This is the bi-weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit or the SSC Discord server.
1. San Diego meetup still planned for today, Irvine meetup still planned for next weekend. Details here.
2. In Silicon Valley: A Reality Check, I included Vox in a list of publications that were overly harsh on Silicon Valley because of the Juicero incident. Vox requests a correction that their article, although somewhat harsh at points, also did note that there was lots of good research and development going on too, and doesn’t deserve to be pilloried in the same way as the others. You can read their article here and judge for yourself.
3. There were a lot of complaints about Polyamory Is Not Polygyny, so let me clarify. The articles I cited were generally criticizing polyamory as it actually exists, ie in a few weird communities. I presented data from one weird community showing that it didn’t look like their criticisms were true. Some other people in the comments presented data from other weird communities showing the same thing. I don’t claim this is necessarily an accurate representation of what a future hypothetical worldwide polyamorous society would be like. For all I know maybe it would be exactly the opposite, the same way we expect a future hypothetical worldwide socialist society to have the exact opposite results as every time socialism has ever been tried in real life.
4. Mingyuan has been doing a lot of work aggregating data and comments from all of the SSC meetups that have been going on lately. See her writeup here. She’s also got a frequently-updated list of where and when the next SSC meetup close to you is here. I’m going to add that somewhere more prominent when I get around to it.
5. My serial novel Unsong is now complete. If you were waiting to read it until it was finished, now’s the time.
6. The Report Comments button is broken and seems to have been so for a while. If you posted something terrible in the past few months, you’re probably off the hook. My normal tech support has given up on this one, but if you want to try fixing it, let me know.
7. Cafe Chesscourt has agreed to serve as an unofficial (official?) SSC forum, so if you prefer bulletin boards to all the other methods of communication we’ve got around here, head on over.
I was reading this post by our host
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/
and this got my attention “Certainly the well-intentioned solutions other people are working on, like a decentralized crypto-Reddit that can’t be moderated even in principle, are unlikely to help (hint: what is the most striking difference between Bitcoin marketplaces and normal marketplaces?)”
Can someone clarify what the hint is hinting at?.
Anyway, this caught my attention because it is not an hypothetical, we have the technical tools to build this, and it has actually been implemented!.
I’m thinking of the fms in the freenet. The freenet is a censorship resistant web, so it’s about as hard to take something down as I can imagine it from a purely technical side. The fms is build over it, moderation is managed by having each user have something like a ban list, trusted members of the community can make such list for people to subscribe to. This makes it so that if their moderation power is abused then someone else can modify their lists and the ‘exodus’ can be made fairly frictionless. I think that their developers also have some experience addressing ddos and spam but I don’t know the specifics. I haven’t actually used it, but it seems pretty cool.
My interpretation is that Bitcoin marketplaces are mainly for drugs and fake assassinations; they are the equivalent of sites that mainly contain “witches”.
I don’t know if that’s a problem inherent on bitcoin or if it’s due to alternatives coming first. I don’t know how this is called, but it would be sort of like how facebook is now when free software alternatives like diaspora or gnusocial exist. As a counterexample the same rationale would apply to end-to-end encryption, but since whatsapp implemented it is not only terrorists and other criminals that use it.
I’ve never been clear on what problem bitcoin is supposed to solve exactly. It’s chief merit seems to be that transactions are somewhat harder for authorities to trace than say an international wire. Hence its attractiveness to various criminals.
Don’t get me wrong, the distributed ledger is something I could see being useful in various applications and the blockchain is a clever implementation of a distributed ledger. But as to bitcoins qua bitcoins, I don’t see it.
“It’s chief merit seems to be that transactions are somewhat harder for authorities to trace than say an international wire”
Put more charitably, the transactions are more private. You can donate to wikileaks without fearing US government retribution, or to journalists the Chinese Government disapproves of. It is not only government intervention one wants to prevent, there is no technical reason for credit card companies to not sell your purchase history for personalized advertisement or similar. Also, for example paypal doesn’t like having anything to do with porn, the decentralized nature of bitcoin gives a more robust environment for free expression.
Also, as far as I understand bitcoin transactions are cheaper than paypal’s and credit card’s. Maybe not cheaper than an international wire transfer but I have the impression that’s not convenient for smaller quantities. At the very least an innovative competition is good for the market.
My biggest reservation are scalability and energy usage, one would think that cost can serve as a proxy but maybe energy is undervalued with externalities like global change. I think it’s a good experiment anyway.
As a side issue, one can note that bitcoin is not actually anonymous unless you buy them in an anonymous way, the distributed ledger is available to everyone. Something like Monero is preferable I think.
The non-anonymous part is why I said “somewhat harder to trace.” If it were anonymous than it would be a somewhat different story.
To take your example, I don’t think it would be a good idea to treat the security though obscurity of bitcoin as true security if your adversity is the USG or China. Granted the ransomware and drug people are doing that, but criminals aren’t exactly know for being risk adverse.
The problem space of “more private than a credit card, but not really anonymous” just doesn’t seem that large to me. Even totally anonymous would be something of a niche.
Or to the pimp of that 15-year-old prostitute that caught your eye, or the thug who offers to kill your wife because she won’t shut up about all the prostitutes. Or buy heroin or automatic weapons, or rent botnets, or just cheat on your taxes.
The people who will want to do that sort of thing, are likely to be much more numerous and much richer than the people who want to donate to Wikileaks et al. Less nerdy, so less likely to be among the early adopters of Bitcoin, but in the long run the advantage Wikileaks would get from only-semi-anonymous donations may not outweigh the disadvantage of being associated with such a generally disreputable crowd.
As Scott has pointed out before, if the chief selling point of your community is “No witch hunts here!”, you wind up with a few principled civil libertarians and a whole lot of witches. That’s a problem if witches are a real threat, or if the witch-hunters are powerful enough to invade and destroy your community.
@John Schilling
Possibly, but not necessarily. There is a currency that is more anonymous that Bitcoin and is used by normal users much more than by criminals. Cash. So it depends on how wide adoption becomes. I think the strongest selling point for the average Joe is how it’s cheaper than alternatives, if it becomes easy enough to use then it could get much wider adoption. I’m not much invested either way, I appreciate the competition in any eventuality.
The transaction costs are relatively low, though not quite as low as they seem since they implicitly include two bid/ask spreads.
However, at least in the United States the high transaction costs of credit cards are hidden from the consumer. Indeed credit card users actually come out ahead versus cash users in that the form of credit card miles or rebates. Further as a matter of both law and custom credit card users have the ability to relatively easily disclaim or reverse transactions made with a credit card.
Unlike consumers, merchants are well aware of the high transaction costs associated with credit cards but they risk alienating the bulk of their customers if they offer discounts for payments in bitcoins.
The most interesting part of Bitcoin to me is that it’s basically a math-backed currency. You don’t need to trust your government not to print a shitload of bills tomorrow (unlikely for USD in the near term, but not everyone uses USD), and you don’t need to deal with the various inconveniences of a commodity-backed currency — perennial fluctuations from industrial demand for the same commodity, everything going to hell if someone discovers a major new deposit (small scale) or figures out how to capture a nickel-iron asteroid (large scale), etc. And you can choose the parameters of the algorithm to give the currency the economic characteristics you need. This really is something new, and it’s worth watching even if the near-term applications are mostly in the realm of sketchy Internet people and the usual collection of breathless first-movers.
The privacy advantages of Bitcoin per se are overbilled, and exist at this stage mostly because no one’s built a really good tracking infrastructure. (That I know of. The NSA might have one.) It is not theoretically harder than tracking wire transfers. You can design a blockchain that really is harder to track, and a few like that exist; however none of them have very much market penetration right now.
(Disclosure: I own a few Bitcoins, and thus have a financial stake.)
No, but instead you’ve got a system that can’t print a shitload of bills when it needs to.
Bitcoin’s “formula” of having the money supply asymptotically approach a finite limit (rather than, say, growing at a fixed percentage rate forever) is deflationary because it will inevitably be outpaced by real economic growth. The constantly increasing value of a bitcoin is corrosive enough to its usability as a currency when it’s due to a bubble, how much worse will it get when everyone notices that long-term it’s baked into the math?
Yeah, that’s the tradeoff. Bitcoin is inherently deflationary and that gives it its own set of disadvantages. In the long run, I expect it to find a niche more as a store of value than as a transactional currency, if it doesn’t just fizzle.
But that’s what I was trying to get at with the comment about choosing the parameters; there’s nothing stopping you from creating an altcoin with the inflationary characteristics you want. It isn’t unlikely that one of those, not Bitcoin, will eventually end up taking over the world, but it’ll still be based on the blockchain technology that Bitcoin pioneered.
And coincidentally, all of the arguments that everyone enthusiastically uses against Bitcoin are the exact same arguments the government is increasingly using in its push to limit (or in some cases outlaw) the use of cash.
Cash can basically only be used to pay someone who is standing right in front of you. Bitcoin, AFIK, is almost never used between two people who are immediately present. They both fill the same “I don’t want anybody to know what I’m buying” niche, but are at opposite ends of the geographic spectrum.
As Matt M notes, the same people who would prefer Bitcoin quietly go away, are nudging people towards abandoning cash as well. And sometimes more than nudging. But consider just the social side of the equation. I tell you that X payed Y for Z by handing him an envelope or briefcase full of $100 bills. What image does this invoke? What is your prior for X, Y, or Z being ethical or socially beneficial?
What happens when Wikileaks getting its donations via bitcoin invokes the same images and judgements?
@John Schilling
” I tell you that X payed Y for Z by handing him an envelope or briefcase full of $100 bills. What image does this invoke? What is your prior for X, Y, or Z being ethical or socially beneficial?”
It seems our perspectives are quite alien. Every week I buy groceries for the week, with cash, I’ve been doing this for the past few years. My parents did the same for the past few decades, we often go together. It’s in the kind of old fashioned market which consist of a building with several stalls where independent sellers sell their produce. There is sometimes haggling. I suppose most of them don’t even have the infrastructure to even receive credit card payments. This is one of the families mayor expenses and many of the people in the extended family and acquaintances go to the same place. We certainly don’t feel nefarious when we do it. I suppose sights like this are less common in your experience and I find it a bit sad that that could be replaced by a default social expectation of mass surveillance as a guarantor of decency, which your post seems to take for granted.
In the consequentalist manner, I’m of course open to being convinced that I’m just being nostalgic, but I would much prefer it to see an effort to quantify the crime prevented by such intrusive schemes, versus the fat tail chance of a police state, hard as they are to pin down, before abandoning the heuristic of the appeal to tradition.
Completely off topic remark, but in order to avoid leaving you wondering, I’ll note that it’s possible that I may not be commenting much after this one, at least on the shortish term. It can be somewhat finicky to post using tor with the security system in place in the blog, this time it seems I had some luck.
Uhm, a last minute edit. In case the question is meant literally, then my prior would be something like the prevalence of crime, and the lenghty detour is just me saying that cash transactions are so mundane and common place in my experience that I expect the probability of someone using it for crime the same as the overall prevalence.
He also cheated by making it a large transaction – large cash transactions are more likely to be illegal than small ones, because cash is very inconvenient for large transactions. A week of groceries is unlikely to require an “envelope full of $100 bills” (my image of that is closer to a significant fraction of a $10K stack rather than just two or three), let alone a briefcase, and even if you spend $200 or $300, as you described it it’s not going to be at a single vendor
Is there any way to go : cash -> bitcoin -> bitcoin -> cash? If so, what’s the slippage? For bonus points let the first cash be dollars in Queens, NY and the second cash be pesos in a medium size city in Hidalgo, Mexico.
This is a transaction that happens all the time, where the fees are high, and where semi-anonymity would be desirable.
I think the difference he is referring to is that almost no one uses bitcoin.
He states this thesis more explicitly earlier:
What do you guys think of Jordan Peterson? I was surprised to see Scott say he’s not very familiar with him. I personally would like his views to spread further in academia. Fat chance though…
The Harvard interview was pretty great:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Urd0IK0WEWU
Shusah, this doesn’t seem to let me reply to the relevant comment, so third time trying this.
HeelBearCub, genuinely thank you for the criticism, I appreciate that you are trying to help me be a better commenter on this site.
I didn’t intend to ride the religion angle so hard, I did intend it to come across as it is lazy and inefficient to help continue the spread and existence of misunderstanding/misconception. If the image Americans have of “Russia and Russianness” is “St Basil’s Cathedral”, that’s okay to an extent, but when it comes to using a metaphor that is heavily reliant, for it to work, on alleged too-close ties between the White House and the Kremlin, then using something more factually aligned to the actual Kremlin works better.
Using an incorrect stereotype because it’s too much trouble to be accurate and educate people is not very reassuring of the quality of a news analysis magazine, which is why I’m complaining about both TIME and CNN’s political blog apparently not knowing the difference between a steeple and a minaret. And the fact that CNN’s columnist used a religious reference means that the religious imagery does sink into people’s minds, whatever their surface conscious thoughts.
Basically, though, it’s the sloppiness of “who cares, nobody knows the difference, nobody is interested in teaching or learning what the secular part of the Kremlin is” that annoyed me in a magazine that, at least in its past, was trying to educate and inform the American public about overseas affairs. If in future a non-American movie-maker or media outlet puts the Statue of Liberty alongside the Lincoln Monument, we can all agree that “but this is the symbol of America that most people recognise, so the truthiness is what counts here!”, right?
Though I was tickled that nobody apparently took offence to me wanting to shut down the National Endowment for the Humanities when they stepped on my toes about T.S. Eliot. Dare to diss TIME, however… 🙂
TIME was trash in the Nineties and I doubt it’s gotten any better. CNN is… well, you probably know.
@Deiseach:
I don’t think I’m comfortable in the role you are casting me in.
Perhaps I would prefer that it be put as “attempting to affect the Overton window of the commentariat”.
But St. Basil’s is closely tied to the Kremlin. If someone were to reference the US Government by illustrating the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool no one would blink. Or French Government by referencing the Eiffel Tower.
Red Square and St. Basil’s as it’s most recognizable architectural landmark is a symbol of Russia, regardless of whether you think that is “correct”. It’s not supposed to be correct in the way you are wanting it to be.
The minaret/steeple thing is annoying and wrong, but it was gotten wrong because the steeples on St. Basil’s don’t look like steeples. They look like something out of Aladdin.
Which, sure, you want people to be correct, but I also think I expect a ton of error in the world like this, especially when people are talking, unscripted, in real time. I’m not sure if you cracked open the brain of the person who made that mistake that it would contain the fact that a minaret is specifically religious, rather than specifically “Arab” architecture.
Interview transcript about The Color of Law, a history of Federal government enforcing housing segregation from 1933 till 1968, with the FHA being the major agency responsible. The US is much more segregated and blacks are much poorer as a result.
This is not to say that this was simply a top down policy. An amazon review mentions black people who managed to buy houses in the suburbs being physically attacked by their neighbors. However, I think the danger of high-status bigots has been ignored because it’s been easier to mock low status bigots.
Now the US is much more integrated and whites are much poorer as a result. I’d rather USG not interfere with freedom of association from either direction.
Evidence that white people are much poorer as a result?
I’ve been noticing something happening in the Culture Wars lately.
First there’d been a few noises around the SJ-sphere, warning about the explicit existential danger posed by actually engaging with
those outside the cultahem, sorry, I mean “right wingers”.Then Laci Green – Ms “Rape Culture Is Everywhere” herself – released a video criticising feminism.
Now, I keep seeing people on places like KotakuInAction and other worker ant sites raging about how anti-SJ YouTubers are a pile of crap and they can’t understand how they ever enjoyed their work.
I have no choice but to blame the Rightful Caliph for my inability to see this as anything other than a shift in the Metacontrarian Stack and I’m wondering in which of the new political factions that will be generated in 6 months or so I’ll end up. (I’m gonna guess it’s whichever one spends less time threatening to destroy my career if I don’t toe the line.)
@Zorgon
Isn’t this about Thunderf00t throwing some sort of tantrum? I don’t keep up with long-form video Culture War drama, but there seems to be a lot of it, and I’m not sure it means much.
It’s apparently ubiquitous – all sorts of anti-SJ types suddenly going after each other for no apparent reason. Thunderf00t is another example of what I’m talking about, though, given he’s very suddenly shifted camp out of Shitlord Central.
he got assmad about Brexit and Trump, which is cool, but then he decided the solution was to basically say dumb stuff and then claim that he was triggering trump fans and the alt right so he must be doing something right
shrug
Perhaps Youtubers in general desire affirmation and praise. When SJism is popular, they’re SJ. When the wind shifts, they hold their fingers up to it and shift accordingly.
And I’m just talking about the media stars here. There’s a difference between someone who does SJ work on the ground or anonymously for the sake of doing SJ work and someone who makes a career out of turning a camera on themselves to talk about SJ stuff.
I’m trying to understand two things:
1. How well is IQ correlated to general intelligence?
2. How well is race correlated to IQ?
I ask because I got the impression on this blog that both correlations are pretty much rock solid at this point. Yet I look at Wikipedia, at google results, and they make it seem like it’s a contentious debate with no clear resolution. Which is it?
Your first question is ill-defined. The only way we can identify “general intelligence” is by measuring it, using tools like IQ tests. IQ tests unsurprisingly measure IQ pretty reliably (in that people generally get similar scores with repeat testing, and as far as I know different IQ tests correlate), and the thing measured by IQ (again as far as I know) correlates with other things like standardised test performance, wealth, and academic success. But how well it correlates with some “general intelligence” thing is not just unknown, but to some extent unknowable.
1. IQ is strongly correlated with measures of specific types of intelligence (e.g. verbal or spatial), and with life outcomes that we would intuitively associate with intelligence (e.g. academic success, white-collar career earnings, not getting yourself thrown in jail). From this, we reasonably infer that there is such a thing as general intelligence that correlates strongly with measured IQ.
2. IQ is strongly correlated with genetic heredity, but observed racial IQ variations max out at about the one standard deviation level and it’s hard to establish statistical significance at that signal-to-noise ratio. If this were any other field of science, the press would run with it while rationalists mumbled “replication crisis!” and sent the scientists back to the laboratory (well, office). With scorn and now actual violence being directed at scientists willing to talk openly about this and the press silent, the rationalist response seems to be to treat racial IQ variation as provisionally and weakly true, mumble something about not beating up the scientists so they can try to pin this down, and not be as clear as we should about the weak and provisional nature of this “fact”.
3. Rationality is weakly correlated with contrarian bias, and some degree of skepticism is called for whenever rationalists tell you that the press / scientific establishment / “they” are wrong about something important.
Thank you for crystallizing this point so clearly and succinctly. That’s been my general feeling, but I hadn’t actually stated it (even to myself) so clearly.
Although the “weakness” of the correlation is probably debatable?
I think this might be at least partially due to the strong predilection for detailed support for every contention. Paradoxically, this means that “common” knowledge seems the most suspect.
There’s that contrarian bias 😉
Yo dawg, I heard you like contrarian bias, so I gave you some confirmation bias to go with your contrarian bias…
Your 2 seems so confused, I don’t know where to begin. Not even wrong.
Well, that was certainly helpful.
I don’t think that’s true. One standard deviation for a large sample is huge; the standard error of the mean is the sd/sqrt(N), where N is the sample size. So if I sample 100 people in a given subpopulation and get a sample mean of +1sd compared to the known population mean, my result is extremely significant.
That’s true in the simple case where there’s only the effect you are trying to measure and statistically random noise. If there are (or could be) multiple effects with unknown correlations, then the 1SD level is where it is impractical to sort out e.g. race vs parasite load vs pre-K education vs # of vowels in name as contributors to IQ, without either very large numbers or the sort of complex statistical analysis that nobody gets right the first time. Hence replication crisis.
Wait. You’re equivocating between two different things here: (i) racial differences in average IQ, and (ii) racial differences in the average genetic potential (or whatever you want to call it) for IQ.
The data on (i) are very solid, and things like parasite load are not confounders here. Environmental factors like that don’t introduce noise in the measurement of intelligence, they change intelligence itself.
They may change intelligence itself. Racial genetics may change intelligence itself. That’s the debate.
If you’re trying to determine whether [X] changes intelligence itself, anything else that also changes intelligence itself makes your job more difficult. You either need [X] to introduce a change bigger than all the others put together, or you need very complex analysis that is difficult for lone iconoclast scientists(tm) to get right.
This is true even if the measurement of intelligence is absolutely noise-free.
I’m not arguing with that. I’m merely arguing that you’re answering a different question from the initial “How well is race correlated to IQ? “.
Is it not clear that my answer is “Race appears to be correlated with IQ at a level that makes it difficult to untangle from all the other things that are correlated with IQ, and so might not be correlated with IQ at all”?
Because I’m pretty sure that is an answer to the question that was asked.
@John Schilling
You seem to be arguing that race may merely be correlated to race and not causally related.
As in: poverty/bad eating habits may be correlated with race and IQ.
There are differences in race and IQ. Our host has written on this in other posts. The variation within a group is much larger than the variation between groups. The fact that measurable differences and their related outcomes exist is not very controversial. What is controversial is if you tie those differences to genetics. Although the fact that IQ is inheritable (~0.5) would seem to point to a genetic race/IQ causation, saying it out loud tends to get the mobs at Middlebury pretty riled up.
Most people do not believe it is entirely environmental or entirely genetic but a combination of those two. The exact ratio has been estimated all over the place but suffice it to say 50/50 isn’t crazy. If you are in polite company it is best to not to even talk about it (I don’t make up the social rules). Most of the online commentary tends to indicate it is immoral to assert it is genetic.
As an example of the “in polite company” view here is Vox:
https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-murray-race-iq-sam-harris-science-free-speech
“There is currently no reason at all to think that any significant portion of the IQ differences among socially defined racial groups is genetic in origin.”
No reason at all? They actually laid out the reasons pretty well in the first section of this article.
“Asserting that the relatively poorer intellectual performance of racial groups is based on their genes is mistaken theoretically and unfounded empirically; and given the consequences of promulgating the policies that follow from such assertions, it is egregiously wrong morally.”
You mean polices that are science based and possibly more effective? I assume they are worried less money goes to education if one assumes the problem is intractable and can’t be fixed.
A bit of emotional entanglement here. Suffice it to say this is one instance where what people want the data to show and what it does show aren’t exactly in sync.
Could a statistician chime in? I don’t understand how this fact has any statistical implications.
Consider the races
A: 101.237438, 100.268263, 99.214716, 107.959729, 81.692870, 104.701754, 110.600146, 113.327399, 113.449232, 108.168194
B: 98.606567, 77.628150, 72.737641, 97.003817, 119.599952, 55.763142, 80.026704, 64.014443, 94.587519, 70.789703
each population consisting of 10 people. The between-groups variation is ~2200, the within-group variation is way higher, ~4100. Yet we would normally conclude that there’s a significant difference between the mean IQs (about ~20 points, in fact) of races A and B. Is this conclusion weakened in any way by the fact that withing-group variation is higher than between-group variation?
I believe it is not brought up to directly challenge the idea of between group differences, but to try and add context. As I understand it (assuming they are real) between group differences are rather small, and in group differences are very large. So the between group differences are not very actionable/have very weak predictive power about any given individual.
This is exactly right. If you were to bet on who has a higher IQ based on people’s skin color you would be wrong quite often.
I don’t have the exact numbers but you would likely be better off knowing their income, educational achievement, GPA, parent’s IQ, etc.
@tscharf:
No, this cannot be right.
Take the races A,B considered above. If you were to bet who has higher IQ based on race, you would be right 87% of the time.
You can even find situations where the between-group variation is smaller than the within-group variation, and yet every element of Group 1 is larger than every element of Group 2.
Of course. This is why one should judge a person on the content of their character and not the color of their skin.
The problem is in technocratic politics people want to use things like median differences in income or wealth between races to prove systemic racism. It’s selective use of statistics.
@publiusvarinius
Obviously it depends on the distribution / shape of the PDF’s and how far apart they are. Then you run the numbers. You would always bet on a particular race, but you are going to be wrong in a very measurable way. The closer the PDF’s are, the more often you will be wrong.
Since I didn’t run the numbers, I cleverly used the ambiguous term “quite often” which means I am right no matter what, ha ha.
If the PDF’s are 1 SD apart (the reported black/white separation) with a normal distribution, then the PDF’s are separated by 34.1% and blah blah blah my 5 second analysis says you will be wrong 50.0 – 34.1 = 15.9%….which is quite often!
Of course there is an assumption you know a priori which race is smarter so the starting point is you are wrong 50% of the time or less. The 1 SD difference changed the odds from 50% to 15.9%.
It looks like the final answer is going to change pretty quickly (approach 50%) as the PDF’s get closer so any errors in the measurement are pretty important to how reliable the estimate is.
Admittedly this number was lower than I expected. Better not tell HR departments, I feel the Middlebury mod descending on me now….
@tscharf:
Thank you for trying to help me understand this.
Your analysis implies that the difference of the between-group and within-group variance does not factor into our predictions at all: the difference between the means already told us everything there was to know (since we already know that IQ is normally distributed with standard deviation 15).
That’s exactly what I thought, i.e. that the between-group/within-group thing is a red herring.
Whether 16% is ‘quite often’ is very subjective. I think that for many things in life, people would be pretty happy with only being wrong that often.
However, there are usually much better measurements, especially if the consequences of being wrong are huge.
@Aapje:
But this is in a context where 50% is (roughly) as wrong as you can be, so intuitions on “acceptable” amounts of incorrectness aren’t necessarily valid.
In short, that fact really doesn’t have any meaningful statistical implications by itself. It’s just a shorthand for saying,”But I’m not racist.” Or “sexist” for the case of comparing genders, which I’ve seen that phrase used for as well, in both spatial skills and strength. I think the popularity of that statement really just reflects the relative statistical illiteracy of the general population.
More relevant to me seems to be the phrase “there is significant overlap between the distributions.” Not as precise, but also more accurate in terms of actually conveying the meaning, which is that even though the means of 2 different populations might be different, the overlap is to a high degree, high enough so that knowing the difference in mean doesn’t let us predict with very high confidence in the difference between any 2 random individuals from the 2 different populations.
But, like many people have said, the empirical science here hasn’t been very well explored, and so actual population differences are far from settled. It may actually be the case that the overlap between certain populations actually isn’t very large at all. Which could have terrible societal implications if enough people have the notion that the intelligence of a certain human population should determine its members’ moral worth or freedom to pursue their interests as independent and free beings.
We know that IQ has a significant hereditary and environmental components. We know that the IQ differences between races are roughly similar to other population differences which have disappeared (Protestant/Catholic Irish differences, Irish & Jewish in America). Also on the order of the Flynn effect over a century. We know that there are substantial environmental differences on average for the different races (i.e. poverty, pollution, and discrimination). Some of those differences have well established biological causal links to lower IQ, like lead pollution. We know that African-American & White American children raised by non-American families don’t show the same differences. We know the differences have decreased significantly over time.
Yet, a lot of people here seem very quick to leap to the hypothesis that it’s racial genetic variation instead of environmental. People do appear to want the data to show something, but that applies at least equally to both sides.
Do you have sources for any of that?
It is true and mysterious that IQ in Ireland seems to have risen a lot over the past half or full century. It is true that the black-white gap in America has reduced maybe 25%, say, from 1.1 to 0.9. It is true that lead has a small effect. Of the rest I am extremely skeptical.
I have never heard anyone suggest Protestant/Catholic IQ differences in Ireland.
What do you mean about Americans abroad? Do you mean one German study? Do you really “know” something based on one study?
Jewish immigrants gained a standard deviation in the second generation, just like all other immigrants who didn’t speak English.
If this (and the implied mechanism) is true, doesn’t it more or less prove that the tests are culturally biased?
Could also be that you generally immigrate to somewhere you don’t speak the language because your life sucks in the old country, and whatever made your life suck might also affect your adult intelligence.
Sure, tests administered in English are biased against people who don’t speak English. You should try to avoid using them and definitely not compare to scores for native speakers. So the only people who do are people trying to cast doubt on IQ tests. I don’t know if the people who originally administered them made this mistake.
Is it a cultural barrier, or just a linguistic barrier? I don’t know. I wouldn’t be surprised if pre-war tests suffer some kind of cultural bias, but people have looked for it and not found any.
What, specifically, do you mean by “cultural bias”? Why do you care?
International comparisons are fraught and Raven’s Matrices are culturally biased. It is a lousy test, but they are used for many reasons, one being fear of accusations of cultural bias.
Nornagest: no.
Okay, probably not a complete explanation, but childhood famine’s hell on IQ.
Are you thinking of a particular 1920s immigrant group subject to famine?
How can you compare the results of two different IQ tests, if you are testing the hypothesis that the groups of people qualified to take each test have different median real intelligence and therefore the tests should not both be normed to 100?
I’m not sure I understand the question. Is one test the translation of another into a new language?
I suppose we should consider the hypothesis that growing up a peasant suppresses IQ scores, either by suppressing intelligence, or because tests are biased against peasants.
I think that the literature addresses all of these questions. Maybe not convincingly, but that’s the place to start. Also, I think people overestimate the proportion of immigrants to America who were peasants.
I think Schilling described the situation fairly well. I would emphasize his point about the replication crisis; we know that social science results in general should be viewed with great suspicion. It seems that there are some around here who think that bias is a big part of the problem, and who think they know exactly how social scientists are biased, and so assume that the studies which appear support muggle realism must be more trustworthy than the other social science studies since they are the opposite of what they would expect from the prevailing biases. This strikes me as involving an utterly unreasonable overconfidence in their ability to diagnose how and why social science studies have problems, but perhaps that’s just my own bias at work.
If you think Schilling described a situation, could you rewrite that situation in your own words?
Claims about IQ are based on huge numbers of studies of huge samples. The only thing they have in common with the replication crisis is that they were done in psychology departments.
Until the return of the Rightful Caliph and a final decision on whether I am to be banned, censured, or merely receive a light flogging with the knout for that reported comment of mine, I’ll assume the best and keep commenting.
Here’s one of those “laugh to keep from crying” stories about the general knowledge of religion/religion-related matters in the mainstream media, courtesy of GetReligion.
So Time magazine has a striking cover, showing the White House morphing into the Kremlin, as commentary on those allegations of undue influence by the Russians over Trump. Very clever, very striking simile, great from a graphic design point of view.
Except that building is not the Kremlin, it’s the church referred to commonly as St Basil’s Cathedral (the official name seemingly is different). Easy mistake to make, no?
EXCEPT TIME‘S GRAPHICS PEOPLE USED PHOTOSHOP (OR SOMETHING SIMILAR) TO CUT OFF THE CROSSES OFF THE STEEPLES OF THE CHURCH.
CNN apparently go one better, when commenting on the Time cover, by calling the steeples minarets; “White House overtaken by Russian minarets on new Time cover”.
Steeples are not minarets. Minarets are not steeples. Two different things, and besides that, two different faiths.
Why does this matter? Besides the fact that it demonstrates once again why the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect is an actual thing, it also perhaps helps explain the mysterious and baffling circumstance that when the mainstream media deign to explain religion (and how they’re doing it wrong) to the masses, the masses never seem to listen and absorb the enlightenment bestowed upon them by their betters. Just maybe it’s because they can tell from what you’re saying that you don’t know your arse from your elbow on this subject?
Hmm. On the one hand, I can accept that St. Basil’s Cathedral may have overtaken the actual Kremlin as the Architectural Icon of the Russian State, in much the same way the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia has overtaken the actual Confederate Flag as the Vexillological Icon of Dixie. Churches, and armies, are generally better at getting the aesthetics right than politicians.
But when you get to the point of airbrushing out all the crosses, how do you not notice that you are dealing with a religious, not political, icon? That’s solid facepalm territory, right there. And I think unethical by the usual journalistic rules about such things.
You really think the issue here is that they “didn’t notice”?
Come on, man!
Yes, yes, you’re very cynical.
I think it’s more likely that Time (and for that matter MAD) knew what they’re doing and didn’t care. Hell, I might have done the same if I was designing that cover: to get the message across, you want to invoke the Architectural Icon of the Russian State, and St. Basil’s is more recognizable than the actual Kremlin. Why omit the crosses? Probably to avoid mixing in an unintended religious message.
I can see how this might offend an Orthodox person, but it seems like a bit of a tempest in a teapot to me.
This seems like such an incredibly obvious explanation that I’m surprised anyone is arguing about it (or is upset).
I think this is the most likely scenario, and I don’t even think it’s all that hard to see.
You want to show Russian influence over the White House, so you draw the most iconicly Russian building folk will recognize. You don’t want to accidentally send the message that the White House is becoming a theocracy or something (we’ll save that for President Pence), so you file off the crosses that most people don’t even know are there to begin with.
I don’t think anybody is questioning the, as you say rather obvious, thought process that lead to the sight gag. The question is, why didn’t they stop?
I can easily imagine a range of gags, visual or otherwise, about 19th century white male authors writing dashing adventure stories about white male protagonists thoughtlessly oppressing women and minorities while everyone cheers. If I find myself illustrating such a gag, funny as it might otherwise be, with a whitewashed Alexandre Dumas, then I don’t think “…but most people don’t even know Dumas was black!” would cut it. Either find another way to make the joke, or put it in the “clever but inappropriate” file.
Similarly, if you have to whitewash (redwash?) other peoples’ architecture and religion to make your clever joke, then don’t do that. Or at least, don’t expect not to be called out on it, and don’t pretend that it is the people calling you out who are out of line.
@John Schilling
The joke is intended as reinforcement for the in-crowd who don’t care to question it, not the gauche Trumpers nor the Orthodox Meme Squad who would pick it apart. When you’re preaching strictly to the converted, your standards are different.
I don’t think you have anything to worry about from that report. The comment was true, necessary, and not particularly unkind. (I know we should hook George Orwell up to a generator before I go here, but I kind of feel that the comment policy could be improved by putting ‘not un’ before each of the tests.)
Did St. Basil’s Cathedral have its crosses throughout the Soviet period? Is it possible that they just used an old picture?
The picture is a drawing, so they didn’t airbrush it out, but they did still have to choose to omit them.
Looking at the photo in the article (with Red Square in the foreground), I notice that those crosses are really easy to miss. They might also barely appear in whatever reference photo the artist used.
It’s also common knowledge that St. Basil’s is a metonym for Russia. Putting the Kremlin tower atop the White House would not have grabbed the eyeballs.
It’s an arguably incorrect metonym, sure. TIME is piggybacking on an even older and more widespread so-much-wrong-with-this.
Could be worse. They could have painted a picture of a crane setting a giant hammer and sickle on the WH roof.
Now, now, we all know Sanders lost the primaries.
‘we all know Sanders lost the primaries’
He won. Hillary stole them. She got caught. Sanders voters didn’t vote for her. President Trump.
Or maybe Sanders lost and I just don’t know it.
You might want to look at who else made that “mistake” (and made it first).
You can probably accuse TIME of a certain kind of intellectual theft, but the outrage over the “don’t kids know anything these days” and “religion is so misrepresented” is typical Deiseachism.
Take something you know a lot about. Find someone drawing on that subject at third or fourth hand. Note the rampant mistakes.
For example do a google image search for Kremlin.
Really? Your argument is that we should lay off Time magazine because they are demonstrating at least as much journalistic integrity as Mad magazine and the average internet user? Or maybe just plagiarizing Mad, and we can’t expect plagiarists to correct mistakes in the source material.
No, my argument is that the TIME mistake doesn’t have anything in particular to do with religion. Especially the “no crosses” part.
Just as the fact that google image search for “Kremilin” is dominated by pictures of St. Basil’s doesn’t have anything in particular to do with religion.
The Mad cover appears to use a photo that has the crosses edge-on to the camera. (Unless the mistake you meant was using St. Basil’s at all)
That’s a good point about the crosses being edge on in whatever the source is for the MAD cover. It still excises them from the image though, no matter how faithful to actual sight lines the image is.
My point is simply that the image evokes Red Square and The Kremlin as a political place, not a religious one. This doesn’t have anything to do with anti-religious feelings, but rather the particular history and iconography of Red Square.
There is a reason I put “mistake” in quotes. The choice to exclude specifically religious symbols makes perfect sense given the clear objective of the image. The image is not trying to make a link between Donald Trump and the Russian Orthodox Church (and, indeed, St. Basil’s is actually a museum and no longer a church.) The image is making a link between Donald Trump and Russian politics.
Yes. They are altering images in order to more properly fit the narrative they want to promote. I’m glad we all agree on that.
But isn’t that supposed to be a bad thing?
C’mon, bro. With or without the crosses, with the Kremlin or St. Basil’s, it’s a Photoshop mashup on the cover of a C-list newsmag. It’s not evidence, it’s a metaphor. It’s not even supposed to be a very tight metaphor.
Altering images to push a narrative is wrong or at least sketchy… when the images are working to document something. If the cover image was a Victory Day parade and we noticed that a couple blocks of ZSUs or marching soldiers had been copy/pasted over something, that would be worth asking questions about. This? This is stupid.
Ah, HeelBearCub, the days of wine and roses! How sweet that you are so attuned to the nuances of my style that you have examples at your fingers’ ends!
I don’t want to ride the religion angle (though that is certainly there) but rather the fakery going on. Using an iconic (ironic, in view of what is being referred to) image of “Russianness”that you know is not what the intended reference points to, is the equivalent of all those trash history/science/politics/economics etc. posts all too comment on the Internet that get reblogged on Facebook and spread around as “This is the REAL TRUTH”.
How convincing and accurate would you find an article in a foreign media outlet discussing something putatively going on in Washington D.C. that was illustrated with images of the Statue of Liberty and which had a map showing Washington D.C. located in Washington State? And what would your opinion be if the magazine or paper photoshopped in images of the White House and the Lincoln Memorial into photos of Seattle, on the grounds that “well, our readers think Washington is in Washington!”
What about an illustration showing Buckingham Palace being transmogrified into the National Cathedral (instead of the White House), the implication being “England is a puppet of the American government”?
Would you take it that the article accompanied by this illustration was indeed factual, accurate and trustworthy? I’m sure there are people outside the members of Russian churches in the USA and indeed other religious types who recognise that the image is that of a cathedral and not the Kremlin, and that this gives them reason to think “Since they plainly don’t know the difference between their backside and a hole in the ground on this one, why should I think the article inside is any better than a steaming heap of manure and is worth reading?”
@Deiseach:
This:
Seems to contrast directly with this:
and this:
and this:
And really the entirety of your original post.
So, I’m really not sure what point you are trying to make.
As to the other matter, if an English media outlet wanted to make a point like “England is a puppet of the American government” there a variety of images they could use to illustrate this, depending on what specific point they wanted to make.
Transforming Buckingham Palace into The White House would likely work generically, as the white house is iconographic enough to be recognizable to an English audience. On the other hand, if the issue at hand had to do with immigration (say Obama successfully had pushed the U.K. to stave off Brexit), morphing Big Ben in to the Statue of Liberty would make a different point. Morphing something into the National Cathedral wouldn’t work because it isn’t iconographic. No one recognizes it and there is no history of it serving as a metonym for the U.S. in the way St. Basil’s has for Russia and the Soviet Union.
If the point was to say something about the influence of US Capital Markets on England, perhaps the famous Charging Bull of Wall St or even the Chrysler Building or The Empire State Building. The actual front of the Stock Exchange building would not work as well, because it is less well known.
To me the whole thing just screamed “Murray Gell-Mann amnesia effect.”
The entire Putin-Trump connection looks like mass delusion and confirmation bias to me, so the screw-up with St. Basil’s makes me think “they don’t know enough about Russia to understand the significance of the various landmarks, and their heads are up their asses with regards to the workings of the Trump administration, too.”
@Conrad Honcho:
Deiseach referred to Gell-Mann amnesia to begin with.
However, the TIME article (and the MAD Magazine cover) aren’t trying to make any particular point about the what buildings house what political function in Russia. They merely want to clearly evoke “a Russian building”. St. Basil’s is used because a) it’s across the street from the Kremlin on Red Square, b) and is far more distinct and recognizable than the Kremlin, therefore c) it has been used to signal “Russia” for about 70 years.
The Statue of Liberty has no official US function either, but stands as a metonym for the the US nonetheless.
I mean, the statue of liberty has been held up as a bastion of U.S. values for a pretty long time. Whereas St. Basil’s is merely recognizable, but also has its own clear value, because it’s a church. Maybe you could swing it if Russia was super religious, but according to the Google machine only about 41% of Russians are Orthodox, although I believe Putin is pretty big into it.
@HeelBearCub
Ha! I did not notice that. I feel silly.
Putin was a literal card-carrying atheist Communist for the first forty years of his life, then became a devout Russian Orthodox Christian right after embarking on a political career in the newly non-atheist, who knew there were so many Christians, Russia. Unclear how serious he is about it.
@John Schilling
I was under the impression he was baptized secretly by his mother who was a devout Christian, and the cross you see him wearing while shirtless was hers.
Obviously “I was just pretending to be a godless commie” is convenient, but in Putin’s case there’s a plausible cover story.
@AnonYEmous:
It’s not, really an active church. Services have been held there very occasionally since the fall of The Soviet Union, but it’s essentially a secular tourist attraction at this point.
As such, it can stand as a sign of the power of the central state, although I doubt that has very much to do with why it is used.
Again, it’s on Red Square. The Soviet’s used Red Square as a backdrop for propaganda displays like military parades. Stalin gave a famous address to Red Square in 1941 to rally the country as the Germans advanced. Even before the soviet era, Red Square was synonymous with Russia.
“It’s not, really an active church. Services have been held there very occasionally since the fall of The Soviet Union, but it’s essentially a secular tourist attraction at this point.”
I mean, the point is that it’s not really
“a sign of the power of the central state”
I don’t think tourist attractions are used in this fashion, especially ones which have and had a clear purpose before their conversion (heck, it still gets used for services occasionally).
And if it is, in the form of Red Square,
“synonymous with Russia.”
Then it’s still kind of silly because Soviet Russia doesn’t exist anymore, even if Russia does, which already starts Time off on the wrong foot. On top of that, it looks like the Kremlin is in that same shot of the Red Square, so it’s not like that couldn’t have been used. And finally, even if Time is just going along with someone else’s category error, that still makes them look bad; at best, they’re talking down to people and dumbing down their message, which still makes them sound dumb.
And to John Schilling: Yeah, I should’ve just said he projects that image, which is the same thing for what I was saying really (assuming that most people believe him, and I do think that’s the case.)
@AnonYEmous:
I really don’t think you are giving a fair hearing to what I am saying.
If they had used an image of The Kremlin, what percentage of TIME subscribers would have recognized it as of Russian origin? What percentage of anyone? That is the only measure that matters.
If someone had wanted to make a point about French influence, they might have painted an Eiffel Tower into being.
If they colored it in red and the word “RUSSIA” appeared somewhere on the page, a pretty high percentage imo
A pretty high percentage would’ve recognised the word “RUSSIA” as signalling Russianness, but that would’ve also been the case if the background picture had been e.g. French government buildings.
@Matt M:
There is a style of political cartoon where one is hit over the head with metaphor by literally spelling it out. This anti-Irish cartoon being an example.
But that is not a style that is used frequently (perhaps ever) on the cover of TIME. Even if it were that TIME did sometimes use it, it’s not the style of this particular cover and there is no particular reason to demand that this cover be in that style.
I wouldn’t have known that was anti-Irish if you hadn’t told me, but I’m struck by how much better the art is than most modern cartoons.
Well call me crazy, but part of the calculus of deploying a sophisticated metaphor is that you take a chance your audience might not get it.
So on the one hand, you’re arguing that they HAD to use a cathedral because the audience wouldn’t appreciate the Krelmin as uniquely Russian…
But on the other hand, you’re also arguing that they can’t just use the word RUSSIA on the cover because that would just be too obvious and simplistic for their artistic tastes…
@Matt M:
I think you are just arguing to argue at this point.
This seems unnecessarily rude for someone who goes around being the local manners police. The tone of the OP was rather hyperbolic but that doesn’t justify making things personal.
It is very typical of what Deiseach posts frequently on these topics, the getting down an eye level with the mole-hill to see the anti-religious mountain.
But the criticism is fair enough. Probably a needlessly aggressive formulation of my point. Is it the -ism that grates? The typical? The two put together?
In any case, I also think that Deiseach presumes the right to post in a needlessly aggressive manner on (at the very least) specific topics. It would be nice if sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander.
Uh, imo probably the two put together. The phrase brings to mind something along the lines of checking the username and rolling ones eyes and moving on from there.
On this I unfortunately agree. But casting the style as an eponym (I think that’s the right term?) is more petrol than water.
In mild defense, I was originally thinking of the recent question on distinctive posting styles (that can be identified across forums and various pseudo-identities). But I didn’t make that point really at all.
And in your defense, the recent Great Deiseach Revival has been harder to isolate and examine ever since the even more recent Sidlesbot Event.
@Paul Brinkley:
Care to point me at a post? I actually was curious about what Deiseach meant at the beginning of her post, but not enough to ask until now.
How do you use the subjunctive in English properly? Now that I’ve finally understood it in Portuguese I have a tendency to use it in English also, it’s sort of neat. I know people might wonder which century you’re from if you use it in spoken word, but still, I like it 🙂 but I’m unsure where it is grammatically correct in English. If I understand it correctly it is only correct in a sentence which expresses desire of something, e.g. “I wish that he be quiet.” (Of course nowadays people would say rather something like “I want him to be quiet”.) Are there any other situations where it can be used?
“I wish that he be quiet.” doesn’t sound right to my ear. It should be “I wish that he would be quiet.” I can’t help you with the proper use of the subjunctive, because I don’t know what it means even after looking it up.
The subjunctive would be: “I wish that he were quiet.”
There is one case I know (and enjoy using) – in the case of counterfactuals. So, for example, “If it were raining…” instead of “If it was raining…”, or in a common phrase, “I wish you were here.” This is still natural enough to usually pass without notice among middle to upper class americans.
Or, actually, two. What wikipedia calls the mandative subjunctive (in “that” clauses conveying a want/need/requirement, e.g. “Candace insisted that Horatio be admitted” vs “was admitted”) is pretty much mandatory in my area.
Edit:
This second instance looks like your example, but as Brad says it sounds a little weird to me. I’m guessing “wish” doesn’t require subjunctive there? Or it needs an auxiliary? In contrast “I demand he be quiet” or “I request he be quiet” seem to be okay (though better as “he be silenced/he be quieted”?).
The subjunctive is often used in a counterfactual. “If I were a rich man…” as opposed to “If I was a rich man…”; the former indicates that the speaker is not a rich man and the rest of the sentence describes what he would do if he were indeed rich. The latter technically refers to being rich some time in the past, but in practice everyone will take it as the former.
“I wish that he be quiet” is an unusual sentence; it sounds oddly imperious, as if some royal figure is announcing this to the world at large and expecting someone to enforce that desire. “I wish that he would be quiet”, as Brad suggests, would be the normal phrasing (still subjunctive)
Another counterfactual subjunctive fan here.
“Were I an advocate of lawyers, I’d agree.”
Subjunctive is appealing to me because it reduces word count.
“If you were more attentive, you’d’ve spotted the finch hiding in the upper left.”
Some people (including me) will use it after “suggest” and “recommend,” as in, “I suggested/recommended that he go home immediately.”
Also, in sentences like this: “It is important that she go home immediately.”
There are two subjunctives in English, the uninflected one that you are talking about and the one in counterfactuals that some commenters are referring to. The latter one is, as they say, used in the antecedent of conditionals, as well as the complement of “wish” specifically. You say “I wish he were quiet”, not “I wish he be quiet”.
The uninflected subjunctive that you’re asking about is used not with verbs of desire, but with verbs that express demands, orders, or the like. So “ask”, “demand”, “ordered”, “suggest”, etc. Also, as Michael Foland points out above, you also use it after “be important/essential/necessary” when you are talking about the requirements for achieving some goal.
The word order is as if there were a silent verb “should”: for example, “The doctor ordered that the patient [should] not be disturbed.”* My impression is that the uninflected subjunctive is predominantly American, whereas British speakers tend to actually pronounce the “should”.
*For this reason, the silent “should” is arguably the correct analysis of the phenomenon, so your uninflected subjunctive is simply the infinitive, preceded by an unpronounced modal verb. If it were actually a finite subjunctive verb form, then “be” and “have” would precede negation.
I seem, well, I did not recognize “should be” as a subjunctive, I thought subjunctive in English was specifically the construction where you don’t conjugate the verb and keep it in the infinitive. I thought that desire/demand both belonged to that category but yeah, rolling it on my tongue a couple of times after people pointed out that my example is weird, I guess it makes more sense with demand.
In any case, it is way more common in Spanish and Portuguese, in English you don’t really have to use it at all, which is not the case in those two Romance languages.
I wonder whether there are other Germanic languages which have subjunctive or whether that is a part of Romance grammar adopted by English. German has the Konjunktiv I (z.B.: “Er sagte es sei so und so”), which is quite a unique grammatical feature (AFAIK), but that’s something else.
The comparison with the Romance subjunctive is really not useful for making sense of the English phenomenon. There is neither a historical connection nor a wide-reaching similarity in the environments in which they occur.
It is also not true that you don’t have to use the construction in English. You can pronounce or leave out the “should”, but you can’t just have a plain indicative of the main verb.
I don’t know what the historical usage of the Konjunktiv I was, I wouldn’t be surprised if it used to occur in contexts like “want” or “demand”. Some varieties of German use “sollen” under both “demand/order” and “want”.
How cool, Trump wants to shut down the national endowment for humanities.
What would you expect to be the consequence to the nation of shutting down the national endowment for the humanities?
It’s easy to see benefits for funding science and technology and engineering research. You may disagree on the amounts or the priorities or the management of that kind of funding, you may even philosophically disagree with having the government do it, but it’s not so hard to see why it could benefit the nation over time–better science and technology have a direct impact on the world that’s pretty easy to observe. This makes it a lot easier to make a case for, say, NIH grants.
It’s not so easy to make that case for funding arts or humanities. It may be a good idea, maybe there’s a deep societal payoff in the future, but it’s not something you can easily point at. When Alice says “this program is funding a bunch of scholarship that craps on my cherished beliefs” and Bob says “this program is wasting money on boondoggles,” it’s a lot easier to come up with a good answer when we’re talking about science/technology research, rather than humanities or arts.
Just to clarify, do you think the government shouldn’t fund arts and humanities?
I’m not albatross11, but yes absolutely.
I marched for the NSF and NIH when their funding seemed to be in jeopardy. I’d like to think I’d do so even if I wasn’t a scientist. Science is key to American greatness after all.
But funding the humanities is worse than burying the money in a ditch. Most of it will simply be spent to no effect, and what remains will fund propaganda in support of radical anti-American ideology.
I think one consistent theme I identified with Trump supporters is they are willing to burn EVERYTHING to win the culture war. EVERYTHING.
—
If you think the totality of arts and humanities in the US is a combination of “no effect” and “radical anti-American ideology,” (your words, not mine) then you are a very small, very sad person.
care to offer some thoughts on which arts and humanities funded by the US aren’t simply no-effect or radical anti-American ideology?
Have you ever read “Rules for Radicals” by any chance? If not I’m afraid that you’re in for a surprise…
Anyway I’m not terribly interested in responding to personal attacks.
Totality of _government funded_ arts and humanities. It’s an important distinction.
Taking down the opposition’s propaganda organs does not count as burning “EVERYTHING”.
>If you think the totality of arts and humanities in the US is a
since when is the national endowment for humanities “the totality of arts and humanities in the US”?
I wonder if Bastiat has anything to say on the matter.
@Incurian
That article can easily be rebutted by pointing to the many arts that didn’t get government support, yet did spread globally. Rock & roll, jazz, rap, graffiti art, etc.
Government funding of art nearly always goes to already established art of the type that is appreciated by the elite. Theater tends to be heavily subsidized for the claimed purpose of supporting art, while this is far less true for movies. Why? Theater is for the elite and movies are for the common man.
Now, of course you are free to argue that the tastes of the elite are so superior that the rest of society needs to pay for them, but this is a fundamentally anti-libertarian position, where the state decides for people which entertainment they ought to enjoy.
It is at a completely different level than funding for science & technology and engineering, where discoveries can enable us to solve major problems or do entirely new things. By contrast, most art tends to merely seek new ways of expressing the same, which, while entertaining and potentially uplifting, provides no obvious obvious improvements over the ability of the art of yesterday to entertain and uplift.
Furthermore, humanity seems to have a fairly strong drive towards art and self-expression in general, so given the population of the earth, there seems to be no dearth of it; where we can point to some lack that needs to be resolved to clearly improve upon the human condition. In contrast, it is trivial to point out many cases where scientific, technological and engineering advances would better mankind.
This week’s effulgent alt.praise of “Saint (mass-murderer) Anders Breivik” — in particular the hundreds of alt.comments that, upon explicitly racial grounds, praise and justify Breivik’s child-homicides — is objective evidence of a high prevalence of “burn EVERYTHING” (including people) alt.Trumpish cognition that richly deserves to be called “pathological”, isn’t it?
The contrast with NEH-aligned humanists like Sherman Alexie is striking:
And so, on the evidence, Ilya Shipster’s assessment of alt.Trumpish cognition is pretty well-grounded in fact, isn’t it? Yikes.
@John
Hey, what’s your opinion on Nelson Mandela?
Instead of making sweeping generalizations about how the NEH is or isn’t radical anti-American propaganda, we could actually look at what they funded. They have a nice, searchable database of all their grants.
Here is a list of all NEH grants in 2016 that received media coverage. (There were over 800 grants total in 2016, but I narrowed it to ones with media coverage to make it easier to skim. Besides, it can’t have been good propaganda if nobody heard about it.)
There are two major categories that most of these fall into: First, museums, archives, and preservation – collecting and digitizing historical documents, documenting near-extinct languages, that sort of thing. This is totally unobjectionable – you can’t study history at all without sources.
Second, you’ll see a lot of historical studies, funding the production of a book or research paper. Now, maybe I’m just not up to date on how the culture war is being waged, but I don’t think a study of a leper colony in the Philippines is the battlefield that shapes our country.
There’s no objective measure of whether something is culture-war-related, but of the 48 grants on that list, there are a total of 4 Women’s Studies grants and 5 African-American History grants. Most of which have only a very tenuous connection to the culture war, like “This study on 19th-century female art collectors will give us insights into how marginalized groups gain cultural capital.”
Conclusion: The NEH generally funds historical research, not anti-American propaganda.
@beleester
If the study of the leper colonies is so vitally important, then it shouldn’t be too much trouble to get people to voluntarily donate to fund it then, should it?
In support of beleester’s admirable comment, NEH-sponsored awards like the annual Jefferson Lectures represent a standard of civil, rational, history-respecing, science-respecting discourse to which SSC commenters can reasonably aspire.
What’s the altermative? Converting the Library of Congress to the “Golf Course of Congress“? Yikes.
@Aapje
I don’t know the numbers, but plenty of government support goes to the film industry, usually in the form of “tax credits if you film here” to support local business, etc.
@Conrad Honcho: That’s an argument that proves way, waaay too much. Try applying that logic to literally anything else the government funds:
“If national defense is so vitally important, then it shouldn’t be too much trouble to get people to voluntarily donate to fund it then, should it?”
“If research on climate change is so vitally important, then it shouldn’t be too much trouble to get people to voluntarily donate to fund it then, should it?”
Better yet, since everyone in this thread is talking up how science and technology funding is so important, how about taking a look at the NSF’s grants? How many of those are something cool where you can easily point to the benefits, and how many of them are the equivalent of the leper-colony study, things that have only a niche interest or a vague handwave about how they might kinda sorta be useful later?
@dndnrsn
That tends to be corporate welfare though, which also goes to other corporate activities. For example, corporate welfare for Apple is also not support for the arts, even though there are multiple Apple computers in the Museum of Modern Art.
At least in my country, you have special committees which decide what art gets funded and what doesn’t (staffed by the established ‘elite’ art scene, who look down on most innovation). The ‘film here’ subsidies generally don’t care about what the quality is of your movies (Uwe Boll famously took advantage of this). Also, the ‘stage’ theaters themselves get a lot of subsidies, while movie theaters generally don’t.
I suspect you did not read past the first paragraph, and are not familiar with Bastiat in general (which is unfortunate because he’s pretty awesome).
This actually flipped me from “meh, pork flows are always getting rerouted, Uni departments can deal with it until the next inevitable cycle” to “oh shit, please don’t” on this one. Thanks, beleester.
Though I’m not convinced it shouldn’t read as
😉
@Ilya Shpitser:
You’re a troll. Reported.
I don’t particularly agree with Ilya in this case, but he is not a troll and that comment wasn’t trolling.
@Space Viking
The reporting system doesn’t work.
@Incurian
You are correct that I was in a hurry and didn’t give your link fair consideration, which was rude, for which I apologize.
Then again, it is also good manners not to merely reply with links to semi-long articles, without a summary, an introduction or an excerpt to convince others that the article is worth reading as none of us have infinite time; and all the comments here have many more readers than writers (one, usually). So I would suggest taking the time to do so, in the future.
As for the article, it is correct in arguing against the claim that employment is a good argument for these kinds of subsidies. However, no one in this thread made that argument, so I fail to understand why you chose to link to that article, as it does not seem à propos.
Aapje: Shoot! I thought that was the essay comparing many public vs private art thingies. I guess I should have reread the whole thing to be sure.
@Nornagest:
Obvious trolling.
@Anonymous:
Then it looks like the trolls will come out of the woodwork. Fun times ahead.
Ilya is not a troll. He was actually one of the top quality posters here until recently, but he has not taken Trump’s victory well.
It seems that he feels that his job is under threat by Trump.
@Ilya:
This is the worst comment of yours I have ever read, for reasons others have pointed out. It’s about two sigmas below your average comments, which are thoughtful and well-reasoned. I’m not going to psychoanalyze you, but I am going to say -1.
Still 1 SD low, but interesting. My take on Trump supporters is that they are willing to burn everything to end the culture war. Last-ditch, scorched-earth defense.
Also, Trump voter != Trump supporter. I’d prefer President Pence, frankly.
(To be perfectly intellectually honest: I’m a Trump voter, just not in the narrow technical sense of actually having voted for Trump; since my vote was guaranteed not to make a difference, I voted my conscience, and filled in the bubble for the Solidarity Party.)
Please stop doing this. It doesn’t do you or the causes you profess to support any favours at all.
What’s so objectionable about the question? Quite a few of us don’t think the government should fund arts and humanities.
It’s an attempt at reversion to the object level, which is used in almost every case (this one included) to attempt to offhandedly negate whatever meta-level argument has just been put forward.
Albatross gave an excellent meta-level account of the potential reasons why someone may be against government funding of arts and humanities, while not actually presenting a moral judgement on it. Ilya then immediately demanded an object-level response. The only reason to do that rather than engaging on a meta-level is because he was attempting to force a moral judgement in one direction or another. The trash-fire nature of the rest of the discussion stems directly from that insistence, since any possibility of a meta-level treatment had been pushed away.
This is an extremely common tactic, one that is easily recognised, and one which tends to immediately turn me against those who use it.
What’s the point of alt.smashing the NEH, if refugee writers and poets find welcoming shelter — even creatively stimulating shelter! — at the NIH and/or the NSF?
For details, see (for example) Andrew Jacobs’ article “Neurocognitive poetics: methods and models for investigating the neuronal and cognitive-affective bases of literature reception” (Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2015), and his followup article with Roel Willem, “The fictive brain: neurocognitive correlates of engagement in literature” (Review of General Psychology, 2017).
Transdisciplinary STEAM-works like these provide ample evidence that Snow’s “Two Cultures” — science as contrasted with humanities — are merging creatively and enthusiastically.
Perhaps alt.SSC commenters are apprehensive — with ample reason (as it seems to me) — that the 21st century’s irretrievably integrative threefold marriage of science, the humanities, and psychotherapy may spawn a 21st century threefold-hybridized Cphulthu-fish that “swims levo” with trebled velocity and irresistible neuroprogressive power.
Gosh, that even sounds like fun! `Cuz in games of “alt.Whack-a-Mole”, the smart money bets on the creative NeuroEnlightenment! 🙂
1. The USA has a very pragmatic orientation where things are only good if they are useful and/or make money , so the humanities and arts, which tend to favor non-commercial virtues, tend to be looked down on. Note that commercial arts such as popular music, movies, and bestsellers are quite celebrated. I wouldn’t say Garth Brooks or 50 Cent aren’t artists.
2. One of the side effects of academia going so far left is to get conservatives really mad at them and eager to defund them. As stated above, the scientists can go ‘well, you do want a cure for cancer, don’t you’ (and as I recall Congress restored most of Trump’s science funding cuts), but the humanities people (as you say) have a much harder time making that case in our business-oriented society.
How much government funding goes to helping out aspiring commercial artists.
I’d be willing to bet that 50 Cent never got a NEH grant to help him get off the ground…
Your second paragaph is largely correct, but I’d rather cut to the chase. If 90% of humanities professors spend 90% of their time shouting about how wicked, stupid, and awful conservatives are, it’s no surprise that if you put conservatives in charge of their budget, they MIGHT want to make some changes…
If 90% of your exposure to humanities professors is soundbites cherry-picked by people trying to get you worked up, I can see how you might believe this. That doesn’t mean it’s even remotely close to the truth. Do you actually know any humanities professors?
The 90% of their time is a clear exaggeration.
That said, I’d be shocked if any more than 10% of Humanities professors have a positive or neutral view of American conservatism. And many of them do not hesitate to make this known.
As I said back when we were discussing the march for science, if you want to openly identify yourself as an enemy of Group X, then you shouldn’t be shocked that if Group X gains power, they aren’t exactly accommodating towards your wishes…
@Matt M:
There is a chicken and egg problem here.
Another way to say this is that “ivory tower” has been a slur directed at academics, primarily from the right, for a looooong time.
I would similarly be shocked if more than 10% of the things humanities professors heard coming out of the mouths of conservative commentators were positive about the humanities. The percentage of humanities professors who have nice things to say about conservatives may be low, but it is not as low as the number of conservatives who have nice things to say about humanities professors.
As I said back when we were discussing the March for Science, let’s not pretend that academia declared a one-sided war here.
The question “What do humanitarian academics think about conservatives” is (of course) a subset ot the broader question “What do humanitarian academics think about?”.
In this regard, please let me commend to SSC readers two well-reviewed, academia-centric, SJ-positive, works by Elif Batuman: her (nonfiction) The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (2010) and her (fiction) The Idiot (2017).
A essential virtue of Batuman’s works — a virtue that is not readily evident in alt.angry critiques of academia — is that her observations are funny.
Take the SSC Batuman Self-Assessment Test:
Of GoodRead’s 29 reader-chosen Batuman quotes, how many impress you as being either funny, or true, or both?
• 00-09 keep reading alt.Roosh
• 10-19 pre-med, pre-law, or engineering
• 20-29 unhappy, but in your own way!
Here’s a type-specimen of a Batuman-quote
Hasn’t Batuman provided the SSC commentariat with a working credo that is solidly grounded in contemporary neuroscience?
“The SSC: where everyone thinks they’re Dumbo!” 🙂
Moving swiftly along…
The humanities is a big tent. It’s certainly fond of themes that most conservatives aren’t, and it’s been infected with the cultural fungus of critical theory, so it would certainly be a hostile work environment for your average conservative, and I don’t blame conservative policy-makers for taking a dim view of the field; but e.g. the lit professors I’ve met spend most of their time talking about literature, as one might expect. I went to one of the leftier schools in the States, and even there I don’t think most of my humanities professors viewed what they were doing as a political enterprise — although some did.
I’d say it’s the softer social sciences — sociology, poli sci, area studies — that have the real hate-on for conservatism. It wouldn’t be far wrong to call sociology the study of leftism.
Sayyyy — those are nice em-dashes! 🙂 Yessir, we’re all Dumbos now!
k
How long are we going back? It doesn’t take very long for modern left/right distinctions to be completely meaningless when mapped onto a historical time period. Can Deiseach provide some historical context? Did people use the phrase “ivory tower” when they were describing, say, theology departments considering the question of how many angels could dance on the head of a pin (and the metaphysical question of whether each individual angel was an individual species, too)?
In quantitative support of Controls Freak’s point, the invaluable textual resource Google Ngrams establishes that the phrase “Ivory Tower” was essentially unknown prior to 1920, and came into general use only following WWII.
How cool, Trump wants to shut down the national endowment for humanities.
After going to their website and reading the article on T.S. Eliot, I want to shut down the National Endowment for the Humanities.
(A more desperate grasping at straws for clickbait headlines I never saw; “people ain’t gunna read no long article ’bout no dead white male poet ‘lessen we sex it up or sumpin’! How ’bout some semi-salacious hintin’ he wuz gay as Christmas?” Never mind that Auden, who was gay and was a contemporary and indeed Eliot was his editor at Faber, never mentioned anything of the sort that I know of, and the omission of Auden’s name from the select name-dropping of “here are London literary figures who thought he was a bender” is very telling).
Lol … Deiseach, your NEH observation is 100% correct! 🙂
Yes, that NEH/Eliot article was pure clickbait — clickbait for NEH’s banner-link to the NEH’s crown jewel for 2017: Martha Nussbaum’s “Powerlessness and the Politics of Blame”, which was this year’s Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities … the Jefferson Lecture being the NEH’s most prominent annual award (by far).
In Nussbaum’s own, explicitly SJ-positive words (video here, text here):
Hmmm — perhaps Nussbaum’s SJ-positive NEH-highlighted topics and methods of discourse, are no bad thing for SSC commenters to embrace?
Among the SSC commentariat, there’s no shortage of SJ-oppositional anger that is (in Nussbaum’s terms), “poisonous”, “incoherent”, based upon “bad values”, and “fatally flawed from a normative viewpoint” … isn’t that pretty evident?
It’s unsurprising that angry alt.Trumpistas hope to silence eloquent, rational, committed, science-respecting, history-informed, SJ-positive, NEH-aligned voices like Martha Nussbaum’s, isn’t it?
And it’s unsurprising, too, that alt.Trumpistas dream of a thought-policed alt.Elysian SSC: “where newbies are unconfused by Jeffersonian ideas” 🙂
I counter Professor Nussbaum’s proposal with Star Trek’s The Enemy Within 🙂
Lol Deiseach, please let me say, that’s a mighty fine Star Trek link that you posted! 🙂 🙂 🙂
Yes, if-and-when the Technobarbarous Enlightenment achieves something like a neurocognitive “reboot” capacity, it will be mighty interesting to see how moral philosophers like Martha Nussbaum advise people to adjust their recommended Cluster B pathology-vs-virtue trait-setpoints.
Hopefully, when the alt.fear, alt.ignorance, alt.anger, and even alt.violence, that the advent of neurocognitive reboot therapies surely will elicit, all diminish sufficiently that reasoned moral discourse is feasible, the emergent stable consensus preference will be something like “mid-range, with plenty of individual choice, and plenty of individual diversity, and plenty of societal embrace of individual diversity”.
In hoping for an SJ-positive, diversity-respecting, Star-Trekkian neurocognitive equilibrium (and even working concretely towards the requisite regenerative healing capacities) perhaps no small number of SSC commenters — including you and me, and even luminaries like Martha Nussbaum and Elon Musk too — can all of us “splice hands”! 🙂
John: you do know that “SJ-positive” sounds like the bad result of a blood test, right?
alt.STD?
I think I’ve seen this story before.
A half-measure taken by a sellout. Now he’s never going to get around to establishing the National Endowment Against the Humanities….
(Contrast art, literature, and history supported by a government with that opposed by a government: the latter is almost without exception better.)
So it’s late in the thread but I wanted to give a shout out to everyone who made it to the San Diego meet-up last night. I had great time even though I only really spoke to those on the northern end of the table and I didn’t get to say anything to Scott beyond “hi, I’m a fan of you blog”. Special thanks to Shawna for acting as organizer and to Katja for being nice while we were standing in line and before knowing that I was a cactus person.
This is probably just a typo in your comment, but it’s also the sort of verbal typo I can imagine myself making when meeting someone (internet) famous for the first time.
Is there any reason to believe that the distinction between alpha and beta male is real in humans?
I don’t think it’s anything so clear cut, as it is in some other species. Humans aren’t really pack animals.
Worth noting that even in wolves, contemporary research has pretty much discarded the whole greek numeric thing as an artifact of observations of very atypical packs.
+1
I’m wondering why the alpha-beta thing got such a hold on people’s imaginations.
@Nancy Lebovitz
Because it’s a useful shorthand for describing “collections of behaviors that get you laid versus collections of behaviors that do not get you laid.”
Because it fits observable behavior, to first order.
For the same reason self help books, cults, and MLM grab a hold of people’s imagination. They allow people to think they understand a complicated world and can effectively manipulate it through “one neat trick”.
It’s an understandable impulse.
I’ve been working from the assumption that the alpha/beta thing is a useful model for the problem of guys picking up women in bars. But I don’t see any particular reason to think it’s a great model for understanding politics or the larger society.
As well as the reasons given above, I also note that while canids don’t have a simplistic pack-dominance hierarchy of the kind denoted by “alpha/beta” mechanics, primates certainly seem to. And I don’t think anyone reaches adulthood without noticing that specific individuals within a given social group develop obvious dominant traits or the way in which others respond to them.
The real problem is that “human social mechanics are complex, multidimensional and difficult to tease out due to operating on so many levels at once” isn’t a satisfying or vindicating statement, especially to those who may already be feeling victimised by said mechanics. Meanwhile, as our host has previously evinced, the primary alternatives presented to people in that situation are, in order: “Oh well, sucks to be you!” and “Shut up you disgusting white male!”
Given that context, I’d be surprised if a comforting mythology of some form didn’t eventually manifest.
@Zorgon
I don’t think it’s used as a “comforting mythology” but a practical model for achieving a goal. If you want to get laid and are not getting laid, then stop doing the behaviors that are labeled “beta” and start doing more of the behaviors labeled “alpha.” If you then get laid more, that validates the model. If not, update the model.
Alpha and beta are map, not territory.
Without taking a position on whether the “alpha” model is good/correct/useful, the criticisms in this thread remind me of the fallacy of grey: “This idea is in the map and not the territory (as if there are ideas that aren’t?), therefore this idea is wrong.”
While I don’t doubt that this is a powerful internal narrative for those sold on the “alpha/beta” model of human social dynamics, I feel obliged to point out that an observed increase in desired outputs from enacting a model does not mean that the model accurately reflects reality or even is necessarily successful in truth (due to all the usual biases).
Accurate beliefs should pay dividends in predictive capacity, but apparent predictive capacity is not necessarily evidence of an accurate belief. There needs to be evidence of a causal arrow and even if there is, A->B does not mean B->A.
Shunting back from the meta-level a bit, The Nybbler basically hit the nail on the head with this:
As does treating human mate-selection as a transactional system, and a handful of other models. The mistake is not in noticing the pattern; the mistake is in believing that’s the whole story.
It’s an interesting question. I’d say the alpha-beta thing in wolves was actually our projecting our own primate social dynamics onto canids that don’t actually have them!
Is is true? Well, certainly there are plenty of polygamous societies where high-status men collect lots of women, but as people here point out, being high-status doesn’t always increase your Darwinian fitness (politicians may actually have less freedom in some ways given how many people are watching them), so leader-of-men and ladies-man don’t always go together. However, since the sort of introverted man who spends a lot of time on the Internet is likely to be neither (and I definitely count myself in this), he tends to conflate all the things he doesn’t have.
The other thing I’d add to Zorgon’s correct statement is that having a more complicated model may not be useful, even if it’s correct. If thinking you are the greatest thing since sliced bread inflates your confidence and makes you more effective at attracting the opposite sex…well, it’s an incorrect model, but if it gets you the results you want, who cares if it’s the whole story or not? Most people would rather have success than knowledge.
What do you mean by “real?” Is it true that there are men who have higher social status and charisma than others? Yes.
It depends on how literal-minded you’re feeling.
Technically alphas and betas don’t even exist in wolves, and there’s no reason to expect outdated models of canine pack hierarchies to apply to primates anyway.
But if you’re willing to not take figurative language literally, there has been some research on fast and slow mating strategies in humans. It’s not definitive by any stretch and people who present the question as settled in either direction are overconfident. More research is needed.
Personally, I buy it because of what I’ve seen anecdotally. That shouldn’t convince you and I don’t expect it to.
Is it real in anything?
What’s the analogy supposed to be, wolf packs? But wolves in the wild do not in fact form multi-family packs, and the only alpha/beta relationship you see is father/juvenile sons.
Wolves don’t normally do complex male dominance hierarchies, but a lot of mammals do. Elephant seals are the first that comes to mind, but there are lots of others.
Okay, granted. But how many people who peddle pop human alpha/beta male psychology have a nuanced understanding of elephant seal behavior?
I don’t think the analogy to any particular species is supposed to be all that tight. Alpha/beta/omega describe status levels in biology, not specific roles; a dominant male elephant seal is playing a different role than a dominant male gemsbok, say. (Could say the same for gorillas and chimps, but “alpha” is rarely used in primatology, for basically historical reasons.)
If there are any, I bet they read SSC comments.
I kinda get the impression that when pop-psych websites are talking about “are you an alpha male or not?” it is wolves they have in mind, not elephant seals. Lone, fearsome hunter versus blubbery beach layabout and all that.
Though this would mean that Barry “Walrus Of Love” White was indeed the most alpha male of all! 😀
Bible scholars: How many times did it happen that Isrealites messed up by abandoning the God of their fathers, for which God smote them by siccing their enemies on them?
IANABS, but IIRC roughly every second generation in I/II Kings and I/II Chronicles. An exact count may be tricky because Kings and Chronicles cover overlapping time periods from a different perspective. Most of these are relatively low-grade, non-genocidal smitings, and in many of them the enemy was the other Jewish kingdom next door. The three big ones, with unambiguously foreign enemies, are slavery in Egypt, the Assyrian conquest of Israel, and the Babylonian captivity.
It was also pretty regular in Judges.
Strictly speaking the slavery in Egypt isn’t described as the Israelites abandoning God as much as the Pharaohs forgetting Joseph’s service to their predecessors.
Yeah I wouldn’t count slavery in Egypt. Not sure about the Golden Calf though. It was the Israelites abandoning the God of their fathers, but the punishment wasn’t in the form of sic’ing their enemies on them.
Agreed on both counts. The initial migration to Egypt has a strong element of “this would have gone a lot better if y’all hadn’t been such dicks to Joseph (but that was my master plan all along, because omniscient)”, but it didn’t turn into outright slavery for many more generations and for reasons unrelated to any Israelite theological deficiencies. I was mentally condensing the two.
The Golden Calf was one of only many occasions in which the Jews of the Exodus abandoned the god of their
fatherspresent selves, which in my book earns the Jews of the Exodus the title of Stupidest People on the Face of the Earth. Y’all have seen the Lord God Almighty part the Red Sea. You eat the Manna he sends down from heaven, every day. This isn’t mythology or superstition. And while we’re on the subject, how many times have each of you, personally, seen some unbeliever consumed by a pillar of fire or fissure in the Earth or whatnot for his doubt or disobedience? But every time Moses turns his back, it’s another round of whining about how there’s no Tabasco to go with all the bland manna, and another false idol or orgy in the name of Baal or whatnot.Or possibly it’s just an allegory of some sort, not meant to be taken as the literal history of a bunch of complete idiots. But regardless, the nature of that story doesn’t allow for foreign enemies to do any smiting on the Big Guy’s behalf, so for forty years he has to keep stepping in to do it himself.
I don’t know that this makes them stupider than any other people, to include people today. There is absolutely nobody who starts smoking crack that hasn’t heard the jokes about people getting so addicted that they suck dick for crack, or who picks up a meth pipe without knowing that plenty of people who did that before them ended up with addictions that turned the lives of their children into blasted hellscapes, but every day there are people that start doing drugs.
I don’t see much daylight between this and the Exodus Jews who had seen the smiting that God delivered to the last guy to do whatever sin they were doing.
The person who smokes crack or meth or whatever, is merely betting that they have more common sense and willpower than the obvious losers they see about them – and not every user is an obvious loser, so this is something that is at least subject to argument or analysis. The person who worships Baal in year 20 of the Exodus, is betting that they can put one over on vengeful interventionist deity after a generation’s worth of experience with the varied forms of smiting.
These are two different degrees of stupidity.
To be fair, the Bible only gives us the examples of those who were smitten … sorry, smited 😛 … nothing (as far as I know) about those that went a-worshipping foreign gods and got away with it.
If we had good data on the probability God smiting you for worshipping foreign gods, relative to the probability of getting disastrously addicted if you start smoking crack (and indeed data on how much fun it is to worship foreign gods relative to worshipping the God of Israel, versus how much fun it is to smoke crack relative to limiting yourself to currently-legal drugs), then you’re talking 🙂
Isn’t the past tense smote?
Several. Can’t remember off the top of my head, but the Babylonian Exile was the big one here, I think.
I think it was six. The story of the old testament is “Israel obeys God, Israel does well, Israel becomes corrupt and disobeys God, Israel gets jacked up.” And the story of the new testament is basically “stop expecting state laws to fix your shit, you have to behave righteously as an individual.”
Is that what the story of the NT is? The state is part of ‘the world,’ but I didn’t get the impression that was the part they focused on in general. I’m willing to believe this is present to some extent, and would be interested to hear you expand on it.
It’s an interesting interpretation for sure.
The Jews were expecting a warrior-king Messiah to come and overthrow the Romans and restore their claim to the promised land. Jesus spoke out against the legalistic (religious) laws that were fed by this belief leading to much missing the point of the religious laws, and much of the NT is about reinterpreting the OT in light of Jesus’ life and teachings.
I would say the story of the NT could be phrased as “God has created a New Covenant not limited to a people group or state”
I would be wary of the ‘behave righteously as an individual’ interpretation – that’s more of a reformation/puritanism belief. In some ways there’s a more individual focus, yes, but the NT is still very big on the importance of community (or assembly, church, what have you).
(In the context of the stories) Jesus is the perfect human. The perfect instantiation of the logos, the highest aim for any individual person, he understands truth and he acts correctly, in the spirit of God’s law, ignoring or overthrowing the corrupt law of the Pharisees. This is the path to follow for the Kingdom of Heaven, for which humans should strive individually within themselves, which if everyone does creates a community like the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, which actually exists metaphysically in heaven. C.S. Lewis said “aim at heaven and you get the earth thrown in.”
In the OT God judges the tribe of Israel, with collective virtue, collective guilt and collective punishment. Christianity though, is personal. When you die, God judges your soul, not your government’s soul.
I think this is a valid reading of the text. Does it make sense? Obviously I’m not qualified to explicitly state the one and only correct interpretation of the story of Jesus Christ 🙂
That was a very helpful clarification, thank you. The confusion was that your description of the OT is a reasonable summary simpliciter, but that of the NT more so when viewed from a specific angle.
Too many to count. Judges 2:10-19 gives the core theme of the OT histories:
So… that Manchester terrorist attack happened. 19 dead, 50 injured during an Ariana Grande concert.
Isn’t there a moratorium of 3 days for this stuff?
You mean on this blog? I’ve never heard of it, but i apologize if i broke a rule.
Yeah. This blog has a lot of rules that are somewhat lazily promulgated. Catches people off-guard often.
To be fair, it’s a moratorium on politicising tragedies, rather than talking about them at all. Though under the circumstances, that might be very difficult to avoid.
Well, now that we’re past the three-day moratorium, perhaps some here might have at it? There’s several avenues of discussion I see brought up about this:
1. What does the choice in target, in particular, signal? How much is there a “sexually-frustrated young man” component to this?
2. Does the reaction — or more specifically, the lack of one — indicate acquiescence and/or doom for the English. Namely, the attitude expressed frequently around my circles is that if the random slaughter of 8-year-old girls cannot cause “the Saxon to begin to hate”, then nothing ever will, and so Manchester will “continue to embrace with open arms those that murder their children and rape their daughters” to the last.
3. The use of “but native born, so checkmate, xenophobes” as an argument mode in the wake of events like this. As if we weren’t talking about the children or grandchildren of previously-admitted immigrants. If anything, doesn’t the fact that this sort of problem is not limited merely to immigrants themselves, but their descendants for generations after, point towards needing to be more selective about who one lets into one’s country?
4. The poll and survey data I’ve seen shows Western women (especially single white women) to be some of the most consistently strong supporters of not only immigration, but Islamic immigration; this, despite, presumably, having more reason to oppose the importation of sizeable, young-male-skewed groups of “regressive”, patriarchal, hard-to-assimilate (based on the track record so far in Europe) populations. I know of a pair of proposed explanations for this apparent paradox floating around the far-right zones I inhabit, but I doubt folks here would agree with either of them.
How often do other people, in reading around the Internet, find themselves recognizing an individual across multiple handles/pseudonyms due to frequent usages of the same particular phrases? Perhaps the key, go-to example for me is “James Bowery“, who, for years before he began sticking to that name consistently, was highly recognizeable across multiple pseudonyms in the comments of places like Overcoming Bias and Marginal Revolution. Just try Googling and searching phrases like:
“If males are liberated, the glass ceiling would be shattered along with all positions of authority”
“Modern economic theory is genocide”
“the eusocial insects and their negation of sex”
“the fact that you’re successfully committing genocide”
“Something must give. That something is sex itself.”
for a ready sampling of what is recognizeably a single individual making the same points, the same way, over and over.
(Similarly, I suspect that this belongs to one of my favorite commentors here, thanks alse to very recognizeable repeated phrases.)
I strongly suspect that I may have a bit of that “favorite turns of phrase” issue myself.
And, of course, we also have a ready local example, in style as well as specific phrases, in our own John Sidles.
On non-anon forums it (with one exception) hasn’t happened to me, if only because I mostly lurk on rationalist and rationalist-adjacent spaces where people use one name for all of their contributions.
On 8chan’s /monster/ board (nsfw) there’s one guy who keeps popping up and posting /r9k/ style self-pity, anonymous like everyone else, but the rest of the board’s cottoned on and tells him to shut up sometimes. I also saw two posts on two separate, slow-moving boards that had pictures of flower-of-life symbolism (pic) and I suspect they’re by the same guy. It’s fun picking that stuff out!
>(Similarly, I suspect that this belongs to one of my favorite commentors here, thanks alse to very recognizeable repeated phrases.)
That would be the one case I noticed. I like that guy’s comments too, and I wish he could be cured of his incurable hyper-depression.
I have never experienced this before reading the linked blog. I, too, recognize that style, though.
Given that, from what I’ve seen in the past, the openness expressed on this website toward, shall we say, “non-mainstream” sexual and relationship norms and practices has extended to a measure of tolerance toward the “BDSM community”, I have another question. Specifically, with regards to tolerance toward “kink”, and the “D” in BDSM, what is the plausibility vis-a-vis a heterosexual couple behaving in accord with “Patriarchy/Christian Headship/White Shari’a” as a “dominance/submission” “kink”? Particularly when one can postulate forth a defense of “role play” versus “real belief” of at least one of the couple being an atheist? “YKINMKBYKIOK”, and all that?
@Kevin C – I had a discussion a while back with someone here about Christian Domestic Discipline, which near as I could tell is an attempt at christian-compatible BDSM. They were of the opinion that it was straight-up misogyny and/or normative Christian behavior, though. Generally, anything in that area seems pretty fraught from a Social Justice angle, but it seems to me that social justice loses out to sexual liberation on a society-wide angle, so odds of the sort of thing you mention working long-term seem reasonable.
On what basis do you conclude this?
I have no idea of what YKINMKBYKIOK means but I’d say that the difference between roleplay and actual lifestyle is that one is a fantasy with rules and ways to get our, safe words etc., so that if you’re not comfortable to continue it stops immediately. If you live in a relationship where one partner is actually dominant this cannot happen. Thus in a roleplay a lot is permissible which would be far beyond condemnable if it were not within the roleplay context since consent is easy to withdraw.
If you were asking about someone pretending to be doing roleplay while actually forcing someone else into a submissive role, well the roleplay is not likely going to happen 24/7 so that seems to be a way to tell the difference.
Your Kink Is Not My Kink But Your Kink Is OK.
What exactly are you looking for in a “measure of tolerance”?
Speaking only for myself I tolerate the “‘D’ in BDSM” in the sense that I don’t think it should be illegal. And if a friend told me he and his wife were into it, I’d wonder why he was telling me but probably wouldn’t shun him. But if a friend and his wife came to a dinner party at my house with him leading her around on a leash and she conspicuously calling him master and asking for permission before speaking or doing anything they probably wouldn’t get invited to any more dinner parties.
That sounds like eminently reasonable tolerance to me. At the risk of appearing to shitpost, what would your stance be if you were hired to cater the dinner party laid out in your latter case?
I’m not sure I’d want to be in the catering dinner parties business. But if I was, I don’t think I’d refuse to cater a party like that. If there were actual sex acts in the open or if the staff were somehow dragged into it (e.g. told that they couldn’t talk to any of the women) that would be a different story.
I don’t think this really happens, (unless it is some kind of a BDSM themed party but then everyone is on the same wave), it is basically dragging (sorry for the pun :-)) your sex live to a dinner party. People don’t do that, regardless of heir kink. Well, unless they’re exhibitionists, I suppose. I am not super happy about people even tongue kissing in public in my close proximity (say a couple on a subway standing 20 cm from me), although I grudgingly tolerate that.
There are a couple of related questions inside this very interesting and relevant post.
Let Alan be a male dominant, and Beatrice be a female submissive. Let them have a 24/7 D/s relationship, where Alan is the D-type.
A. Would SJWs (for any value of SJW) tolerate this? Depends on the SJW. Some might say (1) ‘well, it’s because of the D/s relationship not because of the gender/sex, so it’s OK’, while others might say (2) ‘no, M/f is always bad because it reenacts oppressive social power structures’.
(For what it’s worth, I can confirm from personal experience that the number of women with expressed feminist views and submissive preferences in category (1) is nonzero. I cannot speak with regards to other orientations or genders. I would further advance the suspicion that doing it as a kink makes it ‘edgy’ and ‘rebellious’ and hence makes it more palatable to someone with left-wing views (and I had at least one person confirm this!)…but that’s a lot harder to prove.)
B. Now let this be a part of Christian Domestic Discipline. Would SJWs tolerate this? I suspect the ratio (2)/(1) has now significantly increased, because it seems to them more like the oppressive structures they are fighting against.
Hypocritical? Sure, but your view toward the people performing the exact same heathen ritual is going to change quite a bit if I tell you those guys also moderate on Stormfront.
The standard argument in favour of D/s is consent: so long as everybody involved is a freely consenting adult, your sex life is nobody else’s business. If two people choose of their own accord to engage in a 24/7 D/s relationship, then — hey, you do you.
When you bring Christian Domestic Discipline into the fray, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to feel a little less comfortable. If a woman seeks out a D/s relationship, that’s one thing; if a woman is told that she has a religious obligation to submit, a little bit of doubt creeps in. Given that the rigid enforcement of non-consensual gender roles is one of the main problems that social justice people have with “oppressive power structures”, I don’t think it’s particularly hypocritical to distinguish between the two cases.
(I don’t know enough about Christian Domestic Discipline to speak confidently about whether or not the additional concerns are justified; if I had to guess, I would say that the number of women unhappy with submission in a CDD context is higher than the number in a general D/s context, but that there are still probably plenty of cases of CDD where both partners are happy with the situation, and I don’t have a problem with those.)
And that’s the problem with the consent argument. It has been redefined to “anything I like is consent, anything I don’t like isn’t consent”. That’s why sex with a drunk person, a 15 year old or someone in a traditional culture isn’t considered consentful even though the person could be begging for it. At some point we have to realize that consent is not the be-all and end-all of whether sex is permissible.
Also, I would guess that in many relationships that have a dominant and a submissive, that the dominant person goes out looking for people that can be convinced to be submissive, in which case I don’t see it being any different from the religion case.
@Wrong Species:
If a person does not like religion because it imposes roles on people without their consent, then it is not “redefinition” to say that those roles are not consensual. Less “anything I don’t like isn’t consent”; more “anything that is not consent, I don’t like”.
@JayT:
The difference between the two cases is that one group has “God says you have to submit to me, even if you don’t want to” available as an argument, and the other does not. It is not hard to see how one group will end up with more abusers than the other.
But religion itself is, at least in most of Western civilization, consensual.
@JayT
I don’t have any actual experience with BDSM, but my understanding is that the situation is actually the opposite of what you describe (to the extent that people into BDSM are largely classed as subs, doms, and people who will sometimes dom if they have to). See the comments here.
I think that the type of people for which “God says you have to submit to me” works on tend to be the same type of people that will accept “you have to submit to me because that’s your kink”.
I could be totally wrong, I know my view on this is colored by the fact that the only people I ever knew in this type of relationship was a lesbian couple where my friend was the submissive one, and for a long time would talk about how great it was, but eventually admitted that she was just in an abusive relationship and there was nothing consensual about it.
@Iain
But this sort of consent argument reminds me a bit of what Scott talked about with “fake consensualism” and BETA-MEALR, the “Yes, but how can we be sure the people involved in it really consented? Deep down? I bet they didn’t” attitude; “false consciousness”, “internalized oppression”, yadda yadda yadda. As if there’s no social pressure in other communities, as say, some liberal subcultures, toward, say, being “more open to sexual experimentation”. I know I’ve seen very left-leaning folks on Tumblr complain about feeling pressured by their social circle toward “bihacking”.
And, as always, let’s add a third comparison: take the “religious traditionalist inegalitarian” couple, and replace “Christian” with “Muslim”. If anything, the “less consensual” argument applies even more strongly there, and yet I note the pattern with regards to “tolerance” (from the Left at least) does not match that.
I agree with the ratio shift you posit. But now consider:
C. Let this be a part of a Traditional Islamic Culture. What happens to the (2)/(1) ratio then, and why?
About the medical baking soda shortage. In articles about this and similar shortages in generic medication it is often stated that consolidation and low prices lead to one supplier being vulnerable to factory outages. I really don’t understand. If there is only one supplier they can charge whatever they want, leading to high prices, and would have incentive to have constant supply. If there are two, then when one goes offline, the other can charge high prices and has incentive to make sure outages don’t coincide (unless anti-gouging laws get in the way).
I’ve done some work on this in the context of generic pharmaceuticals.
The implicit model (without drawing any conclusions as to whether it’s applicable here) is that sellers participate in an initial auction to determine who will get the longish-term contract to supply generic drug x.
If these auctions focus exclusively on price, rather than reliability, etc, then sellers will cut margins to the bone in order to offer the lowest price – this includes cutting back on excess capacity, inventory and/or the kinds of expertise which make supply interruptions less likely.
The buyer chooses a single supplier, who is making very little profit from any individual drug, and no other produced has an incentive to retain capacity to produce that drug in the short run. (You make the point that they ought to keep such capacity in anticipation of outages and resulting price spikes – in practice this seems to be too risky when dealing with slow moving buyers who would struggle to agree to a massive price hike which they might not be able to claim back from the first contractor – I proposed creating more certainty around who would be chosen for emergency supply and how much they would be paid, along the lines of peaker power generators in electricity markets)
So it’s not a monopoly/duopoly, it’s a series of perfectly competitive (ish) deals, with the problems occurring between them. There does seem to be a genuine market failure here.
The buyer wants (or at least would benefit from, or retrospectively want) a reliable supply, but does not offer to pay for it, or make multiple-source arrangements (which even GM does), or stockpile the product (easy for sodium bicarbonate, harder for some pharmaceuticals).
This is not a market failure; this is a stupid buyer.
If you could design a new human race, what features would they have?
I would like to have a race without genitalia, grown in cloning vats.
The incidences of knee trouble, lower back trouble, and shoulder trouble, indicate that better design would probably be possible in those areas.
I seem to recall that the knee is pretty close to the best possible tradeoff between several competing qualities? Or has there been more research done?
If this is the best possible knee, then that’s just upsetting.
It’s more repair capacities that it lacks. Better repair capacity for hyaline cartilage in particular and CT in general would improve a lot. But then you have to get more delicate blood supply to a mobile tissue that takes a lot of loading. So yeah. Trade-offs.
Better healing for connective tissue, possibly through increased blood supply.
Those “live past ninety in good health” genes should be a standard feature.
I’d like a net of shutoff valves on all my arteries, and sensors to detect cancers. Shut down the blood supply before they grow.
In one of Poul Anderson’s last novels, a normal human (hundreds of years old, but otherwise baseline) comes back to an Earth where everyone is connected to a worldwide internet at will. He thinks their ability to decide at will what mood they are in is the most alien thing about them.
I’d like greater control over some bodily functions. The ability to instantly fall asleep, and determine exactly how long/what conditions to awake would be useful, or maybe even the capacity to not sleep at all. Maybe a stronger sense of the passing of time, to the extent that we have something of a natural clock? I’m not sure exactly how that would work, but I feel like it wouldn’t be totally impossible.
I’d also like pain to not be as debilitating as it is – while there’s a lot of obvious evolutionary sense to make pain an absolutely unignorable experience, if I had the chance to redesign the human body I’d like to think there would be a way to notify the body of damage without it being unpleasant enough that torture is a thing that can occur.
What are the rules of this? Something with at least a passing degree of biological plausibility? I assume I’m not allowed to give everyone teleportation, superman-like flight, or invulnerability, right? How about superintelligent nanotech swarms?
It seems to me to be highly within the realm of plausibility that you could design a human who, at least as an adult, needs to sleep 4 or fewer hours per night with very little “cost” that was meaningful in the modern world. That’d be like roughly +25% lifespan with a proportionate breakdown of “good” and “bad” years, and strikes me as more likely possible than any other comparable lifespan gain.
Obviously, lifespan gain to whatever extent was possible.
If some kind of increased regenerative capacity was possible in a net-positive way (like: not a huge increase in cancer risk, for example), then that.
Tetrachromacy for everyone! Tetrachromacy sounds cool. I have no reason to believe that this would be particularly important, except that tetrachromacy sounds cool and I wish I were a tetrachromat (except I don’t wish I was a woman).
I vaguely believe — without, I must say, a lot of evidence — that there might be some economic benefit to making people generally a bit smaller? Like, make the 5th percentile to 95th percentile human heights for both sexes be 5′ to 5’4″? We’d need less food and we could make a lot of things a bit smaller and more efficient?
I am pretty sure the last thing is correct, making people smaller without making them stupider is a huge boon. I remember thinking about this back when I read the Rats of NIMH, how cool human intelligence global modern rat civilization would be.
Birds have amazingly compact brains. I’m not sure how far you can shrink people, even using corvid/parrot brains for inspiration, but it wouldn’t surprise me if you could maintain human intelligence in 50 pound people.
You could go the Octopus route and just have neurons all through the body.
@baconbacon I expect that that’s not really congruent with a human mind-plan. The latency seems like it would be too high for a centralized consciousness, and I expect it would weird people the fuck out if their arms were doing things without their conscious control.
We’re at least somewhat modular– we can walk without paying attention to it.
Granted that our consciousness is less in control of us than we tend to imagine (see: works of Peter Watts), but I think if it were several major steps less in control of us than it is now, we would Not Like It.
I think a lot of people would dislike any major change. Less control probably means less awareness– a blank spot in your experience. More control could seem a great deal like work. A nifty interface for choosing how much control you have here and there would be a *lot* like work.
Being more flexible about change should be on the wish list.
I’ve been thinking about how apt children are to believe what they’re told and then have a hard time changing it later. What might be tweakworthy about this?
“You could go the Octopus route and just have neurons all through the body.”
Serious limb injuries now come with a free side of brain damage!
If zefrank is a reliable source of information severed octopus limbs continue to seek out food and attempt to return it to their mouths that they can’t find. That would make for some horror movie shit on battle fields and hospitals.
Total remake into a race of cybernetically enhanced dinosaurs. Everyone knows mammals are lame.
Coming Soon The ability to redo adolescence, as many times as desired, until each individual “gets it right”.
At present, humanity languishes in a biomedical dark age, in which individuals who emerge from their first adolescence with persistent neurocognitive personality disorders — disorders that many endure, but no one really wants — have lamentably few, ineffective medical options.
Still, having directed one adolescent effulgence of connectomic rewiring, every human possesses the inborn genetic capacity to do it again (in principle) — such that this inborn neurocognitive “reboot” capacity provides (plausibly) the chief “unicorn” pivot strategy for Elon Musk’s Neuralink (a startup that is now-hiring).
Also to mention, the “reboot” experience of hormonal charge PLUS neural plasticity PLUS accompanying low-grade amnesia PLUS unreasoned adolescent optimism, would hopefully be experienced, in aggregate, as … well … pleasurable. Or at least, not nearly as horrible as the experience of adolescence can be, the first time around! 🙂
Let’s see … 10^10 people times (say) $10^5 per neurocognitive “reboot” (cheap at the price) … hey … that’s one mega-unicorn! Initiating this mega-unicorn neuroenterprise is (as it seems to me) what Neuralink most plausibly really is all about.
Well, I’m not a front-end Web guy, but having to scroll through a bunch of John Sidles comments without the ability to report them is annoying enough that I might want to take a whack at this. The “Cheatin’, uh” thing appears to be an error message that can be provoked by permissions issues, session expiration, or some other stuff. I’d bet on session expiration in this case, since I seem to temporarily restore my ability to report comments when I log out of WordPress and back in.
The easiest thing to do might be to install a different reporting plugin and hope it isn’t broken.
Another possibility is to make the report button a mailto: link with the URL and content of the offending comment pre-filled. I don’t know enough about wordpress specifically to say how hard it is to add a mailto link based off a comment’s contents to each comment, but if that’s straightforward, you could easily switch over to a “email this address for moderation issues” system.
While I’m really late to the party as usual: I’d love to help out with this, too, if an additional pair of eyes is wanted. 🙂
Previously, on open threads: Why don’t we keep the monuments, but add others memorializing the victims of slavery? Correct the whitewashing of history by adding more context, more information for future generations, rather than just sending the side we don’t like down the memory hole.
I found this idea so compelling that I think it’s worth a first-level comment.
I find it compelling because of the general motif: I struggle to think of any monuments to conflicting individuals whose conflict made the the world better, where both were framed as protagonists. Like, say, Maynard / Keynes, or Lincoln / Douglas (this exists), or Kant / Hume, or Lee / Grant.
Are there any like that?
Does it count that e.g. the Gettysburg battlefield has monuments to both sides, so that taken as a whole the battlefield is a memorial to the conflict more than a victory celebration for the winners?
A lot of (US South) plantations portray both the planters and slaves as protagonists in different parts of the site and tour. It might not be strictly a “monument,” but I’d say it’s on-point.
Also, the last time I went to Bennett Place, both generals Johnston and Sherman were treated as equally protagonists.
There might also be an argument to be made for Confederate monuments as memorials meant to inspire not reverence, but humility.
“We remember Confederate Soldier Smith, lost to us twice: first when seduced by an unequal and evil policy, and second upon his death fighting for it.”
“Here lies John Smith, who was no less a loving husband and father, no less a loving member of the community, no less a man of charity and kindness to those he saw as equals, for the horrible practice he fought for and defended, and no less a villain because of his good attributes.”
“In the memory of John Smith, let us never forget that honor, valor, and loyalty are no defense against succumbing to evil, when that honor belongs to a society of slave owners, that valor is exercised in its defense, and that loyalty is to a way of life which we took too long to condemn. Remember that your enemies can be honorable, their soldiers valiant; and that those to whom you are loyal are not right because of it.”
I am confused by the quote:
and I think an edit would clarify this confusion. Either Scott meant:
1) “socialism” as “Scandinavian socialism” and this was a dig at rightists who think that this kind of socialism would be a disaster, even though it evidently works out OK for Danes. Here his implication was “traditionalists think polyamory wouldn’t scale because socialism doesn’t, but socialism does scale at least to Nordic-sized economies, so the scaling argument against polyamory is crappy”.
OR
2) “socialism” as “state-ownership of the means of production” and this was a dig at traditionalists who he sees as being armed with mere theories about how worldwide polyamory would work out, and who he sees as refuted by modern, small-scale successful (in his view) examples of polyamory. Here his implication is that successful local examples of polyamory are as illustrative as failed national examples of communism in refuting the underlying theory (“polyamory is bad” or “communism is good”). This interpretation seems weird because the Chestertonian fences (monogamy, markets, and social heirarchy) are on the theory side in the one case but against it in the other.
Or did he mean something else?
> I don’t claim this is necessarily an accurate representation of what a future hypothetical worldwide polyamorous society would be like. For all I know maybe it would be exactly the opposite, the same way we expect a future hypothetical worldwide socialist society to have the exact opposite results as every time socialism has ever been tried in real life.
Or it’s like saying a Kibbutz works well, so socialism would work the same. Playing with rhetorical analogies has a lot of degrees of freedom.
As far as I understand, the Kibbutzim work well because they are heavily subsidized by the government, which makes its money from taxes, which are collected by taxing capitalist ventures. So, it’s a rather special case…
The kibbutzim are barely kibbutzim anymore, for better or worse.
While a self-selected group of few thousands people that has been existing for ~10 years, where the members are 90% male, on average 30 years old, IQ 140, etc., is totally representative of the general population?
“For all I know maybe it would be exactly the opposite, the same way we expect a future hypothetical worldwide socialist society to have the exact opposite results as every time socialism has ever been tried in real life.”
It would seem that in real life, nation-states that have more socialist policies AND less hierarchy/individualism fare much better in terms of standard of living than nation-states which do the opposite. And when exactly was a non-hierarchical socialist society tried without immediately being a victim to the U.S. foreign policy of the “threat of the good example”?
It would seem that in real life, nation-states that have more socialist policies AND less hierarchy/individualism fare much better in terms of standard of living than nation-states which do the opposite.
Can you cite some examples for me?
As for me, I usually use Heritage’s Index of Economic Freedom* as a good proxy for how libertarian (little-l) an economy is, and there’s definitely a correlation between economic freedom as measured by Heritage and high standards of living. If you think ‘socialism’ corresponds to better standards of living, where do you think Heritage’s ratings are wrong?
It’s certainly possible to be relatively economically free and still not be free in other respects. It’s also certainly possible to for a country to be economically unfree for reasons other than Socialism. Finally, it’s certainly possible to provide a decent level of social welfare without falling too far on the economic freedom rankings.
I suspect that to be proper, previous economic states matter; perhaps that it should be said there’s a correlation between economic freedom and increasing standards of living. It could be cyclical: rich, prosperous states can afford to spend more, lowering economic freedom and dragging the economy down. The natural tendency is to use government power to treat the symptoms, further lowering economic freedom and accelerating the decline down.
*Heritage’s Index of Economic Freedom is at http://www.heritage.org/index/
John Quiggin noted in 2004 that even though government expenditure is entered to the index negatively it actually correlates positively with the rest of the ratings. http://crookedtimber.org/2004/07/24/big-government-is-good-for-economic-freedom/
“Looking back at Alex’s post, I thought it likely that high levels of government expenditure would be positively rather than negatively correlated with gender development, which raised the obvious question of the correlation between government consumption expenditure and economic freedom (as defined by the Fraser Institute index). Computing correlations, I found that, although it enters the index negatively, government consumption expenditure has a strong positive correlation (0.42) with economic freedom as estimated by the Fraser Institute. Conversely, the GCE component of the index is negatively correlated (0.43) with the index as a whole. By contrast, items like the absence of labour market controls were weakly correlated with the aggregate index.”
Thanks for finding that! It made for interesting reading. I wonder if he’s re-examined the numbers after the most recent economic downturn? Either way, the results should prove interesting.
“State capacity tends to rise with income, so in wealthy countries the state can achieve more, with less obtrusive use of power, than in poor countries” certainly sounds very much like my “rich, prosperous states can afford to spend more”.
It would also suggest that the initial poster’s “nation-states that have more socialist policies AND less hierarchy/individualism fare much better in terms of standard of living than nation-states which do the opposite” then seems to be refuted regarding the other measures of economic freedom: sound money, a fair legal system, free trade, and limited regulation.
Nordic countries may have economic freedom in theory, but in practice that’s not going to help a whole lot when something displeases the employees and they go on strike.
From wikipedia:
“In 2013, labour union density was 85.5% in Iceland, 69% in Finland, 67.7% in Sweden, 66.8% in Denmark, and 52.1% in Norway. In comparison, labour union density was 13.6% in Mexico and 10.8% in the United States. The lower union density in Norway is mainly explained by the absence of a Ghent system since 1938. In contrast, Denmark, Finland and Sweden all have union-run unemployment funds.”
Worker unions, unemployment funds were invented by anarchists.
Another example of a socialist policy is health care based on mutualism which was developed by none other than Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
The unions are strong enough that workers don’t need to actually go on strikes all that often. The workers in France, which has a lower union density, are considerably more strike-prone than the workers in the Nordic countries. (Of course, the French labor market system contains other differences). The entire system of co-bargaining has been set up to avoid the need for strikes.
“Labor unions being invented by anarchists” gives far too much credit to the anarchists. “Let’s stick together to collectively bargain for our wages and working conditions” is not exactly such a radical plan that it needs anarchists to invent it.
Anti-socialism is a sacred value for much of the grey tribe, there’s no point trying to discuss this here.
Let’s be fair, here. I could be wrong (the last survey didn’t ask), but I’m pretty sure the median commenter is a (relatively) high-income earner in the tech sector. There are likely a far greater-than-average proportion of people who style themselves entrepreneurs, and a significant proportion of them probably really are such. This is not a space where anti-socialism needs to be a “sacred” value; rather, it is entirely rational and practical reaction to the relevant material realities.
This space may not “need” to be one where anti-socialism is a sacred value in some abstract sense, but it concretely is a space where enough regular commenters have demonstrated that it is one of their sacred values to frustrate productive discussion on the topic.
It kind of feels like you’ve defined “productive discussion” as “discussion that accepts my basic principles without question and goes from there,” and I’m not sure why you’d expect to find that at Slate Star Codex, of all places.
How do you distinguish a sacred value from a belief you disagree with? Or is that the implicit definition?
My definition of productive discussion assumes engagement beyond reciting tribal slogans followed by attaboys. I wouldn’t recommend trying to seriously discuss socialism on SSC for the same reason I wouldn’t recommend discussing fascism in venue full of antifa.
How do you know that would happen if you refuse to try it?
I’ve seen socialist arguments engaged here before. They seem to have a hard time getting around the problem of avoiding telling other people to do things they don’t want to do. But that isn’t a tribal slogan. It’s an observation of a characteristic of a socialist argument that socialists themselves do not prefer.
How can you tell the difference between that and replies that all say the same thing because they’re right? If I’m talking to a creationist, I’m going to use the exact same talking points as everyone else because those talking points are right. Some people have beliefs that are so thoroughly discredited, there isn’t much more to say and pretty much every socialist I’ve seen hasn’t given me a reason to believe otherwise.
Definitely. But I’m saying that the difficulty in discussing radical left politics is downstream of a straightforward material reality. One of the best things about socialist thinking is that you can so routinely answer questions in exactly that way, and are accordingly will find it far less necessary to rely on vaguely reactionary armchair sociology like “tribes” and “sacred values” and “virtue signaling” (god, especially that last one)
edit: and that’s not to say it never makes sense to advocate socialism to bourgeois people. Engels owned a factory, after all. Capitalism likes to treat its most skilled labor aristocrats pretty well, but communism isn’t exactly known for disrespecting technical skills either. But if you make that approach, it should be done with understanding that, in at least some ways, you’re asking for a sacrifice.
Anyone you would equate with creationists is not someone you are interested in engaging with seriously. I’ve been reading the SSC comment section for years now, and discussions of socialism here are as low quality as discussions of race and IQ by mainstream liberals, or discussions of theology by standard issue net atheists. Bad arguments are still bad arguments even if their conclusions are correct. For example, I agree completely that the doctrine of transubstantiation is nonsense, but plenty of the arguments against it are still garbage, largely because the people making them can’t be bothered to learn what it is they’re arguing against.
These terms and this type of analysis happen to be associated with people of certain political persuasions, but there’s no reason they need to be. Fred Clark, e.g., uses equivalent concepts against religious conservatives
Virtue signaling is one I object to no matter what. It is a disgusting rhetorical trick to undermine people’s efforts to act ethically.
And even the others, sure, they can be rehabilitated–the “Red Tribe” and the “Blue Tribe” can be easily seen as the cultural manifestations of particular clusters of capital (extractive industries vs. finance seems like obvious, if obviously oversimplified, take). Even so, at least from a socialist perspective, they remain masters’ tools–lenses of analysis that were at least initially stripped of class/economic components, popularized by people for which that was very much a feature rather than a bug.
“false consciousness”?
It does typically get used as a slur, but would you disagree the now-dominant usage is a distortion of a useful concept? Surely people do in fact signal virtue, whether consciously or otherwise, and this doesn’t need to be a bad thing. The easiest way to appear just is by being just.
90% of the pro-socialism talk I’ve seen on here is precisely that, including half this thread, but who’s counting?
I object to it precisely on those grounds. The original usage that looked at things like religious rituals in a new way was pretty interesting.
The sneering usage over the last 2-3 years is not only totally worthless in and of itself but has also ruined it for the original context.
I think virtue signalling is possibly the least objectionable of that whole cloud of concepts, because it strikes me as eminently useful in making sense of the worlds. It’s well-defined, and it is, in many instances, a plausible alternative hypothesis to “people try to do good but are completely incompetent and for that reason fail miserably”.
@ChetC3
I know you don’t believe me but if someone gave an honest to God good argument for communism I think I can believe it. I can understand a social democrat even though I don’t agree with them. I just don’t see how anyone could have a rational reason for believing communism is possible. Even when communists come here and try to promote their arguments I can’t help but feel bad because they are so unconvincing. And yes, I’m not exactly receptive to arguments from the far left but I don’t think you guys are helping your cause.
Anti-socialism may not *need* to be a sacred value, but it’s hard to imagine how it could *not* be a sacred value given that the SSC commentariat leans strongly Grey Tribe; anti-Communism is (or at least was) a core Grey Tribe value for both ideological and contingent historical reasons. Ideologically, Grey Tribe tends to draw on classic liberalism (i.e, what gets called liberalism in Europe), which is basically the opposite of socialism. More importantly, historically speaking Grey Tribe is a splinter of Red Tribe, and specifically of *the* Red Tribe faction defined most strongly by opposition to Communism (and support of capitalism).
(I should probably write up a taxonomy of the major constituencies of the American tribes, I’ve been mulling over it for a while and it seems like it would be useful.)
As originally described by Scott, Gray Tribe is a splinter of Blue, not Red. This is one place where tribes and politics don’t quite correspond.
“Let’s be fair, here. I could be wrong (the last survey didn’t ask), but I’m pretty sure the median commenter is a (relatively) high-income earner in the tech sector. There are likely a far greater-than-average proportion of people who style themselves entrepreneurs, and a significant proportion of them probably really are such. This is not a space where anti-socialism needs to be a “sacred” value; rather, it is entirely rational and practical reaction to the relevant material realities.”
…which would, of course, be exactly what socialist theory would predict.
Bingo.
A socialist that operates under the assumption that bourgeois people will support socialism if they can just be handed the right argument or convinced to overcome their “irrational” biases is going to be a very, very frustrated socialist.
To be fair, it happens sometimes, Bertrand Russell and Kropotkin were not from the lower classes. It was not in their immediate material interest to be socialists. But these people are rather rare.
I don’t think it is a sacred value. It’s contingent. The overriding driver is poking a stick in the eye of the hated enemy. You can observe by looking at the collectivist elements of the conservative philosophy and note that the grey tribe rarely or never attacks these things. In fact, given the strict adherence to Reagan’s 11th commandment I’m not even sure it makes sense to talk about a separate tribe at all.
For a concrete example, take a look at the distortions in the student loan market and the distortions in the housing markets (both in the US). You cannot get libertarians to ever shut up about the former, in the case of the latter they’ll be happy to talk about the CRA — which not so coincidentally conservatives don’t like either — but that’s about it. Freddie, Frannie, and Ginny whose lending dwarfs all student loans put together get barely a passing mention. Because attacking those institutions would be sticking a finger in the eye of conservatives as well as liberals and that’s not done.
I’m curious to know how you came to this conclusion. For instance, did you ever Google “fannie mae libertarian“?
fannie mae libertarian
About 169,000 results (0.46 seconds)
cra libertarian
About 562,000 results (0.94 seconds)
Which one is more impactful? Which one is more socialist?
Probably not a fair comparison there, Brad. CRA also stands for the Civil Rights Act, a much larger libertarian bugbear.
That’s quite a passing mention there.
I don’t know that it’s abbreviated all that often, see for comparison.
You are probably also picking up some Canadian hits, as CRA is the Canadian tax authority.
Google results are a very poor way to analyze how much people care about things.
I do talk occasionally about the mortgage deduction being used to segregate America. It has also given white people a subtantial financial advantage over black people.
I’m inclined to think that whether people own or rent their homes is the kind of thing a government shouldn’t be trying to influence.
In general, I think the mortgage crisis was a result of banks (not all banks) scrambling to give bad loans, and as far as I know, the CRA didn’t have a lot to do with it. The mortgage crisis was failure by business, by government, by religion (the prosperity gospel was a piece of the problem), by education (people in general aren’t taught how to manage their finances), and an emotional failure (people were too fond of riding the boom to think clearly about it). There was a racist piece of the situation (black people were more likely to be pushed into bad mortgages).
Arguably, there was also a problem of complexity. A lot of people knew that the housing bubble couldn’t last, but damned few knew how much was dependent on the boom. Those who spoke up weren’t listened to.
I consider myself a libertarian, though a liberal-flavored libertarian. I’m willing to accept that the default libertarian is conservative-flavored, but I will keep saying that I exist and I am a libertarian.
To me the housing crisis is just about the clearest example of a problem created by massive government intervention in the economy. The level of homeownership we have in the US is not a result of market forces. It is a result of massive and ongoing government efforts dating back to the GI bill signed by FDR.
This ought to be catnip for libertarians. Back when I was a libertarian it was a big issue for me — and now that my ideology is more center-left it is still a big issue for me.
Maybe my observations are totally non-representative but it is my sense that self-declared libertarians would much rather talk about the community reinvestment act or zoning or student loans than about Fannie, Freddie, Ginnie, the FHA, VA loan guarantees, and so on. How to explain that leads to me to my thesis about coalitions and driving forces.
There’s no problem with being a conservative-flavored libertarian but I do think you aren’t a libertarian at all if you have no disagreements with conservatives or whatever disagreements you have with them are of such low saliency that you never even want to talk about them.
I acknowledge that there are exceptions. I know that left libertarians exist. I’m sorry if you thought what I was saying erased people like you.
Insufficiently toxoplasmic, maybe?
Apology accepted.
Part of the situation is that I’m exposed to a lot of hatred for libertarians from the left, even though I agree with the left more than I agree with conservatives.
Brad, I feel the need to point out that this comment generalizes and hyperbolizes about libertarians in a manner that, were it another poster complaining about SJWs or feminists, you would be extremely quick to criticize.
That’s a very fair criticism. I should not be talking about “libertarians” but instead narrow it to someone specific or some better defined group.
Why do you think conservatives are fans of Fannie and Freddie? The Wall Street Journal has had it in for them for at least 20 years. Democrats have been the ones appointed to their ridiculously-overpaid executive positions (e.g. Franklin Raines).
I’m an economic-libertarian-leaning conservative, and can’t think of any conservatives who have defended the GSEs. Especially since they did, ultimately, screw up and cash in their implicit government guarantee, getting it made explicit.
If libertarians don’t talk much about Fannie and Freddie, I imagine it’s for the same reasons they don’t talk much about the Khmer Rouge: it’s such an obviously bad outcome that it doesn’t require argument.
I meant conservative in the vector sense of:
Republican – libertarian = conservative
Having been reasonably chastised by gbdub I don’t want to make further big sweeping generalizations, but it is my sense that there’s a faction within the Republican Party supports government intervention in favor of homeowership as part of a middle class, mom, apple pie, and little league agenda. Those government interventions include the GSEs, the FHA and the MID among other things.
If the Republican coalition is united against the GSE than how come they continue to exist given the six year hegemony the Republicans had last decade?
Complete nonsense. Individualism at the national level is positively associated with basically everything nice, including (but not limited to): Social capital, Interpersonal trust, Wealth, Happiness, Innovation.
The spam filter won’t let me link it, but google “population differences in individualism”, there’s a ton of references there. Also search google images for “eupedia map of individualism”.
Oh really?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante
Can you first give a rough definition of “socialism” and provide some examples of policies that you consider “socialist”? Without this basic calibration, all discussion is going to be pointless.
I wrote up a review of The Righteous Mind in which I agree with the author’s most basic point but disagree about almost everything else.
I’m sorry to harp on point 3 even more, but polyamorous bonobo rationalists (or even the people who took the latest SSC survey) are not representative of the general population. I know you were defending polyamory as it exists today in your subculture, but not mentioning this when I’m not the only one to have pointed it out is short sighted.
I think it’s actually worse than that, since asking people their preferred relationship style doesn’t necessarily correlate with their actual relationship style; moreover, people might not understand the consequences of their preferred relationship style; and may be stating their preference out of ideological or signalling reasons.
By analogy, you could survey Americans and you might very well find that wealthy Americans prefer higher taxes than do middle class Americans. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that higher taxes make you wealthier.
Anyway, it’s well known and very easy to verify that when it comes to relationships other than traditional marrage marriage, girls can and do date up; men must and will date down. The Roissy scenario follows more or less inevitably from this observation. So it will take a good deal more than an informal survey to overturn it.
This remark is unnecessarily condescending.
As it has been already pointed out to you, polyamory, under other names, has been in fact extensively tried outside your favored small weird communities, and the results are less than encouraging.
While I personally prefer monogamy, even though they are relatively rare, egalitarian (non-polygynous) polygamous societies do exist in some amazon tribes. Perhaps two factors are at play here, because of the low population, the mate choice is limited so hypergamy is essentially hard to do (like it must have been for most of humankind’s evolutionary history) and then there’s the assumption that a one-size-fits-all centralized/hierarchical society is the only desirable/possible kind of society.
Which tribes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zo%27%C3%A9
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101110161930.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily:+Latest+Science+News%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
Scott is just unable to take criticism.
Good thing you’re here to provide it, then!
It has been provided, and Scott’s response is: “yes, theoretically polyamory may not work in some cases, even though every time we tried it it worked just fine. Just like Socialism theoretically may work, but every time we tried it it failed. So if in order to believe that polyamory may not work despite the contrary evidence you have to be as stupid or fanatic as you have believe that Socialism may work despite the contrary evidence”. Except that Scott doesn’t say this explicitly, he just insinuates it.
This is not only terribly smug and condescending, it is also false, because polyamory has been already tried out many times, under other names, and it typically results in polygynous societies that are often high-conflict, high-emigration, or at least, when they are very wealthy (due to oil money) they are highly hierarchical and illiberal, and exploit large immigrant populations.
Sarcasm, bro.
I’m pretty sure that most people who advocate polyamory under that name favor a system that isn’t quite the same as that of Saudi Arabia. For example, they tend to favor systems where women can have multiple sexual partners without facing a significant risk of getting killed by their families and/or stoned to death.
It’s absurd to point to a society where polygyny is the only legally and socially allowed form of polyamory as evidence that polyamory inevitably leads to polygyny. And I say this as a person who is somewhat skeptical of polyamory.
There’s also the question of whether polygyny is actually the cause of the problems that you mention. As I’ve pointed out before whenever the subject of polygamy and Middle Eastern conflict/terrorism has come up, the country that is the highest per-capita source of foreign ISIS fighters, Tunisia, is also a country where polygamy has been banned for more than 60 years.
@INH5
I don’t think you can claim that being the highest per-capita source of foreign ISIS fighters is indicative of Tunisia’s general culture, since it is also the only country to come out of the Arab Spring with a democracy.
In the spirit of bean’s posts on battleships — except that I’m too lazy to actually acquire the relevant knowledge — I present basic fighter moves.
Man, this takes me back to the days of playing Falcon.
That’s at least 20 years out of date. These days, basic fighter maneuvers are very simple. You fire your missiles, and hope you do so before the other guy. Then you go back to base, reload, and repeat.
Even if you win the shoot-and-scoot race, what’s to stop the opponent from firing his missiles are yours are underway?
This reminds me of a question I have about modern missiles: do they still require several seconds of lock-on in order to acquire a target? I would think they would be sufficiently discriminatory that they could acquire a target, get verification from the pilot/armaments officer and be fired within a matter of a few seconds.
Nothing. Firing first just means that you don’t have to choose between shooting back and dodging.
I’m not honestly sure how much lock-on time modern missiles take. It probably depends heavily on the missile and the system it’s connected to. Keep in mind that BVR missiles don’t acquire the target directly. They’re fired at where the target is expected to be, and updated by the firing aircraft’s radar in flight. Once they get close, their own radar comes on. I think that modern short-range missiles tend to have very short lock-on times, for obvious reasons.
Radar lock-on is still relevant to missiles using semi-active radar homing (technically active as well, but active-homing missiles use their own radar), but semi-active homing is no longer as common as it once was, and modern missiles that do still use it no longer need to have their targets continuously painted by the launcher’s radar throughout flight. These days it’s more common as a terminal guidance method: you’d fire a missile using inertial or GPS guidance, wait for it to get close to your target, then paint the target with your radar for the terminal phase. Often modern missiles come with infrared or anti-radiation seekers too, also for use in the terminal phase.
Signal lock is never going to be binary. There is always a phase of “we think there might be something out there” at the limits of the sensors. Software algorithms can choose to be aggressive or not in determining “good enough to fire now”.
I would imagine what is good enough changes depending on the tactical situation. If your sensors are far superior to your enemies then you would wait for high probability to fire. If your sensors are inferior and you know you are very vulnerable when your sensors are reliable, then you probably fire pretty early in the maybe phase.
There lots of things involved that I’m not well versed in. Sensor range vs missile range for example. Evasion probability based on opponent and missile type. One may fire at the earliest opportunity as a “stay out of my territory” message knowing probability is low.
I would agree with the general consensus, it is more about weapons systems now then jet maneuverability.
We went through this before, of course. But to elaborate: Air combat maneuvering was from roughly 1940-1990 something you trained for in case Plan A failed miserably and you were forced to do battle with a foe who had the unmitigated gall to know you were there. Since the development of helmet-mounted sights and off-boresight missiles, even that is pretty much irrelevant. See the enemy, press the button, boom, no maneuvering required.
To the extent there is maneuvering, it is mostly in pre-combat deployment to maximize the possibility of seeing the other guy without being seen, and to some extent in specialized maneuvers that augment your ECM’s ability to break the lock of the missile that the enemy deviously managed to launch before you killed him. And most of the latter have the disadvantage of making you a sitting duck for his next missile, given that he clearly knows where you are.
To elaborate on what john said below, for as long as there has been air to air combat, roughly 4 out of 5 kills have been achieved without a sexy dogfight, because 4 out of 5 people who get shot down are shot down by someone they didn’t know was shooting at them until it was too late. Dogfighting is mostly relevant only to that 5th kill where both pilots know each other are around and neither tries to run away.
In all the recent talk about basic income I haven’t come across any serious discussion of economic consequences. On a Vox podcast recently somebody mentioned a concern that basic income would lead to inflation, and that concern was immediately dismissed without actual argument.
To a first approximation it would seem to follow that basic income would cause price inflation in exactly the goods that the poorest people are buying. The McDonald’ses and Walmarts of the world know that their market now has more money to spend, so prices rise. There could be a next-order effect when/if significant numbers of people lose their jobs and have to rely on basic income completely, and the pool of people living on very little money actually increases. This seems like the kind of thing you might tune for when deciding what the dollar figure for the basic income check should actually be.
I anticipate the complaint that “the government is subsidizing McDonald’s and Walmart”. And that will be true, as far as I can tell, but that’s already happening.
Another consequence – I can’t say whether this is positive or negative – is that at certain levels of basic income, wages for shitty jobs might actually increase. If you have a choice between being unemployed and being a sewage drainpipe cleaner, you might just decide to hold off and look for a better opportunity. In effect the pool of applicants for undesirable jobs shrinks and wages increase. Again, I don’t know if this is a good thing or not, because that wage increase comes at the cost of some number of people choosing to be unemployed.
You often hear the soundbite “what if people just sit around all day playing video games?” which always immediately makes me think about the synthetic economies of MMO video games. Every MMO quickly develops its own complex economy with a black market for dollars-to-in-game-currency. Human beings crave social interaction, so even a future where people retreat into video games may actually look like people retreating into fundamentally healthy modes of social belonging and participation in the economy. Virtual gold coins are just as “real” as dollars, and if people are willing to trade dollars for them, that indicates that they represent real value.
Most of the above is “to first order”, and most economic disasters seem to happen several layers of abstraction deep, so whatever the nightmare consequences (or hidden silver linings) of basic income are, I’m sure I can’t guess, but it might be interesting to try to think of some. I’m not an economist and what I said is probably a mix of patently obvious and blatantly wrong, but again, I haven’t really seen much discussion of this anywhere, so I’m here to learn.
Russ Roberts hosted Michael Munger earlier this year on EconTalk to discuss a basic income.
Thanks!
Money is ultimately an abstraction over the productive capacities of an economy. If someone or something is being taxed to pay for basic income then the net transfer of money will eventually be reflected in a net transfer of the use of assets. Diminishing returns means that yes there will be some inflation in the prices of the stuff poor people pay but those margins look pretty elastic so probably not too much.
I noticed that the inflation question is never brought up and addressed either.
Perhaps this is like discussions of minimum wage in the mainstream (this includes my Facebook feed). People argue over whether it is “fair” that business owners need to pay more, instead of talking about the unemployment that happens when the minimum wage is higher than a worker’s production per hour.
Does this match anyone else’s impression on discussions of minimum wage in the “mainstream.”
I agree, I’ve never seen people disagree about minimum wage in a way that involved empirical predictions. Even the above-linked discussion about these basic income issues between two actual economists seems to spend a lot of time going back and forth in essentially kneejerk left-vs-right compassion-vs-fairness patterns.
Assuming we fund UBI from taxes, there should be no net change in the amount of money being spent. However, if poor people who used to have very little cash suddenly have more, then prices of things mainly bought by poor people will go up (the demand curve shifts right), and prices of things mainly bought by wealthier people will go down (the demand curve shifts left) in response to those wealthier people having less after-tax income to spend.
One of the reasons for this is simply that making accurate economic predictions about the effects of (say) a minimum wage turns out to be really hard. Especially for relatively small minimum wages, the precise outcome turns on the detailed economic context in which it is applied. Hence what you end up with is lots of argumentative heat, but little light.
There’s a lovely funnel plot of the papers published analysing the outcomes of minimum wage laws on the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States#Economic_effects Essentially, it looks like the Keynesians are right & at the levels currently set the employment effects of mandating a minimum wage net out to a big fat zero.
@ pharmst:
There are three sentences about CEPR minimum wage findings at the paragraph you’re pointing us at. Let’s look at the other two first to clarify what’s going on. Here’s #2:
What they counted as “states that raised their minimum wage” largely consisted of states where the minimum had been indexed to inflation so (in this low inflation year) there were automatic insignificant cost-of-living increases, unlikely to swamp whatever else was going on in the economy and cause measurable job losses. There were only a few states in their sample that had significant REAL (inflation-adjusted) minimum wage increases due to brand new laws taking effect that year, and job creation was actually much worse that year in those states than in the US at large. In fact, if you do a scatter plot of their sample set plotting the percentage wage increase versus job loss/gain you’ll notice a slope – the worst job gains were in the states with the highest percentage minimum wage increases.
Thus even if we accept their criteria (which seem to be “the net job gain amount in this one arbitrary year tells us if the minimum wage increase did harm, ignoring all other years and the base rates and whether the jobs gained/lost are high or low-wage”), then by their own criteria they should have found that raising minimum wage by a significant amount (say, more than 2%) “causes” job loss. That they didn’t notice this seems like a problem.
The third sentence:
“exceeding the national average for job growth” is a pretty low bar. Suppose we don’t want to just be slightly better than average. Suppose we want to see great job growth – what states had the highest job growth in that same year 2014? Why, it’s North Dakota, Texas and Utah – all of them states whose minimum wage was $7.25 (the lowest rate allowed by the federal government).
Now getting back to the first sentence and associated funnel plot, the theory says the minimum wage harms jobs among low-wage workers, people earning less than the new minimum, and does more harm the larger the increase. Their funnel plot isn’t really testing this at all. Given that low-wage workers are a tiny fraction of the workforce it’s perfectly plausible that you could have a big negative effect on low-wage workers that doesn’t show up as statistically significant in the overall employment rate. The fact that CEPR is obviously bad at studies (see above) leads me to suspect this study of theirs is bad too but even if it weren’t, it doesn’t demonstrate the minimum wage effect is zero on the people we care about and expect to be harmed the most, low-wage workers.
The funnel plot was taken from what looks (to an outsider to the topic) to be a fairly comprehensive literature review: http://cepr.net/documents/publications/min-wage-2013-02.pdf
Go to the source rather than critique random sentences from Wikipedia?
@pharmst:
You were the one who initially linked to wikipedia as the source. Given that you were saying “look at this study result from CEPR, referenced in this wikipedia section!” it seemed relevant to me that the other two study results from CEPR quoted in the exact same paragraph which you linked are trivially shown to be bogus. Given that their SIMPLE claims are obviously wrong, I don’t have much faith in their more COMPLEX claims.
What you have linked to now is also not the original source for that chart, that plot is merely included by reference from an earlier study ( Doucouliagos and Stanley (2009)) which…appears to be paywalled. But looking at the Schmitt survey anyway it’s…not very good. (I see a lot of confirmation bias in which studies they choose to find credible and on what basis.)
As a remedy for the Schmitt survey, I suggest you read Neumark & Wascher (2014)
If you torture the data enough it’s usually possible to produce a finding of no employment effect. So those who are ideologically committed to liking the minimum wage tend to run studies which do that, then N&W come along every few years to pull back the curtain and show that, no, the latest round of “corrections” these guys used were just as bad as the previous round and yes, there really was still a negative employment effect after all. That seems to be what happened here.
There’s nothing wrong with claiming it’s difficult to establish the precise effect of minimum wage on employment, but confidently claiming it is proven to be “a big fat zero” goes way too far.
Sure, you can accuse your ideological opponents of fraud, but funnel plots allow you to actually measure it.
@Douglas Knight:
If you want to wade into this mess too, after more google-fu I think I found the actual funnel-plot paper in non-paywalled form – it’s here.
Of particular note: even if we agreed with everything the plot-generators say, their paper did NOT find the disemployment effect to be a “big fat zero” – they merely found it to be small. Less than traditional estimates. But even “small” is not “zero”.
The two sides have very different priors. Schmitt can ignore all results prior to this century because Card’s paper in the 1990s used new methods. Then he can ignore Neumark(2011) because there were some papers that hadn’t been published yet then and so clearly (in 2014) their results are incomplete. Also he can ignore a recent study that found a LARGE negative impact on employment because…it’s too big an effect, inconsistent with the rest of the literature so it’s obviously wrong and we should ignore it, even if we don’t know why.
Meanwhile the other side thinks studies finding NO effect are dubious and need to be corrected, given the massive amount of evidence for a negative effect in all the literature which Schmitt is ignoring or handwaving away, and notices that certain attempts to apply appropriate controls are doing most the work of hiding what would otherwise appear to be an unambiguous effect – they call it “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”. Shrug…
Your prior on the real effect has no effect on the interpretation of a funnel plot and the measurement of fraud.
@Douglas Knight:
Okay, I give up. Care to be less terse? I have no idea what you are saying. Where did fraud come into it? The Doucouliagos paper claims one of his funnel plots showed possible publication bias (in a specific set of papers earlier analyzed by Card), not outright fraud. And Neumark is concerned with (plausibly inadvertent) researcher bias, which he demonstrates by reanalyzing the data and methods used by others and showing how fragile some of the conclusions are. Again, not fraud. So…what gives?
Why would we expect inflation? We aren’t increasing the total amount of money in society, we’re shifting it from rich people to poor people. It wouldn’t increase the cost of production for McDonald’s or Walmarts. If they raised their prices, what would stop competitors from undercutting them?
It might produce inflation in housing, where obviously there’s much more supply limitation. You could make a fairly complex argument about shifting money from wealthy to less-wealthy people reducing investment (since poor people use a larger proportion of their money for consumption than do wealthy people), but we’ve seen various kinds of taxes on the rich for a long time without obviously creating massive inflation, and in general there’s at least a decent argument that increased consumption would be overall economically healthy.
Arguing against a few of the commenters here, I believe you likely *would* see a minor bump in overall inflation, even with no net increase to the monetary base… because you’d see a net increase to the “virtual” monetary base due to an increase in velocity-of-transfers. It’s (I believe) pretty well established that poor people tend to spend money received more quickly, so you’d likely see more/faster transactions with the same starting pool of dollars if more of them were allocated to the poor. This would result in (some) inflation on it’s own.
That sounds plausible, though it also sounds minor, and probably you could adjust existing monetary/fiscal policy to hit a desired inflation target.
I note also that if a UBI does serve to “subsidize Walmart and McDonald’s,” as the OP hypothesizes, that plausibly their customers would share in some of that subsidy and you might see a reduction in nominal prices for the goods of companies that employ lots of low-skill labor.
You might get inflation if the result was that more people chose not to work, reducing total output–the amount of stuff that the fixed amount of money is bidding for.
True, though I think that a lot of people who push for a UBI believe that there will be enormous slack in the labor market, and others believe it would increase long term employment.
On a practical level, I doubt that a UBI that was causing an employment crisis would last.
If you’re describing general inflation from a UBI, then I think the economist’s answer would be Milton Friedman-esque, that as long as the overall monetary base was not affected, one would not expect inflation. So if you printed $4 trillion in new money and handed it out, you’d see inflation; tax the same amount from a set of rich people and hand it out, and you’d not.
I think you’re on pretty strong ground with the “goods specific to the poor” inflation, however.
I can’t speak for the US, but in the UK the income of the poorest probably wouldn’t increase with a basic income. The welfare of the UK is not especially generous compared to some European countries but single people can still receive up to £15’000 per year, or households can get £23’000 per year if they receive all benefits. The poorest 20% in the UK would likely receive a similar or even a smaller amount in a UBI system. So I’m not sure how much demand would suddenly surge for the favoured goods of the poorest.
Most of the people who say “UBI would replace welfare, not be additive to it” don’t actually mean it. It’s a trick to get centrists/rightists to support the idea in principle.
I disagree with the form of UBI that says “Let’s just roll up the entire welfare state into one payment and give that to everyone,” since that would be excessive burden on the disabled. Even if you eliminate minimum wage, which should be a part of any sane UBI proposal, there will be a lot of disabled people who simply cannot work, and those same people are likely to have excessively high care costs. I think you would need to have some kind of extra disability benefit on top, ideally quite stringent on who qualifies, to prevent damage there. And there are probably some other fringe cases that might need a bit of extra help.
In any case, whether UBI is some extra amount given in addition to the welfare state, or a more libertarian interpretation that replaces welfare and possibly health or education spending, would seem to depend on the party in power? Again, speaking for the UK, one would expect the latter given that the conservatives seem a good bet to get another 10 years in power. Meanwhile I suppose continental Europe or a Scandinavian country might try the former. Also probably worth noting that seemingly right wing Macau and Alaska both have basic income systems that resemble the former, being an additional stipend on top of their existing welfare.
That is not necessarily so.
Rather, it would either be “inefficient” or burdensome. Inefficient here means that the payments to the non-disabled would need to be sufficiently high to cover all the needs of a disabled person, so the nominal cost of the program has to be higher (entailing a higher tax base).
Of course, taken to some logical extreme where everyone is expected to (say) pay out of pocket for healthcare or where health insurance is a completely private affair, you end up in a state where either (at least) the congenitally disabled or ill cannot get healthcare or the total tax burden is higher than GDP.
I’m not an economist. I do lurk on various econ blogs and such. My understanding of it is this:
It wouldn’t be net inflationary. Just like any redistribution of wealth, cost of “poor” goods will go up, prices of “rich” goods will go down.
A question: All my life I’ve heard that a nuclear war would destroy all life on earth, or rhat the nuclear arsenal was sufficient to “destroy the world 10X over” etc. Does anyone know WHEN statements like this became true? What year marked the watershed between war and potential extinction?
Never.
John Schilling will be able to explain this better than I can, but while the winning move in Global Thermonuclear War is still not to play the worst result still comes far short of human extinction.
The biggest discussion on that subject was here, though that one was specifically focused on nuclear winter (TL,DR: not really) and we dealt with blast, fire, and fallout in some of the earlier open threads. Really, there was never a point where even total nuclear war would have done much more than kill a billion people and set civilization back a century or so. Which would be bad (citation required), but not extinction-level bad.
People began to believe it would be extinction-level bad in the mid-1950s, with the introduction of thermonuclear (i.e. hydrogen bomb) weapons, because this graph looks really scary if you don’t do the math for converting megatons to casualties. As that math is not a simple linear calculation, most people just eyeballed it and got the wrong answer.
For actual human extinction, and barring Strangelovian mine shafts, you’d need an arsenal about two orders of magnitude larger than history ever produced, and a perverse willingness by military commanders to court rather than avoid extinction. At one order of magnitude past history you’re in the handful–of–savages scenario, more or less.
Very interesting, thank you! I should probably learn not to take my information about casualties from bumper stickers.
given how many people depend on civilization not being set back 100 years to get food, I would think the figure of “kill all BUT a billion people” is probably closer to accurate that just kill a billion. Once you toss society back a century and wreck global trade flows,a whole lot of people are going to go hungry.
Not as much as you’d think. The Green Revolution made for something close to regional self-sufficiency in food production everywhere even without ammonia-based fertilizers, and tossing society back a century still leaves you plenty of ships and railroads.
Indian peasants are going to keep on being Indian peasants, as always. Lots of Americans are going to be come farmhands to make up for the machinery as it goes out of repair.
We don’t ship food around in huge quantities for the most part, but where is the fertilizer going to come from when most of the factories have been blown up? What happens when the spare parts for the combine harvesters stop getting dropped off every week? Everywhere that runs short of food for any length of time will see industrial collapse, and those collapses will ripple though the system in unpredictable ways. Each problem might be individually solvable, but lots of them at once can wreck things, even before you consider that people running short of food will turn to violence to get it.
The best discussion of direct effects is probably here. Or at least that’s the first one I could find, and includes my targeting workup of St. Louis.
It’s not even true, and never was. We probably couldn’t even nuke ourselves into the stone age if we actively tried. Iron age, tops.
Insufficient ambition.
http://file.scirp.org/pdf/CWEEE_2013071113213239.pdf
That @juno.com address just screams legitimacy.
Nuclear warface and biological warfare each are sufficiently advanced as to decimate the global population, without however extinguishing the human race.
However, the lethality of each class of weapon is greatly amplified by deploying the other class of weapon. Thus a nuclear war that substantially eliminated humanity’s vaccine-development and public-sanitation capacities, combined with the simultaneous release of engineered strains of tuberculosis, plague, smallpox, measles, AIDS, ebola, malaria, yellow fever, influenza, cholera (etc.), plausibly could entirely extinguish the human race, via the same epidemiological interactions that were exhibited in the (newly demonstrated) extinction-level New World vulnerabilities to novel Old World infections.
Conversely, treaties that outlaw nuclear weapons are generally beneficial, and treaties that outlaw bioweapons are generally beneficial, and — to the degree that we highly value safety from risk of human extinction — the value of embracing each class of treaty is greatly increased by embracing the other class of treaty.
There’s a small problem with that analysis: any nuclear war severe enough to cripple our response to an epidemic will also be severe enough to cripple our transportation infrastructure. Which means infections will have a harder time spreading, and thus be less lethal.
If you want a really scary thought, consider a coordinated attack targeting food crops. Most of our food crops are monocultures and our response to crop diseases is completely insufficient. I’m much more worried about that than the standard bioterror narrative.
As others have pointed out the “destroy the world 10X over” claim is BS. I think part of the cause is that in most discussions, the person who gives the smallest estimate for the destructiveness of a nuclear winter is perceived as the crazy “General Ripper”-warmonger. This causes estimates of the destructiveness of a nuclear winter to ratchet up over time without evidence.
It’s not true, and never was. I won’t add to what John Schilling said on the subject of nuclear weapons, except to go a little further and say that even the death of 99% of living humans wouldn’t be an extinction-level event without aggravating factors, and the better part of the fuss was and is the result of an inability to comprehend the orders of magnitude involved.
What I can tell you though is that anxiety about “modern warfare” causing the extinction of humanity significantly pre-dates nuclear weapons. Certain pacifistic creeds have held this with varying degrees of mysticism for a long time, but in the concrete sense this idea dates to the early 20th century and particularly to the aftermath of the First World War. Some theorists, most vocally an Italian named Douhet but many others, held that aerial bombing was both so destructive and so unstoppable/cost effective — allowing for the direct annihilation of strategic objectives like cities and ports regardless of intervening ground forces — would or at least could lead to the total destruction of societies via a combination of physical damage and a sense of hopeless demoralization inflicted on affected populations. The bombing in question would be done not only with high explosives but with chemical and biological agents, all of which were relatively novel and extraordinary lethal with many promising developments on the horizon. A particularly vivid and detailed pre-Hiroshima account of a speculative apocalypse along these lines can be found in Olaf Stapledon’s 1930 novel Last and First Men.
This theory of the effects of aerial bombing along with the unprecedented tactical experience of warfare in the early 20th Century and a newly rediscovered sense of civilian vulnerability in Europe produced fears of an apocalypse that would LITERALLY. KILL. US. ALL. It didn’t help that plenty of people who probably knew better fanned these fears for political reasons. Which continues to be true into the present; there is a certain degree of esotericism about dire portrayals of a nuclear holocaust. OK, World War Three won’t _actually_ kill everybody, but it would be very bad and quite possibly the worst thing to ever happen, so we smart people have a duty to say things that make nuclear war less likely at the expense of saying things that are 100% true.
Is the term “Social Justice Warrior” derogatory?
(Sorry — I realize this is a funny question but I actually want to know. I think the original use of the term was dismissive but now it seems to be in more common use?)
I know people who identify as SJWs.
But is it one of those things where they’re allowed to say it but if you say it, it’s bad?
It’s taken as a postitive description.
I don’t think you understand how much dominance Social Justice has in some social circles.
Like with “feminist,” I can pretty much tell the difference between the word being used as an insult and the word being used as a descriptor. (I’m not going to be annoyed because someone thinks I’m pro-social-justice; I might be mildly annoyed if they think I’m too pro-social-justice; if they use it as a “LOL your views are hilarious and terrible” kind of thing, it’s not the words that are the problem, it’s the fact that they think my views are hilarious and terrible.)
I used to identify as an SJW but I don’t quite as much anymore because I want to be a little more careful about appearing to endorse warring in situations where warring isn’t warranted. (Is it odd that the number of feminists with views more extreme than mine haven’t turned me off the word feminist, but the number of SJWs with views more extreme than mine have turned me off the word SJW? I guess it’s that I’ve been in more situations where I’ve been forced to think to myself, “Oh, but I’m not one of THOSE, don’t lump me in with THEM.”)
Okay, but when you use it are you using it only and solely to refer to people that self describe as such?I don’t think a few examples of attempts at “reclaiming” (as dumb as I think that is) are sufficient to disprove the observation that the overwhelmingly primary usage is as a pejorative.
Yes, I think so. It’s certainly not a term that intersectional feminists or anti-racists, or LGBTQ activists, would use to describe themselves. If it’s not derogatory, it’s at the very least disrespectful (and it often meant disrespectfully) and seems more like a handy grouping for opponents to use than an attempt to grapple intellectually with feminism/anti-racism/queer theory on their own terms.
Edit: I saw Nancy’s comment above, which mentions people who self-identify as SJWs. I haven’t seen that personally, and I see the concept more often on here (and on r/The_Donald) than I do among leftists and liberals I know or follow.
Some I’ve known would disagree. Usually followed up by a crack about the type of person for whom “social justice warrior” sounds like a bad thing.
It’s certainly not a universally accepted self-description. I don’t think it was coined in the SJ community. But it is a self-description for some, and not just in a reclamatory way.
I believe it was. It was originally a self-description that became derogatory it came to be associated with the behavior of those it applied to.
I’d say it’s like hippy. It can be derogatory, or it can be how people describe themselves, depending on context.
Is “queer” a derogatory term?
Like many terms, “social justice warrior” is derogatory when it is used in a derogatory way. In any given context, it’s almost always easy to tell. Unless anybody has an ambiguous example, discussing whether it is derogatory in the abstract seems like a waste of time.
Yes. Even the people who use it as self descriptor do so because of some mixture of irony and spite.
I know some people who take the words straight. Surely Social Justice is good. Surely fighting for it is good. Being a Social Justice Warrior must be a good thing.
Some of these people are Jewish, and I think some of them are pulling away from SJW because of anti-Semitism there. Jews (at least on campuses) are getting hassled because some SJWs assume that being Jewish means supporting hardline Israeli policies.
I’m confused. Does the ‘SJWs that assume being Jewish means supporting hardline Israeli policies’ group overlap at all with the ‘people you know who take the words straight’ group?
Sorry for the confusion.
I don’t know whether the groups overlap.
I don’t know any of the anti-Semitic SJWs as described, or at least I hope I don’t.
I don’t think it’s so much that the SJWs assume or care what the individual Jews support, as that they’re big on collective guilt. This is no different from how all whites are guilty of “white privilege”, whether or not their ancestors personally benefited from or even had anything to do with slavery.
And without assholes, we’d all die, so someone, somewhere, could reasonably conclude that an asshole is a good thing. But even if they earnestly believed that, they’d still be wrong if they said “asshole” wasn’t derogatory.
I take the angle that you can’t understand a multi-word name for a thing by parsing the words.
Science fiction isn’t reliable about science. Social Justice isn’t reliable about justice. This doesn’t mean that there’s no science in science fiction, or that Social Justice is always wrong about justice.
This strikes me as a sensible piece of social justice writing.
Half of it is OK, the other half is nonsense.
Aapje, which half is which?
The bits where he complains about anti-racists caring about symbols over things that harm black people more than just hurt feelings are fair complaints.
The bits about racial profiling are fair complaints.
The cultural appropriation complaint is nonsense.
The Instagram feed complaint is mostly nonsense. First of all, I actually looked at the feed and it doesn’t reflect his complaints well at all. Even though the feed does have a lot of focus on sports and music, quite a few of the black people I saw were not part of his four categories for black people and there were quite a few white people in those categories. In so far that the frequency differs for certain topics, that can plausibly reflect actual race differences in what people actually do. His complaint is also absurdly detailed. Apparently, only white people are portrayed as wedge-heel-wearing rugby players (you guessed it, only 1 picture in that category). Besides, if those guys would have been black, he would have taken it as evidence that black people are portrayed too often in the context of sports. When both X and Not X are taken as evidence for a claim, this tends to reflect the bias in the claimant, generally.
Yes.
High modernism!
Would anyone here provide an argument in favor of claims like “we need more women in physics”?
In particular, I am less interested in arguments that are of the form “The current lack of women indicates bias in hiring and teaching that should be fixed for egalitarian reasons.”
I am especially interested in arguments that diversity is good for a field intrinsically. Are there such arguments?
The arguments you disallow are the only arguments. Equal competence and interest is assumed a priori, and policy made to match.
I believe that’s true for physics (and mathematics and some other subjects), but there are arguments for diversity for its own sake in other fields (notably, tech). The basic theme is that it will improve the product or service if the people building the product or service have some sort of connection with the customer. This argument is nearly always made disingenuously; it works for cultural, religious, political, and other sorts of diversity besides the usual sex, race, religion, but the proponents will gasp in horror if you suggest perhaps this means you should hire Republicans or Evangelicals. However, the fact that the argument is made dishonestly does not mean it’s never valid.
For theoretical physics and math and other very “hard” endeavors… well, I’m pretty sure the equations don’t care a bit about diversity.
There are two issues with this argument, even if we assume it’s true. First, you need a woman, not 50% women to gain advantage of it. No field is so female-starved as to make that hard. Second, it equivocates between ‘our workforce has a diversity of viewpoints’ and ‘our workforce comes in many colors and shapes’. These are not the same. Take the following candidates:
1. A white American male from a middle-class background
2. A white American female from a middle-class background
3. An Asian-American male from a middle-class background (raised in the US)
4. A white immigrant male from Poland
Now, which is most likely to add diversity of viewpoints to your team? Yes, #4. Who doesn’t actually add any ‘diversity points’ on most metrics.
There might be a few such fields, but I don’t think I-beams or coal or ore or HVAC equipment care about either your gender or your culture. However, in computer programming there are few enough women, unevenly enough distributed, that you can have workplaces with a dozen or more programmers, all of them men.
Your second point is what I was getting at with the disingenuousness. If your workplace is all white males with a middle class background, then if this argument is true, either an immigrant from Poland or a white female might add more useful diversity of viewpoint (depending on your product and market). Of course a group in tech with a white male from Poland, two Asians from Japan and China, a white man from the hollers of West Virginia, and a white middle class American man is considered “non-diverse”, but just because the arguers are dishonest doesn’t mean the argument is false.
Fair point, but if that’s the case, you pay a modest premium for that one female and move on. If there are more slots where (insert group here) actually add value than there are members of that group in the relevant field, wages will be driven up for that group. The fact that this doesn’t seem to happen makes me strongly suspect that this effect is pretty weak.
I have a personal example to attest to this problem. Two of my best friends from college grew up together. They lived on the same block of a standard middle class neighborhood, went to the same schools, and were both very much ‘universal culture’. Friend A and I won national merit awards. Friend B was, frankly, somewhat less talented than us, but he was still by all means a very good student. He also had [foreign] heritage, but no real connection to it that I’ve ever been aware of. We all went to the same department in the same university. Friend B and I got full rides; Friend A left undergrad with some $60k in debt. I got my full ride because I was an in-state student with a national merit award. Friend B got his full ride because of his [foreign] heritage. Friend A got shafted, because their standard middle class neighborhood was on the other side of the state border, and they only offered a pittance to out-of-state national merit awardees. I never understood how you could justify treating culturally identical students so differently.
This was never a problem or a big deal for any of us; we’re all still good friends to this day. But it frankly boggles the mind to think about the ridiculous lines on which universities are able to massively price discriminate and how the only response is polite applause rather than, “Uh, do you think you could maybe make a coherent argument for all this?”
The full ride explanation is quite simple for state schools, at least in Florida. If this a National Merit Scholar award it is state funds that are paying for the full ride over the NMSC one time award, and the goal of this program is to prevent brain drain from the state’s public schools. This is the case in Florida where it is as you described. It worked to keep both my daughter and her roommate from going to GT instead. Friend A would be excluded intentionally due to the goals of the award.
At University of Florida the school was offering basically zero merit awards. This particular scholarship is funded directly by the state, not the school.
There are many options for National Merit Scholars for full rides in different states.
If the software product is for a US market, and it depends on knowledge of US culture or practices, the Polish immigrant may be a net negative impact to the product. One can imagine a totally diverse international team that would fail miserably on this product. Diversity for its own sake is not always a benefit. I’m sure this last statement has broken a few fundamental laws of nature in these times.
Donald Knuth is an ardent self-professed Christian whom Scott Aaronson has described as
Not much “gasping in horror” in evidence here, is there? 🙂
Dozens of other examples could be cited (Bill GASARCH … Jocelyn Bell Burnell!). Hmmm … perhaps the SSC’s perennial alt.anecdotal complaints in respect to religious intolerance are not well-grounded in contemporary SJ/STEAM-reality?
I wonder if any of them consider that there might be actual downsides to diversity and upsides to homogeneity.
Referring them to studies and articles which (purport to) show downsides to diversity and upsides to homogeneity tends to evoke the same sort of horror response as suggesting hiring Evangelicals, so I would guess that they refuse to consider it.
The mathematics community particularly — and other STEAM-disciplines too — retains vivid memories of disastrous experiments in institutionalized ethnic, racial, and cultural homogeneity.
@Marshayne Lonehand
Godwin ahoy!
(Breaking my usual rule of not replying to Sidles here.)
There’s an alt.Godwin exemption, isn’t there? Now that openly homicidal alt.ideation is an endemic thing?
If having a more female workforce improves the quality of the product, shouldn’t the market already have corrected for that? Evil greedy misogynist capitalists would be paying top dollar for female talent so they can make better products to beat the competition?
It seems unlikely to me that the motivation of the non-STEM people involved in “more women in STEM” advocacy is to increase the profits of corporations despite the corporations’ desire to be less profitable but more woman-hating.
Doing that explicitly is illegal in the US. But indirectly, it IS done (diversity recruiting is a thing), though the reasons may not be to make better products.
Also I’m generally wary of perfect market arguments, as there are always confounding factors. Consider the
parable ofjoke about the economist and the $20 bill.“If having a more female workforce improves the quality of the product, shouldn’t the market already have corrected for that?”
No. The market, like evolution, doesn’t optimize.
It prunes the least efficient and least lucky organizations, but that doesn’t mean that only the best succeed.
Try doing the math for how long such a market correction would take, under plausible assumptions.
To actually achieve an ideally balanced ratio would take a long time to be sure.
But to change current hiring policies should be relatively quick. Assuming the whole “diversity is our strength and clearly and obviously provides huge benefits” crowd is correct (or at least believed to be correct by some definite amount of hiring managers), then plenty of companies will institute “let’s achieve diversity going forward” policies which would mean that for any given woman entering the workforce, she will receive a fair (or perhaps biased in her favor) shot, even if the companies don’t go as far as “let’s immediately fire all our white cismen and replace them with more diverse people”
@MattM
That has already happened.
The presence of women in physics makes female students more likely to see physics as a career they would want to pursue, and therefore increases the amount of talent available to the field?
I have yet to see a good one, beyond diversity is good because diversity.
One of EE Doc Smith’s WWII-era space operas had one.
To defeat the latest cosmic menace, they had some physics that needed working out. They collected all the galaxies best physicists, and put them in a room. They spent all their time squabbling in ego battles, and none of the military men running the operation had any idea who was right or wrong, or what any of it meant.
So they got a second room and filled it with smart but non-genius physicists, with what would these days be called better social skills. They had them work with the geniuses to mediate, interpret and check their results, and explain it to the military.
So the cosmic menace got blown up, by the power of diversity.
Note this argument doesn’t work if you assume men and women are statistically exactly the same, but more or less no-one actually believes that, and it’s ruled out by the premise anyway.
Reuben Hersh’ and Vera John-Steiner’s book Loving and Hating Mathematics: Challenging the Myths of Mathematical Life (2010) sets forth at least some of the pro-SJ arguments that your comment requests (book index here, book “Introduction” PDF here).
Is the 21st century STEAM-Enlightenment evolving towards an SJ-positive society in which mathematical pedagogy is appreciated (in large measure) as an explicitly psychotherapeutic, conscientiously CBT/DBT-compatible discipline? A considerable body of literature points toward the answer “Oy yeah”! 🙂
Can any amount of alt.fulmination obstruct this widening, deepening, accelerating, inherently SJ-positive evolution toward Enlightening pedagogical unification?
Hopefully not! 🙂
For biology, women might be more likely to interpret animal behavior differently than men. This could counteract various biases in research. For social sciences, same argument. Interpretations of data from either gender might include some self-serving bias. The discipline is better off on average if there’s counterargument. I think this argument is correct for biology and you can find real examples without looking hard. I don’t know about the social sciences.
For physics, chemistry, computer science, etc., I can think of arguments regarding different mental structures, but I’ve never seen anyone advance those arguments.
I don’t know much biology. Could you share a real example? I could buy it.
See here for one claimed example: Sarah Hrdy’s work.
Here‘s another example. The interesting stuff is on page 70-72, where the authors claim male researchers were blinded while studying a kind of jay. They say the researchers were so dead-set on male dominance, they missed that the roles are totally reversed in this species.
I don’t know much biology and can’t endorse any of these claims for sure. They’re just to support the plausibility of the argument.
Thanks very much– I was going to mention Hrdy, but I was low on time. I didn’t know about the jays.
More generally, feminist issues get some research because that’s a constituency. I suspect there are tremendous depths of ignorance in areas where there’s no constituency. We need more sorts of people.
I’ve wondered whether there’s math that doesn’t get discovered because some possible areas aren’t interesting enough to mathematicians.
Yeah, you can imagine some difference in womens’ and mens’ brain structures/intuitions/etc., such that if there were more women in math, some areas of math which are now not well-understood would be. I have no idea if there is any such difference in brain structure, or where you’d look for evidence, though.
Short version: BOOBS!
Long version: Physics, math, computer science, and other math-intensive intellectual fields, are predominantly practiced by men who tend not to be very attractive to the general female population, and have even more finding a mate if they restrict their choose to the few females in these fields. Therefore, they would appreciate a larger dating pool of females.
Amusing, and probably somewhat true, but in the current climate dangerous for the men and insulting to the women.
Well, @smocc asked for an argument, not necessarily for a good argument 🙂
OTOH, this is work, not a prom. Mixed environments will cause problems, because suddenly people are trying to fuck each other instead of working.
“Used to be, people would spend all day at the office coming up with ways to fuck each other! And now, now they’re all coming up with ways to fuck each other!”
Yes, men should be banned from working.
If there are good women physicists out there who are being ignored or overlooked or not brought into the field because of lack of policies or initiatives to find them, then the field of physics is at a loss of good thinkers, workers and researchers and is being impeded.
So, not “diversity for the sake of diversity, now we have enough non-white/non-male faces in the faculty and student photos on our website”, but “we need to look outside the places we usually look and consider candidates we don’t usually consider to see if we’re missing out on genuine talent”.
Which seems a non-issue these days. We’ve hit diminishing returns long ago with regards to encouraging everyone to study what interests them, rather than for other reasons (like getting a paying job). Which hilariously results in fewer women going into hard sciences and technology, because those things generally don’t interest them as much as soft sciences and interacting with other people.
+1
If women prefer fields where they’re not the only woman in the lab/office/classroom, then having an extremely skewed gender distribution will lead to fewer women wanting to go into that field than would otherwise be the case. That in turn means that some of the people who would have contributed the most to physics wound up going into some other field instead, because even though they liked the field and were good at it, it was uncomfortable being the only woman in the room all the time.
Again, I have no data on how important this effect is, but it’s at least a plausible reason for wanting efforts to make women feel more comfortable in fields where a lot of women explicitly say they feel unwelcome.
The tricky part comes with deciding on tradeoffs. It’s quite possible that physics would be better off if it were more woman-friendly, but that a given set of proposed techniques for making it more woman-friendly would do a lot more harm than good overall. (For example, affirmative action in grad school applications might end up with a lot of marginal applicants washing out of PhD programs, re-enforce stereotypes about women being bad at physics, and make things worse.)
But if that’s the real problem (I’m dubious but not dismissive) that’s not a problem that calls for more women in physics, or whatever, but for e.g. assortative hiring in physics.
If 20% of the top physics candidates are women (mumble something science that must not be named) but women are reluctant to work in any environment that isn’t at least 40% female, you don’t want to lose the 20% but neither do you want to kick out 20% of the qualified men and replace them with less qualified women. You want half the physics schools, laboratories, and institutes to be all-male, and the other half to be 40% equally qualified women.
Which is the sort of thing that is likely to happen naturally, and to adjust to a changing candidate pool naturally, if you just let people decide where they want to study and work. Might be room for some targeted nudging, if you are thoughtful about it.
So, a sort of monastic system? All-male physics monasteries, all-female physics nunneries?
You have a very strange definition of “all-female” there, or perhaps just poor reading comprehension. And a narrow view of history and sociology, if religious orders are the only de-facto single-gender institutions you can think of.
Poor reading comprehension it is – I saw “other half to 40%”, missing the “be”.
Wouldn’t that result in some universities doing well by specializing in hiring women?
One observes that problem, and solution, in the context of academic minority schools of thought. My first position as a professor was at the Public Choice Center of VPI. The public choice approach was relatively new and uncommon at the time–UVA seems to have made a deliberate attempt to drive Buchanan (and Coase) out. So if that was what attracted you, there was a big advantage to the one school that was specializing in it.
I don’t think that this is particularly likely to be the case today, at least in the west. To some extent, the best people are going to be the ones who will be in the field come hell or high water. Yes, you can keep them out, but the women among them have been doing physics since the 50s, if not earlier. In college, I helped with a ‘Women in STEM’ event where we talked to a bunch of middle school girls about aerospace engineering. My job was helping show off the wind tunnel. Frankly, it just didn’t seem like the sort of thing which was going to make someone realize a deep and untapped love of physics. The people you’re going to be picking up today, where almost everyone has some exposure to science, are going to be the marginal ones who are decent workers and OK at the field. The number of potential superstars who haven’t been exposed to the field is vanishingly small, and most of them are off being superstars or near-superstars in other fields. To use a personal example, I was interested in naval stuff before I moved to LA, but the battleship obsession has grown massively since then. If I’d gone to, say, San Diego instead, I might well be regaling everyone with details of aircraft carriers. Or maybe I’d have stayed with space warfare. But I’d be deep into some highly technical hobby, or a job that doubled as one.
Yeah I have similar feelings, at least as far as aggressive efforts to recruit more women at this point.
Pro-science, and pro-women-in-science, messaging is very strong. While sexism is not entirely eliminated, I would think at this point the pro-women messaging combined with the existing mass of women in the sciences that the number of young girls actually interested in science not going into it because it’s “men’s work” is very small. If anything, I’d at this point be more worried about overencouraging not really interested young women to take up science and wrecking their freshman GPAs in classes they don’t care for. Or scaring young women away by exaggerating the impact of sexism in the field.
But I think you have to get them early, and that’s part of the problem. The messaging for young girls now is better, but that means that their presence in the workplace is going to lag 20 years behind. You aren’t going to convince today’s 30 year-olds to switch careers, but if you try to calibrate today’s education off the time-lagged results of early 90s education, you’re going to over-correct.
I’d also be worried about overpromotion to women, although it should be fairly easy to test, if we can get access to the records for the engineering department at a mid-range college.
Basically, if women are more interested in STEM relative to their ability, they’ll have a higher dropout rate/worse GPA than the men in their classes. If they’re less interested (which could include being scared away by tales of sexism), then you’ll see a higher GPA for the women than the men, as only the women who are really interested (and thus likely to have greater aptitude and/or study harder) will be in the room in the first place.
My money is on it being pretty close to even.
@Bean:
The case I’m somewhat familiar with is Law. When my sister went to Bolt (Berkeley law school) in the late sixties, women were about 10% of the class. One year, of the two top students in each of the three classes, five of the six were women.
The most serious argument I can devise is that we need more women in physics because we need more people in physics. Open those gates as wide as possible. Expand the total number of meatbags who understand what will happen to the water level in a glass when the ice cubes in it melt, or how a battery works, or why absorption lines are important. By sheer statistics, more of them will be women than men (unless there’s something we as yet don’t understand about brain morphology and comprehending relativity et al.).
More women will be a side effect, though, not an end objective, so this is not really a supporting argument. Women might be the largest bloc of people one could appeal to for minimal marketing effort, I suppose.
Slow down a bit. There’s a massive difference between ‘people in physics’ and ‘people who understand physics’. I’m in the later category, as are most of the readers here. This does not make me a physicist. And while an increase in the later category might well be a good thing, it’s going to be a very different program than one designed to get people into a field.
You’re quite right about the difference. Addressing it had crossed my mind.
To my thinking, there’s no shortage of deep physics research to be done, although there may be a shortage of funding for it. Opening the gates would mean more people capable of research, but they admittedly may be relegated to more mundane work.
Meanwhile, though, we could do with a greater amount of understanding of the subject among laypeople. Understanding physics in a general sense would be a cultural change; it would lead to more people understanding math, logic, and reason. It would also yield a morale boost – more people thinking of their environment as a knowable thing, more people able to predict what will happen if they try to improve it in various ways, rather than laying all their hopes for change on an executive god-king.
Conversely, in the areas I’m most familiar with (finance, programming, etc.) I take the William F. Buckley-inspired view that we don’t need more women, we need fewer men.
Do we? The academic system is strongly selective: many more people want to be physicists (or other kinds of professional academics, even outside the hard sciences) than the number of available positions.
Increasing the number of women in physics would not increase the number of physicists: these women would just displace some men. So the question is, how would the overall competence of physicists change?
Feminists argue that there are women just as talented, hard-working and interested in physics as men, but they don’t pursue careers in physics because they are being held back by the Patriarchy. If these sexist barriers to entry were eliminated, more competent women would displace less competent men, increasing the overall competence of the field.
Non-feminists/anti-feminists argue that there are no significant sexist barriers to entry against women, and the observed gender disparity is caused by a difference of interests, talent and ambition between genders. In fact, they argue that where there sexist barriers exist, these are against men, in the form of affirmative action programs that privilege women. The only proposed methods to increase the number of women in the field, more affirmative action, would decrease the overall competence of the field as less competent women would displace more competent men.
The mechanism by which affirmative action reduces overall competence unless it is well-calibrated to counterbalance a biased barrier to entry is well understood, while there is no strong evidence that a anti-woman barrier to entry even exists, therefore I think that there is no good argument (based on increasing the overall competence of the field) to support affirmative action.
I think the strongest argument would be something like:
Intrinsic ability and interest alone would lead to women making up X% of physicists. X might be 50, or it might be less (or more). Suppose that we actually observe that Y% of physicists are women, and we don’t know whether YX. Since Y actually is low, potential women physicists notice this and take that as evidence that physics is not for them. This alone could cause Y<X. Countervailing measures (e.g. coordinated action to get more women in physics) could increase Y back towards X. Ideal measures would get Y to equal X.
This argument does not require X to be 50, or any other number, or make any assumptions about the benefits of diversity, or accuse anyone of sexism. It just requires Y to be significantly lower than 50 (which it is), and for that to influence educational paths and career choices of some women. I don't know if I believe this argument or not, but it is the most persuasive one to me, because it doesn't require a bunch of assumptions that appear false based on my experience and familiarity with the literature.
You’re asking the wrong question. We need more women in physics (and more men in nursing, primary school teaching etc.) because there are various distortionary factors (bias is one, I won’t make any claim about how important it is) that mean physics talent that belongs to women is underused.
But then why is the question “how do we get more female physics talent?” rather then “how do we get more physics talent?” (again, physics chosen only as an example). Is there something special about female physics talent or male nursing talent? If there is, I am interested.
I’m modelling the field of physics as having a fixed number of positions, each of is filled by someone with a certain innate aptitude for physics. If there are `n` positions, we would approximately like them to be filled by the top `n` people for physics ability Suppose women are banned from being physicists. Then those positions will actually be filled by the top `n` men and non-binary people, a group which almost certainly has less total physics ability than the top `n` of all people. Women aren’t actually banned from being physicists, but it seems plausible that there are factors that make them less likely to become physicists, which have the same sort of effect.
@rlms
But what if those women are instead using their talents elsewhere?
A major problem I have with your argument is that it tends to paint women who don’t go into male-dominated professions as wasting their talent.
Furthermore, if one of the factors that keeps women from becoming physicists is that they feel that the job is incompatible with the life they desire, while we pressure men into sacrificing their well-being for the benefit of society, then your argument boils down to putting equal pressure on women as on men. So then we get to BBA‘s argument: perhaps we should have fewer male physicist?
“But what if those women are instead using their talents elsewhere?”
That’s where the “approximately” in “we would approximately like them to be filled by the top `n` people” comes from: there are multiple fields and some people are talented in several (there are probably some people in the top `m` physicists who would be better working as mathematicians). But this issue isn’t specific to women. If you want to argue that women with talent in physics are disproportionately more talented than men in other fields, and they choose to work in those fields over physics, then you need to point out those fields.
I don’t think your argument about pressure applies. I think there is very little pressure on men to “sacrifice their well-being for the benefit of society” in the context of physics. Lawyers have a pretty much 50/50 gender balance, and I think they are on average much more pressured than physicists.
The pressure on men is to sacrifice their well being for _money_. It is expected — less so now than in the past, but still so — that a man will make enough money to support himself and his family. If he does not, he is a failure, to be despised or (if he has children) punished. This applies across professions.
It is also true that men’s social status is more tied with their profession than women’s, and this provides additional pressure; generally, it is better for a man’s status to be a poorly-paid postdoc than a poorly-paid grocery clerk.
But men who do actually sacrifice their wellbeing for money become lawyers and doctors, not (typically penniless) physicists.
@rlms
Men in general work more hours and have longer commutes (unpaid work time), while their happiness decreases with more hours worked.
They also consider parental duties more rewarding than paid work, yet do less of those than women -> sacrifice.
Do men work longer hours and have longer commutes because they are disproportionately physicists? I don’t see why those aspects of patriarchy you mention are relevant.
Men are disproportionately physicists in part because the jobs tend to involve long hours and long commutes, yes. Women tend to favor the opposite (directly and indirectly, the latter because they favor female-dominated workplaces).
I’m considering physicists to largely be academics. I don’t think academia is particularly known for having long hours and commutes, or for being generally gender-imbalanced.
Depends which sort of academia. “People sciences” seem to be greatly dominated by females of late, while “things sciences” remain dominated by males.
@rlms
https://productiveacademicblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/29/challenging-the-long-hours-culture-in-academia/
As for commuting, I think that it is fairly common for academics to travel to symposiums and the like.
@Aapje:
The key word there is “teachers” and if you click the underlying link, you will see that they are not restricting this to university academics. This sector is (at least in the US, but I think most places) dominated by women teaching at the primary and secondary level.
As such, the idea that women aren’t willing to work long hours in this sector would seem refuted.
Traveling to symposiums is not “commuting” in any normal sense of the word.
@HBC
OK, here then:
https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2014/08/25/essay-working-40-hours-week-academic
It’s American too, for extra applicabilitititititiness.
@Schilling
OK, work related travel then.
I would argue that logically, the female preference for shorter commutes which is found in studies, is actually a reflection of a more general dislike of work related travel.
I think that “I have to sit in traffic for an hour on the 405 every single day” and “I have to jet off to places like Rome and New Orleans and stay in nice hotels for a few weeks every year”, are such very different things that I would draw no conclusion at all about one from the other.
Do primary school teachers work particularly long hours?
Not really. Primary and secondary school teachers, at least where I’m from, have pretty leisurely schedules, good benefits and great job security, but are rather poorly paid. For some reason, nearly all of them are female.
@Incurian:
Yes, teachers do work long hours. The school day may end at 3:30, but marking, lesson plans, and extra-curriculars don’t. I don’t know where Anonymous got the idea that teachers have leisurely hours, but it’s probably not from talking to actual teachers.
Teachers work leisurely hours if you average out having summers off, winter break, spring break, etc.
Source: My mom was a teacher.
@Anonymous:
My Mom has taught Pre-school through Kindergarden aged children (at a private, Montessori school) for 40 years.
Leisurely does not describe her schedule.
@HBC, @Iain
I don’t mean “20 hours/week work-from-home flexitime”. I mean “less than 10 hours a day, weekends and summers off”. This is pretty leisurely. My family has several retired teachers.
@Anonymous – are you in the US, or one of those fabled lands where teaching is actually respected as a profession instead of as the rejects of Real Business(TM) (“if you can’t Do, Teach”)?
Your average teacher doesn’t work at a private Montessori school. I’d imagine that working in an alternative school model is more demanding than for an ordinary public school alone for having less of a pool of pre-made work sheets and other ressources available.
Montessori is fairly popular and it’s been around for a long time. I’d be astonished if template lesson plans didn’t exist, unless its teaching model forbids them. Same for worksheets, insofar as they’re relevant to it.
In the US, the name “Montessori” seems to work like “Jello” – you can refer to your own curriculum as Montessori without even necessarily copying the official form.
The son of a friend of mine goes to a school which isn’t specifically named this, but appears to follow a similar model. We refer to it as “Montessorta”.
I’m married to a teacher, and as such a large portion of my social circle is made up of teachers, and I would say in comparison to the people I know that work in industry (tech especially), teachers have much more leisure time in their schedule.
People always bring up the added time of grading, but in reality that is a very boom or bust situation. Teachers may have a couple of weeks where they get home at 3:00 and have the rest of the evening off, followed up by a few 12 hour days of teaching and frantic grading. I would say, on average, teachers work about as many hours in a workday as any other white collar professional. Newer teachers or teachers that are teaching new classes have more hours of prep, but that is balanced by the teachers that teach the same subject year in and year out and have almost no prep time.
However, they also have far more holidays and something like 12 weeks a year off. So, overall, I would say that teachers spend less time at work than other white collar professionals.
Certification is available in Montessori instruction from at least one source (the American Montessori Society) and certified instructors will have developed materials and lesson plans as part of the certification process.
But the daily work of “following the child” is ongoing. Noting and responding to the needs of each class and each child is a process, not a template.
Classroom time is only one portion of any teacher’s day, regardless of method. Preparing for upcoming lessons, whether they are ones you have given in previous years/semesters or not, assessing progress via grading or other metrics, and formulating and communicating on the needs of specific children are all going to to consume time outside of the classroom.
Classroom time is only about six hours a day though, so if you are working an eight hour day that gives you two hours for prep, grading, and student interaction. Obviously, some days that won’t be enough, but then other days it’s more than is needed.
A teacher would have to spend about four and a half hours a day, every work day, on these other responsibilities to spend as much time working as an average white collar worker. I don’t see that being anywhere near true.
I find that most arguments about the benefits of diversity tend to lack strong object-level examples. I don’t really know what people mean by diversity of view or opinion in most scenarios.
Argument abstract of sorts:
“The most fundamental phenomenon of the universe is relationship.” Jonas Salk — Anatomy of Reality
Religion, democracy and capitalism are essentially coding structures / apps for relationship interface.
Genetic code, the same.
The dominant phenomenon of our era is exponentially accelerating complexity.
Add 5.9 billion people since 1900. Add exponentially accruing knowledge. (Human knowledge doubles roughly every 13 months according to Ray Kurzweil, and that may be dated.) Give many of the ~7.5 billion people exponentially more powerful tech.
These additions have generated new, unprecedented and far more complex environs / relationships in-and-across geo eco bio cultural & tech networks.
Re CODE
Code is physics efficacious relationship infrastructure in bio, cultural & tech networks: genetic, language, math, moral, religious, legal, monetary, etiquette, software, etc.
Survival Interface with Complexity — from the biological network:
“The rule of thumb is that the complexity of the organism has to match the complexity of the environment at all scales in order to increase the likelihood of survival.” Physicist, complexity scientist Yaneer Bar-Yam — Making Things Work
Currently, our species isn’t adequately coded — biologically, culturally or technologically — to pass natural selection tests in environs undergoing exponentially accelerating complexity for X number of years.
Year X approaches.
Culture, Complexity and Code2: link text
ATTENTION SCOTT!
I propose a new moderation rule, the Sidles Rule, that anybody whose writing style cannot be distinguished from Time Cube is banned until they learn to communicate clearly. It mostly worked with John, he’s way more lucid these days, and it will greatly increase the quality of discourse.
Alternative explanation: We’re all way crazier.
I know I’m way crazier: I have this persistent delusion that Donald Trump is president.
It’s from wearing my red-ziggurat DEVO Energy Dome! 🙂
Sufficiently advanced word salad is indistinguishable from Sidles. You’re right, we got side-tracked by trying to detect Sidles rather than the style, which was the problem no matter who was doing it.
Ooooh, I’d go a bit easier on postgenetic. I got all the way to the end without my eyes bleeding or my brain dribbling out my ears, and I even understood many of the sentences 🙂
So postgenetic is not up to Sidles levels quite yet!
(Or perhaps a steady course of Sidles comments has altered our brains so that we find such comments more comprehensible, in a fashion akin to the warping influence of contact with Lovecraftian entities?)
Lol … it’s more that SSC comment-bandwidth has been pretty greatly increased, by dialing-down the Kandel / Grothendieck / Foucalt / Faulkner / Pessoa / Spinoza modulation, while at the same time, dialing-up the Twain / Rogers / Goodall / Francis / Chiang / DEVO modulation. The theme of a broadening, deepening, accelerating, science-respecting, SJ-positive Enlightenment, however, “ain’t changed all that much!” 🙂
Are you feeling OK? There’s only one link in this comment.
Lol are we feeling link-hungry?
Let’s consider an ultra-new, peer-reviewed, cognitive-science discipline: neurocognitive poetics. Oh, wow! 🙂
As it turns out, there’s no shortage of fascinating literature that is rapidly developing this brand-new, science-respecting, trans-disciplinary, SJ-positive, psychiatrically crucial, medical research enterprise — see for example, the Jacobs and Willems preprint “The Fictive Brain: Neurocognitive Correlates of Engagement in Literature” (2017).
And this medical literature is broadly SSC-compatible, hurrah! It’s like some beautiful, endlessly unfolding, eminently rational, deeply literate, marvelously thought-provoking, therapeutically promising, gently humorous, scientific dream … 🙂
Thinking this means I shouldn’t run for student council.
Okay, I reread; and yes, sloppy and weak framing, ordering, dot connecting. My bad. My apologies.
Think the linked article is more accessible. Maybe it isn’t.
I liked it; you started with:
…which counts as fair warning in my book; if this comments section ever becomes restricted to fully-formed thoughts I’m in trouble. I think we all go around with lots of partial thoughts, and exchange them with each other, seeing if any fit together in interesting ways. I forget if I thought that before I read The Diamond Age….
Then you went straight to:
…which I think is true, and underappreciated/underbelieved. In my view, information is a relationship, and “the world consists of facts, not things” (translations vary, unless the original is in English, in which case I’m misquoting).
I doubt you think of these things the way I do, so I’d be happy to explain.
This sounds interesting; can you rephrase or expand on it? Is a “network” just a pattern of information flow?
This is interesting, but I don’t believe it as stated: bacteria seem to be doing just fine. I do spend a lot of my time trying to (a) make solutions complex enough to solve complex problems while (b) making those solutions simple enough not to fail. “All scales” doesn’t match anything in my experience, as far as I can tell.
You might be interested in Dave Snowden’s concept of “Cynefin”.
Am I the only one hearing this in Mordin Solus’s voice?
I am now, thank you so much.
Ditto
“I am the very model of a scientist Solarian !”
Is there an e-book version of Unsong available?
epub
Awesome, thank you!
So you expect a world-wide socialist government to take away public health care, schooling, bring in tax breaks for the rich, etc. ?
Seems a pretty weird assumption.
It depends on what you mean by socialism. The nordic capitalist society with a strong safety net looks fairly sustainable to me.
If you’re talking about a centralized (government-controlled) economy, then there’s a risk of the society not being able to afford the safety net, or even failing to produce ordinary necessities, with Venezuela as a prime example.
How much stronger is the safety net in Scandinavian countries than in the US? It seems like welfare capitalism is the dominant, perhaps only, economic system in first-world countries, with the differences being the various amounts of regulation and barriers to market entry. Labor market regulation seems to vary pretty widely too, but not so widely as the basic employer-employee dynamic isn’t the norm around the world.
I guess welfare capitalism is the dominant form because the powers that be tend to be pretty favourable towards capitalism–for obvious reasons–but clearly capitalism in its pure form doesn’t work and so they have to implement some socialist policies to make the system sustainable.
What do you mean “doesn’t work”? And since when are regulations and welfare measures exclusively “socialist”?
By “doesn’t work” I mean that attempts to implement something close to a pure free-market, strong forms of laissez-faire, are unstable and always lead to the necessary reintroduction of measures to counteract this.
See e.g. the history of the development of industrial capitalism in Britain, Russia in the 90s, Pinochet’s Chile.
you mean the first time in history a country dragged itself out of the misery of agrarian economics?
You mean one of the least capitalistic places on earth?
the most economically successful country in latin america, by a wide margin?
Your evidence doesn’t prove what you seem to think it proves.
@cassander
Chile is slightly poorer than Uruguay by GDP per capita, slightly richer when PPP adjusted, and close to Argentina in both cases. There isn’t a wide margin between its level of economic success and the other top three countries (and it isn’t even that far from Venezuela in non-PPP adjusted GDP/capita). But I think Art Vandelay’s point is that a couple of years after the junta introduced laissez-faire policies there was an economic crisis which resulted in banks being regulated and in some cases nationalised.
Regarding Russia, the point is that they tried drastic libertarian reforms in the 90s, but still ended up in a pretty horrible state.
@Cassander
Rims has dealt with some of your points more substantively but for my part I will just point out that nothing you’ve said contradicts anything I’ve said and yet for some strange reason you’ve presented it as if it does.
@RLMS
Argentina’s figures are lies.
Chile has 50% more per capita GDP than the LA average, and while Uruguay has been richer than average for LA for a long time, chile has not. absolute level of wealth today is not the only measure of success. growth matters.
chile remaisn hte economically freest country in latin america, again by a wide margin. Pointing to one contrary policy episode does not disprove that.
No, they didn’t. They started to, but abandoned the effort after a couple of months before it really got started. Russia did not undergo shock therapy, Poland and Czechoslovakia did.
Yes. That is exactly what I assume.
See: Venezuela
Pray tell me, which Venezuelan president was it who brought in tax breaks for the rich, Chavez or Maduro?
“tax breaks” is a very opaque way of looking at things
But if you think that there aren’t an elite and protected class of people in Venezuela who have been largely kept from suffering the brunt of the negative impacts of socialism (disease, famine, repression) you haven’t been paying attention.
Willing to bet Maduro’s lifestyle as compared to the average poor Venezuelan makes corporate write-downs of depreciation seem like pretty tame stuff…
So is the answer “neither of them”?
Chavez. He introduced currency controls in 2003. In the short term this taxed “the rich” and gave tax breaks to the politically connected. But it quickly became taxing the poor and giving tax breaks to the rich.
Venezuela’s a fairly low-tax country. Their highest marginal income tax rate is lower than the one in the US (34% vs. 39.6%). Their total central government tax revenue as a percentage of GDP is significantly lower (something like 13% vs. the US’s 20%).
Normal welfare capitalism takes some money from rich people and gives it to poor people. Scandinavian “socialism” does the same. Venezuelan socialism simply decrees that meat costs $1/lb now, and then wonders why nobody will sell meat in Venezuela anymore.
I think he’s using socialism to mean the Stalinist thing, not the Swedish thing.
Ahh I see, the tired, old, capitalist meme of “socialism = Stalinism”. I guess it’s a hell of a lot easier than actually engaging with opposing ideas.
If “socialism” is now ambiguous between “state ownership of the means of production” and “capitalism, but with a strong regulatory and welfare state”, is there a commonly accepted term that encompasses only the former?
I don’t think you will find many people advocating total state control of the means of production. If you do, you can ask them how they identify politically. Stalinist perhaps?
There are socialist parties throughout the world that support things like state-owned energy, transport, health service, etc. but do not want to nationalise every company in the country.
My personal experience is that socialists who want to go further and have all industry collectively owned tend to emphasise worker-owned and managed factories, which is quite a different proposition from state-ownership.
Marxist-Leninist would be the most reliable self-applied designation, but I’d suggest that anyone calling themselves “communist” while still advocating a system that allowed for some privately owned capital is being dishonest.
(although the fact that there are forms of ownership other than “by the state” and “by private capitalists” muddies the water a little bit, as Art notes in his last paragraph)
Yes you do, all the time. Single payer healthcare, nationalization of credit, national financing and control of education, national systems of retirement, the modern left desires to control more than half of the economy outright, and regulate almost every aspect of the rest. Nationalizations isn’t dead, it just operates under new names, and goes after a different set of commanding heights.
No, just the important ones, exactly the same plan old school socialists had.
I think it’s more along the lines of: socialism = collectively owned means of production = state owned means of production = authoritarian state
I don’t know if modern socialist try to block the second or third step.
AFAIK, no first world countries with nominally socialist governments have a majority of the means of production either collectively or state owned, so the question of whether that leads to an authoritarian state doesn’t arise. (My impression is that Norway’s oil sector is big, but not that big.) Or am I missing some?
Right, hence the confusion over the term “socialist”. If Norway is socialist, then I don’t see why the US wouldn’t be considered socialist too.
Collectively owned means of production is the marxist definition of socialism.
Socialism at it’s core is the opposite of individualism. It views humans as a social animal that cannot be understood, exist, or be abstracted out of the context of the group. Science shows this is true. On the other hand individualism is a system of belief that sprang from the dualism of christianity: people are just equal monads existing independently of each other that have a magical thing called “free will”. From this comes the view that society is merely the sum of “rational” economic monads whose only goal is to maximize their own interest. Equal opportunity instead of equal outcome. Multiculturalism, or the belief that you can lump together people of different cultural backgrounds and they will coexist peacefully through commerce. Laicism, or the belief that you can do the same with people of different religious backgrounds. Freedom of religion instead of freedom from religion. Socialism is not the left. The left is liberalism, an ideology of merchants, bankers that requires individualism as an assumption. They opposed monarchy because it limited their freedom to engage in economic trickery (rent, speculation, hoarding) to maximize their own interest. They sat on the left wing of parliaments. Socialists didn’t give a shit about parliaments and opposed both reactionaries wanting to roll back society to monarchy and liberals. Neither Proudhon or Karl Marx never said they were on the left. There are two forms of socialism, hierarchical and anti-hierarchical (anarchism). Soviet-style communism is a variant of hierarchical socialism. Because of anthropological reasons (individuals with more psychopathic traits rise at the top of hierarchies) it always fails at creating a society that is fair for all. Soon it’s ruling class realizes that roman-inspired methods of slave-management used in liberal regimes are a better way to control the masses.
Was Aristotle a socialist, then? I’m genuinely interested in hearing about the Roman-inspired methods of slave-management.
Were Roman slave owners the first management theorists?
https://aeon.co/essays/were-roman-slave-owners-the-first-management-theorists
The general pattern when people try to implement Marxism, that we’ve seen from the Spanish and Russian revolutions to Venezuela, is of doubling down on failure. Which is both why those who claim that “socialism has never been tried” are worrying and why the Chinese and Vietnamese communist parties aren’t.
Socialists begin with an plan, often a very clever one like in Allende’s Chile. And then when the plan turns out like this either the regime is overthrown, as Allende’s was, or the leadership doubles down on the failing policies and starts hunting for wreckers. Which can get very bloody and leaves the underlying issue unsolved.
The Chinese Communist Party under Deng represented a rare third option, of socialists who learned their lesson and went with pragmatism over a dogmatic adherence to ideology. It doesn’t look much like socialism but you won’t hear many Chinese complaining over it.
How exactly does one implement a critique of capitalist political economy? You surely realise that Marx intentionally left no prescription for what should come after capitalism and according to his theories none of the places you mention were ready for a transition to socialism?
Marx himself would seem to disagree, since advocated for revolution within his own lifetime.
But I’d rather not get into the weeds of socialist apologism.
Let’s say you’re right and that the world wasn’t and isn’t ready for true socialism. Why advocate for it now then? If global revolution really is inevitable due to historical-material forces then waiting it out in relative comfort, as the CCP are, would seem like a much better way to spend your time than trying to bring about a change before its time.
That has the side benefit that, if you’re wrong, you haven’t killed tens or hundreds of millions of Innocents for nothing.
Seeing as you’re clearly an expert in these matters, could you cite me the place where Marx wrote that socialist revolution should take place in feudal societies or in less-advanced capitalist societies?
@Art Vandelay
http://www.marxistsfr.org/archive/marx/works/1885/letters/85_04_23.htm
http://www.marxistsfr.org/archive/marx/works/1881/zasulich/draft-1.htm
@Cassander
Either you haven’t properly read those sources or you haven’t understood them. I could explain why they don’t say what you seem to think they say but the fact you don’t even quote the passages that you believe support your point inclines me to think you haven’t bothered to read them properly.
Well, you see, no true socialist…
@Nornagest
Excellent argument.
No mention as well of the U.S. foreign policy of the “threat of the good example” every time any alternative society that forbids U.S. corporations to rob and exploit it is implemented somewhere and looks like it could be successful, the U.S. oligarchy immediately proceeds to destroy it by any means. The U.S. has been doing all it can to undermine Venezuela, because extreme poverty has receeded there since Chavez.
@ SchwarzeKatze:
How old are the numbers you’re looking at? Venezuala’s recent regular poverty rate is over 75% and its “extreme poverty” rate is similarly, well, extreme. (If you’re looking at Wikipedia, the relevant charts there cheat by cutting off the data at 2013, right before the wheels fell of the bus).
It’s true that effective poverty had gradually declined somewhat over time in Venezuela (as it had in much of the rest of the world) but in retrospect it looks like they postponed disaster by eating the seed corn rather than with sustainable economic development. It’s a real mess now, one that needs no help from the US to look bad.
what has the US done to Venezuela since, say, 2010, that has caused mass hunger and even starvation. Please be specific.
@cassander:
Funding right wing groups to do economic sabotage such as hoarding food and medicine and destroying electric installations.
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Venezuela-Finds-US-Army-Uniforms-in-Paramilitary-Camp-at-Border-20170322-0026.html
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/NSA-Spies-on-Venezuelas-Oil-Company-Snowden-Leak-Reveals-20151118-0010.html
@SchwarzeKatze
Are you seriously giving us links to a news organization that’s sponsored by the governments of every leftist Latin American state and expecting us to just believe it? Even if they’re telling the truth, US Army uniforms can be acquired surplus, and frankly we aren’t incompetent enough to get caught with such a simple mistake. And the NSA spying on everyone isn’t exactly news, nor is it proof of sabotage.
“Communism only failed because at least one person in the world wasn’t properly communist so this is clearly the fault of capitalism!”
@SchwarzeKatze
You’re literally and sincerely blaming hoarders and wreckers for the failure of socialism? Words fail me.
Are you seriously expecting me to believe news organizations that are owned by the rich who have an interest in making the venezuelan government look bad and making sure every attempt at an alternative to capitalism fails?
This isn’t anything new. This has been a longstanding practice of the U.S. There’s documented evidence that the U.S. funded and had the U.S. military train contras in Nicaragua so the sandinistas would be forced to divert their resources to fight them instead of working on social programs which they had been doing successfully. The U.S. also recently sent back Lybia to the stone age which had the highest standard of living in Africa using pretexts that as usual were entirely false. And that’s just two examples. There are many others. So why would it be any different in Venezuela?
@SchwarzeKatze
Even if the US had been doing the reprehensible things that Venezuelan propaganda attributed to it, that still can’t alone cause hyperinflation and shortages. That’s not how economics works.
Let’s imagine that we could prove that the problems of Venezuela were caused by its own government. Just curious, how would that affect your beliefs?
This is a thing I expected Socialism symphatizers would tell us, since they are the ones who want to implement Socialism. Preferentially, they should sort this out before trying to actually make the revolution.
It shouldn’t be expected that Socialism skeptics should do all the work.
That’s an interesting response, are you from the USA by any chance?
It seems that you were unable to grasp the point I was making. Marx didn’t set anything like a plan for his version of socialism. If you define Marxism as what Marx wrote–which would seem like the most sensible definition–then it’s hard to see how you would implement it. If we define Marxism as the ideology and policies of people who say that they are Marxist then the term covers such disparate views as to become meaningless.
Not from the US.
I am afraid I was. The point is that we cannot say Socialism didn’t work/won’t ever work from its previous attempts of implementation because there was no clear plan for implementation from the start, and Marx himself saw many possible problems.
The point is, on its virtuous side, either a demand for extreme rigor in dealing with induction; or an argument to the definition of Socialism. On the vicious side where it can possibly go (and in my experience often does), it can become either an isolated demand for rigor or a denial of true Scotishness.
Reading this with good will, I do concede that there is no way of being absolutely sure, 100% sure, that no attempt of Socialism will ever work based on previous experiences. But I am also fully aware that every attempt at implanting a Socialist regime has been a miserable failure, and even the relatively wealthy and powerful Soviet Union crumbled in three generations. When I see things failing repeatedly, that is a compelling argument for said thing not being able to succeed. Ever. I cannot reach 100% certainty, but I can get close to 95%.
Of course you could argue that, according to Marx, none of these countries were ripe for Socialism, but… isn’t it weird that no country was ever ready for the regime?
Meanwhile, you say that according to Marx none of these failed places were ready for Socialism. Having not read Marx, I cannot tell whether these observations are fair or if they are ad hoc interpretations. I mean, if Russia, Spain, Venezuela, and China (the countries Nabil mentions) were not ready, what would a “ready” country look like? Could you tell beforehand that these four places would flunk under Socialism? And which of the existing countries in today’s world would be Socialism-ready?
cassander posted two links above that seems to contradict your claim.
Here I disagree. Marxism is not just what Marx wrote, in the same sense that Darwinism is not just Darwin’s works and Christianity is not only what Jesus said in the Gospels. These terms cover not only their supposed founder’s view, but also the developments of disciples and followers. The current versions of each of these intelectual movements are distinct from the original views first layed down, which is expected with the passage of time and the development of the principles established in the initial phase.
But if we define Marxism as strictly as you want, then the term also becomes meaningless for lack of Marxists. With a super broad definiton of Marxism we would be attacking Strawmen Marxists (which you rightfully criticize), but with a super strict one we get no Scotsmen left to attack. This is also bad, as it puts Marx’s idea above any criticism: every wrong turn can be dismissed as unorthodox, and hence the orthdoxy is spared from the attacks. Every wrong Camarade is not an actual Marxist, and so on.
I am not against excluding Kim Jong Un and the Chinese Communist Dinasty from the definition of Marxist, but we cannot take this as far as to excluded the likes of Chavez and Maduro.
No they don’t.
Oh, well, that settles that then, I guess.
@ Chevalier
The onus is on the person posting the links to explain why they believe they contradict my point.
Two people in this thread have claimed these links contradicts me without putting forth any explanation or citing any passages. If either of them wants to actually wants to make their case I will be happy to respond to them. But as it is, they have posted links which do not support their claims so I am going to assume, for now, that they haven’t actually read these links properly.
For me that’s fine, since my point does not depend on that. I was just being lazy in link-hunting. But since this was the only thing you cared to answer in my comment, let me try again. The claim I was answering to was
But he did. From the Communist Manifesto:
He calls himself a Communist, and summarizes what he believes must be done. But there’s more: he also proposes a series of measures that would lead to the implementation of the goals of Communism:
This looks a lot like a plan to me.
Sorry, I don’t think I expressed myself very clearly on the planning point. I wasn’t saying Marx never speculated about what he thought the proletariat would do once they seized power or make suggestions about what socialist/communist society would be like, but that he never laid down a clear or at all detailed plan to be implemented.
Note also, he is here, in the passage you quote, talking about proletarians, not an elite vanguard party of middle-class intellectuals. He is predicting that the proletariat will seize power and they will institute policies like this, not that a small group of committed Marxists should seize control of the state and institute these policies.
The quote you’ve picked out also strengthens my point that Marx believed this should take place initially in the more advanced capitalist countries.
The same was true with link that Cassander posted that was actually written by Marx (Cassander didn’t seem to realise that the other one was written by Engels). He’s talking about the possibility of sections of the Russian peasantry moving towards socialism without passing through capitalism and he stresses several times that this must happen very gradually, how resistant the peasantry are to sudden changes or having much of their what they have produced taking away and that they can only develop towards socialism spontaneously i.e. he is not suggesting that a small group of middle-class Russians seize control of the state, violently force all the peasants onto collective farms and appropriate all their grain.
So yes, he did perhaps offer a plan of some sort, my opinion is that it is nowhere even close to being detailed or consistent enough to be able to talk simply about “implementing” Marxism. A key point here is that he was actually actively opposed to intellectuals trying to plan out the future society as he believed this was mere utopianism (he wasn’t keen on the utopian socialist tradition). But as the writings you and Cassander yourselves have supplied make abundantly clear, the plan, to the extent that it did exist, was opposed on many key points to what the Bolsheviks and their counterparts elsewhere actually did.
If you’ve no idea what’s involved in the transition to socialism, how do you decide that any place isn’t ready for it?
This sounds a bit like a prescription for what would come after capitalism. A description of “communism”, if you will.
I don’t think that’s an isolated example.
Overall, “Marx just had some thought on capitalism, how can we judge him for what happened when people did the things he advocated their doing?” strikes me as an extraordinarily desperate gambit, and one which tends to confirm that communism is entirely indefensible.
‘communism is entirely indefensible.’
No, you can say Marx meant ‘State of Seige’ as an awful warning and an exposure of tyranny, then say that Ludendorf’s War Communism, Ludendorf’s protege Hitler, and Ludendorf’s ally Lenin all took it as a blueprint. Ludendorf really was that much of a creep.
This would mean a communism that abandons Marxist-Leninism. I’d call that a feature, not a bug, but an awful lot of socialists would disagree.
That description is evidently not a clear policy that one could implement. The fact that you think “Marxist” regimes ‘did the things he advocated their doing’ demonstrates the paucity of your knowledge.
This is the general problem here. There are many people holding forth on a topic that they clearly have an extremely poor understanding of.
Indeed, but these excerpta from the Communist Manifesto are:
There you have them: these are policies one could implement, which Marx and Engels believed would lead to the implantation of Communism. That is his version of how things should be done.
Art, this looks like an ongoing and, frankly, fairly weak attempt to shift the goalposts from what you wrote originally, which was:
So, yes, Marx’s description of what communism would look like is impracticable and ridiculous (it’s not clear to me why you think that represents a defence of your position), but he certainly had such a vision, not just a critique of capitalism.
So I think the tone you’ve adopted across your posts here is completely unearned and unhelpful – no one is buying your “superior knowledge” shtick.
You seem to be unaware of, or wilfully blind to, whole tracts of Marx’s work. You should embrace the opportunity for someone to make up for the apparently significant gaps in your knowledge of a topic in which you seem very interested.
Engelberg, I think you’ve truncated that quote so much that it doesn’t bear much relation to what I was arguing, which means your response doesn’t either.
@pdbarnlsey
As I point out above, Marx was opposed to trying to plan the future society in any detail. I was perhaps not clear in earlier posts about the “in any detail” part. Yes he did make vague speculations or predictions, but he did not leave behind a plan to implement which was the initial point.
I’m not an expert on Marx by any stretch of the imagination, nor do I have any particular desire to be, but it is abundantly clear to me that I have a far better understanding of his work than the people who are disagreeing with me in this thread. Whether you “buy” it or not is of no concern to me.
Art, “under communism we will all be completely free to just wander around between different tasks as we see fit” is an extremely complete description of an economic system.
It’s brief, yes, but only because it doesn’t require any additional conditions or explanations. The communism, apparently, will see to all of that in the background.
So he had a very clear prescription for the end point, contra your initial claim.
Now, did he also create a detailed plan for getting there? Well, it depends what we mean by “detailed”. To you it seems to mean “more detailed than any plan with which I am presented, updated as and when my previous claims are contradicted”.
That just seems like a (silly) word game, rather than a magisterial demonstration of superior knowledge.
I think your overall point seems to be “no attempt to implement Marxism can be see as actually existing Marxism, because Marx didn’t leave enough instructions to follow”. If we grant that, then it sounds like Marx didn’t leave us with anything practically usable, just some fairy tales about taking care of cows when we feel like it, and that those who attempt to follow him are, at best, misguided.
I’m fine with that, but I don’t imagine you really are.
I’m going to assume that your claim here is some odd joke that you’re making because I can’t really see any way to interpret it as a serious statement. You vacillate between calling this an extremely complete plan for how to run a nations economy and calling it a fairy tale about cows.
What I have repeatedly said is that Marxism is not a plan you can implement and this is because Marx intentionally did not leave proper instructions. What Marx left was a large body of writing on philosophy, economics and history, in particular a critique of the mainstream economics of his day and a theory of history and the development of societies. This was his aim, not leaving a plan for how to organise a communist society (and just to repeat it once more because it doesn’t seem to be hitting home, he intentionally did not leave a plan). What he left, and what most people read him for, are his ideas on these topics. I do, however, agree that people around today who try to “follow” Marx are generally misguided, but they’re rather few in number (in the UK at least) and you probably don’t need to worry about them all that much.
One of the problems in this discussion is that you have two definitions for “trying socialism”:
1. Implementing (a certain version of) socialism by force as state policy without a possibility for implementing an alternative (Soviet Union, Cuba etc.)
2. Participating in a strong socialist movement in a mixed-economy capitalist state so, that the socialist movement in question has a real effect on labor policy, economy etc. (such as what happened in the Nordic countries)
I should hasten to add that what I mean by section 2. is *not* building a mixed economy in itself but rather the existence of the socialist movements (including parties, labor unions, other organizations) in themselves. In many ways, social democracy means simultaneously accepting the existence of capitalism (at least for the time being) and urgently believing that since the capitalists are going to advance their own interests, they need a strong counterweight with clearly set ideals and effective means of getting things done. This also led to good results in many countries – and now, as the socialist movements and labor unions are less strong, those gains have been partially dismantled.
One of the problems with these discussions is that they’re being had only from the perspective of state policy as a deliberate choice made by the policymakers themselves (“Should we implement socialism? Or capitalism? Or something else?”), not from the point of view of movements and their interplay in a society.
Between Unsong (which is now finished) and The Good Student (which is on a very slow burn), I am short a good wed serial. What do the people here think about The Good Student.
Side note, if anyone here wants to take the survey, it can be found here (Its painless, I promise)
I’ve read up to the current point in Good Student, very very readable but no real payoff yet in terms of plot. I’m honestly surprised it was holding the #1 slot on topwebfiction when it has yet to grow much meat on its bones.
That’s why it’s so popular, people are waiting for the payoff.
The guy who writes The Good Student is also writing two other serials on topwebfiction.
I enjoy How To Avoid Death On A Daily Basis, but, uh, content warning for the protagonist being prone to antisocial and misogynistic rants.
The other active web serials I read are Dungeon Keeper Ami and Mother Of Learning.
I agree with you that TGS doesn’t have much payoff yet.
I too was surprised to find The Good Student so high up on topwebfiction. How to Avoid Death on a Daily Basis, also by Mooderino, is much better imo: laugh-out-loud jokes, unexpected plot twists, character development, memes, – AND it updates five days a week! – everything you could wish for in a web serial.
You might want to check out /r/rational, that’s where I usually get my fic recommendations. Do you read fanfiction or original fiction only?
I read How to avoid death on a daily basis for a while, by the same author, and it was okay. It irritated me in how the main character was portrayed as being great and right about everything all the time, while also being terrible.
I’m currently reading The Fifth Defiance, which is good fun. It’s a superhero thing with a rather unique setting and the characters are all very distinct and interesting. I’d suggest giving it a try if you need more things to read.
Link
Sorry for the brevity here, but does anyone here have any views on Pope Francis? Despite being an atheist, I’ve been consistently astonished at his level of lack of intellectual consistency, as well as the sheer lack of consistency with what came before him and traditional Catholic doctrine.
I’ve noticed he’s unusually liberal for a pope. Of course if you’re head of one of the worlds most conservative organizations and obliged to not outright reject their positions any level of liberalness is going to look inconsistent. At least he seems more appealing to younger people and seems to have slowed the previous freefall of the churches reputation/popularity. Sometimes it’s good for the church to change it’s position.
It’s not a bad thing when the roman catholic church occasionally moves with the times sometimes does things like say “actually we’ve changed our minds and we now think it’s ok for a paraplegic to get married”
No. Appeasing the progressives is not a good strategy. It will lose members in the long run, in addition to defiling tradition.
It’s only good if the Church has actually been wrong on the specific matter.
It would be interesting to see how many non-Catholic Francis fans have joined or are seriously considering joining the Church as a result of his Papacy. My guess is that the number is going to be very small.
Don’t forget to account for people who would have left the church were it not for him.
Which will be figures hard to come by because, for example, in ireland so many were officially defecting from the church that the church abolished defection from canon law (oh wait, isn’t it supposed to be bad to change ancient laws and traditions as a knee-jerk response to current conditions) and just started pretending that those people had never left. Like a demented teacher talking to an empty room refusing to accept everyone has walked out in disgust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_act_of_defection_from_the_Catholic_Church
A surprising number of older people simply up and walked out of mass after some of the crap that was read from the pulpit prior to irelands vote on gay marriage.
It was already reeling from decades of uncovering of sex-abuse, mass graves, financial fuckery and various other scandals.
With the current popes slightly softer, slightly less odious/hateful positions on some matters the church might see less people simply walking away.
Catholicism typically hasn’t been big on evangelizing and gaining converts, it’s basically a rounding error. On the other hand if existing Catholics and the children of Catholics walk away in disgust then that hits the church hard.
There also is the possibility of him making existing Catholics more so, for instance increasing the chance of people raising their children as Catholics.
Murphy- Going by your own link it was made in 1983. Hardly an ancient tradition.
And how many of those are there? Given that conservative denominations generally have an easier time retaining members than liberal ones, I’d be very surprised if making the Catholic Church more liberal would result in fewer people leaving, but maybe you have evidence to the contrary.
How do you decide when the Church has actually been wrong on the specific matter?
If the pope came out with an official statement that god had called him up and told him in his official capacity as pope that god really doesn’t have a problem with gay people, that god considers it to be in the same catagory as shellfish,loan interest and mixed fabrics then would that mean that the church had actually been wrong or would it be one of those other times?
That’s for the Church to decide, not me, but generally it concerns matters of fact, replicable by experiment, such as the arrangement of the solar system.
AFAIK, he can’t do that. The Pope can change canon law at will, but he can’t make sweeping changes to doctrine without summoning an Ecumenical Council, and can’t change dogma at all, because that’s set by God*. Homosexuality is one of the things covered by the Ten Commandments, which are immutable. Shellfish, mixed fabrics and even charging interest aren’t so protected versus editing.
* Apologies for any legalistic or terminological failures. I am not a canon law scholar. I present my best understanding of the mutability of various levels of law in the Church.
Well that’s a new one to me.
I assume you might be referencing “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” simply because it mentions the word wife, but I don’t know how you get a condemnation of homosexuality from that.
It’s actually the 6th, not the 9th, that’s in question. Specific heading here.
@Anonymous:
A) That heading refers to tradition, rather than an intrinsic grounding in the commandment itself.
B) It puts homosexuality in the same category as lust and masturbation (and fornication, pornography, prostitution and rape).
Are you saying that Church teachings on lust and masturbation are just as immutable?
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t implicitly follow from the rest of the core of Christian sexual morality.
I should hope so, but I can’t say for certain if they haven’t been tweaked a little, given new wording, etc. (Almost certain they did, but don’t have access to the old catechisms here.)
Supposing that some group of heretics would seize control of the visible Church’s hierarchy and enforce their homosexual agenda, they could change things around to accept homosexual acts and homosexual marriage. But in order for that to be consistent with everything else, they would have to throw out the requirement that marriage needs to be at least remotely capable of resulting in children from the union of the partners, change the definition of a proper sex act, and the teachings against contraception and masturbation would need to go, too.
Are you saying that Church teachings on lust and masturbation are just as immutable?
Yes, which is why (for instance) IVF etc. is forbidden, even if it’s a married couple wanting to use the husband’s sperm.
That’s part of the whole “to the outsider it looks completely insane but it does at least hold together with logical consistency, even if it takes it to the reductio ad absurdum” 🙂
The current teaching on homosexuality would fall under ‘doctrine’, and it’s entirely possible for doctrine to ‘develop’ in any direction the church wants it to.
Like I said, I really doubt that there’s much wiggle room here without throwing out either logical consistency, or smashing existing sexual morality. FWIW, homosexuals are offered the same deal by the Church as the rest of us, including asexuals and attack helicopters: be chaste, and you’re fine; if you’re capable of reproductive intercourse with the opposite sex, you may marry as well.
There’s as much wiggle room as the Church wants there to be. Divorce used to be impossible, now you just need to go to a tribunal where a wand gets waved and everyone declares that the marriage never actually happened. Of course, the idea that people could be mistaken in thinking that they were married without actually being married got all the scrupulous folk anxious, so the church declared that up until the point that the tribunal finds that there was no marriage, there is a marriage, and only afterwards was there never a marriage. Magic!
The idea that the Catholic church is some bastion of ‘logical consistency’ is laughable.
Not if the Church wants to continue existing there isn’t.
Divorce has, AFAIK, always been possible in the Church, via the Petrine and Pauline privileges. Not to mention that annulments were available at least from the 10 century onwards, and the Church has strived successfully to reduce divorces and put marriage under its jurisdiction before then.
Not magic, sacraments. If you pour water over someone’s head and say the appropriate rite, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve performed a valid baptism. So too in case of sacramental marriage, which has requirements that need to be fulfilled at the time of marriage, or else the sacrament fails silently.
The idea that you can tell one way or the other is dubious.
I agree that public opinion plays a large role in what the church decides.
Do you think the proportion of marriages that have turned out to not actually exist has changed? Do you think whether someone in the past got an annulment or not might have depended on their position on society?
Sacraments are pretty magical, but I’m referring to the particular bit of time travel that takes place in the annulment procedure. If the Church has sufficient wiggle room for that, I think it can handle some non-PIV intercourse.
My parents were married for 20 years (and had two children 12 and 18 years old at the time), then divorced for another 20 years, with one of them remarried for 17 years or so, the other remarried for 2 years, before they finally filed for annulment. (Because my mom wanted to be remarried in the Catholic Church).
So, yeah.
Actually, come to think of it, I never did get really solid on what that made me in the eyes of the Catholic Church. I’m pretty sure I was still only just as damned as before, never having been confirmed (and would have been totally fine if I was confirmed and active in the church). But I still kind of wonder what the official position on it is.
It’s no more magic than the principle of “guilty until proven innocent” is. A guilty person is still guilty even before he’s convicted, after all.
What I meant is that if the Church starts officially sanctioning logically inconsistent policies, its own hierarchs will revolt and leave. The Pope running his mouth occasionally is bad enough.
Yup. If you look at, say, the rates annulment in the US and Europe, you’ll see that there’s a wide gulf. And some of that is justified, given how often American Catholics are heretics more like Protestant Americans than like non-American Catholics. And the other side is that some of the clergy is borderline heretical as well, and willing to bend canon law into a pretzel to get the resolutions it wants. This, however, is corruption, not how things ought to work, and work elsewhere.
Totally. Welcome to fallible human nature. The clergy are not free from sin.
You’re equivocating. The sacrament truly taking place or not is not time travel. An annulment merely recognizes that it did not take place, given new information about the past. An annulment does not undo the de-facto, non-sacramental marriage that did occur in between then and now. The parties in question would have had the same kind of relationship as informal cohabitators (which is sometimes considered a “common law” marriage), or people who just married civilly (with the state as the regulating organ, not the Church).
Formalizing corruption and evil is not the way here.
The church holds that something supernatural happens when two people are married. And that up until the point of an annulment, that thing really has happened, until the annulment finds that it hasn’t, in which case it’s not invalidated, but rather it’s suddenly the case that it never did happen. Similarly, see radical sanation.
AFAIK, bastardy is currently unregulated in the Church.
It does more than this, because the church holds that up until the annulment the marriage really has taken place. Not just that you should assume that it has, but that it really has. Until the point where it’s determined that it hasn’t. In which case it never took place.
I guess I’ll have to ask what logically inconsistent means. Certainly changing doctrine seems fine, again pointing to the example of charging interest. And if you mean in the sense that both A and not-A hold, well this annulment business seems to stray into that territory.
The bolded part is wrong. We don’t actually ever know, because of the unknowable elements involved. Some people may get “married” in the Church, but in fact the sacrament failed, and was never recognized as such. The Church’s opinion does not matter regarding whether the sacrament happened or not. It merely recognizes our best understanding of whether it did or not.
The church really does have the power to acknowledge the sacrament into existence under this nifty ‘binding and loosing’ business. Here’s another example of retroactively declaring things into existence: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/_P47.HTM
I don’t think that necessarily contradicts what I said, but I’d have to consult a canon law scholar to be sure. Thanks for the link, though.
I’m getting the distinct impression that the people talking about how “logical” the churches positions are working of a radically different concept of what constitutes logic. Normally for popular philisopical positions it’s easy enough to find the logic, there’s a differing set of precepts and assumptions but the implications fall out using genuine logic (like with pro choice and pro-life positions. )
but this… this looks more like someone slapping lipstick on a bulldog and declaring that it’s the most beautiful human woman in history.
People have written a great deal but there’s no apparently coherent thread of logic.
Anonymous talks about “logical consistency” and all the things that would be thrown out if the church threw out the “reproductive intercourse” criteria for marriage while ignoring that the parent comment talks about the church having already thrown out that criteria for some people like paraplegics. Such logic should have already triggered. But I’m sure they’ll insist that the “logic” still holds. Somehow.
Bonus: Anyone who calls bullshit is labelled a heretic and must henceforth be ignored.
Shouting that there is “logic” and “consistency” in a position doesn’t make it so, especially if you use examples which have already had any possible consistency dissolved from under them.
In a logical system of precepts any false statement that is allowed to be slipped in can be used to “prove” anything else regardless of truth value. That’s remarkably important to remember, one false precept and you’re fucked. unfortunately they’ve not defended their precepts terribly well and they weren’t particularly big on strong filtering in the first place.
The church has had thousands of years to end up riddled with false statements in it’s central precepts that have little more behind them in reality than “eeeeewwww that’s yucky” combined with inventive motivated reasoning and an already doomed system of deduction. So it’s not terribly surprising that the …. “logic”…. is so obviously no such thing at this point.
Since doctrine already contains plenty of utter bollox it would be trivial for the church to to the same kind of heel-turn they did for infertile people: simply classify homosexual couples similarly to infertile couples. The church even has the ceremonies for blessing gay couples in it’s archives. Unfortunately a few centuries back it seems the church abandoned tradition in the face of changing public sentiment and allowed it’s ancient traditions to be shelved in favor of anti-homosexual crap.
http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/when-marriage-between-gays-was-by-rite-1.181956
Murphy- I can’t think of any objections to your claims on the Church changing it’s rules (don’t know enough), but you haven’t given reasons why a system can’t be wrong and yet entirely internally consistent, especially when it comes to false factual premises, e.g. about the will of God.
@Dabbler
Once a system of formal logic becomes inconsistent it can be used to prove practicality anything.
The traditional example is someone using the flawed/false precept “2+2=5” and using it to prove the statement “I am the pope”.
Sure, when you’ve got a formal system and you’re moving symbols around according to certain rules of inference, but this sort of thing doesn’t apply to real world reasoning. (This is essentially the content of Hume’s fork that I mentioned above)
Do go on.
I’m ignoring it because I cannot find any confirmation that this is actual policy, rather than an isolated instance of corruption or failure of judgment. (Or even what specific case this refers to.) Canon law still requires both ability to consummate and consummation to occur for a marriage to be valid. Some paraplegic cases can get through this, naturally. You don’t necessarily need to have full command of your lower body in order to have sex.
From the wiki, via Canon law citation:
The ceremony of adelophopoiesis described in that article was, as the name (adelphopoiesis means “brother-making”) suggests, not actually sexual, and not seen as equivalent to marriage.
“real world reasoning.”
If the chain of reasoning doesn’t have an equivalent (even theoretically ) expressible in any formal consistent system then you still run into the same problem only you no longer even have to meet the criteria of having incorrect precepts to reach incorrect (aka bullshit) conclusions.
In that case the bullshit can flow freely with no reference to truth ,consistency or reality and you’re basically free of constraints.
“real world reasoning.” doesn’t get a free pass when it comes to consistency. If anything it’s a few tiers down and utterly crippled from the get go if your goal is consistency.
@The original Mr. X
That does seem to be the position taken by people utterly desperate to believe.
From the linked article:
Certainly sounds nothing at all like marriage. Nothing!
When I looked for people talking about it on catholic forums I saw a lot of facile screeching about heretics but what it mostly reminded me of was this
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/13/debunked-and-well-refuted/
people willing to call anything that anyone wrote arguing against the position to be a “debunking” despite…. well… reality decency and common sense .
They call gut feelings “logic” (that apparently is so transcendental that it can’t be expressed in any formal system of logic) and disgust “natural law”.
you can put a pig in a dress and call it a supermodel but you can’t stop it oinking.
An interesting quotation. Let’s look at it in slightly greater length:
So, not only did you cut out the first half of the first sentence, thereby making it seem like this view of affrerement is the historical consensus as opposed to just one scholar’s opinion, you also ignored the part of the article which quite clearly undermines your attempted equivalence between adelophopoiesis and modern same-sex marriage. Somehow I get the impression that you’re not entirely arguing in good faith here.
The traditional route from “2+2=5” to “I am the pope” is variously assigned to Bertrand Russell and GH Hardy and goes:
2+2=5
4=5
4-3=5-3
1=2
The set containing me and the Pope has 2 members.
Therefore the set containing me and the Pope has 1 member.
Therefore I am the pope.
I don’t think the 2+2=5 thing is what Dabbler was talking about. Presuming for the sake of argument that God doesn’t exist, then “God exists” is a false premise, but in a different way from “2+2=5”. In the latter case, the ability to deduce anything comes from assuming a statement “2+2=5” and its negation. You can prove any proposition `x` from this by saying “One of `x` or 2+2 = 5 must be true (since we know 2+2=5). We also know 2+2 != 5, therefore `x` must be true.”. But Catholicism doesn’t assume the negation of “God exists”. If you believe “all swans are white” and “this is a black swan”, you can derive anything, but believing the (false) former statement alone doesn’t let you do that.
THANK YOU. That is exactly what I meant! A system can be false but intellectually rigorous if it has false premises but has a set of beliefs that are entirely consistent within themselves. The “God exists” example illustrates that point nicely.
And Hume would say this is an argument about sets, and has nothing to do with the pope.
You can’t express reasoning about the world we live in in a formal system, by definition.
@J Milne
Sure, because the magic of existence is just too full of magic I’m sure.
Stop calling it “logic” when would be more accurately described as “someone made statements based on their feelings and called them self evident features of the universe”
Actually, come to think of it, I never did get really solid on what that made me in the eyes of the Catholic Church. I’m pretty sure I was still only just as damned as before, never having been confirmed (and would have been totally fine if I was confirmed and active in the church). But I still kind of wonder what the official position on it is.
If you’re talking about damnation, the salvation of your soul is not reliant on the status of your parents’ marriage.
If you’re talking about illegitimacy, that depends. Assuming there was genuine cause for annulment of the marriage (and it wasn’t the American church ‘divorce mill’ ruling), then you are not considered a bastard. The idea is that the innocent should not be held guilty for the faults of others; it is not just to stigmatise children who could not affect the marriage or have any influence on it (not being born yet) as born outside of wedlock. Given that annulment is that at least one of the parties believed they were licitly married, and had the intention to marry, and did not intend knowingly to have children by fornication outside of wedlock, then the children of an annulled marriage are not illegitimate.
As to “magic wands making and unmaking marriages”, there are rules as to what pertains to a sacramental marriage: among them are intent to marry, knowledge of what a marriage entails, free consent, and other matters. So if someone goes into the marriage with, at the back of their mind, “ah well if this doesn’t work out I can always get a divorce”, that’s not an intention to marry. If someone is mentally incapable – too immature, has a mental illness, some other reason – of understanding what is involved in marriage, that is not full consent and intention to marry. Someone being forced by their parents to marry Jack because he’s rich – that is not free consent.
Take, for example, the case in a Sherlock Holmes story where there is a forced marriage. The plot revolves on making a woman marry a man whether she wants to or not; if he can trick her into marrying him because she falls in love with him, great; otherwise they plan to carry out a forced marriage.
Even though the women absolutely does not consent and is being forced at gunpoint, literally gagged, to ‘marry’ the villain, the gang say that she really is married in the eyes of the law (until Holmes puts a spoke in their wheel by pointing out some overlooked points).
So are we to say that this is a magic wand undoing a real marriage? That Violet Smith was married up until Holmes announced she wasn’t? Plainly, by any understanding, we all say “No, of course she wasn’t married, never mind if there was a clergyman officiating and a marriage licence procured”.
Same with a judgement on annulment. Same with civil annulment, if it comes to that.
Given the first clause about stigmatizing the innocent, how do the parents’ beliefs and intentions enter into it? If illegitimacy exists as a status at all, it can only apply to people with no control over the circumstances of their conception.
Are there any religious implication to being a bastard in Catholicism? In Judaism, certain kinds of bastards (mamzer) and all of their descendants forever are forbidden from marrying non-mamzer Jews (with certain exceptions and loopholes).
@Brad, during the Middle Ages, bastards couldn’t be ordained as priests. AFAIK, there aren’t any implications anymore.
It was Vatican 2 that allowed the ordination of bastards.
The Catholic Church has stopped growing pretty much everywhere except Latin America and Africa. I don’t know about Africa, but Latin America is getting more progressive over time.
So?
Despite believing Catholicism to be objectively false, I don’t like what he is doing for a combination of reasons.
1- Catholicism’s level of intellectual coherence is declining rapidly thanks to vague statements, all-new contradictions, criticism “rigid” Catholics etc. Encouraging intellectual coherence is a good thing, and the principle you should follow your own laws (rather than playing them down and encouraging doctrinal anarchy) isn’t.
2- I am skeptical (because of the Anglican Church, for instance) that Pope Francis is even reversing popularity at all.
In all organisations, I believe it better that they stick to positions that are intellectually coherent because intellectual coherence is an essential virtue for creating true positions. Pope Francis’s Catholicism is not intellectually coherent any more- it lacks clarity (see vague response to the Dubia), it lacks internal logic (Amoris Letitia is not very compatible with what has come before it), and decentralization of authority is philosophically very incompatible with Catholic views e.g. on going to hell for heresy.
Worse still, I don’t think Pope Francis even realizes any of this.
“unusually liberal” is one way of putting it
“barely disguised communist” might be another
“Whoever has two tunics should share with him who has none, and whoever has food should do the same.”
Confirmed commie.
Calling him a communist may be too much, but I think we have some evidence of the current pope’s sympathy for communism. He talks quite often against imperialism, consumerism, the excesses of capitalism, and how money and the US are to blame when things go wrong. These topics are not exactly literal quotations of Das Kapital, but are quite close to the kind of rethoric we get from communist sympathizers in the West. He is also a Jesuit from Argentina, which kinda garantees that he was influenced by that weird Theology of Liberation which sweeped Latin American clergy inthe 70s/80s/early 90s.
He also tends to adopt quite a soft stance when dealing with communist(-inspired) rulers of Latin America. For example, when he visited Bolivia in 2015, Evo Morales gave him an image of Christ crucified on a hammer and sickle; though a bit embarassed at first, Francis accepted the gift and was quick at making apologies for the controversial imagery.
Who else other than communists actually believes that one of the major threats to society today is that the education systems are being over-run by dangerous libertarian ideals?
I have a feeling that the “libertarian” in “libertarian individualism” isn’t actually doing any work, and that the phrase should just be read as “individualism”. Education and culture in the US right now isn’t remotely libertarian, but it isn’t very collectivist either.
“Who else other than communists actually believes that one of the major threats to society today is that the education systems are being over-run by dangerous libertarian ideals?”
This is more about your overview than about Francis. Individualism being “a bad thing” is an idea in Catholicism that predates Marx by centuries.
Francis’ Pontifical Academy gets the planetary science mainly right (as a strong consensus of the world’s scientists thinks, anyway).
Francis himself gets the planetary morality mainly right (as many folks think, both inside and outside the Roman Catholic Church).
This tweet is a good example of what I like about Francis: https://twitter.com/antoniospadaro/status/817144723093733377?lang=en
I think there’s far too much emphasis on the ‘intellectual’ aspect of the Catholic church. Scholasticism used to be another word for sophistry, and while it’s suddenly popular in niche communities of online lay people reading Feser and Dr. Taylor Marshall (PhD), it hasn’t really responded to the past 200 years of philosophy and doesn’t seem to have as much currency with the actual clergy.
I think we can both agree that 2 + 2 in philosophy can never, literally or metaphorically, make 5. Why should theology be different, if it is to even be a theory of truth at all?
I read it as a rejection of the voodoo metaphysics that permeates Catholic thought, and an acceptance of Hume’s fork.
I don’t think “2 + 2 in philosophy” is a meaningful statement in any way, and I don’t think theologians should be describing their field as ‘a theory of truth’.
Given that Hume’s fork is notoriously self-refuting, I don’t think it obvious that accepting it counts as a good thing.
But it’s not, and that’s a great example of Feser being a bad philosopher.
Hume isn’t claiming to be making a metaphysical statement (obviously), but if you’re going to insist that he is, I’d love if you’d give me some criteria for when a sequence of characters constitutes such a thing.
So which is Hume’s fork, then, a “relation of ideas” or a “matter of fact”?
A matter of fact.
Since, for Hume, “matters of fact” refers to “experimental reasoning”, what experiments can you produce in favour of Hume’s fork? Hume himself, as far as I can see, doesn’t provide any.
He uses ‘matters of fact’ to catch whatever doesn’t fall under ‘relations of ideas’. He would happily place “We should vote for the liberal party” in the former pile, for instance.
No he doesn’t:
If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
So, maybe we should try using this test on Hume’s fork itself. Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matters of fact and existence? No. I guess that makes it nothing but sophistry and illusion, then, and we should get rid of it. It’s what Hume would have wanted us to do.
Of course, if we do suppose that “matters of fact” is simply a catch-all term for “whatever doesn’t fall under ‘relations of ideas’”, then Hume’s fork becomes tautological and uninteresting. “All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Things That Aren’t Relations of Ideas.” Thanks for the insight, David, but I think I could have worked that one out on my own.
So what, it’s somehow unfair to use the principles Hume uses to judge other philosophers to judge his own work?
He’s giving principles by which to judge tracts of abstract reasoning.
Suppose there’s a meaningless intellectual activity called Blorf that people engage in. If I come along and say ‘All these Blorf statements are meaningless’ that isn’t “self-refuting” even if the Blorf-equivalent of Ed Feser says that I’ve just made a Blorf statement.
That’s not what Hume himself says: “All the objects of human reason or enquiry” is clearly a much broader category than “Pieces of abstract reasoning”, and Hume’s fork explicitly refers to the former, rather than the latter.
It is self-refuting if your reasoning is “Blorf statements are neither mathematical nor derived from experimentation, and every meaningful statement has to be one or the other.”
Right, and his advice on when to burn things applies to that which falls under the ‘relations of ideas’ heading.
Hume uses ‘experimentation’ to refer to anything discovered from observation or experience, and would describe his fork as an observation about how certain groups of people reason.
Huh? Hume quite clearly denies that the books he wants to burn contain “relations of ideas”, which for him seems to basically consist of maths.
Actually, Hume doesn’t, as far as I can see, cite any observations to back up his fork, at least not in the Enquiry. Also, it’s clearly not just an observation about “how certain groups of people reason”, but a claim about reason in general: “All the objects of human reason or enquiry.”
Sorry I’m coming late to this, but Hume’s Fork is certainly a relation of ideas (or to put it in the terminology that has become more common since Kant, it is analytic).
So I guess, following the rest of Hume’s philosophy, Hume’s fork can’t actually tell us anything about the real world?
@The original Mr. X, Yes, in the same sense in which that is true of mathematics. But that doesn’t prevent it from telling us about metaphysics, since that doesn’t concern the real world.
Citation very much needed.
@The original Mr. X, OK, a citation.
Well, that’s just plain false: I’ve come across plenty of metaphysical propositions which were perfectly intelligible.
My wife refers to me as a practicing non-Catholic (as opposed to the more common non-practicing Catholic). I attend mass about every Sunday with my family.
I am not a fan of Francis. My main beef is that he tends to speak about areas that he is ill informed on (Economics, Libertarianism are two) and does not seem to have put any effort into actually becoming informed before speaking. And consequently sometimes reaches wrong and potentially harmful conclusions (to his own goals).
ETA: As someone with an open mind towards joining the Catholic church (but with an admittedly low likelihood) his statements have nudged my personal probability of joining lower. But I am probably not his target audience.
That rueful laughter you hear is me.
Um. I should start off by saying Benedict was my pope, in a way that John Paul II wasn’t (but Paul VI before him was, even though I was barely aware of him by the time I was old enough to be aware of the world around me and he was at the end of his reign then). So I’m prejudiced here, because I had great sympathy for what Benedict was trying to do, whereas Francis doesn’t get that from me.
He is a Jesuit, so “lack of intellectual consistency” is probably not as much as it looks to be on the surface. He is much more pastoral than Benedict who was a scholar, so there is that. The theme of his pontificate to date seems to be Mercy, particularly the mercy of God. He has made very much of this, and if you take that as the motivating force behind his thought and actions, it may help tie things together better for you.
He doesn’t care about the rules qua rules so much, he is very big on being pastoral and going out to seek the lost sheep. On the other hand, he has been quoted out of context by the media a lot, who love the (perceived) contrast between Big Bad Rottweiler Enforcer Did You Know He Was Head Of The Inquisition Benedict and Kind Liberal Spirit of Vatican II At Long Last Gay Rights And Women Priests Francis.
Gay rights women priests is… not gonna happen, despite the hopes of the Spirit of Vatican II lot. Francis, for instance, is not simply all “God is merciful and wishes to forgive”, he does insist that people need to go to confession and repent their sins. He favours a lot of the old devotions and religion of the laity that the post-Vatican II reform-minded wanted to sweep away as superstition and not sufficiently consciousness-raising as we liberate society from the ills of capitalism.
He has ruffled a lot of feathers. The big one so far is Amoris laetitia, which he is sticking fast on and is being very hardline about, despite all the requests for clarification (he refused to answer dubia put to him by four cardinals, which is a really big deal).
He has a vision for the Church, and he’s ploughing on with it. The big resistance is not so much outraged conservatives, it’s the institutional inertia of the Vatican bureaucracy (the Barque of Peter has the turning circle of a supertanker) which prefers to operate on a calendar timescale of decades or even centuries. Francis is trying to reform all this, but most of the comfortably bedded in officials who have their little power-bases will rely on the traditional Italian tactics (if that’s not being culturally insensitive) of smiling, saying “yes of course”, then going back to their offices and dicasteries and doing nothing while producing excuse after excuse, in the hope of running out the clock and then when he’s gone there will be a new guy and they’ll still be in their comfortable position.
I can’t say I really have a read on what or who exactly Francis is. I don’t have the frame of mind sympathetic to his. But you know, filial obedience 🙂 He’s the pope, and that’s that (unless he’s an anti-pope as some fervently believe, but I don’t think so).
I don’t see why, considering how the church has done turn-arounds before.
What precedent is there for the Catholic Church reversing its stance on specifically doctrinal matters?
I could be wrong, but didn’t they recently (historically speaking) reverse their stance on evolution ? That used to be a pretty heavy doctrinal issue; in some Protestant circles in the US, it still is.
No. The Catholic Church has never been officially opposed to the theory of evolution.
Charging interest, the swearing of oaths.
Not that I don’t think you’re right there J Milne, but do you have sources? They would be very useful to set the argument in stone.
The church (understandably) tends not to maintain a changelog of its positions, but here’s a source that runs through the history on charging interest: http://canonlawmadeeasy.com/2014/09/04/what-does-the-church-say-about-usury/
It gives the standard church argument that the church’s teaching *hasn’t* actually changed, rather the church’s understanding of the way money behaves has, but of course you can run this sort of argument to justify literally anything. The usual formula is to assert that doctrine can’t change but can ‘develop’, where ‘develop’ means whatever you wish.
Regarding oaths, here’s far more than you want to know: http://awaywiththeatheists.blogspot.ie/
There are three elements: (a) dogma (b) doctrine (c) discipline.
So, for instance, clerical celibacy is a matter of discipline. There previously were married priests (St Peter for one), Orthodox churches continue to have married clergy (but not bishops) and there are rites within the Catholic Church which traditionally also have married clergy. Changing to a celibate clergy was a matter of discipline, as would be relaxing the requirement.
Doctrine is the development of dogma, and so can develop as our knowledge and understanding develop, and as circumstances require (look, Cardinal Newman has done the heavy lifting here). Things like “is lying a sin?” Yes. So you have early Church Fathers saying that if a persecutor knocks at the door and asks”are there any Christians hiding here?” you must answer truthfully, even if you know he will take them (and you) away to be killed. You can see the problem here, as in the example people like to use – “are you obliged to tell the truth if a Nazi knocks at the door and asks if you are hiding Jews here?” Most people would say not just no but hell no, and moreover that it is not a lie to tell him “Nope, no Jews here, all pure-blooded Aryans!”
So doctrine about “when is it and when isn’t it a lie?” developed over time.
Dogma is the most important one and can’t be changed (e.g. Jesus as Son of God, Second Person of the Trinity, Virgin Birth, True God and True Man, etc.) without that becoming heresy or simply not Christianity. There’s a strain of modern progressive Christianity which likes to go “Well, plainly nobody can – in our scientific modern age – take seriously the idea that a woman can get pregnant without sex and while being a virgin, so what really happened was…” and then we get stories like “She was raped by a Roman soldier and became pregnant, and people referred to her as ‘Mary the virgin who was raped’ and that’s why the Gospels called her the Virgin Mary” things. Or ice-floe skating Jesus.
Or people who somehow seem to imagine this is the first time anyone has ever pondered the question, and apparently are unaware that the Perpetual Virginity of Mary was argued and discussed in the early centuries of Christianity:
Rather you must not lie, and you’re free to not answer if you wish.
How so? As far as I’m aware the stance is still no lies of any sort, though no one seems to make much of a fuss of things like Santa.
Deisach- May I ask your opinion in particular on the dubia question? I know this sounds very odd coming from an atheist, but I see it as an appalling act of failure to establish intellectual consistency.
This is only my own personal view, but the refusal to address the dubia is, ironically, much more in the style of the old monarchical popes (e.g. the popular notion of the Renaissance popes) and less in Francis’ spirit of collegiality. It really looks like “I’m the pope, the buck stops here, no questions” and is a departure from the model of working with the cardinals/bishops to reach judgement as a whole.
Again, personally, I think that Francis does badly need to set out clear directions as to what, exactly, “the pastoral discernment of those situations that fall short of
what the Lord demands of us” means in practice and most especially when mediating between the dogma and the pastoral application. I think Francis does believe quite strongly in what he says in the introduction:
That’s great! Except, you know, there has been some local cultural sensitivity that has led to complaints that, for example, in the USA the annulment procedure has been turned into ‘divorce by another name’ and that there was pretty much an annulment mill going, whereas in Europe it would take years for a case to be heard. Or cases like the Church in Germany, where there is a mix of the worst of both worlds: hierarchy living like the prince-archbishops of old and content to agree with the State church tax, and very reluctant to let people formally defect because of the loss of same, at the same time as they are very liberal and liberalising in doctrine.
So the questions the traditionalist cardinals are raising are very pertinent: okay, mercy, pastoral sensitivity, but when it comes down to it – what are the teachings on divorce, remarriage, irregular unions, having children outside of marriage, all the rest of it? What are you changing or not changing? The big question is, of course, readmission to the sacraments.
I think Francis’ refusal to answer stems from (a) he believes these questions are dealt with adequately in the text of the Apostolic Exhortation itself (b) that there is some kind of trap here, or at least that there is not sincerity in the dubia and those posing them because they are on the traditional side and could be seen (certainly Cardinal Burke has been portrayed in the media in this fashion*) as attempting to lead a movement to push back against Francis’ reforms (c) this is an Apostolic Exhortation, not an Encyclical, much less an Apostolic Constitution (the “papal bull”) so it is not making any claims to be formal teaching or statement of docrtrine binding on the faithful, so they are looking for things that are not there (i.e. he is not changing or contradicting any past teaching with this).
I wish Francis had replied and it is (uncharacteristically?) dictatorial of him to adopt this “take it or leave it but you can’t leave it ‘cos I’m the pope” attitude, but there are probably deep waters here.
*Remember when Steve Bannon was still part of Trump’s inner circle? And his meeting with Cardinal Burke? And how some conspiracy theorising took off into the wild blue yonder about Burke getting machinations under way with Trump against Francis? And yes, mainstream media outlets, I am looking at you about this.
Catholic here, and not a fan of Francis, mainly because he keeps sticking his nose into temporal politics instead of focusing on the spiritual world. He’s just as much a materialist as the greediest capitalist, except he’s focused on riding himself of the world rather than acquiring it.
Amoris laetitia aside, he has not changed much of anything in Catholic doctrine. Mostly you’re probably just noticing the extremely poor job the media does reporting on religious news. Religious reporting is the only thing they do worse than science reporting.
People who are Catholic and still Catholic in this age of secularism do not want progressive politics or cultural norms. We want MOAR CATHOLICISM. The atheists I know say to me, “I sure do like this Francis guy, he’s just want the Church needs these days!” and I ask, “Oh, great, are you planning on joining now?” Oddly enough they always answer in the negative.
This.
I am sure other people here are more capable of pointing theological reasons for opposing or supporting the current Pope, so I will stick to the lower matters that shape most of my opinions on Francis: politics.
Which befits him well, since my main problem with Francis is that he has trouble separating his religious duties from his political views.
Here is what I think of him: he is a Pope with a flair for mediatic actions (which may or may not be good in the long run) and an inclination to Latin American populism, who has trouble separating his pastoral concerns for the spiritual well-being of his flock from his personal ideas as to how his flock should be managed by their secular governments.
Calling him a Communist, or even a Liberal in the American sense of the word, is a bit misguided; like almost everyone in the Church hierarchy, he opposes gay marriage, does not want the ordenation of women, opposes contraception and abortion, and (of course) rejects atheism and a godless society. The media has been keen on portraiting him as tolerant and liberal (which is fair, though a bit overblown), but he is still in touch with Catholic traditon.
But the problem is that he is just as much in touch with Peronist tradition and the broader Latin American Left Populism that developed in the 70s and rose to power everywhere in the continent in the late 80s (and is now starting to crumble). Though sometimes at odds with individual leaders, ideologically he has been mostly at their side – see his eagerness to forgive and forget Cristina Kirchner’s enmity and receive her with honors in the Vatican. This hospitality was not extended to Kirchner’s foe Mauricio Macri (who leans more to the right) when he became President.
Another example: Francis had a very good relationship with former (Left-wing) Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who was impeached last year; he is much colder towards Michel Temer, her sucessor, who leans a bit more to the right. Recently, Temer invited him to thecelebration of the 300 years of the Apparition of Our Lady Aparecida, the patron saint of Brazil; Francis refused to come, saying his schedule is busy for 12 October while also criticizing (in the same letter!) the austerity measures adopted by the President. See the issue? Not only the Pope could not find a way to come to the 300 years feast of the patron saint of the largest catholic country in the world, but he also did not miss the opportunity to harangue his opinions on matters of internal national policy.
He is a man of the Church, but he is clearly not only a man of the Church – perhaps not even primarily so. He is the Pope, but he is also a Left leaning politician.
Anybody here who’s practicing meditation based on the methods described in “The Mind Illuminated”?
It’s a fairly recent (published less than two years ago) book of the practical meditation instructions with minimal religious baggage variety. It’s very good and it’s level of clarity and precision are quite beyond anything I’ve read before in that space. It also describes the entire process of getting from complete beginner level to very deep states of concentration (divided into ten stages).
I meditated in the past but stopped when I felt like I plateaued and wasn’t convinced that the benefits were worth the time investment. I read TMI a bit over two months and it cleared up a lot of confusion I had about meditation and got me intetested in meditating again. So far, I’ve been growing more convinced, based on my experiences, that the stuff in the book is real, including the kind of crazy stuff that’s supposed to be happening at the later stages.
So, anybody who’s read the book and maybe has something interesting to share?
I have not read the book but I have been looking for one like this every now and then, so thanks for the recommendation.
I feel like I’m in a similar situation you were a few months ago (plateaued, not convinced if the benefits were worth more time investment) and from your text I assume you made some progress since then. Would you say the book helped you significantly to leave your plateau? Did you advance any stages and was it worth the time investment?
Yes, to both questions. The book addresses a lot of subtleties and warns about mistakes that it’s very easy to get confused about on your own. I definitely advanced past the skill level I had before.
I also consider the time innvestment worth it. My original motivation for meditating was stress reduction and maybe improved concentration and I’m seeing benefits here. Plus, meditation used to be intrinsically interesting when I first tried it, and now it feels intrinsically imteresting again. The quality of experience is changing, new stuff is happening and this keeps me motivated. YMMV, obviously.
If you’re interested in the book, there’s an olderr document that outlines its contents:
http://dharmatreasure.org/wp-content/uploads/LightOnMeditationHandout.pdf
Here is an eff article about the repeal of privacy rules, to serve as counterweight to the claim in the previous open link thread, “they repealed a less-than-one-year-old regulation that hadn’t come into effect yet, changing literally nothing”.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/05/congress-repealing-our-internet-privacy-rights-meant-congress-repealed-internet
I found it to be helpful context.
When we made democracy and modern governments we were so worried about national control falling in the hands of the wrong human, that we made sure that it would be managed by a non-human system. But do we worry enough about it being managed by the wrong non-human system? Nobody can fix things if the system spirals out of sanity in the Moloch/Great Depression way or becomes unfriendly in the 1984 way. After all a single human changing the system is exactly what the system was meant to prevent. We care about things like a stupid President or the wrong representative more than first-past-the-post voting systems or gerrymandering or perverse incentives. How scary is this?
Sounds sorta like anacyclosis.
I didn’t make any predictions about what happens when some democratic systems fail though. Anacyclosis does. If I had to predict, some systems may work with varying degrees of human value alignment, some may collapse like a badly programmed robot, some may even work and be unfriendly, such as in 1984 – a self sustaining, non-overthrowable system that works to hurt people and would be far worse than no system at all. I don’t see why a working and well-aligned system would collapse into anarchy, which anacyclosis says always happens. It might evolve into a different system, but not necessarily collapse.
Nit: while O’Brien and propaganda within Nineteen Eighty-Four (e.g., Goldstein’s book) claim that the system is permanent and can’t be overthrown, the linguistic appendix is written from the perspective of a post-Ingsoc world.
(“Newspeak was the official language of Oceania” “It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050.” “It was intended” that Newspeak make political heresy unthinkable”. Etc.)
That suggests the boot didn’t actually stamp on human faces forever– however little good that did Winston or Julia.
I suspect that in practice no system is actually going to be self-sustaining and permanently non-overthrowable, though: a) That’s hard to falsify (albeit in much the same way that it’s hard to prove that any given living person isn’t actually immortal without killing them; sure, lots of people have died, but on the other hand there are eight billion who haven’t). b) As with Winston, the fact that the system may (or even certainly will) end at some indeterminate but distant day, and may be replaced with something better on an equally indeterminate and even more distant one can be pretty cold comfort. A system can certainly outlast a human life, the more so if it’s actively engaged in ending human lives.
Orwell wrote Animal Farm about how a totalitarian state is established, 1984 about what one looks like instantiated, and intended to write a novel about how one collapses but died before he could do it. He never intended it to be un-overthrowable.
I was always under the impression that 1984 was written to be as hopeless as possible, a warning that once it gets to a critical point it can never be undone. Where is this other novel mentioned?
@Wander:
Good question. I can’t find reference to it. I read it in a biographical essay of Orwell at some point but I can’t find it now.
At the risk of being overly terse: Very. Say what you want about a dictator, but at least he is mortal. Whereas a system without death can survive the deaths of any of it members. Furthermore, there is a limit to how insane and evil one human can be before he is nonfunctional, whereas a system can be infinitely crazy.
Indeed. In how many movies do you have plucky rebels standing up and saying something to the effect of “you can kill us, but you can’t kill an idea”? And my response to this “positive” message is that it also applies to bad ideas. Like John Quiggin’s whole book, Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk among Us.
And yes, a bad dictator, king, or emperor, may be deposed. But what do you do about a bad electorate?
Your question reminds me of the Book of Mormon’s rationale for democracy. Basically, a good king can do a lot of good, but a bad king can do a lot of bad. So because there is no guarantee your kings will always be good people, democracy’s better. And if ever the people themselves are bad? Well then, they’re ripe for destruction by the hand of God as it is, and no king could change that.
So the answer to your question is that said electorate will be smitten by God.
Probably that should be written as “God will smite the electorate”.
Smitten by God is a funny typo though.
Is it a typo? According to the dictionary, “smitten” is perfectly cromulent to mean what he plausibly intended:
My usage of “typo” is probably incorrect.
I don’t think I have ever seen it written to refer to anything other than meaning 3 (which is likely derived from the original meaning).
“May I be struck down by God” scans near as well as “May God strike me down”.
“May I be smitten by God” doesn’t scan at all, compared to “May God smite me”.
But meaning 3 demands the preposition with, not by. An electorate smitten by God will find itself decidedly not smitted with God.
Wouldn’t it be easier for God to just smite the bad kings, before they can lead the people astray?
@anonymous:
Sure. But it doesn’t scan correctly as written. At most it suggest that they entered the state of being smitten, with God as the cause. Maybe God just said “everybody get together and try to love one another right now.”
@John Schilling
Generally the stuff God wants you to do are pro-social. When God smites “the people” as a whole, it’s more like “the society collapses or is easily overtaken by outsiders because people were doing corrupt things that weakened the society instead of the fruitful things that strengthen the society.”
My impression is that the only thing that ever really matters is social conventions. Writing things down can help fill in details of implementation and, more importantly, add an aura of immutability to conventions, but it’s ultimately the conventions which matter. Otherwise, a third world nation could simply adopt the Constitution of the US and have an equally functional political system (such as it is).
I was thinking about the Al risk topic. As a almost 30-ish person who’d very much like to ideally check out before things turning into a cliche’d dystopic sci fi film, how worried should I be about this? Like do I need to start planning now to off myself in X number of years to avoid this? and how many years can I safely allocate before I need to kick the bucket?
That’s a complicated question; there isn’t a set date for an intelligence explosion or even a predicated date. Bostrom’s 2013(?) survey had a median prediction of 2082 for human level AI with 90% confidence, but there are a number of additional factors to consider beyond that. First, human level is considered a danger if there is a hard takeoff scenario where it bootstraps to superintelligence in a short period. It is far from certain that this will occur, and human level AI in and of itself is unlikely to pose an existential danger. Second, there are a range of outcomes from superintelligence, many of which do not contain sci fi dystopias. Some futures will have friendly AI. A large proportion would likely be simple extinction. Actual dystopias like I have no mouth and I must scream probably form a very small percentage of possible futures.
And that’s not the only area of uncertainty, we also have to consider your own life expectancy. I don’t have access to mortality tables so I don’t know exactly what your current LE is, though I’d guess that living to your 90s is still a long shot. You’d probably want to look at the ages that your ancestors survived to, and if you have a family history of any kind of disease. It might be that you are quite unlikely to live to the 2080s anyway, though you would need to balance this against possible advances in medical science, and possible earlier singularities.
In short, all that uncertainty adds up to a lot. I’d say that the chance of a superintelligence being not merely unfriendly but actively evil, is so unlikely that worrying about would qualify as Pascal’s mugging, even aside from all the other conditionals.
Don’t worry about it. Your life will become a hellish dystopian cliche without any kind of Singularity-grade AI (which I’m not convinced is in any way likely to even exist). And, barring unforeseen events such as meteorite strikes, it will happen so very gradually that you won’t even notice. Human politics is much more dangerous than any AI.
Someone in a previous thread suggested that you can’t have good art based around Social Justice, and someone else said you could. I think the latter is right, though, obviously, the work can’t be too propagandistic. Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to come up with a list of such works. My starting suggestions:
Bertolt Brecht, various poems and plays
James Baldwin, Essays
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Tony Kushner, Angels in America
The work can be in any media, but it must be actually good and contain actual SJ content, not just be a good work of art by someone calling himself a Marxist or feminist or whatever. Otherwise I thought we should keep things pretty loose.
I don’t know how you want to bound the category, but some of the Harlem Renaissance poets were pretty great. Maybe even more of a stretch, so were a lot of the early union songs.
Given my druthers, I’d bound the category by only having works from after SJ solidified as an ideology.
This being said, Donald and the riot from Stand on Zanzibar (1968) is a very modern-looking presentation of privilege. Donald is a well-off man who decides to expand his experiences by going out on the street at night. Things go wrong which wouldn’t have if he hadn’t been there. Two people die. He disclaims all responsiblity because he didn’t know better.
Been a long time since I read _Stand on Zanzibar_, but you don’t have to be SJ to write about privilege in its ordinary sense. Or about religious dictatorships with a penchant for rape; Heinlein wrote about both. (“Logic of Empire” and “If This Goes On….”)
“Logic of Empire” is definitely about privilege. It starts with a man arguing in favor of indentured servitude who finds out he knows much less about it than he thinks.
I would say that pre-SJW, there was relatively little about privilege.
Farnham’s Freehold is rather good about microagressions.
Given my druthers, I’d bound the category by only having works from after SJ solidified as an ideology.
While I appreciate the point, the resulting list would be extremely short. I have my doubts that the extreme identity politics of the moment are going to produce anything of artistic value.
You don’t think “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” or “The Rain That Falls On You From Nowhere” or any of Frank Wu’s _Analog_ stories are going to be listed among the great stories of SF?
Yeah. Probably not.
I’ve argued in a previous thread that the movie Ex Machina is both extremely good and based entirely on SOTA feminist ideas. Others disagree, seeing it as a story about AI boxing, though.
The Rain That Falls On You From Nowhere could be an excellent SF story, if it got (a) rigorous editing from an experienced editor willing to hold the writer’s nose to the grindstone on whether he wanted this to be a science fiction or a fantasy tale or hey, split the difference, science fantasy and (b) said rigorous editing involved forcing the writer to give Boyfriend an actual characterisation, more time to the parents, stop being so pissy about his sister, and take an axe to some of the self-indulgent prose including the “pretty writing for the sake of pretty writing” and (c) not willing to let him skate on “hey I’m a gay Chinese man writing about a gay Chinese man, what more does this story need?” That’s just the appeals to exoticism wrapped up in a modern “diversity and representation” disguise .
There’s the bones of a good story there, at least. Nothing can be done with If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love, not even soaking it in petrol and setting it alight, for it is too drippy to catch fire even with those measures.
– I say we keep the category pretty loose.
– Scott reminds me that a lot of folk music might apply. Maybe Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger for starters.
– Some “Civil Rights Anthem” songs might fall into this. Sam Cooke’s A Change Gonna Come and Curtis Mayfield’s People Get Ready.
– Nina Simone
– Some socially conscious rap, particularly before the ascendency of gangster rap. Though arguably a good deal of political rap, like Public Enemy, is actually far right.
– I might have added Latin American poets like Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo and Aime Cesaire, but their good stuff is mostly just general sympathy with the poor or a celebration of their own culture. (Even a right winger like Robert Frost can do sympathy for the poor well.) Their more explicitly political stuff is pretty awful.
– A lot of the writers and artists I’ve mentioned would be pretty unhappy with how Social Justice politics have taken for the censorious. Certainly Atwood has taken some stances which have gone against the grain of carceral feminism. See here.
– Even though there are good works in this category, I’d have to say that the Social Justice aspect is a bit of a blight on many of them.
What about Dickens? That seems to not simply be sympathy for the poor and go to fundamental ideas about fairness and privilege. Although I may be misremembering Dickens.
Dickens strongly objects to the abuse of privilege, but he’s pretty comfortable with class distinctions and the privileges implicit to them.
In many ways, Dickens was quite a right wing writer. See here.
Zola or Hugo might be a better candidates.
Nothing wrong with keeping the category broad, but I think I object to counting most folk music. A common explanation of social justice is to specifically contrast it with older class/economics progressivism, which tended to be less conscious of issues like race and gender. Folk has generally been mostly economic, dealing with race some but gender hardly at all. And I have a general sense that it’s hard to let in folk without also embracing a lot of communist art, which feels like a clearly different category from social justice.
More specifically, I think my complaint is that a lot of really great folk was about groups like Harlan County coal miners, who are at this point cast generally cast as villains. For that matter the environmentalist stuff is largely on the outs – Big Yellow Taxi doesn’t really mesh with the environmental justice framework.
(I’d be quicker to argue for songs like Southern Man than most folk – some protest rock might well count.)
The musical RENT. Truly fantastic music sung by (and about) truly terrible people with a terrible message.
Ah, that post-teenage moment in a Rent fan’s life when he starts sympathizing with Benny….
I thought Rent was a rip-off – or reworking, if you prefer – of La Bohème? That being so, shouldn’t we be giving the credit to Puccini?
It’s a pretty loose adaptation, and I don’t think Puccini was much of an SJW (based on his Wikipedia page). But in any case, La Bohème is itself an adaptation, so we should really be crediting Henri Murger.
Story wise, sure, but the Andrew seems to be crediting the music as the good art, which isn’t based on 19th century Italian Opera.
Belting out the big show-stopping
ariamusical number isn’t based on 19th century Italian opera? 😉Where there any reasons given why it couldn’t produce good art?
As devils advocate I would argue that for example Handmaid’s Tale is “not based around SJ”, but really around dystopian totalitarism. Analogy “Star Wars”: It may be the goal of hour heroes to bring peace to the Galaxy, but what we really want is big space battles (even though we all are peace-loving pacifists).
Where there any reasons given why it couldn’t produce good art?
As someone on the right, opposed to ‘social justice’, and that may have been involved in the original thread (I can recall at least two on the subject):
It’s very hard to balance the needs of political messaging and the needs of artistic creativity. I think in order to be great, art needs to be able to touch something common to just about everyone. Given their popularity, just about anyone can listen to one of Beethoven’s symphonies or look at one of Hokusai’s prints or read one of Shakespeare’s plays and know it’s a work of art. The fact that just about everyone can read 1984 and identify someone with many of the aspects of Big Brother is a testament to how well written the work was. And this is not despite but because everyone disagrees with just who is comparable to Big Brother.
This applies to observers as well as creators. I don’t trust someone that is tied up in the message of the work to give an honest appreciation of the artistic merits of the work. If the work has a message that isn’t universally applicable, the true test is to find people that disagree with the work’s message and still appreciate it, or to find people that find a message in it at odds with the creator’s intent.
I can look at some of the Socialist Realism propaganda paintings and appreciate the use of form and design to send a message despite disagreeing with the political opinions they were designed to support. However, you won’t find many on the right that think The Handmaid’s Tale was an enjoyable book.
One way to know whether a work is good is: can you quote any of the lines and expect people to recognize them? Sing a few lines, if it’s a song? Would you recognize the art if someone made a homage to it? I’m willing to accept that Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster is a work of Social Justice art, just because so many people have copied the style.
To answer the original question, it’s not impossible to produce good Social Justice art, but the failure of progressive advocates of social justice to understand their opponents and the needs of the message makes it very difficult to produce something that is both on message and universal enough to appeal to almost everyone. And, to be fair, I think most political movements these days have the same problems.
It’s very hard to balance the needs of political messaging and the needs of artistic creativity.
Is it though? No work of social justice art is as heavy-handed in its messaging as, say, a cathedral is about Christian messaging (which was for most of history also political messaging). But cathedrals are great art and appreciated by Christians and non-Christians alike. And the cathedral architects were not particularly consulting people who disagreed with the works’ message.
No work of social justice art is as heavy-handed in its messaging as, say, a cathedral is about Christian messaging (which was for most of history also political messaging).
How much of that is because we’ve come to associate the stone structure of the cathedral with Christianity? When we think of cathedrals, we picture something like Notre Dame or Chartres, old buildings that are very big and very ornate (or modern reproductions in the same style), which would make them attractive art no matter what they were. Compared to that, the overt religious symbolism or religious messaging is nothing. Take a look at St. Basil’s in Moscow, which is now more a symbol of Russia than of Orthodox Christianity, or the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.
These days, ‘old’ and ‘big’ or ‘old’ and ‘ornate’ is enough for a tourist attraction, and would probably qualify as art no matter what it was. The Parthenon in Athens and the Pyramids in Egypt are both religious structures that have survived in culture long after the message of the religions they were built to spread… which is what makes them recognizable as art.
The cathedral builders made art, and if they intended a message it was a universally understandable ‘I have artistic talent and am using it to make something grand that will last’.
Four letters: DEVO! 🙂
Seconded: Tony Kushner’s Angels in America
Alt.banned: Sherman Alexie. Sherman Alexie’s works, in particular, illustrate how the best SJ works can explode-in-the-mind decades after being read.
Unsurprisingly, America’s alt.Boeotian political movements persistently seek to ban hundreds of SJ-positive titles aimed at young adults. It is striking too, that pretty much every GoodReads genre-class awards high ratings to SJ-positive literary works … including the aforementioned banned SJ-positive works.
How is it that the GoodReads community, encompassing persons of every age, class, race, religion, nationality, education-level, political persuasion, and gender, whose sole shared trait is a pronounced love for books and reading, has evolved to be so strikingly SJ-positive, the world wonders?
I watched Angels in America, but wasn’t impressed. It had its good moments, but overall it came off as cheesy and oftentimes preachy. I have to give them points for trying, though; it’s obvious that their goal was to make a decent movie/miniseries, as opposed to pushing as much propaganda as possible. They didn’t quite succeed, but this is still better than most ideologically motivated art.
Angels in America came out at a time when our well-liked system administrator was completing a long process of dying of AIDS (which for years had been horrifically untreatable).
Angels spoke, on many levels, to all who knew and respected this man … who almost lived long enough to benefit from the advent of highly effective anti-retroviral drug regimens.
This was (for me and many of my generation) a paradigmatic example in which the force of art was diminished by advances in science. Long may such advances continue.
I’d read the play. The character of Roy Cohn carries the whole thing and elevates it about being just an AIDS piece.
Any recommendations for specific Alexie works?
Personally, more than any single Alexie work, attending a Sherman Alexie live-reading made a big impression on me (Alexie talked about what books and libraries meant to him as an adolescent). This man has presence.
Alternative suggestion: get ahold of one of Alexie’s short-story/poem collections, and find a story/poem that works for you … such choices being deeply personal.
At home we have the collection First Indian on the Moon (1993) and the novel Reservation Blues (1995) (which is pretty episodic, come to think). Both are recommended; first-time Alexie readers likely will find the collection easier to get started with.
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is top-notch, at least to my mind. Lots of style variations, and I think something there will work for a lot of people.
I wouldn’t say SJ can’t produce good art. While SJW artists feel the need to sacrifice some measure of their art to the message, the overall result can still be good.
I’m currently watching the Handmaid’s Tale with my girlfriend, who read the original book, and it’s certainly well made in technical terms even if the setting and characterization are extremely weak. It’s not as strong as it could have been if the scriptwriters had ever cracked open a Bible in their lives or spoken to a human being face to face. But the resulting dissonance injects an element of humor into it which lightens the mood.
I still think the shallowness and inaccuracy of the “Christianity” in Handmaid’s Tail is a feature, not a bug.
I mean, would Christians be happier if the authoritarian theocracy that seems to be founded in large part on systematic, ritualistic rape actually did seem to have elements of genuine Christianity? I’m a lifelong atheist and I can say that I’d be really turned off if the jackbooted thugs were praising Jesus and quoting chapter and verse instead of just manipulating rhetoric and imagery for their own secular ends (not the least because, to Christianity’s credit, it would become completely contradictory)
Side-note: While I think it’s important to the theme and the plot that Gilead be Christian-in-Name-Only, I’m far from sure the creators of the show and even the book did. They might have, and I hope they did, but it’s entirely possible they just toned down the similarities to contemporary Christianity to avoid offending contemporary Christians, or at least to give themselves a bailey to retreat to in the event it did.
In that case, we can start a list of “artistic works that were improved by authoral efforts to avoid offending outsiders” and put Handmaid’s Tale at the top. Anyone else know of any other entries there?
I’m not sure it counts as an artistic work, but two days ago I heard a commencement address by Leon Panetta. It wasn’t a very good talk but, to his credit, he managed to talk about political problems without saying anything that would seriously offend a Trump supporter, of whom there were surely some in the audience.
Depending on your criteria for “outsiders,” Casablanca was improved because the moral guardians refused to let Ilsa abandon her husband and stay with Rick – as it is, it’s much more poignant and memorable. I’m sure there were other films that went through the same sort of trials.
I’m very skeptical of the story that the ending was ever in doubt. There’s no way “wife leaves her resistance hero husband to be with her true love” would get past the Hays Code.
(Even without the Code, I’m skeptical that that would fly even today without giving Lazlo a fatal flaw greater than a lack of romantic passion- or just killing him off.)
Ilsa left with with her husband in the original play. There is no evidence that the filmmakers ever considered changing that.
They made a number of changes both before and after talking to the censors. The most important is that they made Ilsa (in Paris) think that her husband was dead.
Christians are going to be offended regardless, because the very explicit message is “don’t let these monsters ever get into power or this will happen to you personally for real!” They beat that point home in episode one when Aunt Lydia was looking right into the camera saying how this! will! become! normal!
A more nuanced Gilead-ist theology would have added a bit of depth to the world and explained why so many normal people were gung-ho to sign up with them. They did a good job of showing the world falling apart due to collapsing fertility but totally squandered the chance to show how those desperate people decided on this particular solution. It was as if someone had sown the ground with dragon’s teeth and a fascist militia burst fully formed out of the Massachusetts soil.
One-dimensional villains aren’t nearly as compelling, because they might as well just be evil robots or demons. An adversary with some kind of internal logic to their motivation would have greatly improved the series.
Agreed that it would be nice to see a little bit more of the groundwork laid. I haven’t finished the show and am hoping there is more of that, because I firmly believe one of the most important things to understand about authoritarianism is that just because it isn’t a democracy doesn’t mean you don’t need a constituency, and all the representatives of the potential core constituencies of Gilead (the commander, the driver) seem ambivalent. Ann Dowd is basically the only character who is an enthusiastic supporter of the regime, and I don’t think you can really build a fascist state on old-maid resentment.
If you’re using it to comment on actual Christianity, and it’s not similar to actual Christianity, it’s a strawman. That counts as a bug.
It’s true that people still won’t like it if you made it similar to actual Christianity, but it may be that someone who understood Christianity enough to write it properly would not make Christianity a villain in the first place.
Not if your audience wants a strawman and would object to an accurate portrayal.
My point is that I don’t think its trying to comment on Christianity. It’s trying to comment on patriarchy, and making the reasonable assumption that if you built a state in North America structured specifically and explicitly around the exploitation of women, its ideology would be a de-Jesusfied bastardization of Christianity. And, really, if you take the initial goal of a dystopian Western patriarchy for granted, what else would it look like? A Matrix rip-off? American Soumission?
It always seemed to me that Atwood is trying to have it both ways on whether the religion of THT is representative of Christianity.
And, really, if you take the initial goal of a dystopian Western patriarchy for granted, what else would it look like?
Then it’s not just us Christians, it’s all men who should be offended, because what it is saying is “If you let men have what they really want and give them the power to get it, what they want is to enslave and degrade and control women so they can get as much free pussy as they please”.
If Christianity is only set-dressing to sell the new regime to the rubes, then the core of the message is: this is what men are really like, unless we are very, very careful.
@Deiseach:
There are many stories that spin out a failure mode of a particular way of thinking. They aren’t dependent on the failure mode being inevitable.
You are always so eager to take offense.
That’s like saying anyone who has ever been involved in politics (or, at least, any politics to the left of Murray Rothbard) ought to be offended by 1984.
Nazis? Neo-Confederates? Neo-feudals? Neo-Victorians? Neo-most things? Absolute monarchy? Weird apocalyptic cults? Hypermasculine raider tribes, Mad Max style? Jack Chick anti-Catholicism? Practically anything in the cyberpunk genre?
@herbert herberson – ” And, really, if you take the initial goal of a dystopian Western patriarchy for granted, what else would it look like? A Matrix rip-off? American Soumission?”
‘If you don’t take a job as a prostitute, we can stop your benefits’
Ha, but that one’s not fair. The twin currents of neoliberalism and sex-positive feminism were still infants when Atwood was writing; hardly a knock against her that she couldn’t anticipate their absurd and grotesque natural conclusions.
“Ha, but that one’s not fair. The twin currents of neoliberalism and sex-positive feminism were still infants when Atwood was writing; hardly a knock against her that she couldn’t anticipate their absurd and grotesque natural conclusions.”
Gibson had all the relevant insight by Burning Chrome in ’82 (Lewis had them in ’43 with Abolition of Man, but outgroup of course).
Molly as a meat-puppet, waking up halfway through a snuff scene. And extrapolation is the whole point of skiffy. Christian Theocracy is the boring safe version, while at the same time a dig at the outgroup. It’s as bold and daring as Stephen King’s Mrs. Carmoody types.
Handmaid’s Tail
Freudian slip? Or the porn version? Which would be much more entertaining, I imagine 🙂
I mean, would Christians be happier if the authoritarian theocracy that seems to be founded in large part on systematic, ritualistic rape actually did seem to have elements of genuine Christianity?
But the trouble is that for Atwood (whatever about the TV writers and producers) and a good section of the critical and reading public who swooned and swoon over the book, this is what they think “genuine Christianity” is all about. Atwood may make mention in interviews of ‘this is not my Christianity, my Christianity is nice liberal [Universal Unitarianism]’ but the “actually back in the day when Christianity was starting out it was completely egalitarian until Constantine and the Patriarchy and the suppression of women and gays and so forth for two thousand years” Lost Golden Age version of ‘real Christianity’ she and others approve of is the equivalent of the Lost Golden Age of Matriarchy and Moon Goddess Priestesses many 70s feminists lost their marbles over – it has everything to do with wish-fulfillment and nothing to do with reality.
In that case, ‘real Christianity’ is going to be the safe ideal version that does not exist and the actual Christianity that is out there is going to be the convenient scapegoat for all the bad things (e.g. “Christianity is anti-gay!” “Not my Christianity, this is the fault of the bad guys who took over and grabbed power, as my speculative novel describes”).
You see? She gets to eat her cake and have it: use the dangers of a theocratic USA and have people applauding her foresight and trying to identify which members of the Moral Majority or Trump’s current administration would love to set up such a dictatorship, at the same time she gets to judge global and historic Christianity as “it’s not really Christian if it’s not my Christianity which is liberal and non-dogmatic and all about Christianity As Social Work”. So, you know, by that yardstick Pope Benedict was Not A Real Christian, but Pope Francis might be 🙂
Imagine a writer opining “I don’t consider the Orthodox to be Jews because they refuse to permit women to be rabbis and they do not have at the core of their behaviour and ideologies what I, in my feeble Canadian way, would consider to be the core of Judaism which is ‘do justly, love mercy and walk humbly’ “. Whatever your opinion on women’s rights and ordination of women, I don’t think anyone getting up on their hind legs and declaring an entire section of the Jewish population to be “not real Jews” based on sexual politics would fly.
Ha, yeah, I have a weird habit of typoing homonyms.
I’ve been in a couple Handmaid’s Tale threads lately, and have made and corrected that mistake more than once. Apparently it was only a matter of time before one made it through.
As for the edited in part–still seems incoherent. You’re simultaneously complaining that the religion depicted is too Christian and not Christian enough. Whatever Atwood’s thoughts are re: definitions of Christianity and how different contemporary denominations live up to it, the fact remains that Gilead doesn’t resemble any contemporary denomination. Nobody puts the Hagar story at the center of their beliefs. Nobody excises Jesus to that degree–not just neglecting the message, but never even using the damn name. At least as far as I’ve gotten in the show and remember from the book, we don’t even see churches, services, or clergy. Just “commanders” (not patriarchs, or Fathers-with-a-capital-F) and “Eyes” (not inquisitors).
I’ve never been an angry atheist, but I been a regular atheist for as long as I can remember (these two facts are probably related) and I can tell you that if I were going to paint a fever dream from my deepest and most biased fears of the Religious Right, it wouldn’t look anything like Gilead.
It can be too Christian in the sense of “the author is presenting it as Christian” while being not Christian enough in the sense of “actually resembling Christianity”.
Handmaid’s Tail
Freudian slip?
Amusingly, Atwood herself touches on that in the epilogue:
There’s a strong, strong subtheme, throughout the entire book, that Gilead is not particularly Christian. I mean, parts of the book are basically Atwood flailing her hands and screaming THIS IS NOT ACTUAL CHRISTIANITY! THIS IS A CYNICAL ATTEMPT TO CONSTRUCT TOTALITARIAN MISOGYNISTIC REGIME WITH CHRISTIAN TRAPPINGS – I seriously fail to see how some people don’t catch this, but I guess the thought of Handmaid’s Tale as an anti-Christian book in some sense is so strong it prevents this. Let’s recap:
– most of times when we hear someone actually opposing the Gilead regime, they’re Christians. News reports tell of Baptists fighting Gilead in the mountains, the state executes renegade Catholics and forces undercover nuns to be handmaids, Quakers try to help June and her husband escape to Canada etc. (The book also makes it clear that the pre-Gilead Christians June’s feminist group worked with were not necessarily particularly liberal on all issues)
– Gilead is explicitly shown tampering with the Bible – inserting “From each according to her ability, to each according to his need” etc.
– Gilead freely borrows practices from other religion, such as automatic prayer scrolls etc. – the epilogue also refers to the scholars studying similarities between Hindu practices and Gilead
– The epilogues also compares the regime to theocratic Iran
– The epilogue also extensively discusses how Gilead’s founding fathers crafted Gilead’s ideology in the think tank on the basis of Waterford’s marketing background etc. and how they borrowed freely elements even from pre-Christian religions to build a functional totalitarian state
Really, this theme is really not even particularly hidden.
Sounds like you’ve made the mistake of actually reading the book being discussed. Ideally you shouldn’t know anything about it except what you’ve heard from fellow culture warriors. Anything more will mark you as someone who can’t be trusted – you might be one of them.
As other commentators have pointed out, there can be elements of “my side are the True Christians, the other side calls themselves Christian but aren’t True Christians”. It is perfectly consistent with this to have textual evidence that the other side isn’t really Christian.
The series, and by implication the book, are seen as being anti-those-Christians (and anti-Republican) by the people who praise it. And I don’t think this comes out of nowhere. The series pattern-matches to common left-wing accusations about outgroup Christians, even as it fails to match actual outgroup Christians
Damn it, now I’m tempted to read the book and do a compare and contrast with Heinlein’s “If This Goes On–“, which does the same thing. The religion of the Prophet Incarnate clearly draws from both Bible Belt revival meeting Christianity and the LDS (hard to avoid the latter given an American Prophet with a new revelation, and Heinlein was clearly kind of fascinated by the trappings), but Heinlein is careful to show the actual Mormons and Baptists as active allies to the (Masonic-based) rebel Cabal, along with Catholics and Jews,
I happen to have a e-text version of Handmaid’s Tale, and I just did a control-F for “Christian.” The word actually only appears twice in the entire book, and in neither case are they coming from the regime or its proponents. So, technically, the author never even had her antagonists “call themselves Christian.”
(edit: also, every use of the word “Jesus” and “Christ” is part of an expletive-esque outburst, unless you count a couple similes involving Christmas trees and cards and the aforementioned instances of “Christian.” Two instances of priest, both referring to people hanged by the regime. No pastors, parsons, or clergy. Several instances of “church,” but they’re all either idioms or references to a church converted into a museum by the regime. Admittedly, lots and lots of “Bibles”–but the overall text repeatedly contrasts the “Bible” used by Gilead to the real one)
Heinlein literally doesn’t use the word Christian or any specifically Christian iconography in If This Goes On__”, it just seems obvious that it’s Christian. The leader is the Prophet, and I think the Temple Guards are Angels.
It might be interesting that this early book is about a revolution that happens because regime is tyrannical, while his later Red Planet and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistriss are revolts against people in charge whose policies would make life literally impossible.
@Nancy You’re right. It’s clearly Abrahamic and follows Christian-derived customs (e.g., church on Sunday), and the culture uses biblical names and imagery from both testaments, but Heinlein is careful not to actually confirm that it’s Christian.
(And while the Mormons are referred to as heretics, so are the Pariahs (Jews), so clearly they’re using a broad definition of heresy.)
Lack of Christian elements among the straw Christians is quite possible. The question is how much the villains resemble anti-Christian caricatures, not how much they resemble actual Christians, and they can resemble the former without any reference to the Bible.
A book about evil bankers who poison the wells and use babies’ blood to make their ritual bread would be an attack on Jews, even if they never uttered the words “synagogue” or “Passover”, and even if the book showed Black Hebrews or Jews-for-Jesus as honorable people who did none of those things.
If Atwood’s task was to write a book trying to portray how an average woman (with feminist sympathies) would attempt to cope in a dystopian, misogynistic totalitarian society, and the story is set in the US, it makes sense that the misogynistic totalitarian society would contain elements derived from Christianity. Despite this, Atwood went above and beyond the call of duty in including elements that set the regime apart from Christianity.
Of course there are those who praise the book due to seeing it as anti-Christian. This may have been considerably affected by all the attacks made against the book by people who might not even had read it but still wanted to ban it from schools etc. for being a supposed attack against Christianity.
But I dispute that it resembles anti-Christian caricatures. If it did, everyone would speak with southern accents, they would regularly attend megachurches and watch televangelists, and the Commander would be a closeted gay.
But the point still remains that when Atwood is considering a dystopian USA, her attitude is that the most natural form is a theocracy. Why not a brutally pragmatic secular state that counters the demographic threat posed by the fertility crisis by applying eugenics in a breeding programme where the remaining fertile women are assigned to be broodmares for the males with the “best” genes? That would work just as easily.
Crafting the ideology and borrowing elements from all religions and none need not end up with a ‘Christian-lite’ version to presumably make the medicine go down easier; why not substitute in Gaea’s will for God’s will while you’re think-tanking your marketing strategy? Or run the Handmaids not as “Scarlet Letter” Hester Prynne knockoffs but as sacred prostitution, freely and joyfully sharing the bounties of sexual love and fertility? Priestesses of Astarte? The hieros gamos?
You could very easily write a theocratic dystopia that exploits and controls women by the avenue of training them to be doves of Venus and dropping all their hang-ups about free love and promiscuity, every bit as much as you can write one with repressive quasi-Biblical ‘handmaidens’. But that might be a little uncomfortable for Margaret Atwood to contemplate and would certainly alienate those praising her for showing up the hypocrisy of Christianity’s puritanical and repressive attitudes to sex.
None of those things has any historical relevance in America. Maybe a very, very skilled writer could make the rise of a fascist state built on a Sumerian fertility cult in modern America sound plausible, but I don’t think either of us think Atwood is anywhere close to that skilled (this is her only book that I was impressed by, myself)
(honestly, even Giliad isn’t plausible under the standards I usually apply to SF–I just find it to be just really well realized and to work as broad allegory)
And for that matter, the television series “Touched by an Angel” never mentioned Jesus Christ until the final episode. Even unambiguously positive presentations of Christianity, when aimed in part at a secular audience, often play coy about exactly which conservative theistic religion they are talking about.
@John Schilling:
You certainly have a point, but the word “angel” in that context is pretty specific nod to Judeo-Christianity.
Now I want an sf novel with several different sorts of mysogynist tyranny, just to be annoying.
A postapocalyptic dystopian novel written entirely in Redpill jargon!
The word “angel” narrows it down to all three Abrahamic faiths, Zoroastrianism, and some brands of Wicca or Neopaganism. The context that further narrows it to Christian with maybe a bit of Judeo-, would do so even if the word “angel” hadn’t been used at all.
Similarly, both Heinlein’s and Atwood’s context points to the cyncial interpretation of Generic American Christianity, Protestant-ish without being tied to a specific denomination.
Because I’m happy someone brought it to my attention:
If This Goes On…
For something recent, how about Ruthanna Emerys’ “The Litany of Earth”?`
It might not count as pure SJ. Most of it is an SJish account of Lovecraft’s Deep Ones being a harmless persecuted minority. Ubjrire, vg raqf hc jvgu rayvtugrazrag inyhrf cebivqvat n fbyhgvba.
I want to thank you for the unintentional (?) humor of a block of rot13 coming after a mention of the Old Ones. I chuckled.
Anyway I’ve heard that book is good, might try picking it up. I can read anything as long as it’s not too preachy.
It wasn’t intentional humor, but I did notice that it was funny.
I haven’t read the novel. There was a novella (?) which came out earlier.
The Litany of Earth is available for free online, the book is called Winter Tide.
Thanks for the recommendation — I’ve read the Litany of Earth and I liked it. I think it’s written quite well, but I’m not sure if it would count as “SJ literature”. It is set in the past, shortly after Innsmouth was destroyed, and most SJ literature is set in the present (or close to it), for the purposes of drawing attention to the current social injustices.
I’m well aware of concepts such as “historical parallels”, “allegory”, and “subtlety”, but most ideologically motivated literature — including SJ literature — is a bit more… direct… than that. It is designed to address specific grievances, as opposed to drawing attention to man’s inhumanity to man (or other sapient being) in the abstract.
My impression is that historical SJ fiction isn’t all that rare. Offhand, Six Gun Snow White, Karen Memory, and the American Fairy Trilogy.
The point seems to be to show that there was a lot of oppression. My favorite of the bunch is the American Fairy Trilogy.
I haven’t heard of any of those — thanks ! I’ll check them out when I have time.
You can’t limit the class of SJ literature to “Only the SJ literature that beats you over the head with its themes,” and then complain that SJ literature is bad because it beats you over the head with its themes.
It seems like it’s pretty obviously an allegory – the narrator directly discusses the Japanese-American internment camps as a parallel to the camps for the Aeonists. She discusses how most
MuslimsAeonists are good people and a few fanatical sects gave them a bad reputation. And she meets a cult that uses her rituals in a way that can only be called “cultural appropriation.” It’s clearly using themes applicable to the present even if it’s a historical setting.All literature has some sort of themes (otherwise it wouldn’t be literature). Persecution and alienation are some of the themes that are quite emotionally impactful, and thus they are used quite often. But I don’t think it would be fair to say that any literature that deals with such themes is automatically “SJ literature”. True, the SJWs have pretty much grabbed onto persecution as their defining characteristic, but they are not unique in this regard; other people, such as conservative Christians, or maybe gamers, often have a bit of a persecution complex.
As far as I can tell, the key points of the SJ narrative are: 1). the focus on a persecuted group, as opposed to any given individual; 2). clear demarcation of demographic/social groups into the persecuted ones (the good), the oppressors (the bad), and the ugly (allies, for now); and 3). direct opposition to any moral ambiguity, and, lately, a call to violent struggle. And, despite involving some common SJ topics, Litany of Earth is pretty much the opposite of all of those.
It focuses on the protagonist in a personal way; she is important not because she fits into the “Innsmouth” demographic category, but because she happens to think and feel certain things. The book even goes out of its way to contrast her with her brother, who belongs to the same category but is, in some ways, her polar opposite.
True, the protagonist does feel safest with when she is among the members of a persecuted minority; however, the book once again goes out of its way to point out that the conflict is not entirely between “Innsmouth folk vs. humans”, or “Racial minorities vs. U.S. Government” (though there is some of that); but rather, between Aphra’s own preconceptions (however justified they may be) and reality. Some humans are bad; some are good; others are just stupid. They are not presented as a monolithic block.
And, of course, what makes the story so interesting is the fact that Aphra herself isn’t entirely sure if what she did was right (at least, not at first). The reader is invited to make his own judgement, which means that some people would make the “wrong” one (from the SJ point of view, that is). And, of course, Aphra abhors violence, though I suppose you could make the case that she does so out of fear, not principle.
Incidentally, these are also the reasons why I don’t consider Steven Universe to be a SJ cartoon. While it’s true that they have embraced it, its themes (interpersonal love and acceptance) run counter to the SJ narrative (hatred of the outgroup and struggle).
What is “social justice” for the purpose of this question? I’ve almost always seen it used to describe a certain sort of recent left-wing, sorta-leftist, thinking which is heavier on identity politics and lighter on class than leftism was in the past, focuses heavily on language and entertainment media, etc. Does Bertolt Brecht really fit into that?
A phrase badly in need of taboo here (and everywhere)
You could save it for talking about actual social justice, the way everyone outside a handful of USians does.
I’ve intentionally kept it pretty broad, for the sake of promoting discussion. But you are right that a lot of the works listed above arguably don’t fit the identity politics obsessed thinking we’ve seen lately. Even someone like Atwood isn’t really a full on SJW.
Gosh … perhaps the community of folks who care about social justice issues doesn’t much resemble alt.SSC caricatures of that community? Can such things be? 🙂
SJWs may not be representative of left liberals in general, but they are in control of the agenda right now. So, frankly I don’t give a shit that most people who favour gay rights or whatever are pretty reasonable people who would be happy to compromise and find pragmatic solutions.
No.
That’s a…novel interpretation of things.
From the link Nybbler supplied:
Here any psychiatrist will appreciate that (mathematician) Adriana Salerno is patiently attempting to engage her group-audience in a DBT skills-exercise. She requests a “benefit of the doubt” response, for example, along the lines of “the themes of this essay reminded me of Ursula LeGuin’s SJ-positive novel The Dispossessed (1974)“
Being relatively young, and lacking formal therapy-training, Dr. Salerno did not appreciate the tough psychiatric reality that open enrollment group therapies fail utterly — open enrollment fails for the common-sense reason that a substantial proportion of Cluster B personalities reject therapeutic practices so adamantly as to do all they can to sabotage, not only their own therapies, but the therapy of the entire group.
No therapist experienced with alt.Boeotian cognition would be surprised that Dr. Salerno had to close down her blog’s comment section, in consequence of a flood of comments containing “profanity, insults, personal attacks, or suggestions of violence.”
More broadly, abusively antisocial Cluster B behaviors are very commonly seen, too, in families, romantic relationships, small businesses, theatre groups, research groups, athletic teams, etc.
How to deal, in practice, with alt.Boeotian, intractably antisocial, Cluster B behaviors? Throughout human history, that has been a mighty tough question, hasn’t it?
Atwood predates SJWs, but the Handmaid’s Tale is in the news again because of the Hulu series, which doesn’t, and which constantly gets associated with Trump.
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
That right there would be one of my “you can’t have good art based around Social Justice” examples, were I going to argue that 🙂 Brecht is not exactly Social Justice, more a mish-mash of anarchism, Dadaism, socialism and a flavouring of Marxism, Kushner’s Angels In America is sentimental tosh, Lessing had a lot more going on than SJ even in the older sense of the word, and Baldwin is a damn good writer on his own merits.
Can you describe why you dislike The Handmaid’s Tale so much ? Personally, I absolutely hate the epilogue; I think it completely ruins what otherwise would’ve been a great book. It should’ve ended when the main story ends — jvgu gur cebgntbavfg trggvat vagb gur haznexrq pne, ubcvat ntnvafg ubcr gung vg yrnqf gb fnyingvba naq abg qrfgehpgvba. Erzbivat gung nzovthvgl ruins the impact of that scene, I think.
But the rest of the book is IMO quite good, assuming you read it as a dystopian alternate future novel, which is how I approached it.
I think I have a lack of sympathy with Atwood’s style. I’ve read a couple of her books and avoided others (The Blind Assassin, for instance, is a book that should have been catnip to me, but I have never read it because it’s by Margaret Atwood). I know I’m being unfair, but it’s the perceived whininess of tone; when she mentions, or it is mentioned, in newspaper interviews that she’s Canadian, I can well believe it 🙂 Not to be unfair to all Canadians, I mean the types who pat themselves on the back that “We have Justin Trudeau and they have Trump!”, for example (though I know Trudeau is not without his critics).
It’s that air of writing about nice, liberal, educated, middle-class women (like herself) who were happily going around being nice and liberal and progressive when all of a sudden out of nowhere all these horrible illiberal people (men/conservatives/religious/religious conservative men) appeared and ruined everything. Offred, for example, is one of this class; I don’t know if Atwood can or would imagine writing a working-class or other woman as a heroine.
It isn’t a terrible book, but the details of the society don’t make much sense.
Why dress everyone in color-coded uniforms? Okay, the handmaids are subjugated and you can tell them what to wear, but why did upper-class women agree to get rid of their wardrobes and wear the same thing every day?
Why are handmaids the solution to infertility, rather than voluntary mail-order brides, or surrogate mothers living in some other location? (What modern woman would want a rival right there in her home?)
As far as I understand from reading the book, all of this stuff happened because a semi-fringe religious faction seized power by capitalizing on the political and social instability. People were afraid and confused, and this religion promised a return to order and safety. Upper-class women, such as Fred’s wife, went along with it — either out of honest faith, or out of some calculated political expediency, whatever.
As it turns out, though, when you back a religious cult you end up riding the tiger. In this case, the Gilead Church used their newfound power to implement all of the policies that they wanted to implement anyway: subjugation of women, uniforms, holy wars, etc. Basically, it’s what could happen in our world if someone like the Westborough Baptist Church — or ISIS, for that matter — suddenly came to power.
If you look at the rise of Wahhabbism and radical Islam generally, many Muslim women, upper-class and not, have ended up effectively in uniforms, in some cases with mandated colours.
Douthat did a nice job in the NYT explaining (I thought) how the book grows out of the anxieties of women in Atwood’s position in the 1980s.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/24/opinion/handmaids-tale-and-ours.html
There’s a saying (and I’m sure someone here knows by who) that science fiction is really about the present, not the past. It’s hard to blame Atwood for not being able to write for people 30 years in the future. IMHO the Christian Right has lost the culture wars and the new right-wing dystopia is going to be doing ethnic segregation using genome sequencing. But, hey, go back to when it was written and the book’s a nice piece of dystopia fiction. Even 1984 doesn’t really make sense anymore.
The new left-wing dystopia too.
Strange times.
Would TV shows like Orange is the New Black, Jessica Jones, or Luke Cage count? None of them are all that preachy, but all take lots of inspiration from modern Social Justice issues, often displaying generally accepted good Social Justice opinions in a good light, even if not necessarily advocating them. I think all of them are very good shows for reasons unrelated to the virtuousness of the SJ content they have.
Yes, I think those would be good examples.
I feel like a lot of these shows are good IN SPITE of SJ influence, not because of it
The more I read this thread, the more I feel it’s just a giant no-true-Scotsman party.
“Yes, it’s a good work with SJ themes, but it was written before modern social justice became influential!”
“Yes, it’s a good work with SJ themes, but it’s historical fiction and SJ deals with modern issues. And allegory isn’t a thing.”
“Yes, it’s a good work with SJ themes, but it doesn’t matter because bad SJ authors control the agenda!”
“Yes, it’s a good work with SJ themes, but it’s good in spite of its themes, not because of it!”
Yes, if you narrow the definition whenever someone suggests a good SJ work, then obviously no SJ work is good. Very clever.
If the question is whether you can have good art based around modern Social Justice, it seems a fair objection that the art was created before modern Social Justice.
As for the rest of it, I suspect it is at least possible to make good work with SJ themes (though as with any message fiction, it will be difficult for the author to avoid dropping anvils on the reader). However, I don’t think it’s possible to make good work with SJ themes while obeying SJ strictures about what fiction is allowable to make.
If Social Justice is new enough that you wouldn’t expect it to have a strong artistic tradition yet, then good art coming out of a range of ideologies or mobements similar to modern Social Justice is a good proxy for predicting whether we will eventually see a tradition of good Social Justice art.
I think the artistic record of Social Justice’s ideological ancestors is weak – there’s not much of note from 1990s Political Correctness, for example – but it is hardly a null set nor an irrelevant one.
The Nybbler, what do you think are the SJ strictures about allowable fiction?
You’re not allowed to write about marginalized people when you’re not a member of that particular marginalized group. You’re also not allowed to have too many privileged people, nor are the marginalized people allowed to be portrayed in a negative light nor having any flaws. Also you can’t kill them off or otherwise have bad things happen to them.
Those all seem like way more hard-and-fast rules than my actual observations of SJ-types’ take on fiction, which tends to be more like this:
a. You aren’t allowed to put a great focus on the internal experience of being a member of a marginalized group if you’re not a member of said group.
b. You must have a pretty substantial representation of marginalized groups.
c. Depicting flawed or unadmirable marginalized characters is inversely problematic to how many people of that group exist in your story and how close you the author are to that group. So if you just have one homosexual character and that character is a big stupid evil jerkface, and you are not homosexual, you’ll be tagged as highly problematic. If you have twenty homosexual characters, are yourself homosexual, and one of those character is a big stupid evil jerkface and many more of those characters have flaws in various ways, you’ll probably be fine.
Not that I particularly agree that those are wonderful authorial constraints, but I don’t think that they are such great authorial constraints that good art is impossible within them.
@Nybbler that’s a pretty massive failure to model social justice art criticism. It reads like a parody.
Note how Moonlight, probably the most social-justice-acclaimed film in the last year, flagrantly violates every single one of your so-called strictures. This should be an opportunity for self-reflection.
Social Justice is often a self-parody. Certainly my description is a weak-man version while sandoratthezoo is presenting a steelman, but I think the weak men(/women/nonbinaries) of Social Justice are rather more common.
@Nybbler
Well, so much for the self-reflection.
Just to repeat:
Moonlight:
A film about gay characters made by a straight man.
Marginalized characters full of flaws, including a drug addict who shakes down her child for drug money, and all manner of moral cowardice.
Characters from these marginalized groups mostly suffer throughout the entire film. Some die.
This was the social justice-approved film event of the year. It’s a bit hard to express how wrong you are about this.
@Philosophisticat
It does not particularly surprise me that they’re willing to accept violations of strictures they’ve claimed as hard and fast rules in other circumstances.
The Nybbler:
Just as with weakmanning the other side’s arguments, it’s easy to weakman a movement’s ideas w.r.t. art, science, etc., and thus convince yourself that those people you’ve always disliked are indeed unlikeable, unscientific, unartistic, etc.
I suspect it would be possible to draw a nice one-to-one mapping between your take on why SJWs can’t do good art, and some liberal weakman’s take on why conservatives can’t understand or accept science.
I’d object to characterizing my description as a “steelman.” I could’ve been considerably more generous to them. I intended it as a dispassionate description of how people into social justice seem like they practically judge works.
I think we’re talking different people here. There are some who are just looking for problematic things to complain about, and since everything is problematic they’ll never be satisfied with anything. There are others who are willing to be more nuanced, and care about things like treating the subjects with respect and approaching the issues in good faith. If you get on enough of the second group’s good side, the first group won’t make as much of an impact on the dialogue.
If we take what a hypothetical ban on “depicting Muslims as terrorists” as an example, what has been accomplished? Is the thinking that people are so deluded as to not be able to tell the difference between fiction and reality? I don’t see this in the movies or fiction so it certainly isn’t happening in reality.
We don’t want to further a stereotype. That stereotype exists not because of the movies, but because of reality. 99% of people assumed the recent bombing was by Islamists and it wasn’t because of the movies.
If you want to have a conniption because Eskimos are being routinely depicted as terrorists when in fact they aren’t, that seems valid. If you want an alternate universe set of rules where a terrorist must be anyone but Muslim, or must be a white male, that seems invalid.
It seems the accurate depiction is that while many terrorists may be Muslims in this time, the vast majority are not. One can depict that reality accurately without blanket bans on so called protected classes.
The actual issue isn’t so much Muslims being depicted as terrorists as very little depiction of Muslims who aren’t terrorists.
Speaking of SJ fiction, Nnedi Okorafor is both good and mostly SJ. (She’s gotten some flack for portraying FGM as bad in Who Fears Death).
In The Shadow Speaker, a character who was definitely Muslim but had it as a medium-sized part of her life (the way a lot of Americans approach religion) was a revelation to me.
She’s gotten some flack for portraying FGM as bad in Who Fears Death
what
Cultural practice. People will argue about *anything*.
People tend to favor fiction that relates to them. My guess is lack of “normal” Muslims is mostly a marketing, sales, and culture issue. If the fact they are Muslim is incidental to the story then it probably doesn’t matter. If it is about the oppressed Muslim experience then you are likely to have a more limited audience for reasons unrelated to the ‘ism’s.
Bear Town has a leading character who is a Muslim that happens to be a great hockey player in Sweden, mother is an immigrant. The mother and son were portrayed as flawless characters amid rape culture, sexism, Islamophobia, overt worship of sports, classism, the evils of capitalism, homophobia, and a few other SJ check boxes. Everyone (all white people) is fatally flawed in various ways except the Muslims.
His previous book A Man Called Ove had I believe an Indian main character that came off as truly incidental. Bear Town came off as darkly culturally moralizing in the only socially acceptable way allowed. It was still a good book, but it was intentionally blind to a host of flaws in Islamic culture (the white people are the sexists and homophobes in this story?).
That is what I would expect from any new fiction as it relates to Islam. A binary representation of monster terrorists or shining beacons on the hill amid Morlocks, with most of if the latter.
If I doubted that a good person can be a murderer, and you offered examples of people you think are good murderers, it would be entirely appropriate to look at your examples and say “well, he did commit a murder, so that disqualifies him from being good”.
Jiro:
I think this is one of those places where English language introduces some ambiguity.
You could assert that SJW beliefs make good literature impossible, based on some definition. And we could discuss that definition, arguing about either how we define good literature or how we define SJW ideas. But note that here, we’re arguing about definitions, not making any kind of prediction or observation. And there, it’s certainly possible to make arguments that, say, some universally-accepted work of genius that is also widely seen as SJW is somehow not a contradiction to your argument, because it is somehow disqualified from being SJW or being good art by some aspect of your definition. But it’s hard for me to see why that would be a very interesting discussion. Also, this is exactly the situation in which no-true-Scottsman usually seems to come into play.
You could also be trying to ask: Has the modern SJW movement produced good art? Can we expect good art out of that movement in the future? For that, you probably want to spend less time precisely arguing definitions and more time checking to see if there’s good art that’s been produced from broadly within that movement.
Being a SJW means promoting a specific belief system in particularly strident and biased ways. Being a good work requires nuance. These are pretty much mutually exclusive; I would expect that examples either don’t count as social justice or aren’t nuanced enough to be good.
@Jiro:
Note that you are switching back and forth between SJW and SJ to make your argument.
Maybe for Luke Cage, probably for OITNB, but no way for Jessica Jones. Kilgrave is plucked directly from fears and hatreds of contemporary pop-feminism. Compare, for example, the part of the final episode from which it gets its title with this. Given that he’s arguably the best MCU villain ever, I think it’s fair to suggest that this unique influence was not a negative one in this case. Certainly, he was the best part of that particular show–every scene with him and JJ was gripping and chilling while the most of the stuff with the subplots (JJ’s guilty feelings towards Luke Cage, Trish Walker and her new cop boyfriend, most of the neighbor stuff) was pretty average.
I could be wrong, but aren’t the original comics older than modern pop-feminism ? I haven’t read them, so I’m not sure…
2001-2004.
Yeah, the Purple Man isn’t actually a very old character.
Also, reading the relevant wiki, I’m getting the impression that “Kilgrave as the ultimate abusive SO/Nice Guy”–as someone who genuinely believes he loves JJ but whose conception of what love means is twisted both by experience and temperament–wasn’t really the original framing and is probably an innovation by the TV show.
The Purple Man himself is an older character dating from 1964. However, his depiction in Jessica Jones is based on the Alias series, which is from 2001-2004.
Even the left-leaning commenters here managed to miss the feminism of Fury Road, which was even more brick-to-the-eyes unsubtle.
Fair enough. I don’t know if Fury Road was actually meant to be a Social Justice Film — allegedly it’s been planned for some absurdly long time — but it was released in the social justice era, has some pretty overt social justice themes, and it was a really good movie.
Its villains are far cooler than its heroes (as factions, at least; Imperator Furiosa’s plenty cool, but how many people quote or cosplay the War Boys vs. the Vuvulini?), but that’s true for lots of media without its politics.
I’m not sure I follow – the 1st sentence seems to disagree with me that Jessica Jones is an example of a Social Justice based work of art that is also a good work of art, but the rest of the post seems to provide evidence that agrees with me. Could you clarify what you mean by the “no way?”
I’m not much a fan of MCU, but from what I’ve seen, I’d agree that Kilgrave is the best villain of the bunch, and in a large part thanks to how well he embodied the Social Justice boogeyman of rape culture and patriarchy. What I think especially worked well for the show was that it didn’t try to bash the viewers’ heads with the message that this was a metaphor for reality. Rather, his effectiveness as a villain was the result of him personifying a boogeyman, and that’s scary regardless of whether or not this boogeyman actually exists in real life. This is a major reason why I think Jessica Jones is a good Social Justice based work of art – it uses tropes discussed by the SJ crowd, but it doesn’t ever demand that the viewer buy into them as at all reflective of reality in order to enjoy them to the fullest extent.
Similar for why I thought Luke Cage fit, with respect to issues generally associated with Black Lives Matter. It never preaches to you about how poorly black people are treated by the police or demands that you take it as a premise about how reality works, while still effectively using it as a major theme to the series.
I think Get Out is both Social Justice and an excellent horror movie.
@lvlln: I’m pretty sure that herbert herberson’s “no way for Jessica Jones” was responding to Matt M’s sibling post (“I feel like a lot of these shows are good IN SPITE of SJ influence, not because of it”), rather than your post directly. It was more obvious before a bunch of people replied to Matt M.
Yeah, Ian is correct. I agree entirely with your take on JJ–it is good because of the themes it pulls from pop feminism, not despite them.
I only watched a little of JJ. Would anyone care to weigh in on whether her problems were part of a larger system of oppression vs. whether they were the result of being targeted by a stalker who had superpowers that no one had heard of?
@Nancy A little from column A, a little from column B. Much more the superpowered opponent, but he represents various real-world concepts (as the show’s creators perceive them) in a heightened manner, the way superhero stories often address social issues by analogy rather than directly.
Just as, e.g., it’s not unknown for Storm of the X-Men to face standard American racism. But she’s much more likely to be in a story in which the underlying issues are represented by anti-mutant prejudice, a violent militant mutant organization emerging in response to it, etc.
Not really. Like, Kilgrave’s sense of entitlement and objectification of JJ parallels (almost certainly purposefully so) rape-culture-type critiques of how society passes down and facilitates misogyny and patriarchy through the generations. People’s reluctance to believe his victims also provides a comparable metaphorical parallel. But, the actual plot-mechanics of why Kilgrave is the way he is is more of a direct result of how powers like that would fuck up any child’s sense of boundaries and morality, no assistance from the wider culture required; nor is it treated as all that surprising or blameworthy that people are skeptical re: the existence of a mind-controlling supervillain.
I’m pretty confident Kilgrave’s power is supposed to work both on the object level and as “male privilege, but supercharged and turned up to eleven”.
Supergirl is doing a lot of social justice (which has created a lot of terrible moments). The most recent episode has a character give an inspiring speech about how we should fight against the invading aliens who want to make the world great again. (They’re invaders, and at no point said they wanted to make the world great for Earthlings). Also a speech about how strong women are important. And the president of the United States is secretly an alien, which is apparently supposed to be a good thing (space aliens have been standins for mundane aliens in this series).
To be fair, the speech about how “we’re all strong women not hindered by the need to engage in patriarchal competitiveness, surely we can work together and find a solution!” was punctuated by the villain blowing Air Force One out of the sky with the speaker and President aboard. But yeah, the themes are frequently heavy-handed and run counter to what’s actually going on on the screen.
And I don’t know what they even think they’re doing with making the President into Clinton-as-Birther-Nightmare, especially after the whole J’onn J’onzz thing. (“Hidden aliens are secretly infiltrating the top levels of government, repeatedly. Isn’t it great?!?”) Superman and Supergirl are already the perfect poster children for the traditional pro-immigration narrative. Given the show’s political orientation, why would the show go out of its way to justify the paranoia of its villains?
All of which doesn’t stop me from liking the show, but it does sometimes require making allowances.
Because the narrative of the show is “illegal aliens are here and it’s great.” The president being one isn’t something you’re supposed to be paranoid about, it’s something you’re supposed to celebrate. Birtherism was bad in the same way that insulting someone by calling him gay is bad, it accuses him of lying, but the thing he’s supposed to be lying about shouldn’t be thought of as shameful.
Also, Superman and Supergirl are a lot more like refugees than like economic migrants.
But if it’s a good thing, why is it a secret? Why not be out and proud?
(Especially given that they’re making Supergirl’s own secret identity increasingly vestigial.)
Because the dumb right-wing bigots that comprise society would never accept it.
See also: Left-wing theories that Obama is a secret atheist, because he’s obviously too smart to ACTUALLY be a Christian, but he knows that the American public is so stupid they’d never vote for an Atheist so he has to pretend not to be one in order to get elected.
I only watched the first two seasons, but with the exception of Laverne Cox’s character, I didn’t see a lot of social justice in Orange is The New Black. Piper is sent to a prison, where everyone’s guilty, it’s effectively segregated by color, age, and culture, and she quickly accepts this as normal.
Orange is the New Black is definitely more of a stretch than the other 2. I’d say segregation by color/age/culture is something that modern SJ advocates as a good thing, but I don’t think the show had any particular commentary about it besides just presenting it as a reality in prisons. It does have the terribleness of the private prison system and the heartless corporate & government stooges that run it as an on-going theme (as well as the not-so-heartless and very well-meaning ones who still end up causing harm to others). But I’m mainly thinking of in season 3, one pretty major plot point was an overt reference to Eric Garner’s death and Black Lives Matter.
I haven’t read most of those, but while The Handmaid’s Tale is certainly popular among SJ and consonant with its values, it is not a product of capital-S capital-J Social Justice, which didn’t exist when it was written.
I know that Ursual Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness is practically cliche at this point, but I still think it’s a good example. In fact, it works especially well when contrasted with some of Le Guin’s other works, where she completely failed to restrain herself from yelling SJ propaganda at the reader for 200 pages straight. It’s amazing how the same author can succeed so well in one case, and fail so badly in the other.
I’ve got to admit, though, that part of my enjoyment of the book probably stems a bit from my own personal history. If I heard about a country where rirelbar vf havgrq gbtrgure sbe pbzzba havgl naq cebterff, jbexvat ba gbgnyyl ibyhagnel pbzzhany snezf sbe gur orggrezrag bs gur pbzzba tbbq, zl svefg ernpgvba jbhyq or, “bu fuvg, EHA !”. Ohg gur obbx’f cebgntbavfg pbzrf sebz na npghnyyl rayvtugrarq fcnprsnevat phygher, naq uvf ernpgvba vf, “bu, svanyyl, gung fbhaqf fb avpr”. The dramatic irony is delicious.
FWIW, I read Left Hand of Darkness last month, along with my left-leaning book club. We all hated it because the plot didn’t get moving for half the book and then went at a snail’s pace, and we didn’t get understand or sympathize with any of the characters till near the end of the book. Also, we all agreed, society had outpaced LeGuin’s gender theories to the point where her protagonist seems hopelessly old-fashioned when he keeps trying to categorize the Winter-ites into one or the other gender box.
(For a gender issues sci-fi book done much better, I recommended David Brin’s Glory Season. I definitely wouldn’t call it an SJ book, though.)
Uh, as I said, I have difficulty of recognizing the book from your descriptions. Would you care to elaborate what did you think were the LeGuin’s outdated gender theories?
I remember it as a book that explores a Planet of Curious Almost (but Not Exactly) Utopian Planet, and the author’s theories of gender surfaced mostly when the protagonist explicitly notes the various ways how the Winter’s culture and technological development had took a different route than more regular human civilization. (Now most of those presented implications I disagreed with, I thought the proposed concept was too simplistic / utopian. But still, worthwhile thought experiment about weird genetically engineered humans for the purposes of one science fiction novel.)
Also, I don’t think the society is yet so progressive that planet of people of Winter with their peculiar biology wouldn’t still be very confusing to any human of Earth, no matter how genderqueer.
I agree; I couldn’t say that the protagonist “struggles” with gender perceptions; rather, he is fascinated with the native biology, and its effect on their society. What he definitely does struggle with are the intricacies of a society which, under the veneer of social politeness, is much more brutal and cunning than his own. It’s this struggle that makes the book interesting, IMO — especially since Winter is (obviously) much closer to us than the Ecumen.
I also (re-)read the Left Hand of Darkness not too long ago, and I appear to have read a completely different book than you and Evan.
I somehow missed that part of the protagonist’s reaction. Wasn’t he mostly puzzled by the peculiar culture of the both nations of Winter he visited?
Which one you’d consider the worst offender? I have hard time coming up with a book of hers that would be exactly “yellling rampant SJW propaganda” (I grant I have not read them all and some of them many years ago), not just quite regular left-aligned ethics.
I guess you could read The Dispossessed that way if you only focused on the depiction of the capitalist planet?
It’s not exactly positive about the anarchist society either, but I guess I could see a reader with a deep attachment to libertarianism/capitalism missing that part entirely. We feel the attacks on ideas we identify with more deeply than those that we don’t & all that.
I thought LeGuin played fair on the anarchist moon, showing it with its problems. But the capitalist planet read to me like a picture of the U.S. written by a loyal communist who had never been outside of the Soviet Union.
I agree with David.
As far as I recall, the protagonist was definitely “puzzled” by the peculiar native culture, yeah. Puzzled to the point where it almost ends up killing him him several times. He makes mistake after basic mistake, due to his mistaken implicit assumption that every alien culture is basically kind of like his native Ecumen, only maybe less polished, or something. Watching his actions is kind of like watching a bunny walk into a meat grinder. That said, watching as the protagonist finally discards his naive cultural assumptions one by one, and begins actually listening to people, is what makes the book so fascinating, IMO.
I always find discussion of Le Guin’s work rather amusing, because in my mind I associate her with The Wizard of Earthsea over everything else. The last few in that series start to show signs of her ideology, but otherwise they’re so very different from the Left Hand of Darkness.
Strange Fruit
And Nina Simone’s version, while we’re at it
It sure seems like there is a negative correlation between preachiness and fiction quality. On the other hand, the best part of any Dostoevsky book is when some character goes off on a 10-page rant/sermon.
Right; you can be preachy, but you also have to be interesting. Although I don’t think we should fault preachy literature for being uninteresting because it’s preachy, as most literature is uninteresting.
There’s a reason “show, don’t tell” is such a good idea.
I wonder how much of a factor it is that Dostoevsky characters who rant and sermonize are rarely saying things Dostoevsky himself believed. Though I suppose most authors do that badly as well, creating straw men; Dostoevsky was amazing for how well he portrayed characters whose views he disagreed with.
He’s Dostoevsky. He can do things other writers can’t.
I’m not gonna claim it’s a win for “great art” by any means, but in terms of having a powerful, compelling message to people all over the political spectrum, various iterations of the X-Men and Star Trek have managed to do so while being extremely bleeding heart social justicey at the core
Star Trek is egalitarian and very socialist, but working from my understanding of SJ , which is that they are primarily concerned with identity politics, and, if not actually against socialism, see it as a distraction from the real issues(I am not very clear on all this, I have only the SSC comments to go on?) Star Trek does not seem very ‘social justicey’.
In particular, Star Trek is race blind, I am not sure to what extent that is compatible with the future* the identitarian left wants.
*I have no idea what they want, but in general they seem to be moving in the opposite direction.
Eh, Sisko has his moments every once in awhile, including entire episodes devoted to random flashbacks designed to show how horrible discrimination against black sci-fi writers was…
Doesn’t Sam Delany complain about it a lot, when he’s not lovingly stroking his various Hugo and Nebula awards dating back to the 1960s?
I think it’s possible to for there to be discrimination that only lets the very best through, while eliminating opportunities for the merely pretty good.
I should have mentioned Sisko, I placed his flash backs in the same category as a normal episode dealing with discrimination in some ‘alien culture’ but you are right, the important part is that he still sees himself as being of a particular race and that his identity as such influences how he interacts with the world.
In general though, DS9 ruins everything about Star Trek, and so I try to redact it from my headcanon.
Yes, the pattern here would be: Group is underrepresented in the total population, but overrepresented in top performers. I believe that was true of women in college several decades ago.
It’s not JUST the flashbacks though. There’s also the whole “he won’t go to Vic’s because he feels like he would be betraying the legacy of his great-great-great-grandparents who were discriminated against in 1940s America (and lectures Jake on it as well)” thing.
Which honestly struck me as brutally depressing. The idea that even centuries later, black people will STILL feel personally wronged by Jim Crow is not very utopian at all…
@SpookyLou
What do you mean by DS9 ruins everything about Star Trek? I’m curious.
DS9 is by far the BEST Star Trek.
Well, DS9 has two of my favorite characters, Garak and Quark, and I have watched the whole series a few times, so I am not saying it is a horrible TV show or anything.
However, I do feel like it fundamentally breaks some of the most important themes of the Star Trek series in irreconcilable ways.
IMO, one of the most important, and great aspects of Star Trek, is similar to an idea Scott talks about, the Federation is like Elua.
The Federation is good, and honest, and exactly as advertised. They fight against slavers and the obsidian order and military dictatorships who will do anything and everything to win. Yet at the end of the day, these peace loving democratic socialists who actually follow their own rules, WIN. They are going to take over the galaxy, and whats worse, you are going to like it.
Oh wait, section 31 an evil black ops organization has been operating since the foundation of the Federation and it is only by the actions of evil men who will do anything to win, that the Federation actually wins.
Thanks DS9.
Let’s not also forget the amount of supernatural mumbo-jumbo that becomes critical to the overall plot of DS9, up to and including “the Bajoran Gods help Sisko win the war because they like him”
@Spookykou:
I advise you not to put that much weight on SSC’s characterization of social justice. Concluding that social justice people must hate Star Trek based on SSC comments is like deciding based on the writings of Richard Dawkins that Catholics must hate the Lord of the Rings. You can probably find an example if you look really hard, but it’s far from the norm.
Stuff like this (“Gene Roddenberry: The Original Social Justice Warrior”) is more representative of the kinds of things I see social justice-y people say about Star Trek.
I saw a tweetstorm a few weeks ago about how Roddenberry was a sexist pig (and worse) and how his awfulness taints the entire Star Trek franchise, and therefore no decent person should be able to stand watching it. It contained one grave accusation against him, which on further reading turned out to be unsubstantiated (which, to be overly charitable, doesn’t mean it was false). Without it, Roddenberry just comes off as skeezy, but within the typical range of skeeziness of the ’60s entertainment industry.
I lost the link, and have no interest in tracking down a possibly slanderous rant from somebody of unknown standing in the SJ movement. But suffice it to say, the views in your link aren’t the consensus.
I didn’t say anything about that link being the consensus. Indeed, I was pretty clear that there wasn’t a consensus. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a far more common position.
Put it this way: if we (or rather, two different people who cared enough to bother) went shot-for-shot pulling out examples of social justice people who like vs hate Star Trek, I am pretty confident that the “SJs hate Star Trek” side would run out of examples first. Do you disagree?
Fair enough. As long as the SJ people who like it acknowledge how deeply problematic it is, otherwise I question their SJ bona fides. 😛
@Iain
I imagine you are correct here, both in that lots of people like Star Trek, and SJ is a large group of people who hardly have consensus on every issue.
All I was really driving at is that, in Star Trek(excluding DS9), race basically doesn’t exist. It is possible that the people who currently pursue identity politics actually want a future where identity is ignored, but it isn’t obviously to me. I am a big fan of the Star Trek Utopia*, it seems like a great one to me, but is it their Utopia?
*I like The Culture a good deal more, no Deathism, but that is neither here nor there.
@Spookykou:
The original Star Trek, among other things, featured the first inter-racial kiss on American network TV.
Literally the whole show is about different groups of humanoids, with different features, learning to understand each other and embrace their differences while striving for a common morality.
In Next Gen, even the Klingons become allies.
I think it’s a real mistake to say “Star Trek posits that racial disharmony has ended on earth, therefore it doesn’t deal with social justice”.
@HBC
That was not what I was trying to say, but I am not a very succinct writer.
I am trying to ask the very particular question, do identitarians want the future as it is presented in star trek, where racial identity is(mostly) not a thing, or do they see some other(equally good?) future where identity is still important.
I agree the show had a very liberal agenda, but I was not trying to talk about the general themes of the show, rather the details of the future Earth as they present them, and how those relate to modern social justice.
*I am focusing on identity politics because it seems like the most noticeable shift in ideology from the liberalism that Star Trek was born from. I certainly don’t refute the idea that it was liberal for it’s time.
Spooky,
I get your overall point, but I don’t think Trek was as racially blind as you think. Chekov still claims Russia invented everything. Sulu still can randomly use a ninja sword. Scotty still has a ridiculous accent and is prone to brawling over slights to his pride. O’Brien still indulges every Irish stereotype in the book thereabouts. We’ve already covered Sisko.
And EVERY alien race (many of which are clearly inspired by 20th century races, nations, or ideologies) has their own universal identity-based stereotypes that never really go away.
In terms of being “colorblind” I’d say that the difference between today and 100 years ago is far greater than the difference between today and Trek.
I don’t think that’s actually in contradiction with the contention that Star Trek espouses an ideal of colour blindness. These differences are all minor individual quirks that add a touch of colour and serve as a source of amusement, while they have little overall import as they don’t threaten how all these people are part of the same universal culture. This doesn’t mean that everybody is the same, it just means that these differences have no impact whatsoever on the characters’ membership in the universal culture. They are merely touches of colour and sources of amusement.
Occasional lapses aside, original series Star Trek explicitly taught an earlier version of feminism, one which the SJ faction rejects. Consider episode 15, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”. One alien race is black on the right side, white on the left, the other has that reversed, and they are at war over this difference. The point of making the racial difference so arbitrary is to hammer home that these kind of differences are meaningless and should be ignored, not celebrated and protected. Nobody would argue that the “white on the lefts” have a unique culture and way of doing things that needs to be nurtured and protected from oppression by the Rightriarchy with safe Left-only spaces and Left-studies departments in the universities and affirmative action to ensure 50% Left representation and decrying of “cultural appropriation” when one group copies the other. Nope. the two groups are the same, the difference in appearance is trivial and they should just Get Over It.
I don’t think that attitude would fly today. When Colbert claimed “not to see race” that was a joke – today it’s taken for granted that people who claim “not to see race” must be bigots who totally do see race.
As a follow-up: Let’s also keep in mind that in most Trek series, we’re looking at a fairly elite level of one of the most prestigious armed forces in the galaxy.
Like, even today, there probably isn’t a whole lot of casual racism on display during working hours on the bridge of the USS Ronald Reagan. Just because the top levels of the military appear colorblind during working hours does not necessarily imply “there is no longer any racism in society”
Not feminism; while modern SJ combines feminism with racial issues, they were largely separate then. In fact, I would argue that SJ is mostly derived from feminism and is not really the successor of the (racial) civil rights movement.
“Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” drops the anvil to beat all anvils, but the advantage of that is you certainly can’t say it’s not clear as to what it’s saying.
My contact with SJ started with RaceFail (sf, both fannish and professional, with a lot of it happening on LiveJournal) in 09. At that point, it seemed to be mostly about race (it was called anti-racism), and then a similar style was brought to issues affecting women.
I *think* it started out as mostly about what was published, and then started including what was going on at conventions.
Just while I’m doing history, one big change was that it started with “Educate yourself!” It took a while for the current large amount of material explaining the issues to be easily available.
@spookykou:
Vulcans, Klingons, Ferengi, and any number of other humanoid alien “races” are presented as having individual cultures that impact their identities. These cultures are presented as having a great deal of worth, while also presenting specific problems. The zeitgeist of the show is not “we are all one universal culture with no differences” it is rather “each individual culture has worth and can contribute to the betterment of the whole, but individual cultures must also adapt and change for the betterment of the whole”.
One of the most enduring and frequently referenced relationships in the original series is that of “Bones” and Spock. That relationship is built on the clash of cultures between the two individuals. Arguably the Spock role gets split between Data and Worf in NextGen.
But where this really plays out is in the contacts with the various alien races. And we can most especially see this is the formulation (and re-formulation) of The Prime Directive.
As stated originally (my emphasis):
@Matt M
The use of a European fencing sword for that one scene in the original TV show was in fact a deliberate choice (by Takei, who was given a choice between that and a katana) to not do that sort of thing.
Yes– in contrast to e.g., Scotty, I can’t think of anything Sulu ever did onscreen in the original series or the original cast movies that was stereotypically Japanese or specifically Asian. (IIRC, the character’s supposed to be from San Francisco.) The katana in the 2009 Trek film was a break from that.
@HBC
You are making some good points, I would say that the only real point of confusion for me is,
which strikes me as a pretty accurate description of Star Trek ideals.
However I was not sure to what extent the bold section was an acceptable position within the identity politics frame work. If you think that it is, I will accept it as such, I am confident you have a better understanding of these issues.
@spookykou:
Let’s take some real world examples, FGM and the prevention of education of females. The bog standard SJ position on both of these is that these social practices need to change, despite being rooted in distinct cultures.
You can always find someone who will argue just about any position, so obviously you can find someone who espouses SJ with a different opinion on these issues, but they won’t be central examples.
I’ve often thought that Spock was a stand-in for the clever but inscrutable Oriental. (Remember that Asian stereotypes were a little different back in the 60’s.) They even used yellowish face paint to depict him.
One thing that amused me about Sisko: he only dated black women. Sometimes the woman was an alien, but she still had to be a black alien.
@Jiro:
I think it’s fair to say that Star Trek drew on common tropes in creating it’s universe.
But I think the actual trope is much older than what you are pointing at. Outsider comes into our culture, finds it odd, curious, etc. (and is, in turn, perceived as odd and curious by the locals) and needs it explained seems like a common mechanic for writers, simply because it so useful and allowing for exposition (as well as creating certain kinds of dramatic tension).
Trying to think how that compares with other captains.
Kirk: mostly white women, plus one green. The one woman he married was an American Indian (at least culturally and phenotypically).
(His famous kiss with Uhura was psychically forced, with no romantic relationship.)
I think Picard’s few romantic interests were all white.
Janeway’s look to be as well, though I didn’t watch Voyager all the way through. Ditto Archer.
(Interesting if the only Trek captain with any diversity along that axis is the one imagined in the 1960s.)
Star Trek is by this point completely incoherent(*), to the point where diametrically opposed ideologies can often find support from within what passes for canon. But if we try to narrow it down to “What Gene Roddenberry intended before the network made him tone it down”, as seen in parts of TOS and most of early TNG, I think the politics comes down to Democratic Socialism plus trying to do the right thing on race and gender from a 1960s perspective.
And at the other extreme, I don’t think modern Social Justice has given up on a racially blind and maybe genderblind society as an ideal to be achieved by the 23rd century. So there’s certainly room for SJWs to adopt much of Star Trek as their own if they want.
And I’m perfectly happy to let them have the Space Hippies, and all of DS9 and Voyager if they want.
* Insert obligatory SJ joke here
Um, they are actively fighting against it TODAY. If you suggest one should be color/genderblind, most SJs will promptly point to that as proof of your racism/sexism. I suppose you could entertain the theory that “persons of color need their own white-free safe spaces” is just a temporary measure until racism has been sufficiently abolished among evil whites and THEN we can fully integrate and have the genderblind society. But uh… count me as NOT believing that one!
To be fair, I’ve seen some who claim that they do want racially blind society someday in the future, but believe that the overwhelming majority of appeals to “not caring about race” are made in bad faith, as a cop-out by guilty whites who just don’t want to acknowledge the changes they have to make in order to achieve what a “real” color-blind society would look like.
To what extent the modern social justice movement is comprised of people whose views on racial identity is:
1) “an ideal future is one where everyone takes great pride in their traditional ethnic/racial heritage and is loyal to Their People…except for whites who have abused that pride with centuries of bad behavior and thus lost the right to it”
vs.
2) “an ideal future is one where everyone sees value and worth in aspects from all cultures and traditions, but no one over-invests in them because we all share identities that go beyond the old and dated tribal characteristics of ethnonationalism and socially-constructed fictions like ‘race’.”
Is a good question, but I have to say that in my experience View 1 is the dominant one of the past 17 years or so and is the one espoused by the majority of young (<30) proponents of Social Justice, while View 2 is the dominant one from the 1960s-90s, and is still espoused by the older and more "established" adherents of Social Justice as a philosophy/movement.
I'm not going to try to make a claim about which is "really" representative of SJ, but I am profoundly skeptical of claims that View 1 represents an internet-only (or even college students -only) Vanguard/Lunatic Fringe minority.
Mmm, has anyone tried to sit down and map out a coherent history of Social Justice philosophy and activism in the way that academics have for modern feminism? First Wave/Second Wave/etc?
Color me as one who can’t figure out what these changes are supposed to be. Is there an actual policy goal here, or is there one that is understood by everyone except me?
A parody of the conversation goes something like this:
SJ> We want more respect and equality
NGW (not guilty white)> I respect you and think you should be equal.
SJ> No you don’t.
NGW> Yes I do.
SJ> What about (insert injustice of a protected class)?
NGW> Well….
SJ> …Check your privilege first!
NGW> Huh, what?
SJ> You can’t speak on this subject unless you are oppressed
NGW> Didn’t you just ask me about this?
SJ> Check.your.privelege.
NGW> I don’t even know what that means.
SJ> Accept my answer, you have no standing here.
NGW> I’m confused, you haven’t even told me your answer.
SJ> Racist!
NGW> Ummmmm….OK. I’m leaving now.
@tscharf
It’s guilt; it’s a blank check. Once you’re in the appropriate guilty state of mind, any demand can be made and there is no defense against it because after all, you’re guilty and if the demand looks punitive you deserve it.
Have you tried rewatching TNG recently? It’s extremely cringe-worthy in the early seasons, pretty much in exact proportion to how hard Roddenberry was pushing his particular vision of the future. Later on they got away from that, and DS9 pretty much discarded it altogether, with a corresponding raise in quality.
Part of the problem was that they never really did the world-building needed to back up things like “there’s no money anymore,” “humans have evolved past greed,” which probably would have resulted in a much too foreign society for good tv anyway.
Star Trek had some weird ideas about evolution even in episodes that didn’t mention the money/greed thing (prime directive episodes were another big category of offender), I wouldn’t be surprised if “evolved past greed” were meant literally.
This is so strange to me, the only interesting thing about Star Trek for me is that, especially in TNG and the original series, the crew are not just modern Americans in space. Which is exactly what they become in DS9, and which I found deeply disappointing.
I think TOS was, if anything, more (idealized, Cold War liberal) Americans than anything in the TNG era was.
DS9 certainly gave more attention to the idea that the Federation had a specifically post-capitalist philosophy (even if that was frequently in the context of demonstrating why there was a niche for Ferengi trading knowhow or Cardassian realpolitik), where TOS frequently featured supporting human characters with economic motivations (miners going to dangerous places for high wages, itinerant traders and scam artists, etc.) or the need to make pragmatic, unsatisfying compromises (e.g., supplying a long-term proxy war with the Klingons) without needing the advice of a friendly tailor to put the idea in their heads.
I find the TOS and TNG worldviews very different. Kirk solved problems by punching them in face (or seducing the ladies (or both)). Picard solves them by giving a speech.
Mostly, I don’t find the claims TNG makes about their society believable (in the context of the show). They’re too much like modern Americans for all of those changes to have actually taken place. What does it really mean for the society to not have money anymore? They sure don’t seem very post-scarce. The question is never really explored beyond the occasional statement that there’s no hunger/money/greed anymore.
I think a lot of Roddenberry’s ideas about how enlightened humans would behave would have removed most of the opportunities for drama, so the writers ignored them as much as possible.
This I guess again falls back on my seemingly idiosyncratic taste given how popular DS9, and in particular the Dominion war, is. I am very happy that the characters in DS9 are, at first, presented as different from the Ferengi and the Cardassians, because the theme in Star Trek that I like, that sets it apart from any generic sci fi show, is that an honest open friendly socialist democracy that is inclusive and alliance building, is better than these other models(although I hate that they strawman the other models, it would be much more interesting if the Ferengi were actually hyper capitalist and not just greedy little trolls). That everyone constantly tells them, no, the universe is scary and horrible and you have to be scary and horrible to survive, and they reject that idea, and they win.
DS9 is a complete reversal, they embrace the idea that the ends justify the means, and in the process become no better than ticking time bomb Jack Bauer. This is what I meant by ‘modern Americans’ I should have said ‘generic TV people’.
Edit: TNG at least has an air of ‘If we must stoop to this in order to win, we do not deserve to win.’ which you just Never see in TV or Movies. We are the good guys they are the bad guys, and us winning is good, has more than enough media coverage, Star trek, at least for a time, offered up something different.
@Spookykou:
It’s almost as though they’d rather have been writing for a new Battlestar Galactica series instead…
I think a whole lot of this is simply preference for long story arcs generally, which hadn’t really been a thing in Trek prior to the Dominion War. I’m kind of neutral on DS9. IMO the Dominion War was cool, not really as a plotline in and of itself (it included tons of stupid, unrealistic things) – but merely for the fact that it was a long-running over-arching arc to keep you hooked from episode to episode.
Even consider that within TNG, the good seasons (4-7) were distinguished, in part, by having the occasional mini-arc run across them (Borg arc, Klingon arc, Romulan arc, Cardassian arc, etc.). It’s a way to reward fans for repetitive viewing by making them feel like they understand things better than the casual viewer who tunes in for a random one-off episode.
DS9 did a much better job of tightening up this structure, even when it kept going back to dumb things like the parallel universe (ugh, one of these episodes would have been enough, instead we get 5???).
Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth is maybe a good candidate. It deals with a lot of SJ-related themes (especially post-colonial experience) and was published in 2000, so it’s not awfully anachronistic to refer to SJ influence. I read it in college, it’s pretty good. Funny & well-written.
District 9.
On the other hand.
This survey of common secrets seems relevant to discussions on poliamory and relationships.
Within the last few days the Betfair odds of Trump winning the next election have gone up from around 21% to their current value of 28.6%. They’re not usually very volatile so I would expect a sudden rise like this to be in reaction to some particular piece of information. But I didn’t notice any particularly pro-Trump news three days ago. Does anyone know what this was?
EDIT: There was a 3.5% increase in the probability of him making it to the end of his term, a 5.6% increase in the probability of him being nominated given that he made it that far, and a 10% increase in the probability of him winning given that he was nominated. So the boost to his popularity was across the board, not just in one of these factors.
Could it be that 21% was a short term dip brought about by overestimating the effect of certain negatives, and that the rise reflects a correction of that?
It is dangerous to look for narratives in complex events.
Maybe his Saudi deal convinced people that he would have the support of various US factions/actors, like arms manufacturers and Middle East hawks. Not that I would have bet against that previously either but there seems to be less uncertainty now.
Bear in mind betting odds aren’t solely probabilities. It depends on how much money the company has received in either direction. If they’re getting a flood of money on Trump they will reduce the price.
But the relevant question then becomes: WHY are they getting a flood of money on Trump?
Trump betting on himself to improve his press for a bit?
It could be market manipulation. Although, is “BetFair moving towards Trump” really going to be a reported storyline?
The prior on a sitting president winning the next election is pretty damn high. It could simply be market correction. That doesn’t need a significant explanation other than a small nudge, I would think.
I put some of my money into those markets because the odds that had just been mentioned in SSC comments seemed like a real bargain. Maybe everybody else here did too!
Scott Alexander’s mention of socialism (we expect a future hypothetical worldwide socialist society to have the exact opposite results as every time socialism has ever been tried in real life) provoked me to think it might be a good idea to post this ten-page text:
https://archive.org/details/BrankoHorvatWhatIsSocialism1989
The author BH is kind of rationalistic, so it could be interesting to see the reactions of people on SSC. Perhaps they will be something else than an avalanche of derision.
It’s a selected translation I did a few years ago. Now, I’m without emotional investment in the topic. Both then and now, it was primarily a matter of getting intellectual stimulus rather than peddling some view of things.
I’m brushing up on socialism/anarchism/communism, so thank you. I’m open to more recommendations.
It seems a more honest approach than most (concedes that political exploitation can be as bad, or worse, than economic exploitation, addresses the question of how the state is supposed to dissolve, etc.), but fails to explain (so far as I can tell from a quick read) why the proposed majority-rules democratic decision-making process will be any different from existing democracies. If the people who vote against the resolution are forced to abide by the decision of the majority then it’s not non-coercive; if they aren’t, then the decision making process becomes effectively nothing more than a suggestion.
Also kind of interesting to me that the first couple pages seem to actually bring him most of the way to anarchocapitalism, but he shies away because he can’t accept unequal economic power. Ancap equalizes political power (by devolving it to the individual level), but that inevitably creates the potential for unequal economic outcomes. You can equalize economic power somewhat through coercive political power, but once you start to do this, there’s no way to avoid differentials of political power. And I’m not sure there’s any way to avoid differentials of cultural power/influence due to the nature of charisma, etc. except maybe the Harrison Bergeron route or something.
Somewhat tangential, but oh, socialists and their fetish for meetings. “Meetings, meetings, meetings, every day meetings” is how one older Chinese lady described the Cultural Revolution to me.
If I wasn’t stridently opposed to socialism before, I am now. There are things I like less than meetings, but they tend to involve racks and pliers and red-hot irons.
Perhaps I fall into this category but this looks to be a pretty standard exercise in applying your own specific definitions to allow you to draw the conclusions you want. For example
The question, as always is abolished by whom (who? honestly grammar rules trip me up a lot)? He posits a world without class, but skips the entire process by which you could have a class society broken apart and reorganized in this way. There are two possibilities as are generally described by socialists.
1. People voluntarily share their assets and build communities of like minded people. This is literally just a sub set of capitalism in that nothing (outside of the state) prevents people from treating their property this way, and that it is their individual preferences that prevent it.
2. People harness the power of the state and implement rules that break down the class distinctions. Then, somehow the state also disappears but either the rules remain, or society is now in some perpetual motion of being socialist where the rules are followed without enforcement.
The author follows with
This is incomplete, it requires the break up of the concentration of power and the prevention of a different concentration of power arising. This second portion is ignored for the rest of the piece as far as I can tell, he writes about how labor cannot (should not) be exploited by others and that income should be derived from ‘work’
What occurs when two people’s ‘work’ is unequal? Well their incomes must differ, which results in different purchasing power, and eventually the separation of economic classes and the end of socialism (as he defines it). In the end you either need some power structure (which looks suspiciously like the state with all its requisite inequality between governed and governors) or you get the steady break up of the ideal once people start demonstrating their individuality.
“Whom” is on the verge of obsolete. (This doesn’t make me especially happy, but it’s dropping out of even relatively formal writing.) However, if you want to use it and aren’t sure whether to use “who” or “whom”, try substituting “he” or “him” and see which sounds right.
Or, for more detailed explanation, including why you should use ‘whom’, as well as how, see this Oatmeal.
This is nonsense, basically. It’s well written erudite nonsense, but it’s still nonsense.
“A socialist society [consists of] people who are free, equal, and united in solidarity”. Well gee, how can that possibly be bad?
He is presupposing the results of socialism then defining socialism as those results, not actually defining what socialism consists of doing. This is handy as it allows any failure of a socialist project to be cast as a failure to achieve socialism, not a failure of socialism. This is as absurd as saying that is capitalism when “everyone is free to get rich, and does”, implicitly declaring that any society where that doesn’t happen isn’t real capitalism.
Flagging for the next links post: rampant nominative determinism.
As reviewed here.
For me the main point is that there are no people already living in the ocean. It might be difficult for the US Libertarians to move 20 thousand people to New Hampshire (they seem to have moved about 10% with another 13% who had already been living in NH). However, they need those 20 thousand in order to have a strong enough voting base. If you start from a blank slate, any number of people high enough to sustain the community is enough. The problem in NH is that individual and group rationality are not in alignment. If I move today and nobody else does, it incurs costs on me (provided that I didn’t want to move to NH anyway of course) but brings no benefits. If I stay and everyone else (or a critical number of them) does, they will pass the reforms I care about anyway and I might as well stay where I am until that happens.
With the seastead, you don’t have these issues. As for trailer parks, well, they still occupy the land owned by a government, so I don’t think that’s a good comparison. In an ideal world, this would of course be easier to do on land, but there’s no more land left (maybe Antarctica in the future?).
I don’t quite see countries claiming the middle of the ocean, mostly because there are many of them who would like to claim it and no clear way to decide who should get it.
What could indeed be an issue is that not very many people actually might want to live in the middle of the ocean. Also, there are a lot of differences in freedom of various countries and they do not necessarily inspire others. Switzerland is more free than any EU country and there for everyone to see but their system is not going to be adapted by any other country anytime soon. Singapore is not quite free in all respects but it still probably beats Malaysia or Indonesia in personal (if not political) freedom and it is a huge economic success. Still, those neighbours don’t seem to be adapting its policies. The problem might partly be that both Singapore and Switzerland are fairly small and even if they had free immigration (which they don’t) they would not be a serious competitors for other countries in terms of attracting citizens. But oceans are huge and there is a plenty space for people as long as they are interested. And they will be interested as long as living there is not significantly more expensive or less comfortable than living on land, I think.
depends on your definition.
there’s already huge chinese owned factory ships off the coasts of the US and EU.
http://www.futureworld.org/PublicZone/MindBullets/MindBulletsDetails.aspx?MindBulletID=324
Seasteading enthusiasts seem to believe that there’s a big pile of potential efficiency to be picked up from seasteading that would allow them to compete better and maintain their lifestyles with the excess wealth generated while also allowing them all this freedom to choose their own government.
In practice groups who are better at coordinating than them have already built sea-factories where people live for many months at a time. They’re already absorbing the potential profits from operating where labor laws don’t really apply, workplace safety laws don’t apply, where no government can easily make them dispose of industrial waste safely rather than letting it contaminate the local water and in such a manner that they can move to where demand is.
By the time the Seasteaders sort themselves out they’re going to arrive to find that government backed entities from nations with low standards have already taken the best spots, claimed them for themselves and are already running tighter operations than the Seasteaders are ever going to be able to get going.
Likely, but I believe I just read the linked scenario is fictional.
Euck. Sorry about that. I was trying to find articles on the subject and missed that that was a fictional prediction from a few years back.
A small company owner I met in spain makes replacement jet aircraft parts to order, the sort of setup where they courier parts out in <24hours. Very precise, very strict tolerances.
He was bemoaning a chinese factory ship which had taken up residence off the coast. (pretty much exactly as the fictional article described) They were cutting into his business and were undercutting him because while he had to pay for things like disposal of hazardous chemicals, labor laws or compensation if workers were injured the chinese boat did not since there was nobody to prevent them from just dumping waste over the side.
He noted that their work wasn't crap: it was extremely high quality.
Annoyingly I can't find articles about said barge/ship, it's swamped by things like articles about china setting things up in the south china sea.
Sending a destroyer to escort it out of the country’s EEZ (waste dumping counts as economic usage, doesn’t it?) doesn’t seem particularly difficult on a technical level. Capture or sink any repeat offenders and they’ll quickly decide it’s not worth the risk.
I don’t see the “efficiency” in moving to a place where you need to create or import your own terra firma, and drinking water, and pretty much everything else, rather than starting where those things are in ample supply.
1. There is increased status inside of the community for moving early. Both for having the courage to move first and because these people end up welcoming and connecting others.
2. Should the project be successful, early moving is an incredibly strong signal. Early movers can be trusted to have moved on principle and be true believers, later movers are more likely to be opportunistic.
This sets aside what I think is the largest immediate value for libertarians, which is finally living with a community where other people share your values. Sure there are only 5,000 people in NH, but that’s already 1 in 200. And more than that ratio if you pick the right city. Just going to the super market or walking downtown, you’ll run into others or see a bumper sticker on a car, etc. If you’ve spent your whole life feeling like others don’t share your values, it’s psychologically lifting to a degree I didn’t anticipate.
(I moved to NH < 2 years ago.)
Having found a pretty good-sized libertarian group in my last place of residence, I can definitely understand that feeling. Sadly, I moved again, and not to NH. 🙁
A very long time ago there was a libertarian get together on Santa Catalina island, I think organized by Robert Lefevre. En route, I spent, I think, a couple of days visiting with people in the L.A. libertarian community. It was a non-geographical village, spread over perhaps an area perhaps fifty miles across. I remember both that and the conference as occasions when I had the same sort of feeling others have just described.
I remember at one point putting out a bowl of potato chips with a price label on it, possibly five cents a chip. The point was not that I wanted people to pay money but that I was celebrating being in a culture where charging money for things was not seen as sinful, even in a social context.
I haven’t been to any libertarian meetings or anything like that, so I can’t really say. But I am not sure. I think I would enjoy company of open minded people (which is why I frequent this forum, it’s not ideal but it is pretty good), even those who disagree with me, but who do it in an interesting way. I know some libertarians whom I definitely do not like, because they’re ideologues who are immediately done with everything because they see anything libertarian as an obvious good and anything else as obvious evil. I would not want to spend time with people like those.
That said, I would probably enjoy if liberal/libertarian opinions were held by more people, say 20% as opposed to 5-10% of the population. One reason for that is that that would make non-liberals more aware of good arguments for liberalism. Most people, even most educated people, hold a very caricatured view of liberalism, basically they see liberals as people who like big business and weed (sometimes just the big business) or something like that. It is sometimes fun making smart and curious people aware of actual liberal/libertarian arguments, but it is tiresome to read a lot of nonsense on that matter in the media…Although lately, I’m considering stopping reading the media altogether, even the BBC sometimes shows outright tabloid-like “news” nowadays, for example yesterday one of the things on the front page (just below the main story) was how Justin Trudeau photo-bombed someone’s photo while jogging. That’s not news. What I haven’t figured out however, is how to get any news at all if I do that, sometimes they still report about something important enough that I want to read about it.
Onyomi, if you’d ever like to visit, I’d happily host you. I’ve much enjoyed your contributions in past open threads.
Tibor, I agree, and if I had a complaint about the community it’d probably be that there are plenty of ideologues, just of a different stripe. Nonetheless, I find it preferable to be surrounded by people who share my beliefs for flawed reasons than to be around people with do not share my beliefs, but also hold these beliefs for flawed reasons. Open-mindedness decreases in utility as intelligence decreases, so a community where everyone is open-minded is never likely to exist.
I’d also bet that you could leave the chips on a table and return to find a sum of money roughly equivalent to the number of chips taken.
Also, lest any non-libertarians reading this have the impression that a bunch of libertarians living together would turn into some sort of ruthless, Nietzschean dystopia, the libertarian groups I’ve met, as the above kind offer would indicate, tend to be extremely generous and not at all about making everything quid-pro-quo (though whether this would hold true in case of a much larger, still libertarian-inclined population, I don’t know; I think most libertarians have some sense that part and parcel of arguing against government welfare is being open to the idea of private charity).
@Kauffj
Thanks! I’ll send a shoutout on SSC if I’m ever in the area. Have thought about going to Porcfest a few times but not got around to it yet. Some day…
I think that it takes a lot of trust in random people to commit to being a libertarian.
Not random people.
But in my experience, random people are mostly pretty honest. If you leave your wallet where any passer by can steal it, it may well get stolen. If you leave it where one person can steal it, say in a shop where you were looking at things, it will probably still be there when you return.
At least, that was my experience in Teheran a very long time ago.
I think I know what you mean, but life does revolve around interactions with random people, and if you are scared of their behavior absent a large and powerful government/god life is stressful. If you think that the only reason someone has one beer at the bar and drives home instead of 10 is the law against DUI then you will push for lower and lower acceptable alcohol levels. If you trust people as a general rule you are more likely to be OK with them knowing their own limit.
I think a lot of people become crusaders after a personal tragedy because their trust in the broader world has been shattered.
I think that it takes a lot of trust in random people to commit to being a libertarian.
To elaborate on David’s response: every economic system beyond a commune will require trust in random people.
One advantage I see in libertarianism is that it’s more fault tolerant – your worst payoff for trusting the wrong person is better that your worst payoff for trusting the wrong person in a collectivist society. Case in point:
If you think that the only reason someone has one beer at the bar and drives home instead of 10 is the law against DUI then you will push for lower and lower acceptable alcohol levels. If you trust people as a general rule you are more likely to be OK with them knowing their own limit.
I think you left out an important detail here, that many people leave out: that we’re all trusting some other group of people to faithfully enforce those lower alcohol levels. All we do here is replace one trust group with another. Moreover, we put even more authority in that latter group; they’re not just enforcing sobriety, but also general traffic safety, civil safety, speedy investigation of crime, securing justice… and we’re forcing that now pervasive network of implementors on everyone. What happens if that network is perceived as a source of injustice in places?
Statists generally want to trust a small group of non random people to enforce the behavior. They want experts to write the rules and career professionals to enforce them, as a general rule they mentally categorize government officials differently from an average citizen.
I get the same sense as you do, that statists do that. The questions I’m left with, then, is whether we’re correct, or if there’s something we’re missing. I have to believe statists include at least a few people who recognize that this system is going to contain effectively random people at ground level. How do they reconcile that? If they conclude that it won’t work, then that’s where I believe a lot of left-libertarians come from.
My guess is that most people are nice, but there is a small fraction of psychopaths and similar, who can make the average human interaction quite unpleasant anyway.
Some traditional advice for interacting with people — prefer those who were recommended to you by a trustworthy person; very slowly increase the stakes at mutual interaction — seems designed to reduce the damage done by these human black swans.
Unfortunately, this sometimes gets in conflict with the ideal of treating people equally.
The trouble with the Free State Project is that they chose New Hampshire. They could have picked anywhere and they choose a place that simply doesn’t appeal to broad swaths of the population. Rather than attempting to find a state they could influence, they could have build a community anywhere and had it run on a local level according to their ideals. Then it could have been duplicated and spread if it had been successful (and could have been duplicated nearby if they chose their site well, which eventually means county level influence, and then plausibly state level).
What would have been a better location?
Ticino (a canton in Switzerland)? That’s what a similar European project suggests… But they are a lot less organized and it is less easy to move to and become a citizen of Switzerland than to move about the US. Still, if I could simply choose between the two, the almost subtropical (but with close mountains for skiing also) Ticino sounds a lot better than New Hampshire 🙂 plus I would finally get a motivation to learn Italian 🙂 on a more serious note, I guess that size is the number one thing, the smaller the state (in terms of population), the better. I guess there are even smaller states in the US than NH, so those might make more sense. But also you want them to be attractive regardless of politics. If there are no jobs, few people will move, if the state is in the middle of a desert or a tundra, it won’t be very attractive either.
Virtually any place with or near high population density areas.
The southeastern corner of New Hampshire is within commuting range of the Boston area.
New Hampshire has a low population, relatively inexpensive real estate, and parts of it are in easy range of a major metropolitan area.
Its within a long commute of a single metropolitan area and has some brutal winters (by most people’s standards) which makes the commute significantly worse fairly often. There are a good number of places that are within 1.5 hour commutes of 2 or 3 major metropolitan areas in the US.
It is exactly this sort of thinking that is the problem. ‘Easy’ is not a universal definition, my wife had a 45 min commute for a year, we have basically agreed that length of a commute is a deal breaker for the lifestyle we want to lead (barring extreme circumstances of some kind).
What matters is their population:the number of libertarians you can get to move there. The US has 320+ million people, give or take ~3% identify as libertarian, you have 10 million libertarians running around and the FSP has been able to attract ~0.2% of them to promise to move, and ~0.02% of them to actually move in 15 years. By selecting NH you are picking from two groups of people. 1. Libertarians who also want to live in an area like NH, and 2. People for whom living near other libertarians is an overwhelming priority. This is going to restrict you to a tiny portion of the population which explains the results.
As a personal anecdote, my wife and I discussed signing on 5-6 years ago, it lasted about 10 mins before the realization that a long commute, a minimum of 6-7 hours from any immediate family member by car (the closest extended family being a 1st cousin of my wife’s 2 hours from SE NH), limited long terms career change options, and bad weather for our shared hobbies.
Uncharitable response:
“Dad, why didn’t you fight for freedom when so many others did?”
“I wanted to, son, but it was just too cold”
Charitable response:
If you thoroughly consider the possibilities, I think NH was the strongest choice.
Population does matter. The vast majority of people will not upend their lives, regardless of what state you pick.
In addition to a low population, NH _is_ close to a major metropolitan area. I commute to Boston on a regular basis and the southern most parts of NH are only 40-45 minutes away.
Additionally, NH has a native population already inclined to lean libertarian, increasing the ability to persuade existing residents. Additionally, it has a state legislature structure that is incredibly conducive to success. 15 Free State Project representatives currently serve in the house.
Uncharitable response:
Why didn’t you join the FSP dad?
Because in one of the richest and freest countries in the history of the world, the founders couldn’t come up with a better solution than to hide in a uninhabited corner of the country and give up trying to change people’s minds.
So? There is a huge difference between 95% not being willing to up end their lives, 99%, and 99.9% (Which is effectively what the FSP has currently achieved).
It really stuns me when libertarians make statements that are, in effect, saying “its good enough for me”. A 45 min commute instead of a 15 min commute is seven thousand five hundred hours worth of extra commuting time over 30 years. That is adding almost 4 years of full time, unpaid and unhealthy work to your life. For a 20 year old planning to retire at 65 its almost 6 years. People have a vast array of preferences, the choice of a state that a tiny fraction of the country is willing to live in is indicative of not thinking about how people choose where to live.
Its not “its cold”, its “its cold with few (if any) redeeming features for most people”. I lived with Cleveland weather for 10 years by choice because my entire family lived there. I would live with Colorado winters for the enjoyment of the state in general, and I don’t exactly live in Cancun right now.
You keep acting like the relevant comparison is NH vs Manhattan. It isn’t. The relevant comparison is NH vs Wyoming. In which case all of your arguments collapse. They had to have a small state somewhat sympathetic to their ideals. That doesn’t leave many options. And it rules out virtually anything that would pass YOUR personal criteria.
Why is it Wyoming? Why isn’t it Rhode Island or Delaware?
Because those are places that
a) Are not already sympathetic towards libertarian ideas
b) Are not places libertarians might like to live (largely as a result of A)
There are a LOT of variables in play here, but you can’t seem to get past “it’s cold” and/or “it isn’t within 20 minutes of a Top 5 city”
To give this a better, but not full, answer, you need to choose a place where people can move without having to completely change their lives if you want a mass migration to happen. Lets look at a big state and see how it compares, Pennsylvania is the 6th largest state by population and about 9x as large as NH, so you might be tempted to conclude that you couldn’t make it work. However Pennsylvania is surrounded by highly populated areas. To the West is Ohio with ~ 12 million people, you can live a similar lifestyle in Pittsburgh as you can Cleveland or Columbus, or you can move from rural Ohio to Rural pa without much culture or weather shock, and without being a full day trip from your family (if you previously lived close). South of PA is WV, Maryland and Delaware, combined population of ~8 million. Baltimore and Philadelphia aren’t worlds apart, and again the rural sections aren’t crazily different either. Same with large parts of New Jersey (9 million people), and portions of NY (20 million). If a 45 min commute is reasonable to you you can commute from PA to multiple major metropolitan areas like Baltimore, Cleveland, and if you are willing to go further even DC and NYC, plus it has its own major cities.
Between Ohio/WV/MD/NY/NJ/DE some 45-50 million people have chosen to live in a place similar to a portion of Pennsylvania. Between the hardcore free staters who would move regardless of the destination, the much larger pool of people who would be likely willing to cross the border and below average voter turnout you could probably draw about the right number of people to start effecting change if 10-20k would do it in NH, but with added benefits of the national spotlight during election years on a swing state to help spread influence.
@Baconbacon
I think this relates somewhat to a recent thread where I argued that it’s hard for Reddish Gray tribe members to live the kind of lifestyle their stated values would seem to imply they could/should because doing so tends to involve giving up the Blueish cultural accoutrements they usually enjoy.
In the case of the FSP, it would obviously be useless if they didn’t pick a low-population area. Low-population areas tend to be culturally boring compared to big cities and inherently have fewer career options. Get much closer than 45 mins’ driving range and you’re effectively in a suburb, and influenced by the politics and population patterns of the city–and city politics is almost always more anti-libertarian, besides. In other words, for the type of person who tends to be a libertarian, moving to someplace where their presence is likely to have maximum political impact is almost inherently going to be a sacrifice for most.
As for climate, NH is a little cold for me–would prefer somewhere like North Carolina, but then you’re not in driving range of Boston. Put it in NM (home of Barry Goldwater and another place more libertarianish than average) and people will say it’s way too hot. And so on. Climate-wise preferences range pretty widely.
My only negative thought about NH as a choice is that my vague impression is Southerners are more libertarian than Northerners to begin with. If you’re from LA, MS, AL, GA, FL, SC, TN, etc. you’re probably going to be a lot more comfortable moving to say, Virginia than New Hampshire.
Now that I think of it, West Virginia might have been an interesting choice. It has a reputation as an extremely poor backwater, of course, but also has great natural beauty, and a small, very “Don’t Tread on Me” populous. Definitely seems an appropriate place for a “Mt. Liang Marsh” of sorts.
*Edit to add: your point about NH’s non-central geographic location is a good one, though I’m not sure PA is a good example, since, what with Philly and Pittsburgh, you’re going to need millions more libertarians to move there before you can significantly influence the politics.
You are being obtuse, seemingly intentionally. This isn’t about if I would move there, it is about the fact that almost no one in the US wants to move there.
Did you know Ron Paul finished with 16% of PAs primary vote in 2008 vs 8% in NH, and 13% in 2012? PA already has a solid libertarian bent, lower voter turnout which is easier to influence and lower registered voters.
Either way I didn’t choose PA to say “clearly PA is the correct choice”, only to highlight how you should approach trying to convince people to move.
@baconbacon
In answer:
—from “Beyond Folk Activism“, by Patri Friedman.
Now, I have my own objection to the whole ‘go out there and “change people’s minds” over to your side’ response. Namely, that as pretty much every strategist since old Sun Tzu has noted, you generally don’t attack the enemy where they’re strongest. So, what do you do when you’re fighting against an ideology/system/culture/tribe/et cetera whose greatest strength is persuasiveness? Whose ideas are simply more persuasive than yours to the vast majority of people, no matter what you do, no matter how well you “sell” your positions?
Because “persuasive” and “factual” are not synonymous. The “marketplace of ideas” doesn’t select for truth, it selects for virulence. Back in “How the West was Won“, Scott was willing to countenance a comparison to heroin. One might have truth on one’s side, but when one is up against falsehoods more attractive, more persuasive than truth, against “cognitive crack”, trying to match propaganda for propaganda looks like a strategic error. What can one do against a highly-virulent “mind virus”, better able to hijack the bulk of your society’s brains than anything you could ever hope to present?
It seems to me that practically every alternative strategy proposed involves the formation of some manner of “enclaves”/”parallel societies”. Creating a space, geographic, political, or cultural, where one can “go one’s own way”.
First, via “exit”/geographical separation, as in seasteading. I have a whole litany of reasons for which I think seasteading and it’s ilk won’t work, but the final one is pretty much “what do you do when the US Navy brings a ship alongside your seastead and tells you How Things Are Going To Be, Or Else?” The world is too small and too connected for meaningful geographic “exit” like that anymore; there is no more frontier to flee to.
The second is to obtain control of a political subdivision of an existing polity, whether by being explicitly ceeded, as with “charter cities”, or by takeover via concentration of the local democracy, as with the Free State Project. In both cases, you’re limited by how much independence the host polity will allow you — how much “federalism” there actually is in the present US, for the NH case. Plus, plenty of people on this thread have done the job of showing how the numbers don’t work out for NH. And suppose it did work? Consider then the example set. How much of the disconnect in recent presidential elections between popular vote and Electoral College results is due to concentration of Democrat voters in “hyper-blue” places like California or NYC? A left-wing supermajority in CA wins no more EC votes than 50.1% does. So with the “Free State” example, what if some die-hard California lefties moved to some barely-Red states, enough to flip them blue, and spread out that “popular vote” majority until it becomes an EC majority as well. Or “anti-libertarians”, left and right, moving into NH to “flip” it back and undo the “Free State” gains?
The third model is to create cultural rather than political boundaries, the Amish/Benedict Option mode, whereby one develops practices of memetic hygiene, creating a cordon sanitaire against the mind virus.
One problem all of these have in common is that they depend on the willingness of the “host” societies to leave such people be. And I just don’t have that much faith in the “tolerance” of “liberal Modernity” toward those who actively reject it, particulary that those exceptions whereby “illiberal cultures” are tolerated will last forever.
And even if you get your enclave/ghetto, what’s the long-term model? To simply remain a tiny cultural island “parasitic” upon a greater “outsider” host culture (if only in terms of national defense), eking out a limited, insular existence, generation by generation, until either the Sword of Damocles falls and the host culture switches from “tolerance” to “pogroms”, or the Day of Judgement arrives? Or is the idea that your superior views, more in tune with reality than the attractive falsehoods of cognitive heroin, lead to greater success, whether it’s Libertarian seasteads (or NH) proving more profitable and prosperous due to the reduced quantities of obstructive, harmful regulation, or the Dreheresque model of ‘a life well-lived in proper accordance with true Christian values will serve as such a shining example to the world — particularly when compared to the anomie and wreckage in the wake of liberal individualism — that no further proselytization is needed”, and that the attractiveness of one’s visible results will overcome the “persuasion gap.” Or one might posit that since the “mind virus” reduces the Darwinian fitness of its host, if one can maintain “quarantine”, and maintain “tolerance” from the “infected”, one can, in the long run, outbreed them (see also here). Or then there’s the idea that one fortifies one’s ghetto in hopes that when the “pretty lies” bring their inevitable fruit and the Gods of the Copybook Headings return, that one might somehow “ride out” the world-scourging, civilization-ending-beyond-any-possibility-of-returning, mass-genocide-of-entire-races, “fire and slaughter”, to take over as the only people in your area with a clue as to a workable system (the model of “Moldbuggian passivism”). If you can’t tell, I’m pretty skeptical as to the viability of all of these.
(Pretty much the only other alternative I know of, the only “non-enclave” solution, involves those resistant to/opposing the “mind virus” to team up and coordinate clandestinely, and carefully, covertly concentrate themselves not in any particular geographic or political space, but in institutions like the armed forces and police, until we have enough control over these bodies to overcome the “persuasion gap” with superiority in a very different form of “persuasion”, and then go all Arnaud Amalric.)
As much as I love New Mexico, it’s problem is less that it’s too hot (in the summer) than that it’s too dry (year round).
Also, Goldwater was from Arizona. Gary Johnson is from New Mexico, and was even governor there, but my impression over the past 10-15 years is that the state is sliding blue in a major way.
Oh yeah, I was thinking of Arizona politics more than NM politics (thought not at all a McCain fan… his “maverick” reputation notwithstanding), but got mixed up due to next door, and yeah, Gary Johnson.
I actually really like Arizona, but much of it does have something of the quality of an alien landscape to my mind. The dry can be a refreshing change of pace from most of the places I’ve spent my life, but would probably get old after a while.
This was definitely a major consideration when they were determining the place. Locations such as Wyoming were ultimately rejected because nobody would be willing to move there. NH is reasonably appealing as it’s somewhat close to a major metropolitan area (Boston), includes some decent schools, etc.
New Hampshire, its better than Wyoming! Not exactly a great marketing campaign. ~1.3 million people live in NH. The entire NE outside of a pair of major metropolitan areas (Maine, Vermont, NH specifically have a combine population of ~3.5 million after a few centuries worth of development). The parts of NH (and VT and ME) that have been developed are the ones close to Boston, so living there inhibits the “lets impact politics at the local level first” idea that is going on.
The issue was they looked at low population states to try to have an impact, but they are low population for a reason.
Ideally they would have picked a fast growing state, and you get the double effect of drawing like minded people in, and also exposing people to these idea (future neighbors).
I believe Texas did make the Top 5 or so for those reasons exactly.
Of course the other point is that they don’t really want just anyone to move. They want principled libertarians leading the charge. Even with the NH situation there’s already tons of more “hardcore” libertarians who moved out there and then splintered off because the FSP is considered to be filled with a bunch of progressive …. LINOs?
OK, they’re doomed, cue ridicule and laughter.
Libertarians in America are too small a minority to be at all picky; whenever they do the “you are insufficiently pure to associate with us true libertarians” bit, which they do often, they condemn themselves to political irrelevance.
The idea that enough geographically mobile libertarians might settle in one place to shift a small state Gray on the electoral map was always a long shot; adding any sort of purity test puts it so far out of reach that even the ones who would pass the purity test, if they also pass an IQ test, will walk away from the whole hopeless endeavor. To make this work (or to get 5% of the popular vote in a presidential election or any of the other long-shot libertarian goals), you need to not merely accept but positively court every marginal LINO who might be willing to join in.
Libertarians in America are too small a minority to be at all picky; whenever they do the “you are insufficiently pure to associate with us true libertarians” bit, which they do often, they condemn themselves to political irrelevance.
Point taken, but this might not be a bad idea, depending on how the “purity test” is aimed. For example, if you want your cause to succeed, one of the worst things you could do would be to organize a move that ends up only getting the people who are libertarian for the free weed.
To be a little less strawmanly: you’re going to want another city on a hill, full of people who both succeed at quality of life and also exemplify libertarianism. Again, if your vanguard group includes people who weren’t going to rank very high in GDP anyway, then you’re going to have a hard time attracting more.
Then again, if this truly is their approach, then I’d argue this is wrong, too. Libertarianism really is touted as a philosophy for everyone; it should accept all comers, including the slackers, and show that it works about as well as anyone might expect for them, too. An FSP that puts nothing but weedheads in a town is doing the philosophy a disservice, but so is one that puts nothing but Heinleins and Galts there, prospers wildly, then the masses flood in, fail to get the same benefits, cue pitchforks.
The true strategy might be the patient one. Move 20000 there, maintain the approach, and just hold the line a generation or two and see if they’re really doing well economically. If all they’re looking for is libertarians willing to pull their own weight, then I’d expect the political influence to come in due course.
On the other hand, the Early Adopters who’ve moved to New Hampshire have probably helped push the state in a more libertarian-ish direction than otherwise. Trash pickup and a lot of other services are privately-run there, and back during Bush’s second term, one state legislator even proposed a de facto ordinance of secession over the federal regulatory burden.
Once you are asking people to sacrifice even a little you will be dropping the halfhearted anyway. People choose where they live, even if just through inertia, don’t make it even harder by picking a place that ~1% of the population is willing to live in.
And you know what? There are a lot of “legal weed libertarians” in Colorado, and you know what they got? Legal(ish) weed! They actually, mostly through just associating with generally like minded people, got what they wanted.
Which is what boggles my mind. Libertarians generally have a strong free market streak, but when they get together they so often forget some of the basic principles when they plan.
“Most people don’t want to live there” is sort of like, required, for the goal of being able to take over the body politic through ideologically-driven migration.
Going farther back, there’s a reason that the Puritans established a colony in Massachusetts rather than a few miles outside of London, and it ain’t because the New World was considered an Earthly paradise that would be super easy and convenient to transform into something wonderful.
This would be the analogy for sea-steading, not the FSP. Come build a paradise isn’t the same as “move to NH, we know it cold and a long way from anywhere, but hey in 50-60 years it should be more libertarian-ish”.
As I said before the only ratio that matters is the current population:the number of people you can get to move there (+how easy converts would be). The fact that it took 15+ years to get 20,000 just to promise to move speaks to how poor the choice was.
There’s a third part of your ratio missing, which is “# of people necessary to have a meaningful impact on state politics”
Would it have been easier to get 20,000 people to move to Texas? Yeah, probably. Would that make them a relevant force in Texas politics? lolno
And of course, Texas is also really hot and far away from a lot of places a lot of people want to live.
Your basic complaint seems to be “this destination is not perfect in every possible way therefore it sucks”
This isn’t even remotely close to my position. My position is that if 1% of the population has chosen to live in areas like this (total population of Maine, NH and Vermont is ~3 million) then you are asking a lot for people to move there.
This would be entirely encapsulated by population vs total willing to move there. It isn’t missing at all, but since you bring it up NH is actually a poor choice because it has high voter turnout (4th in the country in voter turnout in the 2012 presidential election), so your 20,000 extra votes doesn’t go as far as it would in a similar sized, but lower turnout. If we use the 2012 presidential election as a proxy for overall engagement then your 20,000 votes in NH (70% TO) gets you almost traction in West Virginia (53% TO) despite the extra half a million people living in WV, or Idaho (61% TO). If you want to maximize the impact of your 20k then Rhode Island (25% fewer people, 64% TO), Delaware (30% fewer, 66% TO) or even Vermont (half the population, 65% TO rate).
If your response is “well people won’t move to x, y or z”, well that is the problem with picking NH, very few people want to live there.
I wouldn’t choose Texas either, but at least 25-30 million people want to live there.
What WOULD you choose?
You’ve plenty of criticism of the choice they did make, as well as many of the top alternatives. Would would your Top 5 destinations be?
Edit: And you ignored the “already sympathetic” part. It’s not JUST population/turnout. It’s also “likelihood to be persuaded.” The LSP doesn’t plan on importing a majority (or even an effective minority). They plan on gaining a foothold and then winning over the locals. NH locals are closer to being won over than RI locals.
“Closer to being won over” is a difficult thing to quantify, but in politics the general rule is that undecideds, or those with no affiliation, are easier to convert than those with a history with a party. NH has a strong voting record in terms of participation. If you go in and strike up a conversation with a registered voter and point out how similar your views are to theirs in some areas their reaction is much more likely to be “let me convert him to my political view” than “let me convert to his”.
It’s worth noting that NH has relatively low property prices, even within commuting distance of Boston, which is a significant advantage. I could buy a pretty impressive estate for the price of a San Jose house.
@baconbacon
Yeah, but it’s a bigger state. New Hampshire (and only NH; Maine and Vermont aren’t as high) has about 50% higher overall population density than Texas.
We can cherry pick statistics all day, but probably the most important thing was picking a state (and one with a reasonably small total population so that whatever number they can scrape together can have a real influence on state-level politics) as a Schelling point. And they certainly can’t change it now anyway.
Who is cherry picking? You are. The core of my argument is that what matters is not absolute population, but the relative ease/difficulty of convincing people to move there. The absolute population of all states that are geographically similar to NH is very low, despite their early founding. Unless one of the options was so close to carrying capacity (be it due to natural or artificial constraints) that adding the extra housing necessary would be prohibitively expensive, population density is pretty meaningless.
It still boggles my mind that a movement which is supposedly tied to respecting individual choices failed to look at how individuals actually make choices or the choices that have actually been made when launching, and that 15+ years later people will still defend the choice of choosing that area after people’s choices continue to show that it was poorly considered.
Seriously, why is it so hard to accept the concept that their choice of destination effected the numbers that they can scrape together?
It still boggles my mind that a movement which is supposedly tied to respecting individual choices failed to look at how individuals actually make choices or the choices that have actually been made when launching
Several people have pointed out, repeatedly, that one of the incentives was to move to a place where individuals would have the most significant effect on local politics. They even acknowledge that that’s a tradeoff against that location’s desirability along other lines. I have yet to see you address this; you seem to keep insisting that this place is non-optimal in so many ways – except for the above. Why won’t you address that?
[…] and that 15+ years later people will still defend the choice of choosing that area after people’s choices continue to show that it was poorly considered.
Except that it wasn’t.
You are looking at this way too simply. They aren’t trying to convince just any “people”, they are trying to convince committed libertarians (which makes NH, a libertarian-leaning state, already inherently more desirable than Rhode Island, which is not). And they aren’t trying to convince people to move there for any old regular bucket of reasons, they are trying to convince people to move there for the purposes of influencing state and local politics (which makes NH, a low-population state, more desirable than Ohio, which is not).
It’s not about “ease of convincing people to move there” it’s about “ease of convincing libertarians to move there” which involves two major considerations: How much does it already approximate a place I would like to live AND How difficult will it be to move it further in the direction I would like. You are not accounting for the first factor at all, and only making token attempts to consider the second.
They didn’t use that as one of the incentives, they attempted to make it the primary incentive and then said “well you can commute 45 mins to Boston, its not so bad”. The overwhelming majority of people do not organize their lives this way, and it was only ever going to appeal to people who are willing to make spreading libertariansim their life’s work (or for people who coincidentally want to live in a place like NH and are libertarian). Unsurprisingly these two groups are a minuscule fragment of the population.
It is very simple, you cannot effect local politics if you choose a place no one will move to, and the best way to figure out what types of areas people will move to is to look at where they actually move.
I have addressed this from the first post. The consideration that the effect on local politics is going to be the size (and political activity) of the current population relative to the size (and activity) of the population you get to move there. Absolute population size is meaningless on its own.
Or to put it another way, the incentive they offered for uprooting your family, practically guaranteeing a long commute and living in an area where few people (through revealed preferences) like the weather and living a long way (for most people) from family was that over the course of multiple decades local political outcomes would become steadily more libertarian, while having slightly more libertarian neighbors than other places.
Be a part of something big is a great slogan for a protest march or petition signing. It is not so great for attracting people for lifetime commitments with little recompense.
I think baconbacon’s point can be simplistically formulated as “Not enough people have committed to and actually moved NH to make a significant difference in NH, therefore the choice of NH can be assumed to be sub-optimal”.
There are attacks that can be made on this, but I think they have to take the form of either “There are no good states to choose. NH was the best of a bad lot.” or “Free NH can only be failed and cannot fail (i.e. someday Free NH will happen)”. Maybe I am overlooking alternatives though.
This is basically my position. Note that bacon has refused my request to give me his Top 5 states (instead engaging in a long narrative about a few possible better LOCATIONS)
I will try this tack, and if doesn’t get through I am done.
1% of the country has chosen to live in NH and states similar to NH. Roughly 3% of the US identifies as the type of libertarian that would vote the way the FSP wants. That leaves you with a pool of roughly 100,000 people who are libertarians that want to live in a place like NH, meaning you have to convince 20% of potential candidates to move. Even if you double it* and say that libertarians are 2x as likely as the general population your pool is ~200,000 people, of which you need to draw 10% to hit your basic mass.
To go back to the Pennsylvania comparison ~ 20% of people in the US live in areas similar to a portion of PA (actually a low ball estimate in more ways than a high ball, but we will use it). That leaves a pool of ~2,000,000 people to draw from. So even though PA has 9x as many people as NH, it has a pool roughly 20x as large as NH to draw from, so while you need a larger raw number, you only actually need 10% of that pool, rather than the 20% for the same per population impact.
Most of the other factors also point away from NH favor (as I mentioned voter TO is way higher in NH than most states, including PA which is below average, and PA is a swing state so an effective FSP is more likely to have national ramifications)
*this is unrealistic as if your population 2x as likely to want to live in NH as an average person then many would already live there.
I describe the manner in which you need to approach such problems, which is far more valuable than an opinion. If I gave 5 states then you just retreat to “X isn’t as libertarian as NH, can’t be, I said so, doesn’t work”. Why would I concede to a request when you can’t even state my position correctly.
Well, for what it’s worth, it’s convinced me.
What if you add the people who want to live in cities like Boston but are willing to settle for a state like New Hampshire if it is full of libertarians and within reasonable commuting distance? Roughly 6% of the US population lives in Boston, the Bay Area, Seattle, Austin, or Raleigh-Durham, so if even half of them aren’t bound to the city and its immediate environs that gives you a fourfold improvement over just the ones who like small rural states.
As others have noted, New Hampshire to Boston isn’t exactly a reliably tolerable commute. Maybe if someone were to convince Elon to reroute the Hyperloop…
@baconbacon
It’s a cherry-picked definition of “geographically similar”, clearly intended to make their share of the ‘absolute population’ small out of proportion to their land area. Why else is it that Maine and Vermont are sufficiently “geographically similar”, but Massachussetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and some eastern portion of New York are not?
At one point a Free County Project tried to turn Loving County, TX (whose population was in the double digits) into a libertopia. The locals didn’t care much for this idea and the FCPers were run out of town in short order.
That makes me think, why not a new town altogether? There seems to be a plenty of empty land in the US. Of course this requires a lot more initial investment and organization than moving somewhere where there are people already. And even if you become a new county, that’s probably hardly worth it, since counties probably don’t have much autonomy.
On quite the opposite side of the spectrum, I wonder how well would for example a global libertarian initiative to move, say, to the New Zealand, Chile or Switzerland go. All of these are at least economically quite liberal countries (ore than I almost all others) already and all have a relatively low population (well chile is already borderline with 17 million). The Swiss don’t have very free immigration, particularly if you want to become a citizen you’re looking for something like 15 years in Switzerland first and you have to show you’ve become Swiss enough to be granted citizenship. But Chile and NZ might have more relaxed immigration policies. NZ also speaks English (the most wisely spoken language on the planet) and has a very small population of 4 million. Its main problem is that it’s in the middle of nowhere.
It’s worth noting that under U.S. law states are legally independent–have some rights vis a vis the federal government. Cities and counties are creations of the state and legally subservient to it.
I’m concerned about actual freedom on ships.
Not only is it likely that you won’t have a choice about cooperating with the people in charge (ships are prone to more risks than life on land), but it’s easier to keep people trapped on a ship.
The Art of Not Being Governed convinced me that freedom has a lot to do with being able to leave, even though many modern societies put some real limits on how badly governments treat people. (Please take your cynicism off automatic– a notable feature of the modern world vs. early empires is a lot of people trying to get into the better-governed regions rather than empires desperately trying to keep people from escaping to ungoverned regions.)
What is the difference? Ships in territorial waters are subjects to the jurisdiction of the local government, while ships in international waters are subjects to the jurisdiction of their flag country government, plus some inter-governamental jurisdiction depending on international treaties.
In fact, the government jurisdiction is even stronger in the sea, because while you can own land, which gives you property rights that most governments will be usually unwilling to disregard, you can’t own a parcel of ocean.
I don’t see how the seasteaders’ claims of independence would be treated any different than those of the “sovereign citizen” nutjobs.
Why in the future? You are already free to go there and try to establish your homestead, if you want. You can draw some inferences from the fact that nobody does it.
Similarly, you can draw some inferences from the fact that the “seasteaders” are in the business of selling books about seasteading while they comfortably live on land, instead of being in the business of buying cruise ships or offshore platforms and converting them to actual seasteads.
In the future assuming the permafrost melts enough and the climate warms up enough to make it habitable. The reason people don’t live there permanently is that you pretty much cannot live there. If it becomes more like at least southern Greenland then I’d expect people to start moving in.
A fair point, but is it actually true? My impression was that the Antarctic Treaty designates the whole continent a scientific preserve. I would expect that if you tried to homestead it, you would be at the very least strongly discouraged.
I suppose you could manage to sell it as a scientific experiment of some sort (deconstructing the decolonization of white patriarchal glaciers? 🙂 )
AFAIK, all of antarctica is still covered by permafrost, it is uninhabitable in the long term. Assuming that the permafrost melts eventually, that might change but now it is simply not possible to live there permanently, at least not in any meaningful way and without being 100% dependent on resources from outside of Antarctica.
There actually are 7 countries with territorial claims on Antarctica. Marie Byrd Land is officially unclaimed, although the US has weakly made claims in the past and may start going after it if the ice disappears.
But no part of Marie Byrd Land is north of around 73 degrees, which is probably a factor in why it’s unclaimed (the claimed areas nearly all include land at or north of 70 degrees). Even a bunch of global warming probably isn’t going to get any of it out from under the glaciers.
I think it’s worth noting that there are at least two different potential seasteading models–I don’t know if the recent book puts it that way or not.
One model is to locate inside a nation’s territorial waters with permission from that nation, taking advantage of the fact that if anyone offers you a better deal you can move. The other is to locate outside of territorial waters with no tie to any nation but at some potential risk from raiders, private or governmental.
From what I gather, the first model is supposed to be the starting model and if everything works well and all the technical problems are solved (the ocean is less forgiving than coastal waters) they might try it completely independently in the ocean.
Also the difference between the trailer park and the sea is that your presence might be profitable to the protector country. You might have to pay them for the protection on exchange for autonomy. And you go where the deal is the best. Trailer parks aren’t particularly attractive economically… Although it is an interesting point – couldn’t you make platforms that move on land and are capable of forming a fully functional city? Supertrailers of sorts (one problem might be the lack of suitable roads)
Roads Must Roll.
This coordination issue cannot be the real obstacle, simply because it is too easy to solve.
For example, one could create a fund where people pledge to move to NH if enough people make the pledge within a fixed time interval.
If critical mass is not reached, you get your money back*. if critical mass is reached, you move to NH or forfeit the money.
* You lose a bit to opportunity costs and inflation. But rich people who would benefit greatly from a libertarian utopia would offer to make up the difference for the rest of us – it’s still a better investment than seasteading!
Even if you and a lot of other people move, it has high costs because moving far away inherently has a high cost. Moving to a seastead even more so.
So you’ll only get people who so value the libertarian nature of the seastead so much that the value overcomes that cost, which means extreme idealists and fanatics, people just unable to assess costs, and the like. This will make the whole project fail.
This is exactly how the FSP works, except with no monetary commitment.
You “pledge” to move IF they reach the critical mass of people (which has not yet been reached and likely never will). Everyone who has moved so far is an “enthusiastic early-adopter”
FSP reached its pledge goal about a year ago.
Assurance contracts with unlimited time horizons may be a bad idea, though. If you discount people since 2010, it is only at half.
So you mean, after reaching the goal, only half of those who pledged to move have thus far moved? That still sounds pretty good for a year?
No, I mean that the 10k people who pledged before 2010 have probably made other commitments or even just forgotten about it and we shouldn’t count them. So we should probably treat it as if 10k people have pledged to move.
The pledge is to move within 5 years of the target being reached. 2k people moved before hitting the target. Some sources say that more people are moving since hitting the target, but I’m skeptical.
So… maybe all that money I spent on organic produce because it wasn’t worth arguing with my family was worth it.
Word comes out that, despite overwhelming rodent evidence and reasonable human evidence of chronic toxicity at low doses, the pesticide chlorpyrifos will continue to be used. The EPA notes that there are “considerable areas of uncertainty” about it. So… yeah, that makes me terribly comfortable.
I can understand (even if I don’t agree), the rationale of the new regulators who are looking for a lighter touch. But it means I can’t trust them to keep me safe.
The upshot is that I guess it’s best to buy organic, even though it cuts out some safe pesticides, in order to avoid it. This is not the ideal solution, but I’m pretty sure we’re never going to see “no organophosphates” on a label.
And I get to eat crow for jibing people about it.
I find this article about it in CNN.
The article quotes a bunch of activists talking about how the science is clear and settled and obviously this stuff is harmful as having your fetus smoke two packs a day with a whiskey chaser.
It also reports on some of the science directly, claiming the chemical was found in “picogram” (doesn’t say picogram-per-what) concentrations in some children when it was legal for residential use, and that these children had increased odds of some symptoms. It says it was not found at all after the residential ban.
This does not strike me as a strong argument for banning its agricultural use.
Do you have numbers? How low is this “low dose”? My understanding is that chlorpyrifos has recently been determined to be 10x as toxic as previously believed. But EPA standards are always built on a 1000x safety margin, so that’s not a big deal. Maybe they should now lower the legal limits by a matching 10x, but they shouldn’t ban it.
Something I wonder whenever I see criticism of the modern world, is, how feasible is it to opt out of modern, technological society?
can a person ship some yaks to the canadian shield and become a pastoralist?
could one reclaim the formerly agricultural land on the east coast?
Do the Amish only pull it off because they acquired their land a long time ago before it was in high demand, or is it inherently hypocritical to claim that modern society has made life worse?
I wouldn’t say “inherently hypocritical.” Possibly untestable, though.
Here’s one plausible proxy question we could ask: Do people in rural U.S. areas feel like life is “better” for having smartphones and Internet? (My instinct is that it’s better to ask rural than city folks because city life is more fundamentally shaped by current technology.)
The way you’ve presented the question, I’d suggest being careful to distinguish “with rational actors it’s unavoidable that things end up this way” from “other things being equal, everybody actually wants things to be this way.” Tragedy of the commons is the classic example of where the two notions don’t line up. There’s a plausible case to be made that many aspects of “the modern world”– e.g. everyone’s adoption of smartphones and Internet, or the conversion of mostly self-sufficient farms to factory farms and built-up areas– have a tragedy-of-the-commons aspect to them.
Rural people’s ability to use smartphones and the Internet was limited until very recently. My dad lives in a semi-rural area, and I only started getting acceptable cell reception at his place three or four years ago; he still uses slow, flaky microwave broadband, although cable’s been coming to his area Real Soon Now for at least ten years.
The Amish population doubles about every twenty years, so land acquired a few generations back doesn’t explain their success. They have been planting colonies, Amish settlements in parts of the country where land is less expensive than in the existing settlements. Also, of course, many of them do things other than farming.
I wish I could begin to understand how this is possible. I am all too aware of how hard it is to make mechanized farming profitable; when I see them out there making hay by hand (and hoof, I guess) while knowing they’re still expanding and buying up new parcels it absolutely boggles my mind.
Most of them are poor or at any rate live very poor by US standards. In Pennsylvania there are plenty of them that work in non-agricultural jobs; I knew some that operated a small lumber mill, one that ran a local hay-and-livestock auction, and others that cut and sold firewood. I would be curious to know whether their historical prohibition against taking any government assistance still holds, or whether many of them get SNAP benefits these days.
I think they are very, very frugal, have lots of freeish labor, and probably spend less on inputs that English farmers. I think many English farmers are constantly in debt, which the Amish aren’t. It’s not uncommon to borrow to buy fertilizer and then pay it off when the crop comes in.
It’s still sort of confusing and impressive.
… and they have such a restrictive social structure that the children are pretty much forced to stay in a limited set of low education occupations, which sucks for them but is great for keeping the meme complex alive.
That’s a mighty bold assertion.
It’s time for another round of the SSC comments section argument about whether being Amish is nice! Someone should keep track of the periods of these and similar. My gut says that there are 2 or 3 open threads before the next discussion of selling cakes for gay marriage, and 5 or 6 before someone links those blog posts about Galileo.
But will the Amish bake me a pro-Galileo cake?
To begin with, the Amish aren’t all that non-mechanized, depending on the particular affiliation. Some permit tractors as long as they have steel wheels, making them unsuitable for road use. Some permit powered equipment, such as bailers, on horse drawn wagons.
In some areas a lot of them do construction work. Elsewhere a good deal of small businesses, sometimes in support of Amish agriculture. They can use power tools as long as they are not driven by electric motors.
I like to quote McCloskey’s figure, that real per capita income in the developed world is about twenty to thirty times higher than it was through most of history. That leaves a lot of room between average incomes and grinding poverty.
I often compare the problem of never feeling like one has enough money to that of never feeling like one has a fast computer: computers are always improving in computational power at a rapid rate, but software companies are always making their OSs and software fancier (often in superficial, unnecessary ways) at a roughly equivalent rate, so you always need a newish computer to run the latest programs satisfactorily and you never quite feel you have a lightning fast computer.
On this analogy, the Amish are people who decided to run, e.g. Windows 95 on a cheap 2017 PC.
To my mind, the greatest mystery for us is not the forest primeval, but the premodern city. In the country you can live at any level of technological advancement you chose: you can live like a medieval European, like a hunter-gatherer, etc. You can even see people living like medieval farmers in rural India, or as hunter-gatherers in remote parts of e.g. the Amazon. But you can’t directly experience what e.g. life in Elizabethan London was like. That environment is just gone because third world cities are not like first-world cities a few centuries or millennia ago; they are a mishsmash of cell phones, diesel engines, etc.
In technological terms they might be similar, but the culture of, e.g., medieval England was very different to that of modern India, so anybody hoping to get the authentic medieval peasant experience by moving to rural Asia is still going to be disappointed.
DavidFriedman is right about Amish land acquisition. When you double every twenty years, most of your land is recently purchased. Here’s an alternate theory.
Let’s say you are an Amish family that has twelve children — not really a very unusual family size. Your kids only attend school to the 8th grade (most old-order Amish communities do that). Then they work for you, full time, for about four or five years, and any money they produce is yours.
Say that you can get your kids doing work that is the productive equivalent of a $10/hour Taco Bell job. Now, if you break down worker wages verses the profit a company gets, the owner of the company usually gets about $5/hour off a $10/hour worker. So the real productivity is $15/hour. Add some carpentry skills or something, and making $15/hour off your high schoolers is a reasonable assumption. Now, work your twelve kids four years per kid, fifty weeks per year, six days per week, nine hours per day. 12*4*50*6*9*15 = $1,944,000 dollars worth of labor.
Add that one top of the fact that Dad is working well beyond full-time — the Amish crew my Dad drove around worked on their home farms for a couple hours before going out to their ten-hour-a-day construction jobs. The wives lead similarly demanding lives, but are less likely to be employed formally. You don’t pay rent because you buy your land almost in cash, or you have a mortgage so you’re building equity. You don’t live in town. You don’t need to buy a nice house because you can build stuff or renovate run down country homes, and if you can’t build by yourself your neighbors will pitch in. You eat some farm food, but most of your calorie intake comes from, say ALDI.
No need to save for retirement, and they don’t pay social security or medicaid. When Amish people get old, they live with one of their children. Any old-age expenses can be divided between your twelve kids and forty grandchildren. Got Alzheimer’s? One of your 15-year-old high school dropout grandkids will babysit you 24/7 those last few years. No nursing homes. No electric bill. No cell phone bill. No cell phone. No cable bill. No college expenses. No school tuition. No piano lessons. Everyone wears uniforms, so very low clothing costs. At least in Indiana, even deoderant hasn’t caught on. Waste of money.
As long as you have a zero percent divorce rate, work at least sixty hours a week, work all your high schoolers sixty hours a week, eat cheap groceries, have a close-nit community that self-insures against disaster, and live in a very modest house, you can buy as much land as you can farm.
My Dad was a “yoder toter” for six months — one of those guys Amish guys hire to drive them to worksites. He drove a crew of twelve brothers. One was mildly intellectually disabled. No matter. They all got paid $15 an hour, and the more skilled ones basically subsidized the less skilled ones.
This will run up against limits eventually, though. If there’s about 57,000,000 square miles of land on earth, and maintaining a comfortable Amish lifestyle requires at least 10 square feet of land per person, and if the Amish population doubles every twenty years, then by 2668 AD the Amish will run out of land. At that point they can start building dykes or something, but the handwriting will be on the wall.
I would point out that the Amish are essentially a parasite society. Without the protection of Uncle Sam, and other services, (i.e. Emergency Rooms, Yoder Toters), the Amish life would be very different.
Edit: I mean that they rely on larger society that they cannot produce. The Amish can only exist as a small subculture. Parasite is not meant to be insulting, merely observational.
Symbiote, not parasite. The Amish produce goods, taxes and useful population (both defectors are new Amish), and receive protection in turn. If you want parasites, I invite you to look at populations which take lots of welfare and don’t produce much except crime.
In the future, if you’re not trying to insult a group, I’m sure you could find a way to describe them without using “parasite society” to describe them. But your point is taken.
In one sense, we are all parasitic, in that we all “outsource” a large number of tasks from outside society. I’m not in the military, nor am I a police officer, for example.
One thing some people misunderstand about the Amish, and this might seem like a subtle point, is that the Amish, generally, don’t believe technology is sinful in and of itself. For the most part, they believe that their religious beliefs mandate cultural separation from the non-Amish world, and the anti-tech rules are just one very effective tool for accomplishing that. But each community sets its own regulations (Ordnung). So, for example, many Amish, if they need a medical device that runs on electricity, are allowed to run said device from a diesel generator, but not to hook into the electric grid.
When it comes to emergency rooms, Amish pay cash for that service. They either dig into family funds, or the local Amish congregation covers the medical bill. Many Amish communities have an actual medical insurance bill they pay to their local church which covers unexpected medical bills, while other communities pitch in informally. So while they are relying on non-Amish labor, they aren’t freeloading medically.
But you’re right. Pacifist semi-socialist rule-based communes can only exist at a certain level. When land gets too expensive, like in Europe, the Amish disappear. The last Amish congregation in Europe merged away into a more Mennonite community all the way back in 1937. They need cheap land, and they need to be exempt from public schooling to keep existing.
Perhaps the greatest service the outside world offers the Amish is that we offer a pressure valve. Technically, one doesn’t become Amish till adulthood, and one has a choice. If one chooses to join the Amish faith as an adult, leaving the church results in shunning. But if one chooses not to join in the first place, one can still have a relationship with one’s parents. About 80-90% of Amish youth decide to become Amish, and 10-20% decide not too. If the Amish couldn’t offload the least enthusiastic 10-20% of their children to the outside world in a relatively painless way, maintaining the strict Amish discipline would probably be harder. Many Amish believe that salvation is also available in (less perfect, but still heaven-worthy) non-Amish churches, especially conservative Mennonite churches. So you’re not even necessarily hellbound if you opt out.
Small-scale socially repressive movements like the Amish can work because those who can’t fit in can leave. Try it on a whole country like Russia, and things can get nasty fast, because people only go away if you kill them.
Yes, all you have to do is overcome your Amish upbringing and Amish education while still barely past being a child, with limited preparation for living in the outside world, in a narrow time window that is given to you so that the Amish can claim that people are “allowed to leave”.
Jiro,
I definitely didn’t mean to imply that Amish teens are exercising informed consent to the Amish lifestyle or anything like that. I’m sure people feel all sorts of coercion, and not getting the kids a high school diploma already means they’re likely to have trouble leaving.
I wasn’t trying to endorse the level of choice as adequate. I’m just saying that letting the 10-20% most dissatisfied people leave might be part of what keeps the Amish culture from facing internal rebellions.
I was trying to think out loud about how their leaving policies, limited though they are, might help the Amish continue to exist. I didn’t lose my religion till I was 22. Had I been Amish, it’s possible I would have joined up at 18 or 21, and then realized slightly later that I had to choose between playing along in a nearly unbearable environment (for an atheist) or never speaking to my family again. It’s a terrible thing that those are the options they give people. Understandable, but terrible. Apologies if I got too enthusiastic-sounding there for a minute.
There is a sense in which that’s true of all of us. I remember my sister commenting, when I was in high school, that although I liked writing poetry, becoming a Greenwich village poet just wasn’t one of the options I would consider, because my family background was academic.
Amish youth have imperfect information about the English world, but the same is true in the other direction. It’s possible to convert into the Amish community, but it almost never happens, at least in part because all of us are strongly socialized into patterns inconsistent with that life.
I don’t think the argument that Amish have limited options because they haven’t gone to high school holds up very well. Lots of Amish who haven’t gone to high school are successful as small scale entrepreneurs, have jobs in construction, do other successful middle level things. My guess is that, for many, perhaps most, jobs, growing up helping to run a farm or a big household is at least as good training as four years in an average high school.
You might consider, for instance, that almost all Amish are fluently bilingual.
A higher barrier would be the strangeness of English life to someone who has grown up Amish. I don’t know what the evidence is on how well the ones who leave do. Of course, they have the option of joining a Mennonite congregation, making it a smaller break with the familiar.
I agree on symbiote rather than parasite. And the same is true of all of us. I almost never grind my own flour, never grow my own wheat, so even if we bake our own bread, which we mostly do, we are dependent on the high level of division of labor in a modern society. I couldn’t make the computer this is being typed on.
The Amish get protection against foreign states from the U.S. government. I don’t think they get much protection against crime, given their usual unwillingness to participate in the criminal legal process. But most of what they get is simply the benefit of being able to trade what they produce for things other people made, many of which use technologies they are unwilling to use.
Interestingly, I had a very similar thought when reading Scott’s comment above (“I presented data from one weird community showing that it didn’t look like their criticisms were true. Some other people in the comments presented data from other weird communities showing the same thing. I don’t claim this is necessarily an accurate representation of what a future hypothetical worldwide polyamorous society would be like. For all I know maybe it would be exactly the opposite, the same way we expect a future hypothetical worldwide socialist society to have the exact opposite results as every time socialism has ever been tried in real life.”)
Having “tried something in real life” on a very small scale doesn’t necessarily tell us how it works on a large scale.
A lot of things are a matter of degrees. There are careers and social structures which are denied me because of my background, but fewer than for the Amish.
Furthermore, there’s a difference between being limited by circumstances and being limited on purpose. If a poor child can’t get medical attention because of poverty, that sucks, but you don’t blame his parents for being poor. If a child can’t get medical attention because his parents don’t believe in doctors, then you do blame his parents.
Since it seems like we’re in Round 2 of the “Amish Engineer” debate, does anyone have anything new to say since last time?
An excellent point.
Not only are the Amish hardly the only people to benefit from the division of labor, they’d probably do a much much better job of dealing with the effects of any significant harm to it than most of us would.
Would the Amish be screwed without someone else willing to be soldiers on their behalf? Maybe. But not as screwed as computer programmers would be without someone else willing to mine coal on their behalf… Does that make the programmer a parasite?
If computer programmers made their children take oaths not to become coal miners and shunned those who became coal miners after oath-taking age, but still depended on coal miners for their existence, I might consider them to be parasites on coal miners.
@Jiro:
I don’t follow that. You might think doing that was unfair to the children, but why does it make the parents parasites on the coal miners?
If anything, it’s the other way around. Agreeing not to compete with coal miners is a benefit to the coal miners, a cost to everyone else.
I stand by my thought experiment.
If the division of labor were to disappear tomorrow, the Amish would be a whole lot less fucked than most people would. It’d take some time for some warlord to gather enough strength and stability and motivation to conquer them. Whereas, everyone who didn’t know how to farm or build things would probably find themselves dead or enslaved to a warlord almost immediately.
Because they are using extreme measures to make sure their society doesn’t produce any coal miners, while still depending on the existence of coal miners.
Building on what Jiro said, this has parallels to necessary but historically very low status caste occupations like tanners and butchers in Buddhist countries, or corpse-handlers in India. The Amish are dependent on the host country for defense, but must, to say the least, look down on the very mode of social organization that makes this defense possible. This isn’t galling only because they have very little wealth, power, or extra-communal status.
That said, I do think the relationship is more fairly characterized as mutualistic or at least commensal rather than parasitic.
if the Amish population doubles every twenty years, then by 2668 AD the Amish will run out of land
And by the year 3408 AD, they will run out of galaxy. #amishIntelligenceThreat
Maybe David Friedman can answer this:
How do the Amish feel about paperclips?
As other people have mentioned, the Amish and other Plain People sects are doing quite well for themselves. Their present way of life clearly isn’t sustainable but that shouldn’t come as a surprise since you can’t sustain exponential growth forever.
But the reason the Amish are interesting here is that the Amish are a good counterpoint to an assumption you make: that a technological society must be a modern society. The Amish actually use a fair bit of modern technology, there are even Amish machine shops and factories, but take a great deal of care over which technologies they use so as not to disrupt their way of life. They’ve avoided the societal decay of Modernity while still enjoying many of its more useful technological fruits.
Of course there’s a problem. Modern slave morality is built on a foundation of resentiment and nothing inspires envy like seeing someone living a better life. I have no doubt that once the Amish population becomes too large to ignore we will see a movement to pull them back down into the crab bucket with the rest of us. And since they’re totally unarmed they have no way to effectively resist.
Are there many Amish inventors? If the technology they choose to use was mostly created by outsiders, then it’s not that amazing that they avoided the societal decay of Modernity.
That social decay is the price we pay not for using technology, but for being able to create it.
I don’t know about Amish inventors, but Mennonites (pacifists) invented the rifle.
I don’t think that is correct. Mennonite gunsmiths seem to have been involved in the production of early longrifles, but those were not the first rifles.
That’s going by a quick google–do you have sources to support your stronger claim?
And there is nothing very odd about pacifists making rifles, since the main purpose of rifles was hunting, not warfare.
But they swore if we gave them our weapons the wars of the tribes would cease!
One thing the Amish have going for their survival is that most of them appear not to vote (I see numbers like 15%). This is wise — if the Amish were enough to, say, tip Ohio or PA towards being reliably Republican in Presidential elections, they’d probably be targeted sooner.
The Amish population of OH today is similar to the 2016 margin between Trump and Hillary. They’ll still need a while to equal the margin between Obama and Romney — since 2000, OH has added 30,000 people, of which 20,000 are Amish.
Still, I suspect you’re right that their community will be destroyed in the end. Perhaps they will be punished for unsanctioned hate speech (i.e., literal belief in the Bible) and troubling lack of diversity, or perhaps some crueler society will simply consider them an easy target.
Had the Amish settled in South Africa, I imagine they’d be just about extinct by now, receiving some multiple of the farm murders that Afrikaners do. Had they been in Rhodesia, there’d be nothing left of them.
I’ve repeatedly wondered how much the tolerance for the Amish (and similar “para-Amish” groups) is “grandfathered in”. Specifically, I wonder what would happen if a religious community outside the Amish-Hutterite-Mennonite branch of “Anabaptist” tradition tried to form a similar community with an “Ordnung”, with equally “regressive” social norms and practices, would it be “tolerated” as much or as readily as the Amish? Why or why not?
This question comes to mind frequently at least partially because a common criticism I see levelled at the more Christian reactionaries is that since the core of what they’re asking for, society-wise, is already present for the Amish, why don’t they just become Amish? Besides missing the diffficulty (and rareness) of people actually successfully converting to Amish and integrating into the community, it misses the point that these are people for whom theolody and points of doctrine are things that matter; that, say, infant baptism versus adult baptism, have eternal consequences. Thus, the question of whether one can have, say, “Catholic Amish” — an Amish-style lifestyle with a Catholic church? Or Eastern Orthodox with a “poryádok”?
Also along those lines, I’d point out that one does not often hear of the Amish making efforts trying to convert the “English”. And there’s significant strains in American Protestantism that heavily emphasize the “Great Commission”, who consequently reject Amish insularity as failing to meet Christ’s command; “in the world, but not of it”, and all that. Rod Dreher with his “Benedict Option” repeatedly keeps correcting his major critics that he’s not talking about “heading for the hills” and “becoming Amish”, nor for political passivity (despite some other critics arguing that this is what it would actually take to protect the Faith from the corrosive forces of Modernity like he seeks), and even that level of “measured retreat” is condemned by hosts of other right-wing Christians as a cowardly and unacceptable retreat from the Christ-given duty to spread the “Good News” and save as many souls as possible.
As an aside on the inevitable end of tolerance for — and subsequent destruction of — the Amish, I think a big warning sign would be the overturning of Wisconsin v. Yoder, which many, citing newer precidents, have called ripe for being reversed.
You might want to look at the case of the Romany. I like to say that the biggest difference between them and the Amish is that the Amish have much better PR.
One the one hand, I think Romany system is dissolving. But it isn’t, so far as I can tell, due to the sort of outside pressure you describe. More the corrosive effect of a host society sufficiently tolerant to substantially reduce the barriers between Romany and Gadje society. The Romany seem to have done pretty well at keeping their kids out of school, at least from the description I have of the situation c. 1970–I’m not sure if things have changed since.
The Romany come a good deal closer to the “parasite” description, since although part of the way they live off the gadje is work for pay, part of it is gaming the welfare system, con games, and the like. But that doesn’t seem to have been the problem for maintaining their system.
The Romany are also much lower profile, less visible than the Amish. Most Americans hardly know they are here, and those who do know little about them.
There are some advantages to that approach. The Nazis tried to eliminate both the Jews and the Romany, but they seem to have been much less successful with the Romany–at very rough estimate, killing about a quarter of them.
Wikipedia estimates 150% death toll.
@DavidFriedman
I’m not sure how the Romany are illustrative, as they look to be equally “grandfathered in”. Whatever tolerance is extended to the traditional Romany lifestyle (which you note is dissolving), could others get the same? If a bunch of previously “white-bread Americans” started behaving like the Romany, complete with similar attitudes toward the “Gadje” and the exploitation of them, would they receive the same tolerance?
And you note that in their case, it’s less pressure and more the “draw” of the “host” society that drives the “defections” and assimilation. So pressure is unneeded in their case. But the Amish seem to have much better retention rates, better mechanisms agaist the “corrosive effect” of modernity. Which is why I expect that for them, that since the “carrot” is not working so well, the “stick” will come out. And schooling looks like the wedge. Note the hostility shown toward Amish child-rearing practices and attitudes to schooling by some in this very discussion thread.
And this leads back around to my question from a different angle. We note that the Amish have better resistance to “corrosive Modernity” than the Romany, which presumably has some underlying mechanism, possibly in different cultural practices. So this brings two questions:
1. What are the sort of practices a group could — must — engage in so as to resist, and persist and grow in the face of, an attractive, “corrosive” host society?
2. How much, to what degreee, would a group, not “grandfathered in” by having practiced such cultural forms for centuries, be allowed by the host society to practice such forms? Again, would a group of non-Amish truly be allowed to “go Amish” (that is, adopting Amish-style life modes or social mores without literally joining the existing Amish)?
I don’t think the Romany are grandfathered in in any useful sense. Most of America knows much less about them, and most of them are much more recent immigrants.
If another group started behaving that way and had all the same social institutions, norms, their own language, and the like, I don’t see that they would get any less tolerance than the Romany. The Romany managed not by getting any special favorable treatment but by not, in the U.S., getting special unfavorable treatment, or at least not nearly as much as in other places in the past.
The bit where the Amish get to opt out of Social Security on the grounds that they really, really promise to take care of their old folks, pretty much has to be grandfathered in.
The rest, judging by the performance of other religious cults / separatist movements, I’m pretty sure you can get away with so long as you don’t have the church elders sleeping with multiple teenage girls or amassing an arsenal of tacticool weaponry. And if you get away with it for a generation or so, you get to be a real religion.
When it comes to the Great Commission, there was a split between old-order Amish and what are now known as Beachy people a couple generations ago. I’ve known some Beachy from Holmes County, and they occupy a sort of intermediate zone between Amish and Mennonite. They can’t even agree on whether calling them Amish or not is accurate. But they are evangelistic in a way that regular Amish aren’t.
The Wikipedia article, as far as I can tell from personal experience, treats them as less Amish than they really are. Based on some younger ones I’ve talked to, I’d guess they’re heading towards mainstream evangelical American culture.
Is Amish land really particularly valuable? I don’t know a ton about real estate, but it seems to me that there is plenty of agriculturally-viable land out there for purchase for relatively reasonable prices. The issue seems to be the classic real estate concern of location, location, location. The cheap land won’t be near any major cities or maybe not even major roads. It won’t have broadband, it might not even have electricity. If you are Amish (or someone who wants to live like the Amish) this won’t bother you – if you are literally anyone else, it will.
Water is also probably a major issue that’s a lot more difficult to resolve. Water rights are highly contentious and the state is involved in a major way. Not sure exactly how the Amish overcome this one, but that would be my major concern.
In Indiana, they either just get a regular municipal water hook-up, or they use gas-powered machinery to pull water out of a well.
But if you want REALLY cheap land, it won’t have those features. It won’t be within range of a municipal water supply, and it might not even have enough groundwater to support wells.
(Perhaps this varies from place to place, but where I grew up in Oregon it was actually a big deal, particularly with smaller plots of land during the summer)
We don’t think about those things in my neck of the woods. We have sump pumps so our basements don’t overflow every time it rains. I guess I knew in theory that you might not be able to just dig a well and get water anywhere, but I hadn’t really thought through the logistics.
You need some startup capital and a fair bit of skill, but you can go to Montana or Idaho or Alaska and just disappear if you want to. Don’t practice ‘celestial marriage’ with 15 year old girls, build your own machine guns, put out pamphlets that say no one needs to pay taxes because flags have a yellow fringe on them, stick to your own land or that of your friends, mostly barter rather than sell for cash, and probably pay your local property taxes if nothing else and you should be left alone.
At least that’s the impression I’ve gotten from some people that have seriously considered doing so. Can’t say I know anyone that’s actually done it.
All the good land is probably already taken by plant and animal farmers that use modern methods, a traditional farmer or pastoralist would not be able to compete with them to bid for these lands, hence he or she would have to settle for low-value marginal lands.
They don’t. They use an idiosyncratic mix of modern and pre-modern technology.
ok its time for politics SSC edition
thoughts on Trump’s Saudi Arabia speech? I accept all comers, please try to limit disagreement replies to replies to this thread to like one or two per person.
You mean the one covered here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F148Pez1x8?
It struck me as dumb … and I’m a Trump fan.
The juxtaposition with Putin’s recent speech in China https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcLNCJDBWpU …. is rather telling.
Forgive me if this level of analysis is superficial relative to the SSC norm. On a first pass read—without being particularly critical or reading commentary on it—I liked the speech. As a piece of rhetoric, it hit all the right notes (that I knew to look for). Some things that jumped out to me:
– Founding an anti-extremism cultural center in an attempt to beat the terrorists with culture war is exactly the kind of solution vector I get excited about despite having no data on its effectiveness. I dearly hope they’re trying this for real and it’s not just a token effort.
– Nobody’s going to want to be pro-terrorist, so Trump’s speechwriter gets to rope them all in for the fight against terrorism. The main way to wriggle out of that (that I know of) is to focus on how the terrorists are only reacting to American aggression, but he’s covering that base by saying “We can’t make this call for you; our job here is just to sell you weapons to get the job done.”
– The speechwriter emphasizes that point by highlighting ways in which Middle Eastern nations have been contributing to the security effort. I have no context for these examples, not having done the research, but it sure sounds like everyone’s one big terrorist-hunting family.
– Lot of appeal to religion; my liberal side is screaming “colonial appropriation!” at the white guy flying over to the Middle East and lecturing about their religion, but maybe his audience interpreted it differently.
> “Starving terrorists of their territory, their funding, and the false allure of their craven ideology, will be the basis for defeating them.”
– How confident should we be that achieving these conditions A) is possible and B) would result in the elimination of terrorism?
– Does anyone know what happens if America flies out to the Middle East and calls out Iran in the middle of a summit of Middle Eastern leaders? We’re a salient threat, especially if Saudi Arabia is signing arms deals with us, but I can’t imagine everyone’s just going to turn on Iran either.
Got a kick out of the post-irony spectacle of attacking Iran for terrorism while praising Saudi royals in pretty-much-literally the next breath (and after talking about how the vast majority of terrorism victims are “Muslim” to boot).
I was similarly entertained when watching Reagan praising Thatcher while simultaneously criticizing the IRA. Well actually I wasn’t – not that old – but the analogy illustrates the same fallacy.
Sure, the IRA and Thatcher are all UK citizens and live on the British isles. They favor the NHS, drink Guinness rather than Coors, and have chips instead of french fries. But that doesn’t mean it’s “ironic” or somehow contradictory to support one and oppose the other.
Al Queda and the Saudi Royal Family are both crazy, Islamic, non-western cultures. But in reality multiple factions exist in the space of “crazy, Islamic, non-western”. Not all out-group members are the same.
See also: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/05/trump-administration-looksism-yes-saudis.html
Presumably the irony lies in the fact that Saudi royals are leading sponsors of Salafist terrorist movements worldwide, including Al Qaeda.
But in that passage he didn’t criticize al Queda, but Iran, which is Shia Muslim, while the majority of Islamic terrorists are Sunni Muslims.
What psmith and vV_Vv said, plus: It is entirely true that a overwhelming majority of terrorism victims are Muslims. However, a large portion of those victims are Shia Muslims killed by Sunni Muslims, which nearly none of the opposite (unless you count Assad, which you shouldn’t, since he’s a state actor fighting an insurrection). Furthermore, when people say Iran “exports terrorism” they’re mostly talking about support for Hezbollah, Iraqi Shia militia, and, lately, Houthi Yemeni. Right now, Hezbollah is spending all its time fighting Islamists in Syria, Iraqi Shia are mostly supporting the Iraqi state and its fight against ISIS, and the Houthi Yemeni are mostly just getting bombed into famine by Saudi (there is al Qaeda in Yemen, and I’m sure they’d be as delighted to kill Yemeni Shia as they are all other Shia, but geography has limited al Qaeda-Houthi conflict).
Pretending Iran is a source of “terrorism” in the way 99% of Americans understand the term has always been dishonest, but it’s been particularly dishonest in the last couple years.
Iran – the state actor rather than individual citizens dedicated to overthrowing it – tends to support Hezbollah and others characterized as terrorists.
In contrast, Saudi Arabia – the state actor rather than individual citizens dedicated to overthrowing it – mostly supports only it’s own security forces these days.
My only points are a) that it’s not ironic to support state actors that oppose terrorists while opposing state actors that support them and b) it’s nonsensical to conflate a government with some citizens who are dedicated to overthrowing that government.
I’m not a big fan of the Putin government, but that doesn’t mean it’s fair for me to criticize the Russian govt because of what Chechen separatists do. That’s true even if some rich Russians support them.
A.) The irony I’m talking about isn’t contradicted by either of your points. Whether or not the Saudi state “supports terrorism,” it is well-known to be the primary source for the theology that every terrorist enemy of America of the last 25 years has enspouced. It is equally well-known that the theology of Iran has no such association, and, to the contrary, that those who follow Twelver Shia are routinely targeted by those who follow militant Salafism/Wahhabism.
B.) The Saudis have been arming al Qaeda groups in Syria for years, and I’m sure there’s plenty more in that vein.
C.)
Sure, but I’m not laughing at a failure to criticize the Saudi government. I’m laughing because he went to Russia to talk about how homosexuals and Pussy Riot are the biggest threats to Ukrainian sovereignty in the world–which is funny whether or not you think the Russian government is supporting Donbass seperatists.
The Saudis have sponsored Sunni extremism by funding preachers for decades, and Trump seems uninclined to stop it.
@watsonbladd:
Are you defining “sunni extremism” as advocating terrorism, or as advocating a particular version of Sunni Islam?
@David Friedman
I believe Wahhabism/Salafism is what’s being referred to. Which has been getting a ton of funding from the Saudis, and from wiki
So yes, one can denounce Saudi-branded Islam without impugning all of Sunni Islam (though the Saudis are trying their damnedest to make them one in the same worldwide). Just because a bunch of people do doesn’t mean Wahhabists aren’t seriously fucked up.
See also this gem:
That’s pretty close to orthodox Sunni doctrine. Execution is supposed to be by stoning, not beheading, and the exception is a concubine, which was generally a slave but not any slave woman–a sort of semi-wife category. Intercourse with another man’s concubine would still be the crime of zina.
My point was not that Salafi doctrine was or wasn’t a special subset of Sunni doctrine, it was that what the Saudi’s encourage is Salafi Islam, which isn’t the same thing as terrorism, whether or not one prefers it to other variants of Islam.
What do you mean by “orthodox Sunni doctrine”? How many Sunni adulterers are actually stoned to death?
I think you’re being sarcastic in the first two paragraphs, but I’m sure many people would agree that criticising the IRA but not the British government at the time is hypocritical. I personally don’t, but it’s not a particularly unreasonable thing.
As other people have said, the irony is that the Saudis support the Sunni faction of “crazy Islamic culture”, and Iran support the Shia faction. Neither side looks great in the current conflicts, but the terrorists who threaten Western interests (ISIS is the most prominent one at the moment) are Sunni. Osama Bin Laden didn’t come from a wealthy Iranian family.
The whole thing is an interesting geopolitical tension that has basically come about through historical accident. The US supports the Saudis/Sunnis and opposes Iran/Shia as part of its enmity towards Russia (since that’s the side it inherited from the Cold War), but the actual terrorists that Americans care about are all Sunni/Saudi-backed. An interesting consequence of the tension is that it limits the amount Trump can cozy up to Russia (as he seems to want) and the Saudis (as is classic neo* policy) simultaneously without really shaking things up.
Consider the possibility that the divisions you are drawing (sunni vs shia) are not the relevant divisions.
By this I mean, there is no sunni or shia command and control hierarchy. There are various coherent groups that have these labels attached to them, and they don’t generally agree with each other. Al Qaeda and ISIS are at war with each other. Al Qaeda is at war with Saudi Barbaria.
Most of the Sunnis I know care more about laws against eating beef than any of this stuff (yes, Indian local issues). And the Sunnis in Thailand seem to care more about local determination of the Pattani area than anything else.
In much the same way, “Anglo” vs “Continental” was not a particularly relevant way to think about the IRA/Britain conflict.
Yes, certainly not all (or even many) Sunnis or Shia are aggressively political along that axis. I’m using Sunni/Shia in the same way people refer to the Protestant/Catholic sides in the Northern Ireland conflict. Just as it makes sense to talk about a coherent “Catholic side” despite there being multiple IRAs, it makes sense to talk about a “Sunni side” that encompasses multiple groups with a large amount of sharing of ideology, membership and resources, even if they sometimes fight each other.
My contention is that Shia vs Sunni is a lot closer to Anglo vs Continental than it is to Catholic vs Protestant.
There were multiple IRAs. But there were no “dear British please stay and rule Northern Ireland” factions of the IRA. Insofar as you might describe there being a catholic ideology in that conflict, “British stay here” was never part of that ideology.
My specific claim is that conflating the House of Saud and the various Sunni Islamic groups is like conflating the British government and the IRA simply because both purport to believe in Jesus.
Sunni vs Shia is much large in scale than Catholic vs Protestant, so one would expect more difference within each group. There were instances of infighting in each faction in the Troubles, but I think the categories are still very useful. Likewise with Sunni vs Shia. It doesn’t tell you everything, but it pretty reliably gives you the correct answer to questions like “there is a civil war in Yemen/Syria/wherever, which side are Saudis giving money to?”.
I’ll just leave this here.
I think everyone is over-interpreting what was bog-standard diplomatic patter and an arms deal that was substantively completed before the election (Obama took away a small piece at the last minute, which Trump re-added). I think this will continue throughout his trip; I’m already seeing Trump get credited for the easing of Palestinian construction in Area C which Bibi’s cabinet agreed on in October. Unless he throws up on someone this trip will probably be held up as proof of the long-sought pivot until the next shoe drops domestically.
I’m visiting Hong Kong with a friend who also frequents SSC between June 1st and June 6th.
We were hoping to be able to meet some fellow SSCers on the other side of the world. If anyone in the area is interested, drop me an email here: bingygraham@gmail.com
The pre-dreadnought began with the Royal Sovereign, which ushered in a period of relative stability in battleship design lasting from 1889 until 1905, when Dreadnought arrived on the scene. These combined all of the ongoing developments: barbette mounts, high freeboard, QF secondary batteries, the first steel armor, and improved machinery. The result was a ship of 14,000 tons, with 2 twin 13.5 in barbettes (open at the top, a feature rectified in the following class) and 10 6” QF guns in casemates, 18” belts, and a speed of 18 knots. The high freeboard was the most important advance. Turrets had to be mounted low down to avoid excessive topweight, which limited the ability of turrets to be fought in heavy seas. Even previous barbette ships, like the Admiral-class, had had relatively low freeboard, and had mounted their barbettes well above the deck. William White, the designer of the Royal Sovereigns, extended the deck up to the top of the barbettes. The ends of the hull were unarmored, except for the protective deck, but they were sufficient to vastly improve seakeeping.
As important as the technological revolution embodied in the class was the fiscal revolution that occurred at the same time. Instead of doling out money on a year-to-year basis, which had stretched out the completion of many ships to the better part of a decade, the British passed the Naval Defense Act of 1889, which paid for the seven Royal Sovereigns, HMS Hood, and two second-class battleships over the next four years. In practice, all of the Royal Sovereigns were completed within 5 years of the act’s passage, and rapid construction became the norm. It also marked the formal adoption of the Royal Navy’s Two-Power Standard, where they aimed to have a fleet equal to the next two most powerful navies combined.
HMS Hood was the result of naval politics. Certain members of the Admiralty still favored the turret, and forced the eighth first-class battleship to be built with turrets. Hood had a freeboard of 11’3”, as opposed to 19’6” of the Royal Sovereigns, and was quickly discovered to be a failure. The use of turrets was not repeated.
The follow-on class, the Majestics, introduced the last features which defined the pre-dreadnoughts, the 12” gun using smokeless powder, and the gun shield for the barbettes. Previous classes had open barbettes, but the arrival of QF and machine guns made this too hazardous. (The guns retracted somewhat to load, so most of the crew had at least some protection.) Instead an armored shield was placed over the top, which on first inspection resembles a turret. (Yes, this is confusing). The 12” gun of the Majestics was capable of 720 m/s muzzle velocity, as opposed to 615 m/s for the 13.5” gun of the Royal Sovereigns. William White, their designer, also added two more 6” guns, and a total of 9 ships were built, the most of any class of battleship. Their 12” mountings were improved in later units, adding all-around loading and increasing the rate of fire, and they were fitted with Harvey armor, and improved steel armor which allowed larger areas to be protected.
They were followed by the Canopus class, which were designed to serve on foreign stations, and whose draft was limited by the necessity to transit the Suez Canal and serve on Chinese rivers. They saw further improvements in armor with the Krup process. Over the years between the Royal Sovereign and the Canopus, main belt armor had seen a 40-50% improvement in resistance to penetration for a given thickness. This was important because the rise of rapid-fire guns forced designers to put medium protection over more and more of the ship’s side.
The follow-on London/Formidable class was based on the Majestics, but with Krupp belts. The Duncans, built alongside them, were slightly smaller, faster, and less heavily armored. They also introduced the 3” anti-torpedo boat gun, which was the ancestor of modern battleship secondary armament.
The rest of the world wasn’t sitting around doing nothing during this period. The USN had begun to rebuild in the mid-1880s, beginning with the USS Texas and USS Maine, which were broadly equivalent to the Admiral-class battleships. They were both obsolete by the time they were completed in 1895, and the change in American naval policy brought about by the Harrison administration.
The first result of this change were the three units of the Indiana-class. These were low-freeboard ships with turrets, although this may not have been a huge problem in their designed role as coastal-defense battleships. They pioneered the concept of the intermediate battery, with 8 8” guns in addition to the 13” guns and the 6” guns. This was because the US lacked the industrial capability to build QF guns (even of 6” caliber), and the 8” of the time could fire significantly faster than the 13”. They were badly overloaded, and not particularly successful. At normal displacements, their belts were entirely submerged, a fact made worse by unbalanced turrets, which pushed the belt down further when trained on a target. They were followed by the USS Iowa, which was designed for improved seagoing performance, but was armed with 12” guns and 4” QF guns instead of the 6” BLs of the Indianas.
They were followed by the Kearsage-class (the only US battleship not named after a state), which were a major departure. The US had a 5” QF gun in production, and to gain the space to mount it, the 8” guns had to be fitted on the centerline, where they could fire on either broadside. It was decided that instead of adopting a superfiring arrangement, they would be mounted directly on top of the 13” turrets, and fixed to them. In theory, this was a very good idea, as it kept the 8” gun free of the blast from the 13” gun, and the 8” fired two or three times as fast. In practice, it didn’t work brilliantly, as you might expect. The two sets of guns interfered with one another.
The following Illinois and Maine classes were conventional pre-dreadnoughts, with the introduction of the US 6” QF. However, the following Virginia-class saw the return of the superimposed turret. This was a result of the Spanish-American war, which was fought by the Indianas and the Iowa. During the Battle of Santiago, the 8” gun put in a good showing, and was restored to the next class of ship. Unfortunately, technological advances since 1890 meant that the 8” gun was not a good choice of weapons, particularly as the 12” gun could now fire almost as rapidly, which removed the advantages of the superimposed turret due to the concussion of the firing.
The Virginia-class could be seen as the predecessor of the semi-dreadnoughts, ships with guns bigger than 6” mounted as their secondary armaments. This was driven by improved armor which made the 6” gun less effective, improved power-loading gear increasing the rate of fire of bigger guns, and improved fire control reducing the effectiveness of the 6” guns at long range. British answered them with the King Edward VII-class, which carried four 9.2” guns in single wing turrets in addition to the 10 6” QFs. Eight of these were built, then followed by the two units of the Lord Nelson-class. The Lord Nelsons had 4 12” guns and 10 9.2” guns, getting rid of the 6” battery altogether. They were delayed by the diversion of their mountings to Dreadnought, and were counted as battleships under the two-power standard until just before WWI.
The US abandoned the superimposed turret for the Connecticut-class which followed the Virginias, and adopted a 7” gun in place of the 6”. While it may seem odd to have a 7” and an 8” on the same ship, there was a significant gap between the two in practical terms. The 7” was at the time the largest weapon that one man could handle the shells for, putting it in the same position as the 6” of WW2, with twice the rate of fire of the 8”. The Mississippi-class which followed the Connecticut, was smaller due to Congressional pressure, and both units were sold to Greece in 1914, allowing the US to build a third unit of the later Mississippi-class dreadnoughts. They were followed by the South Carolina-class dreadnoughts, which were ordered before the US learned of Dreadnought. Between 1907 and 1909, many of these US ships circumnavigated the globe as part of the Great White Fleet, demonstrating that the US was a naval power to be reckoned with, and improving the design of later generations of US dreadnoughts. Interestingly, only one more US battleship would conduct a circumnavigation, the USS Missouri in 1986.
I’ve not talked about countries outside the US and UK, due to sources and narrative. I may come back to them later, including looking at the Russo-Japanese war. Next time will probably be Survivability Part 2, as I didn’t say as much as I wanted. It’s also possible that I’ll move to a weekly schedule, as I’m getting a little bit burned out doing this at the rate I have been. Or do something different on the quarter-threads. I’m not going to make any promises.
I’m a volunteer tour guide at the USS Iowa in Los Angeles, and I enjoy explaining battleships so much that I’ve been doing it here for quite a while. This is my index of the current posts, updated so that I don’t have to ask Scott to put up a link when the previous index gets locked down. Please don’t post a reply to this index comment so I can keep it updated as new ones get published and the new posts are easy to find.
History:
General History of Battleships, Part 1 and Part 2
The Early Ironclads
Pre-Dreadnoughts
US Battleships in WW2
Rest-of-world Battleships in WW2
Battlecruisers
Battleships after WW2
The Destroyer that accidentally attacked a President
The South American Dreadnought Race
Dreadnoughts of the minor powers
Technical:
Fire Control
History of Fire Control
Armor, Part 1 and Part 2
Propulsion
Armament Part 1 and Part 2
Underwater protection
Secondary Armament, Part 1 and Part 2
Survivability and Damage Control Part 1
Misc:
Bibliography
Thoughts on tour guiding
Questions I get as a tour guide
Turret and barbette
The loss of HMS Victoria
Jutland Part 1
Jutland Part 2
Jutland Part 3
Next index, as this thread is about to be locked down.
Wikipedia is not super clear on this and your post here seems to assume a bit of knowledge; can you say more on the difference between barbettes and turrets / how one evolved into the other? (Also, I’d love more details on freeboard and how it matters.)
Details are in Armor Part 2:
“Turrets began to appear on warships, using an armor scheme similar to the central battery ships. The problem was that turrets were very heavy, and had to be mounted low in the ship. This lead to an alternative mounting for guns, the barbette. It was essentially an armored tube, which lead from a low-mounted armored deck up to the main deck. The gun was mounted within it, and retracted into the barbette for loading. It was then raised out and fired, with only the aimers coming above deck, where they were protected by armored hoods. However, the rise of the pre-dreadnought with quick-firing guns made this less tenable, and an armored hood was placed over the whole gun installation, which quickly (and confusingly) became known as a turret.”
I think some of the confusion is that most readers (myself included) are much more familiar with the more modern Dreadnought turret, which you imply is not a true turret, leaving a full description of the older “turret ship” style turret unwritten (i.e. your description seems to assume we know what a turret is, and need an explanation for why they are calling these newfangled barbette hoods “turrets”, instead of the other way around).
If I understand it correctly, the Dreadnought turret is basically an armored, rotating box for the gun and crew, mounted atop a barbette (armored tube) that extends down to the armor deck / “citadel” of the battleship containing the magazines and machine spaces.
Whereas the classic turret was a fully enclosed, rotating, armored cylinder for the gun (and all it’s machinery?) mounted directly atop or within the armored space of the ship?
So the modern turret solved the weight problem by allowing the armored citadel to be relatively deep inside the ship for stability, elevating only the gun itself and its armor up to a reasonable firing position by perching it atop a barbette, the barbette providing a well protected path to the magazine and machinery.
Is that close to right?
I haven’t given a full description of the old-style turret because I’m not certain enough of the details to do so. But that’s pretty much it, as I understand it.
(As an example of how confusing this can be, I can’t figure out what the US was doing even based on Friedman. We seem to have skipped the open-top barbette, but I’m not sure if it was in favor of turrets or barbettes with hoods. The French, for instance, apparently kept the turret up until the dreadnought era.)
I started to look more into this, and am even more confused than when I started out. Looking at plans, there’s not an obvious saving on armor on the Royal Sovereign arrangement vs Hood, and the numbers I have seem to bear this out. I’ve tried contemporary naval architecture manuals, which were unhelpful. Every book I’ve tried has said the same thing about the weight savings, but hasn’t explained why it happened. It looks like the turret on barbette is simply smaller and (initially) thinner than the previous turret.
Could it be an ammunition storage issue? The pictures I’ve seen of early turrets have them as very large relative to the guns they mount; I don’t know for sure what the extra space was used for, but ammunition seems like a fair bet. If there was a move from keeping large quantities of ammunition in the turret itself (as, for example, tanks do), to small turrets communicating with a magazine below the waterline via an armored tube, that would be both lighter and safer.
Could some of it be the switch from iron to increasingly advanced steels? E.g. HMS Thunderer had 14″ of iron turret armor in two plates, separated by a similar thickness of teak. Combine that with the mostly-iron guns, and that’s an immensely heavy turret compared to the size and firepower of its guns (compared to Dreadnought with maximum 11″ of steel armor on its turrets, on a ship twice the displacement).
Here’s a diagram of the Thunderer turrets. One thing interesting to me is it appears the whole thing is mounted on the armored deck below it, requiring a sufficiently strong deck to carry it. Whereas a barbette can transfer the load lower in the ship, putting more of the weight down low?
@Nornagest
That’s a good idea, but it’s not it. First, I’d be amazed if half a dozen different reference books had failed to mention it. Second, some turrets were definitely loaded externally. I have details on the turrets of Inflexible and Colossus, and both had fixed-angle loading with the rammer kept outside the turret.
@gbdub
I’m starting to come to the conclusion that this wole issue might be a red herring. Improved armor meant you had less weight to move about for reasonable protection, and improved machinery meant it was easier to move. So you can now mount the turret high enough to be clear of most sea effects. Barbette and turret were converging in the time period under discussion, and only the British didn’t realize this.
As for carrying the structure deeper into the ship, early barbettes, such as those on the Admirals, actually ended above the armored deck, with just an ammunition trunk down to the magazines below. This created an obvious vulnerability, and was fixed on the Royal Sovereigns.
My best reference on weapons and mountings was at home earlier, but I’ve looked it over, and despite its claims that the French and Russians kept the turret instead of using the barbette, I’m becoming more convinced that there was no practical difference by 1900, and quite possibly not by 1895. For one thing, there’s no visible difference between the French and Russian ships and British ships, at least so far as the turrets go. (Before you go looking, be advised that French ships of the time were kept afloat by ugliness, not watertightness.) For another, the idea that armor got thinner allowing it to be carried higher just makes too much sense. Looking over Hood vs the Royal Sovereigns, you have the same amount of armor at the same height, with the guns in a different place. The weight figures I have, though not directly comparable, don’t seem to leave a lot of room for this to be wrong, either.
Thanks for looking into it bean. Not having the books you do and just poking around Wikipedia, I did find it interesting that Iowa (BB-4) and the Russian Petropavlovsk class (both 1890s designs) are described as having “barbette” mounts for their main guns, despite having lighter than Hood but hardly trivial armor for their main gun houses (which externally are visually indistinguishable from cylindrical “turrets”. Seems the two had converged by then – really the only difference looks like whether or not the bottom of “turret” was elevated above the main armor belt and deck.
Thanks for the warning on the French ships. Really I find everything from the end of the age of sail to the late pre-dreads pretty ugly, especially anything with a secondary armament “casemate”, but that Charles Martel pseudo-class is a special kind of hideous.
@gbdub
Well, that makes things even more confusing, as I would have pegged both of those ships as pure turret ships under conventional terminology. I’m becoming increasingly sure that there was no distinction by 1895 at the latest, except possibly in some minor layout details that are of absolutely no relevance to anyone who isn’t studying turret design itself. In fact, I’d almost go farther, and say that the turret was the ultimate victor, and the barbette mount a brief aberration.
A full recounting of my research is likely to be tomorrow’s post, mostly because I don’t feel like writing in full, and because I want to get this all down before I forget.
Edit:
Hodges (The Big Gun) claims that the difference between the French and other systems was that more of the machinery was in the rotating part of the turret, and carried the guns much higher. The ammunition hoist tube, though was apparently smaller and lighter. This is the most sensible explanation yet, but it still seems like unnecessary pedantism to call what we have today ‘not really a turret’ because of it. The US, as I’ve pointed out, didn’t go through open barbettes on its guns, and moving the operating machinery down seems like a pretty obvious step.
If this armor diagram of Poltova is accurate, I’d say she has pretty distinct barbettes, in the dreadnought sense, for both the main and secondary gun turrets.
Heck, if we’re going to call a barbette “a non-rotating vertical cylinder of armor supporting and protecting a gun emplacement” I’d say even the Indiana class battleships have them, especially for the secondary battery, despite being low-freeboard “turret ships”. I’d need better drawings, but it definitely looks like you’ve got turrets atop armored cylinders that extend above the armor belt.
Looking at Hood vs. the other Royal Sovereigns I think you have a point when you say it’s the same armor at the same height. Move the guns from the middle of Hood’s turrets and plop them on top, make the turret armor non rotating, and build up your unarmored freeboard now that the guns don’t have to shoot through it, and you’re back to the Royal Sovereign!
Freeboard is important for seakeeping, and, when undamaged, for stability. When you have water coming on deck, it becomes much more difficult for people to work there. The faster you’re going, the more water comes on deck. Obviously, making the deck higher reduces this problem. But it takes weight, and particularly when the design standards say that all freeboard should be armored, you can’t have much of it.
Is ship design essentially a case of high freeboard, Good firepower, Good protection pick 2? Or is their something I don’t understand.
Pretty much. It’s basically the classic Firepower vs Protection vs Mobility engineering triangle. Good firepower and good protection are both heavy which leads to the ship having a deeper draft or lower freeboard, limiting it’s mobility/sea-worthiness.
Sort of. Freeboard forward is a direct driver of how much speed you can carry in rough seas. When water starts coming on deck, it makes the ship hard to run. One solution, adopted later, was to keep the forward section unarmored except for the protective deck. Yes, holes forward slow you down, but they’re fairly rare. High freeboard leads to better ability to use the guns you have. Some of the ships in question were ridiculously low-lying, and that means the gunners are dealing with spray. If you insist on armoring all of your freeboard, then it directly trades against everything.
First things first: this has been a fascinating series of posts. Thank you for making them.
I have a question about battleship tactics, brought on by a contradiction between the traditional concepts, and recommended practice in the game World of Warships. Obviously the game is not going to be a perfect simulation of real life, but I don’t know how far it diverges.
As I understand it the Holy Grail for an Admiral was to cross the T, because it meant that all of his ships could bring all of their main guns to bear on the enemy fleet, while the enemy could only make use of their forward turrets. By contrast in WoW turning your ship broadside on to an enemy battleship is asking for your ship to receive citadel penetrations. You generally want to avoid doing that if possible, and that is before getting to ships like the Dunkerque which has weak armor but excels at bouncing shots from the front.
The possible solutions to this that I can see:
1. World of Warships is simply an inaccurate model. After reading your posts I am somewhat less inclined to jump to this as an explanation because they confirm that the relevant details of the game’s model are reflections of reality (the ability for battleship armor to bounce battleship shells when angled is one example).
2. Crossing the T is fleet tactics; everyone is in lockstep formation. World of Warships has every player doing their own thing and only sometimes coordinating. Somehow these different situations swing the balance far enough to change what the correct tactics are, though I do not know how.
3. Crossing the T is a bad idea, but never got tested in combat enough for the flaws to be revealed.
4. Armor vs. Guns were balanced in such a way that it really was more important to get as many guns firing into the enemy as possible, even if it meant a far higher chance of your own ships going to the bottom.
Now, ignoring WoW, it seems to me that the basis of Crossing the T is flawed: many battleships could point their rear turrets pretty far forward. Far enough that unless the enemy line was very short they should be able to bring all or most of their turrets to bear on something in the enemy line. In doing this they would also be showing a far smaller cross section to the enemy fleet, resulting in far more misses and bounced shots.
It’s mostly 2 – crossing the T as a fleet basically lets your whole line of ships concentrate fire on a single enemy vessel as they come into range, before the following ships can return fire.
It did matter for single ship actions in age of sail broadside ships, where crossing the enemy’s stern meant you could pummel them with a full broadside with relative impunity, since those ships mounted only a couple guns fore and aft, and often smaller than their broadside guns.
With Dreadnought battleships, approaching head on would mask your rear turret, but it probably makes up for it by presenting a much smaller target. Additionally, incoming shells are more likely to strike the thick turret armor, before reading the armored deck whereas from broadside the whole center of the ship between the turrets can be struck more easily by plunging fire.
I don’t play WoWs, mostly because I’m afraid it will fall victim to the same factors that overpower the Soviets in WoT, but without the grounding in reality that the Soviet tanks have. I suspect it may be a combination of ‘all of the above’.
1. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had given guns somewhat better penetration and accuracy than is historically accurate (wargame players want things to blow up) or limited engagement range for whatever reason.
2. This makes some level of sense. ‘Follow me’ is easy to do, and that was really important before modern radio.
3. This is a distinct possibility. The flip side, though, is that because you’re dealing with a fleet, you have to keep in mind that your course also determines where you’re going. (Tautological, I know, but tactics is more than ‘how do I get the most guns firing right now with the greatest resistance to damage?’)
4. Given the low number of ships lost to gunfire, I don’t think this is necessarily the case. Some people did think so, most notably Beatty.
Training the rear turrets forward has some issues. Firing over the deck is annoying, and it also means you’re closing with the enemy in most cases. This can be a very bad thing if you don’t want to do so. High change of range rates means your fire control may not work well (WWI and earlier).
What reasons are Soviet tanks overpowered? Never played the game, but I’m always interested in “history vs game balance” type issues.
They have a large base of Russian players, and seem to be pandering to them. Or at least that’s the common theory. A lot of the favoritism is fairly subtle, like the fairly low cap on engagement range.
WoT Russian tanks tend to be noticeably better in at least two of armor, alpha damage and camouflage relative to most other nations’ tanks, and armor and alpha damage are two of the easier stats to exploit. As you move up the tech tree on any particular tank line, other nations will have okay tanks and bad tanks mixed in with maybe one or two good tanks. Russian tech trees are generally lots of good tanks with the occasional okay tank. Other nations’ tanks might have a higher skill ceiling, but Russian vehicles are noticeably more easy and fun to play all the way up the tech tree.
WoWs is actually a lot better at balance than WoT, mostly because the ship classes themselves are much better differentiated and balanced than the tank classes in WoT. As Bean guessed, though, they’ve artificially shortened the engagement ranges and fooled with the penetration values such that the experience probably does a very poor job as a simulator.
As I recall, ranges in WOW are very small compared to historical fights, and ships are a lot bigger and tougher than they should be.
Thank you (1) for doing this and (2) for providing this index so that I wouldn’t be wondering forever if I’d managed to track them all down. I’m definitely saving this for later fact-binging.