangs are (actual) refugees.
Sounds like Afzal is someone who, horror of horrors, *assimilated*
@rlms
Ehhh, the wiki page says that he was already made to leave, 4 years after he overturned the decision by the CPS not to prosecute these people. So you can just as easily claim that he is proof that the CPS is not willing to tolerate a prosecutor like that.
@Aapje
No it doesn’t. It says quotes a CPS spokesman as saying “Nazir Afzal is leaving the service as part of [an] on-going drive for efficiency” and that “there has been no impropriety on the part of Mr Afzal”. Perhaps they are lying, and are really the mouthpiece of a grand conspiracy to punish someone who tried to prosecute some sex traffickers several years previously. But that seems unlikely, and requires some evidence to back it up.
@rlms
Why did he get to leave and not another prosecutor? There must have been a reason why he was made to leave and it is conspicuously absent, which is usually an indication that it is an embarrassing reason.
Unless it substantially different for Britain, Afzal was still like a decade+ before retirement. How is it efficient to get rid of someone still near the top of their career arc? Why would a general redundancy target an OBE? Do most people in that profession have some degree of knighthood?
Maybe it’s different for Brits, but “leaving the service as part of [an] on-going drive for efficiency” screams “being pushed out for political reasons” to me.
Even if it is granted that he left for political reasons (in the sense of office politics), it seems vastly more likely that those reasons were to do with his alleged impropriety in texting a defendant in a case just before he left, rather than a prosecution that pretty much no-one seemed to disapprove of several years before.
@rlms
Very true. Wiki didn’t cover that part 🙂
Tinfoil hat right-wing explanation would be that the Swedish government has ordered the police to ignore crimes committed by Muslim immigrants, for the purposes of political correctness. Or to just mess with the statistics somehow.
Myself, I trust neither official statistics reported by police, nor most of the theories of those who are sure they know in exactly which way those statistics are biased. I would prefer to see some statistics collected by sources independent of the police, ideally from more than one such source so the various sources and methods can be compared.
Comments from a Swedish friend of mine suggest that this is true.
Swedish people, like all people, have political allegiances and will say whatever fits their world-view/tribal allegiance.
No, actually the Swedes have transcended political tribalism and only speak objective truth.
I know I was snarky, but there is a mental bias where we often see people from other countries as a homogeneous unit. Perhaps because we don’t have the mental space to know the political conflicts of every country.
Imagine asking one American whether the police treat black people unfairly and taking their answer as gospel.
Yes, I agree with you. I was being aimlessly snarky.
From noted tinfoil-hate right-wing hate site The Guardian:
Well-intentioned attempts by authorities across Europe to avoid giving ammunition to xenophobes have backfired terribly and given far more ammunition to the xenophobes than would have been the case otherwise. Europe needs immigrants – because it appears they don’t want to have children at or above replacement rates themselves – but it has not been handled well, by and large. The incompetence by various levels of government in various European countries has given a great boost to the far right, which will prevent the kinds of changes that would be needed to successfully select and bring in immigrants and integrate them.
> Europe needs immigrants – because it appears they don’t want to have children at or above replacement rates themselves
Hmm, let’s stop burying the lede. What could be done to encourage them to have more children?
Figure out some way to make children more of a joy than a burden. I know all parents claim this is already true, but… revealed preferences.
State-sponsored religion. I don’t think anyone believes relations between Protestants and Catholics are precarious enough that there’s any serious chance of another Thirty Years’ War, so there’s no real reason to keep things like laicite around.
Experiment feverishly with incentives until you find some that work. This is not an impossible problem: Europe has had high birth rates before, and can again.
In the meantime, slow the problem down with limited immigration selective for ability to contribute to and assimilate into society. I don’t see why the far right would be an impediment to this, as it’s exactly what the far right wants.
Or, for a creative solution, don’t bother about the birth rate, instead decrease the death rate dramatically by curing aging.
Or, for a creative, but less uplifting, solution, bite the bullet: let the population decline. Developed countries had lower populations in the past, why not again? It would be disruptive, e.g. no more welfare states, but less disastrous than open borders. The disruption would be spread out over the course of many decades, which allows time for adaptation.
Financual incentives have bern tried with some success in France.
Space Viking: You seem to think that the only options are completely open borders, and very little immigration and population decline. And option in between is to have some immigration, enough to have a modest population growth and good economy. This is what most people advocate, although they are not the noisiest.
The Nybbler: I’m a parent and I can say that children are both a joy and a burden. I think the joy is larger, but because it has diminishing return in the number of children I am not planning to have more than two. That’s not even replacement level. Others will stick to one, or prefer none, while few want 3+.
As for what society can do to increase birth numbers, I believe in things like subsidized child care, parental leave and making sure mothers can resume their career between/after having children. Japan tried to shame married working women to make them stay home and have more babies, and that backfired massively.
Do away with, or at least drastically cut back on, the welfare state for elderly people. Back in the old days (and indeed today in large parts of the world) a large motivation for having children was to have someone who’d look after you when you got old.
Financial incentives means government gives you money to have kids, right?
This would, effectively, be a redistribution scheme from the childless to the child-having. Given the increasing popularity of not having children, it seems like this would be difficult to sell in any quasi-democratic system. You’d have to convince the childless that, even though they’ve clearly decided having children isn’t good for them, that it’s super important that other people do have children – so important that they need to pay them to do so.
The standard argument seems to be “well we can’t support the welfare state you love so much without a bunch of young workers” which I think runs some difficulties. For one thing, not having children is supposed to result in one being significantly richer, at least in their youth. Convincing a DINK professional couple making a combined income over 200k in their 30s that one day they will need all these lower class children to support their retirement seems like a tough sell. And politics in general has shown an astounding bias towards the short-term – meaning that convincing them we have to have taxes NOW to pay for your retirement LATER is abnormal. Why not just wait until we’re old and then raise taxes on the young people then – in the same proud tradition of our parents and grandparents!
Of course, ultimately, “we need to tax the childless to pay for the child-having so that they can produce young people who will be taxed to pay for old people” seems like a largely pointless circle that in the end does little good to anybody but probably enriches a lot of bureaucrats in the administration of all of this along the way.
“What DINKs want” is even lower in importance than who can use what bathrooms. If anti-natalists ever become a substantial voting bloc, we are lost.
Luckily they tend to self-select toward not persisting their selfish destructive attitudes so we can still have things like property taxes of the childless going toward public schools.
If the problem of low birth rates is as significant as people claim it is, they almost have to be a significant voting bloc, don’t they?
AFAIK, we are already too late for this anyway, given the demographic bulge that is moving into retirement soon. If we start increasing birth rates now, we’ll just increase the problems, as we’ll both have lots of non-working old people and lots of non-working young people. It simply takes too long for us to get a return on investment for a new baby (they only start earning back all the investments after 25 years or so and then it still takes a long time for those investments to be recouped). By the time we really start to benefit, the bulge will have mostly disappeared.
Perhaps, unfortunately. A less gloomy hypothesis would be that more people are having only 1 kid (or 2, still below replacement rate) due to various economic and social factors.
Not sure which is correct, but I hope for the future’s sake it’s the latter.
Again, you rarely get much outcry over non-parents’ taxes funding public schools (specifically non-parents, general push toward privatization doesn’t count), so there doesn’t seem to be much organized anti-natalist lobbying going on.
Not if they don’t identify as anti-natalists, or at least don’t identify strongly enough for it to affect their vote.
@Thirteenth Letter:
What attempts have succeeded in encouraging people to have children, and what attempts would be politically palatable in modern NW Europe? Government attempts to raise the birth rate by incentives don’t seem to work, while coercion is probably off the table.
Right now, it appears that when people (especially women) are given the option of controlling how many children they have, they prefer to have one or two, if any. The societies that have the highest birth rates are developing world (limited availability of birth control, subsistence agriculture creates an incentive to have more kids, high infant mortality creates an incentive to have more so more survive, often more limited rights and options for large parts of the population and women especially) and especially developing world Muslim (consider the fertility per woman sorted by the kind of education girls get in Nigeria) nations – and I emphasize “developing world”, as Turkey is a tad below replacement rate, Iran is below replacement rate, etc. Given that the European far-right’s rallying cry is “we don’t want Muslims from developing nations!” is “be more like developing-world Muslim nations” the solution? I don’t see how you could raise the birth rate in the developed world without smashing a lot of the things that make the developed world nice to live in, like women’s rights.
@Space Viking:
The problem isn’t a declining population, the problem is the age makeup of society. A decreasing number of working-age adults and an increasing number of seniors is bad news.
One could argue that expansion of parental, particularly mothers’, privileges would also work. Things like access to childcare and maternal leave policies that don’t make having multiple kids an economic blow or a career death sentence.
Alternatively, a social attitude shift that makes having a stay-at-home dad more common. Or something like a UBI or encouraging remote working for those who want to spend more time with their kids but can’t afford it. I don’t have the time now to dig up supporting evidence for this hypothesis, but I suspect declining fertility has more to do with the Two Income Trap than expansion of women’s rights. I would be honestly interested in counterpoints to this.
We can have a societal attitude of “wouldn’t it be nice to have a big family?” without rolling back women’s rights. There are potential solutions that actually roll forward with it. (Unless of course you’re the sort of anti-natalist crazyperson who believes that the mere fact that women are the ones who get pregnant means having children at all is oppression by the Patriarchy.)
Right now we just have a societal attitude of “wouldn’t it be nice to have more time to sacrifice on the altar of the Economy?”
Children are very expensive. Robots are less expensive. Based on America, assimilating immigrants is possible under certain circumstances and cheaper than either.
On the global level, I’m very skeptical that we need more people. If most of humanities problems can be solved in parallel then yes, more people are needed. But it seems to me that many challenges (e.g. most tech progress) are not so parallelizable.
@dndrsn: would the age makeup of society be a smaller problem if people worked later into their lives?
You mean “were capable of working later into their lives?”
I am under the tentative impression that lifespan has increased more than healthspan.
However, even if people are capable of working later, there also need to be political/social changes such that people accept working later without it feeling like a decrease in quality of life not to retire at the age of previous cohorts (a lot of people don’t like working).
The point of the circle is the production of the young people.
Personally I don’t have a problem with either human extinction through lack of fecundity or idiocracy leading to the collapse of civilization; after all, neither I nor my descendants will be around long enough to worry about it. Theocracy is a bit more worrying; Europe may fall within my lifetime, but probably the US won’t.
But, if you ARE worried about those things, having your intelligent and non-theocratic population produce more kids seems pretty important.
@Gobbobobble
In my observations of professional class thirty-somethings in the NYC area, three children seems to be a status peak. Two is fine, four is a bit much, five plus eccentric, and one sort-of pitiable.
A married couple that doesn’t want children may well find themselves drifting socially.
What could be done to encourage them to have more children?
You want the birth rate among the educated/smarter/middle class to go up? Ban contraception and abortion. See how that flies, in the five minutes between you announcing it and being dragged to the lamp post and strung up by the outraged masses of men and women.
Instead, we’ve got stories like this – I’m not entirely sure I believe all that is being said, but if it’s true, congratulations USA – if you’ve got the money, we’ll provide the services! a motto your fertility clinics live by! Truly no barrier to what you can buy if you wish, and all those who might raise questions are heartless monsters wanting to deprive a potential mother of the joy of having her very own baby, and probably religious zealots to boot!
AFAIK, we are already too late for this anyway, given the demographic bulge that is moving into retirement soon. If we start increasing birth rates now, we’ll just increase the problems, as we’ll both have lots of non-working old people and lots of non-working young people.
Increased immigration is of course the best answer here, since immigrants tend to be of productive ages.
True, but they probably won’t want to leave again when their productive years are over. Then you have the choice of either kicking them out anyway (which would be politically impossible for pretty much any western government) or of bringing over even more immigrants and essentially turning your social security system into a giant pyramid scheme.
Or a shift that makes being a stay-at-home mother higher status.
One response is that nowadays families need two incomes, but I’m dubious. Real incomes haven’t risen much in recent decades, but they are higher than they were fifty years ago, when one income families were much more common.
So far as possible public policies, suppose we had a system of education vouchers, set at the cost of public schooling and available for home schooling as well as private schools. A mother home schooling three children, possibly in cooperation with one or two others, would be getting about thirty thousand dollars a year to help replace the income she wasn’t earning.
@tmk
I also oppose mass immigration short of open borders. See my comments on this SSC post for why, I don’t have time to rehash it here.
@Gobbobobble:
For one thing, I doubt there is much overlap between “we must have more maternal leave and make stay-at-home fathers more acceptable” and “we must raise the birthrate so we don’t need immigrants”.
For another, let’s assume that generous parental leave policies become the norm, and social norms change to the point that male-female couples split all the childcare 50/50 as the default. There will still be a career advantage to not having children, it will just be more evenly distributed.
Also, I don’t see how you can divide (professional-class) women working from women’s rights – wanting to pursue careers was a big part of early second-wave feminism, was it not?
@hoghoghoghoghog:
This is more feasible with some jobs than others.
@dndnrsn: I for one am here to talk about how to raise birth rates while quietly ignoring the “so we don’t need immigrants” subtext. Sometimes blinders are necessary to stay sane in this comment section.
I think currently men gain a career advantage when they have children. Maybe because it signals stability, or because the med who decide who gets promoted often have children themselves and identify with other fathers. That effect may persist even if you lose 6 months of work for parental leave.
@DavidFriedman: is it possible to raise the status of stay-at-home mothers without lowering that of working mothers? If not, they may choose to be working non-mothers instead.
@DavidFreidman
Yes, that too, of course. I was just coming at it from the angle of “women want to work”. That gets in the way of having kids when it is expected that a couple either drops $$ on childcare or mom drops out of the workforce for a while (because a stay-at-home dad is much lower status). So I was hoping that a package deal of better childcare options and less stigma on dads taking a turn dropping work would satisfy that angle.
Or a UBI to dampen the drive for “women want to work” which I tend to see as a proxy for “women want to be self-sufficient”. I completely agree on the two-income front.
@dndnrsn
Overlap in current support, or overlap in effectiveness? Making it easier to have kids should naturally lead to people who want more kids to have more.
True, but I would think the advantage will be smaller if people have better access to childcare. And I’m theorizing that if it became the norm for everyone to be eligible for extended child-rearing sabbaticals, they’d be more expected and less damaging to one’s career.
I’m not trying to? See my response to Friedman.
What I’m arguing against is the notion that you have to roll back women’s rights to re-raise birth rates by shotgunning some alternative ideas. I don’t claim to have a fully-baked solution, I’m just some jackass on the internet trying to get people to be less defeatist. (Except the anti-natalists, they can feel doomed all they like)
Hasn’t Norway done all the things with parental leave and subsidized child care and encouraging stay-at-home dads? That, at least, doesn’t seem to work.
Nothing works Nybbler. There’s no liberal acceptable method to increase childbirth rates. We probably need some sort of technical solution. Or immigration.
@The Nybbler
Worrying about the human race dying out seems a bit premature, since humanity is growing at a rather rapid pace.
@Chalid
That is probably inevitable for healthcare. Britain is already doing that, quite a bit.
However, the current debate in my country is merely about refugees, not about expats. In any case, I’d be a lot happier with Indian or Chinese migrants than people from certain other countries, even if they stay permanently.
But I do think that my country is overpopulated already and could use a slow shrinking of the population.
@Gobbobobble
The women in my country tend to work half jobs, but the fertility rate is still shite. A lot of books get read though and whatever else women in my country do with their spare time.
Actually, they seem to invest gazillions of hours in the few kids they do have, rather than kick those kids into the street to play, like my parents did.
@tmk
But it’s not just parental leave. Someone without kids, or someone who has kids but offloads all the work of caring for them onto someone else and is OK with not seeing their kids much, is far more able to work late, get called into the office on the weekend, etc. The career advantage of men with children assumes that other people (usually, their wives, or, domestic servants of whatever sort) are taking care of those kids.
@Gobbobobble:
Overlap in support. The people who are saying “keep foreigners out” are rarely the strongest proponents of women’s rights.
There will still be an advantage for people who don’t have children, though.
I suppose I misread your comment regarding the two-income trap.
So, I’m not proposing rolling back women’s rights, because I think that would be both morally unacceptable and politically unfeasible. However, attempts to raise birth rates through incentives and making child-rearing easier seem to have failed – the countries with the most generous parental leave, and so on, still have below-replacement birth rates, sometimes dramatically so, and that’s even when you include first and maybe second generation immigrants from elsewhere who are having more kids than the norm (and the later generations will probably have 1.6 or whatever children per woman too). Immigration is the only option that is both acceptable and feasible.
@Nybbler
Could be, I don’t know enough about what exactly Scandinavia has tried. That would suck, if so.
Might require something more, I guess. If having >2 kids becomes entrenched in society as being irresponsible/a weird anomaly, then policies are needed to increase desire as well as ability?
Again, I’m not an expert, just some jackass on the internet looking for alternatives to “I guess we’re just doomed to slowly genocide ourselves (once enough developing countries actually develop so that there’s not enough high-birthrate areas to import people from)”.
@Gobbobobble
“A stay-at-home dad is much lower status. So I was hoping that a package deal of better childcare options and less stigma on dads taking a turn dropping work would satisfy that angle.”
I admit I’m mostly speaking from anecdotal evidence (we’re dealing with an area hard to quantify), but it seems to me that the problem is less “stigma” than female attraction, and the loss thereof. “Stay-at-home dad, working mom” looks like a recipe for a sexless marriage. See, for example, Scientific American article “Men Who Do More Housework Have Less Sex“. Any stigma looks to be a downstream effect of this (rather than a cause). And as discussed in the “Nice Guy” thread, people will be attracted to what they’re attracted to. If working women aren’t as attracted to “househusbands”, then that’s just the way it is. Unless you want to go (back) to separating marital sex from attraction, or else try to massively raise male status versus female status in an attempt to counter this, you’re pretty much just forced to accept it and plan accordingly.
““women want to work” which I tend to see as a proxy for “women want to be self-sufficient”.”
How do you come by this view, because I disagree. It seems more like it’s about status (with the added complication of the apex fallacy and prominence bias) more than self-sufficiency.
“Making it easier to have kids should naturally lead to people who want more kids to have more.”
Perhaps, but most the evidence I’ve seen shows that the upward effects on TFR are small at best. It’s far easier to get people to have less kids than to get them to have more, and as seen in places like Singapore and China, once people get used to lower birth rates and smaller families, that “new normal” does not rebound upward when the downward pressures are eased.
“What I’m arguing against is the notion that you have to roll back women’s rights to re-raise birth rates”
Except the evidence I’ve seen on this topic pretty much supports exactly that “notion”. Low birth rates and modernity seem to pretty much go together.
“I’m just some jackass on the internet trying to get people to be less defeatist.”
Why? What’s wrong with “defeatism”? Doesn’t prudence call one to “know when to fold ’em” and recognize when the battle is lost? At some point, doesn’t “never give up, never surrender, fight to the last man every doomed battle” become wasteful and foolish? And then, doesn’t “trying to get people to be less defeatist” eventually, at some point, become “peddling false hope”?
Population growth in the Third World doesn’t help, though; if the First World dies off, they’re going to die off too. Not destruction of the species, just collapse of civilization.
Yeah, that goes back to “making kids less of a burden”. We (as a population) may be in a cycle where as we have fewer kids they become more valuable to us, which causes them to become more of a burden.
tmk, I remember seeing some stuff from the fifties about employers preferring married men because married men wouldn’t feel as free to leave a job. I don’t know whether any of that is still in play.
If you assume that status is a zero sum game within genders, it could raise the status of stay-at-home mothers, leave the status of working mothers unaffected, and lower the status of non-mothers.
Alternatively, it could raise the status of stay-at-home mothers, lower the status of fathers and childless men. Or …
If one simply raises the status of being a mother, that should increase the number of children.
But I’m not sure status really is a zero sum game, for reasons I discussed in a very old blog post.
@The Nybbler
It will take very, very long for the West to die out at 1.6 replacement rate, especially if you assume that acceptance of migrants will increase if the population starts shrinking.
(Comment had html error and looks to have gotten eaten by attempts to correct; trying again.)
@Gobbobobble
“A stay-at-home dad is much lower status. So I was hoping that a package deal of better childcare options and less stigma on dads taking a turn dropping work would satisfy that angle.”
I admit I’m mostly speaking from anecdotal evidence (we’re dealing with an area hard to quantify), but it seems to me that the problem is less “stigma” than female attraction, and the loss thereof. “Stay-at-home dad, working mom” looks like a recipe for a sexless marriage. See, for example, Scientific American article “Men Who Do More Housework Have Less Sex“. Any stigma looks to be a downstream effect of this (rather than a cause). And as discussed in the “Nice Guy” thread, people will be attracted to what they’re attracted to. If working women aren’t as attracted to “househusbands”, then that’s just the way it is. Unless you want to go (back) to separating marital sex from attraction, or else try to massively raise male status versus female status in an attempt to counter this, you’re pretty much just forced to accept it and plan accordingly.
““women want to work” which I tend to see as a proxy for “women want to be self-sufficient”.”
How do you come by this view, because I disagree. It seems more like it’s about status (with the added complication of the apex fallacy and prominence bias) more than self-sufficiency.
“Making it easier to have kids should naturally lead to people who want more kids to have more.”
Perhaps, but most the evidence I’ve seen shows that the upward effects on TFR are small at best. It’s far easier to get people to have less kids than to get them to have more, and as seen in places like Singapore and China, once people get used to lower birth rates and smaller families, that “new normal” does not rebound upward when the downward pressures are eased.
“What I’m arguing against is the notion that you have to roll back women’s rights to re-raise birth rates”
Except the evidence I’ve seen on this topic pretty much supports exactly that “notion”. Low birth rates and modernity seem to pretty much go together.
“I’m just some jackass on the internet trying to get people to be less defeatist.”
Why? What’s wrong with “defeatism”? Doesn’t prudence call one to “know when to fold ’em” and recognize when the battle is lost? At some point, doesn’t “never give up, never surrender, fight to the last man every doomed battle” become wasteful and foolish? And then, doesn’t “trying to get people to be less defeatist” eventually, at some point, become “peddling false hope”?
@axiomsofdominion
“Nothing works Nybbler. There’s no liberal acceptable method to increase childbirth rates.”
Yes, this. Though, what might “some sort of technical solution” look like? (I also note that you don’t seem to consider ditching the “liberal acceptable” part to be a workable solution.)
Every time I see something here about how the solution to some problem is that we raise or lower this or that group’s status it makes me think that I am witnessing a conversation about how wet streets cause rain. I get a similar sense when I see arguments that people should adopt religion or a particular religion for instrumental reasons. To put it mildly, this is not a good approach to proselytizing for the overwhelming major of people.
@Kevin C.
When discussing a huge aggregate of persons it is almost always a logical error to attribute a singular motivation to the majority of them.
Unless you’re going to posit that self-status (basically self-referential esteem, not comparative esteem) is a thing, and thus basically redefine “status” as a term which has meaning prior to a social context, it is a mistake to say that a particular thing is “more about status” when it is something that the non-socially inclined are inclined to do.
Resource gathering (the primary compensation of jobs in our culture) has immediate effects on one’s ability to survive. Survival* is a basal** instinct which is non-derivative from the also basal social instinct. Jobs fulfill the need of the survival instinct. It is thus, a priori, absurd to assume that social status (a derivative of the basic social instinct) has more aggregate effect on people’s desire for work.
* – As is mate-finding, or more generally pair-bonding or intimacy seeking, which is another basal instinct also served by having a job which both makes one more interesting to others, more able to relate with others, and usually exposes oneself to others.
** – There are instincts which are more complex interactions of the basal instincts, but they shouldn’t be confused for basal instincts themselves.
@anonymousskimmer
So, if I’m reading you correctly, you came by your view by a mix of abstract theorizing and misguided “projection”, both with significant errors made.
First, you underestimate the strength of the need/drive in social apes for social contact and attention from others (e.g. the baby chimp experiments with the “fake mothers” that provide “being held” vs. milk; folks like Socrates choosing death over exile, and so on), and overestimating the degree to which “having a job” is connected to the “survival instinct” (a brandished pink slip does not make you fear for your life like a brandished gun does).
“another basal instinct also served by having a job”
Here’s the second error. The mate-finding instinct is served by having a job, the more remunerative the better, for men. A woman’s earning ability has no effect on how attractive she is to men, and thus no effect on “mate-finding” ability. You’re projecting the strategies and attraction fact of one sex onto the other.
Third, you miss how the degree to which “survival” depends on (economic) “self-sufficiency” itself varies with sex. The idea or attitude that “he who does not work shall not eat”, “I must be able to support myself completely without depending on anyone or else I will literally starve to death” is pretty much a male one. Look across human history and you can see that women have been required to be self-sufficient far more rarely than men, and have always been able to more readily find others to support them (due at least in great part to the whole “male disposability”/”people care more about women’s tears than men’s lives”/”sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive” factors that commenters like DrBeat have complained about repeatedly on this blog). If nothing else, they have more readily at their disposal the underlying exchange behind “the world’s oldest profession”. Given support where needed by parents, a husband, a “sugar daddy”, grown children, the welfare state, subsidized make-work, or charity (religious or otherwise), all the way back to prehistory (and plenty of female mammals trade sex for food, after all). See Bateman and Trivers’s works on the evolution of mating strategies. And look at the male vs female survival and reproductive success differentials across human histories. Or even in the present day, the “pay gap” versus the (far less mentioned) “spending gap”, which indicates the existence of a large scale net flow of wealth in the aggregate from men to women.
So the “joblessness=death” equation simply isn’t nearly the factor for women that it is for men. So why then the (very recent) drive to “career woman” vs. SAHM? First, the increased stigmatization of the latter. To quote French feminist Simone de Beauvoir (writing in 1975):
And in 1949:
One can find similar statements by plenty of other infuential folks. And along with the above, comes the counterpoint of treating job market success as the only success that matters, and concomittent pressure, that one is “settling”, “letting the sisterhood down”, or whatever for failing to “chase the brass ring” and “trying to have it all”.
Second, note that the phrase is “career woman”, not “employed woman”. It’s less commonly about “bringing home the bacon” (and when it is, the “two-income trap” is usually involved) at any old bit of remunerative drudgery than it is about “a fulfilling career” and such. This is where the apex fallacy comes in. One sees the promenant examples of the “upper” men working at careers they enjoy and that pay well, and desires similar (often aided by the “exclusivity factor”: telling a person they can’t have something usually makes them want it more), ignoring the far more common reality of the greater portion of men for whom it’s just a job needed to stay fed, clothed and housed without the stigma of being a man dependent on others. (See also the gendered nature of “basement dweller”, “living with his parents”, “video-game-playing manchild”, and so on.)
Kevin C., I’ve seen women say that their mothers told them to have jobs/a career specificially so as not to be financially dependent on a man.
I don’t know whether that’s the most common reason for women to work while married– I suspect just having more money coming into the household is more common– but it’s in play.
I’ve seen a claim that humans are the only species where at least some of the time males control females’ access to food. Offhand, I can’t think of any other species.
In response to your 12:21 comment:
I saw a man resent/envy women for “sitting on the bank”– that is, having prostitution as an alternative to starvation.
For a lot of women, this isn’t a *good* alternative, and many are disqualified by age. In any case, it’s still men choosing the terms on which women get to survive.
Yes, some men, and some women. And, of course, there are also women who want prostiution to be illegal, so gender vs. gender doesn’t cover the situation.
And it’s arguably a better deal to have prostitution as an alternative than to not have it, when it is an alternative rather than slavery.
For that matter, men do quite a bit of treating men as disposable. Do men who don’t like the situation address the male vs. male part of what’s going on?
@Nancy Lebovitz
“I’ve seen women say that their mothers told them to have jobs/a career specificially so as not to be financially dependent on a man.”
Yes, but first, how representative is this, versus maternal advice about “finding and ‘locking down’ a man of means who can support her in the style to which she is accustomed”, or going to college for “the MRS degree” and such? Secondly, how much is this a recent thing? Examine for contrast pretty much any work from the Regency Era that touches on this issue.
“I don’t know whether that’s the most common reason for women to work while married– I suspect just having more money coming into the household is more common”
That was the motivating factor for my mother to start working in her late forties (for the first time in her adult life), so my experience supports the latter; and for those couples I know where “more money” isn’t the factor, it’s then very much a matter of “status requirements and norms of our social class” and “enjoying the work”.
To add further on the “nothing works”* end on birth rates, there’s an interesting argument made by “Shylock Holmes” in a recent post, “The Birth Control Basilisk“.
He enumerates three instincts:
1. a “very strong, uncomplicated and concrete desire” for sex,
2. a “a somewhat strong, but quite complicated, abstract and malleable” desire for children “at some point in time”, and
3. a “very strong, uncomplicated desire to love and care for the children they have.”
The argument, then, is that the invention of modern birth control has changed our world from one where reproduction is driven primarily by #1 and #3:
*except banning contraception/abortion and rolling back the past century+ of “women’s rights”, or similar unacceptably illiberal measures.
@ Kevin C.
I am not a social ape. Not the way you think of it.
I am speaking from my own, personal point of view.
I have researched this issue, and have discussed with others who have researched this issue for years.
I have also observed people and introspected, and talked to others who have observed people and introspected.
Just because *you* haven’t meant many married women who don’t work primarily for status reasons (or so you think) doesn’t mean bunk. Scott Alexander knows zero creationists, after all.
Whatever the fuck you want to say about what I have done, I am done reading you. I stopped reading at the point I quoted, and I’ll avoid reading you from now on, to the extent I can.
@ axiomsofdominion
There’s no liberal acceptable method to increase childbirth rates.
It’s not liberals who complain about welfare moms.
I’m pretty confident that the MRS degree is a thing of the past in the West.
I am willing to believe they don’t report on some particular lurid incidents, but are you really saying that they’re faking their whole national crime rate statistics just in case somebody tries to correlate them with immigrant numbers?
AIUI, the faking is taking place at lower levels. If the Mayor chews you out for reporting too many Muslim crimes, you stop reporting them. The same happens all over the country, and the national statistics are skewed without any deliberate action at a national level.
I recall some anecdotes coming out of Germany about how women who went to the police with sexual assault allegations against Muslim immigrant men were “encouraged” not to file a formal report and told to cover up more and not walk alone at night. It caused something of a scandal, as I recall.
There’s definite political pressure from authorities in Europe at the moment to downplay incidents of Muslim criminality; it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if that pressure was translating to official reporting statistics. There doesn’t need to be a nationwide High Directive 732 of “thou shalt not report Muslim crimes” in order for unspoken political pressure to encourage police departments in areas with high concentrations of Muslims not to “cause problems” by fueling the fire their political bosses clearly want to put out. But that is of course not evidence of anything, just suspicion.
I don’t think you’re likely to find clear-cut evidence of this unless you can get testimony under oath from people inside the Swedish police who are willing to lose their jobs over it. Do you?
Recordings of victims being pressured to not file complaints would establish it at the lowest level.
Well, you’d have to also prove it’s correlated to the race of the alleged attacker.
It’s somebody’s law – don’t remember who – that “when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure.” David Simon wrote a fairly convincing article about police ignoring crimes in Baltimore (http://davidsimon.com/omalley-bad-math/) for the purpose of keeping statistics down for the purpose of looking good. It’s no surprise that this would be happening elsewhere – indeed, you’d expect it to happen inevitably (Moloch strikes again) anywhere the budget depends on the official crime rate and the official rate isn’t going down fast enough, or, worse, is going up.
Goodhart’s Law, I think
On the other hand, the police also have an incentive to play up the crime rate to lobby for more funding.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/sweden-refugee-centre-attacked-rape-disabled-woman-gotland-claims-a7355186.html
In Sweden, if you’re in a wheelchair, and you get gang-raped by six refugees, it doesn’t count as rape if you don’t “fight enough”.
Just one story, but it does make me wonder how many of these incidents are being “disappeared”.
Noone else clicked the link I guess, so it falls to me to point out it doesn’t remotely support your view that that ‘doesn’t count as rape’.
A more reasonable assumption is that when the police let anyone go, it is because they couldn’t prove they did it. There is nothing in the story as reported that suggests it is considered ‘not a crime’, or omitted from statistics.
Also, what’s a single-victim crime of any kind in a foreign country doing being reported in UK newspapers anyway?
If you click the link, you’ll see that there were public protests following the suspects being released, one of which involved around 100 people and apparently featured stones being thrown at the town’s refugee center, and Swedish authorities were sufficiently concerned by all this to send extra police to the town. That seems a little more newsworthy than your run-of-the-mill single-victim crime.
Coincidentally, a couple of weeks ago there was a shitstorm in Sweden when police officer Peter Springare from Örebro wrote on FB about how when they investigate crimes, turns out almost all suspects today have names like Muhammed or Ali, which is very different than decades ago, and there’s significant pressure from upwards to downplay it. Complaining about it too loudly will get you fired or worse. (Springare says he does not care and is making a public statement because he is going to retire soon anyway. FB post was investigated for hate speech, but the charges were dropped)
It’s kinda disgraceful that only English-language source about this that I can find and is not Infowars or Breitbart, is …
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/02/20/trump-may-have-been-unclear-but-sweden-experiencing-migrant-crime-wave.html
Swedish major newspapers and the FB post (run through Google Translate or something):
http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/O547V/utredning-om-hets-mot-folkgrupp-efter-peter-springares-facebook-inlagg
https://www.svd.se/inget-atal-mot-polischef-efter-facebookinlagg/om/polisens-kris
https://www.facebook.com/peter.springare/posts/10208300682343230?_fb_noscript=1
Why is Breitbart considered either a relatively unreliable and/or far-right source? This is an honest question. I’ve always avoided Breitbart because I got the impression it was a far-right propaganda machine. However, I have just finished reading Andrew Breitbart’s “Righteous Indignation”, and my impression of the author is that he’s right-libertarian (who used to be a liberal), and generally an honest, intelligent and good guy.
Is today’s Breitbart very different from the Breitbart from Andrew’s days?
Or is Andrew full of it? I’d be very curious to read some balanced & rational responses to Andrew’s book, if anyone has any links or recommendations.
“Is today’s Breitbart very different from the Breitbart from Andrew’s days?”
Short answer is yes.
To me Breitbart does not seem very “alt-right” in the “white nationalist neo-Nazi” sense, but they are definitely clickbaity and unabashedly very right-wing biased. I’d certainly avoid them as serious news, and double check anything you find there, although they might occasionally signal boost something you wouldn’t otherwise look into.
I believe the word to describe the system you are proposing is “colonialism.” We had it. It worked pretty well but everyone hated it anyway.
Would you like to be black in Belgian Congo?
I’d rather be in the Belgian Congo than in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, sure.
Even considering the sharp population decline during the Congo Free State period?
I don’t know enough about the history of that specific location to speculate.
Generally speaking, I am very confident that I would rather live in “Africa during the period of European colonialism” than Africa in any other period of time.
@Matt M,
The Congo Free State was to colonialism what the Khmer Rouge were to communism. A ridiculously high proportion of Congolese dead, baskets of human hands collected in lieu of taxes, cannibal tribesmen preferentially recruited as secret police, murdered missionaries, etc.
The modern Congo is an abattoir, and Belgian colonial rule in the 20th century wasn’t particularly great for natives. But both of them look good compared to the Free State.
@Matt M:
Careful now.
Because the implication is that all the people who actually did not want the Europeans there/in power were just mistaken.
Yep. It sure is, isn’t it?
Yes, Ian Smith didn’t seem to like British colonial rule.
This is a very strong mischaracterization. He loved British rule. He hated that they decided to stop ruling. Casting Smith as part of “the people who wanted the Europeans to get out” strikes me as pretty dishonest.
@Matt M:
I am only pointing out that the argument “if they only understood how good our policies are for them they would be on our side” doesn’t usually merit a favorable mention from people on the right around here.
It’s more complex than that.
Nothing says “freedom” quite like having your child’s hand chopped off because you didn’t meet your work quota.
Declaring unilateral independence from British rule doesn’t sound like something you’d do if you loved it.
I mean, you love it, but you love being able to live and not have everyone who looks like you driven from the land in a frenzy of rape and murder a little bit more. There are priorities.
Edit: It seems abundantly clear that the Rhodesians quite clearly would have preferred dominion status within the Commonwealth to UDI – but the British refused to grant them that after repeated promises to do so. They would have rather been ruled by England than by themselves, but that isn’t the choice they were given – the choice they were given was between themselves and Mugabe.
Ah, I wasn’t aware of Ian Smith’s supernatural prescience. Given that Ian Smith decided to declare independence after gazing into his crystal ball and seeing the horrors of the Mugabe regime, I concur wholeheartedly.
Nah, he just gazed to the north to examine what happened in the Belgian Congo when they left.
The idea that he somehow just got lucky, that he had no idea how bad Mugabe would be, is asinine.
No, assuming you mean the early period under Leopold.
Would you rather be in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge or in Somaliland in 1955?
If the answer is Somaliland, as it probably should be, can we conclude that you prefer anarchy to government?
Or in other words, you picked the single worst example of modern colonialism and used it as if it was the norm.
If your reference was to the Belgian Congo a little before independence, then my response is not appropriate and the answer is that I would probably prefer being a black in the Congo then to being a black in the Congo now.
@DavidFriedman: Yes, I picked the worst example of colonialism I could think of as a counterexample to the idea that colonialism “worked pretty well” and people hated it for silly reasons.
There seems to be an idea that life under colonialism was pretty good in all practical ways, and people only criticize it based on things at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy like self-determination, freedom and equality.
You can or course argue that colonialism was good on average. Is that what you mean?
It was significantly better than any of the available alternatives.
Leopold’s Belgian Congo was better than any of the available alternatives? I find that very hard to believe. For one thing, British colonial administrators didn’t usually decorate their houses with the severed heads of native slaves.
Once again, I am speaking in generalities. My claim is not that EVERY instance of colonialism is better than EVERY instance of not having it.
I don’t know anything about immigrants, but the FBI collects statistics on ethnicity of perpetrator and victim for homicides in the US. tl;dr is that the black offender, white victim case is more common than the white offender, black victim case, though large majorities of crime are intra-ethnic and whites commit somewhat more total offenses (as we’d expect them to given their much larger population). This probably has something to do with the fact that most black crime happens in dense, ethnically mixed urban areas, so I’d expect the same to be true for those immigrant groups that end up with higher crime rates, since they usually settle in the same kinds of places.
There is of course the problem that NAM crime (or even NAM immigration for that matter) creates spillover effects not related to violent crime victimization itself. Property crime, neighborhoods get worse, no-go zones, parallel societies, decline in social trust, decline in trust between citizens and the state, decline in the perception that the state has authority over everything it’s supposed to have authority over.
Sure, but eventually you run into the problem of leftists deciding nations have no core ethnicity or culture, that everywhere is a Nation of Immigrants, and soon the temporary workers aren’t temporary anymore.
Parallel societies don’t stay parallel forever. Unless you’re willing to abdicate the rule of law to the huddled masses and allow them to set whatever rules they want for themselves in the territories they’ve been allotted, the kind of law that you’re comfortable with and the kind of law that they’re comfortable with will eventually come into conflict, and then those huddled territories will essentially serve as insurgent launch pads.
Perhaps, but to a substantially lesser degree. The feeling of alienation that might come from living in a neighborhood that has become more Chinese over the years is one thing, but trust within a society is bound to take a much bigger hit when an NAM neighborhood is linked to repeated and premeditated acts of violence against the native population (and all other groups, for that matter), the state claims it cannot do anything about it, and the state’s apologists tell everyone they are foolish to feel this is not a normal state of affairs.
If these countries really are in such desperate need of an increased population and there’s no other way to accomplish that goal, how does importing a zillion people and then stuffing them into a ghetto where they never interact with anyone help? A large population number next to your country’s name in the World Almanac doesn’t help if those people aren’t contributing to society.
That depends on lots of features of the societies. Diaspora Jewish communities stayed parallel–operating under their own legal system with permission from the rulers–for well over a thousand years. Old Order Amish have managed for more than two hundred and are still going strong.
One notes that one problem is of the current immigrants that aren’t contributing. Indeed, are telling transparent lies about being 17 to get better benefits and listening to sermons that tell them that welfare is the current day jizya tax, and so their right.
I’ve heard that less than 1% of those immigrating to Sweden have gotten jobs, for instance.
@Mary
And where did you hear that? I heard that Swedish schools teach that Islam is satanic, and the Swedish government kidnaps the children of immigrants and brainwashes them. You can assert anything you want, but if you want other people to consider your statements you should provide evidence for them.
And where did you hear that?
That? Which statement are you expressing disbelief of?
Any and all of your specific claims.
Ask the Germans how the Turkish Gastarbeiter program has worked out for them. “Temporary workers” have a tendency to stay for generations if there isn’t the political will to give them the boot.
Beyond that, the gains from importing foreign workers come directly from lowering wages and working conditions below what native workers would accept. So it’s not really an enticing offer except for the upper classes who aren’t threatened by low-skill labor. And they typically already have segregated ethnic enclaves to retreat to.
I suspect that poor Hispanics would be equally included with poior blacks. And many of them are immigrants.
Those tend to be Asian immigrants, who are considered non-white only when convenient (remember complainnts about how Silicon Valley is all white?), and who are at any rate subject to different immigration politics than Mexicans.
I suspect you’re making a mistake here by looking at it through a racial rather than cultural lens. My experience living and working among upper-middle-class white liberals/leftists is that they’re delighted to have as many non-white friends as possible, because it’s proof of their worship of the Diversity Gods and hence a strong virtue signal to their peers. But what they don’t want is to live around people from a different culture. Observances of various “flavor” traditions from ethnic cultures — holidays, clothing, art, food and similarly fluffy stuff — are welcomed in the name of Diversity. But only one culture is permitted to supply ideas, behaviors and values: the modern day globalist religion of the Cathedral, taught in universities. All else is heresy.
As such, white liberals tend, in my experience, to live in large multi-ethnic cities where people are divided into peers and peons. The peons can have whatever culture they want, because they’re background decoration; the only interactions an upper-middle-class professional will have with them are of the customer/service provider type. Meanwhile, friendships and any deeper interactions will be limited to a carefully selected set of other professionals like himself, probably mostly white/Asian with various token members of other minorities mixed in, much like college.
It was deeply telling to me how many snide comments and uncomfortable looks I got while living in San Francisco for befriending store clerks and other working-class people and introducing them to my peer group. Nothing ever rose to the Hollywood movie level where you had a bunch of rich white people openly mocking and sneering at the poor person in their midst, but there were definitely some uncomfortable situations where I learned that people whose Facebook feeds are filled with preaching about privilege can be pretty blind to their own. And can be pretty damn intolerant of unprivileged people when they’re sitting at the same dinner table instead of off wherever “they belong”.
Again, note that this isn’t about money, either — this is about culture. An impoverished grad student on food stamps is still “one of us”, the high-status professionals. A self-supporting security guard with no college degree is not.
Yes, it’s the old LETELU phenomenon — Looks Exotic, Thinks Exactly Like Us.
@Cypren: not disputing the factual claim, but just to explain how this looks from the inside: despite the multiculturalism shtick, most liberals are moral realists (in fact if anything they try to derive way too much from supposed universal positive rights of man). So whatever parts of your culture imply ethical claims don’t register as “different culture”, they register as “mistaken.”
To explain why this coexists with diversity rhetoric: While the immediate goal of diversity rhetoric is to get people to live in peace with one another, an important ideological goal is to elevate universal moral truth by denigrating competing communal commitments. If pro-diversity-ism included diversity of ethical commitments it would no longer serve this goal.
(This is all massively confused by various alliances of convenience such as liberals and minority religions or liberals and conservative racial minorities.)
@hoghoghoghoghog
Is it too uncharitable a summation to say it boils down to “Diversity on things that don’t matter, conformity on things that do”?
@hoghoghoghoghog: I think that makes a lot of sense from the internal view, yes. It definitely results in pretty hypocritical behavior in practice.
A lot of what drove me away from the Left was the general observation that the right-wing people I knew tended to have harsh words for groups while being kind and generous towards individuals. The left-wing people I knew tended to spout lengthy, worshipful paeans to humanity and every non-white-male identity group they could find, but in practice, treated a lot of the people they met like stage props placed on this earth for their own convenience. The most abusive, dehumanizing tirades and venom I’ve ever witnessed personally have all been from individuals who think of themselves as champions of the underprivileged and underrepresented. But they only seem to care about people when they’re sufficiently abstract and far enough away that they don’t have to be personally inconvenienced by them.
@gobbobobble:
Not uncharitable at all. My extra bloviating was for the 1% strengthening that being extremely universalist as to morals is part of the cause for being pro-diversity about everything else.
There’s a similar pattern in liberal sexual ethics, where consent tends to push out all other criteria of sexual morality. Again there’s a superficial inconsistency (though much more superficial this time): if I told you there is a political group that is unusually concerned with sexual morality, in particular sexual immorality on college campuses and how schools handle it, you wouldn’t necessarily guess that this is the same group that most supports gay marriage.
The shortest distance between Western Europe and the Muslim world is just nine miles; that’s the shortest distance between Morocco and Spain across the Strait of Gibraltar. All a Muslim has to do to reach Europe is hop on a boat across the Mediterranean. America has the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, so it’s not just anyone who can get here. The Muslim population that winds up in America tends to be extensively filtered for things like class and education levels as a result.
EDIT: And note that the Somali Muslims who were imported here as refugees do decisively worse than say, Lebanese Muslims who immigrated here during the civil war.
Is this really true? I don’t have experience with Lebanese Muslims, but here in Minneapolis we have a large quantity of Somalis. My impression is that there is not a lot of crime by Somalis. I’ve never heard of any Somali gangs. They are pretty poor, which makes sense since many of them came as refugees and are not well educated. Mostly what I’ve heard is that they are entrepreneurial and hustle for jobs, which is kind of the gold standard for poor immigrants.
Maybe this is one of those things that the authorities are carefully hiding from me, but I don’t think so. When a large number of Hmong came to St Paul a couple of decades ago, I did hear about the difficulty they were having with urban society and of many Hmong gangs. Contrary to that, Somalis have a good reputation. Sometimes one hears about young Somalis that go join ISIS, but that amounts to about a dozen total, not at all significant.
The Somali community in Minneapolis is the largest source of Americans leaving the country, or attempting to leave the country, to fight for ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
Okay, but so what? We’re talking about three dozen people, and the community is under increased surveillance because of awareness of the problem (and better yet, are actively cooperating with law enforcement because of recognition of the threat).
I will grant that black swan events are dangerous and hard to quantify. It may be that we will one day experience a massive terror attack perpetrated by a Somali immigrant terrorist cell. But it may also be that we’ll experience a massive terror attack perpetrated by a Chinese sleeper cell or a white nationalist sect interested in destroying the hated Blue Tribe that’s “selling out America”. Radicals gonna radicalize, yo.
For the moment, the quantifiable information we’ve got suggests that the terrorism threat from the Somali immigrant community is both fairly low-intensity and well-contained. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to panic over this.
Dependency is another matter entirely. The last numbers I can find are from 2014 but indicate that of the 33,000 Somali immigrants the Census bureau counts in Minnesota, 17,300 of them are on food stamps. That doesn’t seem promising, but it may also be the effects of fairly recent immigration from an impoverished country with no vocational training for modern economies; Somalis haven’t been in the US long enough for us to tell yet if this is indicative of generational dependency.
Anecdotally, though, people who live and work in the communities with the recent immigrants don’t seem to have a strongly negative view of them; many describe them as hard-working and industrious. This inclines me to take a charitable view for the moment and wait and see how things play out.
You say that like it’s a bad thing. I’m not sure I really see a down side. They want to kill or die in the name of their religion, so they go off to Syria and one of Putin’s guys kills them without the remorse we’d probably feel if it were one of our guys who had to do it. In the meantime, maybe they scare some more productively-minded Syrian to take their place in Minneapolis (or for the next 4-8 years Berlin or Stockholm or wherever).
Speaking entirely based on second and third hand anecdotes, it seems like Somalis in the US have a better reputation than Somalis in Europe. If this is the case – that’s a big if – does anyone have any ideas as to why that would be the case?
@dndnrsn: I don’t have any evidence, but my gut guess would be that because the US biases refugee admittance towards women and children first, followed by family reunification, we get more intact families and fewer young single men. Most of the problems I’ve read about in Europe seem to due to the heavily skewed ratio of single men that have come in via the refugee policies; I recall reading somewhere that they were close to 70% of all refugees.
My guess is that without fluently speaking the native language, and with no skills to succeed in a modern economy and no realistic prospects for marriage or a family, they get into trouble. The American policies ameliorate a lot of this by (intentionally or not) selecting for people who are either young enough to be acculturated through the school system to their new home, or have children to motivate them to work hard and fit in for their family’s sake.
Indeed, the right analogue for North Africans in Europe is probably Central Americans in the US or maybe Mexicans (although Mexico is a rich and well-educated country). But they assimilate just fine in the US, so the mystery remains.
Different populations. The North Africans I know in the UK are perfectly assimilated. They are also middle-class and well-educated.
I’ve heard claims that north african muslims do significantly worse than muslims of other origins. If most of the muslims in Europe are north african (which makes sense given geography) and the ones in the US aren’t, this could explain it.
Is that true? At least in northern Europe I think most Muslims are from the Balkan, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria or Lebanon, some from Somalia.
As for Atlas’ question, I think it is because America is more fundamentally multi-racial/cultural. There is an explicit separation between race and nationality. You can eat dim sum or chicken or beans and still be 100% American. In Europe people will call for immigrants to assimilate, but they conflate following the law and general modern liberal values with things like food, clothes, religion, holidays, etc.
An other things I observed in both the U.S. and U.K. is that employers are quite willing to hire immigrants or people of an other race. That does a lot of help people become a part of civil society. In continental Europe, many people who would not say overtly racist things will still not hire someone who looks different.
There are a lot of Moroccans in The Netherlands, which is usually considered northern Europe.
You can find the statistics for Sweden here.
Most has already been mentioned by other commenters, but 2 summary points:
1: Immigration to Sweden went up by an order of magnitude in 2015, the article covers up to 2013.
2: A lot of the immigrants live in segregated communities where crime is not reported because the communities self-police. On one hand this is great because they are very good at it, on the other hand, the ‘laws’ that they police by have very low compatibility with a modern western society.
The flight of fancy is very close to the current world order. All we are missing is some open borders zones. I propose the U.S.A, that being the place with the most experience of unrestricted immigration (during the Ellis Island era).
(Alas I don’t think the gulf states are typically like this: you need a visa, and your visa is under the control of your employer, hence the labor abuse).
In addition to being very different populations:
1) Employment is important for building social connections, and might be expected to be doubly important for a newcomer. So unemployment among immigrants may be a cause as well as an effect, and a higher employment rate for the low-skilled might be relevant to US success.
1a) In particular, I’d guess that difficulty of firing people might lead to less risky decision-making when it comes to hiring. Then fewer people are going to follow the “hire a bunch of weird despised people for dirt cheap” strategy.
2) tmk mentions that the US might be better at handling minority groups on an interpersonal level. I suspect it’s better on an institutional level as well. Laicite strikes me as strictly inferior to American-style secularism.
http://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=3531748&mc=57&forum_id=2&PHPSESSID=5543c25fdb3906eadc99243a8ffdbe87#32663370
has a lot of analysis of this vox piece on Sweden http://www.vox.com/world/2017/2/20/14669572/sweden-trump-immigrant-crime
It has a lot of something, but I think it’s a stretch to call “knew which voxsplaining faggot it would be before i clicked” analysis.
Has anyone actually looked at the Swedish crime data referenced in the Wikipedia article that Scott linked? The Brå website has numbers up to 2015, and includes preliminary stats for 2016. So, after looking through some of the available spreadsheets as well as the Wiki article itself, I believe there has been an overall increase in reported crime, with some categories of crime falling (e.g., theft), others rising (e.g., “crimes against life and health”).
At the same time, in addition to the reported crime data, there is another data source: the official annual survey of about 15000 people. Based on the survey, the Wiki article suggests that the crime rates have either fallen or remained steady (except for sex-related crimes).
The Wikipedia article cites several reasons as to why the reported crime statistics might be inaccurate, but I fail to find any mention of potential problems with the survey data. Again, apparently, Wiki editors trust the survey to a much larger extent than they trust the crime reports.
Potential problems with the reported crime data mentioned in the article include procedural changes in the 1960s and the introduction of a new crime reporting system in the 1990s. Additionally, changing attitudes to what constitutes a sex crime may have affected reporting of sexual assaults.
Would any of these potential problems explain the rising rates in many categories of reported crime from, say, 1995 to 2015? (If so, why? If not, are there any other problems with the reported data not mentioned in the Wikipedia article?)
Here are some numbers I have extracted from the spreadsheets.
Total number of reported crimes per 100,000:
1996: 13,294
1997: 13,554
1998: 13,344
1999: 13,418
2000: 13,694
2001: 13,370
2002: 13,663
2003: 13,977
2004: 13,885
2005: 13,753
2006: 13,490
2007: 14,280
2008: 14,938
2009: 15,101
2010: 14,605
2011: 14,988
2012: 14,734
2013: 14,603
2014: 14,890
2015: 15,342
Crimes against life & health reported per 100,000.
1995 : 647
1996 : 640
1997 : 655
1998 : 674
1999 : 709
2000 : 696
2001 : 701
2002 : 718
2003 : 768
2004 : 787
2005 : 846
2006 : 889
2007 : 948
2008 : 968
2009 : 980
2010 : 991
2011 : 1,005
2012 : 974
2013 : 896
2014 : 923
2015 : 932
Sex-related crimes reported per 100,000:
1995 : 88
1996 : 84
1997 : 87
1998 : 94
1999 : 102
2000 : 98
2001 : 103
2002 : 108
2003 : 113
2004 : 116
2005 : 130
2006 : 134
2007 : 137
2008 : 154
2009 : 169
2010 : 183
2011 : 181
2012 : 178
2013 : 184
2014 : 210
2015 : 184
But, here’s an example of a category with a falling trend: overall theft crimes reported per 100,000:
1995 : 7,759
1996 : 7,869
1997 : 8,372
1998 : 8,140
1999 : 8,029
2000 : 7,934
2001 : 7,495
2002 : 7,598
2003 : 7,446
2004 : 7,247
2005 : 6,979
2006 : 6,417
2007 : 6,302
2008 : 6,091
2009 : 5,947
2010 : 5,631
2011 : 5,783
2012 : 5,613
2013 : 5,552
2014 : 5,572
2015 : 5,404
With regards to sex crimes, according to NTU survey data, the estimated number of affected people in the population (as opposed to the estimated number of incidents) has changed in the following way:
2005 : 64,000
2006 : 54,000
2007 : 52,000
2008 : 56,000
2009 : 67,000
2010 : 54,000
2011 : 52,000
2012 : 62,000
2013 : 98,000
2014 : 76,000
2015 : 129,000
As far as I know, this has not been adjusted for population growth. However, population in Sweden in 2005 was 9.03 mln, whereas in 2015 it was 9.74 mln, so the relative numbers have increased dramatically as well. If I’m reading the data correctly, the estimated percentage of reported events has changed as follows:
2005 : 11%
2006 : 17%
2007 : 14%
2008 : 19%
2009 : 12%
2010 : 23%
2011 : 19%
2012 : 10%
2013 : 12%
2014 : 8%
2015 : 9%
If this is accurate, the supposed increase in reported sex-related crime cannot be attributed to increased rate of reporting.
Now, there is a separate Wikipedia article about sex crimes in Sweden, which I haven’t studied in detail. However, their graph seems to include data only up till 2012, hence the article’s claim that the percentage of the population exposed to sexual crime hasn’t changed. (The big increase has occurred after 2012.)
If the crime rates are actually increasing, this doesn’t necessarily mean immigrants have anything to do with it. There are some older data sources that suggests certain groups of immigrants committed crimes at much higher rates, and when I have a moment (and if anyone is interested in this discussion) I will try to find all the relevant links and post them here. However, I’m not making any claims that the old data can be easily extrapolated to today’s immigrant population.
[Note: I am having problems submitting comments that contain links. I will try to post a separate comment with direct links to the sources I have used for the numbers above. In the meantime, all the spreadsheets are available on the Brå website.]
[Trying to post links to the official crime stats sources referenced in my comment above.]
Crime report data can be obtained here:
https://www.bra.se/bra/brott-och-statistik/statistik/anmalda-brott.html
Reported crime numbers I listed come from this particular spreadsheet:
https://www.bra.se/download/18.22a7170813a0d141d21800062993/1459410376617/10La_anm2_fr1950.xls
The sex-related survey data I reference comes from this spreadsheet:
http://www.bra.se/download/18.4a33c027159a89523b17f401/1487234377677/Utsatthet+och+anm%C3%A4lningsben%C3%A4genhet+brott+mot+enskild+person+2005-2015.xls
I apologize, but any comments I’m trying to submit with actual links get eaten by the spam filter. If anyone is interested in looking at the data referenced above, the following Google searches will take you where you need to be:
brott per 100 000 invånare fr.o.m. år 1950 – crime report stats
Utsatthet och anmälningsbenägenhet brott mot enskild person 2005-2015 – survey data
i assume part of it is a replacement effect. My model is that a society can only sustain a limited amount of crime, a niche usually filled by the poor and maladapted. When there’s an influx of people who are even more poor and maladapted, the burglary market gets overcrowded, and native swedes find it more lucrative to return to (mostly)legitimate sources of income.
There was a pattern like that in America. The irish and italian gangs gave way to black and hispanic gangs once they stopped being the most poor and desperate kids on the block.
I’m not anti-immigrant, but according to this Wikipedia entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Sweden#Crime
as of 2013, 33% of people in prison or on probation are foreigners when they only make up 15% of the population. It’s possible that the native born population has gotten less criminal, so the overall rate could drop while immigrants could commit more and more crimes. I’d have to do more research (which is hard since I can’t read Swedish), but on the surface it seems plausible.
This is plausible but seems like shifting the goalposts. An immigrant population that’s twice as criminal as the (very low-crime) swedish natives (even before accounting for confounders, like them being poorer) isn’t an “immigrant crime wave” by any means.
Well, Scott isn’t asking about an immigrant crime wave, he’s asking what an anti-immigration person’s response would be to the fact that crime has been going down. To that, I could see this hypothetical anti-immigrant person argue that if immigrants are twice as criminal that the negatives of letting them into the country outweigh the positives.
After looking at the official Swedish data, I don’t actually believe the overall rate has dropped. Reports of crimes against life/health and sexual crimes per 100,000 people are steadily increasing. Although reports of crimes such as theft are decreasing at the same time. Still, the overall rate has gone up (see the numbers in my previous comment). Now, in addition to the reported crimes data there is some survey data that seems to suggest crime hasn’t gone up (other than sex-related crime which has more than doubled since 2012.) The Wikipedia article relies on the survey as opposed to the reported data, but it doesn’t list satisfactory reasons as to why. The Wikipedia article on rape in Sweden, additionally, is out of date, as it cites numbers up till 2012 only.
https://www.facebook.com/archimago/posts/10155054978508415:0?match=aWRvbnkgbGlzbGUsbGlzbGUsaWRvbnk%3D
https://lionsofmercy.com/2017/02/19/if-you-wanna-write-you-need-to-read/?fb_action_ids=10155054978508415&fb_action_types=news.publishes
Tldr: Two accounts (includes a comment on the facebook post) about getting students to be much better writers by getting them to read more.
First link is broken
Sorry, I didn’t notice the icon limiting distribution to facebook friends and friends of friends.
However, the major material is in the second link.
Scott, I love your writing. Did you ever think about compiling series of posts into full-sized books?
Quit your stupid job and do some long form writing. You’ll make more money and do more good for the world. You have a gift Scott, and it would be a damn shame if your ideas never reached people who don’t read blogs.
Your way of breaking down complex and contentious issues is especially important right now. It’s one of the only methods of reducing polarization that I’ve seen succeed.
dank, I have sympathy with that point of view, though I’m not crazy about giving orders to people because you think they should follow your agenda.
Just from my point of view, we may all benefit from what Scott learns at his job.
Telling an aspiring writer to quit their day job is usually bad advice. Telling an aspiring writer to not bother finishing the credentials that will allow them to turn their day job into a lucrative and probably rewarding career, is pretty much always bad advice. If going into writing full time is the right move for Scott; he’ll be in a better position to know that in a year or so, and he’ll be have a much better fallback option if full-time writing turns out to be not so good an idea.
“You’ll make more money…”
The job I’m expecting to get next year pays about 20x the amount I currently make from blogging. I think I might be able to double my blogging income if I begged people a lot and told them that I really needed the money and maybe got some articles accepted to magazines and stuff. That’s still a 90% pay cut.
“…and do more good for the world.”
I’ve informally checked whether I blog more/better when I have shorter hours at my job, and the effect seems to be zero or negative. I’m not really sure why this is, except maybe some kind of “behavioral activation” thing where if I’ve been working hard all day I’m in the mood to work hard, but if I’ve been sleeping late and lounging around I’m in the mood to keep doing that. At some point I should look into this more formally, but it seems true.
Still, thanks a lot for the kind words.
I don’t think you should quite your job in order to blog more. I do think you should publish one or more collections of posts as books. That would not be much work–you might even get one of your fans to volunteer to do the conversion. It would make you a little more money. More important, it would get your ideas to a wider range of people.
Assuming that Scott is happy with a book consisting of relatively disjointed essays, which is probably not the case, given that I believe that there is a correlation between the length of writing and meticulousness.
I second that. Partially, because once there is a SSC book, it can indeed reach a wider audience, be discussed in book clubs, be gifted to friends for their birthdays. And, partially, because a book is more permanent. One of my fears is that Scott one day gets tired of blogging, takes down all of his posts, and I will no longer be able to refer friends and family to his articles.
Perhaps, to Scott, that is a feature and not a bug. Some of the things he’s said are controversial enough that they could pose a threat to his prospects in professional employment. If not now, then in some future state where the overton window has shifted. Perhaps he does not want a permanent record of all of this floating around out there to potentially be used against him later.
On top of the pay cut — no benefits!
The rule for quitting the day job is when it costs you money to go to work instead of writing. Including the cost of benefits.
Also what you observed about time is also true of many other writers: the more time you have to write, the more you spend vacuuming the cat instead of writing.
Is “vacuuming the cat” some sort of slang?
For “avoidance behaviors.”
Sounds reminiscent of “shaving the yak” in programming circles.
I bet you could make $1,000,000 after tax in 12 months if you quit and wrote full time using best business strategy practices. Using kickstarter, book deals, etc
If the world consisted of people with tastes similar to ours, yes Scott could easily do this. But I wonder if part of the reason why we love Scott’s writing so much is that we have weird tastes that few other high quality writers seek to satisfy and consequently Scott’s writings would not necessarily have the potential to earn him lots of money.