Open Thread 77.25

This is the (late) twice-weekly hidden open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit, the SSC Discord server, or the Cafe Chesscourt forum.

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1,209 Responses to Open Thread 77.25

  1. Deiseach says:

    Pasting this from the new thread, where (as I’ve been advised) it’s too culture-war to belong.

    This was triggered by a comment of bintchaos about reading Unsong (sic), and it occurred to me that using UNSONG is a good example of what the Sad Puppies idea was originally about (I’m not going to talk about the Rabids, since I have no contact on that side).

    UNSONG is a work that is very open to criticism of the kind Tor Books personnel indulged in, when it was rowing in on which of their authors were on the side of the angels in the whole Puppy saga.

    I get to read a lot of “But representation is easy, so if you’re not doing it, you must have an ulterior motive!” stuff when discussing fiction of the kind I prefer to read, so you lucky people get to share the kind of critiques I commonly see (I’m particularly thinking of a Chinese-American blogger who first said “there’s no reason not to include Asian characters in your fiction”, then spent about three pages on proper Chinese naming, how they would know if you took the easy way out of copying a name from a Chinese text so as to be sure of getting it right, and repeated at length how they would jump up and down on your bones if you made any one of the myriad mistakes a Westerner could make in naming a character, you should go out and pay a Chinese person to check your character’s names for you if you were going to write a Chinese character – even in fanfiction – and if you didn’t this showed that (a) you didn’t care about getting it right (b) you wanted POC to work for free for your entitled white ass, but yeah it was easy to include Chinese characters with Chinese names and if you didn’t, it was all down to racism):

    (a) The main romance in UNSONG is boring and heteronormative: cis het white straight people being cutesy. No inter-racial couples, no LGBT couples, no trans people. Conventional, safe, easy, and erasure of/denial of representation to those not fitting into the ‘normal’ socially-mandated bracket of romance and sexuality

    (b) The ‘heroes’ are all white. POC are villains (Malia Ngo, Dylan Alvarez) or are stuffed into the Magical Negro trope: Uncle Vihaan is the houseboy and even the Comet King just mopes about ineffectually after his failure to overthrow Hell and it’s his white wife Robin who provides the needed motivation for the eventual success of his mission, which relies on others (such as the narrator’s girlfriend, Ana, who has been driving the second side of the plot) to succeed

    (c) The trope of ’emotional woman who only wants love and to be validated by a man’ is in full flow – see Sarah

    (d) Saturation of Judaeo-Christian Western values; the ‘God’ of the UNSONG universe is the monotheistic God of American Christianity (and to a lesser extent, Judaism); it cannot even be referenced as Abrahamic faiths since Islam is ignored. Instead we get Jewish traditions and a Jewish world-system, backed up by Christian supporting characters such as Father Ellis and the Universalist Unitarians. The Comet King and Vihaan’s Hindu heritage and beliefs get no mention or impact on events at all, and we are to presuppose that that faith system is false by the rules of this universe

    (e) Everyone is able-bodied and neurodivergence, if mentioned at all, is in an appealing, convenient form as applies to the narrator (“oh I’m not ‘normal’, I have much too high an IQ to fit in with the mundanes and get on in the ordinary world”). Manic Pixie Dream Girl is narrowly averted with the girlfriend

    (f) Speaking of the girlfriend, this relationship is problematic for more than the cis-normative, heteronormative elements. The narrator is the classic Nice Guy who, despite several protestations of disinterest by Ana and indeed clear statements that she is not interested in him as a boyfriend and won’t go on a date with him, still regards her as the object of his romantic intentions and as attainable if he only persists in ignoring her clear ‘no’ and wears her down to accept a romantic relationship with him on his terms

    In sum: the lack of disabled, non-cis het, non-white, non-male as central character, non-Western centric characters and background to the universe is a shocking lack of representation and diversity, and fits in quite well with this reviewer’s summation of the whole Sad Puppies and the Hugos affair:

    The rightwing lobby are gunning for books to win the sci-fi awards that match their ideological project. They really don’t care about writing well…mostly male, very white, and overwhelmingly conservative. Unhappy with sci-fi’s growing diversity…At this point, we must be reminded that these are amazing times for science fiction and fantasy storytelling. … And the hack writers and sloppy sentences championed by the Sad Puppies deserve no place in that picture; for their politics, yes, but also their sheer shoddiness.

    You might say that UNSONG is more concerned with the story and theme than in checking off “is there a bi-racial wheelchair-using neurodivergent trans woman main character in a same-gender relationship?” on the list, but that is bad if you want to be a writer of SFF in these brave new days of diversity and representation!

    • The Nybbler says:

      The stuff from the anti-Puppy people is pure Narrative (in particular, “They really don’t care about writing well…mostly male, very white, and overwhelmingly conservative.”) There isn’t much point in addressing it on a factual level. And even Baen authors have been engaging in checkboxism to some extent recently; this does not make the anti-Puppy crowd like them any more. It’s not about the writing, either; it’s about the political views expressed firstly in the books, and secondly by the authors. The checkboxes are just a stick to beat them with, and often enough they do so when it doesn’t apply.

      For instance, I don’t think you’ll find anyone on the anti-Puppy side who likes the series started with “A Desert Called Peace”, despite the fact that it’s ostensibly about a nation full of people of color (Panama, essentially) resisting the forces of a colonialist Europe analog. (It also has many of the flaws the Puppies find in the anti-Puppy books, like being preachy message fiction)

      • random832 says:

        despite the fact that it’s ostensibly about a nation full of people of color (Panama, essentially) resisting the forces of a colonialist Europe analog.

        I can’t even imagine how the descriptions you just gave, and the descriptions in the following official summary, could possibly map to the same entities:

        They should have picked their enemies more carefully.

        Five centuries from now, on a remarkably Earthlike planet that is mankind’s sole colony in space, religious fanatics called the “Salafi Ikhwan” have murdered the uncle of former colonel Patrick Hennessey. That was their first mistake, because uncle was rich and Hennessey was rather a good colonel. But they also murdered Hennessey’s wife, Linda, and their three small children, and that was their worst mistake for she was the only restraint Hennessey had ever accepted.

        From the pile of rubble and the pillar of fire that mark the last resting place of Linda Hennessey and her children arises a new warrior—Carrera, scourge of the Salafis. He will forge an army of ruthless fanatics from the decrepit remains of failed state’s military. He will wage war across half a world. He will find those who killed his family. He will destroy them, and those who support them, utterly, completely, without restraint or remorse.

        Only when he is finished will there be peace: the peace of an empty wind as it blows across a desert strewn with the bones of Carrera’s enemies.

        • The Nybbler says:

          Carrera forms a militia (The Legion) in Balboa (Panama), and uses that to wage war against the Muslims (Salafis). He eventually uses the militia to take over Balboa (in all but name) from its corrupt Tauran(European)-influenced government, and the Taurans attempt to re-assert their control.

          The description for _Come and Take Them_ includes that part:

          http://www.baen.com/come-and-take-them.html

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I read the description, but I have not read this book.

            Are you trying to say it’s the same kind of thing the Puppies complain about? That it’s just a war story, but with lasers, similar to how the anti-Puppy books are just stories about social justice stuff like gay romance, but they’re gays romancing in space?

          • Nornagest says:

            it’s just a war story, but with lasers

            That was my main issue with the Honor Harrington books. They’re competently written as far as that goes, but after the first couple I had a hard time justifying them to myself when I could raid my dad’s library for Patrick O’Brien, get basically the same content, and actually learn something about Napoleonic-era naval warfare rather than a weird sci-fi pastiche of it.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @Conrad Honcho

            I’m just saying that it pushes all the right buttons in terms of representation and even anti-colonialism. But since its politics are Wrong, the anti-Puppies hate it anyway; the representation stuff is an excuse, not a reason. It’s not about representation of PoC or LGBT (which Kratman also includes) or anything like that; it’s about politics.

            (I will grant that the politics apparently promoted in the books is rather disgusting, but that’s not the point.).

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @Nornagest

            Patrick O’Brien

            I’ve been wanting to read those ever since seeing Master and Commander. Do you recommend them?

            @The Nybbler

            In what way are the politics wrong from the anti-Puppy side? Anti-colonialism, and the bad guys are religious extremists…what makes it “problematic?”

          • bean says:

            I’ve been wanting to read those ever since seeing Master and Commander. Do you recommend them?

            I’ve read the first three. They’re pretty good, if you like naval warfare in that era. (Not enough steel to be quite up my alley.) I’d suggest giving them a try.

            In what way are the politics wrong from the anti-Puppy side? Anti-colonialism, and the bad guys are religious extremists…what makes it “problematic?”

            The fact that the author is the next thing to a neo-Nazi, and the religious extremists are thinly-disguised Muslims.

          • Nornagest says:

            I’ve been wanting to read those ever since seeing Master and Commander. Do you recommend them?

            I do, yeah. Strong writing, entertaining naval battles, historically accurate as far as I can tell as a non-specialist in the period.

            Master and Commander the movie amalgamates aspects of the first three or so books, but after that you’ll start getting into fresh territory. You don’t really start getting to know Maturin (the ship’s doctor) until book 4 or 5, and he’s a favorite character for a lot of fans of the series, so if you decide to give it a go and aren’t immediately turned off I’d suggest going at least that far.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @Conrad Honcho

            Carrera is intensely nationalist (never mind that Balboa is only his adopted nation). Also militaristic, authoritarian, and brutal as a matter of policy. (if you’re thinking “fascist”, yes.) He commits and excuses war crimes (even by the standards he himself lays out in some of the earlier books) including torture and the abuse and murder of prisoners. While he has both homosexual and female soldiers, as I recall he has disdain for both — the latter for their fighting ability and the former for being homosexual.

          • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

            @Conrad Honcho,

            In what way are the politics wrong from the anti-Puppy side? Anti-colonialism, and the bad guys are religious extremists…what makes it “problematic?”

            They’re the wrong kind of religious extremists.

            The kind of religious extremists who blow themselves up along with a bunch of children are misunderstood victims of society who need to be protected and cherished. The kind of religious extremists who don’t want to bake gay cakes, on the other hand, are implacable monsters who must be defeated at any cost.

            Clearly the author has gotten things backwards.

            The fact that the author is the next thing to a neo-Nazi, and the religious extremists are thinly-disguised Muslims.

            Case in point. Salafism is a religion of peace.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Ah, I see. Now I kind of want to read a story about brutally fascistic homosexuals determined to murder and torture political dissidents who won’t bake them gay wedding cakes in space.

          • Do you recommend them?

            One of them has, on the back, the following blurb (by memory so not verbatim):

            “C.S. Forester’s Hornblower books have given great pleasure to many people, myself among them. These are so much better that it is almost unfair to compare them.” Mary Renault.

            That’s the blurb I would want if I had written in that genre.

            They are very good.

      • bean says:

        That might have something to do with Kratman being completely insane. Exhibit A is Watch on the Rhine, which is more than just ‘Problematic’.

    • Nornagest says:

      I’m not sure where you’re going with this.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        I think it’s done in the theme of Those Modern Pathologies. You can deconstruct just about anything to make it “problematic,” and Deiseach does so with a work we’ve probably all read by an author I assume we all like (as both human being and author).

        That said, Deiseach should have commented on Sarah literally being an object owned by the protagonist. That’s pretty darn problematic right there.

    • Brad says:

      You might say that UNSONG is more concerned with the story and theme than in checking off “is there a bi-racial wheelchair-using neurodivergent trans woman main character in a same-gender relationship?” on the list, but that is bad if you want to be a writer of SFF in these brave new days of diversity and representation!

      I never really got deeply into the puppy thing, but I did read some of the early posts by Larry Correia. Maybe it was later revised, but at least early on he wasn’t solely or maybe even mainly focused on this kind of representation / anti-representation or other culture war stuff. Rather, he was arguing, basically, that it was unfair that pulpy science fiction didn’t get Hugos.

      That I can’t get behind at all. I think awards and publishers should push the industry towards publishing better written novels. Things like better dialog, stronger prose in general, multidimensional characters, copy edited books (including ebooks), plot arcs that aren’t jarring, and no unintentional continuity or consistency problems. These should be the bread and butter of any novelist, not just the concern of the so-called literary fiction genre.

      • Nornagest says:

        Maybe you think of pulp as a different thing than I do, but by my lights there’s pulp SF out there that meets all your criteria. Charles Stross seems to be the only guy that gets Hugo nominations for it in the modern day (although you could argue for John Scalzi too).

        • Brad says:

          I meant pulp in the cheap, mass produced, and aimed at the lowest common denominator sense. Not the collection of tropes and themes that grew out of the early days of pulp sci-fi magazines. There’s no reason those tropes and themes can’t be present in an arbitrarily high quality novel.

          • John Schilling says:

            There’s no reason those tropes and themes can’t be present in an arbitrarily high quality novel.

            They are. Seveneves. Skin Game. The Martian. The Expanse series. But if your standards are both arbitrary and subjective, there’s always an excuse to shut them out, and tell anyone who complains that their prose isn’t “strong” enough.

            Seriously, are you going to tell me that the dialog, prose, character dimensionality, etc, in “Skin Game” were so abysmally bad that “No Award” was legitimately preferable?

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            I meant pulp in the cheap, mass produced, and aimed at the lowest common denominator sense. Not the collection of tropes and themes that grew out of the early days of pulp sci-fi magazines. There’s no reason those tropes and themes can’t be present in an arbitrarily high quality novel.

            That was a large part of Correia’s point. You managed to miss that?

      • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

        I might be projecting my own bugbears onto the debate, but I remember there also being a big issue where stories with excellent science fiction world-building were being sidelined in favor of magical realist character pieces with token science fiction elements.

        In SF&F characters and plot are ultimately vehicles so that the audience can experience alien worlds. It’s hard to argue that JRR Tolkien or Frank Herbert were masters of conveying emotion but they were unmatched when it came to realizing fantastic universes. And you don’t need to write a door-stopper to do that: I’ve read short stories which present more compelling worlds than most full-length novels.

        A “better written novel” which abandons that core might be a good read but it’s not science fiction. It’s an aping of science fiction.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          Either that, or if you’re going to do politics in your sci-fi, at least use it to explore different options. Was Heinlein a fascist (Starship Troopers), a commie (Stranger in a Strange Land), or a libertarian (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress)? No, he was a really creative guy imaging lots of different ways to live. Well, for misogynists, anyway 😉

          • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

            Agreed.

            It’s not even about some abstract sense of political balance but just about verisimilitude. If you can’t convincingly depict both sides of a conflict you should throw your manuscript into the fire then go pick a new conflict where you can. Cardboard villains are distracting and obnoxious.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @Nabil ad Dajjal

            Yes, the best villains are sympathetic. And not sympathetic in the “oh, he was bullied as a child and that’s why he’s mean now” way, but in the “I completely get where this guy is coming from and in his place might do the same thing” way. For instance, Magneto in the X-Men comics.

        • Brad says:

          I have mixed feelings about what you are saying in terms of world-building vs everything else. I go back and forth.

          But the issue I’m pointing to is at a lower level. I don’t think anyone can claim that The Lord of the Rings trilogy was poorly written and showed that JRR Tolkien hadn’t mastered the craft of writing. He spent more than a decade on them and brought to bear on them his immense knowledge of languages, western mythology, and epic poetry. People get PhD’s analyzing it.

          Here’s a couple of paragraphs from Larry’s original Sad Puppy post:

          Monster Hunter Legion is eligible… I’m just pointing that out. The fact that I write unabashed pulp action that isn’t heavy handed message fic annoys the literati to no end. When I got nominated for the Campbell, the literati message-fic crowd had a conniption fit. A European snob reviewer actually wrote “If Larry Correia wins the Campbell, it will END WRITING FOREVER.” (I’ve since won the prestigious Audie and got nominated for the Julia Verlanger for best fantasy novel IN FRANCE, and all writing still hasn’t been ended, so I must still need a Hugo nomination).

          $60! Sure, Correia, I love sticking it to the man, and having Monster Hunter Legion get nominated for best novel would make literati snob’s heads explode, but I don’t know if exploding English professor’s heads is worth sixty whole dollars! That would buy several pounds of little chocolate doughnuts or half a box of 9mm!

          I don’t think it makes sense to put the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford on the same side of the balance as the guy who wrote this.

          • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

            I have never read anything by Larry Correia and probably never will. Now he’s almost certainly not a peer of Tolkien’s but that’s not a terribly fair comparison.

            Comparing a titan of the genre to some schmuck is never good form unless the schmuck invites the comparison. Most any litfic writer would look like a bug compared to Joyce but we don’t go around trashing them for it. We trash them for being boring and pretentious instead.

            I don’t know what an apples-to-apples comparison for Correia would be. As I said I’ve never read anything of his. But it’s not Tolkien.

          • Brad says:

            Not to engage in some pointless back and forth over who said what, but you brought up Tolkien. I was responding to that.

            As it relates to this discussion, the point I was trying to make is that that the awards should go to the Tolkiens, if any are around, or if not then the closest you can find. Not to the literary equivalent of the popcorn disaster flicks.

            If we are debating between the master craftsman that painstakingly, frame by frame, built a visually stunning martial arts masterpiece or a moving character driven movie with a screenplay by a top contemporary playwright, then we are debating on the right level. We might not come to an agreement, but either way it comes out is really okay.

          • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

            I agree completely with the following.

            As it relates to this discussion, the point I was trying to make is that that the awards should go to the Tolkiens, if any are around, or if not then the closest you can find. Not to the literary equivalent of the popcorn disaster flicks.

            My point wasn’t that ‘Thud and Blunder’ wasn’t getting the respect it deserves, so much that the LitFic snobs who set themselves up in opposition to it also tend to see world-building as a waste of time.

            You can easily find New Wave types trashing Tolkien and the rest of the SF&F pantheon with the same sort of criticisms which they employ against pulp writers. The characterization is weak, the plot is escapist and the message is conservative.

            I don’t care if someone wants to write boring literary or message fiction: I can just ignore it and read better works. But I don’t have that option when those authors try to prevent the fiction I do like from being published at all.

          • rlms says:

            @Nabil ad Dajjal
            Why is criticising boring literary fiction valid, but criticising the fiction you like “trying to prevent it from being published at all”? I’m not aware of anyone proposing Tolkien be banned for not being literary and left-wing enough. I’m also not aware of anyone doing more plausible things like proposing boycotts of Tolkien’s publishers.

          • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

            @rlms,

            Mostly just seeing the writing on the wall. These guys have an MO and it’s not new.

            Yesterday it was blocking awards, today it’s censors sensitivity readers at publishing houses, tomorrow it’s outright bans.

            It’s fine to vocally not enjoy a genre. It’s fine to enter a genre community. But if you enter a genre community that you vocally don’t enjoy it’s also fine to question your motives.

          • Nornagest says:

            @Nabil ad Dajjal —

            You’re talking like you’ve seen this before. Where?

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            Why is criticising boring literary fiction valid, but criticising the fiction you like “trying to prevent it from being published at all”? I’m not aware of anyone proposing Tolkien be banned for not being literary and left-wing enough. I’m also not aware of anyone doing more plausible things like proposing boycotts of Tolkien’s publishers.

            I’d say it is a problem if the same people are the ones in charge of handing out the awards of said type of fiction

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            Come to think of it, there’s probably a place for a literary award based on the sole criterion “How much fun will you have reading this book?” I wouldn’t favor repurposing an existing award, though.

          • rlms says:

            @Whatever Happened To Anonymous
            Sure, “it” is an object-level problem if people handing out awards give them to books you don’t like. It’s not “trying to prevent them from being published”, except in the vague sense that the market responds to demand.

            @Nabil ad Dajjal
            “tomorrow it’s outright bans”?
            Because Stalin got his start making snobbish comments about sci-fi?

          • Matt M says:

            Come to think of it, there’s probably a place for a literary award based on the sole criterion “How much fun will you have reading this book?” I wouldn’t favor repurposing an existing award, though.

            The award for writing books like this is piles of money.

          • Brad says:

            Yes, exactly. Which is why I never got that part of the puppy argument. If you are going to point at sales and say that should drive awards then there’s no point in awards in the first place. You can have the Benjamin Franklin award.

          • You’re talking like you’ve seen this before. Where?

            I’m not Nabil and I haven’t read any of Correia’s books so don’t know whether he is a good writer with unfashionable politics or a poor writer with unfashionable politics.

            But one obvious past case is Kipling. He was a brilliant short story writer, wrote one very fine novel and produced a large volume of poetry that people read for the pleasure of it, not because they are assigned to read it. But generations of people were told that he wasn’t worth reading because he was an imperialist (true), racist (false), … . That did little harm to Kipling but deprived a lot of potential readers of a lot of good reading.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            @RLMS
            Did you miss the part about “These authors have no place in the future of the genre we are creating. For their politics, yes, but also…” in the quote Herbert offered before the thread was moved?

            You can “but also” all you like about supposed lack of technical craft and literary merit. The takeaway there is “These authors have no place in the future of the genre we are creating because of their politics”. And the people championing those views include senior editorial staff at multiple SFF publishing houses.

            Honestly, while I agree with most of the Sad Puppies’ underlying points, I think the entire effort was misguided and poorly thought out from the get-go. At root I tend to agree most with Eric Flint’s take on the whole affair, excepting that I don’t think nearly so much of “literary” traits and in fact think that in many cases they make a book worse, not better.

            At the end of the day, the best thing to do is to accept that the Hugo stopped being representative of the voice of SFF fandom decades ago in large part because “SFF Fandom” has grown explosively, and that’s a win. Attempting to wrest control from the clique that controls it is going to be decried as hostile entryism and trigger all kinds of tribalistic responses and is doomed to failure or at best a pyrrhic victory.

            When I got into SFF as a kid I looked for Hugo awards as a guide to my reading habits. I learned I could no longer do so for Hugos awarded after some hard to define point in the mid 90s, so I stopped caring about or paying attention to the Hugos. ]

            They now represent a very specific subset of fandom (and no, not even SFF -readers-), and that’s ok. That information just needs to get out there and penetrate.

          • rlms says:

            @Trofim_Lysenko
            I have no dog in this fight; I don’t read enough sci-fi to have strong opinions about what kind I would like produce and how I would like it to be viewed. My point is that Nabil ad Dajjal’s idea that people are “trying to prevent [sci-fi they like] from being published at all” is silly. Despite their claims to the contrary, the chance of government bans on pulp sci-fi (or whatever is being discussed) is approximately zero. Publishing houses/award committees not behaving how you want isn’t censorship, it’s normal and healthy functioning of the market in response to consumer demand.

          • AnonYEmous says:

            Publishing houses/award committees not behaving how you want isn’t censorship, it’s normal and healthy functioning of the market in response to consumer demand.

            so normally there would be a bit where we wrangled about whether or not publishing houses are acting in favor of the market or in favor of their ideological interests

            but hold the phone: award committees? The market? What? I mean, I guess there is some oblique interest, but let’s be real here: what is the pressing market demand on award committees?

            oh yeah, and to Trofim:

            I agree with this to an extent. Problem is, it also seems like a lot of the time social justicians take over prestigious institutions and use them for a while. Eventually word gets out, but it’s a real pain in the ass and I understand people who want to fight it.

            Honestly, what annoys me the most is that Puppies are just called “Racist, sexist” and so forth. It does feel like in certain spaces dialogue becomes impossible for these reasons.

          • bintchaos says:

            @AnonYEmous
            Did you even read a word I said about the sad puppies hijacking the awards with ballot stacking?

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            @RLMS
            The “you” was misplaced there, and was aimed at the person I was quoting. I would’ve said “One can talk about lack of literary merit and technical prowess…” but that sounds awfully stuffy.

            and the funny thing is that one of the common complaints actually IS that the big publishers are so ideologically hidebound that they are neglecting a large volume of potential customers and SFF fans, fans that are increasingly turning to indie/non-traditional publishers precisely because the old guard gatekeepers would rather burn printed genre fiction down than let in more than a token few of the “wrong sort” of authors.

            I’m not sure they’re entirely correct, but that’s the claim.

          • Matt M says:

            but let’s be real here: what is the pressing market demand on award committees?

            If the Oscar for Best Picture is awarded to Paul Blart: Mall Cop, the award, and everyone associated with it loses prestige (which is all that really matters for awards, I suppose).

            That’s obviously an extreme case, but I do think that there’s at least a LITTLE bit of a motivation for award committees to not award solely on the basis of politics…

          • AnonYEmous says:

            Did you even read a word I said about the sad puppies hijacking the awards with ballot stacking?

            I specifically didn’t reply to that comment after considering doing so

            Seriously, why did you respond to me in this thread?

          • bintchaos says:

            @AnonYEmous
            Because you are mounting an Ann Coulter defense– she once famously said that some abortion clinic terrorist was driven to do murder because liberals wouldn’t listen to conservatives on abortion.
            The puppies used dirty tricks to hijack the noms.
            This is the problem– theres no compromise, its Sinner v Sinner TfT– dems are LEARNING conservative game moves. But Sinner v Sinner is a CAT game– no one wins.
            That is empirical truth. There are no “alternative facts” here.
            I asked a conservative friend what conservatives want from liberals in a climate discussion. He said, we want respect even when we are wrong.
            How do I respect someone that rejects science and empirical evidence?
            Its too much work.
            And it accomplishes nothing.

          • Aapje says:

            In general, I think that it is better to create your own alternatives if you don’t like what exists. So the Puppies could simply have created their Puppies Award.

            On the other hand, one of the main MOs of SJ is to hijack established words, organizations, awards, etc. This exploits the assumption by people that things are still mostly the same today as they were in the past, creates a chaotic environment that can be exploited through power plays, etc. It can be argued that fighting this by counter power plays is beneficial, as it reduces the value of doing this and makes it clear to people that the appropriation has happened, so they become aware that they have to update their beliefs.

            @bintchaos

            I asked a conservative friend what conservatives want from liberals in a climate discussion. He said, we want respect even when we are wrong.
            How do I respect someone that rejects science and empirical evidence?

            One way is not to do what you just did: take a topic where a small majority of conservatives and a decent minority of progressives reject the scientific consensus and treat this as a strict dichotomy, where all progressives are right on all the science and all conservatives are wrong on all the science.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @AnonYEmous

            The importance of the Hugo is pretty much sentimental; many of the current (adult) readers and writers of SF grew up reading yesterday’s Hugo winners, and for a long time it was _THE_ fan award. Now… well, it’s unlikely something with the politics of _The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress_ could get an award, and especially not if the author was the same as the author of _Starship Troopers_ (which also won).

            @Matt M

            Not sure if you’re referring to Monster Hunter Nation when you suggest “Mall Cop” getting an Oscar. It wouldn’t be completely unfair. But they have already done the equivalent: the 2013 Hugo for Best Novel went to Scalzi’s _Redshirts_.

            But the biggest blow to the Hugo’s credibility isn’t _Redshirts_ or “The Water That Falls On You From Nowhere”. It’s the no-awarding of Toni Weisskopf, longtime editor at Baen.

          • AnonYEmous says:

            He said, we want respect even when we are wrong.

            Let’s leave aside, for the moment, that the disrespectful attitude I see coming from left-leaners causes them to miss that they are the ones who are wrong. What’s wrong with giving someone respect, even if they’re wrong?

            it accomplishes nothing.

            I can’t recall what the psychological effect for this is called, but it’s known that disagreeing with someone can strengthen their belief in something, especially if their ego feels threatened. And it’s obvious why: if you tell someone that he’s an idiot if he believes X, then if he changes his mind he’s obviously an idiot and will have lost status. On the other hand, if you tell him that you don’t care and to think it over, he might actually do that.

            In other words:

            How do I respect someone that rejects science and empirical evidence? Its too much work.

            Yeah, convincing people is a lot of work. If you don’t want to enact that labor, fine. But let’s be real: this is what you’re doing. And you’re being a jerk to boot.

            And to Nybbler: I guess. But like Aapje said, they do this shit all the time. To be fair, I hear the puppies have mostly given up and focused on Dragoncon, which also has more than enough voters to resist any type of ~~slatery~~.

          • bintchaos says:

            I can’t respect science denialism.
            It’s not possible.
            I thought that in my cohort of IQ and educational attainment science and reality would prevail.
            Why isnt that happening?
            alsotoo: What is the technical definition of a jerk? someone that is interested in real world solutions to real world problems?
            And its called backfire effect— Brendan Nyhan only observed this in conservatives.

          • bintchaos says:

            Alsoalsotoo:
            In an Iterated TfT respect gets you nothing as payoff.
            Ditto moral suasion.

          • bean says:

            I can’t respect science denialism.
            It’s not possible.
            I thought that in my cohort of IQ and educational attainment science and reality would prevail.
            Why isnt that happening?

            There is a class of issues where there is enough evidence on both sides to make strong cases, without one side being obviously correct. We often call these ‘political’. I suppose you’ve just never run into smart people who are on the other side of one of these before. Learn that you don’t have a perfect grasp of reality, either, and apply charity to the other side.
            (Related thought. It seems a lot harder to grow up in a conservative bubble and be the kind of person who winds up here than it is for someone in a liberal bubble. Bintchaos is the latest in a long line of people from liberal bubbles who have no idea how to deal with intelligent conservatives, because they didn’t know such creatures existed. I’m not trying to score political points here, and we definitely have liberals who are unbubbled. I’ve met quite a few people from conservative bubbles, but they don’t wind up here.)

          • bintchaos says:

            Forgive my french (et je parle trés bien la français) but that is BS.
            There simply isnt evidence on both sides. not for science denaliasm, not for creationism, not for market competitivity in either academe or scifi in the 21st century.
            I’ve “run into” plenty of “smart people” (dr hsu is first on my list).

            Bintchaos is the latest in a long line of people from liberal bubbles who have no idea how to deal with intelligent conservatives, because they didn’t know such creatures existed.

            Dude! I’m from a conservative bubble. Guns, dogs and a graduated set of Welsh ponies growing up (sectionA to SectionC). My ancestry is land holders and factory owners. I’ve ridden with the Hunt.
            So dont mansplain me on conservatism.
            Or Islam…or socio-physics or EGT.

          • AnonYEmous says:

            I can’t respect science denialism.
            It’s not possible.

            What is the technical definition of a jerk? someone that is interested in real world solutions to real world problems?

            But given that you have acknowledged that the backfire effect functions with conservatives… it sure seems like you aren’t interested in the real-world solution to the problem of science denialism that you brought up. And again, this is fine. But you can’t claim to not be a jerk on this basis. You’re not getting anything out of this and you’re being a jerk about it too.

            Alsoalsotoo:
            In an Iterated TfT respect gets you nothing as payoff.
            Ditto moral suasion.

            I don’t know all of the technical game theory terms, but I understand the concept very well. So let me tell you something very clearly: this is exactly what the other side says. They argue persuasively that only one side abides by certain standards; Hillary Clinton was friends with a KKK member and can be found making off-color racial jokes, but she is fine, whereas Trump is a racist supernazi. Obama was caught on a hot mic asking Putin to cooperate until he got re-elected, whereas Trump is a servant of Putin and thus should be impeached. Do I really need to go on? So you can’t really pin the blame on one political side and call it a day. Maybe if you showed a bit more respect you’d get a bit more in return.

          • bintchaos says:

            They argue persuasively that only one side abides by certain standards; Hillary Clinton was friends with a KKK member and can be found making off-color racial jokes, but she is fine, whereas Trump is a racist supernazi. Obama was caught on a hot mic asking Putin to cooperate until he got re-elected, whereas Trump is a servant of Putin and thus should be impeached.

            Trump should be impeached simply because he’s incompetent.
            But you are arguing that its just TfT.
            You guys are smart enough to know the truth.
            But saying that loses you the Game.

          • bean says:

            There simply isnt evidence on both sides. not for science denaliasm, not for creationism, not for market competitivity in either academe or scifi in the 21st century.
            I’ve “run into” plenty of “smart people” (dr hsu is first on my list).

            I figured it wouldn’t work, but I had to try. To put it in simpler terms, the answer to your questions about lack of evidence is that the evidence is there, but you don’t see it.

            Dude! I’m from a conservative bubble. Guns, dogs and a graduated set of Welsh ponies growing up (sectionA to SectionC). My ancestry is land holders and factory owners. I’ve ridden with the Hunt.

            Assuming this is true, then I guess it’s convert’s zeal. I will say that you don’t understand conservatism, regardless of what your ancestors may have owned.
            (Also, if the email links are the reason you’re embedding replies, then stop using them. Open a browser window, and use the reply button to the relevant bottom-1 comment. It’s a really annoying violation of board norms, and it’s not TOR’s fault.)

          • Matt C says:

            > I thought that in my cohort of IQ and educational attainment science and reality would prevail.
            > Why isnt that happening?

            Seconding the suggestion that SSC may not be the forum you’re looking for.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @bintchaos:
            I’m not sure how much you processed the relative leanings of commenters here, but I am decidedly and firmly in the left/liberal camp. I am only prefacing so you understand that I am not trying to dissuade you from whether your general beliefs are correct. I think we are likely to be broadly in agreement in most issues.

            So, that said, in order to persuade conservative commenters here, you have to lay off anything that looks either a)ad-hominem, or b) hyperbolic. Both of these things are like opening a can of tuna in a field full of cats. It’ll be a dog-eat-dog world and you’ll be wearing milk-bone underwear.

            No, these rules don’t so much apply the other way ’round. The liberal commenters are less interested in gang tackling a bad argument. I don’t know why.

            You are, I assume, familiar with the concept that the smarter and more educated you are, the easier it is to rationalize away evidence that contradicts your beliefs? You should expect to encounter this (and be challenge by this as well). You should also expect lots of nit-picking at arguments, partially because people here are interested in fine-grain nuance, and partially because they like to win arguments.

            But please do stick around, if you can. I think you have a valuable voice to add here.

          • where a small majority of conservatives and a decent minority of progressives reject the scientific consensus and treat this as a strict dichotomy, where all progressives are right on all the science and all conservatives are wrong on all the science.

            At a slight tangent … . I think there is a scientific consensus for the claim that global temperature is trending up and humans are a large part of the cause. I don’t think there is a scientific consensus for the claim that continuation of this trend will have catastrophic consequences and that the problem therefor requires immediate and strong action to slow warming–only a PR attempt to pretend that such a consensus exists.

            I don’t know which of the two claims you are referring to. Some critics of the current orthodoxy reject the existence of AGW but others, and I think the more significant, are lukewarmers, believe in anthropogenic warming but not catastrophic warming.

          • There simply isnt evidence on both sides. not for science denaliasm, not for creationism, not for market competitivity in either academe or scifi in the 21st century.

            There can’t be evidence for science denialism, by definition–but you are assuming that you know what science says. In climate arguments, people who deny that there is good evidence for AGW are denying science. So are people who deny that CO2 fertilization is real and important. People who deny that hotter summers can be expected to increase mortality are denying science–and so are people who deny that milder winters can be expected to decrease mortality. I wasted a good deal of time in FB climate arguments in the past, and I didn’t observe that one side was consistently more knowledgeable on the science than the other. As best I could tell, almost nobody on either side understood the mechanism of the greenhouse effect, although lots of people thought they did.

            I don’t know how you define market competitivity in academe, but I note that Chicago has dominated the economics Nobel prizes. It isn’t because the Swedes are great fans of pro-market economic views.

            As for sf, Heinlein and Tolkien both seem to stand up pretty well.

          • bintchaos says:

            I don’t know how you define market competitivity in academe, but I note that Chicago has dominated the economics Nobel prizes. It isn’t because the Swedes are great fans of pro-market economic views.

            By market competitivity I mean the brutal marketplace of ideas on college campuses, not economics… What millenial or GenXer is going to embrace the Benedict Option, Isolationism, abstinance birth control, standing on the tracks of history hollering stop, or souless rapacious unregulated capitalism?

            As for sf, Heinlein and Tolkien both seem to stand up pretty well.

            I was told that LoTR was an indictment of the industrial revolution and Heinlein explored many forms of government. Much like KSR– have you read the Mars trilogy or The Year of Rice and Salt?

            As best I could tell, almost nobody on either side understood the mechanism of the greenhouse effect

            Again, tossing out the whole debate because of a single flaw. Misdirection. Dr. Hsu has a good piece on uncertainty and model tonality in the climate debate. But again, its just debating the methodology of the analysis, not the data. It did make me kindof queasy to see how how eager Dr. Hsu was to find a reason to dispute established climate science– I was embarrassed for him.

          • By market competitivity I mean the brutal marketplace of ideas on college campuses, not economics…

            You aren’t going to find many economists on college campuses willing to defend the old understanding of the Phillips Curve, under which governments could trade off inflation against unemployment forever. Or fixed exchange rates. Or central planning/five year plans as the way to develop poor countries.

            All of those were pretty much orthodoxy in the sixties, and the criticism of them came from people generally identified as on the right of the profession.

            Margaret Mead’s version of Samoa hasn’t been completely rejected, but it’s seen as much more dubious than it was forty years ago, to take a different field.

            There is still some effort outside of the academic world to reject the massive evidence that intelligence is to a significant degree heritable, but I don’t think many serious people in the field would support that position.

            Or in other words, there are a fair number of areas of academia where the position that was in the past identified with the right has on the whole won out over that identified with the left. Doubtless one could find other cases where the reverse has happened.

            Are you talking about the views of college students rather than professors? About the political views of professors rather than their professional views? I don’t think the politics of English faculties, which I gather are pretty solidly left, tell us much about what ideas won out in the academic world.

            (then quoting me)

            As for sf, Heinlein and Tolkien both seem to stand up pretty well.

            And responding:

            I was told that LoTR was an indictment of the industrial revolution and Heinlein explored many forms of government

            .

            Attacks on the industrial revolution were generally the work of conservatives. Heinlein explored lots of things, but his viewpoint is more nearly conservative than liberal in modern terms–it’s hard to imagine him taking seriously much of the current social justice orthodoxy.

            Does your “I was told that” mean that you haven’t read Tolkien? Heinlein?

            Much like KSR– have you read the Mars trilogy or The Year of Rice and Salt?

            No. Neither. Of modern authors I like Bujold, Cherryh, Melissa Scott, Vinge except when he gets too dark for my taste, Niven, some Le Guin, … .

          • bintchaos says:

            Oh I absolutely believe IQ is heritable… I also believe in red/blue brain biochemistry theory. I think heredity of IQ is currently where the left panders to their base and its isomorphic with the right pandering on climate science. But dems arent very good at pandering yet.
            Of course I have read all of Heinlein, all of Tolkien, all of Asimov, all of KSR, all of Morgan, all of Cixin, all of Stephenson, all of Gibson, etc. I have been a voracious consumer of Scifi since I was four.
            You are still thinking of the brutal marketplace of ideas as strictly economics… its all of culture.
            Music, literature, film, academe.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            @Matt C: Seconding the suggestion that SSC may not be the forum you’re looking for.

            It may not be the forum bintchaos is looking for, but I think this is the forum bintchaos needs.

            Reiterating what bean said, in another way: I think most of what you perceive as science denialism on SSC isn’t science denialism. And you yourself might be suffering from evidence denialism. I urge you to revisit.

            @HeelBearCub: The liberal commenters are less interested in gang tackling a bad argument. I don’t know why.

            The conservative arguments I think of as especially tackle-worthy include things like political arguments based solely on Christianity, or a specific type of uninformed racism (i.e. not TBC-type stuff), and don’t ever get made here. If they came, they’d likely get banned anyway.

            Somewhat less tackle-worthy are arguments for protectionism. Those tend to get push back from even right-leaning libertarians here.

            I’m not in the left / liberal camp, though, so I suspect my set difference from yours includes some notable cases. I could guess at some: ancap; certain anti-terrorism arguments; voter ID. But why guess? You’re right here. What are the arguments you see as conservative, tackle-worthy, and here? I think I could stand to see some weak points I hadn’t noticed before, if there are any.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            @DavidFriedman: I think there is a scientific consensus for the claim that global temperature is trending up and humans are a large part of the cause.

            What makes you think there’s consensus for the latter? Last I checked, there was consensus that humans are on net contributing, but no consensus on the, um, degree. But this was years ago. How large is “large”?

            wrt KSR: The Years of Rice and Salt bored me, except as an interesting writing experiment. The Mars Trilogy, OTOH, got me very excited whenever the future tech projects came up.

          • bintchaos says:

            That is very interesting– apparently your brain just skipped over the bulk of KSR’s thought experiments with diffferent forms of government in both books.
            Which tribe are you in?

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            That is very interesting- apparently your brain just skipped over the bulk of KSR’s thought experiments with diffferent forms of government in both books.

            Mostly because he barely got into any of it. It was a light froth on both stories, never getting into ground-level detail before being sidetracked into descriptions of how much Nergal liked running or the fanciful accounts of three personalities being reincarnated throughout history.

            Which tribe are you in?

            The tribe of people that believes you are overly fixated on tribes.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        I completely agree with your second paragraph. Add on that science fiction or fantasy should form the basis of the what makes the story interesting.

        Rather, he was arguing, basically, that it was unfair that pulpy science fiction didn’t get Hugos.

        I thought the issue was that novels that were just as bad (or worse) but had left-wing politics got (allegedly) undeserved rewards. So write a mediocre war story in space! and get (perhaps justifiably) ignored, but write a mediocre story about gay rights in space! and get undeserved awards. This turns the awards system into just another avenue for pushing politics instead of having much to do with science fiction or fantasy.

        I don’t know to what extent arguments on either side have merit, but I thought that was the complaint. Personally I don’t consult the Hugos in picking out books I’d like to read since they’ve never given an award to Alastair Reynolds.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          but write a mediocre story about gay rights in space! and get undeserved awards

          This kind of thing is self-correcting.

          Novelty wins awards but novelty is self-correcting.

    • siduri says:

      I think what you’re trying to do is frame an argument like this: “the Puppies’ enemies would hate Unsong because it is too traditional, but we all know Unsong is good, therefore the Puppies were right all along!”

      Firstly, I don’t think this is true. I count myself among those opposed to the Puppies and I love Unsong. From my perspective the Puppies have been angry about books like Ancillary Justice winning prestigious awards because they believe the only reason this is happening is favoritism due to liberal politics. But have you read the Imperial Radch trilogy? It’s fantastic, and it is as much “traditional” sci fi as anything else–it’s just that the specific tradition it inherits flows through Ursula K. Le Guin and Anne McCaffery rather than Heinlein and Niven. Women using sci fi to explore constructions of gender has been a Thing for a long long time, and I think these books are winning awards not because they represent some kind of newfangled political correctness, but because there’s a large number of readers who honestly love them. (The Imperial Radch trilogy also works very well on the level of just being a ripping good space yarn.)

      Secondly, you have to really stretch to describe a story about such a diverse cast of weirdos as Unsong as somehow belonging to the tradition of square-jawed, straight-shootin’ starship captains that the Puppies are nostalgic for. I think each of your arguments is forced to distort the text rather severely. I mean:

      a) The main romance is an asexual polyamorous one, that’s kind of the opposite of “boring and heteronormative.”

      b) You’re conspicuously not talking about Sohu, probably because it would be impossible to maintain that there are no nonwhite heroes if you acknowledge her centrality in the narrative.

      c) The number of female characters in the narrative who have drives and goals other than a man is staggering. Erica, Ana, Robin, Malia, Sohu etc. The list goes on and on. All of these characters are presented as *people*, different from each other, each with their own agendas.

      d) I’ll give you this one: the story with a premise of “kabbalah works” is, in fact, working within a specifically Jewish tradition, yes. I would be really startled if the Puppies found Jewish-centered works to be less objectionable than books working within other kinds of non-Christian traditions, though.

      e) Flatly untrue. Uriel is very specifically neurodivergent and in fact this is a major plot point.

      f) This one is less obviously untrue than the others; I think you *could* make a good-faith reading of Aaron as having some Nice Guy elements, although I would argue that we see him transcending those qualities and learning to accept Ana’s asexuality without trying to change her, and furthermore I would argue that this arc is a genuinely heroic one for him.

      So yeah–I would expect that if Unsong won a Hugo, the puppies would throw a fit about how CLEARLY it only did so because of the PC elements, the pandering to women and minorities, the anti-Christian bias etc. And I think the majority of SFF fans actually really like the books they are nominating for awards, and are not doing so merely to satisfy a checklist as you suggest.

      • From my perspective the Puppies have been angry about books like Ancillary Justice winning prestigious awards because they believe the only reason this is happening is favoritism due to liberal politics.

        Have the puppies actually made that objection to that particular series? I thought they were pretty good books.

        Could someone who followed the dispute point me at a list of books that the Puppies approved or disapproved of? If some were ones I had read it would help make sense of the whole business.

        • bintchaos says:

          I’m a voting member and I can tell you what went down.
          The nomination ballot is chosen in the spring– the Sad Puppies mounted an internet campaign to get conservatives to sign up to be voting members, and then stacked the nominations for the categories in favor of conservative authors (where there were conservative authors in that category). Some of the categories turned out just fine, like Cixin Liu’s (a chinese scifi author) 3Body Problem won, one of my all time favorites ( highly recommend it). In categories where there were only nominations of conservative authors, the committee allowed a vote of No Award to get around the puppies dirty tricks, because you cant just write-in names. No Award won several categories.
          This is an example of typical conservative ethos of believing they are deliberately disenfranchised from culture and literature by a liberal conspiracy when actually their product is just not competitive in the 21st century. It seems to be how the Trump presidency is playing out– the only thing that matters is identity.
          A lot of people like George R R Martin were angry about this. He said the sad puppies should have their own awards. He said (like some other commenter pointed out) if your writing is good, you get rewarded with piles of cash.
          Like Dr. S pointed out in the Eternal Struggle this just drove conservative scifi authors off into their own little coven where there is some truly awful sci-fi being written.

        • Trofim_Lysenko says:

          A very, very partial list.

          The works most often disapproved of:

          “If You Were A Dinosaur My Love”
          “The Water That Falls On You From Nowhere”
          Ancillary Justice (yes, it’s generally disapproved of)

          Works/Authors Approved of (asterisks indicate they were pushed specifically as Hugo noms rather than simply thought good fiction):

          Eric Flint Et Al’s Ring Of Fire alt-history/SF series (starting with 1632)
          Jim Butcher (Skin Game* was nominated)
          The Chaplain’s War by Brad Torgerson
          Lines of Departure by Marko Kloos
          Lois McMaster Bujold
          Larry Correia (obviously)
          “The Classics” – Pournelle, Niven, Anderson, Heinlein

          Works both sides of the debate seem to agree on:

          Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
          Some classic SF (e.g. The Left Hand Of Darkness)

          • Thanks. Amusing that the Ring of Fire books are included, Eric Flint being a socialist.

            But a patriotic American socialist. Did the other side visibly disapprove of those books?

            Same question for Bujold. If the “ins” (or whatever the proper term is for the opponents of the Puppies) tried to keep her from getting Hugos, that would be pretty strong evidence against them.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            One of the points made by the “sad puppies” side of the argument was specifically that “good storytelling” and entertaining, interesting ideas are more important than checking the appropriate check boxes for the tastemakers and gatekeepers on both a “literary” and ideological basis.

            Given that, why would it be surprising or amusing that they can list off left-wing authors whose work they still enjoy?

            Mind you, both sides accused the other of really just wanting to push THEIR specific political message. There was a whole drawn out side argument between various people over articles like this leading to snarky and somewhat crass responses like this, followed by deployment of counter-snark, and so forth and so on.

            You could try and summarize it as “non-literary space opera and military SF fans versus literary SF fans”, but that would be inaccurate, and it rapidly descended into the great Internet/American Culture War.

          • John Schilling says:

            Same question for Bujold. If the “ins” (or whatever the proper term is for the opponents of the Puppies) tried to keep her from getting Hugos, that would be pretty strong evidence against them.

            Bujold appears to be semi-retired, having written only two books in the four-year period the Puppies have existed, both minor codas to the Vorkosigan series. Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance was nominated but did not win, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen was not even nominated. Not enough data for statistical significance.

            She did have a best-novella nominee, but not winner, in 2016.

          • siduri says:

            I think Bujold should go under “works both sides of the debate seem to agree on.” She’s widely loved in the anti-Puppy circles I tend to run in. I haven’t read her books myself (been meaning to get around to them for a while) but I see Miles Vorkosigan memes pop up on my (SJW-leaning) Tumblr feed all the time.

            And in general, the anti-Puppy side doesn’t vocally disapprove of any authors other than Vox Day and Orson Scott Card. I’ve read all of Jim Butcher’s Dresden saga, for example, and enjoyed them quite a bit. I don’t think anybody’s anti-Bujold or anti-Butcher.

            However–I guess I have to admit that I think Butcher’s writing is more workmanlike than impressive in a literary sense, that after 19 books or however many he’s got in the series so far the ground is fairly well-worn, and that basically those books are more like beach reads or quick comfort reads than something I would pick up in order to have my mind blown and horizons expanded. I think the Hugo-award crowd tends to be drawn to dazzling prose and subjects that are fresh or groundbreaking in some way. So there is definitely a split along those lines, between the fans who want to reward scintillating prose and fresh ideas, and the fans who want to reward ‘workmanlike’ SF that reminds them of the books they grew up with and loved. (Hopefully that is a way of phrasing it that passes the reverse Turing test?)

            But speaking of the reverse Turing test, all this stuff about prioritizing good storytelling over some kind of PC checklist–that’s a Puppy shibboleth, yes, but it doesn’t resemble reality from my side. Nobody keeps a checklist. We’re all fans and we vote for the books we like. We’re voting for “good storytelling” too–it’s just that they can’t believe we actually like the books we say we like.

        • The Nybbler says:

          The worst I’ve seen from the Sad Puppies about _Ancillary Justice_ (which I haven’t read) is that it was just a relatively ordinary space opera which only received attention because of it’s annoying pronoun gimmick (which apparently consists of using ‘he’ and ‘she’ interchangably and inconsistently, btu again, I haven’t read it).

          I think Vox Day (Rabid Puppy One) had worse to say, but he’s Vox Day.

          • siduri says:

            I have read it and I think this summary does not do it justice at all. My review:

            “Ancillary Justice has a ship’s AI as its narrator. Although actually it’s a bit more complicated than that, because the AI is housed in a human body—a tribute exacted by a conquering interstellar empire from one of its colonized peoples—and there’s strong hints that some of that person’s erased mind still influences the AI. It’s a fantastically nuanced portrayal, at once believably alien and heartbreakingly human. There’s also plenty of action and space-intrigue and murder and skulduggery, which makes the book fun, but it’s the quiet moments when the AI struggles to parse human gender cues, or carries on a subtly catty conversation with a space station, that make it special.”

            I do think your summary of the Puppies’ objection–that AJ “only received attention because of it’s annoying pronoun gimmick” is an accurate characterization of their views. However, where I think the Puppies fail is in an inability to correctly model the kind of reader (like myself) who enjoyed AJ very very much, for a lot of reasons, of which the gender stuff was a relatively small part. I think most of the people who nominated and voted for AJ for a Hugo are like me, and genuinely liked the book very much–as a book, not as a political statement. Furthermore, I think most of the Hugo winning books are genuinely liked in this way by the people who vote for them.

          • For what it is worth, I read the Ancillary series and liked it. I found the pronoun business mildly irritating, but much else definitely good.

            The description of the Puppies’ response sounds to me like the natural but mistaken view of someone who didn’t much enjoy the books and was puzzled as to why other people did.

          • bintchaos says:

            The very best AI is “ship” in Aurora.

            “We think now that love is a kind of giving of attention.”
            ― ship
            Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora

          • siduri says:

            David Friedman:

            For what it is worth, I read the Ancillary series and liked it. I found the pronoun business mildly irritating, but much else definitely good.

            The description of the Puppies’ response sounds to me like the natural but mistaken view of someone who didn’t much enjoy the books and was puzzled as to why other people did.

            I almost totally agree. My only point of departure would be that I found the pronoun business refreshing and thought-provoking overall, but only mildly so–and since you say you found it only mildly irritating, I imagine we’re really pretty close on this particular aesthetic axis.

            I nearly didn’t answer at all, since my response could be rounded to “Yup!” or “I agree!” but. Then I thought that maybe there was some value in verifying that the discussion we had led to convergence of views?

            As a relative newbie to the comment section (even though I’m a long time lurker) I’d appreciate your perspective on whether “Oh yeah I basically agree” is seen as a comment worth posting, following a short/mild discussion. Thanks!

          • As a relative newbie to the comment section (even though I’m a long time lurker) I’d appreciate your perspective on whether “Oh yeah I basically agree” is seen as a comment worth posting, following a short/mild discussion. Thanks!

            If the context is such that people, especially participants, are likely to see the situation as an argument, it’s worth making clear that it isn’t. Otherwise probably not.

          • John Schilling says:

            For what it is worth, I read the Ancillary series and liked it. I found the pronoun business mildly irritating, but much else definitely good.

            The description of the Puppies’ response sounds to me like the natural but mistaken view of someone who didn’t much enjoy the books and was puzzled as to why other people did.

            People can enjoy the same book for different reasons. And when I see things like this and this, I’m not the least bit puzzled by why these people liked Ancillary Justice. There is certainly a substantial bloc that likes the book explicitly for reasons of gender politics, whether internal to the story or in the real world of Feminist SF Authors Winning! the! Hugo!

            Bigger picture, when I check my notes I find that with the exception of Sad/Rabid puppy nominees, exactly zero novels either written by a white male author or featuring a white male protagonist have been nominated for a Hugo in the past three years. If this were reversed, almost nobody on either side of the culture war would consider it acceptable – and it hasn’t been reversed, there hasn’t been three straight years of all-white-guy Hugos even on just the authorial front, since 1962.

            Tell me this is because the voters are choosing the best stories, with “dialog, stronger prose in general, multidimensional characters”, etc, and every single time picking a female or minority author writing about a female or minority protagonist. I dare you.

          • siduri says:

            Bigger picture, when I check my notes I find that with the exception of Sad/Rabid puppy nominees, exactly zero novels either written by a white male author or featuring a white male protagonist have been nominated for a Hugo in the past three years.

            That’s because the Puppy slates have included the books by such authors that probably would have been nominated anyway. Stephenson and Gaiman both racked up Hugo nominations, and Hugo wins, before the Puppies were a thing at all. They would have been nominated last year too, Puppies or no.

            In the three years before Correia started lobbying to influence the ballot (in 2013), the Best Novel nominees included Robert J. Sawyer, Robert Charles Wilson, Ian McDonald, George R.R. Martin, and James S.A. Corey. There obviously was no conspiracy to keep white guys off the ballot, and there still isn’t–it’s just that now the Puppies claim credit for every one that gets on.

          • John Schilling says:

            Stephenson and Gaiman both racked up Hugo nominations, and Hugo wins, before the Puppies were a thing at all. They would have been nominated last year too, Puppies or no.

            Gaiman wasn’t nominated for Best Novel last year. Neil Gaiman hasn’t been nominated for Best Novel since 2009, and neither the Sad nor Rabid puppies have suggested he should be. Because he mostly isn’t a novelist.

            Meanwhile, both the Sad and Rabid puppies gave the Hugos a pass this year. And…

            There obviously was no conspiracy to keep white guys off the ballot, and there still isn’t–it’s just that now the Puppies claim credit for every one that gets on.

            Which ones are those? Which are the “white guy” novelists that the Puppies are trying to wrongly claim credit getting on the ballot this year?

            And if the white guys who did make the list during the Puppy era were people who would have made the list anyway, then why were they all no-awarded in 2015? You’re really going to argue that e.g. Jim Butcher’s Skin Game is a novel the rest of the “Worldcon Community” would have nominated on their own, that the Puppies are falsely trying to claim credit for, and that the same community then decided the same book was wholly non-Hugo-worthy?

            “Conspiracy” is a loaded term, but there’s at minimum a hell of an echo chamber at work here. And you may be right that Neal Stephenson could have eked out a nomination for Seveneves, but everything else you’ve said is either wrong or nonresponsive.

          • bintchaos says:

            I told you.
            What the awards committee objected to was the hijacking and the internet campaign to stack ballots– the dirty tricks part. Thats where the No Awards went.
            So if they wanted Skin Game to win, the puppies shot themselves in the foot by cheating to force it.
            Didnt SSC have something on cheater-detection and the prisoners dilemma?
            And is there a post you could direct me to on what muggle-realism is?

          • Gobbobobble says:

            Skin Game is the 15th book in the series, so it’s not really a good example. At this point if folk think Dresden Files needs awards, Butcher should just get some sort of lifetime achievement award like they do with the Oscars.

            (Disclaimer: I haven’t read that far yet, if it’s the series capstone this argument becomes less true. No spoilers please.)

          • John Schilling says:

            Skin Game is the 15th book in the series, so it’s not really a good example.

            If the claim is that the Puppies are falsely claiming credit for every white-guy novel that made the list, and that is Siduri’s claim, then Skin Game absolutely is a good counterexample. It’s a book that was nominated for the Best Novel Hugo, that the non-Puppy voters unambiguously indicated they thought was unworthy of that award. The Puppies are not wrong when they take credit for getting that one at least on the ballot, and the rest of the community doesn’t get to point to it and say “See, we’re not hateful bigots, we voted for at least one token white guy!”

            ETA: Lois Bujold’s Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance was the 15th novel in the Vorkosigan saga, and was nominated for the Hugo two years before Skin Game. So there’s no particular bias against bignumth novel of a series. I’d consider the two of roughly equal quality, but A: de gustibus etc and B: Bujold has the stronger reputation.

          • Gobbobobble says:

            Lois Bujold’s Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance was the 15th novel in the Vorkosigan saga, and was nominated for the Hugo two years before Skin Game. So there’s no particular bias against bignumth novel of a series.

            Ah, was not aware. That’s what I get for assuming 🙂

          • siduri says:

            Gaiman wasn’t nominated for Best Novel last year.

            No, he was nominated for–and won–Best Graphic Story. He was on a Puppy slate but he absolutely would have been nominated even without that, as he has been nominated (and won) in lots of categories many times before.

            Which ones are those? Which are the “white guy” novelists that the Puppies are trying to wrongly claim credit getting on the ballot this year?

            Are you aware that you’re changing the goalposts here? You originally said “with the exception of Sad/Rabid puppy nominees, exactly zero novels either written by a white male author or featuring a white male protagonist have been nominated for a Hugo in the past three years.” I pointed out that a number of those white male authors on the Puppy slate, such as Stephenson and Gaiman, were shoo-ins anyway and it’s wrong to pretend that the anti-Puppys would have tried to block them. So now you’re trying to shift the argument to this year.

            It’s true, there are no white males on the Best Novel ballot this year. But if you look at the past ten years of Best Novel nominees, you see Vernor Vinge, Charles Stross, Michael Chabon, Michael F. Flynn, Peter Watts, Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi, Robert J. Sawyer, Robert Charles Wilson, Ian McDonald, George R.R. Martin, James S.A. Corey, Kim Stanley Robinson, Neal Stephenson–and that’s leaving out the ones that I agree probably wouldn’t be there without Puppy lobbying (Anderson, Butcher, Correia, and Jordan/Sanderson).

            Again, there is obviously no systematic attempt to exclude white men. In fact, analysis of the ballots shows that without the Puppy slate in 2015, instead of Butcher and Anderson the Hugo voters would have nominated…two other white men! (Specifically John Scalzi and Robert Jackson Bennett).

          • siduri says:

            And if you look at the 2016 Hugo statistics (page 18 for the nomination statistics), firstly: Stephenson was nominated more often than any of the other finalists, so I continue to maintain that he would’ve still been on the ballot without Puppy slates. But if you erase every work on the list of nominations that was backed by the Puppies, then instead of Stephenson, Butcher and Naomi Novik the voters would have nominated Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson (who is a white male), Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear, and The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickenson (another white male). So the overall representation of white men would have been the same without any Puppy involvement at all.

          • John Schilling says:

            Are you aware that you’re changing the goalposts here? You originally said “with the exception of Sad/Rabid puppy nominees, exactly zero novels either written by a white male author or featuring a white male protagonist have been nominated for a Hugo in the past three years.”

            That is what I said, that is what I have continued to defend, and that continues to be actually true.

            I pointed out that a number of those white male authors on the Puppy slate, such as Stephenson and Gaiman, were shoo-ins anyway

            Which doesn’t contradict what said, because I said nothing about whether or not a novelist would or would not have been nominated without the Puppies’ support. It might be relevant, if you were to build on it, but it isn’t “changing the goalposts”.

            Also, in colloquial English, “a number of…” means a number substantially greater than one. Neal Stephenson is one novelist who had one novel nominated for the Hugo in 2016. Neil Gaiman has not had any novels nominated for the Hugo in any year since 2009.

            But on the subject of changing goalposts: When I talk about what has happened to the Best Novel Hugo in the past three years, and you bring up things that happened six years ago and ten years ago and last year in a different award, you are changing the goalposts. If you’re going to do that, you need to acknowledge that it is you who are moving the goalposts, and make a case for why.

            Or you can just burn any presumption of trust or good faith you might have brought to the table here. We’re done.

          • siduri says:

            Which doesn’t contradict what said, because I said nothing about whether or not a novelist would or would not have been nominated without the Puppies’ support. It might be relevant, if you were to build on it, but it isn’t “changing the goalposts”.

            The part that’s changing the goalposts was going from a three year span to a one year span, I said that very clearly, and you selectively quoted in order to pretend that you were addressing the issue when you weren’t.

            If the question is whether non-puppy voters have a systemic bias against white men, then it’s absolutely relevant to look at the years immediately before Puppies began to push their slates, AND to look at the statistics showing who would have been nominated without those slates. Again, you’re not engaging with any of this, because only by taking a very very blinkered view of the Hugo slates can you pretend that any such bias exists.

            Or you can just burn any presumption of trust or good faith you might have brought to the table here. We’re done.

            Yeah, I think so.

          • Aapje says:

            @siduri

            If the question is whether non-puppy voters have a systemic bias against white men

            You can have a systemic bias in multiple ways:
            1. completely excluding white men from consideration
            2. completely excluding white men from the most prestigious category or categories, only letting them win less prestigious categories
            3. Judging books written by or featuring protagonists that are white males more harshly for all categories.
            4. Judging books written by or featuring protagonists that are white males more harshly for the most prestigious category or categories
            5. A mix of 3 and 4, where the more prestigious the category, the more the bias

            You seem to believe that one can only argue about possibility 1*.

            Given Schilling’s insistence on focusing on the Best Novel category, this strongly suggests that he believes in possibility 2, 4 or 5.

            * This is a bit weird, since you say that you frequent at least one SJW space and SJ people regularly argue that some counterexamples are not convincing evidence against systemic bias. See ‘tokenism,’ for example.

          • siduri says:

            You seem to believe that one can only argue about possibility 1*.

            Honestly not sure how you drew that impression? I largely accepted Schilling’s focus on the Best Novel category. Everything I said above about analysis of the ballots before the Puppy slates and subtracting the Puppy slates was focused on Best Novel.

            The only time I widened the focus from Best Novel was to talk about winning white male authors who the Puppies claim credit for slate-wide, and only because Neil Gaiman is such an egregious example of someone who obviously would have won anyway. Literally everything else I’ve said has been entirely focused on the Best Novel category.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          John C. Wright is also very unpopular with the anti-puppies.

    • bintchaos says:

      You are overthinking this again…I was very impressed by Arlie Hochschild’s book, and so I wanted to try to scale my own empathy wall, but instead of low-information Tea Party supporters in Louisiana, conservatives in my own cohort of IQ and educational attainment. I thought because of Dr. S [spot on] Eternal Struggle post, and because of UNSONG that SSC might be a place to do that.
      I read UNSONG in a week, and loved it. It showed such flexibility and subtlety of mind, such command of myth and legend and human frailty, and gorgeous prose, compelling love stories, and the intriguing mysteries of Kaballah, deism, theodicity and Judaism. It would be cool to incorporate Islam, but that would be another book– its not necessary.
      Sadly I dont seem to have either the toolset or the skillset to accomplish my goals. Its really irritating to have David Friedman reject my entire argument because of one perceived flaw– asymmetrical polarization is a documented phenomenon. I’m not a moby or a troll…but I am aspergers positive.
      And I cant quite convey how discouraging it is to have Islam mansplained to me by aged white xian males who cant read fusha and haven’t studied tafsir.
      But all data is good data! Jon Haidt’s thesis is verified (though I still think the heterodox academy is useless.)
      And my thesis is verified, which Haidt would disagree with.
      We are not the same– there are not universal human values, universal human rights, or universal mores and taboos. Its EGT(Maynard-Smith evolutionary game theory) all the way down.

      And one more thing for Dr. S– pandering is not persuasion. Especially in the polarized environment of the 21st century. No one is doing the conservative base any favors by pretending what is happening wont change everything. Culture isnt like the steering wheel of a car where you can wrest control of it and drive it down your preferred path.
      One must be stealthy and subtle…like the brilliant Sauds who have cleverly got Trump to take their side in a 30 year old GCC slap-fight with Qatar while subversively colonizing Indonesia with Wahhabist schools and mosques under the radar.
      I want “conservatives” to take responsibility. Trump is a disaster, and pretending he’s not to curry favor with your base is slavish pandering– its your responsibility to educate your base.
      Quit ducking.

      • Nornagest says:

        Half this forum is on the spectrum, and yet those of us who aren’t generally manage to communicate with that half. You’re not going to win any sympathy points by dropping an Asperger diagnosis.

        • bintchaos says:

          I’m not looking for sympathy, I’m just saying empathy is especially hard for aspies.

      • Its really irritating to have David Friedman reject my entire argument because of one perceived flaw– asymmetrical polarization is a documented phenomenon.

        I’m not rejecting asymmetrical polarization–I don’t know if it is true or not. What I pointed out was that you had made two claims that could be shown to be flatly false by looking at the page you linked to in making them. That doesn’t tell us whether your views are correct but it does suggest that you are either dishonest or delusional–a rejection of you, not of asymmetrical polarization. The fact that you made no effort to either support or retract your two claims (about the Pew report and about which way the median of the red curve was shifting when) suggests that whatever you care about, it isn’t whether what you say is true.

        And I cant quite convey how discouraging it is to have Islam mansplained to me by aged white xian males who cant read fusha and haven’t studied tafsir.

        It’s possible that you have expert knowledge of Islam, but you haven’t demonstrated it. Confusing the Salaf with the Sahaba in a post that started with “I’m sorry, but this commentariat is woefully ignorant about Islam” didn’t help.

        Nor did, in the same post, “Islam is in the position that the catholic church was in once upon a time, when excommunication was literally a sentence of hell,” which made it sound as though you thought someone in Sunni Islam had the power to excommunicate people.

        • bintchaos says:

          I gave you a link on asymmetrical polarization from Brookings.
          This is a typical conservative tactic– find some flaw in the initial argument, pounce and then refuse to acknowledge any further points. Often used in discussions of climate science.
          Much like your point about excommunication where I was really talking about salvation by works, refuting your claim that Islam says “man becomes corrupt”, explaining the idea of dikhr (remembrance) and rejection of original sin and establishment of fitrah, that all children are born muslim.

          • AnonYEmous says:

            bint, there are two ways this goes

            one is you grow politically and as a person

            the second is you keep railing against “conservatism”. I’ll just use my handy-dandy SSC extension and put you on ignore, but I bet you’ll either leave voluntarily or catch a banhammer.

            your choice. But I’m letting you know right now, if you take the second options I’m putting you on ignore, and I think other people will do similar stuff. If I wanted to have basic arguments with political partisans, I’d do it somewhere that mattered.

          • AnonYEmous says:

            Pardon, but does “growing as a person” mean I have to accept conservative butt-hurt poutrage conspiracy theories?
            Or would that be classed as “growing politically”?

            It means you have to be open to them. So can you handle that?

          • I gave you a link on asymmetrical polarization from Brookings.
            This is a typical conservative tactic– find some flaw in the initial argument, pounce and then refuse to acknowledge any further points.

            You wrote: “Pew says the Right has moved farther right. ”

            Several of us followed your link and discovered that the page you linked to did not say what you had just claimed it said. That isn’t a flaw, it’s a falsehood.

            You wrote: “Watch the animation in the linked article– starting in 1994 the red median moves dramatically to the right.”

            Several of us watched the animation and observed that from 1994 to 2004 the red median was moving dramatically to the left. Again, not a flaw but a falsehood.

            After you offer two falsehoods in defense of your claim, people loose interest in paying attention to your further arguments. And you don’t even bother to either concede that what you said was false or offer some defense of it.

            where I was really talking about salvation by works, refuting your claim that Islam says “man becomes corrupt”

            Where did I make the claim that Islam says “man becomes corrupt”? Like me, you have access to the thread, so if I said that you should be able to quote me doing so.

            If you were “really talking about salvation by works,” what was the point of the reference to excommunication? Do you think there is some authority in Sunni Islam with the power to excommunicate people and so send them to hell?

            You are claiming expertise in Islam. What is your view of Uthman? Al-Ma’mun? Was Schact’s view of the hadith correct? Hallaq’s view of the Islamic court system and what happened to it? Was the Gate of Ijtihad ever shut, and if so when?

          • bintchaos says:

            @David Friedman

            What is your view of Uthman? Al-Ma’mun? Was Schact’s view of the hadith correct? Hallaq’s view of the Islamic court system and what happened to it? Was the Gate of Ijtihad ever shut, and if so when?

            What is this, witchtesting? An inquisition? A minha just for me?
            It seems all these questions are suspiciously Orientalist in nature. Always about the Ijtihad and the Western fantasy of “defanging Islam”. Have you read Said?
            I have studied Ibn Taymiyya extensively, and since IANAIS (I am not an islamic scholar) I’m guided by his tafsir. Taymiyya said Uthman only cared about money. I’m uninterested in Schact or Hallaq. The Mu’tazhila are dead as the dodo, and all the blowhards of the West can’t breathe life back into that corpse.
            The other dimension of my understanding of Islam is as a recursive self-similar error-correcting code, an information theory paradigm, fascinating computational linguistics study, and (most critically) as a JMS Culturally Stable Strategy.

            I get the impression that you are very anti-pathetic to my interpretation of Islam. Not sure if its because you believe I’m a liberal snowflake or a muslim at this point. Whatever.
            This is what I mean by by its just too much work.
            I give up, I cant scale the empathy wall.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            @Bintchaos

            No, at no point did you link Brookings. You linked a Washington Post article that quoted someone from Brookings. The Washington Post article in turn cites Poole and Rosenthal’s DW-NOMINATE data.

            Something that has been covered in depth here before.

          • Nornagest says:

            If you really want to understand conservatism, deleting phrases like “conservative butt-hurt poutrage conspiracy theories” from your vocabulary would make an excellent start. It won’t give you any greater understanding, but it would go a long way towards establishing good faith. Assuming, of course, that you’re arguing in good faith.

            If you’re finding that hard, this may not be the forum for you.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            If you’re finding that hard, this may not be the forum for you.

            Generally speaking? Sure.

            But, it’s not like there aren’t plenty of examples.

          • bintchaos says:

            This operates everywhere to some extent.
            https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/874624927541993473
            Degen also: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/874628741389058050
            I guess I understand this… But its extremely frustrating when the Red Tribe just rationalizes things like the Sad Puppies hijacking the Hugo nominations or employing the Ann Coulter defense to justify it.

          • Nornagest says:

            A while back there was a thread where conservatives gave their best one-line defense of their ideas. Well, I’m not really conservative (though I’m pretty sure I’m more conservative than you), so mine is less a defense of conservatism and more a defense of… let’s call it “political humility”.

            Here it is: if you see someone buying into a different narrative, that means their narrative fits their facts better than yours. I’m not talking “alternative facts” or anything like that, and I’m not saying that all narratives are equal. I’m just saying that everyone sees a different slice of the real world, the one that doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it. Sometimes that slice ends up pointing towards ideas you don’t like. And when it does, going on about how they’re denying reality will just piss them off; they know all about reality, it’s right there in front of them, and it’s why they’re doing what they’re doing.

            And yeah, it’s possible that they were lied to or tricked or deluded themselves somehow. But there’s a lot of narratives out there, and a lot of them are carried by people smarter than you. (That’s not an insult. They’re smarter than me too.) What’s the chance that you just happened to get the honest one?

          • bintchaos says:

            OMG you dont understand what I’m saying at all.
            I believe that the upper tail of IQ and g among conservatives is just full-frontal pandering to the low- information base.
            Not going to end well.

          • Nornagest says:

            Hey, I tried. And now I think I’m done trying.

          • bintchaos says:

            mine either.
            look at it simply as an energy transfer.
            not cost-viable.

          • @David Friedman

            What is your view of Uthman? Al-Ma’mun? Was Schact’s view of the hadith correct? Hallaq’s view of the Islamic court system and what happened to it? Was the Gate of Ijtihad ever shut, and if so when?

            What is this, witchtesting? An inquisition? A minha just for me?

            It’s an attempt to find out if you actually are knowledgeable about and interested in Islam or just faking it, by trying to get your views on some interesting issues. With luck I hoped it might also set off an interesting conversation, but probably not.

            Taymiyya said Uthman only cared about money.

            Near the end, Muawiya tried to persuade his uncle to come to Syria, where he had the people well tamed. Uthman’s reply was that he was unwilling to leave the city where the Prophet died. You know what happened. He wasn’t a believer in the mode of his two predecessors, but money for himself and his kin wasn’t all of it.

            I’m uninterested in Schact or Hallaq.

            Schact argued for a claim that, if true, undercuts the basis of fiqh. I would expect anyone interested in the subject to be interested in the claim, whether to agree or disagree.

            The Mu’tazhila are dead as the dodo, and all the blowhards of the West can’t breathe life back into that corpse.

            al-Ma’mun is dead too, but still a very interesting figure.

            I get the impression that you are very anti-pathetic to my interpretation of Islam. Not sure if its because you believe I’m a liberal snowflake or a muslim at this point.

            I can’t tell what your interpretation of Islam is or even whether you have one or just like strings of profound sounding words. I admire some past Muslims, have even written a sonnet in tribute to Umar. My concern isn’t with whether you are a Muslim or a liberal snowflake but whether you are a fake.

          • bintchaos says:

            Schact argued for a claim that, if true, undercuts the basis of fiqh. I would expect anyone interested in the subject to be interested in the claim, whether to agree or disagree

            Why? He’s an infidel, not an islamic scholar, and irrelevent.
            He is trying to use reason alone.

          • I believe that the upper tail of IQ and g among conservatives is just full-frontal pandering to the low- information base.

            This claim has a testable implication. If what Eugene Volokh and Bryan Caplan and I and Thomas Sowell and Charles Murray–you seem to include libertarians with conservatives–are doing is pandering to the low-information base, we ought to be agreeing with them on almost all of Trump’s positions and thinking up clever arguments to defend those positions.

            We should, for instance, be arguing for immigration restrictions and trade barriers.

            Is that what we are doing?

          • bintchaos says:

            Instead of explaining to the conservative base that Trump is a disaster and why he is a disaster, conservative intellectuals have run away from him like scalded cats. Intellectuals are fully aware that Trump is deathpoison for the GOP brand going forward. Students are really protesting Trump– Murray is just a reachable proxy.
            There are no clever (or even unclever for that matter) arguments to defend Trump’s positions.
            Saying you are against Trump but still a “conservative” is just pandering.

          • Saying you are against Trump but still a “conservative” is just pandering.

            Trump gets to define “conservative,” despite not being one?

            You appear to concede that the people you view as conservative intellectuals oppose some positions currently popular with the conservative base. That is inconsistent with your claim that they are pandering to it. Are you now defining “pandering to the conservative base” as holding conservative views, whether or not the base agrees with them? As failing to join the left in attacking Trump?

            The antiwar left was pretty quiet during Obama’s terms. Was the failure to attack him for drone strikes and the like pandering to the Democratic base?

          • bintchaos says:

            Trump is the titular head of the GOP.
            If you don’t openly fight him, and you didnt crit him in the run-up to the election, you are pandering.

            Trump gets to define “conservative,” despite not being one?


            Yes, Trump defines conservative.
            But the only thing that he said to his base that was true is: “I am your last hope”.

          • siduri says:

            Pardon, but does “growing as a person” mean I have to accept conservative butt-hurt poutrage conspiracy theories?
            Or would that be classed as “growing politically”?

            Bintchaos, I didn’t report you and I am actually on your side as far as tribal affiliations go, but this kind of comment is actively hurting our team. At least on SSC, as soon as you throw in a gutter insult like “butt-hurt” it means that you’ve already lost and are well on your way to a ban.

            Please listen to the commentators who are telling you to talk less and lurk more. For what it’s worth, I lurked for a year before I recently started posting. And again, I bet we broadly agree on object-level beliefs, but the SCC commentariat is not like other forums and the way you’re going about things here is counterproductive.

          • bintchaos says:

            @siduri
            I lost my temper. I apologize.
            Tribalism trumps even IQ, g and educational attainment.
            I get it.
            Thats the lesson I learned here.
            But what on earth makes you think I’m “on your team”?
            I’m on Team Reality and Team Science.
            More like “A plague on both your houses”.
            It’s just that one house is so much more extreme in asymmetrical polarization. And I understand the schtick here…its not like I haven’t heard it from my professors and philosophers and public intellectuals my whole life.
            “We are all one”.
            Instead of exploring why the two tribes are different you want to pretend theres no difference. Got it. Its your only hope for reconciliation.
            But meanwhile the House is on fire and its likely to burn to the ground.

          • rahien.din says:

            what on earth makes you think I’m “on your team”?

            Our interests are best served if we define “our team” as “team discipline,” regardless of tribe color. That’s what makes this place go. If you don’t yet have any discipline, you should find a different team.

            (Would someone post a link to that ignore-a-user SSC extension? Could become useful in similar circumstances.)

            butt-hurt poutrage conspiracy theories

            For someone who doesn’t seem to like Ann Coulter much, you do a great pastiche of her snide bitch act.

          • bintchaos says:

            Our interests are best served if we define “our team” as “team discipline,” regardless of tribe color. That’s what makes this place go. If you don’t yet have any discipline, you should find a different team.

            But thats the core of my problem isnt it?
            If my brain biochemistry inclines me to be on Team Explorer– I will privilege intellectual curiosity over discipline. If I privileged discipline and loyalty over empathy and intellectual curiosity I would be expressing the Team Soldier side of the Cooperation Complexity Paradigm.
            And because of my aspergers I’m empathy deficient so I cant scale the empathy wall.

            For someone who doesn’t seem to like Ann Coulter much, you do a great pastiche of her snide bitch act.


            Yes, because I’m exactly like Ann Coulter.
            Both-sides-do-it-ism.

          • Gobbobobble says:

            Yes, because I’m exactly like Ann Coulter.
            Both-sides-do-it-ism.

            “No, see, it’s okay when *I* do it because I criticize the other side for doing it more”

          • bintchaos says:

            The other side DOES do it more– thats what asymmetrical polarization means.
            But that’s not an approved SSC position.
            Case in point– commenters can crit the bejus out of Barack Obama– but crits of Trump arent allowed, even implicitly.
            Get dismissed as Trump-booing.
            I get it– SSC puts its thumb on the scale for conservatives in hopes of creating a middle ground.

          • Brad says:

            @bintchaos

            But thats not an approved SSC position.

            That’s true it isn’t. You are allowed to strawman and make evidence free attacks on ‘the Left’, ‘SJWs’, and ‘feminists’, but you can only critique steel-manned right wing positions.

            This is unfortunate, but you aren’t going to change it by doing what you are doing. Heck, I’m probably not going to change it by doing what I’m doing either. But at least I’m trying to get the discourse leveled up instead of leveled down.

          • bintchaos says:

            Like I explained…it was a socio-lab experiment.
            I arrogantly thought I could be the Arlie Hoschild of the “high-information” conservatives (as opposed to the low-information Tea Party base). I can’t–but its a personal failing, because I can’t do empathy as well as I should be able to because of my brain biochemistry.
            OTOH my CCP model is validated so thats a bonus.

          • John Schilling says:

            That’s true it isn’t. You are allowed to strawman and make evidence free attacks on ‘the Left’, ‘SJWs’, and ‘feminists’, but you can only critique steel-manned right wing positions.

            Except that here she is, critiqueing non-steelmanned right wing positions, and her words appear on my screen just fine. She’s getting pushback, yes. But then, here you are, pushing back against the people who strawman and make evidence free attacks on ‘the Left’ et al, even though they aren’t really doing that in this thread.

          • bintchaos says:

            About half my comments dont make it through the censor filter.
            I’m still learning.

            That’s true it isn’t. You are allowed to strawman and make evidence free attacks on ‘the Left’, ‘SJWs’, and ‘feminists’, but you can only critique steel-manned right wing positions.


            Its almost like Scott is handicapping isnt it? Must mean he recognizes differing ability in the two tribes. 😉

          • Brad says:

            Its almost like Scott is handicapping isnt it?

            No, John Schilling is right as far as that goes. Allowed was the wrong word for me to use. Scott doesn’t enforce such a rule. Rather you’ll get endless dogpilled in the one case and maybe occasionally called out by me or HBC in the other.

          • CatCube says:

            @bintchaos

            Instead of explaining to the conservative base that Trump is a disaster and why he is a disaster, conservative intellectuals have run away from him like scalded cats.

            I guess I’m curious how people at National Review fit into your worldview. They ran an issue against Trump’s nomination prior to the final nomination votes. They currently run stories that would appear to be exactly what you say they should–why the President is bad on this or that issue. Of course, they also have authors (Dennis Prager) writing apologies for Trump, though with pushback from other authors.

            The only author I follow with any regularity is Jonah Goldberg, and he routinely gets shit from Trumpkins for not making excuses for everything the President does, and gets shit from the Left for saying that not everything the President does is bad.

          • bintchaos says:

            In the primaries the GOP establishment hated Trump, but was too terrified of the base to tell them why. Trump is now the GOP brand — what NRO does is the same thing the GOP congress does– plausible deniability for when the pendulum swings back, but absolute support for policy while in power. Decry Trump as awful-awful in public but lockstep compliance off the screen.
            Typical radar chaff for the base: “Trump is just learning” from Paul Ryan. “The Deep State (Intelligence Community) is conspiring against him.” Really Trump is a disaster but conservatives will stick to him like glue until they begin to lose elections. Loyalty and rejecting science and reality are a successful part of conservative fitness landscape…for now.

            I’m not so worried about US…the founders built a lot of protections against demogogues and tyrants into our system.
            Trump is having a lot of trouble doing things he wants to do domestically. I’m not one of those “the sky is falling” snowflakes.
            But his ignorance and vanity render him easily manipulated and tricked by America’s most dire and implacable enemies. I wonder about his IQ…we had a stupid president in GW Bush who also had unscrupulous advisors and he may have set events in motion that will destroy the planet. OTOH Reagan had full blown Alzheimers the last 2-3 years of his presidency but he had excellent advisors. Trump doesnt seem to have many advisors at all, and doesnt listen to them anyways.
            Trust, Russia and KSA are not our friends.

          • CatCube says:

            @bintchaos

            In the primaries the GOP establishment hated Trump, but was too terrified of the base to tell them why.

            So what are you asking for, if not this?

            Trump is now the GOP brand — what NRO does is the same thing the GOP congress does– plausible deniability for when the pendulum swings back, but absolute support for policy while in power.

            Got it. If they call out the President, it’s just a smokescreen. Have you entertained the idea that maybe if they call him out for one thing, then endorse his doing something else, that maybe they just don’t agree with the former but agree with the latter?

            You’re suffering from the same brain defect as the people who demand obeisance to Trump, that everybody is in one of exactly two camps. Just because somebody doesn’t run around frothing at the mouth about everything the President does doesn’t imply that they support him in everything.

          • bintchaos says:

            If you support Trump in one thing, you support him in everything…you cant support his domestic agenda without supporting his foreign agenda.
            This isnt just confirmation bias talking.
            The system is WAI…by that I mean the genius of the Founders will mostly protect Americans from him.
            But while Trump is working his way through our system he may very well blow up the rest of the world.
            The republicans are exhibiting the same moral cowardice and lack of forethought that got us into this situation.

          • random832 says:

            Got it. If they call out the President, it’s just a smokescreen. Have you entertained the idea that maybe if they call him out for one thing, then endorse his doing something else, that maybe they just don’t agree with the former but agree with the latter?

            The problem is when they call him out for one thing and then don’t back that up with action against the same things. For example, supposedly Rubio could have blocked Tillerson’s confirmation.

          • Gobbobobble says:

            If you support Trump in one thing, you support him in everything…you cant support his domestic agenda without supporting his foreign agenda.

            [citation needed]

          • If you support Trump in one thing, you support him in everything…

            Nonsense.

            I support his withdrawal from Paris–I’ve been criticizing the CAGW position for years. There are probably other things he did I approve of–I’m seeing mostly positive responses to his judicial nominees.

            I oppose his positions on trade and immigration. Probably other things as well, but I haven’t been paying attention to the details of his policies and those are the big ones.

            I can’t figure out what his foreign policy is and have no reason to assume it is worse than Hillary’s would have been. I didn’t vote for either of them.

            Have you denounced Noam Chomsky for his writing on Cambodia yet? If not, applying your “if you don’t denounce it you are supporting it” approach to you, you are obviously a supporter of the Khmer Rouge.

          • bintchaos says:

            @DavidFriedman
            Silence is consent…as far I as know Chomsky didnt run for president, isnt president now, and has no power.
            You didnt vote to keep Trump out either….was it because you thought he couldnt win?
            Did you vote?

          • Silence is consent…as far I as know Chomsky didnt run for president, isnt president now, and has no power.

            Chomsky is a prominent intellectual figure. If silence is consent, then your silence about his misdeeds is consent to them.

            Did you vote?

            Yes. For Gary Johnson.

            Who is president doesn’t depend on who I consent to. It didn’t depend on who I voted for either.

            Is your position “if you are not part of the solution, you are part of problem?” I attempt to solve quite a lot of problems and have been doing so for a long time, but I have no interest in being drafted into other people’s crusades.

          • bintchaos says:

            @davidfriedman
            srsly…I’m now going get a strawman lecture from someone who threw his vote away in a petulant protest on a guy that couldn’t qualify to be a high school geography teacher?
            mirable dictu…

          • “someone who threw his vote away”

            A randomly placed vote in a presidential election has perhaps one chance in ten million of altering the outcome. And I’m in California, where the odds are a whole lot worse.

            You may be an adherent of the local secular religion according to which voting is a virtuous act and each voter is, in some mystical sense, choosing the winner. I’m not. Neither Hillary nor Trump was someone I wanted to have voted for, so I didn’t.

          • bintchaos says:

            Then why vote at all?
            I don’t understand.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @bintchaos

            You’ve seen the by-county election map, right? The country is a vast sea of red with tiny but dense pockets of blue in the urban centers. Given that the sea of red is populated solely with the stupid and the evil, how do you make it through your day? Surrounded by that much malice and ignorance? It must take an awful toll on you.

          • Gobbobobble says:

            @bintchaos

            Are you aware that there are people out there who think the two-party system is bullshit and would like to see it cracked open? (Or is that stance just going to get more trollish harrumphing about Trump apologism and obvious innumeracy because Dr Doe solved politics ages ago?)

            More concretely, if the Libertarians got 5% of the popular vote, they’d get additional funding for the next election. So the chances of one’s vote making a difference (for the intermediate objective) go way up, especially when you consider that it doesn’t have to go through the EC.

          • bintchaos says:

            @Conrad Honco
            I’m sorry, but I thought I was clear on this– how much I admired Arlie Hoschild’s book and wanted to try to emulate it. I actually have more empathy for the low-information base than I do for conservative/libertarian commenters here.
            The base is being scammed and heartlessly exploited by their leadership.
            And just redraw that map by population to understand the popular vote.
            Or redraw it by the scholastic poll results to see the future.
            @Gobbobble
            A presidential system pretty much mandates a two party system. So to go to a parliamentary system would necessitate changing the Constitution. I think that the GOP should do that while they have control, it would ensure them a place at the table in a multi-party system going forward. But that won’t happen.
            And I thought it was 10%, and that isnt the reason Friedman voted for Johnson.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @bintchaos

            I’m a Red Tribe commenter on SSC, I’ve had my IQ tested at 155 and have an advanced degree in electrical engineering.

            So I’m clearly not the low-information base. Just to be clear, I’m evil, aware of my evil, and crafting lies for the low-information base?

            In your worldview, why am I doing this? Did I choose to be evil, or was I born this way? Am I profiting in some way from spreading my evil lies? Is there any way I can become less evil, like you?

    • herbert herberson says:

      Making the reply I would have made to your reply:

      Sure, the steelman version of the Sad Puppies is “a SF/F story should have science fiction or fantasy elements as an integral part and not bolted-on or as a veneer.” But, the steel-man anti-puppy side is “Yes, we agree with that, but we still think your cliche-ridden pulp is crap.” The entire argument comes down to de gustibus non est disputandum… and given that I just found out that the author of the excellent Broken Earth series I just finished devouring the second book of is a black woman and prominent anti-puppy, I know where my gustibus is esting.

      Also, side note, I think flogging The Water That Falls On You From Nowhere has officially entered the realm of cliche. It’s just a short story, who cares.

  2. johan_larson says:

    Foxtrot Alpha has a gloomy article about the US Navy.

    The Navy has been in a long budgetary downward spiral since the Cold War ended. Back then, the Navy had just over 500 ships. Since then the fleet has dropped to 275 ships. And the number of ships that are available to deploy in a combat ready status has dropped to embarrassing lows, putting into question its ability to perform its central missions without further straining material and crews. Shipboard maintenance has been backlogged and ships that should be out to sea are instead sitting pierside, making the 275-ship number much, much smaller in an operational sense.

    http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/the-u-s-navy-is-screwed-1795662679

    One of the things the author worries about is whether the US shipbuilding industry is up to the task of producing ships at a faster clip. But really, must these ships be produced domestically? There are at least two nations (Japan and South Korea) that have plenty of shipbuilding expertise, and are the closest of allies of the USA.

    • Matt M says:

      Why is this a problem? Don’t we have like 10x the amount of ships of the next biggest Navy (China)?

      • johan_larson says:

        The USN aims rather higher than the Chinese navy. It is sized for influence in every ocean of the world, including the Indian Ocean, which is literally on the other side of the world. I don’t think any other nation tries to do that; the Chinese don’t turn up much in the Atlantic, and the French and British fleets aren’t usually found in the Pacific. But the Americans are everywhere all the time.

        • Matt M says:

          So we could also just, like, stop doing that.

          • bean says:

            And then we could see the nice global order we have today disappear. Ultimately, global trade, and thus global prosperity, rests on free use of the sea. And the sea is kept free because threatening it results in a visit from large gray ships operated by the US Navy. Sea power is as important today as it has ever been.

          • Matt M says:

            Who has a sufficiently sized navy to “threaten global trade” that does not benefit from global trade at least as much as we do?

            You think China is going to go out there and start sinking our merchant ships? Give me a break.

          • John Schilling says:

            Whose merchant ships, again? The United States basically doesn’t have any.

            And China isn’t going to sink e.g. Panamanian merchant ships either, because why would they want to? Panamanian merchant ships will stop when they are told to stop for inspection by e.g. the Chinese coast guard cutter at the Straits of Malacca. Ships headed for China carrying goods China wants go on their way, ships headed for Taiwan get turned back, ships headed for Vietnam get to pay a fee that makes trade with Vietnam marginally uncompetitive with Chinese trade in any market where China wants to compete with Vietnam. Nobody gets sunk. China has already shown that it knows how to play this game without sinking anybody’s ships.

            More generally, lots of nations benefit from “global trade”, but nobody benefits as much from global free trade as they would from global trade where they get to impose a carefully-chosen set of restrictions.

          • bean says:

            @Matt M
            Have you ever heard of the tanker war? Or the pirates off Somalia? In a choke point, anyone with a boat and a couple of RPGs can threaten global trade.

          • Matt M says:

            Somali pirates don’t really serve the interests of China either, and, if left to their own devices, I imagine they’d be a little more enthusiastic about eliminating the problem than we have been…

          • bean says:

            Somali pirates don’t really serve the interests of China either, and, if left to their own devices, I imagine they’d be a little more enthusiastic about eliminating the problem than we have been…

            This is true even today. Merchant ships request Chinese escort when they can get it, because their ROE is a lot less strict than ours.

            But you asked who had a navy that could threaten global trade and didn’t benefit from it. The answer to that is anyone with a small boat and an RPG who lives near an important choke point. (John did a perfectly good job answering your other prong. One of the main jobs of the gun on a destroyer is firing shots across the bow. No, I am not kidding.)
            And proposing the Chinese as the solution to the pirate problem on a global scale does put as at their mercy when they’re ‘too busy’ to get rid of a nest that we’d like dealt with, or when they start charging for escort past Somalia. Global economic and naval power have always tracked each other quite closely, and I am not certain enough of the direction of that correlation to be comfortable cutting the latter.

            Edit:
            If you don’t believe me, look at what happened the last two times the US made deep cuts to its navy. We learned a valuable lesson, and I don’t want us to forget again.

          • Matt M says:

            Bean,

            I don’t pretend to know much about naval history.

            I was trying to make a larger point that people see China having the most powerful military beneath ours and automatically assume adversarial intent. That if we cut back, they will suddenly take over and start pushing us around for no good reason.

            Except China is just as dependent on us as we are on them, perhaps even moreso. The idea that a Navy 5x the size of theirs is necessary or otherwise they’d threaten our trade is ludicrous. Half our trade goes to them, and if they stop getting it, they’re fucked. Our interests and theirs are pretty much in alignment everywhere except Japan, Korea, and some insignificant rocks in the South China sea.

          • bean says:

            I was trying to make a larger point that people see China having the most powerful military beneath ours and automatically assume adversarial intent. That if we cut back, they will suddenly take over and start pushing us around for no good reason.

            They will start pushing us around because it benefits them to be top dog internationally. Countries are basically psychopathic, unless someone unqualified is in charge. (Wilson springs to mind here.)

            Except China is just as dependent on us as we are on them, perhaps even moreso. The idea that a Navy 5x the size of theirs is necessary or otherwise they’d threaten our trade is ludicrous. Half our trade goes to them, and if they stop getting it, they’re fucked. Our interests and theirs are pretty much in alignment everywhere except Japan, Korea, and some insignificant rocks in the South China sea.

            And what about Taiwan and Vietnam? John isn’t wrong about what they could do if they had the ability, and I’m not at all sure that we’d hit back hard enough economically for it to not be worth it to them. Plan for capabilities, not for intentions is the good general rule. Obviously, the plans for the war with the UK are the result of training exercises, but I’m not confident enough of the Chinese to go that far.
            As for relative naval size, I’d give the Chinese about half our fleet on the whole. Yes, we’re far ahead of them in terms of carriers and SSNs, but land-based air and conventional submarines are reasonably good substitutes when you’re close to your own shore, and most plausible scenarios are going to be fought in the western Pacific. And unlike, say, the Grand Fleet, we have to cover the whole world.

          • albatross11 says:

            I’ve read various comments on the internet along the lines that US aircraft carriers would do very poorly against a first-tier enemy (China or Russia). But my ignorance of this topic is extreme enough that I don’t even know where to begin getting a sense of whether this claim is right. At least a couple participants here are actual experts in something related to the right field, so I’d be interested in hearing what they have to say.

          • bean says:

            I’ve read various comments on the internet along the lines that US aircraft carriers would do very poorly against a first-tier enemy (China or Russia).

            We won’t know until the balloon goes up, but my opinion is that it’s not nearly as bad as you’ve heard. One of the great bugaboos is the DF-21 AShBM, which has never been the subject of a full-up test. The SM-3 that we have on many of our escorts has been tested many times, and seems to work pretty well. I expect that while the DF-21s are busy blowing merchant ships out of the water, the SM-3s will shoot down the few that manage to find real targets. Hard on the merchies, but that’s life.
            On swarm attacks in general, we’re a lot less vulnerable than we were in, say, the early 80s. A modern AEGIS ship has something like an order of magnitude more defense capability than what we had back then. Basically, the cost of an attack on a carrier group that could swamp the defenses is to the point where it’s no longer cheap, and our opponent is likely to run out of attack forces before we run out of carriers.

          • John Schilling says:

            As bean points out, there are some uncertainties due to limited peacetime testing, but the best bet is that any missile fired at a US Navy carrier battle group is simply going to be shot out of the sky. But, any major power is going to have more stand-off ordnance in its arsenal than there are defensive missiles available in a carrier battle group. In the short term, a CVBG will likely survive by being a small, mobile target in a large ocean, never being pinned down long enough for the enemy to concentrate its full force against. In the long run, it’s going to have to pull back to rearm – and it can’t afford to ever go close inshore, less than 2-300 km, against a major power.

            And on the other side of the equation, the major powers have air defenses of their own, maybe not as sophisticated as Aegis but anchored to unsinkable bedrock. Four squadrons of F-18s and a couple hundred cruise missiles aren’t going to e.g. destroy the Chinese Air Force on the ground, they aren’t going to control the skies over China or even just the China sea. At best, they are going to deny the Chinese control of those skies and seas and damage a few select targets.

            If we can keep a couple of aircraft carriers constantly deployed in theater, that means denying China the sea and air supremacy they would need to e.g. invade Taiwan, and make any war more trouble than it’s worth. If all we can do is cause trouble for a month or so before we have to pull back, that’s not so credible a deterrent.

            Same deal for Russia, a hypothetical aggressive EU or restored Ottoman Empire or whatever else we might face over the next twenty years. Because bean is right that it can take a generation to (re)build a Navy. Or to build a new world order to replace Pax Americana.

      • Nornagest says:

        Depends where you draw the line, but the answer’s so qualified that it’s basically no. We have a lot more ships, but that’s largely because we do a lot of power projection and that takes a lot of support vessels; in terms of combatant vessels, and especially in terms of combatant vessels in a given theater, the margins are smaller. Japan has 34 destroyers to our 62, for example, and theirs aren’t nearly as spread out.

        (Interestingly, I found when confirming this that India operates half as many amphibious warfare ships as we do — but three times as many as the UK, which is next on the list. I wonder what they’re planning to do with them.)

        • Sandy says:

          India has Pakistan to its east and China to its west, so at the very least they feel the need to dominate the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal for their own protection.

        • bean says:

          India operates 1 ex-US LPD and 8 LSTs. The USN operates 9 LHDs/LHAs, 10 LPDs, and 12 LSDs. Being really generous, they have an equivalent to 4 of our ships. (All of the US ships can land troops from over the horizon. The LSTs have to beach themselves to unload.) I think you may have stumbled across an article which counted India’s landing craft (as their wiki article does). They have 10, and my latest copy of Ships and Aircraft of the US Fleet (the 2013 edition, as the latest one is still too expensive) says we have 118.
          India’s amphibious force is fairly typical for a power of its size, but nothing special.

          As for the Japanese, you’d need to count the 22 cruisers we have when measuring us against them. There’s not that much distinction these days. Also, a lot of their destroyers are actually what everyone else (except the USN pre-1975) would call frigates, smaller than the Burkes and without air defense capabilities. We don’t really have any comparable ships in commission today, although the LCSs aren’t too far off given how ASW is done now.
          Basically, understanding relative naval strengths is really hard.

      • John Schilling says:

        The United States Navy has fewer ships than the Chinese Navy, though to be fair most of China’s are small coast-defense craft. If you count only large oceangoing combatants of frigate size or above, and modern submarines, it comes to 173 for the United States and 130 for China. The United States does have roughly 5:1 superiority in aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines, and 8:1 in large amphibious ships, but that is changing.

        The United States also has obligations in about twice as many oceans as China. You imagine that these obligations can be abandoned without consequence, but it would be a very expensive and irreversible gamble to test that theory.

        • Matt M says:

          Oh I’m sure there would be consequences.

          Most of them probably good. 🙂

        • MNH says:

          >it would be a very expensive and irreversible gamble to test that theory.

          What, in your opinion, are the most possible and most dangerous negative outcomes that could result from this?

          • John Schilling says:

            Among other things, freedom of the seas is a recent European conceit that the rest of the world has mixed feelings about and that only the US and UK defend in any materially significant way. So take the US Navy out of the equation, and the South China Sea may become a part of China, for Chinese shipping only unless perhaps a suitable tariff or transit fee is paid. Likewise various other seas, e.g. the Persian Gulf w/re Persia, according to the relative power of the navies in question. And possibly wars if the power of those navies is in question.

            If you’re the sort of person for whom “globalism” and “free trade” are naughty words on account of white working-class unemployment, you may find this to be a welcome prospect.

          • baconbacon says:

            @ John Schilling

            The logical conclusion of everything that you have written is that the US should abandon some specific sections f the ocean so that China (insert geo-political force here) will expand into and thus dilute its effective naval strength.

          • John Schilling says:

            China (and other geopolitical actors) are intelligent agents, not ideal gases expanding into any volume opened to them.

          • baconbacon says:

            China (and other geopolitical actors) are intelligent agents, not ideal gases expanding into any volume opened to them.

            So the threat is that China both will and won’t expand their naval influence?

          • John Schilling says:

            China will expand its naval influences into places where this will benefit China, often at the expense of the United States and its allies.

            China will not be rendered unable to do this by expending its naval influence into useless places simply because we say “look, we’ve left this place unguarded so you can send all your ships there – oops, looks like you don’t have any ships left for the places that matter”.

            If the latter is not what you meant by “abandon specific sections … dilute its effective naval strength”, you need to explain that part better.

    • baconbacon says:

      You can modify this type of article to fit 1936.

      Standing army/navy is mostly meaningless in large scale conflict once it is large and advanced enough to stall out an invasion while you ramp up. You can twist this into a justification for Israel to have a massive standing military, but for the US this is all about status.

      • bean says:

        This is just not true, and it wasn’t in 1936, either. The US was the only country which managed to get any meaningful quantity of ships above the scale of destroyers or really austere carriers into service that were started after the war broke out. The British managed to get a total of 10 cruisers laid down after September 1st 1939 into commission, only 4 of which were laid down in 1940 or later (and could thus be considered properly war-built, as these things take time to spin up). There was not a single battleship laid down after its nation’s entry into the war which saw service.
        Even a Burke is much more like a cruiser or a battleship than a WW2 destroyer, and the US doesn’t have the industrial capability to do what we did back then. This is utter nonsense. We need the navy ready to go in peacetime, because mobilization isn’t really possible any more, even if we ignore nuclear weapons.

        • baconbacon says:

          The British managed to get a total of 10 cruisers laid down after September 1st 1939 into commission, only 4 of which were laid down in 1940 or later (and could thus be considered properly war-built, as these things take time to spin up)

          This is because you are using the literal outbreak of war as the cut off. The US started its war ramp up in 36/37, the British had 5 battleships building in 1939, they weren’t random, Germany annexes Austria in 1938, and there was a 5 year build up to that.

          No, you cannot literally wait until the Luftwaffe are strafing your airfields before starting the ramp up, but it is rarely the case that you don’t have tons of advanced warning.

          The Birtish also didn’t prioritize ship building during WW2 because it very quickly became an air war, and the Germans were challenging them at sea constantly. They did however manage to build ~130,000 aircraft during the war, which was where they put their ramp up efforts.

          nd the US doesn’t have the industrial capability to do what we did back then.

          In terms of absolute production this is nonsense, industrial capacity in the US now wildly outstrips industrial capacity during the 30s. In terms of capacity relative to the rest of the world this is also probably not true, but a much stronger case could be built for it.

          Beyond that capacity right now has a lot to do with the Navy having spent 200-400 billion a year for a few decades trying to staff, maintain and upgrade a massive fleet.

          There was not a single battleship laid down after its nation’s entry into the war which saw service.

          Because battleships were mostly a waste once WW2 broke out, not because they couldn’t be built. Being able to produce what the war actually calls for a is a feature of the system, you don’t have to allocate resources to antiquated (but massively expensive and culturally significant) war machines.

          WW2 was mostly an aircraft, aircraft carrier and tank war, saying no one built new battleships during isn’t an argument against the ramp up.

          because mobilization isn’t really possible any more

          This is a ridiculous assertion.

          • bean says:

            This is because you are using the literal outbreak of war as the cut off. The US started its war ramp up in 36/37, the British had 5 battleships building in 1939, they weren’t random, Germany annexes Austria in 1938, and there was a 5 year build up to that.

            It was an example. Navies have spent the past 70 years hunting for mobilization designs, to be built during wartime. They’ve failed. And during that time, the minimum cost for a good surface combatant has been rising. In WW2, it was high enough that major surface combatants were by and large not started after the war broke out. The US is sort of the exception, but even then, most of the effort was carried by ships started before the war.
            Re the 5 British battleships, that was all they had the capacity to build, due to limits on heavy gun mounting production. Vanguard was added because she didn’t tax those resources. There are similar limits on US production today.
            (Also, the naval buildup started in 1936/1937 for a specific reason. Take a look some time at what various navies were planning to build to. It wasn’t obvious that the war would break out when it did, and their plans changed quite a bit.)

            The Birtish also didn’t prioritize ship building during WW2 because it very quickly became an air war, and the Germans were challenging them at sea constantly. They did however manage to build ~130,000 aircraft during the war, which was where they put their ramp up efforts.

            Uhh…. U-boats? The Japanese? The Med? You still don’t have a good grasp of WW2 history.

            In terms of absolute production this is nonsense, industrial capacity in the US now wildly outstrips industrial capacity during the 30s. In terms of capacity relative to the rest of the world this is also probably not true, but a much stronger case could be built for it.

            One of the main limitations on the US production of destroyer escorts was the ability to cut gears for their propulsion systems. The British were heavily limited by gun mountings. This isn’t a strategy game, and countries don’t just have one stat for ‘industry’. I have some idea of where these bottlenecks are and how much effort it would take to break them. Shipyards are more complex than they used to be, and we can’t expand them at will.

            Beyond that capacity right now has a lot to do with the Navy having spent 200-400 billion a year for a few decades trying to staff, maintain and upgrade a massive fleet.

            One of the lessons of the Washington Naval Treaty is that not building a fleet means that it’s a lot harder to build one when you need to. Seriously, the mobilization argument has been thrashed out for decades, and it’s not going to get any more valid today.

            Because battleships were mostly a waste once WW2 broke out, not because they couldn’t be built. Being able to produce what the war actually calls for a is a feature of the system, you don’t have to allocate resources to antiquated (but massively expensive and culturally significant) war machines.

            It’s not even worth my time to rebut this, at least not to you. If anyone else actually believes this, and isn’t dissuaded by my other writings, I’ll be more than happy to explain why it is wrong.

            WW2 was mostly an aircraft, aircraft carrier and tank war, saying no one built new battleships during isn’t an argument against the ramp up.

            So you’re saying that they sacrificed battleships for carriers? Then tell me, how many full fleet carriers (not light or escort carriers) laid down by nations other than the US after the nation in question entered the war actually saw service?
            (The answer is 3 in Japan, 1 in Britain, but in the later case, it was a November 1939 ship.)

            This is a ridiculous assertion.

            So how quickly can we build carriers? How much slack is there in the production system? What about AEGIS? Or gas turbines, or sonars, or any number of other systems? And how long do you expect a war with China to last before it goes nuclear?

          • Nornagest says:

            In terms of absolute production this is nonsense, industrial capacity in the US now wildly outstrips industrial capacity during the 30s.

            This is probably true in an abstract sense, but there are capabilities we had then that we don’t have now. In 1939 we had something like a dozen naval shipyards; now we have five. In terms of commercial shipyards the difference is even starker; there is essentially no production of large cargo ships in the US now, although we still produce a fair number of small and medium-sized craft, mostly for the oil industry.

            (To be fair, a lot of the shipyards making PSVs and ferries could make WWII-era freighters, which were smaller and less specialized than modern container ships.)

        • Deiseach says:

          We need the navy ready to go in peacetime

          Better to have them, and not need them, than need them, and not have them?

          • bean says:

            To quote the conclusion of the British report on the vulnerability of capital ships to air attack, ‘If their [air power advocates] theories turn out well founded, we have wasted money; if ill founded, we would, in putting them to the test, have lost the Empire.’

    • CatCube says:

      Well, Japan and South Korea are US allies because of security guarantees we provide due in large part to the US Navy. If the thought is that we can let our Navy shrink and our shipbuilding capabilities rot because well, we can just purchase them from South Korea when the balloon goes up, we may find that South Korea is a Chinese client by then.

    • bean says:

      Foxtrot Alpha has, of late, managed the trick of being even less accurate than is typical of the news media about military/naval affairs. Do we need to increase the aboard-ship maintenance budgets? Yes. Do we need to get the lead out of our shipbuilding? Yes. But we can do that. I believe our limiting rate in carrier infrastructure is about 1/3 years, and we’re at 1/5 years now. (And the cost per ship will go down if we do that.) Eyeballing, our rate on the DDG-51s is about 4/year, which we seem to be getting back up to after the disaster that was the Zumwalts. The LCS is looking like it might turn out to be useful in the next version.
      I’ve actually been aboard two USN ships in the past year, one for about 10 hours. They didn’t mach what I’ve heard of the late 70s, when it was really bad. I’ve heard the same from others who should know.

      • Garrett says:

        What happened with the Zumwalts and the LCSs? As far as I can tell, we sunk a huge amount of money into them and then decided to stop making them. Why? WTF?

        • bean says:

          We decided to stop making the Zumwalts because they didn’t work, and weren’t likely to. Think of the usual criticisms of DoD procurement, and assume they’re actually true, and you have a pretty good idea of what the Zumwalt program was like. The LCS is still around, but they’re calling the next batch frigates, concentrating on ASW, and making them slower. This is a good thing, although not as good as if they’d been built that way from the start. The LCS-2 in particular has fantastic helicopter facilities, and the helicopter is arguably the primary weapon of ships in that size range.
          That program has been very quiet for the past year or so, which could be very good or very bad. I’m not sure which way to bet.

        • John Schilling says:

          The first round of Littoral Combat Ships incorporated a fundamentally conflicted set of requirements that doomed it from the start. There are two schools of thought on how to win naval battles in littoral environments. One is to have small, fast, stealthy, semi-expendable ships like this (or small submarines) for doing hit-and-run attacks amidst the islands and inlets and shallow waters. Works better for a small navy defending its own coast than for US-style expeditionary warfare, but maybe it wouldn’t hurt for us to have some craft like that ourselves.

          The other is that, as bean says, the helicopter is the primary offensive weapon of the modern surface combatant and all those small/fast/stealthy boats better be more than semi-expendable because they are all going to be hunted down and sunk by missile-armed helicopters. This is a style of warfare the USN is pretty good at.

          But because the advocates couldn’t make up their mind, and because US defense budgets will only stretch to cover one new system in a class per generation, the LCS was given the absolute and explicit requirements of A: a 40-knot maximum speed and B: full helicopter support facilities. Along with the implicit requirement that it be small and cheap enough that nobody laugh too loudly when you say it’s still good for hit-and-run raids along the enemy coasts, etc. A small, cheap 40-knot helipad is such a blatant contradiction in terms that when we demanded such a thing, that’s all we got. Less critical requirements like “can sink enemy warships in battle”, “can withstand high seas without breaking up”, and even “can operate in normal seas for more than a few days without breaking down”, got lost along the way. Also, it wasn’t at all cheap.

          If the next batch turn into decent helicopter frigates, fine, we’ve got an opening for a decent helicopter frigate now that the Perrys are going away.

          The Zumwalts, by comparison, were a collection of good ideas that ought to have worked well together but, as bean notes, brought out the worst in the modern defense contracting process. Not even Captain James Kirk could make that ship work, and unfortunately the Navy doesn’t seem to have an engineering officer named Montgomery Scott.

          • CatCube says:

            Sounds like the movie “The Pentagon Wars” about the development of the Bradley. The basic premise of the movie was that nobody could swat the Good Idea Fairy fluttering around an whispering into peoples’ ears.

          • bean says:

            Sounds like the movie “The Pentagon Wars” about the development of the Bradley. The basic premise of the movie was that nobody could swat the Good Idea Fairy fluttering around an whispering into peoples’ ears.

            Pretty much. The movie gets the Bradly entirely wrong, which is typical. The Zumwalt seems like it might have happened because people took media depictions of the Pentagon procurement process as a guide. In reality, it has to do with a serious change in the way we do warship design, as a warship’s tasks are more complicated and harder to measure than those of airplanes or tanks. Probably. The Burkes slipped in just under the wire on some new DoD processes, and I can’t shake the suspicion of a causal link.

            John’s description of the LCS is pretty good, but it doesn’t quite capture the nuttiness of the era, when there was a proposed small carrier that physically wasn’t big enough to carry the proposed complement of airplanes. The advocates ignored the fact that they would have to stack airplanes on top of each other, and just kept repeating ‘VTOL’.

          • Nornagest says:

            The movie gets the Bradly entirely wrong…

            I haven’t seen the movie since… probably 2000 or so, but what does it get wrong about the Bradley?

            I mean, besides the fact that it described an utter boondoggle and the platform ended up performing tolerably well in two (three?) wars.

          • bean says:

            I mean, besides the fact that it described an utter boondoggle and the platform ended up performing tolerably well in two (three?) wars.

            This, pretty much. The Bradly is widely misunderstood, because it looks a lot like a tank, but isn’t one. This was apparently not obvious back in the 80s and early 90s. The general public does not understand Pentagon procurement, and any result they turn out will be terrible. The ‘reformers’ almost saddled us with a bunch of useless junk. The F-16 was originally supposed to be a simple daytime dogfighter before the professionals managed to make it useful.

  3. Mark says:

    I know the that I have a sense of status and my place within a hierarchy. I’ve experienced the feeling that someone is higher status than me, and I’ve had the impression that someone is lower status than me.

    I’ve never had that feeling with anyone who I’ve spent a large amount of time with, and built a personal relationship with, however. The holder of status/stigma is never fully human.
    When I spend a large amount of time with someone, their status goes out of the window, and it has to be a case of either friendly equality, or conflict.
    I might have to treat them in a certain way to get what I want from them, but I don’t feel any internalised sense of inferiority (as I might if I had just met someone who seemed particularly impressive.) I often feel a sense of unjustified superiority, but I try not to let it show.

    I certainly wouldn’t want to treat a close companion as “lower status” and I wouldn’t tolerate being treated in such a way.

    Does anyone else share this experience? Do you have a sense of “status” existing among your close friends, coworkers, and families?

    If not, and we evolved in small groups of family and close allies, it suggests to me that status seeking is unlikely to be a good explanation for evolved human behaviour.

    [My thinking is that the desire to cooperate must be stronger than the urge to compete for status, and that if status seeking is central to our behaviour, it says more about the culture with which we are cooperating.
    Perhaps the tribes of my ancestors were especially egalitarian.]

    • carvenvisage says:

      disclaimer, I feel like this might be poorly worded in parts, because my thinking on the topic is not that clear.

      _

      I think status is a pretty weird frame to look at things through, and specifically a security oriented habit appropriate only to security oriented situations.

      If you’re friends with someone, you don’t need to be aware of who would be more likely to win in a social confrontation, because ‘Social war’ isn’t a perpetually live (even if unlikely) option between friends. You, being a human, prefer not to view your friends as threats, so if you’re somewhat lucky (but not so lucky that you feel you can afford to do this all the time), when around friends that ‘status assignment’ process can switch off.

      On the other side of it, if you’re already in a conflict with someone, well, everyone knows you can’t just back out of it, right? The whole reason status is something you(r mind) (feel(s) you) have to keep track of, is because people are allowed to attack random other people, but in that kind of equilibrium folk wisdom says its more important to be a poor target than to avoid individual problems, which may not be a problem anyway. Threat again comes out of the picture because your only option is to hold your ground.

      (It’s basically the same problem as prisons small, -when someone attacks someone else, there isn’t a strong(/precise) enough immune response to automatically attack the attacker.)

      _

      I might be overselling the security angle. It could also be that humans are raised in super controlled environments where the only thing that seems ‘real’ or natural to them is the social hierarchy, and then this heuristic is vastly overapplied not because people are at-risk/risk-averse, but because it’s habit/what they’re interested in.

      • carvenvisage says:

        *it could also be other things, didn’t mean to phrase the alternative explanation I gave like it’s the only one.

      • Mark says:

        Yes, I wonder if the direct experience of status is simply the fear felt when confronted by a powerful group of outsiders?

        There is definitely something there, something “status-y”. We will adopt submissive body language, and agree to their demands. The reaction is certainly different when the threat is offered by a person, as opposed to a natural phenomena or animal.

        But, I think the key thing here is “powerful group”. In historical experience, there hasn’t really been that much opportunity for individual behaviour to affect status, or individual power.

        Perhaps intra-group egalitarianism is one solution to the problem of social stability, and the status of the group as a whole wins more reproductive rewards than our status within it.

        Once dealing with an out-group, however, submission can work as a strategy, because they might just go away.

    • Well... says:

      I’ve never had that feeling with anyone who I’ve spent a large amount of time with, and built a personal relationship with, however.

      Nice to say, but: Do you have any close long-time friends who would normally be of a very different status anyway?

      I have several such friends and in-laws, and I still feel the status difference even after decades of closeness. I just don’t let it get in the way.

      • If status is defined in terms of conventional categories, I have had a number of SCA friends who would be of a very different status. They didn’t feel to me like lower status.

        The same is true in the other direction of a friend, via a political context, who is much richer than I am.

        • To expand on my comment.

          I put it in terms of conventional categories of status, by which I meant things such as education and income. Within the SCA, and I expect within many other groups, there is a different sort of status, status within the group. Differences there are consistent with friendship.

          To take one clear case, SCA knights often have squires. The squire is probably a friend of the knight, but it is a relation of clearly unequal status.

      • Mark says:

        I think so. Maybe?

        I have friends who earn a lot more money than me, I have blood relations who are in prestigious occupations (and I most certainly am not), and I have in-laws who are successful business people.

        • Well... says:

          I didn’t mean status in terms of money, I meant more in terms of culture/cultural heritage. Sort of the Charles Murray “Coming Apart” sense.

          So, if you’re educated, white, some species of “rationalist”, come from some kind of middle-class background, etc., do you have friends who are black and from the hood, friends who smoke cigarettes and talk with a Southern accent, friends who are refugees from the 3rd world, friends who are devoutly Christian and rural, etc. Could also include friends who are ultra-rich or really famous and see/experience/access the world in ways that are unfathomable to you because of their wealth and status. (I.e. NOT the “millionaire next door” type.)

      • Tibor says:

        I suspect that if there is a “dividing line” is not so much wealth as it is education. But not even that is true, it is more about intelligence which obviously correlates with education but not perfectly. I think that intelligence is not what people usually mean by status though.

        As for me, one of my closest friends doesn’t have a university degree*, an ex-girlfriend who I’m still very close friends is a trained cosmetician so she did not even have a maturity diploma** when we were dating and only did something like that at a not very good school when she was 26. Her current husband is a lawyer who earns quite a lot of money even though a lot of his friends are basically patrons of one local pub, a lot of whom are sort of “losers” in that they haven’t accomplished most anything and their hobbies mostly consist of going to the pub and to various concerts (I feel like these particular guys are stuck in their early 20s although some of them are in their early 40s now). I don’t know how it is in the US, or even the UK which seems to be more “ordered” in terms of social classes, but at least where I’m from money or even education is not a big barrier. Of course, if you’re smart you’ll less likely to be friends with someone who’s completely stupid. But they don’t have to necessarily be as smart as you or you don’t have to be as smart as them. There are a lot of things other than IQ which influence whether I find someone (un)interesting, and IQ itself is not usually what people recognize as status either (it is usually either money or how “esteemed” your profession is).

        *although he has a sort of what would probably be translated to English as “specialist college” or something, in optometrics. The point is that it is shorter than a proper university and not research-based at all. It is typically a school that prepares people to some kind of a “lower-level” specialist job like being a dentist assistant, optometrist, lab assistant or something like that.

        **this diploma is a common thing in many European countries, it is a requirement if you want to study at a university and it is usually what you get at all high schools (high school for me ends at the age of 18 more or less) which don’t train a specific skill exclusively. So typically a baker, a hairdresser, a cosmetician, etc. won’t have one (although sometimes they have an option to study 1 year longer and get it), but most people will.

        P.S.: I just remember I went to high school with a girl who’s brother is a billionaire and in fact nobody even knew about it for quite a long time. She had friends who one would probably consider “working class”.

    • rlms says:

      I don’t think “general status” is granular enough that there are noticeable differences in it between me and people I know well, as that category doesn’t include any incredibly successful or unsuccessful people. But in terms of specific status systems (social status in particular strata, academic status, etc.) there are definite differences.

    • Tibor says:

      How many close friends have you got? I think that even in a medium-large band of hunter-gatherers (say 30-40 people), there will be people who aren’t your close friends. You can still treat each other like equals with a close friend while being considered of different status by others. You might feel there is no “status between” you and your friend but women might feel otherwise and clearly prefer you over your friend or the other way around, that does not mean that the higher status friend is going to treat the other as somehow below him. Similarly with other contexts (where your relative positions on the ladder might be reversed). As long as everyone is not close friends with everyone in your hunter-gatherer band, status will still remain a motivation.

    • Brad says:

      I’m not one of the people that goes for status explains everything. I think it is a real phenonon but not as important as some in the rationalist and rational-adjacent world claim. With that said, I do think status matters even with close friend and family.

      Among people that I know since childhood or young adulthood, including siblings, cousins, high school, and college friends, relationships have changed between me and them as well as between them and them based in part on standard markers of life progress and success or lack thereof. The most successful of my friends from college in terms of career gets treated differently relatively speaking than he did in college. Not to some extreme extent (see first paragraph) but in a noticeable way.

    • Matt C says:

      I see status distinctions in basically all my personal relationships. Somebody tends to lead, and others to follow. This isn’t set in stone, it can vary with context, but there’s usually a noticeable tendency.

      I don’t see anything bad about this. It’s nice to have a friend you can count on for support and advice, and it’s nice in a different way to be the guy who offers it.

      You seem to be defining status differences as something explicit and dramatic, where Bob is directly bossing Joe around and Joe just puts up with it. But a status difference can be as simple as one of them usually being the one to ask the other where they feel like getting lunch today.

      • Tibor says:

        But a status difference can be as simple as one of them usually being the one to ask the other where they feel like getting lunch today.

        This does not have to necessarily be a question of status. If you want to hang out with me and I want to hang out with you but I want it more since I enjoy your company a bit more (or more often) than you do mine, then it is likely me who will have to be active. I don’t think it makes too much sense to call this status.

        • Matt M says:

          What? This is EXACTLY what status is!

          • rlms says:

            I think there’s a difference. If you are generally more popular than me and therefore your company is in high demand, you are higher status. But another situation that fits Tibor’s description is if we are equally popular in general, but there are differences in how much we enjoy each other’s company specifically. Status doesn’t come into it there.

          • Matt C says:

            Seems we have different understandings of what “status” should mean.

            You and Tibor seem to be on the same page–that if we’re just looking at the interaction between two people as a pair, the idea of “status” doesn’t really apply. Status only refers to social standing/ranking within a larger group.

            So you’ve probably heard the expression, “in love, there is always one who kisses, and one who offers the cheek”.

            To me this is a status difference, in and of itself. You would say the expression is describing something else–not status, or at least not necessarily status. Am I right?

          • rlms says:

            @Matt C
            Yes, I would see that as a different issue. You could view it as status within a group of two, but the group there is so small that most of the ideas about status don’t apply. You can’t really compete or signal status in that context, because there is only one other actor.

          • Matt C says:

            We mostly understand each other, then. Kind of interesting that status “obviously” means one thing to me and (I think) Matt M, and clearly something different to you and Tibor.

            I think many of the ideas about status do apply between two people. Who is more likely to defer to the other, who most wants to smooth over conflict, who is more often seeking approval or assistance from the other.

            And you do have competition and signaling in a two person context. For example my son is constantly playing little one-upsmanship games with his sister, and sometimes with his parents. My brother and I do the same thing with each other. It’s playful, but I still want to come out on top when we get into it.

  4. The discussion of Hungrian genius is pretty dead now, so I thought I would add a bit here. I just got back from a couple of days in Budapest. According to the people there, most of the Jews in Budapest survived the Nazis, although the same was not true elsewhere in Hungary.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      Maybe 60% in Budapest, 20% elsewhere, both countryside and territories annexed during the war.

    • John Schilling says:

      Interesting. Any thoughts/evidence/explanations as to why? I’d expect the cities to have better records of who the Jews are and where they live, more clearly-defined “Jewish Neighborhoods” to search or isolate, and fewer hiding places that aren’t already on the “owned by a Jew so search here” list.

      • I don’t know the reason, but my speculation is that the Budapest Jews were relatively high status people with lots of non-Jewish friends, including ones in the city administration. Also, the urban non-Jewish population may have been less antisemitic than the rural.

      • hoghoghoghoghog says:

        Interesting point about records. Maybe outside the cities you don’t need records? Just roll up to some shtetl and kill everyone there? On the other hand I don’t know that Hungary even had shtetls.

        My overall impression is that Holocaust administration was so chaotic that you expect anamolies. For example, wasn’t the Romania survival rate was surprisingly good given, how enthusiastic the locals were, partly because the government was too rapacious to elevate principled extermination over plunder?

  5. I have another question on the UK elections. It seems that the Scottish National Party had huge losses. What’s up with that? I thought Brexit was supposed to bring out the secessionist in all Scots, so they could go join the EU themselves. Has this meme been way overblown, or are the losses of the SNP totally orthogonal to secessionist Scotland? Do secessionists vote for parties other than the SNP?

    Spoken in total ignorance from the other side of the Atlantic.

    • cassander says:

      My understanding, which is very limited, is that labor and the SNP tend to compete over seats, so labour doing better comes at a direct cost to the SNP. Why labour did better, I couldn’t say.

    • Rosemary7391 says:

      The result of the previous independence referendum was pretty close. The SNP were pushing for another independence referendum, and it seems like folks were fed up with that, so went for the unionist parties instead. There’s also a feeling that the SNP aren’t doing a whole lot else except push for Scottish independence, which is a problem for even folks who’d quite like it but also would like a decently governed country in the meantime.

      I’m quite surprised at how well the conservatives did in Scotland. I wasn’t expecting that. From 1 seat to 13 isn’t bad going – Labour went from 1 to 7, and historically Labour have done much better in Scotland.

    • rlms says:

      A large part of the losses were to the Conservatives, which was unexpected as they have never done well in Scotland. The only explanation I can think of is that there were a large number of Scots who *really* didn’t want another referendum. The smaller SNP losses to Labour were more like regression to the mean; the SNP had previously taken an unusually large number of seats from them. I think it’s less that secessionists chose Labour over the SNP, and more like left-wing non-secessionists (or those who’d supported secession on the basis it would allow them to enact left-wing policies) who’d previously supported the SNP went back to Labour.

      • Rosemary7391 says:

        The swing towards more conservative candidates was also reflected in the local elections last month – areas which no one ever thought would be conservative suddenly returned conservative councillors. I wonder if it’s down to the Scottish Conservative leadership? They’ve definitely done well making noise about being an opposition to the SNP and another independence referendum, and Ruth Davidson seems to come across well.

    • See YouGov on secessionists voting for parties other than the SNP. (In short: there do seem to be quite a few of them who stated an intention to vote Labour or Liberal Democrat. But that doesn’t explain the Conservative gains.)

      • 1soru1 says:

        There are a lot of people who prefer the Conservatives on economic grounds, but were persuaded by the SNP argument for independence on cultural grounds. Other parties call them ‘Tartan Tories’.

        But the proviso was always that the economics worked out as affordable; this is ultimately why the referendum narrowly voted to remain.

        After Brexit, independence basically looks like economic suicide. With England outside the EU, you would need a non-symbolic border with it. Presumably not a literal wall, but passports, inspections, queues, paperwork, maybe even tariffs. Also, they didn’t like the mostly-leftist policies of the SNP in office.

        So ‘Tartan Tory’ voters returned to their natural home. This was helped by a good campaign from the local Scottish leadership. For the middle class, this largely completing the detoxifying of the Conservative brand that Cameron started.

  6. I have heard on this blog and elsewhere that SSC is a rationalist blog, and is read by rationalist readers. Maybe, but what does that mean? Don’t most people in the world consider themselves to be rational?

    In wikipedia they seem to contrast rationalism with empiricism. Thus rationalists give more precedence to apriori thought than to experience. I am certainly not in that camp, and I don’t think this blog is either.

    Maybe it as defined by LessWrong? Does that mean we need to believe in scary AI’s, effective altruism, and the various other things advocated by the sequences to be rationalists? (I haven’t actually read them, and am not particularly interested. But I’ve heard about them here. Maybe I have them mixed up). That may define Scott’s thinking somewhat, but I doubt if it is true of a majority of his readers.

    Is there a relatively brief definition of rationalism that covers the blog and most of its readers? I think there is somewhat of common mindset here, but I’m not sure what it is.

    • Nornagest says:

      It’s the Less Wrong sense, but not necessarily including AI and EA and all that jazz — more what I think of as the core content, which has mainly to do with heuristics and biases and the value of Bayesian statistics. (Though I think Eliezer somewhat overbills the latter in the sequences.) Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow is a good popular survey of much of the same content, if you’re allergic to Eliezer or just don’t want to read half a million words.

      It’s not the mainstream philosophy sense. I’ve often felt Less Wrong made a mistake picking that name, for that reason — in the rational/empirical dichotomy, LW rationalism is definitely more empirical than rational.

    • rlms says:

      Rationalist as in “SSC is rationalist” (saying “internet rationalist” is less ambiguous, but still has potential for confusion with RationalWiki) means “part of the LessWrong diaspora”. It’s a bit more complicated than that since nowadays there are some rationalist things that are more than one step removed from LessWrong, but the basic definition certainly applies here. I don’t think AI safety, EA, being a disciple of Big Yud etc. are necessary conditions for being an internet rationalist, indeed I don’t think there are any necessary conditions. But contrarianism and being vaguely interested in heuristics and biases are pretty common.

    • Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow is a good popular survey of much of the same content, if you’re allergic to Eliezer or just don’t want to read half a million words.

      I am definitely allergic to reading 1/2 million words. It turns out I just finished Thinking Fast and Slow, but I don’t understand how that tells me what rationalism is. He gives a lot of examples to show how people are not rational in particular ways, but I don’t see what that has to do with SSC.

      rlms comment on contrarianism and heuristics and biases sounds interesting. I don’t know that I see such things in SSC, but I buy into all three of them personally. So maybe those are characteristics that I like but don’t notice, just because they seem the natural thing to do.

      • Reasoner says:

        If you don’t want to read the entirety of the sequences, maybe try one of the Less Wrong archive guides here. The guides highlight posts that are especially good. The sequences are of very uneven quality IMO, so I recommend this approach.

    • biblicalsausage says:

      Well, this might not be a comprehensive definition of the whole “rationalist” phenomenon, but here’s how I think about it. The definition contains instructions — feel free to disregard it if you don’t want to do the reading.

      I’d say, Google “Yudkowsky sequences” and read two or three short sections more or less at random. Whether or not you agree with exactly what is being said in those sections, ask yourself if you think that discussing the kinds of ideas in the sequences is a good use of time, and whether you find yourself thinking about how to beat cognitive biases in forming your own opinions on a regular basis.

      If your answer is “yes” then you probably overlap significantly with the kind of people who would characterize the “rationalist” community. If the whole thing looks foreign to you, you might not. Not all the people who use the term “rationalist” agree on all this stuff, and not all the people who might be identified with the “rationalist” trend necessarily call themselves that, but it’s sort of a useful rule of thumb.

      Maybe another rule of thumb might be Bayes Theorem. If it strikes you as a useful approximation of how thinking words — heck, if you’ve even heard or thought about it before — you are probably rationalist or rationalist-adjacent in the way those terms typically get used. An interest — whether positive or negative — in applying utilitarianism to real-world problems and/or some kind of an interest in the effective altruism movement might also be an indicator.

      It’s a bit of a fuzzy term, just like “feminist,” “libertarian,” “alt-right,” “foodie,” or “nerd” might be. They all point at a general phenomenon that’s happening in the social word, but you won’t necessarily find sharp definitions that clearly delineate who is in and who is out.

    • Protagoras says:

      Rationalism as opposed to empiricism is a way of understanding early modern philosophy which is extremely oversimplified but not entirely unilluminating, and it is less pejorative than Kant’s terminology for the historical split (dogmatists vs. skeptics). But it becomes more misleading the further you get from the particular early modern philosophers who inspired it, and as others in the thread have noted the modern rationalist movement has nothing to do with that terminology (if you had to try to categorize it, the Less Wrong types and the people around here are actually closer to the empiricist side, but it’s better not to try to apply those categories so far outside their original targets). It might be better to describe the movement as philosophical, except that for the most part that seems to have turned into meaning people who spout whatever ideas come into their heads rather than people who think seriously about things and try to get them right (to the considerable irritation of philosophers like myself, but language is what it is). Scientific would also be a good candidate, but that would be likely to be taken to imply a level of professionalism and specialization which is not intended. It’s got a lot in common with skepticism in the modern sense, rejecting the supernatural and quackery in various forms, but there’s more to it than that. So rationalism has become the term for people who are kind of philosophical, kind of scientific, and have some skeptical leanings, in various combinations.

    • Deiseach says:

      I have heard on this blog and elsewhere that SSC is a rationalist blog, and is read by rationalist readers. Maybe, but what does that mean? Don’t most people in the world consider themselves to be rational?

      I think SSC has been somewhat diluted, at least when it comes to “rationalist readers”, by the likes of me (who am very much not a rationalist). I can’t speak for everyone else but I do think SSC has attracted a broader audience than Less Wrong, which then has an effect in what we like to discuss in the comments, what we pick out of Scott’s posts and links posts to comment on, etc.

      As to what commonalty we have, I’d say we like a wide range of interests, we have a leaning towards the sciences (though some of us wave the flag for the arts), we like facts and factually-based debates, we like debates/arguments/discussions/exchanges of views/convincing others to change minds and opinions by laying out a reasoned argument that hangs together and is backed up by sourced facts, we try not to wander off into the weeds of “but that makes me feel bad and you are a bad person for making me feel bad and you are wrong and should shut up!” (our degree of success in avoiding that, you can judge for yourself).

      As to the definition of a “rationalist”, I am not going to try to square that circle 🙂

    • nimim.k.m. says:

      This terminological confusion is one reason I have objected to the term “rationalism” as descriptor of LW in the past and still object to it.

    • carvenvisage says:

      Thus rationalists give more precedence to apriori thought than to experience. I am certainly not in that camp, and I don’t think this blog is either.

      I think Scott’s blog is unusually rationalist in exactly this sense. He seems to have a lot of faith in reason/logic, and an affinnity for them. He has written a lot of critiques of bad science, i.e. just going out and looking at stuff without thinking things through, as well as long pieces on topics where gathering data is impossible, and I think even written directly on the subject of using a dumb proxy when the actual variable is hard to measure.

      I’d say he sits near the middle of that spectrum, and that nowadays that’s actually really far to the “rationalist” side.

    • Don’t most people in the world consider themselves to be rational?

      Most people consider themselves above average drivers. Ome of the basics of rationalism is that you try to check that sort of claim.

      • random832 says:

        “Average” commonly refers to the mean (in so far as ‘driving skill’ can be reduced to a single variable in the first place – though if it can’t it makes it even harder anyway to reason about the median), not the median, and “most are above the mean” can certainly be true of a non-normal distribution.

        • rlms says:

          On the contrary, it makes more sense to interpret as meaning the median here. You can only calculate the mean of “driving skill” if you can map it to some numeric value, but you can work out the median as long as you can order people by driving skill (even if you can’t make statements like “x is twice as good at driving as y”).

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            The other thing you’d need to calculate the mean of driving skill is an unbiased set of observations. I believe people are most likely to notice the skill level of other drivers when it’s bad.

  7. johan_larson says:

    What I’m looking for is simple: quality current news, available online, mostly text, nothing fancy. I’m willing to pay for it, but I want no ads at all.

    Does such a thing even exist?

  8. Brad says:

    I just got an email from goodreads letting me know there’s a new Neal Stephenson book coming out next week — The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. Co-written with Nicole Galland. I never heard of her. The publisher’s description makes it sound interesting, but the ARC reviews are mixed. It doesn’t matter I was going to buy it no matter what.
    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32075463-the-rise-and-fall-of-d-o-d-o

    • bintchaos says:

      Oh yeah me too.
      Stephenson in REAMDE was so prescient– and he does have empathy for conservatives. I’m remembering his treatment of the survivalist family in that book, but Anathem, Snowcrash, Cryptonomicon and Diamond Age shaped my world view way more.

    • Nornagest says:

      Don’t know anything about this one in particular, but a good rule of thumb when dealing with co-authored sci-fi books is to assume it was actually written by the less famous of the pair, with the more famous contributing editing, ideas, and maybe a few scenes. (There are exceptions — Good Omens, for example — but they’re rare.)

      Might still be good, in other words, but I wouldn’t expect it to read like a Neal Stephenson book.

      • Brad says:

        Yep. I read the Mongolian invasion books, and didn’t love them, but hope springs eternal.

  9. Well... says:

    In the last 6 months I’ve noticed a number of e-magazine articles (in UX trade magazines anyway) arguing that people who use instant cash checking/payday lending services instead of traditional banking are actually doing the smarter thing given their situation. Maybe similar articles have appeared in publications geared toward economics that SSC readers have come across.

    I want to agree with those articles, but the more I think about it, the more they seem obviously wrong and based on contortions designed to fit some “I’m the friend of the disadvantaged” posture.

    Am I missing something?

    • rlms says:

      Scott posted a link to an article about that in this links thread.

    • random832 says:

      I thought the argument was generally that they don’t have access to traditional banking (at least not at the quality and price that leads middle class people to assume that “of course” they would be using instead if the evil payday lenders weren’t exploiting them) and therefore that regulating these things out of existence will leave them no access to financial services at all, rather than that using them is somehow “smarter”.

      • John Schilling says:

        I think most of the people who use payday lenders have “access” to financial services in that the mainstream banks won’t kick them out the door if they ask to open an account. They’ll just charge middle-class fees, topped with nigh-usurious penalties if they don’t approximate middle-class financial practice, and this isn’t actually a good deal for those customers.

        The people at the very bottom, literally couldn’t open a normal bank account if their life depended on it, so there’s some of that as well.

      • Matt M says:

        Access to “traditional banking” =/ access to short term cash loans.

        Payday loan customers can mostly open checking accounts, sure. But most banks simply aren’t in the business of giving short-term low-amount loans to people with terrible credit. As has already been mentioned elsewhere, the closest thing most traditional banks can offer to a payday loan is a checking account that you have the ability to overdraft… which they then hit you with fees that compare similarly to the interest the payday lender would have charged you anyway.

        I don’t have a link handy but I remember reading an article suggesting this is exactly what happened when the military banned payday lenders from loaning to servicemembers. Checking account overdrafts skyrocketed. And of course, everyone’s solution is “let’s ban checking account overdraft fees too, surely that will solve the problem!”

        • Brad says:

          The best parallel to payday lending is not a checking account, it’s a credit card with some room to spare.

          • Matt M says:

            I feel like most people regularly dependent on payday loans and/or overdrafts are probably already maxed out on whatever credit cards they are able to get, but I’ll admit to not having researched that.

          • Brad says:

            I’d agree with that. My point was if you want to know why people use payday lenders don’t ask if the can get checking accounts, ask if they can get more credit card credit. If the answer is no, which we agree it probably is, ask why not.

            For that last part, I think there’s a limit on what level of interest a cc can charge, though I’m not sure where it comes from.

          • Loquat says:

            In the USA, as far as I can tell, there’s no national limit on credit-card interest rates. Some states may have usury laws on the books, but the Supreme Court held in 1978 that those don’t apply to issuers headquartered out-of-state, which is why so many credit card companies are based in South Dakota and Delaware which basically have no interest rate cap.

            Now, in practice you won’t actually see very many credit cards with interest rates above 40% APR because competition, but there are a few, mainly aimed at people who wouldn’t be able to get a credit card otherwise because they have such bad credit. But more importantly, they also tend to have low credit limits, generally under $500, and high fees that go towards the account balance – i.e. a card offered with a 60% APR and a $300 credit limit might also come with $75 in initial fees so that the effective credit limit is $225 until you’ve paid those fees. Plus since the fees are part of your regular balance, you have to pay interest on them if you don’t pay them in full right away.

            So if that’s the only form of credit card credit you can get more of, a payday loan isn’t necessarily a worse deal.

        • John Schilling says:

          Access to “traditional banking” =/ access to short term cash loans.

          It kind of does; they’re just called “overdrafts”. And if that’s where you’re headed, yes, the nearest payday lender will charge you much less than BoA will end up costing you.

          But not needing to do that sort of thing very often is part of what I meant by “middle-class financial practice”.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      I’ve seen this, too, and it sets off my “viral marketing campaign” detector.

      Similarly, there’s a new story about how everyone hates Uber, or Uber is run by awful people, or Uber is doomed to fail seemingly every other week. Now I have no love for Uber, I think the “sharing economy” is a scam and is not “innovation” but an indication of a dying economy eating itself. Still, if someone is going through your garbage, interviewing your postman, all your ex-girlfriends and your third grade teacher to publish every awful thing you’ve ever done, it could all be God’s honest truth but there’s still somebody out to get you.

      • The Nybbler says:

        Yeah, I’m suspecting propaganda in the Payday Loans category as well. As for Uber, at least Sarah Lacy (Pando) is out to get them. Seems like Google is as well.

        • Deiseach says:

          Seems like Google is as well.

          I was going to pooh-pooh that but then I seem to remember some fuss about a former Google(was it? could be some other company, too lazy to look it up) engineer who worked on their self-driving cars going to Uber to work on their self-driving cars.

          So taking out the competition for self-driving cars does make sense, and would give Google an incentive to go after Uber, so this is not an unreasonable assumption to make.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Google leaked the fact that their former head of search — Amit Singhal, who had recently been made head of the self-driving car division at Uber — had been investigated for a sexual harassment claim that was found to be credible, and was about to be fired when he resigned. And Google was apparently perfectly OK with this leak. Most companies, and Google is no exception, are serious about HR confidentiality. As far as I know, no other personnel actions have leaked directly from Google HR. So I conclude that the leak was either done to hurt Singhal, or to hurt Uber; the timing points to Uber.

      • Matt M says:

        Yeah, the constant drumbeat of things like “look at these sexual harassment charges!” strikes me as a well coordinated attack. Especially when not coupled with any reasonable comparison or frame of reference. A few anecdotes about employees behaving badly doesn’t impress me. I assume every company has a few employees behaving badly. Even Lyft. Why are there ten billion articles about sexual harassment at Uber and zero about sexual harassment at Lyft. Am I legitimately supposed to believe Lyft has solved sexual harassment in the workplace and has none of it? If so, why doesn’t anyone write an article about that?

      • albatross11 says:

        Interesting–I was wondering about the same thing. A dozen damning stories and scandals all came out at once–I assume this was a coordinated PR campaign, but an alternative is that once the first stuff came out, all the other people who wanted to bash Uber and were waiting for their moment saw it.

        • baconbacon says:

          The other alternative is that simply by growing quickly they hit a point where they were having enough negative interactions with people that they started to feel like a trend.

        • John Schilling says:

          all the other people who wanted to bash Uber and were waiting for their moment saw it.

          This is probably the case, but note that “all the other people who wanted to bash Uber” includes an unknown and possibly significant number of people who wanted to bash Uber because they actually were sexually harassed at Uber but didn’t think anyone would take them seriously if they complained.

          See also, e.g., Bill Cosby date rape accusations.

          • albatross11 says:

            Sure, I didn’t say they didn’t have good reasons for bashing Uber. (I haven’t followed this stuff enough to know one way or the other, though it sounds like Uber would be a pretty awful place to work.)

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        For your consideration: Trump-Style Tactics Finally Stopped Working For Uber

        Indeed, it is hard to think of a figure from the last five years who has been as successful as Kalanick, save one of course — President Donald Trump. Indeed, Trump and Uber represent the pinnacle of this decade’s American success. They are our defining brands, and their core values of reflexive aggression and casual dishonesty are the decade’s defining values, seven years in.

        Uber has sought to steer clear of Trump, but their values are so close that the brands are utterly intertwined in the public imagination.

        Has anyone considered Trump and Uber “utterly intertwined in the public imagination?”

        • Gobbobobble says:

          Buzzfeed link

          Well there’s your problem.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Well that’s kind of my point. How did this article come to be? It’s like someone said “we have to keep hammering Uber! What’s something Buzzfeed readers hate?” “Trump?” “Great, write a Buzzfeed article about how Uber and Trump are the same, and bad, and failing!”

            Uber and Trump have absolutely nothing to do with each other, and they don’t establish that in any way in the article. How did this article come to be?

          • rlms says:

            In shocking news, people sometimes write silly things on the internet. Thankfully this phenomenon is confined to one side of the political spectrum.

          • Gobbobobble says:

            Thankfully this phenomenon is confined to one side of the political spectrum.

            Am I missing where that was implied somewhere? Buzzfeed is infamous for being low-effort clickbait, it’s not like I’m ragging on Vox or something else that’s lefty-but-actually-reputable.

          • bean says:

            Am I missing where that was implied somewhere? Buzzfeed is infamous for being low-effort clickbait, it’s not like I’m ragging on Vox or something else that’s lefty-but-actually-reputable.

            What you’re missing is sarcasm.

          • Gobbobobble says:

            I’m aware of the sarcasm. Unclear what brought it on.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @rlms

            In shocking news, people sometimes write silly things on the internet. Thankfully this phenomenon is confined to one side of the political spectrum.

            I’m not talking about the Trump part, I’m talking about the Uber bashing. You could replace “Trump” with something else Buzzfeeders don’t like, like perhaps “head lice” or “North Korea.”

            I have never liked Uber, yet I’m surprised by the torrent of negative Uber news I’ve seen in the last 6-8 months.

            Epistemic status: “Tinfoil hat.” Somebody is conducting a negative PR blitz against Uber so when the regulatory authorities eventually dismantle them, no one will care.

          • rlms says:

            @Gobbobobble
            Sorry, my sarcasm was aimed at Conrad Honcho (under the assumption that their answer to their rhetorical question involves the phrase “left-wing media” or similar).

            @Conrad Honcho
            To respond more substantively: I’m taking it as a given that Buzzfeeders don’t like Uber, and they have done the common thing of arbitrarily linking two things they don’t like (I withdraw my sarcastic comment which was made presuming you shared this assumption). There are multiple plausible explanations for this Buzzfeed’s enmity: Kalanick sounds generally obnoxious and there are many criticisms of the company to choose from.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @rlms

            Sorry, my sarcasm was aimed at Conrad Honcho (under the assumption that their answer to their rhetorical question involves the phrase “left-wing media” or similar).

            No, my tinfoil hat suspicion is not “left-wing media” but “paid PR campaign.” I think Buzzfeed is pairing Uber with Trump because they assume the Buzzfeed readership doesn’t like Trump. I wouldn’t be shocked if elsewhere in the blogosphere articles are being written about how Uber is part of the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

        • Nornagest says:

          Well, at least one person apparently does.

          Your average Buzzfeed article is best parsed as six hundred words of negative affect wrapped around a chewy core of smug, though, so I don’t think there’s anything to this.

        • The Nybbler says:

          As Journolist, the Ants, and the DNC debacle taught us, if something looks like more than a coincidence in “journalism”, it’s probably more than a coincidence.

    • skef says:

      The point these articles make doesn’t seem to be wrong, but they do tend to put a strange slant on the situation.

      Modern finance, increasing wealth disparity, and low interest rates have largely eliminated the need to aggregate retail banking deposits in order to fund, or example, mortgages or small businesses. Some of the money gets used that way, but it’s not what makes retail banking profitable. And “front-door” competition has reduced or eliminated up-front or regular fees. Banks now mostly make profits on irregular fees — going below minimum deposits, overdrafts, etc. It’s mostly psychology now: customers can feel up front that they’re getting something for fee, and the fees are structured around unpredictable circumstances and common cognitive mistakes.

      That approach doesn’t work as well with poor customers. It’s not that the check-cashing places aren’t scammy, it’s that the banks have structured their account products so that they don’t make sense for poor people. Different financial and psychological conditions call for different fee structures.

      The factor that these recent articles do tend to omit is the advocacy for reviving postal banking, which is common in other countries. Those advocates have been making largely the same arguments, so the “surprise” expressed about these recent papers is probably disingenuous.

      • random832 says:

        Banks now mostly make profits on irregular fees — going below minimum deposits, overdrafts, etc.

        One thing that I’ve never understood is why overdraft fees – especially on cards, which can be declined, so the bank doesn’t have to pay the shop – aren’t considered equally or more exploitative as anything a payday lender does.

        EDIT: Plugging the numbers into an APR calculator, a $30 fee for a $10 overdraft that is covered by a deposit 7.5 days later is a 14,600% APR.

        • Deiseach says:

          why overdraft fees – especially on cards, which can be declined, so the bank doesn’t have to pay the shop – aren’t considered equally or more exploitative as anything a payday lender does

          Well, you worked out the calculation for yourself, but yes – if you look at the small print and work out what the APR is on credit card charges, they compare very similarly with the rates charged by Mr Legbreaker and Associates 🙂

          Banks rather depend on customers not reading the small print when they’ve been dazzled by the large, flashing print of “0% APR when you change your balance to us!”

          • random832 says:

            Well, the APR on a fixed fee ultimately depends on the amount of the loan, and $10 was chosen to be deliberately unfavorable (the 7.5 days was chosen to be the average amount of time until someone’s next paycheck if they get paid twice a month, which is actually favorable because most likely most overdrafts are likely in the last few days) but probably typical, especially if someone doesn’t know they’re overdrawn, and gets hit with the fee per transaction.

            In a discussion elsewhere, it was pointed out to me that one of the exploitative things payday lenders do is refuse to allow partial payment (i.e. if you borrowed $200 and only have $180 now, you cannot reduce your loan amount at all, only pay a fee to extend it).

          • Loquat says:

            one of the exploitative things payday lenders do is refuse to allow partial payment (i.e. if you borrowed $200 and only have $180 now, you cannot reduce your loan amount at all, only pay a fee to extend it)

            Do they not allow you to take out a second, smaller loan and then use that loan money plus your cash on hand to repay? I.E. if you borrowed $200 and can only pay $180, but they won’t take less than the full $200, why not just take another loan of $20 and now you have $200 to pay the larger loan?

      • baconbacon says:

        Modern finance, increasing wealth disparity, and low interest rates

        The only thing that matters for a bank is the spread*. 4% interest rates or 8% interest rates aren’t inherently more profitable one way or the other, it is the difference between loan rates and deposit rates where they make their money.

        * The direction that interest rates are going also matters.

    • baconbacon says:

      Am I missing something?

      Think about it like a bank. The traditional view of banking is that you lend them money, and they lend it out and they make money on the spread which is the difference between the two. Say it takes an hours worth of time to open up a bank account (face time, filing paperwork etc), and that costs the bank $50 on average with everything included (free checks, insurance, physical location, utilities). If you keep an average of $2,000 in your account it will probably take the bank 1-2 years to make that money back lending it out. If you keep $200 in your account it will take 10-20 years for them just to cover the initial costs with recurring costs.

      Banks don’t want huge numbers of people with $200 or less in their account, if you say “I can’t believe you charged me a $30 fee for a $10 overdraft, I am taking my business elsewhere” the bank’s reaction is mostly ‘good, fine, we don’t care’ (unless you have a long history with solid numbers at the bank in which case a manager will often waive the fee knowing its likely a one time thing).

      A system that is designed to work for people with $X in their account isn’t going to be optimal for people with $10X in their account (and yes people who keep $100,000+ in accounts get different treatment at banks than people with $1k-$10k).

      • The Nybbler says:

        (and yes people who keep $100,000+ in accounts get different treatment at banks than people with $1k-$10k).

        Mostly in that they try to sell high-fee low-yield investment products to the people with a lot of money in their accounts.

  10. johan_larson says:

    I’m trying to reconcile two facts that point in opposite directions without quite being contradictory. Both concern private schools.

    On the one hand, wealthy people often send their children to (pricy) private schools, hoping for a superior education. On the other hand, when voucher plans are set up to money to poorer folks to send their children to private schools, studies generally find their scholastic results don’t change.

    So what’s going on?
    – private schools are no better, so the fancy folks spending money on private schools are throwing it away
    – it’s the amount of money being spent that matters, not whether the schools are public or private
    – poor people are bad at shopping for education
    – expensive private schools do a better job, but mostly because they allow their students access to a better peer group
    (and more…)

    Any ideas?

    • random832 says:

      studies generally find their scholastic results don’t change.

      How is this measured? If it’s based on grades, maybe the private schools also have tougher grades, which “cancels out” the benefits in the terms that the study can measure? If it’s based on standardized test scores, maybe the private schools provide a better education but are also less likely to engage in “teach to the test” tactics, so they don’t provide better test scores. Maybe the fancy private schools are better specifically at teaching the kind of skills someone who is from a wealthy family will need later in life, without being better at general education

      All of these theories predict that the children of wealthy families *also* won’t have notably better “scholastic results”, as measured however the study measures it, than those who go to public school. Is this measured by any study?

    • dndnrsn says:

      Consider that scholastic results are usually measured by tests, whereas some of the benefit of a private school education is that it impresses people. Considering universities, the perceived gap between the best in a country and the twenty-fifth best in a country is greater than the actual gap, by and large.

    • baconbacon says:

      studies generally find their scholastic results don’t change.

      It is actually fairly simple, scholastic results are only a modest portion of why parents send their kids to school. Take religious private schools, children there have the same scholastic production, but also get the bonus religious instruction that some parents want. Other times it is athletics, discipline, artistic or music programs, safety etc.

      The same grades/SAT results + extra curricular activities > just grades/SAT results, which is why parent satisfaction is much higher for private schools than public.

      • albatross11 says:

        The way I understand it[1], private schools do better in academic terms overall, and I think that’s usually true for charter and magnet schools. But they are also selective about which kids they let in and which kids they kick out. When you account for the quality of students coming in, I think the academic advantage (in terms of test scores) goes away either mostly or entirely[2].

        This is easy to see for magnet schools–you get in by having good grades and high test scores. Almost any school is going to look great on the basis of *those* kids’ performance. (Where I live, the public schools usually put magnet schools inside schools with big problems, to raise the average test scores.)

        Private schools typically have some academic requirements for admission, but not as high as a magnet school. But they also have parents who care enough about education to spend their own money on schooling, which means they’re likely to lean on their kids to do homework and stay out of trouble. And private schools can expel a disruptive kid much more easily than public schools, so where a public school has a kid who disrupts every class he’s in for four years, a private school has a kid who does that for one semester.

        A lot of middle-class parents put their kids in private schools for reasons that don’t show up so much in test scores. For example, if the local public schools are bad (either bad academically or bad in terms of violence or gang problems), you probably don’t want to send your kids there. Maybe your kid will do okay in life despite four years getting terrorized by thugs at Gangland High, or four years wasting time in classrooms where the teachers have lost control in Ineffectual High–after all, smart kids with good work ethics do pretty well most of the time. But why subject them to that crap if you don’t have to?

        Also, if you’re Catholic, a Catholic school is going to raise your kids with something like your values. If you think a lot of popular culture is a sewer[3], that can be worth a lot. Having classmates who care about grades and school and mostly stay out of trouble is worth a lot, too–it probably helps your kids stay out of trouble.

        [1] At least one regular commenter here, Freddie De Boer, is an expert in this stuff who writes a blog that’s very much worth reading on the subject. Hopefully he’ll tell me what I’m getting wrong.

        [2] I haven’t tried to dig into the statistics used to do these comparisons, and there are definitely ways to get this wrong, but I’m assuming these results are relatively solid. It’s of a piece with a bunch of other evidence that it’s hard to have a big impact on measurable stuff like test scores of kids, once you’re somewhere close to standard best practices.

        [3] It is.

    • Well... says:

      Your last reason sounds like the most plausible. Also, kids going to expensive private schools are more likely to come home to…

      – a nanny or tutor or very involved parent who helps them with their schoolwork.
      – a house full of very educated adults, where the adults’ very educated friends sometimes visit as well, providing a mostly universally well-educated cast of IRL role models and authority figures.
      – a house full of books, smart stuff on the TV/other screens, magazines aimed at the highly educated, and a generally more enthusiastic attitude toward learning, discipline, and being knowledgeable.
      – parents who, in addition to carefully selecting their children’s peer group through school choice, also carefully select it through other relationships and activities, both structured and unstructured.
      – Etc.

      Plus, part of what parents are paying for is the much lower odds their kid will be stabbed or beaten up over drug money or something like that.

      Education outcomes definitely aren’t about money spent–not directly. 8th-graders 130 years ago graduated from one-room schoolhouses knowing way more than many of today’s freshly-minted bachelor’s degree-holders.

      • albatross11 says:

        What fraction of people went to 8th grade 130 years ago, relative to today?

        • Well... says:

          I’m not sure. Maybe you’ll have better luck at this link than I did: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf

          I’d imagine the answer is “a smaller fraction, relative to today” but is it small enough so that that alone accounts for the difference in performance (meaning the hoards of dummies simply weren’t in school dragging the curriculum down)? I doubt it.

    • rlms says:

      Do you have links to any studies that show the second fact?

    • Nornagest says:

      For the average student, all conventional and most unconventional education is probably mostly equivalent in terms of knowledge retained. That doesn’t mean it’s socially equivalent, though: going to an expensive private school has social benefits for the kids in that it allows them to hang out with rich children and probably a few exceptionally smart scholarship students (so approximately point 4), and it has social benefits for the parents in that it allows them to hang out with rich or smart parents at parent-teacher functions (and to brag about what they’re spending on their kids and how nice a school they’re sending them to).

      Also, exceptional students might actually benefit from the extra resources available to them at expensive private schools. There aren’t very many exceptional students (so this won’t show up cleanly in most statistics), but there are a lot of parents who’d like to think their kids are exceptional.

    • 1soru1 says:

      – studies generally find their scholastic results don’t change.

      Contradicted by:

      http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/schools/special-report-working-class-pupils-went-to-private-schools-under-margaret-thatcher-s-abolished-8857345.html

      http://www.suttontrust.com/researcharchive/open-access-independent-evaluation/

      Note that here we are talking about sending selected kids to expensive schools that justify their fees to parents by results. The result of taking a pre-existing school and simply adding shareholders may vary.

      • johan_larson says:

        Here’s a couple of links to articles that support my claim that school vouchers don’t improve student learning (generally proxied by test scores.) They’re not formal studies themselves, but they link to them.

        http://news.stanford.edu/2017/02/28/vouchers-not-improve-student-achievement-stanford-researcher-finds/

        https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/upshot/dismal-results-from-vouchers-surprise-researchers-as-devos-era-begins.html?_r=0

        It seems voucher plans are at least not a quick, simple win. And that’s kind of surprising, at least to this conservative/libertarian. People should be able to do better managing money for their benefit than bureaucrats, right? And if they don’t, that’s a) weird, and b) interesting.

        • Well... says:

          I think any underwriter would quickly tell you the average person is totally lousy at managing his money.

        • 1soru1 says:

          None of the theoretical arguments about markets actually apply to education on any timescale short enough to actually act on the information buying the product gets you.

          So it is purely a matter of pre-judgement, and who makes it. Professionals can do many things better than amateurs; distinguishing between a good school and a well-marketed school may well be one of them.

          • albatross11 says:

            One thing you definitely can do as a parent is tell that your kid is doing badly in a given school. I’ve done this with 2/3 of my kids, once moving a kid between Catholic schools, once moving a kid from a Catholic school to a public school, both successfully in terms of the kid in question being apparently much happier.

            This isn’t necessarily about it being a bad school, either. Sometimes, things just aren’t working out, and a change of scenery is in order. This works if the parents have choices, and doesn’t work if the parents have to buy a new house and maybe find a new job to move their kid to a different school.

    • massivefocusedinaction says:

      The wealthy aren’t buying a better education, they’re buying into a restricted peer group for their children. There’s much less peer selection effect when the requirement the entry requirement is some paperwork rather than a relatively expensive tuition.

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

      I’ll join in with those saying that it’s paying for a better peer group, with a side order of credentialism for the most elite schools with recognizable names.

      This doesn’t just apply to private schools. Stuyvesant and the other NYC magnet schools are public schools but, crucially, they’re still very selective. Selectivity is what’s important, because neither schools which select based on the student’s abilities nor those which select on the parent’s willingness to pay (whether for tuition or for housing) are likely to be full of budding criminals and lowlifes.

      As someone who’s been through public school and dealt with that, it’s a very pretty important criterion.

    • currentlyinthelab says:

      I wonder if people underestimate just how bad things can be in lots of public schools. There are a lot of parents who do absolutely no research on the schools in the nearby school district, who just don’t care enough about their childs future besides effectively feeding them and sending them to the nearest legally required school. That alone probably makes the networking events for parents themselves decent.

      What well said “Plus, part of what parents are paying for is the much lower odds their kid will be stabbed or beaten up over drug money or something like that.” is entirely true in multiple parts of this country.

      Or, things in some public schools can go horribly wrong(and I mostly don’t blame the teachers in these cases) that simply probably won’t in private schools due to similar reasons. Some students in public schools (some of those were the officailly “gifted” AP students due to test scores) in my area growing up had stores of parents basically not feeding and dressing them when younger, and often they lived just a block away or two from the school. I’m not sure that would happen in a school that had some minimum amount of time and effort and paperwork to require students to go in.

      (I am *highly* suspicious of studies that say parenting dosen’t matter, and I wonder how much is explained by the fact bad parents lie, or we don’t include peer-to-peer events that actually can be partially chosen by parents, that just end up lost in effect sizes due to difficulty of definitions of words)

      Most scholastic results commonly mentioned in the media and magazines are extremely loaded in terms of IQ. In fact, you could even call many basic reading comprenhension tests and basic pre-algebra tests IQ tests, which after a minimal amount of training don’t improve much. (though, to be fair, I absolutely include the quadratic formula and sphere volume into the “crystallized” component of capability)

      There is a lot of useful material lost by obsessing over math and reading scores, but unfortunately so much of the rest of useful knowledge is lost in such debates. Its not surprising that “scores” don’t go up in these, when you’re using the exact same sort of questions that IQ tests use.

      • Deiseach says:

        I am *highly* suspicious of studies that say parenting dosen’t matter, and I wonder how much is explained by the fact bad parents lie, or we don’t include peer-to-peer events that actually can be partially chosen by parents, that just end up lost in effect sizes due to difficulty of definitions of words

        I tend to take it (and I don’t know if this is true or not) that these kinds of studies don’t look at abusive parenting because “duh, if your parents starve and beat you, of course that is going to have a bad effect”, so instead they look at “okay, so we have sixty kids from families where they have a bed to sleep in, food to eat, and clothes to wear. Now we’ll examine academic grades/some other factor, and see if parental influence has any effect there”, and then conclude that there’s pretty much no effect whether Bill has a father who plays the trombone and wants Bill to learn to play it or not, the real effect is if Bill’s schoolmates will mock him and bully him for playing the trombone so that affects if Bill wants to learn to play it or not. Therefore peers not parents have a greater influence on the growing child.

        • currentlyinthelab says:

          Why I am extra suspicious of the little-parenting effect there is that ultimately, parents do have some control over the peer effect and after-school effect, which churches, recommended after school events, cautious and socially aware picking of schools.

          By forgetting that a certain amount of the “peer-to-peer” interactions are a partial function of parental effort, that greatly minimizes possible spotting of parental effect.

          A certain amount of pruning over the entirety of possible peer-to-peer interactions are due to parental effort, the problem is that’s simply really difficult to spot and put on studies of these.

          Stated one way, the set of probabilistic peer-to-peer interactions are a partial function of parental choices in this society, leaving this debate of how effective parents can be to be a debate on the language and what is allowed to be subsets of other effects. And if one doesn’t admit that, then one will find a much smaller parental effect then one should.

          Hell, acne is a good example today. A non-sporty teenager with cystic acne isn’t going to have a great time. A socially intelligent and well, financially well off parent can prevent the worst of that with dermatologist visits(that the teenager has no way of affording on their own), thus greatly changing lots of peer to peer interactions.

          But how the hell do you untangle the mess of genetics(acne prone, non acne prone), parent effect(parent with the foresight that yes, this should be delt with and teen X should not go alone) or peer to peer effect(popularity, dating, even likelihood of being elected to student office or club leadership positions, which then gives college scholarships, etc). I mean, a parent who forces a youth with bad teeth and cystic acne to go to the dentist and dermatologist very much changed how high school will go. Its a large interlinked web, with how to neatly distinguish what is what impossible.

          I think alot of this low parenting effect is just some impossible mess to distinguish in basic questionnaires on these twin-adoption studies, where all these fuzzy categories of parental decisions are not being included. So this becomes a facet of Wittgensteins observations that just how we define words, and have words linked to other words totally change the conclusions of a study.

        • 1soru1 says:

          The rate of filicide is non-zero; pretty sure killing your child has a long-term measurable effect.

      • Deiseach says:

        Its not surprising that “scores” don’t go up in these, when you’re using the exact same sort of questions that IQ tests use.

        Now that I’ve picked myself up off the floor and stopped laughing, yeah that IQ test must be pretty poor. The 30 minute adult version gave me this result:

        You scored a 34, which puts you in the 95th percentile. According to the WAIS, your IQ is 127.

        Considering I guesstimated the “what number comes next in this sequence?” questions and I know I got one of the word questions wrong, this result is not exactly rock-solid 🙂

        • currentlyinthelab says:

          Oh, perhaps I picked a bad example as an IQ test. Some of those are more *coachable* then the makers would like to admit.

          My underlying point still stands. For certain tests of reading comprehension and basic abstraction of addition principals in algebra, after simply *some* amount of training(which both public and private schools have incentives to train for)they become very highly g loaded activity, to the point where we might as well wonder why private schools don’t improve basic physical reaction times.

      • John Schilling says:

        I suspect much, and possibly most, of it is that the gold standard for studying this sort of thing are twin studies. So you’re talking about identical twins, adopted in infancy (because otherwise early environment is impossibly cofounded) and in good health (because ditto congenital disorders). And the economics of adoption in most of the western world for most of recent history is that there are more people who want to adopt healthy infants than there are healthy infants to go around, so they all go to the most stable and least impoverished families. Which mostly excludes the “interesting” parenting styles and effects we might otherwise like to study.

        Would, e.g., Laszlo Polgar have been able to requisition three matched sets of Hungarian orphans for his field test, if he’d admitted what he planned to do with them?

        At the other end, yes, I expect the scientific community would very much like to study what various forms of abuse actually do to children, rather than just assume “it’s real bad” – but not as much as adoption agencies want to not send children to be raised in abusive environments if they can help it.

    • Private schools often offer scholarships , and have a motivation to do so: it bumps up the averages, but not in a way that means paying customers are going to get better results for their kids.

  11. siduri says:

    This article is very culture-war-y, but I’m posting it for kabbalistic purposes as will shortly become clear: A Physics Expert Had Her Own Theories Mansplained Onstage—Until One Person Stood Up

    Nominative determinism in action: the person in the audience who cried out “Let her speak!” is named Marilee Talkington.

    • baconbacon says:

      I think my life would improve if I could stop reading terrible articles to confirm my negative opinions based on the descriptions.

      At the least I would have more free time.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        I’ve been gradually acquiring the ability to not click on various sorts of links which are likely to make my life that little bit worse.

        I think it helps to remember how annoying, infuriating, or unprofitable various sorts of articles feel.

        • johan_larson says:

          Nancy Lebovitz, as I live and breathe! I remember you from rec.arts.sf.written, back in the day. Wow, that must have been twenty years ago, now. How have you been?

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            Reasonably well– good physical health, need to do more with the button business but it’s still running, miss trn more than I can say.

            How are you doing?

          • johan_larson says:

            Replying here to Nancy, rather than to her posting directly. (No reply link.)

            I am OK, thanks. Closer to twenty years out of school now, I’m working as a software developer in Toronto. Middle age is looming.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            This site has limited nesting– that’s why there was no reply link. Like I said, I miss trn.

            Have you read anything good lately? I’m currently rereading _Fourth Mansions_ for Laffcon— a one-day semi-academic gathering of Lafferty fans.

          • johan_larson says:

            The best things I’ve read recently are some LA detective novels by Michael Connelly. Not particularly hard-boiled, but really great for local color. I’m on The Black Box right now; that’s the eighteenth in the series, or so.

            The best video I’ve watched recently is a six-hour documentary series called Emperor of All Maladies, about the history of cancer research and treatment. Gripping stuff. You can find it on YouTube. Watch it! Watch it!

          • Reasoner says:

            Is this how friendly everyone was with each other back in the early days of the Internet? (Sorry if I’m interrupting)

          • LHN says:

            @Reasoner: Usenet gave the world terms like “troll” and “flame war”, so it wasn’t as utopian as all that. But rec.arts.sf-lovers/rec.arts.sf.written was a generally well-behaved newsgroup as such things went. (And we had the lost technology of the killfile with which to disengage if desired.)

            I’m not sure that SSC is actually much worse in tone on average than r.a.sf.w was. But back then it was possible to manage to keep things relatively civilized without a moderator or the ability to ban users.

            (Mostly. In principle, the organization providing access to the net could take it away. But that was pretty vanishingly rare. Many universities were barely aware that they were providing net access in the first place.)

            Beyond that, Nancy Lebovitz has always been a watchword for reasonableness. (There are names from those days that would likely be greeted with less enthusiasm, or at least more caution.)

          • Nornagest says:

            Killfiles suck. With ban-mediated moderation, each problem user wastes one moderator’s time for thirty seconds; with killfile-mediated moderation, each problem user wastes O(n) users’ time for thirty seconds where N is the size of the forum.

            Given that the number of problem users also scales as O(n), you start to see the problem. They can be useful for the cases where feuds develop or where a handful of people are intolerably annoying to each other for some reason, but they’re nothing to base a moderation system on.

          • johan_larson says:

            @ Nornagest

            Killfiles suck. With ban-mediated moderation, each problem user wastes one moderator’s time for thirty seconds; with killfile-mediated moderation, each problem user wastes O(n) users’ time for thirty seconds where N is the size of the forum.

            True, killfiles are inefficient for solving the problem of posters who piss of nearly everyone. But not all posters annoy everyone. Some of them only annoy some people, so selectivity and choice are useful.

            For example, if John Scalzi were a frequent poster here, I would probably killfile him because I tire of his relentlessly smug advocacy of Orthodox American Liberalism. But I wouldn’t be surprised if others, considerably to my left, considered him one of the best parts of this board, and they sat there clapping and cheering, “Say it again! Say it again! Preach the Word, brother!”

          • LHN says:

            Exactly, johan_larson. There are any number of people on the net whom I wouldn’t even wish to be generally silenced, but whom I’d be happier to never hear from again.

            Killfiles are also vastly more flexible than per-user bans or blocks. I’m on numerous social media fora where the same people produce a) interesting observations about pop culture and b) endless repetitive political screeds. The simple ability to have a killfile that contained words like “Trump, Clinton, alt-right, SJW”, etc. combined with certain poster names would make Facebook, G+, and the like much more pleasant.

            (Twitter does seem to have introduced something like that, though not nearly as powerful as what trn had a generation ago.)

            Likewise, the ability to kill by thread or subject heading. “These people are all individually interesting, but this particular discussion/topic has long since gone off past what I’m interested in.”

            None of those things lend themselves to moderation even in theory. I don’t want a group that ejects people or discussions based on my whims. (Bans are certainly justified, but the bar is much, much higher than plonking.) I just want to be able to choose to stop seeing it myself.

          • Zodiac says:

            First time I’m hearing about killfiles. I really wonder if this principle could lower tribalization/polarization.

          • albatross11 says:

            The golden age of newsgroups was also a time when only people at universities, research labs, or a few high-tech companies had access to the net. That did two things:

            a. It selected for a somewhat higher class of participant (in the social class sense, also in terms of education) who often had technical interests.

            b. It meant that sufficiently abusive behavior could get you real-world consequences–like losing your university computer account.

            But there was one more, probably more important difference. Successful systems attract parasites. Usenet wasn’t big enough to be a great food source for parasites, and the parasites mostly hadn’t had a chance to adapt to it. When they did, killfiles and cancel-Moose quickly stopped working.

          • Nornagest says:

            I really wonder if this principle could lower tribalization/polarization.

            Forgive the incredulity, but… you have a mechanism that works by selectively kicking people out of your information bubble, and you’re wondering if it’ll lower polarization?

          • Zodiac says:

            If I understand correctly you filter out the information but not the person (or did sleep deprivation trick me?).
            I think that can make a difference. Right now a lot of what is going on is that you often completely shut out the other person once you find out that they supported the wrong party or liked the wrong post or something.
            Maybe you’re not so quick to condemn other people once you find out about their political beliefs when you had other interactions before about unrelated topics.

          • Nornagest says:

            If I understand correctly you filter out the information but not the person (or did sleep deprivation trick me?).

            The prototypical example of a killfile is one that blocks all posts from a particular user, so I assumed that that’s what you were talking about. More sophisticated versions can be used to block e.g. posts from a given user that contain the word “Trump”.

          • John Schilling says:

            Classic usenet killfiles allow two bubbles to overlap in the same space, with the people who want to interact with the “other”, and are worth interacting with, doing so. Everybody else sees only their bubble.

            Not clear that this is an improvement over one space, one bubble. Among other things, it’s hard for newcomers to orient themselves, and they may find it a hostile environment regardless of their perspective.

    • Soy Lecithin says:

      Watched the video, and I would say that Talkington perhaps read too much into the situation. I don’t know. In any case, the moderator seemed very gracious and immediately shut up when she called out of the audience.

      A clarification to the article, Hubeny was not explaining “her own theories.” None of the ensuing discussion touched on anything particular to Hubeny’s research. The moderator was just repeating some very standard stuff. So it was not as if she was having her ideas explained back to her or anything.

      (In fact it’s odd that they invited her to the panel at all, as AdS/CFT has nothing to do with inflation, what the discussion was ostensibly about. The cynic in me thinks that they needed a female on the panel and when they couldn’t get a cosmologist they just shrugged their shoulders and thought, “String theory, close enough!” That’s the real indignity Hubeny was dealing with, having her topic just shoehorned in.)

      • siduri says:

        I skipped to the part of the exchange directly before Talkington interjected, and I did find it very awkward to listen to the moderator asking her a question and then, just as she began to answer, talking over her in order to give his own answer instead.

        To what degree this is gendered is, of course, difficult to tell. Apparently Holt has gotten the feedback before that as a moderator he talks too much, so this is pretty characteristic for him, but it seems like an area in which he should strive to improve. I don’t believe he had any deliberate animus but I do think the gender dynamics make it quite possible for a voluble man to unintentionally end up interrupting a woman more often than he would interrupt another man, and when she’s the only woman on the panel this becomes more uncomfortable for the audience.

        The applause from the audience would indicate to me that they really did want Hubeny to get a chance to speak. I agree that the entire panel, including the moderator, handled the interjection well–laughing and then comfortably returning to the subject, with Hubeny given space to answer the question.

        Holt apologized afterwards, quite graciously according to Talkington herself, and Hubeny wrote a rather lovely comment on Talkington’s post where she said that she had not felt marginalized: “You may be amazed to hear it, but during this panel session I genuinely did not feel affronted or discriminated by the moderator’s behavior. It seemed more amusing to see him try posing a question in a way that at the same time tried answering it. It’s true that this made the question a bit of a moving target for me (and therefore harder to address coherently), but I don’t a-priori assume that the incident was rooted in sexism. Maybe I’m too naive, but I simply gave him the benefit of doubt that he was so excited by the newly-learned idea of the duality that he couldn’t resist, and that the same might have occurred had the panelist been a male instead of me. So it didn’t bother me.

        “In fact, even though in my entire academic career I was in an environment where women were in striking minority (and as a student often the only woman in the class), I never felt discriminated against or thwarted in my calling. The feeling was rather one of camaraderie: the challenges to unravel the deepest mysteries of the universe, the thrill in understanding another tiny bit of this grand puzzle, and the sheer wonder at how beautifully the physics hangs together, put us all in the same boat, so to speak. In retrospect I think I was fortunate in being amongst like-minded physicists who were not only great but gracious and earnest in their love of science. But when I eventually did start coming across others who were not of the same caliber, they somehow seemed insignificant.”

        So basically, the entire story would have had a happy ending where the issue in the panel moderation was corrected midstream, everyone involved behaved well, and everyone was happy with each other afterwards. (Except of course that now it’s on Internet everyone will start behaving horribly. I predict there will be a campaign to get Holt fired from his job, and I further predict that both Talkington and Hubeny will receive rape and/or death threats.)

        But–Talkington! Nominative determinism! I really just thought it was a humorous coinci… I mean, the thing that never happens because nothing is ever one of those.

  12. biblicalsausage says:

    Content warning: biblical depictions of rape, mass killing, fire and brimstone.

    Turn in your Bibles to the Book of Genesis, chapters 18 and 19.

    God has been hearing bad things about Sodom and Gomorrah, and he decides to come down and lead an investigation to find out if the rumors are true.

    Two angels go to Sodom, and are talked into staying the night by a hospitable fellow named Lot. They have finished dinner, but before they get to bed a mob assembles, calling for the guests to be brought out, in order to rape them. Lot, unwilling to see his guests treated this way, offers instead his two daughters for the crowd to have their way with.

    Fortunately, the angels intervene before this can transpire, by striking everyone blind. The blinded would-be assailants, unable to take a very strong hint, continue in their quest to rape the angels. They want to break down the door, but they can’t find it, and eventually they tire out and quit. The angels conclude that, yes, things are pretty bad in Sodom, and it would be completely appropriate for the whole place to be set on fire and destroyed.

    God rains down fire and brimstone, burning down the whole area, but not before warning Lot of his intentions. He tells Lot to run to the hills, but Lot is scared of the mountains, and requests permission to run to a little nearby town instead.

    But Lot, traumatized after the massive destruction, which in an odd twist happens to include his wife being turned into a pile of salt, then finds himself afraid of staying in the city. So, in a strange ironic twist, he runs away from the town and flees to go live in a cave in the hills, where he was supposed to run off to in the first place.

    For reasons that the narrator does not explain, his two daughters who live with him in the cave become convinced that their father is the last man living on earth. Concerned that he is getting old, and afraid that they will never manage to have children, they come up with the plan of having a child by him.

    While Lot is perfectly willing, as a gesture of hospitality, to toss his daughters to a mob of rapists, this idea is apparently one he would not have consented to. So the daughter liquor him up until he passes out, and then they use him to impregnate themselves.

    In a strange ironic twist, the episode begins with Lot nearly getting his daughters raped, and ends with his daughters raping him. It would call it “poetic justice”, but there’s nothing poetic about it.

    Is this reading modern concerns about consent and intoxication into an ancient text, or does the narrative actually work the way I’m reading it?

    • hlynkacg says:

      I disagree that it’s not poetic.

      • biblicalsausage says:

        I doubt we have a substantive disagreement there. The whole episode leaves a bad enough taste in my that I felt weird about the term “poetic justice.” But if the passage is saying that I think it’s saying, then it is poetic in a way: it’s cleverly arranged; it doesn’t hit you over the head by making the connection explicit. It just runs you through its story, detail by detail, waiting to see if you pick it up or not.

        I bet I read that story (and most of the Hebrew Bible — I’m not obsessively re-reading Gen 19 specifically) about a half-dozen times before it the symmetry of it struck me.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      I take the story as an insult to the neighbors of the tribe of Israel. Lot is not a progenitor of the Israelites, he’s the nephew of Abraham, so first cousin to Isaac, and Lot’s inbred kids are Jacob’s (Israel’s) second cousins. They are Moab, meaning “From my father,” ancestor of the Moabites, and Ammon, meaning “The son of my kin,” ancestor of the Ammonites.

      The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is therefore a just-so story of why the Moabites and Ammonites are so screwed up: they’re the inbred rape-babies of a morally confused drunk.

      • biblicalsausage says:

        I agree on the insulting nature of the names. I think the “just-so-ness” can be confirmed by the way that the narrator has to reach a bit to make the etymologies work. The narrow has to convince you that “Ammon” is derive from “Ammi” and that “Moab” is derived from “Me-ab.”

        But does this mean that the rape angle isn’t also deliberately included in the story?

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          Sure, I don’t think anyone comes off well in this story, so I assume that’s intentional. It was recorded by the Israelites, who were frequently at war/in conflict with the Moabites and the Ammonites. If I’m writing the back story for the tribe my tribe is at war with, it’s not going to be full of heroism and grace, but cowardice, stupidity and lecherousness.

    • J Mann says:

      It’s worth reading the stories of Abraham and Isaac offering their wives for their own safety together with this one. I always imagine Abimelech as hilariously exasperated the second time he (or he and his father) almost sleep with one of the biblical martriachs based on her husband’s false representation that they’re not married. “What is it with you and your father, Isaac – If you guys are just that kinky, I’m not going to judge, but you need to disclose!”

      Alan Deshowitz writes about some possible interpretations of the Lot story in The Genesis of Justice. Some possible observations:

      1) That at the time, violations of sexual consent were seen as preferable to loss of life – Lot’s daughters are offered to save the lives of the angels, and they rape Lot to preserve the future of humanity. Deshowitz also compares Ham, who gazes on Noah (and possibly attempts more, depending on which commentators you read) without a necessity defense and is cursed, with Lot’s daughters who are not cursed.

      2) That readers of the time wouldn’t expect patriarchs to respect women’s autonomy. In this respect, I guess Lot’s rape could be seen as poetic comeuppance.

      • Well... says:

        I think it’s been said here(?) before, but hospitality was a much bigger thing in that time period and region, and daughters were valued much less than they are today in the West.

      • Deiseach says:

        I’ve interpreted the story as Lot’s attempt to shame the people of Sodom; if they really don’t consider the violation of hospitality (and whatever they wanted to do to the visitors, which might have been beating them up and robbing them or worse) to be faults or crimes, surely even they cannot be so shameless and hardened that they will sexually violate the virgin daughters of one of their townspeople. It’s an attempt to shock the Sodomites into realising what they’re doing – compare it with Jesus writing on the ground when the Scribes and Pharisees bring the woman taken in adultery to Him for a decision.

        Imagine, let’s say, a respectable white citizen in a small Southern town gives shelter to three black men and outside the door a lynch mob is calling for him to let them have the men. Imagine the man saying “No, I can’t do that, but if you really want to hang someone, here are my two sons instead”.

        Would we be talking about “And this story shows how Southern white men valued their sons much less than we do today!” or “Southern white men valued their social standing so much, they preferred to sacrifice their own children rather than oppose their neighbours” in this case, or would the moral be hitting us over the head about “oh yeah – maybe lynching people is not a good thing?”

        You can talk about “the patriarchy” all you want and how “it/they” would not have valued daughters or women as much as men, but I do think even back then, the hearers of the story would have thought “Wow, this was a terrible thing to offer. If this is the lesser of two evils, then how much more terrible must the crimes of the Sodomites have been!” and this justifies the destruction of Sodom as righteous punishment.

        • bean says:

          I was reading this recently, and noticed something. Lot claimed here that his daughters were virgins, but they were both actually married. He tried to get his sons-in-law to come with him, but they refused. Or maybe marriage customs then were different.

          • John Schilling says:

            My RSV offers in 19:14 “Sons-in-law who were to marry his daughters”, which suggests “sons-in-law” is a clumsy translation of a status that encompasses betrothal as well as marriage.

            Would also explain the refusal to accompany Lot & company; they thought they were marrying into a prosperous urban family but they hadn’t committed and now the crazy old coot expects everyone to run off and be goatherders or whatever.

          • Soy Lecithin says:

            I’d assumed that in addition to his two virgin daughters he had married daughters. The married daughters would have staid with their husbands that refused to leave. After re-reading it, however, I’m not so sure, as the elder of the two is referred to as the “firstborn.” Presumably the firstborn would have been married off first and neither of Lot’s virgin daughters would be his firstborn.

          • biblicalsausage says:

            At least as I’m reading the story, the daughters aren’t married. They’re engaged. And the men, as far as I understand the biblical concept of “engaged” are committed — an engagement was legally binding and would require a formal divorce to undo — but the weddings haven’t occurred.

            So I think it’s plausible that they could have been virgins.

          • For what it’s worth, Jewish marriage law involved two steps. The first was a binding betrothal–getting out of it involved the same consequences as getting out of marriage. The second step was consummation.

        • biblicalsausage says:

          @Deiseach,

          Leaving aside the question of just how ingrained patriarchy is in the Bible, I do think the text is pretty clear about what the mob wants to do to the visitors. They wanted to rape them.

          The verb translated in KJV as “know them” (Hebrew yada) is a standard biblical verb for having sex with someone. Then Lot confirms that they have sex on their minds by offering his virgin daughters as a substitute. Then Judges 19:22-24 has a parallel story with almost the same elements. A man and his concubine are staying the night with a host, and the men of Gibeah form a mob around the house. They demand to yada the visiting man, and the man of the house tells them instead to take his own virgin daughter and the (less virginal) concubine. The concubine is raped and killed.

          I’d find it hard to read both stories as attempted robberies gone bad.

          • Deiseach says:

            I was going for an alternate explanation out of (a) hermeneutics where the sin of Sodom is described as “inhospitality”, which seems a very euphemistic way to describe rape if that is what is intended (b) being a big scaredy-cat who wanted to avoid the whole “identifying same-gender sexuality with rape is so horrible and homophobic!” distraction. Unlikely we’d get diverted onto that path here, but it might happen and I didn’t feel like fighting Culture Wars right now. See the “homophobic Christians don’t even know what the real sin of Sodom was, but I – a gay Christian – will enlighten you all” article right here for the kind of discussion I just don’t have the spoons right now to get into.

            As to point (a), in another part of Scripture this is how it is described:

            Ezekiel 16:49-50

            49 Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. 50 They were haughty and did an abomination before me. So I removed them, when I saw it.

            And I am a little wary/tired of the easy interpretation of “it’s the sexist misogynistic literal patriarchy way of devaluing women that lets Lot offer his daughters to be raped in order to protect strangers – who are men and therefore the only ones of real value”.

          • biblicalsausage says:

            Fair enough. I think I see your thought process a little more clearly.

            If it helps any, I posted this with zero intention of anyone arguing about homosexuality. I’ve got my own opinions about the Bible and gays, and have zero desire to debate that with strangers on the internet. Though I really should have given some thought to the possibility that it would come up.

            My questions was strictly concerned with Lot and his daughters, and my questions was: does the text implicitly treat the incident with a blacked-out Lot as a rape, by setting the up the narrative to compare it to Lot’s offer to the mob? Getting a good answer to that would tell us something interesting about how at least one Hebrew-speaking biblical author looked at sexual ethics.

            Discussing whether or not the Bible is okay with gay people is a much less interesting question. All the relevant arguments have already been made ad nauseam. I would have nothing to add on that question.

      • Deiseach says:

        It’s worth reading the stories of Abraham and Isaac offering their wives for their own safety together with this one.

        Given that later in the history of the people of Israel King David does deliberately send off Uriah to be killed, in order to marry Bathsheba with whom he has been sleeping and who is now pregnant by him, I imagine there was precedent back in the days of the patriarchs for “oh crap, Important Powerful King fancies my wife, he’s not going to take ‘oh she’s married? guess I can’t sleep with her then!’ as an answer, and his solution may be to make my wife a widow” thinking on behalf of men with beautiful wives and slightly shaky status as “are we insiders or outsiders?” in foreign lands.

        • John Schilling says:

          “I know that you are a woman beautiful to behold;
          and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife’; then they will kill me, but they will let you live.
          Say you are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared on your account.”
          Abraham to Sarah, Gen. 12:11-13, RSV

          So that’s fairly explicit in at least some translations. My problem is with the next bit:

          “But the LORD afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarah, Abram’s wife. So Pharaoh called Abram, and said, “What is this you have done to me? Why did you not tell me that she was your wife? Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her for my wife? Now then, here is your wife, take her, and be gone.”

          What the hell, God? Or God’s translators, as the case may be. The Pharaoh may not have known what was going on, but You knew he was acting in good faith, and it was Your agent who deceived him and set him up for this. So why the plagues, and on the Pharaoh’s entire house for that matter?

          And IIRC that’s not the only time that story played out in the Old Testament. By the time all this got written down, someone certainly had a jones for God setting up non-Israelites for an undeserved smiting.

          • johan_larson says:

            Yeah, I always thought it was odd that when the pharaoh acted against Moses and his people, God punished not the pharaoh, not his court, not his armies, not even his entire extended family, but the entire country that he ruled, including all sorts of innocent subjects of the god-king.

            The God the Torah was Not a Nice Man.

          • biblicalsausage says:

            “And IIRC that’s not the only time that story played out in the Old Testament.”

            That story played out three times: Abraham and Pharaoh, Abraham and Abimelech, Isaac and Abimelech.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife–sister_narratives_in_the_Book_of_Genesis

          • biblicalsausage says:

            It’s also interesting to do the chronological math. If you work through the various chronological details in Genesis, Sarah is between 65 and 76 years old the time she gets seized by Pharaoh for being such a hottie. And she’s 99 and post-menopausal when Abimelech decides he wants some of that.

          • Jiro says:

            Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her for my wife?

            Taking a random person for your wife against her consent is rape. This amounts to Pharaoh saying “why did you trick me into thinking she was someone I wanted to rape instead of someone I didn’t”? That’s not really a defense of Pharaoh at all.

            Yeah, I always thought it was odd that when the pharaoh acted against Moses and his people, God punished…the entire country that he ruled

            I suggest, not with complete seriousness, but with a real point to make: When humans fight wars, there are civilian casualties. Even if you don’t directly shoot civilians, there’s always someone who starved in a blockade, or who was made an orphan because their father was an enemy soldier, etc.

            God doesn’t want the level of civilian casualties in his divine war to be be zero, because if it was, humans would start to think that normal wars have to have zero civilian casualties too. God, in other words, doesn’t want to set an unrealistic example.

          • biblicalsausage says:

            “Taking a random person for your wife against her consent is rape.”

            That’s true as far as it goes. But given that we’ve been given zero information in the narrative about Sarah’s mental or verbal response to these episodes, other than Abimelech’s claim that she pretended to be Abraham’s sister, I’m going to reserve judgment on whether Abimelech is a (would-be) rapist in this scenario. Heck, the narrative says he didn’t touch her.

            As for the use of the word “took,” that’s pretty much bog-standard marriage terminology in Hebrew. Think, “Do you, Jack, take Jill to be your lawfully wedding wife?”

            Now, whether the Bible tacitly endorses some forms of rape is another question. But when it comes to Sarah specifically, I don’t see it.

          • John Schilling says:

            That’s true as far as it goes.

            I believe that by the standards of pre-Rabbinic Judaism, it was taking a random person for your wife against her fathers’ or husband’s consent that counted as rape, but as you note it’s not clear exactly how those negotiations went down for any of the parties concerned.

            But is there a more tactful way to turn down a proposal or proposition than a truthful “sorry, I’d love to but I’m already married”? If Abraham is saying that is out of the question because he fears the Pharaoh is going to get all jealous and murdery, neither he nor Sarah are likely to be offering any of the lesser excuses to turn down a marriage proposal from the most eligible man in Egypt.

            So, yeah, the idea that the same people who wrote Leviticus and Deuteronomy were also secretly having God deliver a plague-smiting upon the relatives of someone who may or may not have violated a moral code that wouldn’t be invented for another thousand years or so, strikes me as unlikely. And still ethically questionable even if all the unknowns break in God’s favor.

          • nimim.k.m. says:

            @johan_larson

            Yeah, I always thought it was odd that when the pharaoh acted against Moses and his people, God punished not the pharaoh, not his court, not his armies, not even his entire extended family, but the entire country that he ruled, including all sorts of innocent subjects of the god-king.

            I don’t remember who told me this interpretation when I wondered about the same thing (the innocent subjects being punished): if you wield power of the king, you’d better know the responsibility that comes with it, because if you make mistake, it’s your subjects who will suffer. Which is sort of true: how often the politicians who mismanage the affairs of their country have personally bear the consequences?

            Only the ones who deserve it being punished … that would be too unbelievably unrealistic.

          • Deiseach says:

            So why the plagues, and on the Pharaoh’s entire house for that matter?

            I think this is the way older religions (and not just religions) thought about things: intention did not come into account, what counted was actions and indeed perceptions of actions.

            If you look at Rama and Sita, Ram is the ideal man, and he puts his wife (a) through a test of her chastity by fire because she has been living under the control of another man (well, demon) for some years – never mind that she was kidnapped by force and threatened with death and nobody seriously believes she was this king’s lover, it has to be done in order to fit in with social custom (b) then when she passes this test and they return from exile to his kingdom and she is pregnant with twin sons, he then sends her off into exile because (some of) the people think by taking her back after she had lived with another man, now the women of the kingdom will be willing to commit adultery and expect to be forgiven by his and her example.

            Or look at the story of Oedipus – a plague hits Thebes and they have to find out who killed the old king – never mind that this plague happens years after the death and not in the immediate aftermath, it turns out that everyone has been acting unwittingly and in ignorance. That makes no difference to the Furies, though: the laws (both the legal code and the laws of filial obedience and not committing incest) have been broken, and punishment must ensue.

            God punished not the pharaoh, not his court, not his armies, not even his entire extended family, but the entire country that he ruled, including all sorts of innocent subjects of the god-king

            The king represents the people and the land not just in a metaphorical but in a very concrete way in these schools of thought; any wrong doing by the king has repercussions beyond his own person. Any fault or flaw in the king results in the same for the land: plagues, bad harvests, scarcity, etc. In Irish law even a blemish on the face was enough to disqualify someone for the position of chieftain or king, and one of the powers wielded by poets was the ability to raise a blister on the face of a person by the power of their satire on that person.

            From Prionsais Mac Cana’s 1970 “Celtic Mythology“:

            The qualities of a rightful king (which in Irish are comprised under the term fir flaithemhan, literally ‘truth of the ruler’) are reflected in the condition of his kingdom. They ensure peace and equity, security of the kingdom’s borders, and material prosperity: the trees bend low with the weight of their fruit, the rivers and the sea teem with abundance of fish, and the earth brings forth rich harvests. Conversely, a king who is blemished in his conduct and character or in his person will bring about corresponding privations: for this reason Bres was deposed, since he was completely lacking in the princely virtue of liberality, and Nuadhu was obliged to abdicate once he lost his arm in battle. Cautionary instances were numerous and familiar, such as that of the usurper Cairbre Caitchenn, during whose reign there used to be but one grain on each corn-stalk and one acorn on each oak, and the rivers were without fish and the cattle without milk. In Welsh the same notion is at the origin of the sudden desolation of Dyfed in the Welsh tale of Manawydan, and in the Grail legend it recurs still more explicitly in the waste land which results from the maiming of the Fisher King.

            At least in the case of Pharaoh, we should take into account the fear of Abraham that if Pharaoh wanted Sarah, the easy way for him was to have Abraham killed. This at least indicates the possibility that Pharaoh (or other important men of the kingdom) were willing to commit murder for the sake of lust; so if this was indeed something Pharaoh was willing to entertain, he’s not completely innocent.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @Deiseach

            Very interesting about the Irish, thank you.

            I also read the Old Testament God to New Testament God as a transition from man’s understanding of morality as a collective endeavor to an individual one. In the Old Testament your tribe is pushed for their sins, or the sins of their members. In the New Testament, when you die, God judges your soul, not your government’s soul.

            Gal 2:16

            [yet] who know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.

            Gal 2:21

            I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing.

            ETA: And just to throw in some culture war fodder (but I think you and I are generally on the same side, so take it more like commiseration?), this is why I roll my eyes at leftists who pull the “you’re a Christian? Then you should vote for my massive government programs to help people because Jesus said to help people” schtick. No, the call to charity is individual, not collective. Jesus commanded you to care for the sick and needy, not to vote to force somebody else to care for the poor while you go about your business, washing your hands of the situation because “problem solved.” Also, we learned throughout the Old Testament that institutions of man can never do the work of the divine, and will always fail to human corruptibility (see Babel, and all the times Israel got smote for turning their backs on God). Hence, collective attempts at virtue are counterproductive and doomed to failure.

    • Well... says:

      In my experience any given interpretation of a Bible story should be checked against the following questions: (not an exhaustive list, just what came to me at this time; there are likely others)

      – Is the interpretation consistent with your interpretations of other parts of the Bible, or do you have to change your understanding from one part of the Bible to the next in order to have it make sense?
      – (related to above) Does the interpretation lead to absurd or impossible conclusions?
      – Does the interpretation take into account the context in which the Bible was received?
      – Do you have the facts of the story right? E.g. have you checked the accuracy of your translation? Do you understand the wider situation of the characters and setting in which the story takes place, etc?

      • biblicalsausage says:

        As far as I know the way I’m reading it is consistent with the rest of the Bible, although I’m not sure why inconsistencies between different passages would rule out either interpretation, unless the reader is committed to all the passages being entirely correct on everything.

        I don’t think my reading leads to any absurd conclusions, unless it is simply too much to think that the author of Genesis 19 would have read the actions of Lot’s daughters toward him as analogous to his actions toward them earlier.

        As for the context in which the Bible was recieved — the culture of the area and whatnot — that’s a hard one. Most of our written material on the culture of Judah/Israel/Canaan from that period is the Bible. So we wind up in a hermeneutical circle — we check our interpretations of Bible passages against what we know of the culture, but we generate our understanding of the relevant culture from the Bible. It’s not all completely circular — some surrounding peoples did leave some written records, but it’s circular enough that biblical scholars have a heck of a time sorting a lot of stuff out.

        As to the translation, I read it in Hebrew, and I’ve read all of Genesis through 2 Kings that way. But as to whether I’m understanding all the passages rightly, then I do fall back on a lot of previous interpretive work, and it’s always possible I’m confused about something.

  13. Kevin C. says:

    Can I say that I’d like to see more like this around: “Yes, Ashkenazi Jews (Including Gal Gadot) Are People of Color” (by Dani Ishai Behan, hosted as a “third party contribution” at The Times of Israel blogs)?

    Yet the “anti-racist” left, whose relationship with the Jewish community can best be described as “troubled”, could not help but demonstrate its glaring blind spot where Jewish origins and Jewish suffering are concerned. This is something the broader Jewish community has known about for years.

    Correspondingly, the reactions on Twitter were what I expected: a melange of curiosity and enriched perspective offset by heaps of seething outrage animated either by ignorance or deep-seated anti-Semitism — usually both. Jews are a historically persecuted and displaced Middle Eastern ethnicity indigenous to Israel, as well as one of the oldest and most continuous victims of European colonialism. However, the “anti-racist” left is generally hostile to Jews (particularly Ashkenazim aka Jews who wound up in Central and Eastern Europe as a result of colonialism) identifying as Middle Eastern, as a people of color, or even as a minority at all. Most of the tweets that I read only seemed to prove my point.

    Now let us take a look at the history and heritage of Ashkenazi Jews. An indigenous people of the Middle East, Ashkenazi Jews were driven out of their homeland by European (and later Arab) colonists and taken as slaves to Europe where they were consistently regarded as savages, periodically massacred, and excluded from society on the grounds that they are a foreign, non-Christian, and non-European (or in the words of our European oppressors: Oriental/Asiatic) presence on European soil.

    • BBA says:

      Yeah, no. As far as the racial categories go in the countries where nearly all Ashkenazim live, we’re white. Trying to wrap ourselves in the language of socjus is never going to work.

      • The Nybbler says:

        Trying to wrap ourselves in the language of socjus is never going to work.

        Of course not. When you can match any other group but descendants of chattel slaves, atrocity for atrocity (and that’s BEFORE playing the Hitler card), and yet still are doing not worse but better than white people in nearly all the things SJWs care about, you’re a big glaring counterexample to their theory which must be hidden somehow.

        • BBA says:

          Be fair. Most of those atrocities were on another continent and besides, the wench is dead and their impact is lessened by distance and time. Selection effects matter too. Compare the 100-year run of the descendants of chattel slaves on top of Liberian society against their cousins who remained in America.

          Also, Jews have always been white in America. Consider Judah Benjamin, etc.

        • AnonYEmous says:

          this is why asians are only oppressed when it comes time to talk about movie underrepresentation or maybe certain types of cultural appropriation

          also to above BBA comment: if italians and the irish weren’t always white in america, were Jews? Or are we talking post-whitening? Which is fine, that was long ago enough to merit an “always”, but just wondering.

          • Sandy says:

            @AnonYEmous:

            I believe Italians and the Irish were always white in America, in the sense that was the racial category on the census they were expected to write down, they just weren’t considered part of “respectable white society” — read “Anglo-Saxon Protestant”. I remember, as part of an administrative law course, reading transcripts of Congressional debates from the 1880’s regarding restrictions on migrant labor not just from Italy and Ireland, but also from Poland, Hungary and Croatia, and the anti-immigrant sentiment was also in large part an anti-Catholic sentiment.

          • AnonYEmous says:

            hmm

            having googled, it seems like they were “accepted as white” but still highly discriminated against. Well, that’s another story and I’m no storyteller, so you win for now.

      • AnonYEmous says:

        Yeah, no. As far as the racial categories go in the countries where nearly all Ashkenazim live, we’re white. Trying to wrap ourselves in the language of socjus is never going to work

        having reached this conclusion myself but partially seen it be reversed because social justicians have started gaining respect for –antisemitism– i would like to put forward that i wouldn’t like it to either

        then again your previous postings would indicate the same desire, so there it is.

    • The Nybbler says:

      Indigenous to Israel? Don’t you need to be there since pre-history to be considered indigenous?

      • John Schilling says:

        Define “history”. I don’t think there are any written records of anyone living in Israel prior to King David and his people, though I may have missed something. There were certainly people living there before the Israelites, but if all we know of them is from archaeology and late transcription of preliterate mythology, does that count as “since pre-history”?

        • The Nybbler says:

          My complaint is that there are written records showing the Israelites came from somewhere else (if you count Exodus, at least), not that there were other indigenes (though there probably were)

    • J Mann says:

      I don’t understand the whole thing, but typically when some college student is yelled at for denying his white privilege, he’s Jewish, so it seems like whoever makes these rules is pretty clear that Ashkenazi are on the wrong side.

      It’s not super clear why Spaniards are POC, but Greeks aren’t,* but I think most lefties see Askenazi as on the side of the line that should be punished, not rewarded.

      * I read the other day that Armenians get to be POC, or at least the Kardashians do, so the line is moving closer to Southern and Eastern Europe, FWIW.

      • rlms says:

        “Most lefties” don’t make moral judgements based on weird racial distinctions.

        • J Mann says:

          You’re right, that was unfair and unkind, and I apologize for the generalization. I should have said “racial justice advocates” or something like that.

          Generally, though, it’s true that you don’t seem to be able to earn POC status just by showing that a group has been oppressed.

          Every so often there’s a piece mocking some guy for claiming he doesn’t have white privilege, and said privileged guy of the day is very often of Askenazi descent.

        • Anon. says:

          moral judgements based on weird racial distinctions

          Isn’t that exactly what disparate impact and affirmative action are?

          • rlms says:

            No. Those are to do with the practical implications of racial distinctions; how people on different sides of them experience different consequences. Choosing where to draw the lines for those policies is done based on facts. This means the distinctions are vaguely logical (for some value of logic). In comparison, in theological discussions about which groups have “privilege” you can draw lines anywhere you want. People take advantage of this to make the weird distinctions I referred to.

    • Art Vandelay says:

      It’s really hard to argue that Jews are currently oppressed in the US or other Western countries.

      The problems with the left and antisemitism is that if the way SJWs identify oppression were correct, then there would pretty much have to be some Jewish conspiracy going on. Probably the main indicators they look at when arguing for oppression are money, political influence, and media representation. When they find that [insert oppressed group here] scores lower than cis-gendered, straight, white males it is, to them, clear and irrefutable evidence of injustice, evidence of a white-supremacist, heteronormative, patriarchal system.

      Pointing out that things might be slightly more complicated than that is just trying to maintain systems of oppression.

      Now, if you look at the Jewish population in the US or the UK, you will find that they do better than even White Males ™ on these indicators (if we measure representation and influence per capita rather than overall). In a sense they are the whitest of the white males. They also have a much longer and more awful history of being horrifically oppressed than any other ethnic group. The left has no idea what to think about any of this and partly because of blind spots caused by their own ideology, and partly through a very high level of sensitivity to perceived anti-antisemitism on the left, nobody talks about it. I suspect most don’t acknowledge the existence of this problem even to themselves.

      • dndnrsn says:

        You’re ignoring that, at the same time, Jews are still a large target of hate crimes relative to their % of the population. There certainly have been times in history before that the Jews in a given place have been doing quite well, and then all of a sudden the majority turns on them – for rational reasons, they aren’t going to think “gee, statistically we are well-educated, well-represented in prestigious positions, educationally successful, so we can kick back and relax.”

        Additionally, the situation on the left is complicated by Israel. While liberals mostly don’t have a big problem with Israel, a lot of leftists regard it as a prototypical oppression. Sometimes anti-Israel rhetoric basically sounds like anti-Semitic conspiracy theories with the serial numbers filed off.

      • albatross11 says:

        I suspect a lot of the problem here is models developed for one situation and applied to a very different one. For example, Americans interested in racial conflict and oppression tend to have models of those things based mostly on the ugly history between blacks and whites in the US. When those models get applied to other conflicts (white/Asian, white/hispanic, gentile/Jewish) the models have a lot of screwy assumptions built in.

        You can see that with affirmative action programs, too–designed originally to address this centuries-long campaign of kicking blacks around, they were quickly applied to hispanics, and immigrant blacks whose families have endured zero oppression at the hands of Americans, and women who had their own *completely different* pattern of being kicked around and excluded from power and wealth that has almost nothing to do with how blacks were mistreated.

    • Brad says:

      I’d say that this is an unfortunate side effect of globalization. With the internet Israel can sometimes feel close to the United States, but that’s a false feeling. The issues at play in the United States are not by and large the issues at play in Israel. More than once I’ve seen an Israeli comment about what they think is *really* going on in American college campuses and just get the groups, motivations, and resentments all wrong. Which is annoying enough, but if the Israeli in question claims to speak for the Jews generally, it is intolerable.

      You see something similar when Europeans try to map American race relation discourse directly onto whatever local demographics are present in their own countries. And I’m sure it also happens vice-versa.

      • Deiseach says:

        And I’m sure it also happens vice-versa.

        Definitely vice versa. I’ve seen commentary about a TV show talking about an inter-racial couple, where the characters in question are an Italian-American (played by a Jewish actor) and a Cuban-American (played by a Cuban-American actress), and the characters to me both read “white*” (the actress looks like she’d fit more into this category) so I’m going “wha’?”

        There’s a Chilean-British actor who has mentioned in interviews that it’s hard breaking into America, as there he is considered a “brown” actor, and so doesn’t get offered the same range of roles:

        In America, I am brown; I’m ‘of colour’, so I would be offered Latin roles, and I’ve fought against that. I don’t want to be put in a category, to be just offered the same sort of thing. For me, it’s all about different roles, telling the stories of the great writers.

        *So to me she looks a little “Hispanic” but that makes me think “Spanish”, not “Ah, South American, Person Of Colour!”

    • Deiseach says:

      An indigenous people of the Middle East, Ashkenazi Jews were driven out of their homeland by European (and later Arab) colonists and taken as slaves to Europe

      I suppose for certain values of “European colonists” yes, Titus son of the Emperor Vespasian was one. Or do we mean later in history than the Siege and Sack of Jerusalem?

      I know Wikipedia is considered unreliable, so how about a quote from a website using Nicholas de Lange’s 1985 “Atlas of the Jewish World” as a source?

      Germany was known in medieval Hebrew by the biblical name of Ashkenaz, and its Jews came to be called Ashkenazim. The expulsions and persecutions had not succeeded in ending Jewish life completely, but material and cultural conditions were poor. Excluded from the cities, the Jews tended to be dispersed in small towns and villages. There was a steady stream of emigration eastwards to Poland, where from the 13th century Jews had been attracted by grants of special privileges. This movement became even more pronounced during the upheavals of the Reformation.

      Not really seeing a lot of “dragged off in CHAINS to be SLAVES” there, but I am open to correction.

    • Björn says:

      The article is a stupid attempt in applying post-colonial theory on Jews. This can be seen in the author’s use of concepts like “Orientalism” and “People of Color”, and also in his general focus on colonialism, like when he claims the Jews where driven from their land and enslaved. But one has to keep in mind that post-colonial theory is about the colonialism of the imperialist countries in the 18th and 19th century, and how this influenced society in the 20th and 21st century.

      So applying this theory to what the Romans did to Israel is highly questionable. This can be easily seen, because when the Jews are victims of Roman colonialism, then so are all other people who lived Mediterranean Sea 2000 years ago. Also, claiming any moral result for today from events that happened so long ago is nonsense.

      His other arguments are very weird as well, he picks bits from the history of discrimination of Jewish people that vary greatly(spanish inquisition, antisemitism in the Enlightenment, in other articles he wrote also the holocaust) and hammers them into his thesis that the Jews are victims of Roman, European and Arabian colonialism.

      I read some of his other articles on his timesofisrael.com-blog, and they all read like he learned some vocabulary from post-colonial theory/social-justice-people, but does not really unterstand it. It also seems to be quite important form him that the Jews are THE TRUE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE of Israel and not anyone else, especially not the palestinians(http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/cultural-appropriation-you-say/ for example). This is an idiotic and dangerous thought in it’s own right, but if drenched in post-colonial terminology it becomes even more insidious.

      • The Nybbler says:

        But one has to keep in mind that post-colonial theory is about the colonialism of the imperialist countries in the 18th and 19th century, and how this influenced society in the 20th and 21st century.

        Which is to say, the theory can only be applied where it was originally applied, and nowhere else. That’s… very convenient.

        • Björn says:

          I don’t think that theories should only be applied where they where originally applied, but if applied anywhere else, one should be cautious and argue why the results will still be correct. In the case of post-colonial theory, I think that you can not find something that is comparable to colonialism anywhere else in history.

          Through technological advantages like industrialization and advanced naval technologies, the western powers were able to become much more powerful that the rest of the world. At the same time, there was a first wave of globalization when it became possible to maintain a global empire, so the colonial powers divided the whole world between them. This enabled the colonial powers to force their culture onto the rest of the world, and also mold the political structures there as they wanted.

        • Deiseach says:

          Which is to say, the theory can only be applied where it was originally applied, and nowhere else. That’s… very convenient.

          The English: imperalist colonisers or post-colonial people?

          Because if we applied the post-colonial theory outside of 18th-20th century context, the Romans colonised a large part of Britain. Hence, the native inhabitants were a colonised people, with the creation of an artificial elite (the Romano-British) mediating between the less assimilated natives and the foreign occupation/government. This can be compared to the situation in the Raj and you can draw what parallels you like to post-Roman withdrawal Britain and the fate of the Romano-British with post-Independence India and the fate of the Anglo-Indians (whether you want to include or exclude ‘memsahibs’ and babus as both part of that designation).

          Skip forward a millenium or so, and after a heck of a lot of immigration/invasion and admixture, we now have a new collection of inhabitants going by the collective designation of the British, and they in their turn are now imperial colonials and one of the set of villains for post-colonial theory.

          Do you intend to argue that discussing the British in the context of post-colonial theory should not be confined to, or commonly taken as referring to, “the colonialism of the imperialist countries in the 18th and 19th centuries”, since otherwise this would be suspiciously convenient for the purpose of unspecified political views?

          • The Nybbler says:

            What I’m saying is that a theory — and this is my hard sciences prejudice coming through, I suppose — which applies only to exactly one particular instance and explains everything about it isn’t so much a theory as a just-so story. It’s very convenient for the proponents of the theory, because you can’t say “Look, your theory says colonialism should have all these bad effects, but here’s this other case in history where there was colonialism without these bad effects”. It’s perfectly reasonable to respond to that with “Oh, your cases are different because A,B, and C”. But to say that “Oh, this theory only applies at this particular point in history and its lessons can be applied to no other” is very suspicious.

          • Brad says:

            The Celtic people the Romans conquered weren’t indigenous either, or at least their culture wasn’t. The Stonehenge builders were of the beaker culture that came before the Celtic invasion / migration / cultural diffusion from mainland Europe.

            I tend to think the concept of indigenous isn’t particularly useful outside of the western hemisphere, Australia, and Oceania.

          • At a considerable tangent sparked by your example …

            Rudyard Kipling is commonly viewed as both a British nationalist and an Imperialist. But his work includes stories and at least one poem set in Roman Britain, evidence that his imperialism is not based on a theory of racial superiority.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @Brad

            The ancestors of the American Indians probably weren’t the first group of humans to live in America either.

  14. Nabil ad Dajjal says:

    I’m a bit late to the party but I was hoping someone else might help with another off-the-wall physics question.

    I only recently became aware of something called metallic hydrogen. As far as I understand it, in metallic hydrogen the protons are suspended in a sea of electrons analogously to metal kernels. It’s much denser than hydrogen gas, is a superconductor, and probably isn’t metastable at room temperature. Apparently it would make very good rocket fuel (specific impulse of ~1700s) provided that you could store it at a pressure lower than what’s found at the center of a gas giant or brown dwarf.

    The piece of information that I’d like to know, and which I think this article (PDF warning) may contain, is whether or not metallic hydrogen or hydrogen isotopes has any relevance to fusion power. Some internet randos seem to think so but that means very little, and I lack the physics expertise to interpret the literature properly.

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

      OK so I did some more digging:

      It looks like there’s a really incestuous clique of Japanese physicists, really mostly just Setsuo Ichimaru and Hikaru Kitamura, who published a ton of papers in the late nineties to mid aughts on so-called pycnonuclear or “solid” fusion. The idea is that adiabatic compression of metallic hydrogen at extremely low temperatures (around 10 K) will cause fusion to occur. The name pycnonuclear is a play on thermonuclear, where the prefix pycno- refers to density.

      This seems very shady and none of their stuff seems to have been published in a high end journal or even cited much outside of their own clique. Some of it isn’t even in English, there are a few Japanese-only articles in there. So it’s probably BS.

  15. rlms says:

    My predictions for the UK election (posting here in case I get them all right).
    Written a few weeks ago, and I haven’t changed the couple I got right at time of posting, I promise! In light of the Conservatives campaigning very poorly, Labour being reasonable, and the polls being against the Lib Dems, I think I will likely be wrong in the direction of a smaller Conservative majority, more Labour and fewer SNP seats (maybe 335 Conservative, 230 Labour, 20 LD, 40 SNP).

    • rlms says:

      For anyone who’s not following it, the UK election looks to be going pretty crazy. In an unprecedented set of events, the male populist outsider (known for his friendly attitude towards Russia) is doing unexpectedly well against the female neoliberal favourite (known for her friendly attitude towards the Saudis).

      • the male populist outsider (known for his friendly attitude towards Russia) i

        #

        IRA, rather.

        • rlms says:

          He’s also pretty dovish towards Russia, claiming that Russia’s behaviour in Ukraine was “not unprovoked” by Nato.

          • Art Vandelay says:

            Otherwise known as living in the real world.

          • rlms says:

            Doesn’t mean it’s not friendly in comparison to the average for politicians.

          • So it had nothing at all to do with NATO? Or is the problem saying that?

          • rlms says:

            @TheAncientGeekAKA1Z
            I wasn’t intending to claim his beliefs were wrong, merely that they were non-mainstream in the direction of Trump.

            As it happens, I do think it is silly to suggest (as Corbyn has) that Nato policy is a cause of Russia’s adventures in Ukraine, or that Russia are just helping people in Ukraine exercise their right “to seek a federal structure or independence“. You can make a realpolitik case that the costs of standing against Russian expansion outweigh the benefits (and I’d be inclined to agree with it in many ways) but people like Corbyn lean towards ignoring the costs altogether.

      • Tibor says:

        The characterization is not quite accurate. Corbyn is not really a friend of Russia. He has connections and sympathies for the IRA and Sinn Féin, he is an admirer of Hugo Chávez and leftist authoritarians in general and there are some signs he might also be antisemitic, even thought it is mostly dressed up as a “critique of Israel, Zionism and bankers, nothing to do with antisemitism at all!” He is a horrible person. Despite May’s efforts to make a fool of herself completely, he thankfully did not win.

        On the other hand, May as a far cry from neoliberalism. Or, I don’t know, this is kind of a word that everyone uses to describe anyone they don’t like. But let’s say that Margaret Thatcher is what neoliberalism means in the UK. Then May could not be further from it while still calling herself a Tory. She is a proponent of the nanny state first and foremost and has nothing against the increasing role of the state. She is still conservative, but mostly socially. Not a great choice either, but compared to Corbyn, well, she’s still ok.

        • rlms says:

          I’m not fan of Corbyn, but while there are lots of photos of him with probable anti-semites I’m pretty confident he isn’t anti-semitic at all.

          I meant May was neoliberal in the sense of being part of the general “centrist” political consensus that controlled (up until Trump) most of the West. Like most prominent Tories, she isn’t really socially conservative, and she definitely falls within the neoliberal (in this sense) consensus economically with an attitude that is largely “keep things more or less the same”.

          • AnonYEmous says:

            worth noting is that the daily stormer endorsed him

            and then put out an article explaining “no really, we’re serious about this” and laying out why

            not going to link the daily stormer but, if you want you can go find it. It seemed pretty genuine.

    • Salem says:

      I don’t think we will even get to a majority let alone 335. A disaster for the country, and surely the beginning of the end for Theresa May. Who, incidentally, is no neoliberal. She will limp on for a few months but she is done for. God damn you George Osborne for stepping down. You saved the country once, now we need you to save it again.

      • rlms says:

        Indeed, it’s starting look like it will be 300-320. I think this further than the beginning of the end for May; I can’t see her lasting longer than a couple of days.

        • Salem says:

          She called for a period of stability. I assume that means she plans to start handling the Brexit negotiations, on the tacit agreement that she stands down in a few months. But if, like Ted Heath, she’s obstinate enough to think she can stay on, then yeah, she’s gone pronto.

      • Art Vandelay says:

        George Osborne? You mean the man who failed to meet, often spectacularly, pretty much every major economic target he set himself?

        • Salem says:

          Osborne slashed the deficit and cut taxes*, in a coalition or with a wafer-thin majority where every backbencher could try to hold him to ransom for more their pet spending projects. He bore down on public sector wage settlements despite the howls of the unions. He oversaw a dynamic economy with fast growth and more than 2.5 million jobs created in when our major trading partner was languishing in torpor. He’s a historic Chancellor, up there with Gladstone and Howe. The fact that he wanted to do even better is greatly to his credit, not a stick to beat him with.

          *Or rather, tax rates. Government income went up.

    • rlms says:

      Current evidence suggests I have uncanny predicting ability in the narrow field of Northern Irish elections that don’t involve the SDLP.

    • Protagoras says:

      As it is now clear that the conservatives are short of a majority, a question from an outsider. I presume the LibDems are not stupid enough to join a coalition with the Conservatives again, and of course SNP is more sympathetic to Labor and I can’t see Sinn Fein joining a coalition or the Conservatives being willing to be in a coalition with them (if they even have enough seats to make the difference). But DUP is a conservative party, with enough votes to put the Conservatives over the top. Probably it is obvious to anyone who knows anything about the DUP or UK politics, but why wouldn’t a Conservative-DUP coalition be the obvious outcome? Is DUP too toxic for the Conservatives to partner with them? Is the DUP too uncooperative to partner with anyone? Or is there something else going on that I’m missing?

      • Salem says:

        A Conservative/DUP agreement is a likely outcome, you are not wrong. But it doesn’t have to be a coalition, it could be a minority government with a supply agreement.

      • Sinn Fein

        Sinn Fein don’t even take their seats.

        But DUP is a conservative party, with enough votes to put the Conservatives over the top. Probably it is obvious to anyone who knows anything about the DUP or UK politics, but why wouldn’t a Conservative-DUP coalition be the obvious outcome?

        Likely. It’s happened before, it was pretty grim and it was followed by a huge swing to Labour (first Blair govt).

      • Art Vandelay says:

        Word now is that May and the DUP have reached an agreement. As TheAncientGeek suggests this does not bode well for the Conservatives.

        • gbdub says:

          This is one of the weird things to me about multi-party parliamentary democracy.

          By “defeating” May, largely because Labour and LibDems gained ground, the U.K. will now end up with a more right wing government?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Same thing happens in two party systems, via different mechanisms (party primary plus swing districts)

            It’s the swing districts that really show this. Lose your centrist members and the farthest from the center member has more power.

          • Deiseach says:

            By “defeating” May, largely because Labour and LibDems gained ground, the U.K. will now end up with a more right wing government?

            Yes. The Tories lost their majority and are now reliant on another party coming in with them to reach or exceed the 326 seats needed to be the majority. They only have 318 seats and lost 12 that they previously held.

            Labour, which improved its share of MPs and seats in the House of Commons, still did not do well enough to be able to form a government with any form of coalition – the numbers don’t add up (unless every single non-Tory MP and party goes into that coalition, which ain’t gonna happen).

            The Lib Dems who got badly burned being the minority party in the last coalition government, this time round pledged not to form a coalition with the Tories, so their 12 seats are not available.

            The DUP is the only party willing to go in with the Tories, and their 10 seats give the Tories 328, which is enough to form a government. And so there will be a price to pay for their support. And because it’s the DUP who are the more Unionist of the Unionist parties in the North, they are inclined to be more right-wing, and more conservative, on many topics so they may push policy more in that direction – or will at least support the more right-wing policies expected under a Tory government headed by Theresa May.

            Theresa May ‘lost’ because (a) she called an election unnecessarily (b) instead of getting the mandate for “strong and stable” government negotiating Brexit, they were rejected (c) they lost seats and lost their majority so can’t be a single-party government (d) they are now reliant on the support of a tiny party that will expect concessions (e) Labour, instead of being crushed under Corbyn as everyone expected, and instead of Corbyn getting kicked out due to a bad result, now gained seats and Corbyn is in a stronger position to deal with any heaves or leadership challenges. Even the Lib Dems have recovered a little from the bad odour they were in, having been the “yes, master, whatever you say, master” minority to Cameron’s majority party in the last coalition.

            I don’t know if this example maps onto the situation as well but imagine Hillary Clinton had won the election, there was a Democrat majority in Congress, and going into the midterms in 2018, the expectation was that the Democrats would comfortably beat the Republicans to solidify the result of Hillary’s victory – but it turns out that having President Hillary call for everyone to get out there and vote Democrat resulted in huge losses for the Democrats and a resurgence in the Republicans in Congress and state governorships, as well as third party candidates actually getting somewhere for a change? (I know this doesn’t map exactly because you have to have your 2018 elections and Theresa May didn’t have to call an election, but it’s the nearest I can think of in a two-party system).

          • rlms says:

            The right-wing DUP will have disproportionately more power than when they didn’t have any formal arrangement with the Conservatives, but there still aren’t many of them (it’s not a proper coalition like the last one, where the Lib Dems formed quite a large proportion of the government). However, the right-wing parties still have fewer seats, which means it is more difficult for them to pass bills (the number of defectors needed to stop a bill is smaller). That’s one sense the Conservatives have lost. The other sense is that they’ve done far worse than expected. Everyone was assuming the Conservatives were going to gain a load of seats. If you’d said they wouldn’t get a majority a few weeks ago, people would’ve laughed.

        • Deiseach says:

          Not going to be great for Northern Ireland either, and our lot in the Republic are watching nervously. Preliminary skimming over the results, it looks like the moderates in the North got hammered in the elections, leaving the DUP (very Unionist) and Sinn Féin (very not) as the winners. Our lot are anxious because post-election and new government, will it be a ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ Brexit, what about the border (return to a hard border between the North and the Republic or not? the border is important for us as a lot of trading is done (a) with Britain so goods travel to the North and from there to ‘the mainland’ (b) apparently a lot of goods for the Continent also travel the same route, and that’s not taking into account the business etc. done on both sides of the border, people living on one side and working on the other, and so forth) and what will the DUP attitude be?

          I can’t get a good read on this because one lot of commentators say the DUP want a hard border and will insist on a hard Brexit and another lot say no, the DUP (or Arlene Foster as leader, who has just herself recently ridden out the after-effects of a scandal) want or will appreciate the value of a soft Brexit and soft border.

          And then there’s the question of the increased polarisation, as shown by the election results, and the effects this might have on the peace process. Recently it was looking like the continuity splinters of the IRA were starting to give up and fold but this result may instead invigorate them: we tried your way, Sinn Féin, (peaceful political struggle) and look what it’s got us, back to the armed struggle now is the only way!

          The DUP being “kingmakers” in a coalition (or even not that, a voting arrangement) with the Tories means that in return for their support, they will be looking for concessions. Which means that they will be operating a system of patronage in Northern Ireland (and the price to be paid probably won’t be great for Britain either as the money for those concessions or the results of those concessions has to be borne somehow).

          Northern Ireland as a statelet is not capable of surviving independently, it’s very dependent on GB and EU money to keep going. If hard Brexit, EU funding is going to dry up, and kinda-sorta austerity Great Britain, which already wants to scale back on spending on the North, is not going to be able to/not willing to take up the slack. They don’t come through with the money, the DUP pulls out of the coalition/agreement, the government collapses, back to square one with elections and if Labour pull something off even better this time and can cobble together a government of their own, maybe a second referendum on Brexit?

          The EU is not at all happy with the “first you want in, then you hold a referendum and your guy loses and has to go, his replacement says okay we’re going, she calls an election, maybe in six months’ time she won’t be in power anymore and you guys will now want back in” goings-on.

          So it’s all looking very “What the hell is going on, nobody knows” right now for all sides.

    • Why do you think May did so little personal campaigning? My prevailing theories are:

      1. She was trying to be presidential and above politics.

      2. Her handlers told here she has negative charisma.

      • Art Vandelay says:

        I suspect she knew herself that she is extremely un-charismatic, she’s never been a campaigner. I’m quite convinced by the argument that Cameron made her Home Secretary as a sop to the right-wing of the Tory party but specifically chose someone rather mediocre so they wouldn’t be a threat to him and his mates. Somehow she emerged from the post-referendum infighting in charge of the party, and the Tory media wrote endless paeans to her magnificence. The Tory election campaign was always going to be largely based around trying to limit the damage caused to the image that had been created that would inevitably come from too much exposure to what she is actually like in reality.

        • Hmmm. the Maybot was sounding pretty uncharismatic AND pretty presidential (refusing to admit that she even has any so-called opponents) in her screech after visiting Her Maj.

        • Deiseach says:

          Somehow she emerged from the post-referendum infighting in charge of the party

          Which was magnificent and (sadly?) did not signify the end of the Tories (at least not just yet); I still chortle over Michael Gove’s spectacularly back-firing back-stabbing of BoJo which then ended up not with Gove and La Vine as Leader and Leaderene, Prime Minister-in-waiting (and husband), but lost it all, while Boris got the job of Foreign Secretary. A plot twist (or series of them) that would be written off as too contrived for “House of Cards”.

          I note that Gove has managed to retain his seat as MP for Surrey Heath in yesterday’s election, so something is going right for him.

    • Anonymous Bosch says:

      My question: Why are so many commentators so sure that this will necessitate a second election soon? My understanding of parliamentary systems is that party discipline is very tight compared to the US, so even if the margin is small, won’t they still win every relevant vote anyway as long as the DUP is on board? I can understand that deaths and by-elections might chip away at it but there’s no way to predict when people will die or resign.

      • Nornagest says:

        I am certainly not an expert on British politics, but my understanding is that elections are conventionally called there whenever a major piece of the governing coalition’s agenda fails. That doesn’t happen as much as it does in the US because of said party discipline, but it does happen, and it’s more likely to happen when the coalition’s margins are weak or its internal relations are strained.

        • Brad says:

          I think the rule in the Westminster system is that if an appropriations (which they call supply) bill fails then the government automatically falls. Otherwise it takes a motion of no confidence.

          • Salem says:

            That used to be the rule until the Fixed Term Parliaments act was passed. Now it takes a specific no confidence motion. We could get into a situation where supply fails or a Brexit deal is rejected, but the government can’t call an election either. We’d be totally stuck – potentially for years.

          • random832 says:

            They can’t just make a new government with the same parliament? Possibly picking compromise centrist candidates for each cabinet position separately if it comes to that?

          • Salem says:

            They could in theory make a new government but it’s unlikely. The current arrangement is the only way anyone can get a majority, unless the Lib Dems are willing to ally with the Conservatives again.

      • Salem says:

        Party discipline is tight but not absolute. Every government will have a handful of serial rebels, plus principled defections on critical issues. And this government is going to have to negotiate Brexit, which will have to anger someone. If the Fixed Term Parliaments Act had not been passed, we would absolutely be heading for another election. As it is, we need one, but may not get one.

      • Deiseach says:

        won’t they still win every relevant vote anyway as long as the DUP is on board?

        “As long as the DUP is on board” is the important part here. If the DUP decides to withdraw support for whatever reason, then the coalition fails.

        In 1992 in the Republic, Fianna Fáil managed to cobble together a coalition government with the Progressive Democrats. It only lasted a year when, due to a series of ongoing scandals from the previous administration, the PDs withdrew their support, voted a motion of no confidence in the Taoiseach (prime minister), the government collapsed and a general election had to be called.

        Being the majority party with a minority party propping you up is comfortable when you have a large enough cushion and the minority party is desperate for power (as in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government of David Cameron). You can get the minority party to do a lot of your dirty work for you, or at least shift the blame onto them in the public perception.

        Being the majority party dependent on the support of a minority party is bad when they’re the tail wagging the dog and can hold over your head the threat of walking out and forcing the collapse of government (and a new election) anytime they feel they’re not being treated right or getting their due.

        Why are so many commentators so sure that this will necessitate a second election soon?

        Because it’s an unstable arrangement. The DUP has only 10 seats and it represents Northern Ireland, so it has little to lose if it pulls out of government any time it feels slighted (unlike the Lib Dems who were a much larger party – the merger of the sad remains of the once-mighty Liberal Party and the Social Democrats – and who had aspirations to be the power they had (partly) been before, and were a nationwide (in Great Britain) party, so they had a lot to lose if the coalition collapsed due to them).

        This means that to last, the Tories have to keep giving in to them, and if the giving in is too much or too blatant, it’s going to cause resentment and give the other parties a great chance to move a motion of no confidence to try and bring the government down. And it can’t last because it’s so unstable – all 10 DUP MPs have to vote in total agreement to support the Tories, and if only one or two decide to be mavericks on a particular cause, then they can hamstring policy. All this in the middle of trying to negotiate and implement Brexit.

        For the Tories, this is like trying to unicycle across a tightrope while the tightrope is on fire and burning through in front of them.

        Another election re-throws the dice and may bring either a better Tory result or enough seats for Labour to form a government themselves (either alone or in coalition).

        • The Nybbler says:

          Seems to me the Tory’s best strategy now is to lay the groundwork for a better election result (I have no idea how) and keep saying “Nice doggie” to the DUP until they think they can win.

          • Deiseach says:

            I can’t think of any way the Tories can lay a better groundwork in the short term, and the DUP are well aware that the Tories will be telling them “nice doggie”, so the occasional snarl and baring of teeth will remind them that to keep the happy tail wagging, they need to provide the treats 🙂

  16. Nancy Lebovitz says:

    http://www.metafilter.com/167493/Distinguishing-character-assassination-from-accountability

    There are getting to be more people on the left who see problems with call-out culture.

    The link has links to much more history on the subject than I knew existed. I don’t know whether there’s the ability to make it clear that opposition to oppression needs to not be oppressive itself, but I’m feeling more hopeful than I have since 2009.

    • gbdub says:

      The last quote in there from Noah Smith is an excellent one:

      “…for centuries, humans have tended to have small, strongly tied inner social circles and larger, more weakly tied outer circles. We tend to respond strongly to any vocal criticism within the inner circle. But social media has thrown this concentric pattern of social circles into disarray, by making the inner circle just as “strong” as the outer one in some ways. So criticism from someone in the outer circle now often carries the social weight and destructive power that only the inner circle should really have.”

      The problem with “call-out” culture in the social media age is that the response is often wildly disproportionate, but in a totally unpredictable way. Well, that and that it encourages people to one-up each other in their outward displays of righteous indignation.

      The badness of an action gets judged not on the merits, but on the only very loosely correlated magnitude of the resulting Twitter shitstorm.

      • Kevin C. says:

        I think I’ve made similar points to that quote here before, that social media has expanded the powers of shaming taboo-violations and dissent from that “inner circle” to the “global village”, and if Brin is at all right about the inevitable triumph of surveilance technologies over privacy, it will get worse. Because, while the more optimistic predict that people will eventually start pushing online networks back into the “outer circle” (ignoring Twitter mobs and ending the effectiveness of http://racistsgettingfired.tumblr.com), I expect that the likely outcome is the continuation of this trend to make the (formerly) mythical “permanent record” we were warned of in school into a real, life-long thing with serious and permanent effects. Relevant from The New York Times: “The Secret Social Media Lives of Teenagers“.

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

      Puts on fake Karl Marx beard.

      The problem with callout culture isn’t that it hurts people’s feelings. People on the internet hurt each other’s feelings all the time. It sucks but you can roll with it.

      It’s a lot harder to roll with being fired, especially when the first page of search results of your name is filled with stories about the controversy around you. You almost certainly don’t own your car or your house, and the way divorce works in our country you won’t be able to keep your family together either. Those are quantifiable material injuries: you have literally been impoverished.

      Removes beard.

      But yeah, seriously. The problem isn’t that people will call you mean names on the internet. The problem is that they will say magic words like “racist” “sexist” or “homophobe” which make it legally risky to continue to employ you.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        “The problem with callout culture isn’t that it hurts people’s feelings. People on the internet hurt each other’s feelings all the time. It sucks but you can roll with it.”

        Sometimes callout culture hurts people’s feelings so much they get something like PTSD from it.

        You may be thick-skinned enough to handle a full barrage, or you may be kidding yourself. See So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.

        • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

          Ok, that’s a fair cop, I downplayed the psychological harm of public shaming and ostracism. That is a big deal.

          But my point still stands: however bad the psychological harm is, this isn’t just about psychological harm. It also about a very literal threat to your livelihood. And if you weren’t depressed or traumatized before losing your livelihood, you can bet that you will be afterwards.

          Framing it purely in terms of feelings buries the lede.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            Thanks for acknowledging the psychological harm.

            It’s a little complex– the earlier phases of callout culture (see the Joanna Russ piece about “trashing”) didn’t have the same threat to livelihood that the current callout culture does.

          • albatross11 says:

            I imagine the impact depends a lot on whether it’s a lot of people from some outgroup you don’t like calling you names, or people from your ingroup calling you names, with the potential of being cast out from your community.

  17. Conrad Honcho says:

    Consider Pat Buchanan’s recent article, Is Afghanistan a Lost Cause? regarding the resurgence and perhaps dominance of the Taliban in Afghanistan. I was particularly shaken by this quote:

    The Taliban hold more territory and are active in more provinces than they have been since being driven from power in 2001. And Afghan forces are suffering casualties at the highest rate of the war.

    1) Do you agree with Pat’s assessment of the situation in Afghanistan?

    2) Is a secular, pro-US government possible in Afghanistan, regardless of US military involvement?

    3) If not, what are the implications of losing the war in Afghanistan?

    • bintchaos says:

      1) Terrorism and islamic insurgencies are antifragile. That means the tools employed to destroy the target actually wind up growing it instead.
      2) never.
      3) Afghanistan is well known as the Graveyard of Empires. We should just leave and let Afghanistan reach equilibrium in situ.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        What ramifications would the US leaving Afghanistan have for American foreign policy in the Islamic world? Taliban takes over, massacres people who sided with the US, potential opposition to the US taking refugees, wouldn’t the message to the rest of the Islamic world be “side with the US and you get necked?”

        • albatross11 says:

          And on the other side, is it workable for us to have a more-or-less permanent occupation and low-level war going on in Afghanistan?

    • Wrong Species says:

      I’d say we have four options in Afghanistan:

      1. Crackdown on the population in a way on a scale not seen since World War 2, whether directly or indirectly by supporting a dictator who is willing to do so.

      2. Up the number of troops significantly and credibly commit that we are going to stay there for the long haul.

      3. Limp along with the current number of troops or maybe even slightly higher and hope we can at least keep some parts of the government alive

      4. Cut our losses and give up

      I don’t think Americans have the political stomach for 1 and 2. 3 is probably the most likely option for now.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        I’m not sure we have the political stomach for 4, either. Only the most strident isolationists would agree to say “well, too bad that didn’t work out, good luck with the Taliban, later!” I am a pretty strident isolationist and that doesn’t sit well with me. It doesn’t seem to sit well with Pat, either, and he’s one of the people who made me an isolationist with his book “A Republic, Not an Empire” 20 years ago.

      • John Schilling says:

        5. Concentrate on making the cities into civilized places under liberal pro-American governments, while maintaining persistent surveillance elsewhere and periodically breaking up any concentrations of anti-American power.

        We could abandon the cities as well, but the cities can be defended and governed and the air bases we use for the surveillance and bombing must be defended, so two birds, one stone.

        • bintchaos says:

          @John Schilling
          Three words:
          Operation Frequent Wind. You really dont want to be besieged liberal islands in a sea of angry peasants who will gladly embed insurgents and terrorists who will kill you and your hajiis allies anyway they can.
          Given that conservatism is hyper-focused on the past, I think there are many lessons to be learned from US VietNam experience. Its very frustrating to me that US keeps doing the same things over and over and expecting different results.
          For example US originally sponsored Ho Chi Minh as an insurgent to plague the french, much like patronage of Osama bin Laden to frag the Russians.
          And Crossover Point– do you guys know Crossover Point? That was the theoretical sweet spot where US had killed enough VC so they gave up. There is no Crossover Point for IS or the next islamic insurgency or the Taliban. There is a near infinite resupply of proto-jihadists in Muslim Asia and MENA and sub-saharan africa… and US policies just make more and more of them.

          @Conrad Honcho
          Don’t you think the local populations know you get necked by now? US sponsors local minority groups to oppress the Sunni majority. But there are so many more sunni muslims (deobandi sufi muslims in Taliban case) because of TRF and demographicshift. Think about what happened to those poor dumb Sons of Anbar in the “Anbar Awakening”.
          US can’t win the A-stan fight– better to drawdown gracefully than be forced out in rooftop choppers under fire.
          If you want to read a book about ‘Nam then read Nick Turse Kill Anything that Moves. Its entirely composed of FOIA requests. Someday there will be a similar book about OIF and OEF.
          Maybe I will write it.

          • John Schilling says:

            Operation Frequent Wind. You really dont want to be besieged liberal islands in a sea of angry peasants who will gladly embed insurgents and terrorists

            You need to stop learning military history from fifty-year-old leftist propaganda. “Operation Frequent Wind” had nothing to do with angry peasants, insurgents, and/or terrorists. Rather, it was the North Vietnamese Army, a quarter of a million regulars with a thousand tubes of artillery and three hundred main battle tanks, which the United States Army, Navy, and Air Force were explicitly prohibited from engaging in combat by land, sea, or air, that forced the evacuation of Saigon.

            This is rather different from my proposal.

          • bintchaos says:

            But didnt the ARVN collapse just exactly like the Iraqi army?
            Someone told me that Mosul 2014 was just Da Nang redux.
            Thanx but nothanx.
            I’ll get my ‘Nam history from Nick Turse and my evo theory of games from John Maynard-Smith.
            My reference to Op Frequent Wind was the helo evac of Saigon as it fell. My point is US cant win an iterated game against embedded terrorists/guerillas– they have infinite resource resupply. Didn’t Kissinger say something about that?
            The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.

          • albatross11 says:

            How long do you imagine keeping US troops and a low-level war/whack-a-mole operation going in Afghanistan? Should I plan for my hypothetical grandkids to enlist to help in our continued occupation in Afghanistan?

          • John Schilling says:

            The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.

            There were no guerillas in Vietnam in 1975, you chaotic bint. Not enough to matter, at any rate. The ones that mattered, all died in 1968. And they died because they were baited into the suicidally foolish move of attacking securely-held cities.

            In 1975, there was a war between two regular armies, and a nonbelligerent nation evacuating its civilians before the final onslaught. That’s what usually happens when two armies clash; 1975 was just the first time it could happen with helicopters and TV cameras.

            @albatross: In two generations, your hypothetical grandkids may be able to take contract jobs as drone operators. It probably won’t pay very well, but they can work from home and monetize their leet gaming skills. But most of the work will probably be in more recent conflict zones than Afghanistan.

          • bintchaos says:

            ??
            Not what Kissinger said lol.
            Why did US burn hooches and villes and bomb rice paddies if not to deny support to embedded guerillas?
            It was stated policy.
            And US still lost. On tv.
            dinky-dau.
            https://twitter.com/ye_wenjie3/status/873196167370297344

          • John Schilling says:

            bint: You may be confusing 1965 and 1975. In 1975, it had been three years since the United States bombed anything in Vietnam, and then it was mostly bombing missile batteries, airfields, railroads, power plants, and other heavy logistics targets supporting the regular army that was waging war against the US and its allies.

          • CatCube says:

            @bintchaos

            The ARVN didn’t collapse under guerilla warfare, it collapsed under a massive conventional invasion by a regular Army. This regular North Vietnamese Army had tried to conduct a conventional invasion in 1968 and got crushed by American forces.

            The US pulled out due to a guerilla campaign, but it didn’t “collapse” in the way you’re implying. US forces made an orderly withdrawal after a political decision to abandon South Vietnam to its fate (resulting in the mass murder of those who had supported us). The evacuation of the embassy was pulling out the very last of the US civilians and troops, who were not engaged in combat operations, and as many Vietnamese civilians in danger of being murdered by the Communist regime as possible before Saigon fell to regular forces.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @CatCube

            Additionally, with American support, South Vietnamese troops had managed to halt a Northern offensive in 1972.

          • bintchaos says:

            I apologize for not being clear on what I meant.
            I meant to support 4.) withdraw as the optimal solution.
            In VietNam US employed the Crossover Point as doctrine– the theoretical tipping point where US had killed enough VC that they gave up.
            That point was unobtainable in Nam, and even moreso in MENA, sub-sahara, SE Asia today because of demographic shift and the youth bulge in ME and Africa.
            I didn’t mean to refight VietNam even as a socio-physics experiment in conservative attributes.

      • hoghoghoghoghog says:

        This could be the pundit’s fallacy, but I think 4 would be fine. What percentage of Americans even know that the US military is still active in Afghanistan? Further, this isn’t like Vietnam, where the whole purpose was sending a message of resolve – the main goal was simply revenge, and we did that.

    • Protagoras says:

      The misguided war on drugs seems to play a role. Opium is one of the few ways for the desperately poor farmers of Afghanistan to get by, the Taliban lets them grow it, and the U.S. doesn’t. Obviously, the farmers are going to keep growing it as long as it remains profitable, and that’s going to keep funding the Taliban and guaranteeing it a lot of popular support as long as they’re the ones who permit that.

      • cassander says:

        I always said that you could turn Afghanistan into Kuwait by giving them a global monopoly on the production of legal heroin.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          How much would heroin be worth if it were legal?

          • Anonymous says:

            That’s a good question. I figure it would be taxed into space similarly to alcohol and tobacco. Since some forms don’t require any particularly technologically advanced tools or processing, I figure the price for commercial units would be close to the named substances.

          • skef says:

            It would certainly be worth something, but this split would be rather strange.

            The primary psychoactive compound in opium poppies is morphine, and most morphine is still produced from farming poppies. Obviously, morphine is a common pharmaceutical, albeit a controlled one. Heroin is the preferred street drug because it’s very easy to turn morphine into heroin and the latter is twice as potent. Heroin is schedule-I (in the U.S.) mostly for messaging reasons.

            So designating one country as the supply of legal heroin, while leaving the morphine infrastructure as it is, would be weird.

          • gbdub says:

            Heroin? I don’t know, but legal opiates are a huge industry.

          • Brad says:

            I believe Tasmania in Australia is currently the largest grower of legal poppies. Don’t think they are exactly experiencing Kuwait levels of wealth over there.

      • John Schilling says:

        Opium is one of the few ways for the desperately poor farmers of Afghanistan to get by, the Taliban lets them grow it

        “From late 2000 and the year that followed, the Taliban enforced a ban on poppy farming via threats, forced eradication, and the public punishment of transgressors. The result was a 99% reduction in the area of opium poppy farming in Taliban-controlled areas”
        G. Farrel and J. Thorne, 2004

        I don’t know what the situation is in the Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan now, but then there aren’t any areas of Afghanistan where Taliban control is uncontested and if there are places where the Taliban are leaving opium farmers in peace that may just be on account of not having the bandwith to deal with them this year. Which is presumably the case in some non-Taliban-controlled areas as well.

        But the last time anyone let the Taliban have nigh-uncontested control of Afghanistan, they turned out to be the most hard-core drug warriors this side of maybe Singapore, and the worst nightmare the poor hard-working opium farmers of Afghanistan ever had. The US occupation reopened that trade, and that route to prosperity for at least some Afghanis.

        • Protagoras says:

          2000-2001 was an aberration, partly motivated by the Taliban seeking good relations with the U.S. at the time. Apart from that they have not been anti-opium, and if you look at more recent years their gains have coincided with an increase in Afghan opium production.

    • Anonymous Bosch says:

      A secular, pro-US government would be possible in Afghanistan if we had zero moral compunctions and our population had an infinite tolerance for expensive, bloody wars. So possible, but not in the sense anyone reasonable would want.

      • 1soru1 says:

        ‘secular’, ‘pro-us’, ‘democratic’, ‘government’. Pick one, or two if you want to spend enough blood and treasure.

        You probably can’t afford 3, and definitely can’t afford 4.

        • bintchaos says:

          3 is impossible.
          As Bush found out in his hilariously tragically wrong superwrong Democracy Promotion Doctrine–
          when muslims are democratically empowered to vote, they vote for Islam. Muslims like Islam.
          1, 2, and 4 won’t work because of bordering islamic populations.
          There isnt enough blood and treasure in the world to force that.

          • 1soru1 says:

            3 is pretty much the easiest one, providing you don’t attempt #1 and #2. Unlike earlier eras, democracy is now the default form of government in the world. Anything else needs active foreign support.

            Thing is, a democratic government follows it’s own decisions; those are not going to be to go out on a limb for the US, or impose contemporary liberal Christian morality on its populace.

            The US spends nothing to ‘prop up’ e.g. Iranian democracy; in return, you get crowds chanting ‘Great Satan’ and homosexuals being hanged.

            The US spends does spend billions propping up the Saudi monarchy, in return you get photo-ops and various bribes and a few concessions on human rights.

          • bintchaos says:

            Beg pardon.
            But aren’t Iran and KSA theocracies?

          • 1soru1 says:

            Iran does have theocratic elements in its democracy, e.g. the Assembly of Experts have to pass a religious exam.

            SA is a straight monarchy – the clerics work for the King, just like they did for Henry VIII.

          • bintchaos says:

            Depends on how you define democracy doesnt it?
            I think think the consensual rule of law of a citizenry determines that– either government by the laws of God (shariah) or government by the laws of man (secular law).

          • 1soru1 says:

            Every functional democracy has non-democratic elements; a constitution, a monarch, an imperial power, a religious hierarchy. Social theories like Marxism get press-ganged into this role sometimes; it’s not one they have been noticeably successful at.

            As far as I can see, subjectively the _nature_ of the non-democratic element matters a lot to the locals. But objectively it’s the _proportion_ that matters.

  18. Jaskologist says:

    Question for those on the (American) left.

    Over on the right, we like to complain about “failure theater” a lot, where Republicans will pretend to oppose a given left-wing initiative or piece of legislation, but do so in such a way as to not actually succeed in stopping it.

    What sorts of failure theater do the Democrats engage in?

    • bintchaos says:

      We are just beginning to get into Sinner v Sinner TfT.
      Ask us later.

      • Gobbobobble says:

        wat

          • Gobbobobble says:

            I’m still not seeing the relevance. Are you asserting that lefties would never do failure theatre but now that the righties are that they’ll have to start?

          • bintchaos says:

            exactly.
            gold star.
            The Founders set up a Nash equilibrium, but in 2008 the congressional GOP began playing zero-sum TfT
            Sinner v Saint means the Saints always lose.
            But Sinner v Sinner is a CAT game.
            No one wins.
            Dems are just learning to play right now. That is why screaming “but dems are the party of free speech” isnt going to get Murray or Coulter an auditorium on campus.

          • CatCube says:

            Too bad you weren’t here when Jill was; you two could argue about whether the Evil Republicans destroyed civil discourse in 1994 or 2008.

            No, sir, the Democrats had no hand in the Bork hearings.

          • bintchaos says:

            @catcube
            Interesting.
            Mid 90s is when polarization really started to take hold.

    • gph says:

      Perhaps opposition to war/military actions. It plays really well to the liberal base, but ultimately I think most democratic politicians are fully on board with most of our foreign policy and military interventions.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        When Obama was elected I honestly thought “at least he’ll close gitmo and we’ll stop bombing people’s weddings in the middle east.” Nope.

        • Jordan D. says:

          What’s interesting is that I think gph’s example here was definitively true in 2008, but after all the years of continued actions in the ME we’ve sort of stopped having a true anti-war party. The Democrats used to be pretty anti-war when Bush was in office, but while they lost their taste for pacifism under Obama, the Republican party never picked it up.

          I’m interested to see if the Democrats suddenly take up the banner again under Trump or if interminable endless war has drowned that for good.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I’m interested to see if the Democrats suddenly take up the banner again under Trump or if interminable endless war has drowned that for good.

            When he lobbed missiles at Assad’s airbase, Trump supporters were more angry at him than anyone else. If Trump starts a war he’d never win re-election. I think his only interest is in finishing up the ones we have. Unfortunately, that may be impossible. ISIS can be defeated. But the Taliban in Afghanistan is as strong as ever. The only hope on that front, I believe, is starving them out of resources. Perhaps Trump’s detente in Saudi Arabia will pay off, but who knows.

        • cassander says:

          If the Obama administration taught us anything, it’s how hard it is for US presidents to do nothing. Doing nothing takes resolve.

    • Brad says:

      It’s not quite the same, but Democrats constantly pretend that their gun control plans have any chance when they know damn well they don’t. Every legislator is at least an amateur whip, they know what’s plausible and what isn’t.

      • gbdub says:

        That was going to be my example. And it’s probably a good call on their part – any compromise measure wouldn’t appease their base, and probably wouldn’t work anyway, with the net result of just giving more ammo to the now riled up pro-gun side.

        Not sure how you break that incentive chain.

      • Protagoras says:

        Well, they do pass some gun control laws. And they don’t generally pretend that they’re planning to implement the kind of laws that might actually have an impact (UK level of restrictions, say). Mostly they just pretend that the laws they actually try to pass and sometimes pass successfully, like their slightly fussier background checks and attacks on strangely defined “assault weapons,” will actually do something. Of course, pretending that sure to be ineffective policies will actually help is common on both sides. And I’m sounding like a libertarian. I guess this is one of the issues where I tend to lean that way.

    • andrewflicker says:

      Single payer healthcare seems like a good candidate.

      • BBA says:

        This, more than any other example, shows how “failure theater” gets to be a thing. Because single payer either costs a ton of money, forcing huge tax increases, or it means a massive loss of money for the entire medical industry, from big pharma all the way down to your local pediatrician’s office. This is hard to explain in a soundbite, so the pols either have to lie and claim it’s doable and then shrug when it fails to pass, or just quietly bury the issue.

        Sure, this repeated failure to pass a policy the base loves gets them mad at the party elite, but the base isn’t actually a majority of the electorate. There are in fact lots of people who don’t want single-payer, just like there are lots of people who don’t want [insert right-wing policy here], and they’re enough to swing an election.

    • cassander says:

      The exact same thing, with republican bills?

      Or if you mean a different sort of theater, the apoplectic reaction (“they’re slashing budgets”) to even minor reductions in spending. And not even to actual reductions, to even the suggestion that spending might grow more slowly this year than last year.

      The current kerfuffle in Kansas is a great demonstration of this, tax cuts were never more than 5% of the state’s budget, where the actual deficits were only a couple percent, and where spending rose continually, but I’ve seen dozens of people talking about how Kansas proves that slashing taxes and spending doesn’t work, talking about the state as if it had descended into mad max style chaos.

  19. bintchaos says:

    I wonder if the SCC commentariat tribe has opinions on Comey’s testimony, given that we are all watching it.

    • Deiseach says:

      Only going by what I heard on the news, but:

      (a) I think he’s getting his retaliation in first

      (b) I think he’s basking, just the tiniest bit, in his new-found adulation as Hero Of The Republic. Makes a big turn-around from the days when people were calling for his immediate resignation, sacking and/or head on a plate for making a political mountain out of the nothingburger molehill of Hillary’s private e-mail server, and that there was no place for the head of the FBI to be making politically-tinged or politically-influential decisions 🙂

      I have no idea if there’s a real pig in that poke, but it’s going to be great fun in the media.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      Rorschach test. If you think Trump is an evil mafia type, then “I hope you can let this go” is a threat. If you think Trump is a good guy who doesn’t want to see his good guy friend Flynn unfairly harangued, then “I hope you can let this go” is innocuous.

      Nothing will change.

      • CatCube says:

        The FBI will routinely jam people up for relatively innocuous statements. Here is Popehat on how the Feds can goad a business partner into giving you a call regarding an investigation, come over to talk to you and at best get evidence of a misdemeanor, then slyly ask you if you talked to anybody else about this. If you say “no” they’ve just converted your misdemeanor into a felony.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          1) How is that relevant to Comey’s testimony?

          2) Do you think Trump is going to be impeached based on Comey’s testimony? What’s your confidence in your prediction?

          ETA: Caveat. Some may believe Trump is impeachable, but will not be impeached because Republicans control the legislature. So perhaps consider a version of question 2 with “is going to be” replaced with “could be.”

          • CatCube says:

            Sorry, I didn’t actually say what my point was: that people get in severe legal trouble for “misunderstood” statements to the FBI pretty frequently.

            I agree that Trump’s statements to Comey have an innocuous explanation, and that Trump is so unthinking in his words that it’s very plausible that he meant the innocuous meaning. However, it’s hardly unprecedented for the FBI to treat these kinds of words uncharitably, and people other than the President go to jail for the FBI’s uncharitable interpretations all the time.

            I doubt that Trump is going to be impeached based on Comey’s testimony. If Trump would get with the program regarding how the system he’s in charge of works, stop gabbling dumb stuff on Twitter and get to governing, we wouldn’t be dealing with this nonsense. It’s frustrating.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I think the media, the Democrats (and many Republicans) would be pursuing these investigations regardless of anything Trump does or doesn’t do. The process is the punishment.

          • Matt M says:

            I think the media, the Democrats (and many Republicans) would be pursuing these investigations regardless of anything Trump does or doesn’t do. The process is the punishment.

            This.

            Trump will be impeached if and when there are enough votes to impeach him (which itself is probably a factor of polling for battleground congressional seats in 2018 elections), no sooner and no later. It will have very little to do with the availability or legitimacy of accusations against him.

          • CatCube says:

            Well, no I don’t think they’d be pursuing these investigations. These investigations are only possible because the President is not a good politician.

            I grant that there would be other, much weaker, investigations if he was able to avoid colorable accusations of conflicts of interest and manage a consistent fucking messaging strategy; but then we’d be spending most of our time talking about his infrastructure plan this week (just two more days in infrastructure week!) and much less about Democratic whining about Trump personally.

      • albatross11 says:

        However, one thing that Trump has demonstrated time and again, before and after reaching the presidency, is that he doesn’t much worry about the aspect of being in a position of great power that means that when you thoughtlessly remark “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?” the next day the Church has a new martyr.

        When you have a lot of power, your words have impact. When you’re the president and you tell your FBI director “I hope you can let this go,” it has a very different kind of impact than if you’re the FBI director’s neighbor or even colleague.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          Unlike the media, and lots of others I see, you correctly described Henry II’s words as “thoughtless.” I could be wrong, but I never got the impression Henry was speaking in some kind of code to his men.

          The media (and Comey) seem to interpret it as code. Which again is the Rorschach test. If you think Trump had ill intentions then you interpret his words as ill intended. I find this unlikely, though, since Trump is not known for his subtle verbal cues. If Trump wanted Comey to do his will, and had him alone, I’m pretty sure he would have bought him some furniture and grabbed him by the pussy.

    • sandoratthezoo says:

      I didn’t watch it, read articles about it. Looks to me like it will probably lower Trump’s approval rating slightly, but not much more.

      Possibly there would be something more explosive in the classified briefing sections, but not super likely.

      The special prosecutor might be a different story, but that’s a pretty long way from resolution I think.

    • gbdub says:

      So far (getting this second hand, can’t watch myself) we’ve got Trump doing 4 bad things:
      1) Asking Comey to “let the Flynn investigation go, if he can”
      2) Asking Comey to say publicly what he had told Trump privately, namely that Trump himself was not under investigation
      3) Expecting Comey to be “loyal”
      4) Actually firing Comey (although the investigation continues without him)

      On the other hand we’ve got the Obama/Hillary camp doing some bad stuff too:
      1) Comey claims the Lynch/Clinton tarmac meeting pushed him to go public on the Hillary investigation
      2) Lynch asked Comey to call the Hillary investigation a “matter”, not an “investigation”.

      And you’ve got Comey himself doing a bad thing:
      1) Leaking his memo to a friend with the intent of it then being leaked to the media (which it obviously was).

      I think only Comey’s action is definitively criminal. As far as troubling, Lynch’s actions and Trump’s strike me as similarly bad. There’s also the question of who was doing all the leaking and unmasking of Trump officials… this testimony seems to make it more plausible that Comey was complicit in at least some of that.

      • Brad says:

        What crime to you think Comey committed. AFAICT the memo didn’t contain classified information. Leaking unclassified but not authorized to be released information may be ground to be fired, but I don’t think prosecuted. Maybe something to do with physically keeping the memos after being fired?

        • gbdub says:

          I was operating under the impression that the memo was of a sufficiently sensitive classification that leaking would be illegal, not merely administratively punishable.

          But I could certainly be mistaken.

          • albatross11 says:

            I’m sure Comey was careful not to include anything classified in a memo he leaked which obviously came from him. He was the director of the FBI, so you have to assume he knows something about what is and isn’t illegal, and also about what kinds of things a serious investigation would be able to discover.

            He’s a private citizen who is disclosing to the press the experience he had as a member of the administration, which is 100% legal and perfectly legitimate to do. I don’t see how this is any different from someone who is fired by the president then writing a tell-all book that makes the president look bad. As long as he doesn’t release classified material, there’s no problem.

            Presumably, Comey felt some personal obligation not to leak this kind of information before he was fired, but presumably didn’t feel much obligation afterwards.

          • gbdub says:

            But did he create the memo as private citizen Comey, saving notes for his memoirs, or as FBI director Comey?

            If the latter, it’s still an official document, and leaking it probably at least violates his employment agreement.

          • Brad says:

            I’m not exactly sure what the legal framework is. On the one hand, my original thought was that if the memo was drafted on the clock then belongs to the employer and couldn’t be kept after employment. But then I remembered that high government officials often leave their ‘papers’ to educational institutions. I vaguely recall that Richard Nixon sued to assert ownership over his and won. So now I’m not sure.

            In any event that would only apply to the actual memo itself. The memories are Comey’s own and so long as passing them on doesn’t violate some other duty — whether under the classification rules, an NDA, or similar — then he is free to share them with whomever he likes.

            Even in the case where keeping the memo was technically a violation of, say, the fidiciary duty owned to an employer, we are way down in the peccadillo weeds. Only if the information itself couldn’t be released, like if it was classified, are we looking at serious wrongdoing.

          • CatCube says:

            @gbdub

            Comey no longer has an employment agreement, which is something that the President should have considered before firing him.

            If the document was classified or had FOUO information, there might be something there. However, if it has none of that and was written by Comey for Comey’s own records (especially as a CYA document) it’s Comey’s to do with what he will.

            Plenty of people have left government service to write tell-all books. As long as they’re not taking the Government dime, there isn’t and shouldn’t be a problem with that.

          • bintchaos says:

            All Trump had to do was invoke executive privilege.
            Thus Comey’s reference to Trump’s failure to do that in his testimony.
            Its he said, he said…but only one of the sayers gave testimony under oath.
            so far.

      • Deiseach says:

        3) Expecting Comey to be “loyal”

        I don’t find that one particularly bad. It’s not a great request, but since Trump is still apparently operating from a business mindset – where he’s the boss – and not a political one, it’s natural enough that he would expect loyalty from an ’employee’. Isn’t inculcating loyalty to the firm one of the modern tools of management? And behind the idea of confidentiality agreements and not going to work for a competitor until a certain period has lapsed after you’ve left a company? Apparently it is even required in Quebec law!

        Yeah, it doesn’t (and shouldn’t) work like that in state organisations, where it’s not personal loyalty but loyalty to the office and to the nation that over-rides everything. But equally I can imagine an Aaron Sorkin-written episode of “The West Wing” where Jed Bartlett makes a great, impassioned speech taking down a spineless, disloyal low-level civil servant (who maybe leaked what looked like bad publicity to the press or tried to fabricate a scandal about one of Jed’s Big Initiatives) about how he doesn’t require them to be loyal to him or even like him, but he’s The President and they have to respect the office and be loyal to that etc. etc. etc. oh man this is gonna win another Emmy for sure and have all the TV reviewers passing out in spasms of ecstasy as they write their reviews.

    • Jordan D. says:

      Comey actually offered a few more opinions than I expected. I was surprised to see him answer that he believed he’d been fired over Russia, instead of just saying that he didn’t know. I was especially surprised to see him admit that he’d asked a friend to leak something* since it would have been very easy for him to just not talk about that at all. Possibly he feels that frankness is a better thing than ordinary political coyness?

      Anyway he did a pretty good job keeping his composure and responding appropriately, although the questions were a lot more civil than political inquests like this usually are. I’m gonna give him an 8/10.

      *Although nothing that strikes me as obviously classified or illegal to leak

    • hlynkacg says:

      A Earthly Knight said on the sub, There isn’t much new information for any one who’s been following the saga closely. I’d say the biggest revelation is that Comey himself authorized the leaking some of the Flynn memos in the hopes that congress would appoint a special prosecutor.

      Edit: Overall, I’d say his testimony did some minor damage to the Trump administration but nowhere near the amount damage his opposition seems to have expected. If anything I’d say the real looser in this is the FBI (as an institution) as it’s pretty clear that they were playing politics in the 2016 election.

      • bintchaos says:

        Comey leaked the content of one memo.
        He said he deliberately made his memos unclassified. Unless you have a Tempest car you can’t create a classified memo on your laptop in your car. There are strict protocols for creating and storing classified material.
        I can kinda guess at what went down behind the doors.
        Trump is in serious trouble and he deserves it. Do you think the US spook community welcomed him blabbing intel shared by our allies Israel and the UK to russian randos?
        Plus his actions in Riyadh have made a giant headache for the Pentagon…we dont even know how bad it will get yet …could be the WWIII kickoff.
        You guys are against WWIII, right?

        In my opinion the Founders built this country’s constitution well enough that Trump’s poor impulse control and demogogic tendencies can’t do much damage. But the Trump/Kushner plan for MENA is just crazy dangerous and extremely risky. It frankly terrifies me.

      • hoghoghoghoghog says:

        wrt damage: I think the real question is whether this gives the Republicans an excuse to impeach him. Pence would be far better for all conservative goals. Meanwhile, the last election showed that conservatives are deeply concerned about corruption and propriety in office. So they could probably get rid of Trump and strengthen their standing with the base.

        • bintchaos says:

          Lol, the GOP doesnt have the nads.
          Empirical proof is how the elites behaved during the primary.
          They know Trump is guaranteed hateful deathpoison for conservative recruitment going forward, but they are pants-wetting terrified of their own base.

          • albatross11 says:

            To be fair, they have good reason to be afraid of their base, given how they’ve governed when they’ve had power.

    • onyomi says:

      I never watched any of the testimony as I don’t pay close attention to the day-to-day of politics. I do, however, periodically check news aggregator sites like Realclearpolitics just to get a sample of opinion on the issues du jour.

      I like RCP because it generally picks a variety of articles covering the ideological spectrum. On any given day they are usually linking NYT, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NY Post, American Conservative, Reason, etc. for a pretty good cross-section of mainstreamish editorial opinion.

      The coverage of the Comey issue has struck me in that it seems to have really hit a new high of polarization. It no longer feels like two different sides are providing different spins on their reporting of the same game. It feels like they’ve been watching two entirely different games. It would be like, in the past, Chicago newspaper reports on 4-3 Mets v. Cubs game by saying “Heartbreaker for the Cubs” while the NY paper headline is “Mets score upset final-inning victory!”

      Now it’s like you have the same game and the Chicago paper is like “Cubs lose by only one point despite rampant cheating by the NYMets, the most unethical team in the history of baseball” while the NY newspaper reports “Mets dominate Cubs, once again proving they are the greatest team ever assembled.”

      Like, it used to be the liberal papers would say “Reagan’s new tax plan an insult to the poor” while the conservative papers would say “Reagan’s new tax plan promises to boost growth, create jobs.”

      Now it’s like you have two different papers reporting on the same testimony, one headline is “Comey’s Testimony Reveals his Duplicity, Completely Vindicates Trump” while the other headlines, about the same testimony is “Comey’s Damning Indictment of the Most Corrupt Administration in History set to Sink Trump Admin by 2018.”

      It feels like they aren’t even watching the same events anymore.

      • 1soru1 says:

        > It feels like they aren’t even watching the same events anymore.

        Occam’s razor says only one side has changed; the question is which. And that is something you can’t find out by reading both sides. You need to compare the report to the reality.

        Take some event or situation you have first-hand, personal knowledge of, or some trusted way of getting detailed data. Read reports from the two sides; which one is summarizing, simplifying or perhaps exaggerating. And which one is flat-out making stuff up?

        Obviously I have a view, but I don’t feel i need to push it here; most people who do that honestly will, I feel, come to a conclusion I can live with.

        • bintchaos says:

          Occam’s razor says only one side has changed; the question is which.

          Pew says the Right has moved farther right. If my hypothesis is correct, this is the only possible response to the GOP base’s belief that they have been deliberately disenfranchised from academe, culture, and the economy.
          My thesis is that what the GOP is really responding to is eroding relative fitness of conservative ideology in the age of the internet, positive correlation of educational attainment with liberal ideology, and decreasing relative population parity under demographic shift, eg white majority shrinkage.
          This is a problem for the GOP going forward, since 21st century jobs will increasingly require more and more education while the predominantly HS only, predominantly white population ages and dies off.

          • AnonYEmous says:

            So your link doesn’t say what you say it does. Am I missing something? Well, fairly doubtful, especially when you consider the current left climate of “impeach, single-payer, socialism now”. Pretty sure those words cover the three main bases, and represent significant shifts leftward.

            Meanwhile, non-conservative ideology has done pretty shit, all told. It’s just that the mainstream made fun of Bush and didn’t dare do so for Obama. Ben Rhodes managed to create a literal media echo chamber to push the Iran deal; not exactly something Trump can pull off. And as for claims of population shift causing permanent doom for one party…heard those before, they haven’t come true yet. Besides, if anything we’re likely to see less people in college as the 21st century rolls on, given that most of the people who go now derive little benefit from it.

            So which side has changed? Well, consider for a moment which side has been promising that Trump will be impeached – and which side wants him to be impeached, as well. Now, if this hearing really removed all chance of impeachment – and it basically does – how can the media report this? If they do, there goes all of the angry anti-trump base, and there goes all of the clicks. And also, there go their dreams. And so it goes.

            Anyways, Bint, I’ll give you this warning: the GOP currently controls both houses of Congress, the Presidency, a large number of state and other local governments, and soon the Supreme Court too. Looks like reality…might have a conservative bias 😉

          • bintchaos says:

            ??
            Watch the animation in the linked article– starting in 1994 the red median moves dramatically to the right. Data ends in 2014– it will be interesting to see an animation of 1994 to 2018 soon.
            I have read a lot of other articles that mark the shift of the red median to the right with the rise of the Tea Party.
            Would you like to read one of those?
            My hypothesis is that the animation will show another push to the right, dating from Trump’s nomination/election event when the base went all in for him.

          • I have read a lot of other articles that mark the shift of the red median to the right with the rise of the Tea Party.
            Would you like to read one of those?

            No.

            You linked to a particular article from Pew. Nowhere in it did it say what you claimed it did. Of its six points, only one (3) described a pattern as being stronger on the right, and even for that the pattern existed on the left as well.

            Nowhere in the text was there support for “Pew says the Right has moved farther right,” which was your claim.

            Watch the animation in the linked article– starting in 1994 the red median moves dramatically to the right.

            Watch the animation. The red median is moving left until about 2004.

            Anyone who believes that bintchaos is both honest and in touch with reality should check that–it’s a pretty striking contrast to her claim.

          • bintchaos says:

            Sorry, guess I foolishly assumed people would watch the animation– carries the most information content.
            (shrug)
            But this is in itself an example of polarization and ideological hardened networks.
            There is probably nothing I can say. To me that is the most awful part of this…the idea that all data has inherent bias.

          • AnonYEmous says:

            Having read your claim and re-watched the animation a couple of times…I don’t see that at all. What I do see is both medians moving left, then a fairly strong rightward shift for the Republicans cancelling the earlier shift and slightly overshooting the original position, then two opposite shifts with the democrats going slightly farther. Or in other words:

            To me that is the most awful part of this…the idea that all data has inherent bias.

            No, all interpretations of data carry partisan bias. Case in point: both of us saw the same data and see different things. One of us is wrong. How do you know it’s not you?

          • bintchaos says:

            No, I mean when conservatives reject the raw data– like climate science data.
            There’s many timeline studies that show when conservatives have moved right in greater numbers– its called asymmetrical polarization.

            Political scientists have known for years that political polarization is largely a one-sided phenomenon: in recent decades the Republican Party has moved to the right much faster than Democrats have moved to the left. As Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution has described it, “Republicans have become a radical insurgency—ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of their political opposition.”

            What causes polarization?
            I mean what do SSC commenters think causes polarization?
            I have my own opinions but I’m interested in SSC opinions.

          • Sorry, guess I foolishly assumed people would watch the animation– carries the most information content.

            I watched the animation. The red median is moving left until about 2004–strikingly inconsistent with your claim that “starting in 1994 the red median moves dramatically to the right.”

            I cannot see why you would deliberately lie about something so easily checked, so either I am somehow misinterpreting your posts or you are delusional.

          • bintchaos says:

            I didnt say that…I said polarization started in 1994– the data covers 1994 to 2014.
            The move to the right starts ~2007 with the rise of the Tea Party. I bet if we collect data for 2015-2018 Trump’s election will cause the blue median to move left.
            You can google asymmetrical polarization– its a thing.
            Isnt this a perfect example of rejection of data perceived as outgroup?
            If I’m labelled a leftist here no conservative is going to accept anything I say. Not about polarization, not about Serenity, not about Qatar, not about climate science.

          • What causes polarization?

            Interesting question.

            One element is that elite schools are a political monoculture. As best I can tell from my observations and the observations of my children, the usual attitude is that a fairly extreme version of left wing orthodoxy is obviously true and anyone who disagrees is stupid and/or evil. That not only causes polarization on the left, it causes it on the right, because people are unlikely to listen to the arguments of those who regard them as stupid or evil.

            I don’t know what the evidence is on left polarization vs right polarization. I note, however, that in the most recent election a major candidate for the Democratic nomination was a self-described socialist. In the Republican race the winner was a non-ideological demagogue. It looked to me as though the polarization on the right consisted not of people on the right holding strongly conservative positions but of people on the right strongly rejecting the left.

          • bintchaos says:

            “people on the right strongly rejecting the left.”

            This is probably true.
            Do you think liberal institutional monoculture has any relationship to selection for IQ in students and professors?
            You are saying– correct me if I am wrong– conservatives feel disenfranchized from elite schools, universities, and colleges?

          • bean says:

            @bintchaos
            Stop putting your replies in the middle of the thread. It’s rude, unless you’re doing it purely as a technical exercise, which you aren’t.

          • bintchaos says:

            I’m not doing it on purpose– I use Tor & a VPN (slows transmission), and it happens when someone replies while I’m still typing.

          • Nornagest says:

            I’m starting to feel like I’m being trolled.

          • CatCube says:

            @bintchaos

            It makes no sense to talk about raw data as something to be “rejected.” My favorite quote on data: “Knowledge is NOT power! Knowledge is like coal. Dirty, black lumps of lifeless facts and figures. To harness the power of knowledge, you need to apply the fires of intelligence and imagination!”

            Data requires analysis to be meaningful.

          • bintchaos says:

            @Nornagest

            I’m starting to feel like I’m being trolled.

            Well…I’m starting to feel like Dr. Elizabeth Shaw.

            Elizabeth Shaw: This place isn’t what we thought it was. They aren’t what we thought they were. I was wrong. We were so wrong.

          • AnonYEmous says:

            I was wrong. We were so wrong.

            i mean, yes, but not like you mean it

            which brings up the question: are you ready to accept that you’re wrong like you actually are? Or does this signal a retreat into the bubble? Guess I don’t mind either way.

          • bintchaos says:

            @AnonYEmous
            That is very disingenuous.
            I’m wrong about who I thought you were (meaning the collective SSC you), just like poor Dr. Shaw was so terribly wrong about the Engineers.
            My fault–I had a sample of N= 1, meaning I read Unsong and the Eternal Struggle, and the comments on those threads.
            I am right about complexity science, math, Islam, socio-physics, IQ, demographics, educational attainment, and Serenity.
            I thought I wanted to understand conservatism better.
            Its too much work.

          • Nornagest says:

            I’ve heard that before… oh yeah, Jill/Moon said the same thing. And this is playing out a lot like that did, come to think of it.

            Kind of a shame.

          • Deiseach says:

            Jill/Moon said the same thing

            Jill may have been away with the fairies when it came to politics, but she was sincere about it and genuinely believed what she was saying.

            bintchaos is giving off a different odour to me, and I don’t believe they are arguing in good faith, representing themself honestly, or doing anything more than attempting to gadfly a perceived Wretched Hive of Right-Wing Conservative Scum And Villainy (viz. the SSC commentariat) into showing our true colours by goading us into frothing fits of denunciation of the left and blurting out how we personally grind the faces of the poor and quaff the tears of widows and orphans.

            Whether that is simply for teh lulz or part of a trickster-style assumed persona, I have no idea.

            I’d prefer if bintchaos were to come clean, since in the odd comment or two where they drop the text-speak affectation, they are perfectly capable of using clear and correct English to communicate a point, and I think we’d all get on a lot better if they were up-front about what they think is going on here at the SSC, what their politics/views are, and why they think we need to get woke by them.

          • Deiseach says:

            My fault–I had a sample of N= 1, meaning I read Unsong and the Eternal Struggle, and the comments on those threads.

            Given that UNSONG is a work of fiction that explores kabbalah, mysticism, the Western Esoteric Tradition, theodicy, the Problem of Evil, some pop culture, some nerd/geek wish fulfilment fantasy, alternate history, the poetry of William Blake and a ton of dreadful whale puns, as well as a lot of other stuff I’m leaving out, what the hell conclusion are you drawing from that which gives you to think “Ah yes, a typical example of the average conservative Red Tribe American population on here”?

          • I didnt say that…I said polarization started in 1994– the data covers 1994 to 2014.
            The move to the right starts ~2007 with the rise of the Tea Party.

            You wrote:

            Watch the animation in the linked article– starting in 1994 the red median moves dramatically to the right.

            If I’m labelled a leftist here no conservative is going to accept anything I say

            It has nothing to do with your being a leftist. You gave a link to a page talking about polarization and described it as “Pew says the Right has moved farther right.” That wasn’t what it said, as several of us discovered by following the link and reading it.

            You claimed that “starting in 1994 the red median moves dramatically to the right.”

            Starting in 1994, the red median moved left until about 2004.

            If you say things that are demonstrably false, people who notice it are not going to accept what you say. Whether you are left, right, or center.

          • Do you think liberal institutional monoculture has any relationship to selection for IQ in students and professors?

            Unlikely. Holding with great confidence the same beliefs as those around you while being almost entirely ignorant of the arguments against those beliefs is not evidence of high IQ. I’ve spent my entire life in the academic world and that seems to be the usual pattern, going back to 1964 when I was a Harvard undergraduate.

            It isn’t evidence of low IQ either. It’s pretty much the normal behavior of people in a social environment with a strong orthodoxy.

            You are saying– correct me if I am wrong– conservatives feel disenfranchized from elite schools, universities, and colleges?

            No. I am saying that they feel as though the culture represented by those schools is both ignorant and dismissive of their views.

            Going back to your question about the causes of polarization. Part of it might be the reduction in the power of the major media due to the rise of the Internet. If all an intelligent conservative has available to read is the NYT and Scientific American, he might conclude that his views really are wrong, or at least are not shared by many other intelligent people. If he has the option of reading a wider range of opinion, such as the Volokh conspiracy, a blog started by someone who graduated from UCLA at 15, he discovers that there are lots of other smart people with views inconsistent with the current orthodoxy. Some are conservatives, some libertarians, but almost all have a low opinion of the set of positions that almost everyone at Oberlin either believes in, pretends to believe in, or keeps silent about.

            I can imagine the same thing happening on the left, as reflected in the willingness of a lot of Democrats to support a candidate who self-identified as a socialist.

            But that’s only a guess–I don’t have a theory of the causes of polarization that I am confident of.

          • AnonYEmous says:

            I’m wrong about who I thought you were (meaning the collective SSC you), just like poor Dr. Shaw was so terribly wrong about the Engineers.

            Yes, that is what you were saying

            But I was turning it around by explaining that you were in fact wrong, but in a different way. I mean:

            I am right about complexity science, math, Islam, socio-physics, IQ, demographics, educational attainment, and Serenity.

            Serenity? socio-physics? demographics? IQ? I mean, if you declare yourself to be right, who am I to argue…

            I thought I wanted to understand conservatism better.
            Its too much work.

            Doubtless. But if you don’t want to understand something, I’d refrain from making broad statements about it. Or you could stick around and learn a couple of things. Your choice.

          • I’d prefer if bintchaos were to come clean

            Your theory is different from mine, perhaps because I am more naive. When someone makes factual claims that are flatly false, a fact observable in the link that is supposed to support them, I assume delusion, not dishonesty.

        • Brad says:

          I’m sure it is productive to argue about what the simplest explanation is, but I would have thought it would be a change in the market for news that hits all media outlets rather than a change in the mindset of one or other side of the ideological aisle.

          Just now on Bloomberg radio I heard a long retired news anchor (sorry didn’t catch which one) talking about how the news changed when studios decided that news programs were supposed to make money instead of be loss leaders.

          • AnonYEmous says:

            Just now on Bloomberg radio I heard a long retired news anchor (sorry didn’t catch which one) talking about how the news changed when studios decided that news programs were supposed to make money instead of be loss leaders.

            I’ve also heard Freddie’s theory that labor unions used to be much stronger in newsrooms, letting journalists do their thing. And there’s probably also something to polarization of journalists more generally as well, as well as their concentration in certain areas.

        • Nornagest says:

          Occam’s razor says we should favor theories that have fewer moving parts, but that doesn’t imply that it’s all one side’s fault. There’s still plenty of stuff that affects both sides of the aisle.

      • Matt M says:

        It feels like they aren’t even watching the same events anymore.

        They don’t need to watch the events at all. Both sides know what their readers/viewers want to hear. And it isn’t “the truth but slightly spun in favor of my side,” it’s “blatant propaganda for my side.” The market for “unbiased news” is two old dudes smoking pipes in a country club in Boston somewhere. Everyone else wants exactly what we’re getting…

        • bintchaos says:

          You should at least pay attention to Foreign Policy. Like Trump’s disastrous Qatar tweets.
          That should be one thing both sides can agree on– Saudi Arabia is not our friend.
          While publicly declaiming sponsoring terror, KSA is working diligently to flip Indonesia into strict wahhabism. Its really a brilliant invasive strategy in cultural transmission– religion as a transmission vector.

  20. albatross11 says:

    This is what I really hope will happen w.r.t. muggle realism sorts of discussions in the next few years. Heritability of intelligence and personality, certainly explaining differences between individuals and maybe explaining some differences between racial or other large identifiable groups, seems pretty solid. So we need people to the left of Charles Murray and Steve Sailer to think through what this means for policy, and to come to some decent conclusions.

    And the moral points she makes in her article seem to me to be correct and really important: Differences in peoples’ abilities, whether from genes or environment or other stuff, are important for figuring out who should go to medical school and who should try to become a plumber instead, but they don’t have any *moral* significance. People with higher IQs and better educations are *NOT* more valuable in moral terms, and I don’t see a lot of obvious reason to think they behave in more moral ways overall.

    Right now, a lot of our society seems set up to take the people at the bottom and grind them in the gears of the system, either to raise money (as with policing for a profit and charging money for jail time and such) or just because nobody really cares what happens to the losers (homeless people sleeping on storm grates). This screws over plenty of people with normal intelligence, but it really clobbers the folks at the bottom of the intelligence and education and social class ladder. I think one part of the explanation for this comes down to the cognitive stratification Murray talked about in _The Bell Curve_ and more recently, in _Coming Apart_. In some other world where we *hadn’t* turned Murray into a pariah and talked about what a wicked book _TBC_ was without bothering to read it, maybe we would have started thinking coherently about how to address this.

    • Matt M says:

      People with higher IQs and better educations are *NOT* more valuable in moral terms, and I don’t see a lot of obvious reason to think they behave in more moral ways overall.

      If a doctor and a plumber are the last two passengers on a crashing airplane and one parachute remains, how do you decide who gets it?

      1. Give it to the doctor, because he is clearly more valuable to society in economic terms (which we will use as a stand in for morality)
      2. Attempt to apply some sort of moral test to see which person is “better” in strictly moral terms? (how much did they give to charity last year? have they ever committed a crime?)
      3. They are completely equal in every way, flip a coin

      Legit curious to hear people’s answers here.

      • Vermillion says:

        I don’t trust myself as a perfect judge of either economic or moral worth so I would go with coin flip.

      • ADifferentAnonymous says:

        1 would have the best immediate consequences and create decent incentives. 2, if implemented perfectly, would create the best incentives for people to be good in the ways they can control. I think the main rational motivation for 3 is that implementations of 1 and 2 can go very wrong.

      • lvlln says:

        I would answer 3, for about the same reason as Vermillion. I’d add that I disagree with the part of 3 that says: “They are completely equal in every way.” Obviously, a doctor and a plumber are not completely equal in every way. But their right to stay alive are. I reject the notion that someone’s right to stay alive has any relationship with how much value they provide to others or anything of the sort (e.g. the fact that a doctor is more likely to increase quality of life or length of life of more people than the plumber has exactly zero impact on who I believe deserves more to stay alive). And that’s mainly because I don’t trust anyone or any group of people to make that call.

        • Matt M says:

          Just to be clear, the obvious reducto ad absurdum of this position is something like, if the two passengers are Hitler and Mother Teresa, do you still flip the coin? Or are you now willing to trust your own judgment?

          • lvlln says:

            Well, substituting someone I actually respect as a moral figure for Mother Teresa – Ayaan Hirsi Ali perhaps? – yes, I still flip a coin. Both Hitler and Hirsi Ali have exactly equal rights to stay alive. I find the notion of someone deciding that their own judgment is suddenly valid or trustworthy just because they judge a case to be extreme to be morally repugnant and obviously abusable. If we go along with such exceptions, then it just incentivizes people to honestly believe that every case is an extreme case, and therefore their own judgments are valid in every case.

            It’s akin to the phenomenon of “free speech is OK, but hate speech is just too extreme” followed by “arguing against against a law that would force you to address everyone by their preferred pronouns is hate speech.”

          • Jiro says:

            I find the notion of someone deciding that their own judgment is suddenly valid or trustworthy just because they judge a case to be extreme to be morally repugnant and obviously abusable.

            I do not. My judgment is bad, but it’s not completely 100% terrible. The error bars on my judgment are not large enough that I’m going to make a mistake when comparing Hitler and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

            If we go along with such exceptions, then it just incentivizes people to honestly believe that every case is an extreme case, and therefore their own judgments are valid in every case.

            I don’t see a way around this. We have to let humans make some judgments. Nobody says “if we allow people to kill each other in self-defense, that incentivizes people to think every killing is in self-defense”. Or “if we allow proportional response, that incentivizes people to think every response is proportional”. Or “if we allow people to not pay tips to restaurants for poor service, that incentivizes people to think that all service is poor”.

          • Matt M says:

            To completely derail this conversation even further…

            What do you find objectionable about Mother Teresa?

          • lvlln says:

            @Jiro

            My judgment is bad, but it’s not completely 100% terrible. The error bars on my judgment are not large enough that I’m going to make a mistake when comparing Hitler and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

            I don’t think any individual is qualified to make an accurate judgment on the size of the error bars of their own judgment.

            I don’t see a way around this. We have to let humans make some judgments. Nobody says “if we allow people to kill each other in self-defense, that incentivizes people to think every killing is in self-defense”. Or “if we allow proportional response, that incentivizes people to think every response is proportional”. Or “if we allow people to not pay tips to restaurants for poor service, that incentivizes people to think that all service is poor”.

            For those specific examples, I think we outsource the judgment call to others; an (theoretically) impartial judge & jury determine if a killing was self-defense. Likewise with proportional response. For tips, we rely on social shaming, though I’m actually very much pro-outlawing tipping, in part due to the failures of the mechanism of social shaming that have been on display in the past few years.

            In general, I don’t think any individual can be trusted on their judgment. I think free speech and democracy are the band-aids that help to alleviate this problem – we need to constantly discuss with others who have completely different perspectives, in order to get to the least-worst judgment possible in any given situation. And there’s still no guarantee that we’re making the right call. It’s just a constant process by which we struggle to get it the least wrong together.

            @Matt M

            What do you find objectionable about Mother Teresa?

            Mainly, I don’t know enough about her to judge if she was particularly good or particularly bad. I’ve heard things about her here and there that paint her in both positive and negative lights, and as such I don’t really respect her as a moral figure, not any more than I would any random person.

          • Deiseach says:

            The error bars on my judgment are not large enough that I’m going to make a mistake when comparing Hitler and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

            But what if this sinking lifeboat situation happens before Hitler is Hitler? All you know then is that you have an Austrian amateur artist and a Somalian-Dutch-American writer in the boat, and you need to judge which of them “deserves” to live.

            The old-fashioned “women and children first” attitude would lead you to pick Ayaan Hirsi Ali simply because she’s a woman, but absent that, how can you choose? And that’s our “doctor and plumber” quandary, not “plainly evil and wicked genocidal dictator versus feminist heroine”.

          • lvlln says:

            @Deiseach

            Matt M was specifically invoking a reductio ad absurdum situation that took the original doctor vs. plumber situation to the extreme, presumably in order to ascertain if I would bite the bullet. Which I did. So I understood Jiro to be talking specifically about that extreme case wrt trusting that his judgment error bars are bounded below some threshold, not the original more general case where it would be more murky.

      • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

        I mean, the example sort of fails here because there are tons of doctors, so even if the doctor is “more valuable”, his marginal contribution is really small. I guess you could replace the doctor with a famous scientist or something.

      • gbdub says:

        If I’m in a position to decide, I’m probably on the plane, so I’m taking the ‘chute myself and getting the hell out of there.

      • albatross11 says:

        Most of life isn’t very much like choosing the last spot in the lifeboat. Nor do I think we can actually come to an agreed-upon ranking of value of humans, since those values are both subjective and multidimensional. (Does it matter than Dr Smith is a bachelor and Plumber Smith is a father of three? Depends who you ask.)

        As a matter of setting policy, I am very much opposed to trying to decide on a ranking of which people are more or less valuable–I don’t believe we are likely to get good policy out of that in almost any situation.

      • rahien.din says:

        3b. They fight.

        In the future, I would do a better job with parachute inventory and preflight checklists. (And technically, clean water and effective sanitation have been more important to humanity’s health and advancement than most of medicine.)

        Also, I would be extremely suspicious of any system/algorithm created by smart people that purports to establish that smart people are definitively more valuable than their countrymen in moral terms.

        • gph says:

          Love this answer. Why get a third person involved to make a decision when you have two direct agents that can settle it through natural law.

      • nimim.k.m. says:

        You know, the good answer is an easy one.

        The morally more righteous one — in particular, if any of the two is more righteous enough for it to count on any measurable scale — will volunteer to give the parachute. And because this act makes them the righteous one, we should not overrule their final decision.

        The survivor will recount the tale, and inspires the other members of the society towards more virtuous behavior in general and in similarly dire situations in particular.

        If neither of them are willing to settle for the noble sacrifice, toss a coin. It would still be remarkable if the one who loses also accepts the result. The tale will affirm the norm of trust in the society.

        • hlynkacg says:

          Beat me to it.

        • Matt M says:

          And because this act makes them the righteous one, we should not overrule their final decision.

          Dang. I was hoping for a King Solomon style “The one who volunteers to die has proven himself morally superior, and thus is given the parachute” ending.

          • random832 says:

            The problem is that the scenario falls apart if there is a third person aboard the plane empowered to give them the parachute (Because who says he gets a parachute?). Only examples that work for the possible behavior of two people – possibly with no-one else watching – can be true results of the scenario.

            I would be wondering if there is any way to rig things so that one person can use the main chute and one can use the backup chute from the same pack. But that scenario can be eliminated by making it more than twice as many people as parachute packs – you don’t get to put the trolley on a track with no-one tied to it.

        • Nornagest says:

          Good answer.

        • rahien.din says:

          The norm-promoting effects are counterbalanced by rewarding selfishness, IE, if you really want to survive in dire situations, your best bet is to manipulate the other person into acting virtuously.

          In which case, we are back to my strategy of 3b. they fight (!). Except that this fight is not overt and physical, but instead is covert and mental/emotional, which favors high-IQ persons.

          Insofar as these norm-promoting and behavior-rewarding effects have these impacts on society (which as you say could be “in general” and not limited to “similarly dire situations”), the conclusion of your strategy is a world in which smart people can survive or win by manipulating others into virtuous self-sacrifice.

          Ultimately that is erosive of widespread virtue, and will tend to segregate morality from intelligence.

          • hlynkacg says:

            I don’t think you understand. Manipulating people into acting virtuously is the freaking point. The idea that morality and intelligence are (or ought to be) intrinsic to one another is a distinctly modern, specifically WEIRD notion.

          • rahien.din says:

            I don’t think you understand. Manipulating people into acting virtuously is the freaking point.

            I do understand. nimim.k.m.’s hope is that this strategy would manipulate most people in society into acting virtuously. I try to show that it won’t work that way.

            A person is more likely to give up the parachute if they believe in the norm and want to perpetuate it. They can come to that state either genuinely, or due to some manipulation by their opponent. It follows that a person is more likely to get the parachute and survive if they manipulate their opponent into perpetuating the virtue-norm.

            This is an exploitable system. I agree that morality and intelligence are not intrinsic to one another. Selfish intelligent people will try to manipulate their opponents out of their parachutes, every time.

            Think of four people, representing combinations of binary values: high(H) vs low(L) IQ, and virtuous(V) vs selfish(S). Imagine the following interactions :

            HV vs LV : 50% chance of survival for either person
            HV vs LS : HV dies
            HV vs HV : 50% chance of survival for either person
            HV vs HS : HV dies
            HS vs LV : LV dies
            HS vs LS : LS dies
            HS vs HS : 50% chance of survival for either person
            LV vs LS : LV dies
            LV vs LV : 50% chance of survival for either person
            LS vs LS : 50% chance of survival for either person

            Selfishness and high IQ definitely increase the chance of survival. Now hopefully there are not enough crashing planes for this system to affect society. But, if this is to constitute a norm, then likely these will be rules that society plays by. Meaning, over the long term, they will have significant effects. Successive iterations show that the overall prevalence of virtue decreases, and P(selfishness|high-IQ) increases.

            So this system/norm would do the opposite of what it purports. It would overall decrease virtue, and it would result in high-IQ people being more selfish.

          • hlynkacg says:

            All you’re saying is that the winning move in a one-off prisoners is always to defect. We know that and that’s precisely why we all agree before-hand to punish defectors. Yes people who are both highly intelligent and selfish are corrosive to society and that’s why “too clever by half” is an insult.

            Assuming an even distribution of H L V and S and assuming that all dilemmas are one-offs you’d be right. But “the system” does not exist in a vacuum and the whole point of having norms is to skew the distribution by ensuring that no dilemmas are one-offs.

          • nimim.k.m. says:

            If one of them is smart enough to think about exploiting the system under the time constraint, it stands to reason that it would be their moral duty to act with magnanimity, because they do realize the wider implications. If they don’t, well. Who said that the justice prevails and the good win, despite that everyone involved knows — we know — what the good and just would be?

            As Nybbler said downthread, “morally righteous behavior is for suckers.”

            This is why virtue is called a virtue, not “business as usual”. Honorable and virtuous behavior is exceptional, though admired when it happens. We still retell the Plato’s tale how Socrates chose die with style instead of running out of Athens like a coward, because most people would not be inclined to do that. The story about a son of the god, half a god himself, thus the most powerful being in the existence, who decided to die painfully so that we could be better off turned out to be amazingly popular.

            However, the wider context are not falling airplanes (that do not usually come with parachutes anyway), but our actions in our everyday lives. Which kind society do you want to believe in? Your responsibility to act to maintain it scale with your capabilities. Looking at state of the world, where the morally unscrupulous win at business and politics, and societies with high trust and low corruption are rare, it looks like an unfruitful task. On the other hand, nobody said that moral right would be easy or that it pays off. On the contrary, the usual culturally shared notion is that it’s hard, and in the end, you are the dead sucker.

            I don’t probably win at morality, either. But I do notice that the platform we are having this discussion is by blog a person whose most famous posts are eloquent ramblings in favor of trust, society, niceness, and other community norms and lamentations against the everyday mundane evil arising from the lack of coordination. Or maybe it’s the one about cactus people.

          • Aapje says:

            @nimim.k.m.

            This is why virtue is called a virtue, not “business as usual”. Honorable and virtuous behavior is exceptional, though admired when it happens.

            I strongly disagree. Honorable and virtuous behavior happens all the time, but because it is a social norm we don’t admire it very strongly as it is required of everyone. What we do is punish people who don’t do it.

            Nobody pats you on the back for not running a red light when it is safe to do so. It is a virtuous act that upholds the Schelling fence, but we don’t treat it as being virtuous, because we don’t people to see it as going beyond what they ought to do. In some other countries, it is normal to run red lights and those people act with less virtue.

            We only strongly admire people who act with honor and virtue beyond the normal standard we demand of people and/or people who act this way in extreme situations where the cost is very high.

          • rahien.din says:

            hlynkacg,

            All you’re saying is that the winning move in a one-off prisoners is always to defect.

            I don’t think this is a prisoner’s dilemma. The whole dilemma of the prisoners is that cooperate/cooperate maximizes payoff, but that they have no good way to get there from the default position of defect/defect, as they are prevented from communicating.

            In contrast, in this system, cooperate/cooperate and defect/defect have identical payoffs. Moreover, the players can communicate. This is like two prisoners in the same cell before questioning, trying to talk each other into taking the fall, when the outcome for mutual cooperation and mutual defection is, identically, a prolonged stalemate.

            Moreover, in this system, we deliberately do not punish defectors. The norm can only be promulgated (and the system can only succeed) to the degree that survivors/winners are believed, when they extol the virtue of their dead/defeated opponent.

            nimim.k.m.,

            Which kind society do you want to believe in? Do you really believe that virtue is for suckers?

            [Appeal to authority/venue/emotion]

            I am criticizing a system that, widely applied, would weaponize virtue in the hands of evil intelligent people. This system will destroy virtue by creating the “virtue is for suckers” game and therefore it is bad.

          • Civilis says:

            Ultimately, you can’t directly determine how virtuous someone is, you have to have some proxy marker you can use instead, like the amount of time or money given to charity.

            In a system where status is tied to virtue, the correct move for someone that wants high status is to use the most commonly used markers for virtue. We even have a phrase for this: “virtue signalling” (the action or practice of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one’s good character or the moral correctness of one’s position on a particular issue).

            I am criticizing a system that, widely applied, would weaponize virtue in the hands of evil intelligent people. This system will destroy virtue by creating the “virtue is for suckers” game and therefore it is bad.

            People with the combination of intelligence, common sense, drive, and social skills to determine and achieve the set of markers that best signals status will always be of high status in society. A system where virtue is accorded status is better than one that relies on something like power for status, because often the markers for virtue are something you want almost as much as virtue itself. It’s still good to have intelligent evil people donating money to charitable causes to look good. You still run into problems once people stop auditing how virtuous those ‘charitable causes’ are.

          • hlynkacg says:

            You’re wrong about cooperate/cooperate and defect/defect having identical payoffs. The cooperate/cooperate scenario is what nimim.k.m. described above. The survivor will recount the tale, and inspire the other members of society towards more virtuous behavior. This does not happen in the defect/defect scenario.

            Furthermore, where are you getting the idea that we deliberately do not punish defectors? Punishing defectors is what makes a social norm a norm. I would have thought this was obvious but it seems that it needs to be explicitly stated; Good != Nice.

          • Civilis says:

            You’re wrong about cooperate/cooperate and defect/defect having identical payoffs. The cooperate/cooperate scenario is what nimim.k.m. described above. The survivor will recount the tale, and inspire the other members of society towards more virtuous behavior. This does not happen in the defect/defect scenario.

            Doesn’t the survivor in a defect/defect case have an incentive to claim that the case was actually cooperate/cooperate? If I’m a habitual defector, I want as many people to be cooperators as possible.

            If I’m selfish and able to pass as virtuous, I still want as many people around me to be virtuous as possible, so long as I can still pass as virtuous (given it’s not a binary, as long as I can still have enough markers to give me the status advantage I seek).

          • rahien.din says:

            hlynkacg,

            The cooperate/cooperate scenario is what nimim.k.m. described above. The survivor will recount the tale, and inspire the other members of society towards more virtuous behavior. This does not happen in the defect/defect scenario.

            Civilis beat me to it.

            where are you getting the idea that we deliberately do not punish defectors?

            Honestly, I wondered why you hadn’t gotten this idea, until I realized there are multiple definitions of “defector.”

            The first is the overt parachute-snatcher who refuses even to display virtue. Sure, those people get punished in accordance with how norms are usually policed. (As Civilis points out, I don’t think those people event exist.)

            The second is the evil winner, who manipulates their victim into ceding the parachute.

            In a tactical sense, those people are going to be really hard to identify. They will look exactly like non-evil winners. In order to even devise a norm-policing strategy, we would have to start by assuming that a meaningful proportion of winners are evil, and that in and of itself weakens the norm.

            In a strategic sense, even if evil winners are punished for their defections, this has the effect of weakening the norm. People will see that a significant proportion of winners are evil, and that will make them more likely to believe that their future opponents are evil. Widespread belief in the norm will be eroded if people think that many do not follow it and in fact use the norm only to manipulate.

            So, sure, we would punish those who fail to display virtue, if anyone is so stupid. But if we would adhere to this strategy, it is counterproductive to punish the evil winners.


            ETA : forgot the link to Civilis’ post

          • bintchaos says:

            Great discussion thread, gratitude.
            Have any SSC commenters read Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid?
            Complexity science is redefining evo theory of cooperation, fitness selection, altruism etc. with the addition of Cooperation Competition Paradigm.

          • nimim.k.m. says:

            @Aapje

            Thank you for making that comment, I fell a bit optimistic about humanity again.

            @others, regarding the “evil intelligent people” defecting:

            I don’t think one could design a foolproof system where evil, sufficiently intelligent (so that they can hide their tracks) people do not win. I tend to believe that there’s is no other option than to do your best to propagate the message that being evil is dishonorable and you should feel bad about it even if you nobody catches you (especially when it comes to raising kids and teaching them to act ethically when they are adults). Punish the defectors that are caught. And on the flip side of the coin, admire the virtuous publicly.

            Apropos, I’d like to make a recommendation to everyone interested in this discussion, that is, to see Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon if you ever have an opportunity.

        • The Nybbler says:

          The survivor will recount the tale, and inspires the other members of the society towards more virtuous behavior in general and in similarly dire situations in particular.

          What, wait? Seems to me that

          1) If the survivor felt shame at this turn of events, the survivor probably would not recount the story accurately.

          2) If the survivor did not feel shame, the lesson given would be “righteousness is for dead suckers”.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Rather you are alive because the people around you were righteousness. A smart individual will thus seek righteous company/encourage righteousness in those around them.

            A less smart individual will conclude “righteousness is for dead suckers” but be smart enough to keep their damn mouth shut.

            A truly stupid individual will say as much, and be shocked, shocked when the so-called righteous decide to throw them overboard.

          • Randy M says:

            What if the survivor felt gratitude or admiration? “I was not strong enough to give the parachute to Joe Plumber; rather he insisted I take it. I hope someday to get a chance to pay forward his kindness.”
            (I agree with “let them work it out among themselves” in terms of the best way to fight the hypothetical, but that seems to be dodging the question.)

          • The Nybbler says:

            Rather you are alive because the people around you were righteousness. A smart individual will thus seek righteous company/encourage righteousness in those around them.

            The smart individual will be encouraged to encourage this sort of self-sacrificing righteousness in those around him, but selfish “villainy” in those he cares about most. This is a great racket providing the “righteous” don’t catch on, but I don’t think I’d call it righteous.

          • hlynkacg says:

            This is a great racket providing the “righteous” don’t catch on,

            That’s a big proviso.

        • Randy M says:

          Can someone convince me that the most moral act, from the point of view of someone trapped in the plane, is to offer the parachute to the other man? I was initially quite sympathetic to this answer, but thinking about it more, I wonder.
          It is certainly altruistic, but it ignores the fact that I have duties on the ground, and handing over the parachute, no strings attached, seems to ignore these (you can determine the intent on that pun yourself).
          I wouldn’t consider this analogous to a situation where a soldier jumps on a grenade to save the lives of his friends–trading his one life for several others. Nor for a situation where I risk my life by charging a gunman–taking a greater risk for death for another’s sake.
          I’m also not endorsing “fight it out” or “grab it a and run.” And I guess if the hypothetical is designed to require a slit second decision, shoving it at the other guy is optimal. But if we have a moment or two to have a conversation, I’m going to make my case before offering it freely, and I think I would take it if offered unless the other guy has a very compelling case.

          • nimim.k.m. says:

            I was answering a question “is any of them morally better enough to deserve the parachute more than the other one”. In most cases, that’s impossible to judge. But in this hypothetical, either of them can make the decision to be a better person, at least in one regard, in a way that it counts.

            I’m also outright rejecting the banal utilitarian option of evaluating which one of the two would provide more material value to the society. Also, it is not an actionable policy, because in the hypothetical, you are not there to decide who gets the parachute: the passengers have to resolve it amongst themselves with only the information they themselves bring to the table.

            And if they both try to argue their case before decision, can they trust each other to tell the truth about their conditions? (Any time spent also opens to door for manipulation by an “evil winner”, and is possibly fatal to both depending on how long time they have in this scenario.)

            Ideally, you would want to live in the world where people are willing to offer the parachute willingly and without prompt, because it nicely solves these kind of problematic ethical situations, where there isn’t really an option that is good and fair and just to everyone concerned. That’s why offered the “throw a coin and accept a result” as an another option.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          Better answer: punch out the other guy, steal the parachute, then tell everyone how wonderful and righteous he was for gifting it to you.

      • Wrong Species says:

        If I was God, I would probably choose 1. But realistically, I would probably choose 3. It’s hard to look someone in the eye and tell them that they have to die because their marginal contribution to society doesn’t quite cut it.

        • Matt M says:

          It’s easier to look them in the eye and say they have to die because a freaking coin landed on the side with Abe Lincoln on it?

          • Wrong Species says:

            Yes, actually. Randomness is seen as more fair than trying to objectively weigh people’s varying qualities. By definition, it doesn’t involve favoritism. Call it a quirk of human psychology but people prefer no bias to possible bias, even if the latter could potentially have better consequences.

          • Matt M says:

            . Randomness is seen as more fair than trying to objectively weigh people’s varying qualities.

            Seen as, yes. Actually is, no.

            At some point don’t we have to step up and say “Random chance is stupid, yes, I may make the wrong decision and it sucks that I’m in this situation, but I trust my own judgment better than the flip of a freaking coin?”

          • Wrong Species says:

            How do you go about weighing people’s good vs bad qualities in any kind of objective manner? Maybe the doctor is a terrible person while the janitor is a saint. You can’t judge someone’s worth just by looking at their occupation. If it was completely lopsided to one person being better in almost every conceivable manner, I would probably go ahead and choose but when you have so little knowledge of them or one isn’t clearly superior to the other, you might as well just flip a coin. How do you know you can trust yourself to make the right decision? It’s not like you’ve been in this situation before. Maybe there is a 60% chance you make the right decision in which case you should do so. But maybe it’s a 40% chance, in which case you shouldn’t. Faced with uncertainty, a 50% chance is not a bad compromise.

          • How do you go about weighing people’s good vs bad qualities in any kind of objective manner?

            Just round of moral standing to instrumental worth…

      • baconbacon says:

        Let the two of them decide between them since it is their lives at stake.

      • John Schilling says:

        (Does it matter than Dr Smith is a bachelor and Plumber Smith is a father of three? Depends who you ask.)

        Dr. Smith? The Dr. Smith?

        Him, we throw out of the plane without a parachute, even if there are plenty of parachutes. And if there’s any danger of the plane crashing, it’s because you didn’t throw out Dr. Smith soon enough.

      • The Nybbler says:

        To heck with both of them, I’m taking the parachute myself.

      • Well... says:

        4. Who raised better kids.

      • 1soru1 says:

        My preferred solution is not to crash the airplane.

        This is not just snark, the only plausible situation that leads to a dilemma like that is one deliberately engineered to create it. A plane that crashes with one parachute and time to discuss who should get it is being remote controlled by a pulp villain.

        The analogy to contemporary economics is obvious, right?

      • hoghoghoghoghog says:

        Great question! I would do (1) if no one will ever hear about it, otherwise (3). (1) leads to the fall of civilization if people come to expect it, but in a one-off it is better.

        (Analagously, if you are the US president and the USSR has just sent enough nukes to irradiate the entire first world, the correct response is to not retaliate. But 5 minutes earlier, when the USSR was threatening to irradiate the first world, the correct response is to publicly do whatever you can to commit future you to retaliation)

      • J Mann says:

        If it’s an infrequent event, flip a coin in the interests of equality. Probably if it’s a frequent event too.

        If I were a better economist, I might have the doctor pay for the parachute. Simplest way would be to pay before the flight for the parachute in the event of a crash, so that parachute-wanters could subsidize lower prices for parachute-not-wanters. Presumably, if a lot of people wanted to pay the cost of having an extra parachute on the plane, the airlines would start including more. (I might regulate maximum cost if I thought that the airlines were able to generate artificial scarcity).

      • Cadie says:

        4. Without other significant information or a volunteer, I’d give the parachute to the doctor because they’re more likely to survive. They almost certainly know more about the human body and how to keep one alive than the plumber. This matters if they land somewhere where they aren’t found very quickly. Either one or both might already have injuries from whatever is making the plane crash – even mild-seeming head injuries can turn into something nasty. And landing even with a parachute can cause injury. The doctor can better anticipate this and deal with it, catching warning signs of trouble faster and doing what they can with what they have to keep the damage to a minimum.

        My choice, though not the reasoning, would change if there was a good reason to think the plumber had a better shot at surviving mild to moderate injuries and waiting for / finding help. Such as s/he is 30 and in robust shape vs. a very frail 75-year-old doctor. We really want to avoid the scenario of both of them dying, and since it’s highly unlikely the one left behind will survive the crash, it makes sense to give the parachute to the one who would fare better after landing.

    • Randy M says:

      People with higher IQs and better educations are *NOT* more valuable in moral terms

      I think this is actually the position that Murray and Sailer hold.

      I don’t see a lot of obvious reason to think they behave in more moral ways overall.

      Theoretically no, but higher IQ does seem linked to conscientiousness and time preference. I don’t think it does to any extent which would enable prejudging guilt on the basis of race or class, of course.

      maybe we would have started thinking coherently about how to address this.

      This in fact is the theme of Sailer’s recent articles although he doesn’t really get around to any specific policy proscriptions.

      • Ha Sailer ever come out with a clear manifesto? he seems vaguely right-wing, but vaguely.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          Didn’t he come out with a clearly expressed view of the need for white political solidarity and supremacy? It’s not exactly a manifesto of what to do with that power, but it is a statement of principles of a sort.

      • Well... says:

        I haven’t read Sailer in a few years (before then I read him every day) but toward the end of when I was reading him my impression was that he seemed to resist being clear about his honest views on anything. It was a lot of winking and gesturing and phrasing things for plausible deniability. I got a sinister flavor from it, which I admit was largely contributed to by his commenters.

        • BBA says:

          Everything by Sailer I’ve ever read (including his comments here) gives me a camel’s-nose-under-the-tent vibe. He has a real knack for sounding nice and reasonable and then halfway through I realize what he’s arguing for and it creeps me out that I agreed with the beginning.

          • Brad says:

            There was an exchange here a few weeks back where he stridently attacked a poster that had made anodyne statement worrying that his visa wouldn’t be renewed. It was pretty terrible.

          • bintchaos says:

            I like the camel analogy.
            But I compare to Sailer to a vampyre politely angling for an invitation into your house.
            (vampyres can’t come in unless they are invited)
            It creeps me out too to interact with him because he has an agenda, and if you read any of his old stuff, its pretty obvious.
            Once the Vampyre gets in the House, he invites other vampyres in, and soon pretty much everyone in the House becomes a vampyre, and you wind up having to burn the House down to get rid of them.
            Its like Dr. Alexander’s witch analogy in the Eternal Struggle post.
            Moral of this story?
            Reject vampyrism in all its forms.

          • Mark says:

            Hmmm… but vampirism spreads.

            The problem with race talk isn’t that it might be convincing, it’s that it makes you look bad (witches are the better analogy).

        • albatross11 says:

          BBA:

          What do you think Sailer’s agenda is? I feel like I have a relatively clear idea from reading his blog, and while I often disagree with him, it doesn’t seem obviously nightmarish or sinister to me.

    • bintchaos says:

      Much as we need people in the Red Tribe to stop pandering to their base on climate science, evolution, and the non-competitivity of conservative ideology in 21st century America (except in Jesusland).
      I’d ask for a pony too but I already had several.
      Didn’t help.

      • Deiseach says:

        If you want me to take your opinions seriously, please don’t make sarcastic comments about “Jesusland”. Find some secular political jibe nickname to use, please.

        For someone who claims to have been raised Catholic and who demonstrated in a previous comment thread that they had the fine details of Islamic theology at their fingers’ ends, you don’t show much sensitivity to those of us who may actually take our Christianity as seriously and don’t like how it’s been turned into a political applause light (both by the “yay, religion!” and “boo, religion!” sides) in the USA.

        (This has been the semi-occasional dose of traditional Catholic harrumphing. We now return you to your regular schedule of programming).

        • bintchaos says:

          I’m sincerely sorry.
          Thank you for ur estimable crits– it means you have hope for me ( I think).
          Jesusland is just shorthand for redstate, fly-over country, heartland, non-coastal non-urban America. What would you prefer I use?
          Remember I’m at least 50% scifi… Jesusland comes from Richard Morgan’s Thirteen, aka Black Man in the UK– i didn’t mean it as a slur, but as a descriptive.
          Empathy is really hard (for aspies especially, but I’m not making excuses).
          I’m trying to improve.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            “Red states” isn’t quite descriptive because there are a lot of states that are red everywhere except for the dense urban population centers. In SSC parlance, “Red Tribe” is fine and everyone knows what you mean. In the wider world, “the Republican base” or just “conservatives” is likely understood.

          • bintchaos says:

            thanx, thats super-helpful.
            🙂

          • Matt M says:

            “Red states” isn’t quite descriptive because there are a lot of states that are red everywhere except for the dense urban population centers.

            Every state is red everywhere except the densely populated urban centers.

          • Deiseach says:

            Even “fly-over country” is better; the Jesusland versus United States of Canada meme after the 2004 election irked me because of the smuggery inherent in the “naturally the ignorant hicks voted for Chimpy McHitler” view it encouraged; ah, if only the educated and nice liberals could break away from the knuckle-draggers and form their own more perfect union with the lovely like-minded people in the Great White North! How happy and blissful that land would be!

            Nope, you’re all one nation, they’re your fellow-citizens, many of them are only cursorily religious in a cultural way, quite a few aren’t even religious at all, and you have to hang together or all hang separately; if you can’t even find a way to live with those beside you, it says that all your great notions about living harmoniously with those of other cultures, creeds and nations is bushwah.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @Matt M

            Good point.

          • bintchaos says:

            oh my goodness I didnt mean to get everyone so worked up.
            Jesusland is a real place in my scifi universe– its a partition of America in a Richard Morgan book.
            Its just a permanent part of my skull furniture that apparently doesnt map well to red tribe/blue tribe convos.
            Sorry.

          • Randy M says:

            oh my goodness I didnt mean to get everyone so worked up.

            This is a kind of rude conversational tic, where you exaggerate other people’s response to play the martyr.
            You don’t have that many people commenting in this thread, and only Deiseach made a comment that even approached worked up, and it could also be characterized as politely informative. Google “Jesusland” and count how many pages it is until you find one referencing the book Black Man rather than the unflattering map or the memoir–huh?
            Interestingly, it is five pages, and then one finds a blog by, um, you. That was random. It does seem like you knew back in March that the phrase is meant to demean the referent as “Ignorant, racist America”

          • bintchaos says:

            sigh
            I am aspergers positive.
            I honestly don’t get why things I say are offensive so I appreciate the explanation.
            Morgan’s Jesusland is more real to me than the internet meme– its eems like a perfectly useful meme complex.
            I just used it as a literary device for a blog post. Theres a big wall around Morgan’s Jesusland, not to keep people out, but to keep people in. Abortion is illegal– birth control is illegal– all schools are private and for profit. Prisons are for profit…its sort of the natural projection of conservative hopes and liberal fears.

          • Civilis says:

            I just used it as a literary device for a blog post. Theres a big wall around Morgan’s Jesusland, not to keep people out, but to keep people in. Abortion is illegal– birth control is illegal– all schools are private and for profit. Prisons are for profit…its sort of the natural projection of conservative hopes and liberal fears.

            If you’re trying to learn about conservatives, re-read that again, and look for something that really, really doesn’t fit any of the multitude of American positions that get lumped into conservative.

            Is there any reason what-so-ever to consider “a wall to keep people in” something conservatives would ever hope for?

          • 1soru1 says:

            > Is there any reason what-so-ever to consider “a wall to keep people in” something conservatives would ever hope for?

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850

            Historically, this is so much something hoped for, as accepted as a necessity. The precondition is the existence of a necessary segment of the population who would be radically better served by a neighboring state that it is impossible to conquer. Slaves in the South, the middle class in East Germany, the educated in Morgan’s JesusLand, fertile females in the Handmaid’s Tale, and so on.

            But then isn’t that reluctant acceptance true of a wall to keep people out too? Who thinks a wall is an end in itself, as opposed to something unfortunately necessary?

            Now you may say ‘no true conservative’. But if conservatism as you use the word doesn’t describe someone who is happy with the way things are in the face of foreign countries with economic advantages, then you may need to pick a less confusing name for whatever you are talking about.

          • Jiro says:

            But if conservatism as you use the word doesn’t describe someone who is happy with the way things are in the face of foreign countries with economic advantages, then you may need to pick a less confusing name for whatever you are talking about.

            That is roughly like saying “Those Democrats believe in a republic! So they should really be called Republicans!”

          • Civilis says:

            Historically, this is so much something hoped for, as accepted as a necessity. The precondition is the existence of a necessary segment of the population who would be radically better served by a neighboring state that it is impossible to conquer. Slaves in the South, the middle class in East Germany, the educated in Morgan’s JesusLand, fertile females in the Handmaid’s Tale, and so on.

            That doesn’t map onto any conservative I’ve read, or if you consider the pre-Civil War slaveholders somehow conservative, any conservative since 1900. It would be much easier for me to say that
            because of the behavior of the Warsaw pact and Cuba that keeping people in is something liberals hope for and conservatives fear. During the Vietnam war, the conservative chant was ‘America: love it or leave it’, and we’ve been rather hopeful to the point of taking donations to help those celebrities that promise to leave for Canada next time the Republicans win the election.

            Having someone that doesn’t want to be here stuck here is a drain on resources. You can’t expect them to contribute to society and you have to spend effort to keep them in line. There’s a reason conservatives oppose slavery, be it the chattel type or the socialist type.

          • 1soru1 says:

            > That is roughly like saying “Those Democrats believe in a republic! So they should really be called Republicans!”

            Except, like, the other way round. The post I was replying to was objecting to the use of the word ‘conservative’ in a science fiction novel to describe a group that had beliefs that were presented as an adaptation of contemporary US conservative morality to a near future scenario.

            You either find that plausible or you don’t, you can’t play a ‘gotcha’ with the dictionary.

          • J Mann says:

            Bintchaos, what did you think about the Cold Commands trilogy? I enjoyed it quite a bit – Morgan can be challenging, but is often rewarding.

          • bintchaos says:

            Loved it and love everything Morgan has ever written, especially the Quellquist Falconer/Takeshi Kovacs stuff.
            Altho Cold Command is more grimdark wuxia than political…
            I’m an insatiable consumer of hard scifi, starting from gradeschool, when I thought Dune and Ringworld were the greatest books ever written.
            Morgan was kindof the prophet of the genre of political scifi–I love KSR, the Mars series and Aurora are the best.
            And of course my avi– from Cixin Liu the 3body Problem– its really mathy.

        • Protagoras says:

          Hmmm. You know, you never show the slightest bit of respect for people to whom sex is something that is meaningful and important in their lives. I realize that it doesn’t seem to matter to you, and that from the perspective of someone for whom that’s the case, it would surely all seem very silly, and of course sometimes harmful. Which is kind of like how your religion looks to outsiders. I thus find it hard to have much sympathy for your complaints here.

          • Deiseach says:

            You know, you never show the slightest bit of respect for people to whom sex is something that is meaningful and important in their lives.

            Oh sweetie pie, was I mean and horrible and made you feel all frowny-faced? Let me make it up to you by kissing you all over your darling little face! Don’t I respect your sex-positive lifestyle? How very naughty of me! I probably need a good spanking, right? 😉

            Kiss kiss kiss, and go forth and be happily liberated!

          • CatCube says:

            @Deiseach

            OK, c’mon. I agree that almost anything under the “sex-positive” label is utter nonsense, but this is uncalled for.

          • John Schilling says:

            Agreed on both counts. If the saccharine silliness that is most of sex-positivity deserves an occasional snarky parody, that probably shouldn’t be directed at real people who are posting in good faith.

          • Protagoras says:

            I thought it was very kind of Deiseach to immediately provide an example of the sort of thing I was talking about. Thanks!

          • Deiseach says:

            Protagoras, we could get into mutual name-calling. I was gearing up for some snarky comments, but instead I’ll leave it at this; your deity is Venus Genetrix and mine isn’t. I am not happy with Aphrodite for her punishment of Hippolytus, but that is a separate quarrel between those who follow the rules of nature’s law and the due to society, and those of us who would prefer to follow Artemis and Athena and not pay the debt to nature 🙂

            Well, let me offer you some lines of poetry to honour the goddesses and spirits of love!

            We shift and bedeck and bedrape us,
            Thou art noble and nude and antique;
            Libitina thy mother, Priapus
            Thy father, a Tuscan and Greek.

      • Well... says:

        Aside from the obvious, one problem with the “Jesusland” epithet is that the specified area begins about an hour (or less) outside basically any urban center. It isn’t some isolated remote region in the Southeast.

        [Edit to add: just saw Matt M made this point too. I leave mine here to underline its importance.]

        • bintchaos says:

          The thing about political scifi is we can test-drive the future in multiple scenarios.
          In Morgan’s Jesusland, the interior of the US has seceded from Canada and the coastal regions…the Rim, aka the Union. Jesusland is actually the Confederated Republic. It certainly seems plausible that this could happen in view of the extreme polarization sundering the US where contractors pulling down confederate generals’ statues are receiving death threats. Morgan was where I first heard of Jesusland, and he does acknowledge its inspired by the internet meme, much like Herbert’s Dune was inspired by Islam, arabic and resource theft in the Middle East– he says the spice is a metaphor for oil.
          The Handmaids Tale is certainly another vision of a dystopic future…and I’m watching it with friends every wednesday (one ep left). One thing that is really resonant to us (liberal high educational attainment academic types) is the resonance between the Berkeley riots and Offred’s flashbacks to her university days and the rise of Gilead. We talk about the hatred and anger visible on the faces of Identity Europa and the Proud Boys, and their fury at being excluded from Berkeley university culture and society.
          So it is utterly believable to me that a wall built to keep people out might turn into a wall keeping people in.

          • Well... says:

            It certainly seems plausible that this could happen

            Only if you lack an understanding of your geographical situation. America isn’t blue in thick bands along the coasts and red in the interior. It’s red everywhere with tiny dots of blue here and there, mostly along the coasts. Consider this county-level election map and remember it’s actually not even that granular; if you broke it down further into households, the blue clusters would look even smaller, and many large peninsulas of blue would become tiny islands–even in Southern California and New England.

          • Deiseach says:

            Jesusland is actually the Confederated Republic

            Really?

            Why didn’t he go the whole hog and call it the “Dictatorship of Evil Slave-Holding Misogynist Witch-Burning Xenophobic Homophobes Who Probably Don’t Even Sort Out Their Recycling From The Rest Of Their Garbage”, while he was at it? Just to drive the point home, you know.

            This review doesn’t entice me to read it, and while in 2007 you might have got away with “alpha male really manly man stud who is, um, black and has the ancestral genes for violence and conquest and is sexually superior so he entices away the chick from her white partner”, you certainly couldn’t get away with that today 🙂

          • bintchaos says:

            But this is the future. At the secession event those blue islands just got captured by the seceding states. The Confederated Republic needs some percentage of doctors and engineers etc– those people just got fenced in.
            This is very interesting — do conservatives worship the past and liberals worship the future? Is that why conservative scifi is so (Rabid Puppies) horrible?

          • littskad says:

            There’s a precinct-level map of the 2016 election available here.

          • bintchaos says:

            well…here is a map of the probable future.
            http://election.scholastic.com/vote/
            remember half these kids will be eligible voters in 2020.

          • Nornagest says:

            If the new voters of 2020 vote more like they did as students in 2016 than like their equivalents in 2016 did, I will buy a hat and eat it on live webcam.

            People vote differently in mock elections where nothing is at stake. Turnout is different; protest votes are more attractive. And people’s opinions really do change as they get older. Concretely, a similar mock vote was held at my high school in the late ’90s and the Greens came close to winning. Guess how well the Greens did among that cohort a few years later?

          • bintchaos says:

            well…another ban word is {Our Current President} repellent thesis.
            Nate Silver hypothesizes that there is a bayesian probability that RW european parties are more likely to lose since Trump was elected.
            UK2017 is the seventh such election in Europe where nationalist parties have lost seats.
            Labour in UK was definitely a youth surge.

          • Nornagest says:

            Labour in UK was definitely a youth surge.

            If that’s substantiable, which I doubt, it still doesn’t mean youth can reliably win elections for the Left in the future.

            Younger voters tend to be more leftist, it’s true*. But reliably getting them to vote is an unsolved problem. There have been youth get-out-the-vote campaigns in literally every election I remember; one in ten, at best, can be said to succeed. Most are cringeworthy at best to Adult Me, so they’re probably Kryptonite to actual 18-24-year-olds.

            * Though this seems to be linked to youth and not to the cohort as such. Eventually they get old and conservative like their parents did, which is why the now-demographically-dominant hippie generation isn’t winning every election for the Democrats.

          • bintchaos says:

            But that isnt the problem going forward– its the correlation of educational attainment and liberal voting patterns.
            Not liberal voting patterns and youth.

          • Nornagest says:

            Okay, that one’s not obviously wrong. Still, I’m very very skeptical of demography-is-destiny type arguments — remember when evangelicals and Mormons were supposed to deliver a permanent majority to the Republicans? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

            The fact that educational attainment has lately correlated with liberal votes doesn’t mean that’ll continue at equal strength as higher education gets more ubiquitous (if it does). Higher education has to draw in more and different people if it wants to continue growing, and that changes the game.

          • bintchaos says:

            No I dont remember that.
            The cold hard facts are that if you want you want a good job in the 21st century you are going to need education.
            Education changes some Red Tribe offspring to blue when they go to college. See Dr. Alexander Eternal Struggle for a really poignant anecdote.

          • Nornagest says:

            No I dont remember that.

            It was conventional wisdom around 2004. Smug thinkpieces from the right, hand-wringing thinkpieces from the left, everything you’d expect. Of course, then some of the chrome wore off Bush’s foreign policy, and pretty soon Obama came along.

            Fast-forward four or five years and then it was rising black and Latino populations that were going to deliver a permanent majority to the Democrats. Same reaction, just reversed. Then they started losing elections.

            Bottom line, I trust our political leaders to fuck up more than I trust any particular demographic group to win (or lose) elections for me.

          • bintchaos says:

            Oh, that will happen eventually.
            I think the demographic death cross is pegged for ~2040.
            Educational attainment and the He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named repellent thesis are happening right now.
            Silver
            McCormack
            The internet is an accelerant for social change.
            I get why conservative elites would want to conceal this from their base.
            Doesnt every parent want a college education for their offspring?

          • albatross11 says:

            bintchaos:

            You mean like the books of Niven and Pournelle? Or SM Stirling’s work? Or Heinlein?

            It’s not 100% clear how to define conservative SF, but however you define it, there are clearly some right-of-center writers who have written very well-regarded books. And there are books/movies/TV shows with profoundly conservative themes. Though, really, US political discourse covers like 0.001% of imaginable political ideas, so any decent SF is probably not going to be clearly liberal or conservative in the same sense as modern politics. Is _A Deepness in the Sky_ conservative or liberal? How about Firefly? Or _Protector_? Hell, how about the original Star Trek?

          • bintchaos says:

            I would say Verner Vinge was definitely conservative scifi–probably the most recent definitive good conservative scifi– but not Firefly or Buffy, or Dollhouse for that matter– do you follow Joss Wheedon at all?
            Or Gibson or Stephenson, inspite of Stephenson understanding conservatism, history, etc– Baroque Saga and Cryptonomicon, Seveneves is progessive, political scifi– and the orbital mechanics are awesome– i favor hard scifi with lots of maths, KSR is both pretty mathy and liberal progressive.
            I think the divergence is more recent– maybe due to polarization?
            I think I noticed some scifi began to sound very preachy– Charlie Stross Singularity Sky maybe? And soon after that the Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies erupted. Its the preachiness that ruins conservative scifi– trying to impose your world view on others. Like Dr. Alexander says in the Eternal Struggle post, then angry conservatives that cant win acceptance in the scifi community go off and form their own witch coven of bad scifi writers.
            I think Pournelle, Heinlein, Anderson etc preceed the Great Divergence, the Great Sorting. Its the same problem with contemporary conservative film– the preachiness. Ruinous.

          • This is very interesting — do conservatives worship the past and liberals worship the future? Is that why conservative scifi is so (Rabid Puppies) horrible?

            I don’t know what you define as conservative, but if it covers people who would have been likely to vote for Barry Goldwater in 1964, I expect that includes at least Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson and Jerry Pournelle. Would you describe their work as horrible?

          • albatross11 says:

            You mean the very conservative show Firefly, where the main driving organization is the intense bond of loyalty between two combat vets? Where the plucky heroes are evading the oppressive and nasty government that was imposed after they lost the civil war, er, I mean the war with the core worlds? Where everyone carries a gun? Where the biggest existing problem was caused by a great social improvement experiment by the government that went wrong?

            Or maybe you mean the liberal show Firefly where everyone they meet is on the business end of some kind of nasty economic exploitation from rich companies and individuals, where a major positive character is a prostitute, and where the plucky heroes are on the run from militarists trying to turn one of them into a superweapon?

            Trying to hammer any good fiction about the far future into current-day US political tribes is kind of silly.

          • bintchaos says:

            I think we watched 2 different Firefly’s– its a ship-family show like the Expanse (another beloved show) — Mal and Zoe were insurgents lol, not Alliance soljahs. And then they became space cowboy/pirates operating on the fringes of Alliance territory.
            I think conservatives really dont understand how non-competitive classic conservative ideology is in the 21st century. Who wants to go to a NCLB muggle-realist school in Betsy Vos education world when you could go to a Hogwarts-style worldclass university?

          • bintchaos says:

            I mean this version of Firefly/Serenity i guess.

            “People don’t like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think. Don’t run, don’t walk. We’re in their homes and in their heads and we haven’t the right. We’re meddlesome.”
            ― River Tam – Serenity

            I think Wheedon’s intent is pretty clear here.
            Much like Cameron’s in Avatar.

          • CatCube says:

            @bintchaos

            I think part of the Rabid Puppies was that the “mainstream” Hugo nominees was just as horrible to people who aren’t left-wingers; that is, what counts as “regular” SF is preachy, terrible nonsense to people who don’t agree with it, same as many of the RP nominees.

          • bintchaos says:

            Well then we are back to the Eternal Struggle arent we?
            I think you are trying to blame the scifi otaku community for preferring exciting empathetic underdog characters that are rebelling against established order and injustice…pretty hard to portray conservative themes as rebellion.
            Its about competitiveness, not some liberal plot to keep conservative authors out of the winners circle.
            I fell asleep while reading Singularity Sky when Charlie brought out the cross symbolism and the time travel stuff was just irritating…
            That almost never happens.
            To me, the hard science is really critical for my enjoyment.
            Like George R.R. Martin said after the Sad Puppies/No Award dust-up…good science fiction rewards the author with book sales.
            Its its own reward.

          • Sandy says:

            UK2017 is the seventh such election in Europe where nationalist parties have lost seats.

            The Tories are hardly a nationalist party anymore than the GOPe is; the only really nationalist party (besides Sinn Fein, but they’re a different story) that was in the race was UKIP, and it was a bygone conclusion that they were going to lose seats given that the sole purpose for which they were created had been fulfilled.

            I suppose you could call the SNP a nationalist party, but they lost seats to the party negotiating Brexit. Alex Salmond lost his seat to a Tory!

            I am curious as to which “nationalist parties” in Europe you’re thinking of; Geert Wilders’ party gained five seats in the recent Dutch general election, and I don’t think the French legislative elections have been held yet.

          • bintchaos says:

            Just quoting Nate Silver and the Economist
            https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/873031105351262209

          • Sandy says:

            You quoted Nate Silver without bothering to find out what he’s talking about? The UK’s May council elections were an absolute bloodbath for Labour and the British left, but you wouldn’t have guessed it going off just the June results. I’m not sure how continent-wide generalizations can be made off these things.

            The FPO in Austria lost a presidential election after Trump won in November, but their share of the national vote from the previous election rose by 31%. What is the moral to be taken from that story? I suspect local issues have more to play in this sort of thing; Silver, like most American pundits, falls prey to the idea that everything in the world revolves around America.

          • bintchaos says:

            ? I follow Nate Silver– this is just his latest post on this…during and after the UK election.
            previously, after the Netherlands and French elections he hypothesized that the Trump effect harms the chances of RW nationalist parties in europe –even though they might gain a few points, they still couldnt win– you guys are baysesians here, right? Silver’s hypoth is Trump effect imposed an apriori penalty on RW parties.
            He hasnt said anything about Australia that i read so I wouldn’t know.
            You can go back in his TL and see when he proprosed this– he said the last six EUROPEAN elections had resulted in losses before the UK election. He has been talking about this for a while.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @bintchaos:
            Please stop replying in whatever manner is allowing you to put your comments out of time order in the lowest sub-thread.

            I understand it likely makes you feel better about actually replying to the person you intend, but actually it just makes the sub-thread confusing and is considered rude here at SSC.
            Never mind, already answered.

          • Sandy says:

            pretty hard to portray conservative themes as rebellion.

            I dunno, Suzanne Collins seems to have managed it, being that The Hunger Games is about a reactionary traditional society rebelling against a cosmopolitan post-scarcity empire.

          • bintchaos says:

            lol– and here I thought the Hunger Games was a retell of the periodic Athenean youth sacrifice in the Labyrinth of Crete.
            sillie me.
            “I volunteer myself as tribute” to be sacrificed as the most leftist probationary member of the SSC commentariat.

          • Sandy says:

            previously, after the Netherlands and French elections he hypothesized that the Trump effect harms the chances of RW nationalist parties in europe even though they might gain a few points, they still couldnt win– you guys are basyesians here, right? Silver’s hypoth is Trump effect imposed an apriori penalty on RW parties.

            Silver’s hypothesis is basically impossible to falsify. There were literally no polls that claimed Marine Le Pen could win and nobody reasonably believed she had a chance, whether or not Trump was elected. Wilders’ party gained seats in the Netherlands election and became the second largest in the Dutch parliament, but the center-right VVD is committed to shutting them out and that’s been the case since long before Trump came down on his escalator. Silver’s basically saying that a few parties that never had a serious chance of coming into governance are now less likely to come into governance, and when those parties (as expected) fail to come into governance, he says “Ah, yes, my hypothesis is playing out as expected”.

            The FPO is an Austrian party, not Australian. Since Trump was elected, I know of the Austrian presidential election, the Netherlands general election, the French presidential election and the British council elections. I don’t know which others Silver is talking about, and it seems that you don’t either, which is strange considering you’re attempting to make a point with it.

          • bintchaos says:

            lol, sry– i did read austrian for australian– apolos.
            Like I said, its Silver’s hypoth, not mine– take it up with him.
            I’m developing my own Trump effect hypothesis, but it has to do with socio-physics and complex adaptive systems theory, not poll aggregator statistics.

          • Deiseach says:

            a Hogwarts-style worldclass university?

            If you are unaware that actual “Hogwarts-style” universities (and not the American pretenders to be ivy-clad halls of academe when the oldest only got started during the reign of Charles I as a Calvinist seminary) are not deemed to be conservative bastions of privilege, I suggest you start with the Bullingdon Club

            Some redbrick in California whose name begins with “B” may be as liberal as bedamned, but it certainly is not “Hogwarts-style” (because Hogwarts draws on the British literature tradition of private schools, such as that depicted in Tom Brown’s School Days) 🙂

          • bintchaos says:

            Pardon, no intent to offend.
            I was thinking of the Clarke quote when I wrote that…

            Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
            Arthur C. Clarke, “Profiles of The Future”, 1961 (Clarke’s third law)
            English physicist & science fiction author (1917 – )

            I overvalue the hard sciences…this has been pointed out to me before, and I guess I’m a sort of liberal technocrat. But if you think of western philosophy as magical, then of course Bullington would be the Hogwarts nonpareil.

          • CatCube says:

            @bintchaos

            I’m going to reply to several of your comments in one.

            I think we watched 2 different Firefly’s– its a ship-family show like the Expanse (another beloved show) — Mal and Zoe were insurgents lol, not Alliance soljahs. And then they became space cowboy/pirates operating on the fringes of Alliance territory.

            As far as I can tell, the Alliance was a regular force. The opening scene shows them outfitted in gear, and IIRC uniforms. They laid down their arms on orders passed to them via radio when their superior officers negotiated a cease-fire.

            I think conservatives really dont understand how non-competitive classic conservative ideology is in the 21st century. Who wants to go to a NCLB muggle-realist school in Betsy Vos education world when you could go to a Hogwarts-style worldclass university?

            This statement is so confused I can’t engage with 90% of it. However, if conservative ideology is so noncompetitive why are left-wingers turning up at events with e.g., Charles Murray and blowing air horns, shouting down speakers, and injuring people? They’d let him say his piece to an empty auditorium if they didn’t think it would get traction. This is part of a wider effort to actively drive conservative voices out of institutions, rather than those voices being incorrect and failing to get traction.

            I think you are trying to blame the scifi otaku community for preferring exciting empathetic underdog characters that are rebelling against established order and injustice…pretty hard to portray conservative themes as rebellion.

            Except, as noted above, in the modern university, conservative themes are rebellious. To take an extreme example, ISIS is both extreme right-wing and a rebellion. Most people in the USSR who ended up in the Gulag were mildly to the right of the official ideology. Similarly, most resistance in the Third Reich was at least mildly to the left of the government. Whether one side or the other is “rebellious” depends upon which side is in charge to be rebelled against.

            Face it, most of your excitement about the stories you read is because they flatter your opinions and politics, not because they’re “objectively” better or something. It’s likely Singularity Sky is boring and terrible, as most scifi of any stripe is boring and terrible (Sturgeon’s Law), but the specifics you cite don’t sound boring to me. As a matter of fact, I may actually look it up to check it out.

          • bintchaos says:

            see my reply to Deiseach with Clarke’s third law.
            I am a liberal technocrat so im crazy about hard science, math, physics, etc.
            I had to be forced to take philosophy classes…so by world class Hogwarts style I just meant that.
            MIT would be my idea of Hogwarts (learning magic), not Harvard.

            You got the Battle of Serenity Valley all wrong. I’m a browncoat from way back.

            I don’t think students are at all concerned about Murray’s ideas taking hold on campus– they just really hate Trump.
            Even though Murray has never endorsed Trump they are welded together for student communities and university campuses all over the country. Striking out at Murray is just a proxy for striking out at Trump who wouldnt dare show his face on campus.

          • Montfort says:

            The Hunger Games is about a reactionary traditional society rebelling against a cosmopolitan post-scarcity empire

            Nitpick: If the empire is post-scarcity, how come there are poor districts where people don’t have enough food? And if you still have most of a district’s worth of people mining coal, it can’t be that post-scarce, can it? Seems more like a classic command economy to me. I’m not very conversant with Hunger Games Lore, but I think District 13 wasn’t supposed to be very appealing, either.

            Still, it’s definitely a reactionary-flavored rebellion.

          • random832 says:

            Because they waste their post-scarcity resources on stupid shit. It’s not explicit, and there are arguments over what we’re actually seeing (including one I found by googling “hunger games” “post-scarcity”), but the technology we see used in the games themselves, at least (most specifically, materializing mutant hunting dogs out of thin air) certainly seems characteristic of a typical sci-fi post-scarcity industrial base.

          • albatross11 says:

            bintchaos:

            So is Firefly conservative or liberal in outlook? How do you decide?

            My best answer is that it’s not really either one, at least not in terms of the current ideologies marketed under those brand names in the US. It has elements of both, and elements that don’t fit into the mainstream of either one.

            I think that’s true of good SF in most cases, because the possible range of situations and societies and beliefs is immensely wider than the range of common political views in the US.

          • bintchaos says:

            Spoiler: both Avatar and Firefly/Serenity are virulently anti-establishment. So is Starwars lol.
            River’s quote is about the alliance meddling not about the rule-breaking space cowboy/pirates on Serenity.
            And does it really matter?
            The Rabid Puppies weren’t able to impose their choices on the awards by ballot stacking– those categories just turned into No Awards.
            Its the same as Murray on campuses. Free speech laws and sci-fi author quotas arent the solution– its just that conservative ideology is past its sell by date in the 21st century.

          • albatross11 says:

            bintchaos:

            (Re your Serenity quote)

            That quote reads to me like something a lot of conservatives would say about establishment liberalism. It seems at least as conservative as liberal. In the modern world, it seems to me that we see a lot of attempts by people broadly on the left to control what may be said in an attempt to control what people think, and a lot of attempts to propagandize particular points of view via TV shows, movies, and even what’s taught in schools. I imagine conservatives would love to do the same thing, but they mostly don’t own the megaphones.

          • bintchaos says:

            Except in context River is talking about the Alliance trying to control the outerplanets, and not as a benign nannystate either. Have you even seen Serenity?

          • rlms says:

            @Sandy
            “I suppose you could call the SNP a nationalist party”
            Don’t forget Plaid Cymru!

          • Deiseach says:

            We talk about the hatred and anger visible on the faces of Identity Europa and the Proud Boys, and their fury at being excluded from Berkeley university culture and society

            Is it just me, or does anyone else think that ya binti is just the tiniest bit disingenuous, with her faux-naïf “I’m just an Aspie, I had no idea this was controversial and I certainly had no intention of poking the wasp’s nest” text-speech schtick?

            By contrast, I do miss and think fondly of Jill/Moon, and hope that she is well and happy. She may have believed the Russians physically changed votes for strategic count centres, but she at least was sincere in believing this, and not adopting an “oh hai, diz comment iz cool, k?” stance.

            I mean, all the repeated “conservative angry this conservative bad that conservative envy the other – oh sorry, u iz conservative? u mad, bro?” refrain is beginning to make me suspicious.

            Though I did get a good laugh at the idea of anyone pining over being excluded from Berkeley Redbrick kulchur and the society of bike-lock wielding ethics professors. Oh, indeed! To re-purpose a quote from “The Big Sleep”:

            I grieve over them during the long winter nights.

          • bintchaos says:

            Trust, I’m very much hated and despised by many liberals too.
            I honestly dont get why people would rather not know the truth.
            You dont have to accept me into SSC commentariat. I’ve already said banned words here and lost my privs for days.
            I wanted to comment here because of Unsong and Scott’s Eternal Struggle post.
            If I’m guilty of anything its curiousity about what makes a conservative.
            I’m looking to support my CCP thesis, and SSC is my is one of my field labs.

          • albatross11 says:

            There’s a delicious irony in having top colleges be the bastions of liberalism and opposition to conservativism, given that they’re also a major part of how the ruling class gets and stays in its position. In some sense, the culture at those universities is deeply conservative, not in the sense of being Republicans, but in the sense of having a vast investment in maintaining the current order of things.

            Spend four years protesting and signing petitions for all the best liberal causes, then get a job at Goldman or go to law school and end up working for some huge law firm doing M&A work for gigantic corporations.

          • bintchaos says:

            Very true.
            If I may, my very favorite quote from the revolutionist Quellcrist Falconer (Richard Morgan):

            “And in the end that’s all a Quellist society is–an aware populace. Demodynamic nanotech in action.”
            “Right– so the big bad oligarchs have switched off the nanotech.”
            She smiled again. “Not quite. The oligarchs aren’t an outside factor; they’re like a closed subroutine that’s gotten out of hand. A cancer, if you want to switch anaologies. They are programmed to feed off the rest of the body no matter what the cost to the system in general, and to kill off anything that competes.”

          • Montfort says:

            @random832
            That seems unlikely to me.

            Either the Capitol needs the districts or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, why does it make them work all day and pay them money and supply them with things to buy for that money? Why didn’t it kill them all when they rebelled? If it does, and if it’s post-scarcity, why is it not at least giving them enough food that they can get by without starving or breaking the law and going out to poach animals? Why are basic consumer goods out of reach of poor citizens? If instead the Capitol both needs the districts and cannot produce enough food and other common materials for everyone to get them at little to no cost, then it’s not post-scarcity, it’s just extracting wealth from the districts.

            In other words, if basic living conditions for your population are a serious tradeoff against other goods, I don’t think that’s really post-scarcity.

            Now, maybe you’re right that the technology they demonstrate (do the dogs just materialize, or do they come out of a tube like the tributes?) could be used to create a post-scarcity society instead of what they currently do. But a potentially-post-scarcity society is not a post-scarcity society, especially not if you’re trying to use “post-scarcity” as a marker of vague leftish resemblance.

          • CatCube says:

            @bintchaos

            I don’t think students are at all concerned about Murray’s ideas taking hold on campus– they just really hate Trump.
            Even though Murray has never endorsed Trump they are welded together for student communities and university campuses all over the country. Striking out at Murray is just a proxy for striking out at Trump who wouldnt dare show his face on campus.

            There may be a case to be made that they’ve gotten more vicious lately, but left-wing no-platforming well precedes Trump.

            You got the Battle of Serenity Valley all wrong. I’m a browncoat from way back.

            I don’t feel like digging out my DVDs, and a straight-up post of the opening scene of Firefly doesn’t seem to come up in a quick YouTube search. The ones that come up seem to be a collage of various snippets over music, but it still looks like a conventional fight to me. You’re going to need to articulate why you think otherwise, considering your posts on the Vietnam War elsewhere in the thread don’t give me confidence that you understand the difference between unconventional and conventional warfare.

            Note that “underdog” doesn’t mean “insurgent” in the warfare sense.

            Spoiler: both Avatar and Firefly/Serenity are virulently anti-establishment. So is Starwars lol.
            River’s quote is about the alliance meddling not about the rule-breaking space cowboy/pirates on Serenity.

            Except in context River is talking about the Alliance trying to control the outerplanets, and not as a benign nannystate either. Have you even seen Serenity?

            To reiterate, the USSR was neither benign, nor a non-nannystate, but it was definitely left-wing. You’ll have to refresh my memory on the specific political stances of the Alliance, but I don’t recall it being particularly right-wing. That’s the kind of thing that usually jumps out at me, even if I end up liking the story. It was definitely authoritarian, but that’s not right-wing on its own.

          • Matt M says:

            Goldman and the huge law firms may be economically conservative but they are 100% onboard with the left-wing side of every social issue, across the board.

            I work for an elite consulting firm that has already sent out three different system-wide emails in response to various Trump policies making sure everyone knows that they clearly disagree and are on the correct side of things (travel ban, paris accords, sanctuary cities).

            The economics majors and the gender studies department may disagree on taxes and the minimum wage, but that’s all they disagree on.

          • Deiseach says:

            binti, binti, binti – Arthur C. Clarke? As an exemplar of the graduates and faculty of the Hogwarts-liberal universities?

            He was a techie who got his initial training in the RAF during the Second World War and then, post-war, went to King’s College in London for a maths and physics degree. Hard as you like science, but arts liberalism? Not so much (and you don’t see it in his writings, either; his early SF stories are solid 40s and 50s skiffy where the plot twist due to the science/engineering McGuffin is way more important than characterisation, and any social commentary confines itself to the golden future that will ensue when rational scientific planning takes hold of society and engineers, psychiatrists trained on the most up-to-date models of good scientific how-brains-work and scientists rule the world).

            You are crossing the streams, my child, and you know that’s not a good idea! At this stage, I’m not even sure I believe your tender, trembling claims to be a female 🙂

          • bintchaos says:

            exactly. im hard as you like science too. I would vote the Science Party straight ticket in a heartbeat.
            And I’m a heretic…i think social science and political science aren’t real science, and that Big Data is going to rigorize the heck out of those sad fluffy arm-wavy fake-sciences.
            I also think mathability is separable.
            I no longer believe in evo theory of cooperation or altruism as they were taught to me.
            A lot of ppl think I’m a guy.
            Its because I use big words I suspect– thats so sexist.

          • CatCube says:

            @Montfort

            The issue is that on the whole, the world of the Hunger Games is not very well thought out. Most fiction of this type falls into two camps: the world built by the author is extensive and lovingly crafted with the characters tending towards caricatures, or it’s a good exploration of how the characters think and behave but the worldbuilding is a house of cards that falls apart at the slightest breath of wind. The Hunger Games is very much that second one.

            The distances between the “Districts,” their population, etc., leaves vast areas uninhabited for reasons that are mostly unexplained and the few explanations we have I don’t recall making a lot of sense. The Districts seem to exist solely for the Capitol to have somebody to rub its balls on. Which I think Collins does a creditable job of showing how people react when they’re getting balls rubbed in their face, but it breaks down pretty quickly outside of that.

            @bintchaos

            I’m looking to support my CCP thesis, and SSC is my is one of my field labs.

            Pro-tip: using an acronym that other people in the conversation don’t know doesn’t make you look smart, it makes you look like a smart-ass. Documents that are heavy on acronyms usually have an appendix that explains them, assuming it’s not obvious from context (like SSC). Since we don’t have that here, you’re going to need to explain “CCP.”

            By the way, I don’t know what link in the e-mails you’re using to generate replies (mine has the link to the specific comment, but not a Reply link that fills in the comment number), but please stop using it. I know that you can manually fill in the replytocon field to nest your reply under the one you’re using, but don’t do that. With the way that we’ve settled around threading here, it scatters your replies around the deepest-nested level like a dog’s breakfast, and it’s obnoxious to follow, even with the thread auto-collapse and highlighting new comments. Just reply to the second-most-deeply nested comment (yours, for this thread) put @CatCube in your replies, and the e-mail program will ping me.

          • bintchaos says:

            CCP is Cooperation Competition Paradigm from complex adaptive systems theory.

            And I’m NOT DOING THAT.
            On the advice of the online infosec community I use Tor and Tails and a VPN.
            Thats the only explanation I can offer.
            What does the SSC commentariat think of the infosec community? Infosec Taylor Swift, Morgan Mayhem, Moxie Marlinspike, the Grugq? Are they good, evil, or neutral?

          • Montfort says:

            @CatCube
            I’m willing to accept that the world-building may not create a cohesive picture of economics. I would like to know, though, if there’s anything that specifically creates the impression of “post-scarcity” as opposed to “advanced technology with the Capitol being very rich.” Random seems to allude to some evidence, but doesn’t give specifics.

          • BBA says:

            I’m very much hated and despised by many liberals too.

            Did you used to comment on Balloon Juice, or am I confusing you for someone else with a similar style (and taste in SF television)?

          • bintchaos says:

            I don’t know what that is.

            So…no opinion on infosec?
            check.

          • John Schilling says:

            You’ll have to refresh my memory on the specific political stances of the Alliance, but I don’t recall it being particularly right-wing.

            The only consistent stances of the Alliance were:

            1. We’re in charge. Not you, us. In charge. Everywhere that matters. Us.

            2. Medical care to anyone we can find who needs it, from Core World elite to actual Reavers. But if you’re not Core elite, not until our bureaucrats have made you suffer nigh unto death to make sure you know your place, because see #1.

            Until the movie, the alliance’s means for ensuring its in-chargedness were not terribly different than any other powerful government, even the democratic ones. But they sure do look bad when seen through the eyes of a bunch of rogueishly charismatic criminals.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @Sandy
            I’ve heard Collins intended _The Hunger Games Trilogy_ as an anti-war message; if so, she failed, as her dystopian government is too evil to make the war look worse.

            Conservative rebellion is pretty common, I thnk — The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, or “Red Dawn”. If you include the “rugged individualist against oppressive government” trope, you get a LOT, including both “Star Wars” and “Firefly”. Mal wouldn’t be politically out of place with a Gadsen flag, though it wouldn’t fit his style.

          • CatCube says:

            @Montfort

            Re: post-scarcity.

            Fair enough. I don’t recall coming away with the impression that it was post-scarcity, but it wouldn’t surprise me if somebody was able to make a colorable argument that doesn’t directly conflict anything in canon.

            @bintchaos

            And I’m NOT DOING THAT.

            I can’t dereference the pronoun here. You’re not performing the action of using a link in the e-mail? You’re not performing the action of editing the replytocon in reply links? You’re refusing to use the reply links?

            On the advice of the online infosec community I use Tor and Tails and a VPN.
            Thats the only explanation I can offer.

            If whatever method you’re using is editing the HTML stream to change your reply locations, your TOR hops may not be as secure as you’re hoping.

            What does the SSC commentariat think of the infosec community? Infosec Taylor Swift, Morgan Mayhem, Moxie Marlinspike, the Grugq? Are they good, evil, or neutral?

            I don’t know what that is.

            So…no opinion on infosec?
            check.

            I personally don’t feel the need to massively slow down my connection with what I post here, so I don’t really have much of an opinion on any INFOSEC concerns. I post pseudonymously, but my general policy is to not post anything that I wouldn’t be willing to have attributed to me so I’m not concerned about it anyway. Besides, if the government were to really make an effort to unmask me I’m not laboring under the illusion that I’m skilled enough to actually stop them.

            BTW, this whole issue should go under a new thread. Anybody who doesn’t care about science fiction is scrolling past these unread, and it’s the day before the new Open Thread 77.5 anyway. I certainly don’t care enough about the issue to keep replying.

            Your best bet is to start a top-level thread tomorrow after it drops (assuming Scott isn’t late in creating it) Be advised that the x.5 thread is culture-war free, so as aggressive as you seem to be about this INFOSEC thing it might be fruitful to wait for the 77.75 on Wednesday to air whatever has got you wound up.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @Montfort

            District 13 was Spartan and totalitarian; your entire life was planned and literally scheduled for you. This, supposedly, was because there simply was no surplus, no room for anything but the optimum productive activity. Supposedly.

          • Montfort says:

            @The Nybbler

            Thanks, but District 13 was different management (right? Or is there a conspiracy theory there?). I could see District 13 being stretched in logistics even if Panem/The Capitol is post-scarcity.

          • @Bintchaos:

            It might be helpful if you told us how you are using “conservative.”

            There are at least two quite different possible meaning. One is “opposed to change.” From that standpoint, the campaign against AGW is conservative and Hillary was the conservative candidate in the election. The other is “associated with a particular cluster of political positions in present day America.”

            Which are you talking about when you make statements about conservatism? Or do you have a different definition from either?

          • Well... says:

            Sidestepping the surprisingly lengthy discussion of sci-fi (:cough:nerds!:cough:) to get back on topic here…

            @Nancy Lebovitz and others who might (?) be arguing that population-adjusted maps paint a better picture of where the blue/red divide lies than a straight-up precinct map would:

            Why should a given tribe’s geographic holdings be discounted?

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            EDIT: Shortened to avoid contributing to threadjacking. Short version is +1 to Catcube, he beat me to the same points on conservatism and rebellion, and I just rewatched the relevant portions of Firefly and there’s no reasonable way to consider them ‘insurgents’. Finally, Charles Stross, whether preachy or not, is not even “conservative” for European values of Conservative, much less American. Calibration is required.

          • I would say Verner Vinge was definitely conservative scifi

            Vinge is a libertarian–in “The Ungoverned” he presents a positive view of an anarchist society. Are you using “conservative” to cover both conservatives and libertarians? That’s a possible terminology, but it’s worth being clear if it is what you mean.

          • bintchaos says:

            @David Friedman
            I mean the content — the Qeng Ho free traders seem very aligned with conservative values to me.
            Some one else pointed out the contents of the book arent necessarily reflective of the authors politics.
            So what is the solution the puppies want? Quotas? X amount of conservative authors nominated on the Hugo ballot? This is the same problem conservatives face in academe, where quotas have been actually been proposed (in North CarolinaI think).
            It seems profoundly anti- free market to me. People will buy, read, and love great scifi. Crappy, boring and trite books won’t sell.
            Same thing in academe– the marketplace wants what it wants. Affirmative action for the red tribe– its sort of hilarious in a way.

          • I mean the content — the Qeng Ho free traders seem very aligned with conservative values to me.

            Could be. Have you read “The Ungoverned”? I think it’s pretty clear from that and other things Vinge has written that, insofar as he fits any political category, he is a libertarian.

            So what is the solution the puppies want? Quotas? X amount of conservative authors nominated on the Hugo ballot?

            I’ve seen lots of second hand discussions of the controversy but wasn’t myself involved in it. As best I can tell, what the Puppies wanted was for books to get nominated and chosen based on literary quality. What they believed was that books were being nominated and chosen based in substantial part on whether the political views they implied fitted the views of a clique of fans who were dominating the Hugo process. They attempted to stop that by themselves entering the process, which under the rules they were entitled to do, and nominating works that they thought deserved Hugos, which they were entitled to do. That set off an enraged response from the other side.

            I can’t tell how justified their complaints were, since I don’t participate in the Hugo process and haven’t read most books nominated. I do know that someone I know well who is trying to break into the world of SF writing by submitting short stories believes that it is necessary to avoid including anything in his stories that would offend the social justice morality, whether or not such is appropriate to the story. He may be mistaken, but he has paid quite a lot of attention to the question of how to get published.

            If one political clique has managed to get control over the mechanisms by which books get attention, whether the major SF publishers or the Hugo process, that’s a problem, since it is likely to result in fewer good books getting published. Do you disagree? I can’t see that the Puppies did anything inconsistent with that view.

            This is the same problem conservatives face in academe, where quotas have been actually been proposed

            I don’t think many conservatives are in favor of them.

            University departments are for the most part run by their faculty. The view of academic conservatives, as I observe it, is that departments should make hiring decisions on the basis of academic quality, do make them on some mix of that and political agreement with those currently on the faculty.

            I usually put it, in the context of claimed support for diversity, with the following hypothetical. The hiring decision is down to two candidates who appear about equally qualified. An additional fact turns up–that one of them is an articulate and intelligent defender of South African Apartheid.

            If diversity of views is something the department values, that should make them more likely to hire him–it’s not a position that they or their students are likely to have been exposed to. In fact, in most departments of most universities, it would make them much less likely to hire him. That’s an extreme example, but the point applies more generally.

            For a real world example, consider that the University of Virginia pushed out three faculty members whose work later got them Nobel prizes elsewhere. In the case of two of them, there was documentary evidence that the reason was disapproval of their political views.

        • Brad says:

          bintchaos, quit fucking with the comment order. It is obnoxious.

          • bintchaos says:

            ?? im just replying via email links

          • Montfort says:

            Agreed. Our local norm is if a “reply” button isn’t visible on the post you want to reply to, reply to the post one level up instead (i.e. click the up arrow, then reply to that post).

            Please respect it. When you don’t, things get confusing for those of us who are trying to read new comments in order.

            Edit: If that’s how the email links work, at least that explains why people keep doing it.

        • bintchaos says:

          I think this is what is happening– from Eternal Struggle

          I’m desperately trying to avoid the Nerd Culture Wars, which have somehow managed to be even worse than the Regular Culture Wars, but even I’ve heard about GamerGate and the Rabid Puppies. These were originally movements to fight a perceived liberal bias in regular gaming/sci-fi. They of course failed, and now they’re their own little separate conservative spaces practicing conservative video game commentary/sci-fi writing. I don’t want to deny that they’re often horrible. They’re horrible in exactly the same way FOX News is horrible, and for exactly the same reasons. I expect this pattern of conservatives seceding from theoretically-neutral-but-realistically-left-leading communities and forming terrible communities full of witches to repeat itself again and again, because it’s happening for systemic rather than community-specific reasons.

          Isnt the mark of good fiction or film that you care about the characters and empathize with them?
          Besides, much like Avatar, we really know who the villian is supposed to be.
          Blame Cameron or Wheedon for being heavy handed– not the scifi otaku for preferring their work.

          “People don’t like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think. Don’t run, don’t walk. We’re in their homes and in their heads and we haven’t the right. We’re meddlesome.”
          ― River Tam – Serenity

    • James Miller says:

      “The idea that some people are inferior to other people is abhorrent.”

      What if it turns out that mutational load is the major cause of differences in human individual intelligence? Your moral theory should be robust to this possibility.

      • albatross11 says:

        It seems to me that any moral theory that wasn’t robust to this kind of finding would also not be robust to day-to-day observation. Jim the physicist who runs iron man races when he’s not volunteering at the local soup kitchen is probably better at almost everything that Fred the janitor who’s just barely bright enough to operate a broom and weighs 300 lbs, and examples like this would have been visible to basically anyone who has ever thought hard about morality.

        • I see nothing morally relevant there at all.

          (To be more precise, I a moral multidimensionalist. I see no difference between the two in their basic worth as moral patients, although I can certainly see the difference in terms of Heroic Leadership. But the Heroic Leadership axis only predominates in times of crisis).

          • hoghoghoghoghog says:

            The physicist has produced valuable physics[*], which is more valuable than building maintenance. If you judge people by the value of the consequences of their actions, the physicist is morally superior.

            [*] Well, maybe not, but let’s assume they did.

      • I am failing to see what moral weighting I am supposed to be placing on that fact.

      • 1soru1 says:

        That seems approximately morally equal to the idea that environmental lead is the major cause of such differences: a single discrete and (relatively) easily-fixed medical issue.

        As far as I can see, to think differently is to be one of those people who say ‘genes’ but mean ‘vril’.
        The idea that genes are things with inherent magical properties, or moral worth, has immense cultural weight. Literally every pop sci-fi franchise has some form of ‘life force’ that can be picked up on scanners as an assumed background detail.
        When visually represented, it is always a holographically-glowing DNA double helix, and spoken of as somethign sacred, a ‘miracle’.

        When the underlying metaphysics changes, I change my moral judgements. What do you do?

    • Kevin C. says:

      In pretty much all of these “people are unequal on various traits, but still morally equal and possessed of equal rights” arguments, a point I see raised by some (both Left and Right) but rarely well-addressed is that, as this view arose directly out of a (specific) religious worldview and context, to what degree it is a coherent and sustainable view outside that context? To a metaphysical naturalist, how does one derive moral equality from “material” inequality without resort to the (nonexistent) “non-material”?

      • Randy M says:

        I’ve made this point before. Sans the Imagio Dei, there are two kinds of value humans have–utilitarian, and arbitrarily assigned. And in the modern world, many traits that in the past were quite valuable are of quite little value–physical strength and agility, etc.

      • Wrong Species says:

        We might find out soon. China is often pointed to as a capitalist society without the egalitarian “baggage”. Considering their interest in genetics, it’s not an unlikely outcome.

        • Anonymous says:

          China is often pointed to as a capitalist society without the egalitarian “baggage”.

          Not sure if that’s correct. Communism is nominally egalitarian, just like liberal demotism (and similarly followed through in practice).

        • John Schilling says:

          What does communism have to do with China’s future, aside from providing a name for the current dynasty?

        • baconbacon says:

          SOEs

        • Anonymous says:

          Aside from having infected its ruling elites for a generation or two? It hardly had no effect on China’s law, or its culture.

      • You have asked, and I have answered this question before: game theory, and Rawlsian veils.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        but what if someone started a fascist/eugenicist society based on the alternative principle that how much one can contribute to the community’s competitiveness is the determinant of one’s moral worth

        We’re finding out what happens when politics abandons Christian (or Judeo-Christian) principles. I read an article I cannot find (I think it was The Atlantic but I’m not sure) about how emergent political movements on the left and right are either not informed by or are contemptuous of Christianity. The alt-right is not a Christian movement, many in the movement believe Christianity has made whites/western civ too weak to preserve itself (“christcuck” or “cuckstianity” are slurs). The Civil Rights movement started in the churches and allowed blacks and whites and Jews with a common religious underpinning to communicate and reform American race relations. But Black Lives Matter is not a Christian movement, does not explicitly reject violence or rioting. One does not wear a suit and have a sit down with your oppressor during a revolution.

        I would also throw the SJW left into this lot. The “everything is an arbitrary social construct with no constructs preferential to any other” mindset is built out of postmodernist thought, like Derrida’s rejection of the “phallogocentric” worldview.

        The idea that human life, particularly the lives of my enemies, outgroups, the other tribe have intrinsic value is non-obvious. I think the stereotypical /r/atheism worldview of “religion is all bad and causes all the wars and once we get rid of it we’ll be at peace” is falling out of favor, but I think the damage is done. There’s nothing rational about letting your enemies, or “useless drains on society” live. Rationality is “my tribe murders or enslaves the opposing tribe.” As Christianity wanes, that appears to be where we’re headed.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        “but what if someone started a fascist/eugenicist society based on the alternative principle that how much one can contribute to the community’s competitiveness is the determinant of one’s moral worth?”

        No can do. You actually get moral worth based on an estimate of contributing to the community’s competitiveness.

        The standard could just plain be wrong, and you can also reasonably expect that people will try to optimize their own competitiveness by manipulating the community standard.

    • ShemTealeaf says:

      People with higher IQs and better educations are *NOT* more valuable in moral terms, and I don’t see a lot of obvious reason to think they behave in more moral ways overall.

      What exactly do you mean by ‘morally valuable’ here? I don’t think high IQ people necessarily behave more morally, but they’re probably more societally useful in general, which could be considered a form of moral value.

  21. Tarpitz says:

    There’s a line of economic argument popular among parts of the British left (and presumably elsewhere) that goes something like this:

    1. Governments that borrow in and print their own currency can never go bankrupt, as they can always print more.
    2. The British government (near enough) borrows in and prints its own currency.
    therefore
    3. Arguments to the effect that government expenditure on desirable thing X is unaffordable are always unsound.

    It seems to me pretty clear this proves too much. On its face, the implication would be that government should print money to fund anything even slightly desirable – free everything for everyone, all the time, missions to Alpha Centauri, the works – with no regard for cost, and should stop levying taxes entirely.

    It also seems pretty clear to me that the hole in the original argument is that “X cannot go bankrupt” does not entail “X can afford anything”. Moreover, we know at least one mechanism for this: hyperinflation.

    Advocates of the above argument will point to the fact that quite large amounts of quantitative easing in many developed economies have not led to hyperinflation, or indeed even notably high inflation. I have no desire to argue that quantitative easing is importantly different from outright debt monetization; if anyone here does, I would be interested to hear that argument. I do suspect that QE has lead to some undesirable asset bubbles, notably in UK housing, but that might be a price worth paying for greatly improved health and social care (or maintaining current levels of health and social care in the face of rising dependency ratios) or for a basic income, or for whatever other thing we might like the government to do.

    The question, then, is the exact nature of the relationship between monetization of government activity and inflation. Can it be modelled with tolerable accuracy in only two dimensions, at least given that we are interested in the question as applied to an advanced economy in the early 21st Century, or are other factors important enough to demand their own axes? If there are, what are they?

    My hunch is that somewhere on that graph there is an elbow, where the money multiplier increases in response to increases in the money supply and inflation goes loco. My assumption is that the steelman of the original argument says that we’re nowhere near that point, and could print a lot more to fund useful activity (or tax cuts) without risk. My skepticism about humanity’s grasp on macro-economics leads me to worry that we would probably be very, very bad at identifying the location of the elbow before we reached it, and should consequently err on the side of not going anywhere remotely near it, but if I’m wrong about that, it would mean leaving a lot of utility on the table.

    Would be very interested in the thoughts of the SSC readership in general, but particularly those of any knowledgeable Murphyite economic leftists present. Most of all, if my steelman of the original position is wrong (perhaps you don’t think there’s an elbow at all, for example) that would be valuable information.

    • Alex Zavoluk says:

      The way that hyperinflation works is that increased demand causes prices to rise, which in turn prompts more money printing. In the case of recent quantitative easing, most of the money that was printed (effectively) is sitting around doing nothing. One of my economics professors showed us a graph of excess reserves (cash held by banks in excess of what they are legally required to hold). Similar graph here. Notice that it is flat, at 0, until QE starts in late 2008, when it spikes to billions of dollars. If all of the money that was effectively being printed during QE just sat in banks doing nothing, it would not lead to hyperinflation. It probably would not have many other effects, either.

      > it would mean leaving a lot of utility on the table.

      Well, no, because marginal government spending is probably not that beneficial utility-wise. Inflation to pay for things is effectively a tax on savings and on wage-earners who can’t renegotiate salaries quickly. If you actually spend the money you print, which is what you suggest we do, will most definitely lead to price increases. And moreover, inflation is not a long-term solution to pay for things, since everyone will adapt to the amount of money you expect to print each year, and will quickly either turn into hyperinflation or fail to pay for things.

      • Nornagest says:

        If I’m reading that graph right, there’s two trillion dollars of reserves just sitting around in banks doing nothing. I thought the whole reason banks wanted to hold money was so they could then turn around and lend it out to other people. Why would they be holding onto those kinds of resources? And given that they are, shouldn’t that lead to some kind of user-facing change in banking?

        I notice I’m confused, in other words.

        • Alex Zavoluk says:

          Banks, like any other agent, will only lend if their expected return compensates for the risk of not being repaid. During a period of high economic uncertainty, with lots of businesses failing (financial ones especially) and not nearly as many new ones starting, you can expect that quality investments are few and far between and so banks just don’t have any good investments to make. Anyone who had money in the bank during this time period would also note how little of a return they were earning (<.1% a year IIRC).

          And given that they are, shouldn’t that lead to some kind of user-facing change in banking?

          What sort of change? QE happened relatively quickly and most people probably expected the recession to be relatively short, so they can just hold onto the cash as a reserve. No reason to give it away, or piss of your customers by trying to charge them more fees or something.

          • Nornagest says:

            Sure. But that graph goes back a while, and while we’re certainly in uncertain economic times, 2017 doesn’t look much more uncertain to me than, say, the 1987 stock market crash or the Savings and Loan crisis or the dot-com bust or the post-9/11 downturn. To be fair, there is a visible blip in September 2001, but it’s tiny by comparison.

          • baconbacon says:

            Those reserves didn’t come out of ‘nowhere’. Banks took loans that were on their books and sold them to the Federal Reserve, and now they are holding cash (which has been paid a small rate by the Fed for years) and the Fed is holding securities, where as it was the opposite way in 2006 (the Fed wasn’t literally ‘holding’ the cash, but as a lender of last resort it functionally was).

          • Alex Zavoluk says:

            It does seem to be going down, and it will probably take a while to eat through all of those reserves. Banks aren’t really used to having reserves, and unless you can find another time when the government engage in lots of QE, you won’t see another similar spike, because banks don’t usually want to hold on to excess reserves.

        • Why would they be holding onto those kinds of resources?

          I think this kind of comment is why some people seem to be in favor constant stimulus, whether fiscal or monetary (not that I’m saying that is your opinion, Nornagest).

          Money is NOT resources. The economy does not grow by spending more money (maybe reported growth, but not real growth). Resources are things like goods and labor. Money is used for two things: to provide a comparative measure between more than one kind of resource, and to allow exchange between such resources.

          Sometimes economists call for an increase in the money supply because of excess resources not being spent. It might be that there are actually real resources not being used in the economy which monetary stimulus could shake loose, but that isn’t necessarily a good thing. There are times that holding back resources are a good thing for the economy, waiting for a better place to use them. Fooling people into spending those resources early by simulating a better economy than actually exists is where the government thinks it knows better how to spend resources than those who hold them, which I think is rarely true.

          I think monetary (or fiscal) stimulus is almost always a bad idea. Money should grow at the rate of the economy, to maintain stability.

          • Nornagest says:

            Okay, I get the point you’re trying to make, and for what it’s worth I agree with it, but I still feel compelled to defend my phrasing here. From a god’s-eye view of the economy, no, money is not a resource; you can’t just add more money and get more stuff. (Well, you sort of can when growth is being constrained by the money supply, but that’s a second-order effect and not important here.) But from the perspective of an individual bank, money is absolutely a resource. It’s not in Chase’s job description to modulate the economy by doing magic with the money supply; that’s what the Fed does, and they don’t hold money, they print it. (Well, mostly they issue electronic money.) Chase’s job is to loan money to people, and all their incentives point in the direction of loaning as much money to as many people as they can by law. Sitting on it does them no good, unless they’re literally unable to find people they expect to pay it back.

            Did the 2008 crisis spook them that badly?

          • baconbacon says:

            @Nornagest

            Lots of resources sit “idle”. You don’t see lumber companies cutting down every individual tree on all their land at once, even though trees are a resource and a lumber companies job is to produce lumber.

            Chase’s job is to make profits for their shareholders.

          • Did the 2008 crisis spook them that badly?

            I think the answer to this is yes, and that’s a good thing. It appears to me that business has learned the lesson of the Great Recession much better than the government has. The lesson is to be more conservative with your resources (and yes money is a resource to an individual firm, because it is equivalent to a claim on other people’s property). But the government seems to yelling “stimulate! stimulate!” constantly, without any conception that immediately using all resources is one of the things that got us into so much trouble in 2008. Republicans are as guilty of this as Democrats; it isn’t a leftist thing.

    • Deiseach says:

      Governments that borrow in and print their own currency can never go bankrupt, as they can always print more.

      I thought the problem with this was that paper scrip is a promissory note and has to be backed up by something of real value; that this is part of why forgery is illegal (because those notes are not issued by the government and thus not backed up by real currency), that this leads to hyper-inflation (this was the reasoning behind the German plan to forge British bank notes to crash the economy during the war) so that you get things like Weimar Republic Germany where people have to hand over blocks of bank notes to pay for a loaf of bread, and the Third World nations that had to print million-unit of local currency notes precisely to avoid their citizens having to hand over blocks of bank notes? That this degrades your currency to the level of Monopoly money and you’ll be routinely handing over a thousand dollar bill to pay for your Big Mac if this is indulged in?

      If all that has gone by the wayside and the government can just print as much more coloured paper as it likes, then really there’s no reason to prosecute forgery; if you need an expensive repair on your car, don’t take out a bank loan, just fire up the 3-D printer and run off a couple of thousand bucks instead. After all, that’s what the Mint is doing!

      • Matt M says:

        You say this somewhat in jest, but there’s a certain fragment of the Austrian school that would argue that your analogy is 100% correct, and that the printing of fiat currency is, in fact, forgery in the exact same way that it would be forgery if you printed currency yourself at home.

      • Nornagest says:

        Major currencies haven’t been denominated in anything but themselves for decades now (the Bretton Woods system, under which e.g. the dollar was gold-backed, collapsed in the early Seventies). This effectively replaces trust that the government (or bank) will not print more certificates than it can redeem in gold under normal circumstances, with trust that the government will keep the supply of fiat money tight enough that it stays a reliable store of value.

        Forgery is illegal because it subverts that trust: adding to the money supply devalues all the other money in circulation. Print off a million dollars in fake money and you’re effectively stealing slightly less than a million dollars’ worth of value from everyone else holding USD.

        • Deiseach says:

          Print off a million dollars in fake money and you’re effectively stealing slightly less than a million dollars’ worth of value from everyone else holding USD.

          But if the US (or another) government decides “to heck with word of honour and gentlemen’s agreements not to print extra money, we’re going to do that and you can’t stop us”, aren’t they in effect doing the same thing?

          I know the argument there is “if I owe money to the bank and can’t pay it back, they can re-possess my house, but if the American government can’t pay its debts, what are the Chinese going to do – invade the USA and take over the entire country as seized assets?”

          But er, why not? A big fear back in the 80s/90s when Japan was booming economically and buying up American property and corporations, there was a fear (how genuine I can’t assess) that they would in fact end up ‘owning’ the country. If we can imagine the US ‘liberating’ a smaller foreign nation that couldn’t pay back loans and debt, in order to acquire their natural assets under the guise of ‘installing a democratic government to oversee the transfer of power from the wicked evil dictator (who used to be our good pal until he decided not to pay danegeld any more)’, why not something similar for the debt-holders of US debt, if not by military force, by subtler means?

          • hls2003 says:

            This type of forcible debt repayment used to be very common – for example, seizing port cities by gunboat and diverting tariff or duty revenues to pay the debt. It was a primary cause of both the Monroe Doctrine (no European interference in the Americas) and Theodore Roosevelt’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (the U.S. might intervene in other countries to prevent unpaid debts or other provocations tempting Europeans to interfere).

          • Nornagest says:

            If the American government can’t pay its debts, the Chinese probably won’t invade and repossess Fort Knox. We still have more nukes than they do. But no one will want dollars anymore, which would cause chaos in dollar-denominated assets, starting with American taxes, and would be every bit as devastating to the American government’s ability to get stuff done as a war would be.

            It probably still wouldn’t let China literally buy Los Angeles, because that land would still hold a fair bit of the value it used to (if somewhat less, because American real estate isn’t as valuable when America doesn’t rule the world) and its owners are not obligated to accept payment in dollars. Probably they’d insist on getting paid in yen or yuan or Bitcoins or Kongbucks or something.

          • John Schilling says:

            I know the argument there is “if I owe money to the bank and can’t pay it back, they can re-possess my house, but if the American government can’t pay its debts, what are the Chinese going to do – invade the USA and take over the entire country as seized assets?

            Refuse to loan the U.S. government any more money, and that’s not just the Chinese, even domestic US citizens and corporations will stop loaning the government money. At that point the United States Government absolutely has to balance the current-accounts budget, which means either immediate tax increases of $360 billion/year, immediate spending cuts of $360 billion/year, or some sort of thinly-camouflaged money-printing scheme which leads promptly to hyperinflation, or government checks start literally bouncing.

          • Alex Zavoluk says:

            But if the US (or another) government decides “to heck with word of honour and gentlemen’s agreements not to print extra money, we’re going to do that and you can’t stop us”, aren’t they in effect doing the same thing?

            So long as the government doesn’t do that, and doesn’t behave like they are going to do that, they are considered to have a credible commitment to not do it.

            Once they break that trust, everyone else responds in kind (higher interest rates on loans, fewer people taking the money, etc.)

    • herbert herberson says:

      “3. Arguments to the effect that government expenditure on desirable thing X is unaffordable are always unsound.”

      Is what you’re talking about the same thing as Modern Monetary Theory? If so, then this part is not accurate–the argument, rather, is that the one and only upper bound on the government budget is inflation.

      The other interesting part of that approach you didn’t touch on is that the purpose of taxes shouldn’t really be understood as a way to procure revenue, but rather a way to force individuals to use, or at least get ahold of some of, your currency.

      • Tarpitz says:

        I believe what I’m talking about is Modern Monetary Theory as propagated on Facebook, usually in meme form, by people who ought to have the brains to know they don’t know what they’re talking about. In fairness, Google leads me to conclude that the person most responsible for popularising these ideas among the UK left, Richard Murphy, came to them independently and only himself discovered that MMT was the term for this aspect of his views in 2013.

        Would it then be fair to say that the serious point of disagreement is over the probability distribution of changes in inflation for any given amount of monetization?

        • herbert herberson says:

          I’d say that’s one of two. The other, and probably bigger one, is whether central banks should act independently of the state and add money to the supply through the banking industry, or whether they should be subservient to the government and add money to the supply through deposits in the government’s general revenue.

    • Chalid says:

      I don’t think anyone sophisticated really believes the line of argument that you lay out at the beginning, because, as you say, it’s obviously wrong.

      You’ll see arguments that a country that borrows in its own currency won’t experience a Greek-style crisis; this is probably correct, but it doesn’t mean you can’t have other types of problems or crises.

      As I understand it (which is, honestly, not that well), the point being made is that if a country experiences an adverse shock such that investors are less willing to invest in or lend to the country, then that economy’s net exports (exports minus imports) must increase to make up the gap. (Note that this shock doesn’t have to relate to government debt; of the PIIGS only Greece and Italy had lots of government debt, and it’s funny how anti-debt people ignore that and focus on Greece as a reason to stop borrowing.) Anyway, how this adjustment occurs depends on the country’s currency:

      If the country has its own currency the adjustment takes place primarily through devaluation, which is relatively painless compared to the alternatives.

      If the country is part of a currency zone like the EU the adjustment takes place through greatly increased interest rates and recession, which is what happened to Southern Europe.

      If a country does have its own currency, but borrows in a different currency, then the rapid devaluation of the home currency leads to an explosion in the size of the debt in local currency; this gives you the Asian crisis of the late 1990s.

    • Brad says:

      The question, then, is the exact nature of the relationship between monetization of government activity and inflation. Can it be modelled with tolerable accuracy in only two dimensions, at least given that we are interested in the question as applied to an advanced economy in the early 21st Century, or are other factors important enough to demand their own axes? If there are, what are they?

      I’m not an expert, but it is my understanding that we are at the point where inflation is mostly an observed variable. We have some hypothesis are about what might influence it in this or that direction, but nothing like a formula.

      This upsets people that want to say “we can’t do X it’ll cause hyperinflation” and the people that want to say “we can do X, no risk it’ll cause hyperinflation”. The best bet under such uncertainty is to take small step in the X direction (assuming that’s something you’d want to do in the absence of concerns about inflation) and see what happens.

      • John Schilling says:

        This upsets people that want to say “we can’t do X it’ll cause hyperinflation” and the people that want to say “we can do X, no risk it’ll cause hyperinflation”. The best bet under such uncertainty is to take small step in the X direction (assuming that’s something you’d want to do in the absence of concerns about inflation) and see what happens.

        “How did you go bankrupt?”
        “Two ways: Gradually, then all at once.”
        E. Hemmingway, The Sun Also Rises, 1926

        The transition from ordinary inflation to hyperinflation is nonlinear, chaotic, and irreversible. Because it isn’t just mathematical, it is also psychological. As Alex Zavoluk points out above, people price their expectations of your future money-printing behavior into their rates. Hyperinflation marks the transition to a consensus belief that you are in fact going to crash the economy and everybody else needs to decouple from it if they are going to survive the experience.

        So with your “best bet”, what happens is that either you get some uselessly noisy data on the marginal impact of money supply vs. low levels of inflation/deflation, or you find out after the fact that the last tranche of quantitative easing was the one that pushed the inflation rate from 11% to 12,000%. Please go make your “best” bets in some other nation’s economy, where they may serve as yet another cautionary tale for ours.

        • Brad says:

          Please go make your “best” bets in some other nation’s economy, where they may serve as yet another cautionary tale for ours.

          Inflation is nowhere near 11% much less 12,000% despite people like you claiming it was going to be any day now. It is in fact struggling to hit the target of 2%.

          Did you update at all? Or just get even more histrionic?

          • Nornagest says:

            Don’t be a dick.

          • CatCube says:

            He, uh, wasn’t claiming it was 11% currently. That number was obviously used as a hypothetical breakpoint between “reasonable” inflation and runaway hyperinflation; it’s hypothetical because the whole point of his post was that you can’t tell where it will occur until it’s happened.

          • John Schilling says:

            It is in fact struggling to hit the target of 2%

            And if you “take a small step in the X direction”, it will reach 3%. The next steps get you to to 4%, 5%, 7%, then back to 6% because this is noisy data. Then 7% again, then 8%, then 10% and on to 11%. The step after that you go to 20%, then you take a hurried step back and inflation only goes back down to 18%, and you stand still for a beat while you calculate how much it will cost to take ten steps back. While you are waiting inflation goes up to 100%. Now millions of registered voters will go hungry this month if you don’t pay for emergency programs whose costs call for three steps’ worth of quantitative easing and hey, the last three steps only resulted in 12% inflation so you do it. The next three steps push you from 100% to 800%, and before you can react it goes up to 2500% and then 12000%.

            Gradually, then all at once.

          • Brad says:

            The last decade is evidence to the contrary. We took several steps towards X and no such escalation occurred. When the world and your model disagree, it’s not the world you are supposed to throw out. Not even if you built an entire morality around your model.

            And if you “take a small step in the X direction”, it will reach 3%. The next steps get you to to 4%, 5%, 7%, then back to 6% because this is noisy data. Then 7% again, then 8%, then 10% and on to 11%.

            No one is suggesting taking additional steps beyond 3-4%. But we haven’t gotten there. We spent years below target. In no small part because of faith based objections to figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

          • John Schilling says:

            The last decade is evidence to the contrary. We took several steps towards X and no such escalation occurred.

            Bob over there took several steps past the sign saying “Danger: Minefield”. Bob didn’t blow up. This is, indeed, evidence that there is no minefield. But it is very weak evidence, and Bob is a damn fool.

            We’ve been watching people step carefully in the direction of inflation, only to have it blow up into hyperinflation, for over eight hundred years now. The exact number of steps, the threshold value of inflation, at which it blows up, is different every time. Nobody knows how to calculate it. Deflation has its own problems, and there’s good reason to target 2% inflation rather than zero.

            But, given the marginal and transient gains involved, what’s your case for taking even one more step in the direction of a known catastrophe at an unknown distance?

          • Chalid says:

            Examples please?

            Here is Wikipedia with a list of hyperinflations. It looks like every single one involved the aftermath of a war or very major political instability. There are no cases of a country simply borrowing too much in peacetime, trying to inflate it away, and getting hyperinflation.

            In the section on high but non-hyperinflationary episodes has the vaguely analogous case of Mexico in the 1980s, but that was because it had debt denominated in a foreign currency (USD).

            Meanwhile countries have run at 10% or higher inflation for decades and enjoyed robust growth. Korea averaged somewhere around 20% from 1950 to 1980.

            So it looks to me like if you don’t lose a war or have a revolution you won’t have hyperinflation. What is an example of careful steps going too far and leading to hyperinflation in a way that might be relevant to the US?

          • Chalid says:

            And I want to add that the *cost* of excessive worry about about hyperinflation is lowered growth; a lot of people think that the Fed’s inflation target is much too low for example, which, among other things, may have made the Great Recession worse.

          • Tarpitz says:

            The current Venezuelan hyperinflation (800% in 2016, per Wikipedia) looks to me very much like the product of a peacetime mismatch between government revenue and expenditure.

          • baconbacon says:

            In no small part because of faith based objections to figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

            This is just a weird objection. The Federal Reserve not only engaged in unprecedented major programs but also a few odd ducks (operation twist) trying to figure out what “worked”.

          • John Schilling says:

            Here is Wikipedia with a list of hyperinflations. It looks like every single one involved the aftermath of a war or very major political instability.

            “Very major political instability” is ill-defined for the heavy lifting it is being asked to do here.

            Robert Mugabe has seen no serious challenge to his rule in at least thirty years, and it’s been longer still since any major war Zimbabwe; they’ve still got hyperinflation. Likewise North Korea. The Depression-era hyperinflations in Hungary and Poland don’t seem to be associated with anything I would call “very major political instability”, but I’m not an expert there. Then there’s the Yuan dynasty; I again am not an expert on the subject, but the Chinese national museum’s currency exhibit doesn’t blame those multiple hyperinflationary incidents on anything but fiscal mismanagement.

            That’s just from Wikipedia’s “notable examples” list, which is not exhaustive. They also list 1980s Mexico , during a seventy year streak of peace and one-party rule, as not technically hyperinflation but that just means it took a few years rather than a few months to destroy 99.9% of the peso’s value.

            It is curiously absent from the “hyperinflation” article itself, but wikipedia’s article on the economy of Venezuela explicitly calls out the current state as hyperinflation. In a nation with nineteen years of peace and one-party rule with a political opposition far less significant than the current US Democratic Party.

            Similarly, Argentina 1989-1990 is ackowledged as hyperinflationary by Wikipedia, and that’s difficult to tie to war or very major political instability.

            Or just go with the full list. Lots of peaceful nations there; maybe you can find excuses to write them all off for “very major political instability”, but I think that would be a very great stretch.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            For whatever it’s worth, there’s levels of inflation between 2% and “hyper” that very much suck.

          • Chalid says:

            Looking at the complete list linked by John Schilling (57 countries), the vast majority (44) are related to events which I think we can all agree qualify as major instability: the Soviet Union’s collapse, WWI, and WWII, and their aftermaths.

            Excluding those events, the complete list is just 13: Zimbabwe 2008, Peru 1990, France 1795, Nicaragua 1991, Congo 1993, Argentina 1990, Bolivia 1985, Peru 1988, Chile 1973, Angola 1997, Brazil 1990, Zimbabwe 1998, North Korea 2010.

            I guess we can say that having a brutal dictator or civil war or being in the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, covers all the remaining cases except Chile 1973 (Allende?)

            I don’t know a ton about the Latin American debt crisis but I do know the oil shocks plus the fact that the countries weren’t borrowing in their own currencies were key aspects of it. Ditto for Venezuela today.

            For me to think that an inflationary episode was really relevant to the US, it’d have to be a country that was politically stable, not in a major war or recently emerged from one, had debts primarily in its own currency, wasn’t poor by the standards of the day, and had a reasonably diversified economy (ie no petrostates), and happened in the past several hundred years. I don’t think these are unreasonable criteria for me to ask for.

            You’re not going to convince anyone that it could happen here by pointing to Yuan Dynasty China or Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

          • John Schilling says:

            For me to think that an inflationary episode was really relevant to the US, it’d have to be a country that was politically stable, not in a major war or recently emerged from one, had debts primarily in its own currency, wasn’t poor by the standards of the day, and had a reasonably diversified economy (ie no petrostates). I don’t think these are unreasonable criteria for me to ask for.

            “Had [large] debts primarily in its own currency” and “wasn’t poor by the standards of the day”, bring you to the null set, which I think kind of is unreasonable. And that’s before you bring in the overarching requirement of “tried to monetize away its debt or long-term deficit”, without which hyperinflation isn’t an issue.

            Better than 90% of the sovereign debt on Earth is issued in one of half a dozen or so currencies, all of which are administered by nations which are rich, peaceful, politically stable, and which have a long track record and ongoing commitment to Not Monetize Away Their Debt. This is not a coincidence. But if one of these nations were to up and say “ha ha fooled you!” and try to monetize away their debt, is there any reason to doubt that the results would be any different than for anyone else?

            You might as well argue that jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge would be a wickedly awesome thing for a sane person to do, and yet safe because the only people who ever die doing that are the suicidally insane ones and we expect suicidal people to die. There’s no evidence that sane people jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge would die, just a theory, and how can you stand in the way of awesomeness with just a theory and no evidence?

          • Chalid says:

            “Had [large] debts primarily in its own currency” and “wasn’t poor by the standards of the day”, bring you to the null set

            You’ve got the US, UK, Japan, Canada, Switzerland, China, Scandinavia, and a whole bunch of European countries pre-Eurozone. I think you’ve got several hundred country-years of data, perhaps even thousands.

            But if one of these nations were to up and say “ha ha fooled you!” and try to monetize away their debt, is there any reason to doubt that the results would be any different than for anyone else?

            … and *wow* this is a change in your standards. First you say that small steps in the direction of higher inflation are incredibly dangerous because it is “chaotic” and “nonlinear” and that you could find that the “last tranche of quantitative easing was the one that pushed the inflation rate from 11% to 12,000%” and that we have been watching people “step carefully in the direction of inflation, only to have it blow up into hyperinflation, for over eight hundred years.”

            It is of course not literally impossible to achieve hyperinflation. Sure, if Trump declared his intention to monetize the entire national debt, we might get uncomfortable inflation (though not hyper-). But another tranche of quantitative easing? The fed changing its inflation target to 5%? No way. This would be literally historically unprecedented AFAICT.

          • John Schilling says:

            You’ve got the US, UK, Japan, Canada, Switzerland, China, Scandinavia, and a whole bunch of European countries pre-Eurozone.

            One of your standards, and the one I called out as most objectionable, was: “not poor by the standards of the day”. When were the US, UK, Japan, Canada, etc, ever considered poor?

            Japan if we go all the way back to the 1940s, perhaps. Likewise “European countries pre-Eurozone”, but by strange coincidence that gets you the worst case of hyperinflation anywhere, ever.

            … and *wow* this is a change in your standards. First you say that small steps in the direction of higher inflation are incredibly dangerous because it is “chaotic” and “nonlinear”

            Fine. If you want to run an experiment in say Norway where you try to see how much money-printing it takes to push inflation from 2.5% to 3%, that would probably be pretty safe. And pointless.

            But that’s not what you are proposing, and you know it. The United States (and much of the Eurozone) does have a very large national debt and ongoing deficit, and you are proposing to see how much of that you can monetize away. The answers, every time someone else has tried it, are “not enough to matter” and “oops, too late”.

            Yes, all the “too late” data comes from poor nations. Because only poor nations are stupid enough to do that, because the economic stupidity necessary to do that also makes you do other things that make you poor. There’s no reason to believe that being rich insulates a nation from hyperinflation, any more than there is reason to believe that being sane insulates a person from blunt-force trauma after jumping off a bridge.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            Miyazaki’s _The Wind Rises_ has somewhat about the Japanese considering their socity to be poor and backward in the 1940s.

            This is mostly an excuse to recommend the movie.

          • bintchaos says:

            I love the movie but its so sad…Miyazaki always had such strong anti-war themes and in this movie its like he’s conceded the necessity of war for the Japanese….its like a eulogy.
            I dont understand about the inflation stats either– I think oversampling and seasonal adjustments are distorting the picture.
            For example (and this is anecdote) Bruno Mars tickets for this fall are 300$ each– and those aren’t even good seats.

          • Jiro says:

            I can just imagine what Miyazaki would think of a movie which was all about the scientific wonder in creating the atom bomb. We could call it “The Mushroom Cloud Rises”. I can’t imagine he’d like it very much.

            “Glorifies Japanese participation in the war”, to Westerners, is easy to mistake for “is anti-war”, since both of them involve opposing the Americans.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            I saw The Wind Rises as being about war as an activity done by ordinary people with ordinary human motives. This can look like glorifying Japan’s part in WW2, but it didn’t seem that way to me, it was more like a corrective to Japan simply being the bad guys. I have no idea how the movie went over in Japan.

            I also consider to be unspeakably beautiful. Literally. Usually, when I like the way a movie looks, I can say things about composition and the use of color. In this case, it looked great, but I have no idea why.

          • bintchaos says:

            You didnt think the overwhelming theme was sadness, melancholy?
            I cant help contrasting Wind to the power and beauty of Nausicaa, Mononoke and Howl.
            The kaiju eiga were the obvious responses to the War.
            Miyazaki is much more layered and complex.

          • Jiro says:

            I saw The Wind Rises as being about war as an activity done by ordinary people with ordinary human motives.

            The atom bomb was created by ordinary people with ordinary human motives, but if a Westerner were to depict the atom bomb that way, it would be seen as a horrible whitewash.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            If war is mostly done by ordinary people with ordinary human motives, I want to believe war is mostly done by ordinary people with ordinary human motives. And I want it said in public.

            Perhaps it would be good to have a movie depicting this for both sides of a war.

          • Nornagest says:

            Miyazaki’s pretty good with that, I’d say. I don’t agree with all of his politics, but he usually does an outstanding job of humanizing the people on both sides of whatever (usually fictional) conflict he’s looking at, to the point that most of his movies don’t really have villains. Nausicaa, the one setting of his that tackles WMDs directly, is no exception — although it’s clearer in the manga than in the movie.

            I haven’t seen The Wind Rises yet, though.

          • Jiro says:

            If war is mostly done by ordinary people with ordinary human motives, I want to believe war is mostly done by ordinary people with ordinary human motives.

            “War is done by ordinary people with ordinary motives” isn’t a factual proposition that you can say that for; it’s a matter of emphasis. Nobody’s asking that Miyazaki literally not show the Japanese as humans. Self-deception and blind loyalty and willful ignorance are human traits too, and someone who makes weapons for an aggressive war full of atrocities has engaged in those very human things, which is not Miyazaki’s spin.

            It’s like having a movie about someone who always wanted to be a business administrator and achieves happiness running a Nazi concentration camp.

          • Zodiac says:

            It’s like having a movie about someone who always wanted to be a business administrator and achieves happiness running a Nazi concentration camp.

            To me that sounds like a great concept if executed correctly. Now I want that movie.

          • Protagoras says:

            Though he didn’t specifically run any concentration camps, otherwise the example seems almost deliberately intended to be a reference to Adolf Eichmann.

          • Aapje says:

            …based on the false idea that Eichmann didn’t have personal convictions.

    • baconbacon says:

      1. Governments that borrow in and print their own currency can never go bankrupt, as they can always print more.

      This is either literally false, or only true in a misleading sense. In the literal sense places that have seen hyperinflation often (always?) have periods where the inflation increases are vastly greater than the money supply increases. Any government obligation tied to the inflation rate (for the US government TIPs and SS would fall into this category) would bankrupt them during this period.

      You could argue that in the modern world the building of presses isn’t necessary, and that 10x the amount of money formerly in existence can be created with the stroke of a key, however this is just a dodge of the issue above. What happens during hyperinflation is that the currency no longer functions as money as people stop accepting it, and they turn to alternatives like gold, foreign currencies and barter. Technically the argument could be correct, but only if you assume that the government in question can perpetually borrow in its own currency in the face of inflation levels that cause the public to stop accepting it, it is basically a catch 22.

    • James Miller says:

      Macroeconomics has lots of flaws, but one thing they know with near certainty is that printing lots of money causes inflation.

    • The Nybbler says:

      One thing about the crash is you also didn’t see massive deflation. And the crash should have been a seriously deflationary event; all sorts of asset values going to zero. So one possibility is the quantitative easing only cancelled out the deflationary effects of the crash.

      There’s more going on, though; as Alex Zavoluk points out, there’s the enormous increase in excess reserves. Why wouldn’t the banks be lending those out? Is the Federal Reserve trying to fill the hole in the economy left by the crash with a bunch of assets that essentially only exist on balance sheets, and making it clear to the banks that they need to play along?

    • J Mann says:

      Brad:

      To quote Krugman from back in the day, a reasonable model for modern inflation is that it will be whatever the Fed wants it to be, plus or minus a small factor to account for the fact that Alan Greenspan is not actually God. In other words, the Fed is targeting inflation, and as a result, we’ve gotten a small monetization of the debt. (You’ll need some kind of accountant to explain why tripling the money supply didn’t result in a sharp drop in the debt, but it apparently didn’t.)

      So right now inflation is low because the Central Banks stop easing operations when they think it might rise, and the easing operations they’ve done are for the specific purpose of raising inflation to where they want it to be.

      My intuition is that actual monetezation of the debt would require much larger operations (based on the fact that we don’t seem to have successfully monetized much debt so far) and an abandonment of the interest rate target as the standard to set monetary policy.

      • Brad says:

        In other words, the Fed is targeting inflation, and as a result, we’ve gotten a small monetization of the debt. (You’ll need some kind of accountant to explain why tripling the money supply didn’t result in a sharp drop in the debt, but it apparently didn’t.)

        I think any disagreement we have will end up being in here. Are you pointing here to the accounting fiction that the Fed is a separate entity from the USG and treating that as a real?

        The federal reserve dramatically expanded its balance sheet and used to the newly created money to buy debt instruments of the United States (including the GSEs which likewise ought to have their legal and accounting fictions disregarded for our purposes). Drawing a line around all federal entities and looking at what happened in and outside, trillions of dollars were created through the expansion of the balance sheet and no corresponding external liabilities were created at the same time.

        How is that not monetization?

        • J Mann says:

          The general answer is that if the Fed will hold the securities indefinitely, then it’s monetizing the debt, but if it’s going to sell the securities eventually as interest rates pick up, then the ultimate effect on the government balance sheet is the difference between the buy and sell prices, plus the foregone interest.

          I’d actually be delighted to learn that the US government’s long term financial prospects had been improved by the QE operations – have you seen any analysis of whether that has happened, and by how much?

          My default assumption is that the ultimate effect on the US government balance sheet is predicted to be small (I’ll accept market or expert predictions), and that material monetization has a good chance of having more substantial effects.

          In an unfortunately circular effect, if market participants expect the Fed ultimately to unwind its position, then you won’t see much inflation, but if they expect the position to be irreversible, then you will see more. I’m not smart enough to look at TIPS spreads during shocks or whatever and tell you what the market thinks, but it is a data point that no one in the government has, as far as I know, released a budget that assumes QE is permanent.

        • Brad says:

          The exact same thing would be true if there was no fictional intermediary. A government that monetized could always decide to demonetize at some point down the road. I don’t think it is reasonable for ‘the market expects it to be reversed at some future date’ to be the pivot on which the definition of monetization turns.

        • J Mann says:

          @Brad – Thanks!

          1) I agree with you that the intermediary issue is not material. As to me at least, you can consider that issue resolved.

          2) I think whether the position is likely or expected to be unwound is material, however, if you are interested in one of the following two ultimate questions.

          2.1) Has the US government improved its long term financial situation? For example, have we extended the date of entitlement reckoning by a few weeks as a result of QE?

          2.2) Is future monetization likely to lead to inflation?

          I’ll grant that you can definitely characterize the QE activity as a “temporary monetization” or a “monetezation expected to be followed by a roughly equivalent demonetization.”

          However, if the question you are asking is: Does QE show us that we can safely monetize the US debt without risking hyperinflation?, then I think you have to take the expected duration into account in order to see whether the effects of this market activity are likely to be seen in a permanent monetization.

          • Brad says:

            Re 2.1
            I’m not sure I share your premises. First because I think the entitlement reckoning is mostly about out of control healthcare cost growth. Second — and this one is directly related to the subject at hand — I don’t think the concept of a fiat issuer saving money for future expenses is a particularly coherent one to begin with.

            Contracting the money supply today, when the economic circumstances wouldn’t otherwise call for it, because we have a big chunk of anticipated expenses in a decade or two doesn’t make much sense. At least not if the “savings” are just going to be forgone spending. You might be able to make some sort of case for a sovereign wealth fund type setup, but you’d have to see what the return trade for that versus the returns of investing in your own countries’ people and infrastructure would be. Or the trade off of just reducing the money taken out of the economy (i.e. cutting taxes).

            2.2
            Despite accusations to the contrary, I think I’m being pretty little-c conservative here in what I’m saying. I’m not saying that QE’s success is evidence for the fact that we can do something radically beyond QE without any worry. But I do think we can continue to take baby steps in the same direction as needed and as conditions allow–i.e observed inflation remains low.

            FWIW, at least in the United States, I don’t think now is the time. Unemployment is very low, and inflation is finally starting to nudge up.

            The main points I’m trying to make is that:
            1) We don’t know what controls the rate of inflation. We aren’t even especially close to knowing. If someone tells you he does, check your wallet.
            2) Macroeconomics is not a morality play.There may well be moral and immoral choices to be made, but first we need to understand what is going on. And what’s going on is often highly counterintuitive. We can’t just extrapolate from 18th century Puritan notions of personal finance which aren’t even necessarily optimal even for households.

          • J Mann says:

            Well, if we have a 2% inflation target, then we’re going to do exactly as much monetization or demonetization as is required to hit that target.

            Assuming that you’re not proposing that we stop targeting inflation, then I guess the way to implement baby steps would be to move the inflation target up to 3 or 4 percent and see how much money we make.

            If we do the alternative (hey, let’s monetize $500B and see what happens to inflation), then we’ve given up inflation targeting, which is a pretty radical change.

    • cassander says:

      It doesn’t just prove too much, it’s demonstrably wrong, particularly in the UK, which actually did go bankrupt in its own currency in the 70s. Printing money is not an escape from debt, it’s just another method of default, paying people back in dollars (or pounds, whatever) that are worth less than they anticipated instead of paying back fewer than anticipated.

  22. albatross11 says:

    One of the unforseen positive impacts of the Middlebury fiasco (with Charles Murray being kept from speaking) is that there are people who aren’t white supremacists trying to engage with some of the important ideas of muggle realism. Sometimes the goal is to debunk those ideas; maybe it’s just to think them through properly. Often the goal is to salvage what the writers think are valuable mental tools or areas of research from being thrown away because those things seem to be the tools of the outgroup.

    This is an attempt to make a more careful statement about race, heritability of IQ, etc., by some people who aren’t remotely muggle-realists. In particular, this is a smarter version of the common (and silly) rhetoric that says race doesn’t exist and therefore shut up about race and IQ.

    A big thread in this article is that it would be very hard to really nail down evidence that the black/white IQ difference is genetic, and this seems plausible to me–trying to untangle genes vs environment in the American environment looks hard. My main qualm with their article is that it seemed to me, as a non-expert in the relevant fields, that equally strong arguments could be made for why it would be really hard to nail down evidence that the black/white IQ difference is environmental. That is, I think if we follow their approach, we have to end up saying that the evidence isn’t sufficient to make any confident statements about whether that IQ difference has a genetic component or not[1]. Otherwise, they’re engaging in an isolated demand for rigor, demanding enormously higher standards of evidence for a genetic hypothesis than for an environmental hypothesis. Someone who wanted to claim a genetic explanation could toss out equally-valid demands for rigor to undermine any environmental argument.

    [1] And indeed, that’s really close to what Herrenstein and Murray said in their book.

    • bintchaos says:

      Inheritance is complex.
      I think you have you have to make a distinction between molecular differences in brain biochemistry and symbolic and behavioral inheritance, as differentiated from genetic and epigenetic inheritance.

    • The Red Foliot says:

      Yet we have seen Taiwan and South Korea, for example, go from poor societies with populations that could barely survive to countries with some of the highest living standards in the world.9 Thus, there are probably better accounts than genetic ones for explaining geographic variation in standards of living and associated social outcomes, explanations such as institutional differences in the rule of law and so on. For now, research and theory suggest that genetic differences are a potential—but highly unlikely—explanation for national, racial, or ethnic differences in behavior and socioeconomic success, but such an explanation is a very difficult case to make.

      The reasoning here is distorted. What the observation shows is that genetic differences, if they exist, are overshadowed by other factors in their role in national economic success, not shown to be ‘highly unlikely’.

      Overall the article says that differences in racial genetics are difficult to determine due to confounders, but it doesn’t rule out the possibility of their existing or even show that they are unlikely.

      • albatross11 says:

        Steelmanning their argument: There’s a persistent thread of muggle-realist argument that says that the dire poverty in much of sub-Saharan Africa is largely genetic in origin–the folks there just aren’t smart enough to manage a better civilization than what they’ve got. South Korea and Taiwan demonstrate that the argument proves too much–both are places where a similarly-thinking muggle-realist in 1900 would have told us that those countries were poor because their natives simply didn’t have the inherent mental ability to do better. That implies that it’s not a great idea to assume that poverty and dysfunction in a country come from the inability of their people to manage better.

        The broader issue is that when you look at different races and measure their outcomes, that’s always observational. We know that there are a lot of ways that the lives of blacks and whites in the US, say, are really different. We can try to correct for some of them in our observational studies–try to match parents of similar socioeconomic status or income or education to see how their kids do, for example. But we have to recognize that we’ll *never* get all the differences in life experiences, and in fact, adding a lot of corrections for different things (or excluding all but a really carefully curated subset of participants in your study who are massively range-restricted) is a good way to get a statistical model that’s very complicated and can have a lot of subtly screwy assumptions built in. That’s one reason it’s hard to really have confidence in any assertion about a genetic basis for differences in stuff like IQ or school performance between blacks and whites.

        But like I said above, this isn’t just an argument that applies to genetic causes. It applies just as well to environmental or social causes. For example, if you want to assert that the IQ difference is caused by differences in culture and upbringing, I think you’ll have the same kinds of problems–you will never really be sure you’ve eliminated all the subtle and unsubtle confounding stuff that comes up comparing American blacks and whites.

        If you accept this line of argument, I think you should be bashing everyone who claims certainty that there is no genetic component to the black/white IQ difference just as hard as you bash Charles Murray.

        I’m skeptical that this is such an intractable problem that nothing can be done but to throw up our hands. Instead, I suspect we can get a pretty good idea of what’s going on from the available evidence, even though that will never 100% nail things down. But I don’t think we can do that very well unless we make the same demands for rigor of all sides of the argument.

        • The Red Foliot says:

          So what you’re saying is that, although there is undoubtedly evidence that ‘other factors’ than genetics greatly affect socioeconomic conditions of a country, there is no way to rule out the possibility that genetics may play an enabling role in allowing those ‘other factors’ to develop such as they do?

          So, for instance, Korean politics and culture played a great role in developing their country to its current state–but it’s impossible to determine that their politics and culture were utterly deterministic and not contingent on them having the right genes as well?

          That seems like a valid point, and indeed I don’t think the article above says anything against it.

        • Wrong Species says:

          There are 54 countries in Africa and not one of them is a first world country, other than perhaps Seychelles, which has no indigenous population. East Asia also started at a low spot and yet they all(with the notable exception of North Korea) seem to be converging with the West. Hell of a coincidence, isn’t it?

          • baconbacon says:

            East Asia also started at a low spot and yet they all(with the notable exception of North Korea) seem to be converging with the West. Hell of a coincidence, isn’t it?

            East Asia, why East Asia? Is it because if you just use Asia the comparison falls apart?

          • Nornagest says:

            Of course, the way exponential curves work, Africa could just have started a few years later and this kind of analysis wouldn’t uncover it.

            You need to look at the actual GDP graph to tell the difference, and when you do, some interesting data emerges: most of sub-Saharan Africa is economically flat for as far back as the data goes, averaging shallow declines 1975-2000 and shallow increases 2000-now. But there are some exceptions, and they don’t seem to be driven by ethnicity: compare Botswana to neighboring Zimbabwe.

          • Wrong Species says:

            @baconbacon
            No, it’s because East Asians are genetically and culturally distinct from other Asians.

            @Nornagest

            I don’t believe all economic differences can be reduced to genetics. Botswana is doing relatively better than Zimbabwe. They’re still not anywhere close to a Western European country.

          • Nornagest says:

            I’m more interested in the shape of the graph than whatever the present value happens to be, as that’s what determines whether convergence is possible. (Analogous to complexity classes in computer science, if you have training there.) Zimbabwe’s is a mess, and I don’t expect them to approach the West in the foreseeable future; Botswana’s looks a lot like China’s, and they might.

          • The Red Foliot says:

            @baconbacon, Wrong Species
            If you look at it socioeconomically, rather than racially, it makes sense. Lots of correlation there. But then it becomes impossible to say whether it’s the society perpetuating itself, or the society shaping the genes which then perpetuate the society.

          • Wrong Species says:

            Botswana’s GDP growth can change at any time. I wouldn’t count on the economy approaching first world status. We’ll see.

          • baconbacon says:

            @baconbacon
            No, it’s because East Asians are genetically and culturally distinct from other Asians.

            Where does this distinction end?

            Mongolia (GDP per capital of ~$4k per person, 4% growth rate) isn’t converging on the West), China’s PPP GDP per capita would put it 3rd on this list of African countries . Very quickly “all of East Asia” becomes “South Korea, Japan and Taiwan have Western level standards of living and China, Mongolia and North Korea don’t”.

          • The Red Foliot says:

            If you look at the extent to which societies penalized violent behavior in their past vs. the levels of violent behavior found in descendants of those societies today,
            or,
            The extent to which societies rewarded intelligence in their past vs. the levels of intelligence found in descendants of those societies today, you seem to find a huge amount of correlation.

            The nurture argument is less persuasive because the descendants of those societies are now dispersed across many foreign lands with foreign cultures, and their homeland cultures have altered radically as well (from how they were historically), yet they still seemingly fit the same pattern, regardless of where they’re dispersed to. If culture was the key then you’d expect a huge amount of variation across so many different cultures, but instead, you find only a little. Genetics is the only alternative explanation that accounts for such homogeneity across culturally disparate racial groups.

          • Wrong Species says:

            @baconbacon

            Don’t forget Hong Kong. Also, Singparore to a certain extent. It’s not East Asian geographically, but it does have a majority Chinese population in a similar way to the US and Canada being more similar to Europe than the Americas. I think everyone agrees that North Korea is as poor as it is because of its government. Like I said earlier, I don’t think all economic growth can be reduced to genetics. Command economies can severely depress a country’s wealth. China started later than the others and is following the exact same path. Now maybe you’ll object that there are countries in Sub-saharan Africa with high growth rates, which is true. But China has held these high growth rates for over 20 years while industrializing. That isn’t true in Africa. So it seems safe to say that China will join its neighbors in reaching first world status.

            That leaves Mongolia, which I’ll grant as a concession with two caveats. One is that they didn’t start liberalizing their market until the Soviet Union fell, putting them at disadvantage even compared to China. Two, they are on the periphery of East Asia, which makes them more of an edge case. I feel pretty confident that China will catch up with the rest of East Asia. I wouldn’t say the same about Mongolia. So every country in East Asia is either on the same path or has a communist government holding it back, with the possible exception of Mongolia. Meanwhile, even the best run Sub-Saharan African countries are poor while the region has barely, if at all, improved its economy relative to 50 years ago.

          • albatross11 says:

            Foliot:

            Thomas Sowell discusses this in his Culture books (Migrations and Culture, Race and Culture, Conquest and Culture). His take is that people bring their culture along with them, and lose it very slowly even when they’ve assimilated in most visible ways. This seems to me to be one intelligent alternative to a lot of muggle realist interpretations of the history of ethnic groups.

            I’m not convinced it catches everything, but it’s clearly a big part of the way the world works. For example, when German immigrants seem to end up running breweries in lots of different countries–that looks pretty convincingly like culture and path dependency. I’m a lot less clear on how culture could explain Jews being so heavily overrepresented in physics on both sides of the Atlantic, say.

          • baconbacon says:

            @ Wrong Species

            30 years ago it would have been a totally different story. It was “look at Hong Kong and Japan, clearly being a western protectorate state is the way to go….. and just kind of ignore South Korea, cause their GDP per capita isn’t so hot, but then again they are on the right track. Yeah China has had some growth, but they started from nothing and its only been a handful of years, Japan is about to overtake the US in total GDP!”

        • Anon. says:

          South Korea and Taiwan demonstrate that the argument proves too much–both are places where a similarly-thinking muggle-realist in 1900 would have told us that those countries were poor because their natives simply didn’t have the inherent mental ability to do better.

          Obviously no. The muggle realist would go and measure IQs in SK and Taiwan and correctly predict they would experience high growth in the future. Read Garett Jones.

    • Deiseach says:

      Part of the problem is that the African-American population in the USA is not a pure African population, there is a heavy (to one degree or another) admixture of white ancestry in there too. So how do you disentangle “intelligent white genes” from “less intelligent black genes” in that case, which is the danger most feared (i.e. that some people will take it to mean “intelligent white genes” and “less intelligent black genes”).

      So even if it could be shown that the average IQ of, say, the population of Chad was in the high 90s which is below the average IQ of the white population of the USA – what does that say about the rest of the continent of Africa? And does it have any bearing at all on the African-American population which probably has little to no ancestry derived from natives of Chad and a lot of ancestry derived from the various white immigrant populations in the USA?

      • The Red Foliot says:

        I think the trouble is that ‘race’ is socially constructed to be based on physical similarities only, so that whatever cognitive similarities there are are purely incidental to the method of sorting. That’s not to say there aren’t cognitive similarities, just that they aren’t inherent attributes to races. While it’s inconclusive, one might look at the evidence today and, on the basis of their own partial judgment, guess that blacks probably have slightly worse genes for intelligence than other races, on average. That is a fair, socially relevant assessment, but it isn’t necessarily a relevant one if you’re thinking about the evolutionary and migratory forces that could have shaped the distribution of group intelligence.

        Once you start thinking about those forces, it becomes necessary to delineate population groups in a different way, as the forces that shaped Chadian intelligence were undoubtedly different from those that shaped African Americans’, and grouping them together based on physical similarities is arbitrary.

        So that’s not to say that differences don’t exist, or that assessments of those differences are invalid, just that to go on to further reasoning you have to greatly refine your model.

        • Deiseach says:

          While it’s inconclusive, one might look at the evidence today and, on the basis of their own partial judgment, guess that blacks probably have slightly worse genes for intelligence than other races, on average.

          Still does not get around the problem of “if blacks have worse genes, what about African-Americans who do not have purely and solely black genes, they also have white genes in the mix”? Then you would have to argue that successful and intelligent African-Americans are those with a higher/greater proportion of white ancestry (and hence better white genes) and those who aren’t, have a greater inheritance of worse black genes, which is then not too different from “intra-population differences are greater, due to genetic variance, than inter-population differences” and we needn’t drag in ‘bad’ black genes versus ‘good’ white genes at all?

          • Nornagest says:

            For what it’s worth, “colorism” — favoritism given within the African-American community to individuals with lighter skin — is a thing, with its own politics that don’t usually make it to the ears of white folks. Doesn’t map one-to-one to European ancestry, but there is a correlation.

          • J Mann says:

            Has that issue been studied?

            Presumably, if the intra-group differences are mostly genetic, and if we could know the proportions of ancestry from people with ancestors in both groups, then we’d expect IQ to vary proportionately with IQ mix if the “mostly genetic” hypothesis holds out, and proportionately with some mix of appearance, ethnicity of custodial parents, ethnicity of neighborhood, etc. if the mostly environmental (and the environmental variable in question is racism) hypothesis holds out.

            Of course, if it’s mostly envirornmental (and the variable is something we haven’t thought of) or mixed, I’m not sure what happens.

        • cassander says:

          >I think the trouble is that ‘race’ is socially constructed to be based on physical similarities only, so that whatever cognitive similarities there are are purely incidental to the method of sorting.

          I don’t know what you think you mean by this, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t mean what you think it means.

          People cannot directly measure race, true, so we rely on heuristics like skin color. These are not completely accurate, but that doesn’t mean that race lacks biological reality. Yes, it’s perfectly possible, theoretically at least, to extract, say, the genes for darker skin and stick them in those of otherwise non-african descent, but that’s not how people have ever reproduced. Grouping people based on physical distinction is NOT arbitrary, it’s a reflection of much broader differences that simply aren’t visible.

        • albatross11 says:

          Race is an easy-to-observe socially-defined thing that correlates with genes, culture, environment, starting resources, etc. It’s also a thing that we care about w.r.t. antidiscrimination law, affirmative action programs, and claims of racism.

          In the US context, blacks’ ancestry is mostly from one area in Africa, and there’s a lot of shared culture and history that presumably drives all kinds of stuff we care about. This tends to get messed up when you look at immigrant blacks. For example, blacks who have immigrated from the Caribbean tend to do quite well relative to American-born blacks, and so do their kids, which makes an argument for culture being important. (On the other hand, immigration is a filter, so we may be getting a large fraction of the smartest, most driven Caribbean blacks coming to the US. Something like that is definitely going on with the population of Indians and Chinese in the US, for example.)

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            I think race is a common surrogate for ethnicity.

            That is, American WvB racism is actually about perceived ethnic difference, so Carribean blacks look like American blacks but have a clearly different accent, so that reflexes which are actually about ethnicity don’t get set off in whites.

            See also that Americans tend to be bewildered by ethnic hatred between groups that “look alike”.

        • I think the trouble is that ‘race’ is socially constructed to be based on physical similarities only, so that whatever cognitive similarities there are are purely incidental to the method of sorting.

          That isn’t quite right. The physical similarities are due to adaptation to a similar environment, so one would expect them to correlate to some extent with cognitive similarities due to adaptation to a similar environment.

          There are, of course, cases where the similarity is in only one feature of the environment, possibly relevant to physical or not cognitive (or vice versa). But that is likely to result in less physical similarity. SubSaharan Afrians and people from southern India and Australian aborigines all have dark skin, presumably an adaptation to a lot of sunlight, but are very different in other physical characteristics. We are, as a result, less likely to lump them into a single racial category than groups that are more similar.

      • Drew says:

        So even if it could be shown that the average IQ of, say, the population of Chad was in the high 90s which is below the average IQ of the white population of the USA

        To go further, even if we granted this, it’s not clear that it would make any kind of policy difference for Chad.

        When reading these arguments, I like to switch “genes that produce the potential for intelligence” for “genes that produce potential for athletic ability”. Athleticism obviously has a genetic component. There are some people who are held back by genetic limits. Genetics will show up among elite athletes.

        But the overwhelming majority of people are nowhere near their theoretic limits. Instead, my mile-time sucks because I don’t run consistently. I’ll get outrun by anyone who trains regularly, even if I have better genes.

        When we see population effects, I expect the major causal chain to be, “Genes make running appealing -> Person runs -> Person has high-athletic performance.”

        The same thing should be true about intellectual ability. “Genes make reading appealing -> Person reads -> Person can talk about complex subject.”

        So, even if we granted a 10-point difference, it’s not clear that it matters.

        An individual can still choose to spend their time reading, and (active-reader, bad genetics) is going to result in more skill than (no-active-reading, good genetics) for pretty much any real-world application.

        A big problem with the debate is that the left has bought into a silly false-dichotomy where we either believe that no effect exists, or believe that vast numbers of people are doomed.

        Without that dichotomy, the whole debate becomes as much of a mild academic exercise as “are there genetic differences in VO2 Max?”

        • Aapje says:

          A big problem with the debate is that the left has bought into a silly false-dichotomy where we either believe that no effect exists, or believe that vast numbers of people are doomed.

          To believe that racial IQ differences doom vast numbers of people, you already have to believe that people with low IQs have little economic value in modern society.

          As IQ is a normal distribution, without racial IQ differences you’d still have vast numbers of people who are economically worthless. They just won’t be disproportionately black.

          What I find rather disturbing is that quite a few leftists seem far more upset at an uneven racial distribution of the poor, rather than their total number.

          • What I find rather disturbing is that quite a few leftists seem far more upset at an uneven racial distribution of the poor, rather than their total number.

            Yes indeed. there seems to be a belief that being poor, or being treated badly by the police, or going to prison, is somehow inherently worse for the participants in these bad environments if it is disproportionately higher for a particular race. It’s not so bad if the cops beat you if you are White. But it’s been my impression that this mindset was mostly an American one. Is this true for similar partisans in Europe?

          • Aapje says:

            Europe consists of countries with different cultures and different situations, so it would be wrong to speak for all of them. In the Netherlands, my perception is that much of the black community is heavily into a narrative of oppression, very clearly based on US Anti-Racism. They use that terminology (regularly even without translating it) and frequently copy American claims even when they make little sense (my country never had domestic slavery, nor domestic segregation, nor racial disenfranchisement, nor racial redlining and the percentage of black people is far lower than in the US).

            In contrast, the much bigger Muslim community tends to be much more rational in my eyes, as they tend to focus on specific issues (like police profiling or job discrimination), without trying to fit it into a grand theory based on vilifying the oppressive, colonialist, sexist white man.

            I would say that the Dutch white left doesn’t buy into the SJ narrative anywhere near as much as the American white left, although those that do are trying to spread the message (and so do their opposition, so you have increased polarization). In my eyes, the far greater fault of a large part of Dutch white left is their elitism/neoliberalism, where they make choices that negatively impact the lower classes and then argue that this is just inevitable in a globalized world. They don’t seem to get that a very high level of globalization is itself a choice and that it’s actually very viable to make choices that limit the negative impact of globalization on the lower classes.

            I’ve never seen a discussion of potential racial IQ differences in the Dutch mainstream. Probably because real conservatism doesn’t exist in The Netherlands and the anti-Muslim/migrant debate centers around culture & religion, not economic issues.

            The Dutch white elite left is very strongly into gender quotas right now and I worry that they move into racial quotas in the future. It’s hard to explain why they aren’t already.

          • The Dutch white elite left is very strongly into gender quotas right now and I worry that they move into racial quotas in the future. It’s hard to explain why they aren’t already.

            Could that be because Dutch Blacks and Dutch Muslims tend to be pretty segregated populations, and so the elite Whites simply don’t notice them too often? I don’t really know much about demographics in the Netherlands, but that is my impression.
            Whereas of course genders are right there.

            But racial quotas are bound to happen sooner or later. Some protest entrepreneurial type will see that as something he can have an impact on, and will start egging on his compatriots.

          • As IQ is a normal distribution, without racial IQ differences you’d still have vast numbers of people who are economically worthless.

            At a tangent to the main discussion … . I don’t think one should assume that people with IQ noticeably below the mean are economically worthless, just (on average) worth less than people with higher IQ. This feels to me like a variant of the absolute advantage/comparative advantage mistake embedded in the common use of “competitive.”

          • Aapje says:

            @Mark V Anderson

            Sure, but people are also actually just looking at the numbers where if the percentage is not close to 50%, they get upset. They could easily get similarly upset if Muslim are not 6%. In fact, surveys even show that people tend to grossly overestimate the number of Muslims, so if anything, ‘they’ should be quite upset over working in mostly white work spaces.

            @DavidFriedman

            I think that there is a minimum wage reference in your comment that you are carefully not making explicit, yet you are also carefully not offering any alternative suggestions. 🙂

            Or you became a communist 😛

          • @DavidFriedman

            I think that there is a minimum wage reference in your comment that you are carefully not making explicit

            ???

            The term I was responding to was “economically worthless.” Someone who produces (say) $5/hour when the minimum wage is $6/hour isn’t economically worthless.

          • Aapje says:

            You can have different definitions of ‘economically worthless’:
            1. Produces nothing of value
            2. Produces less of value than the absolute minimum to live on
            3. Produces less of value than what society considers the absolute minimum

            You seem to use definition 1, however, as most people derive value from other people not dying, any human can earn some ‘sympathy money’ (like when begging). So I only consider 2 and 3 to be reasonable definitions. Furthermore, in any decent society, people are prevented from dropping under a minimum and if so, society would be better of without them (not suggesting that this ought to result in getting rid of them of course, but merely from a perspective of who is a net contributor vs who is not).

          • You can have different definitions of ‘economically worthless’:
            1. Produces nothing of value
            2. Produces less of value than the absolute minimum to live on
            3. Produces less of value than what society considers the absolute minimum

            I was using 1. I can see an argument for 2, on the grounds that someone who cannot produce as much as it takes to keep him alive is in some sense worthless on net to others. But have you thought about what 2 actually comes to?

            Real per capita income in the developed world at present is twenty to thirty times what the global average was through most of history, so you are talking about something easily an order of magnitude lower than current minimum wages.

            I don’t know what “society considers” means, society not being a person. Minimum wage laws are the result of a political process, not a moral judgement.

            Does it make sense to you to say that Bob is economically worthless and Bill is not when the only difference between them is that Bob lives in a country with a minimum wage of $10/hour and Bill in a country with a minimum wage of $5/hour?

          • Aapje says:

            @DavidFriedman

            Societies can make moral judgments too. They are just compromise morals laid down in policies, laws and social mores (which is not so different from personal morals, which are also often compromises and which tend to strongly influenced by the social context).

            Does it make sense to you to say that Bob is economically worthless and Bill is not when the only difference between them is that Bob lives in a country with a minimum wage of $10/hour and Bill in a country with a minimum wage of $5/hour?

            None of my three definitions featured the minimum wage, so your question doesn’t reflect what I argued.

            The minimum wage level is different from the welfare level because the former has a variety of (possible) purposes and effects, beyond pricing people with low productivity out of jobs. Welfare can be more reasonably be argued to be the level from definition 3.

            If:
            – society has decided that a person needs a monthly income of X
            – Bob is actually is only capable of earning X – 50 dollars
            – welfare is a minimal system that tops up the monthly income to X
            Then:
            – Bob costs society 50 dollars per month, which is more than 0, which is the economically neutral point.

            Of course, this is highly simplistic, because it assumes no taxes (pretty much everyone pays consumption tax) and doesn’t count the government services that the person consumes (pretty much everyone gets government benefits in kind). It’s also not a lifetime analysis, where in reality, people usually are very costly to society early and late in life.

            So realistically, one can probably argue that you need to pay a certain amount of taxes in your lifetime to be economically neutral.

          • None of my three definitions featured the minimum wage, so your question doesn’t reflect what I argued.

            A little further up the thread, you wrote:

            I think that there is a minimum wage reference in your comment that you are carefully not making explicit

            That’s why I was interpreting your point 3 as a reference to the minimum wage.

            If:
            – society has decided that a person needs a monthly income of X

            I still cannot make any sense out of “society has decided that a person needs a monthly income of X.”

            People in a society may believe that it is desirable to make sure everyone has an income of X, and if enough believe that it may happen. What does that have to do with “need”?

            If the argument is that anyone with an income below X is living a life not worth living, you would expect the same people to argue that, if welfare to level X can’t be arranged, poor people should be painlessly killed, which I don’t think is the position such people actually hold.

            – Bob is actually is only capable of earning X – 50 dollars
            – welfare is a minimal system that tops up the monthly income to X
            Then:
            – Bob costs society 50 dollars per month, which is more than 0, which is the economically neutral point.

            That seems an odd definition of “economically worthless.” Other people in the society choose to provide the welfare. The question is why:

            1. They are Becker altruists, who get utility from the utility of others and are spending money on the poor in order to raise their own utility.

            2. They are politicians who are buying the votes of the poor.

            3. They suffer disutility from knowing that other people are poorly off. The ideal solution for them would be for the poor to all drop dead, but since they have no practical or moral way of arranging that they choose the second best solution of welfare.

            3 looks like the only version in which the poor are in some sense producing negative value. Following out that line of argument you also have to conclude that atheists produce negative value in a religious society most of whose members strongly disapprove of atheism, homosexuals in a society with traditional views of homosexuality, … . It’s a logically consistent view–indeed, the view that Robert Bork propounded in an old article explaining why he was not a libertarian (not the way he put the argument)–but not one that many people are comfortable with.

          • Aapje says:

            @DavidFriedman

            This is just us arguing semantics, to quote Wikipedia:

            A need is something that is necessary for an organism to live a healthy life. Needs are distinguished from wants in that, in the case of a need, a deficiency causes a clear adverse outcome: a dysfunction or death. Needs can be objective and physical, such as the need for food, or psychological and subjective, such as the need for self-esteem. There are also needs of a social or societal nature.

            Plenty of people define ‘need’ less strictly than a lack of something resulting in death or a fate worse than death. For example, Henry Murray argued that humans have psychogenic needs, which if not met, result in psychological pain. I believe that this model is a fairly useful way to look at the world, as it seems clear to me that well-being requires far more than the physical well-being of the body.

            In general, you seem to desire fairly hard definitions, which are less culturally dependent. While I respect this desire for solid underpinnings, such demand for rigor can obscure reality if true, but fuzzy models are rejected as being inconvenient, because one cannot draw many hard conclusions from them.

            3 looks like the only version in which the poor are in some sense producing negative value.

            I think that we all experience both utility and disutility from others, which is correlated to their poverty, but certainly not strictly. But my point is more that societies have a definition of minimum standards for well-being, which can simplistically be expressed in purely economic terms. If we assume a theoretical society where anyone earns this amount of money, we don’t need welfare and all government spending is ‘extra’ (when compared to the minimum that people consider necessary). Such a society would presumably be ancap Utopia, as the lack of need for redistribution means that the free market can supply all needs (well, if we ignore the other problems of ancap). However, anyone who isn’t able to earn the amount of money to pay for the minimum standards for well-being requires money to be spent on welfare and thus reduces the pool of ‘extra’ money.

            In hindsight, ‘economically worthless’ is not really a very good term for this, but I do think that many people agree with the basic concept that some people are a ‘drain on the system*.’

            * Which is a rather negative way to put it, implying that these people are the problem, rather than the system

          • Plenty of people define ‘need’ less strictly than a lack of something resulting in death or a fate worse than death.

            I, on the other hand, regard “need” as a word that ought to be eliminated from political discourse, since it has no useful meaning. It’s used to imply that some wants are infinitely more important than others, usually with the further implication that the existence of those wants is objectively determinable. Both claims seem to me obviously false.

            We observe humans routinely trading off trivial benefits against life–not generally against a certainty of dying but against a very small increased probability of dying. Do you regard such acts as clearly a mistake, something nobody should do? If not, are you not conceding that all wants, including the want for life, are on the same scale of value, hence that the distinction between needs and wants makes no sense?

          • bintchaos says:

            sheesh
            its a complex adaptive systems problem.
            P[dying] convolved with P[survival] convolved with P[reproducing]

          • Aapje says:

            @DavidFriedman

            I agree that needs and wants are pretty much interchangeable, for some definitions of ‘need’ and ‘want’.

            I don’t actually need to live, for example. I want to…

            In general, ‘need’ only makes sense if you already accept a goal, which makes it subjective and thus a ‘want’ more than a cosmically necessary thing, like a law of nature. Unless you believe that we have no free will, I guess.

  23. NIP says:

    The time has finally arrived! Back in…February, I think? I dropped a link to a Holocaust revisionist documentary that I had found on YouTube. Predictably, it wrinkled a lot of people’s sprinkles. Various commenters accused me of trolling or posting in bad faith, without any intent to have a real discussion. A few were curious, but all agreed that ain’t nobody got time to sit and watch a four-hour documentary on a controversial topic at the prompting of an infrequent commenter.

    Then Said Achmiz suggested, in a heartwarming gesture of good faith and respect for free speech, that if I were really serious about having a discussion about this film, that I should make a transcript of it and host it on a website so that everyone could read it at their leisure, since SSC’s commentariat are generally more reading than visual-oriented. Various commenters agreed that if I did this, they’d read it and give it a chance. So, taking them at their word, I did just that. I had never so much as toyed with HTML or CSS before, but with the assistance of a few people (who know who they are and who have my sincerest thanks), I managed to cobble together what I consider to be a passable imitation of a website, on which I am hosting the transcript of the film along with various screenshots, links to sources, and commentary/clarifications by yours truly.

    For those who’ve been waiting for this, and for those who haven’t but may be curious, I now invite you to go to my website – but before you do, keep a few things in mind.

    First, this is my first website, so please try to be understanding of any errors I may have missed and be gentle with feedback (though if you notice anything I need to fix, please tell me!) The site should function correctly on mobile devices, but then again, it may not. In any case, it “Works On My Machine”, and will probably work fine on laptops and desktops.

    Secondly, the free webhosting service I’ve been using has been experiencing just enough issues to make me worry, but not enought to stop using it, in the form of 403, 500 and 502 errors related to the seemingly constant maintenance they’re performing on one network node or another. Service has been much better in the last week (apparently they finished some major changes) so I’m optimistic, but if you get one of these errors while trying to view my site, I apologize but can’t help you. You’ll just have to wait and try again later. I’ve been working on getting a WordPress blog up, but it’s not finished, so if for some reason everyone is telling me they can’t view my site, I’ll try this again in another open thread when my WordPress blog is done.

    Third and last, I want you to know that I do take this topic seriously and that I worked very hard over several months to accomodate the commentariat here so that we could have this discussion. As I mentioned, I’m taking you all at your word that you’d be willing to read the transcript and have a calm, reasoned conversation on the subject of Holocaust revisionism. If you wish to take part in the discussion, please show me the same courtesy I’ve shown you and read the transcript in its entirety before commenting. Contribute to discussion by making calm, specific criticism or comments related to the content of the transcript. If you don’t want to do this, then please just…don’t comment! No one is forcing you to be part of this discussion.

    Without further ado, here is a link to my website. Give it a thorough read and then come back and let’s all discuss our thoughts (take your time; not only is it very long, meaning I won’t expect many replies right away, but I’m gonna go to sleep after posting this, as I’ve been awake for over 24 hours just so I could get the first post EDIT: and still missed it, lol). Is there any credence whatsoever to revisionist arguments, or are they all insane bigots? Is the truth somewhere in between? Whatever the answer, I think we can hash it out in a mature, civil manner.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      As detailed here, this thread is /pol/ trolling us by trying to get us to look into this stuff. Please don’t feed the trolls. Also, NIP is banned.

      • Leit says:

        Hmm. Reading that, I don’t get the impression of trolling at all. I see that he’s put sincere effort into trying to convince people here of something he believes is correct, and in learning new skills to present that information. There’s no suggestion of insincerity, the OP defends the commenters here as reasonable and your ban policy as based on rules-breaking rather than POV, and he has been engaging apparently in good faith in the comments further down.

        Seeing this makes me inclined to stop bothering with SSC at all, because this does look like some sort of cultural sacred cow that you’re banning based on a thread that you haven’t bothered to actually skim, much less read, simply based on where it was posted.

        Christ, Scott, what the hell?

        • gbdub says:

          Did you read the /pol/ thread? Scott’s description is accurate – this is explicitly admitted trolling.

          • registrationisdumb says:

            Given that something as innocuous as innocuous and obviously true as HBeeDee is banned here, I’m not surprised Scott would ban other things that go against his personal worldview.

            It is obvious he wants an echochamber here.

          • Anonymous says:

            It is obvious he wants an echochamber here.

            My assessment is that he wants the intersection of “echo chamber” and “diversity of thought”. You can disagree, so long as Scott doesn’t care about the subject! 😉

          • albatross11 says:

            He tabooed the term, not the ideas, which have been discussed extensively, including in this thread.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Kind of a long op. Impressive in a way.

          • Aapje says:

            Impressive and kinda sad.

            The guy did a lot of work for very little pay off. Just because he thinks that the (((Illuminati))) are hanging out on SSC.

          • rlms says:

            It’s quite funny really that this was all a Machiavellian plot to “redpill” the movers and shakers of the SSC comments section.

            However, I think it might be worthwhile to have a genuine discussion about Holocaust denial without a troll pushing one side. It’s useful to see that stupid things can be convincingly argued for if you pick your facts carefully. I also worry slightly that this means anyone can censor SSC discussion of a topic by making a plan on /pol/ to troll us about the topic. Hopefully there aren’t many people who want to do that.

          • Randy M says:

            It’s useful to see that stupid things can be convincingly argued for if you pick your facts carefully.

            https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/14/abraham-lincoln-necromancer/

          • Leit says:

            I did. Did you?

            Nowhere was trolling implied or admitted. Unless you consider getting their heterodox view in front of the posters here and then arguing in favour of it in order to try and influence them to be trolling. And I mean, trying to influence others is kind of the point of many of the discussions here.

            I’d accept if Scott didn’t want certain types of influence – he’s already banned on that basis – but dismissing an apparently earnest poster as a troll on the strength of the existence of a thread on 8ch where said poster says nothing about being insincere… that’s rather poor.

            Basically, it comes off as a “no-one could seriously hold this belief” discreditation with a thin justification.

          • rlms says:

            @Leit
            NIP’s comments here are written from the perspective of someone with an open mind about Holocaust denial and no motive other than truth-seeking, the posts on the /pol/ thread suggest they have already made up their mind and are trying to persuade others.

            They describe themselves as “not a Nazi” in a comment here, and describe SSC as “k*ked to and run by a literal k*ke” (I assume Scott would prefer not to have his blog appear in search results for this racial slur, so I’ve censored it). That seems insincere to me.

          • gbdub says:

            If deliberately misrepresenting yourself on one forum, then going onto another forum to brag about what you’ve done and the shitstorm you created, and further recruiting additional people to lurk and create another shitstorm, all while referring to the first forum’s host using racial slurs, is not trolling, then nothing is.

            Also, given NIP’s deliberate attempt to recruit additional holocaust deniers to join up for the express purpose of “tactically redpilling” this forum, I’m going to be unusually suspicious of any rare or recently added commenters in this thread, and would encourage others to do the same. Apologies to any innocents caught up in this.

          • Jiro says:

            It’s not quite trolling in the normal sense. It’s concern trolling, a comparison I pointed out before Scott linked /pol to prove it’s concern trolling.

            And it has a lesson to teach for the concern trolling stuff at the top of this thread, which is here at the same time as a Nazi concern troll by pure coincidence.

            Yes, in theory, an argument’s facts and logic are right or wrong regardless of the source. No, the world doesn’t work that way, because believing the other person’s argument depends on his credibility and his judgment, not just his facts and logic. Also, you’re an imperfect human who probably can’t rebut every single logically flawed argument out there, so if the source is unusually likely to produce flawed arguments, it may not be worth listening to him.

            Concern trolling is real. Motivated reasoning is real too. People’s motivations for arguing matter.

          • ebil_nahzee says:

            >this is explicitly admitted trolling

            No it most certainly isn’t. You might feel that it is implicitly admitted trolling, but there is nothing explicit about it. He was genuinely trying to discuss something that you really can’t discuss anywhere else. We warned him in the previous /pol/ threads that there was nothing rational about you guys and this was the response he would get, but he was insistent that you would be reasonable and stick purely to the facts. Good job proving us right.

          • onyomi says:

            “Concern trolling” is a bad concept. The only time I can see it being applicable is when someone is genuinely arguing in bad faith. And we already have a term for that. It’s called “arguing in bad faith.” Which is not what happened here.

            If you want to say “sorry, I’m not going to consider your arguments because it’s a waste of my time because the probability they are valid is too low,” then fine.

            If you want to say “sorry, I’m not going to consider your arguments because the probability you are arguing in good faith, based on my past experiences with you/people like you, is too low,” then fine.

            If Scott wants to say “sorry, I just don’t want any discussion of this anathema topic on my blog, even polite, nice discussion,” then that’s perfectly understandable.

            But to say “ah hah! you were just plotting to convince me of this evil thing you believe by politely presenting me with evidence for it! Good thing I caught you on this other page sneakily saying how you were going to… try to convince me of this evil thing you believe by politely presenting evidence for it” seems bizarre.

            The arguments themselves may or may not be bad for reasons of Gish Gallop or whatever. I haven’t read them.

            The arguer may or may not be worth listening to, and it also makes sense to say “I’ve got no time to listen to antisemites from /pol/” (though if you’re surprised that’s what NIP turned out to be, I don’t think you were paying attention months ago). If the ban is for associating with horrible people (I think most of the really awful posts linked are not by NIP himself, except the top one and the one with “cash money”), then say it’s for associating with horrible people.

            But the idea of “don’t be fooled by his attempt to politely, nicely present you with evidence and arguments for his evil viewpoints… the politeness and the niceness are just an act! As proved by the fact that he believes something evil and has evil friends and therefore cannot possibly argue for anything sincerely” seems highly pernicious to me because it creates a tool for unfalsifiably dismissing anything you don’t agree with.

            To take a less inflammatory example, imagine a regular SSC poster comes on SSC to say “hey guys, I’ve been posting on this social justice board where they have a really strong commitment to anti-Muggle Realism, but they also seem very reasonable and committed to careful evaluation of evidence, so I spent a bunch of time putting together this elaborate presentation to convince them of the truth of Muggle Realism! Let’s hope they see the light!” Then, on the said SJ board, the SSC poster gets banned for being a troll after someone finds his SSC posts clearly indicating his intent to try to convince them of something evil.

            After all, Muggle Realism is evil. Therefore no one could sincerely, nicely, politely offer arguments in its favor–especially if it turns out they indicated their intent to do so elsewhere!

            Actually, this reminds me of the problem with “Sacred Principles as Exhaustible Resources.” Basically, you can only fight for free speech if you didn’t intend to fight for free speech. You can only present arguments for something awful if you didn’t intend to convince anyone.

          • Jiro says:

            “X is evil” is one of those things which isn’t universally right or wrong–it depends on what X is. So Nazis are evil and muggle realists aren’t–because “proof by grammatical similarity” is not proof. Yes, anyone can be called evil, but that doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as evil, it just means that true things can sound a lot like false things.

            Plenty of people get accused of being Communists or fascists, including people who are not actually Communists or fascists. Are those terms just ways of unfalsifiably disagreeing with someone, or are they terms which are misused, but also have real meanings? People even get called “liars” who aren’t. Obviously calling someone a liar is a way of unfalsifiably disagreeing with someone, just like “evil”, right?

          • skef says:

            To take a less inflammatory example …

            Or on the other hand, we could consider a more inflammatory example. There is concern on the other site that this one is “k*ked to hell and run by a literal k*ke”. Setting aside the inflammatory language, this statement has some factual support! If it can be fully supported that would be good to know, as those not yet k*ked to hell might want to intellectually protect themselves. I don’t myself see the forum as k*ked to hell, but of course I’m a f*gg*t. Like, extentionally a f*gg*t. So I suppose anything I might say on the matter is questionable at best.

            What do you think, onyomi? Is the forum k*ked to hell? What factors do you see as counting for and against the proposition?

          • dndnrsn says:

            @onyomi

            Is not “well guys I found this thing, and I don’t know what to think of it, so what do you think” bad faith when it’s false? If someone says they believe in Horrible Banned Discourse, and gives their reasons why, and so on – compare that to someone coming on and talking about how they have stumbled across this stuff about IQ, and so on, and what do people think of it – does the latter not involve at least some degree of bad faith? I may not be remembering whatever OT it was back when correctly, though.

            Ironically, someone just showing up here and saying they were a Holocaust denier or a gas chamber denier or whatever and seeking argument would probably not have been banned for trolling. Someone can believe things that are some combination of incorrect and morally wrong, without acting in bad faith.

            I find myself amused by the parallelism of neo-Nazis or whatever saying that SSC has a significant commie population who supposedly complain SSC is too right-wing; meanwhile, the commies are saying that SSC is full of fascists (who, presumably, complain SSC is too left-wing). Also that we’re “socialites.”

            (side note: neither Horrible Banned Discourse nor Death Eaterism is actually banned here, @registrationisdumb. The terms are banned, for whatever reason or combination of reasons.)

          • onyomi says:

            @Jiro

            But the accusation I’m disputing here is insincerity. I see no evidence that NIP was insincere. My problem with the idea of “concern trolling” is that it seems to allow you to assume insincerity on the basis of horribleness of the belief alone.

            Like if I were arguing with an admitted Stalin apologist and then discovered that same poster on a different board saying “look at all this evidence I’ve amassed in my quest to convince onyomi Stalin wasn’t so bad” then I would take that as evidence of sincerity, not insincerity.

          • onyomi says:

            @Dndnrsn

            Is not “well guys I found this thing, and I don’t know what to think of it, so what do you think” bad faith when it’s false?

            Yes, I can agree with you here, and to the extent NIP pretended to have been neutral on the question and just kind of exploring it for the heck of it, then yeah, that was arguably disingenuous.

            But like I said above, it always seemed clear to me who NIP was, and it didn’t seem to me like he exerted much effort to hide it. After all, how many people who truly have no opinion on the matter are going to expend hours and hours transcribing a documentary arguing for a thing and then setting up a website devoted to it? How many people from /pol/ who just happen to be interested in this are just kind of neutrally exploring the idea?

            I mean, he basically came on here months ago and said “hey guys, who’s interested in reading a transcription of a documentary on X??” and some people (not I) said “me!” Then everyone acts surprised to learn he’s a sneaky Xer interested in making arguments for X?

          • AnonYEmous says:

            But like I said above, it always seemed clear to me who NIP was, and it didn’t seem to me like he exerted much effort to hide it.

            I didn’t feel this way, and more importantly I didn’t want to believe this, because it suggests that there is no room for neutral truth-seeking

            and who knows, maybe there isn’t. But if not, well, that’s a depressing notion.

            so yeah, glad he got the boot.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @onyomi

            As I recall, it was “hey, found this Youtube video”, and “make a dang transcript ain’t nobody got time to watch that” was the logical response. The trope of “oh hey guys, just happened to come across this thing, 100% neutral, what do people think” is not a new thing, and thus cause for suspicion, but assuming good faith is supposed to be part of the culture around here, right? So jumping straight to “you’re being sneaky, you sneaky Nazi” was not the immediate response. And the offsite “descending into the lair of the enemy, to do battle with them” thing was evidently noticed overnight.

            I’m of the view that Holocaust denial falls apart when viewed in the context of real historical scholarship (and not your grade 10 history teacher putting Schindler’s List on instead of teaching). The strategy of “you can’t talk about that” doesn’t work very well in the age of the internet – we’ve seen that with a whole bunch of things. I’ve never seen a Holocaust denier do more than throw stones at a few bits of dubious eyewitness testimony (for which “vast conspiracy” is not the most parsimonious explanation) and attack details of certain camps in Poland – eg I’ve never seen any of them provide alternate theories to the mass shootings by the Einsatzgruppen in the East, or provide a coherent explanation as to what exactly happened to all those people if they weren’t shot/gassed/starved/worked to death (“oh, they were just shot/starved/worked to death” is a bizarre position to hold, since it’s hardly less monstrous). Unfortunately, this was just another case of the former.

            What I find puzzling is that someone would put so much effort into it, especially when it’s more of the same low-quality stuff the internet’s already got reams of, and not do a better job of the false-flag component. (Perhaps it’s part of some vast conspiracy?)

          • onyomi says:

            @AnonYEmous

            I didn’t feel this way, and more importantly I didn’t want to believe this, because it suggests that there is no room for neutral truth-seeking

            and who knows, maybe there isn’t. But if not, well, that’s a depressing notion.

            I mean, when Scott wrote his consequentialist FAQ or non-libertarian FAQ, was he engaged in neutral truth seeking? Did he have no opinion on consequentialism or libertarianism when he began to write? And should he have? Did the fact that he wrote a consequentialist FAQ turn out to mean he was unwilling to ever consider an anti-consequentialist argument in the future?

          • onyomi says:

            @Dndnrsn

            As I recall, it was “hey, found this Youtube video”, and “make a dang transcript ain’t nobody got time to watch that” was the logical response. The trope of “oh hey guys, just happened to come across this thing, 100% neutral, what do people think” is not a new thing, and thus cause for suspicion, but assuming good faith is supposed to be part of the culture around here, right?

            Well, okay, if that was the impression he gave then that was disingenuous, though as someone who believes many things others would react very badly to elsewhere (including IRL), I guess I can sympathize with not coming right out and announcing one’s abhorrent beliefs very explicitly. Like if I were discussing tax policy with a friend who I know is a mainstream Democrat, the first sentence out of my mouth isn’t “well, I’m a libertarian who thinks taxation is theft, but… have you considered this argument?” (though I also make no bones about my views even discussing them IRL, which is maybe why I tend to just shut up when politics comes up IRL).

          • AnonYEmous says:

            I mean, when Scott wrote his consequentialist FAQ or non-libertarian FAQ, was he engaged in neutral truth seeking?

            If he wasn’t, then he wasn’t claiming to be either.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @onyomi:
            I have a clear memory of NIP presenting their self as a complete neophyte on the question, but having watched the video they found it compelling. They also in the OP said they did not want people to just reject out of hand but wanted people to comment on it only if they watched the whole four hour video (which then led to a request for a transcript).

            I’m not surprised they were lying, but that I (and others) didn’t buy their lies doesn’t make them any more truthful.

          • onyomi says:

            @HBC

            That’s not really how I remember it, but okay, maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention.

            I guess the bigger question is: people around here, myself, and, I think, you included, put a lot of stock in niceness and politeness. I tend to feel I can have a conversation with anyone about anything if they are willing to be nice and polite. I may decide at some point it’s not worth my time, but I won’t just dismiss them as I would someone engaging in ad hominem, etc.

            This raises the following problem: niceness and politeness can easily be interpreted as evidence for dishonesty or deceptiveness if the other side is pre-convinced you are evil.

            Which is not to say there’s no difference between nice, polite, honest and nice, polite, dishonest. In some ways, the latter is probably more dangerous than anyone since it’s harder to dismiss it as mere emotional flaming. And to the extent NIP was being dishonest, I support banning him for dishonesty, but not for nice, polite dishonesty.

            Which is my problem with “concern trolling” as a concept. If the problem is duplicity, disingenuousness, bad faith, etc. then accuse someone of duplicity, bad faith, etc. But don’t cultivate a prior which says niceness and politeness correlate with bad faith because I don’t think they do.

          • Jiro says:

            But don’t cultivate a prior which says niceness and politeness correlate with bad faith because I don’t think they do.

            It’s not necessarily that they correlate, but that they don’t anti-correlate. If 100% of the nice Holocaust deniers are arguing in bad faith, and 100% of the rude ones are arguing in bad faith, then that’s no correlation at all.

            Holocaust denial is so poorly supported by history and so often motivated by evil and done in bad faith that listening to arguments for it is a waste of time, whether polite or not. It’s just like listening to arguments for perpetual motion machines or homeopathy or creationism or 2+2=5, except replacing “evil” with “deluded” or “ignorant”.

          • onyomi says:

            @Jiro

            As I said:

            If you want to say “sorry, I’m not going to consider your arguments because it’s a waste of my time because the probability they are valid is too low,” then fine.

            If you want to say “sorry, I’m not going to consider your arguments because the probability you are arguing in good faith, based on my past experiences with you/people like you, is too low,” then fine.

            But there’s a difference between not listening because you assume the likelihood of good faith is too low based on past experience, and actually accusing someone of bad faith. If, as others have said, NIP pretended to be neutral on the issue while actually have a strong agenda, then fine, ban him for demonstrated duplicity. But don’t ban him for duplicity on the theory that it’s impossible to argue for x in good faith, just because few have done so in the past. That seems like a recipe for epistemic disaster.

            For example, if someone says “hey guys, check out this 100,000 word essay I wrote on why 2+2=5,” I think it’s good practice to say “not interested; probability of being right is too low to be worth my time.” I don’t think it’s good practice to say “haven’t read it, but I know you’re deluded because it’s impossible to believe that without being deluded.”

            Similarly, if someone says “hey guys, check out this long philosophical treatise I wrote on why rape is ethical,” it’s good practice to say “nope, probability you are arguing in good faith and not just trying to justify something evil is too low, so not worth my time.” It’s not good practice to say “nope, you’re evil, because no one who’s not evil could argue that case, and I don’t listen to evil people.”

            Triage is about treating the patients you think have the best chance of survival, not killing the ones you think don’t.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @onyomi

            I’m not sure there was much niceness or politeness going on either. This is Scott’s place, and showing up and putting on a nice face while calling the host ethnic slurs elsewhere is the opposite of nice and polite.

            The lies about factual matters (rather than about motivation) didn’t help either – eg, the Germans kept plenty of paperwork relating to the Aktion Reinhard camps. What happened at those camps is not attested solely eyewitness testimony.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @onyomi:

            Here is the comment where they introduced the video.

            I stumbled upon a video a year or two ago which is critical of (a specfic part of) the Holocaust narrative. Now, prior to this I had had little interest in the Holocaust as a historical subject.

            -I am not a “Holocaust denier” or an anti-semite, nor have I ever been. The contents of the video I’m about to share with you have not caused me to become either of these things. What they have done is cause me to become interested in critically re-examining the conventional narrative of the Holocaust. I hope the same will be true for you.

            The implications of this video, if true, are extremely disturbing to me, and it’d be nice to hear someone else’s perspective. Please don’t presume that I’ve made up my mind on anything or that I’m coming at this topic with an axe to grind or with prejudice.

            So, I guess make up your own mind, but given the /pol/ thread Scott linked, that all seems highly-disingenuous to me.

            And this all pattern matches with a general type of disingenuous argumentation. As soon as one has been exposed to this form of argumentation, one realizes what a ethically crappy form of argumentation it is, how it is designed to pick off those most prone to common biases (and therefore it is ineffective to pattern match to to this). So, one takes care not to appear to engage in this form of argumentation.

            So, if I see the quack, and the walk, and the swim, I am going to be very wary of that being a duck I am dealing with.

            Sure, some people innocently stumble on all the markers without being a duck. But, from a Bayesian perspective, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t assign a high-prior to “duck”.

          • Deiseach says:

            Well, if NIP is a troll, they’re the most civilised troll I’ve encountered! Shame if this is all an elaborate sting; I thought the linked videos and transcript were pure fruitcake, but NIP did seem on the face of it to be engaging with us in good faith.

            Another reminder, as if I needed one, that every time I think I’ve finally become cynical enough – no, I really haven’t.

            🙁

          • danred76 says:

            I came here from that thread. (I’ll probably get the banhammer too) No one from /pol/ really cares about this place. Except for our mutual NIPpon friend who for whatever reason thought this site was worth debating. He’s not trying to troll and in the minds of any anon who does come here they probably don’t have that in mind either. They are most likely here to argue in good faith. There probably are some trolls who come along with that but hey, it’s the internet first and foremost and this site comes secondary to the rules of the land.

            the posts on the /pol/ thread suggest they have already made up their mind and are trying to persuade others

            And are you saying that all the posters or even just a good portion of the posters here don’t have the same disposition on different subects? Others here haven’t “made up their mind and are trying to persuade others” on anything they talk about? Awfully disingenuous to be honest. But I’m just beating a scarecrow here, don’t insult us.

            If deliberately misrepresenting yourself on one forum, then going onto another forum to brag about what you’ve done and the shitstorm you created, and further recruiting additional people to lurk and create another shitstorm, all while referring to the first forum’s host using racial slurs, is not trolling, then nothing is.

            Also, given NIP’s deliberate attempt to recruit additional holocaust deniers to join up for the express purpose of “tactically redpilling” this forum, I’m going to be unusually suspicious of any rare or recently added commenters in this thread, and would encourage others to do the same. Apologies to any innocents caught up in this.
            As to your first claim, as far as I remember, NIP did no such thing as insult Scott and in fact defended him several times. I however did laugh at the extent of his stereotypes and may have insulted him but I honestly can’t remember and have no interest in reading through my posts again or that thread in general. He also certainly did not show up to brag about any “shitstorm”, that too is disingenuous and and an insult to NIP. He did however come to “recruit” but not to lurk and create a shitstorm. To foment discussion, as he has repeatedly asked of us to follow Scott rules and not insult as we please which is very difficult by the way. We refer to each other using racial slurs regardless of whether or not we even know what race the insutee is thank you very much.
            As to the second half, do you expect to have a fruitful conversation on this topic without earnest holocaust deniers? Isn’t the point of this site to engage in discussion of topics with opinions that would be looked down upon in Scott’s social circles. Free discussion of anything and all that? I didn’t realize the rules for this site stated “holocaust deniers allowed”. You seem to outright supporting this place acting as a hugbox concerning actually taboo subjects which is ridiculous at best.

            I honestly doubt this comment will be seen at all considering how late I am to even show up and I may end up banned for all this anyway, but I suppose it hardly matters. I will say this though that from what I’ve read of these comments, and I only picked out a very few, this place suffers from two things. Names, which create ego and reputation which is attached to posts and therefore causes the reader to have a preconceived response to the content based on that identity attached to it, and this rule of politeness. Certainly this second grievance is nothing more than personal opinion and an argument could be made that the first is as well, but the fact of the matter is that from what I’ve seen here, many of the resident posters must be extremely thinned skinned. Forgive me for saying this but in all the years I’ve spent on imageboards I’ve seen more fruitful argument come from anonymous posters slinging racial slurs and ad-homs in the same breath as a long well thought out post. Here’s the question I’ll leave you all with if anyone has even bothered to stick around to read this. Which site has the freedom to speak about anything they want? SSC, where certain words are banned. Or the site Scott so graciously linked in his divine post? And bear in mind while /pol/ will treat you like a whipping boy for having a different opinion, especially on certain topics you won’t be banned unless you picked a bad time and the board is in the midst of a raid. Also the marxists and left-leaning individuals left of their own volition and were not banned and forced out. Their arguments were hilarious, they would lose constantly and they would become asshurt when insulted which just adds fuel to the fire so they made their own board with furries and traps.

          • AnonYEmous says:

            As to your first claim, as far as I remember, NIP did no such thing as insult Scott and in fact defended him several times.

            I mean, he defended him by substituting greater insults by lesser insults, and arguing that some of the insults applied generally to everywhere.

            just popping in to say that, not replying to the remainder, no offense

        • skef says:

          Set aside the question of trolling. However unpleasant conversation here can sometimes get, the participants are generally treating each other as ends, not means. The premise of this exercise is apparently that the people who talk here might be used as widgets in a process of influencing further people who, you know, might actually matter.

          Can you really not see that distinction and it’s relevance?

      • cactus head says:

        I think it’s worth honestly engaging with the material even if over on the /pol/ thread people (including the OP!) are shitposting about subverting and redpilling rationalists. If the holocaust did not happen, I desire to believe that the holocaust did not happen, etc. 😛 I also don’t think banning the OP so quickly is a good way of handling this situation. Quite a few commenters here were interested in the discussion taking place. NIP should be given more of a chance to respond to the replies here, if for no other reason than the sheer amount of time and effort it took for him to write the transcript.

        Also,

        >implying /pol/ is one person

        • Anonymous says:

          >implying /pol/ is one person

          Probably the same person as the infamous hacker – “Anonymous”!

      • Said Achmiz says:

        Hmm. Well, this was very disappointing. :\

        Edit: I mean, I’m disappointed that NIP turned out to be a troll after all (not that Scott banned him). Not very surprised, but disappointed.

        Edit2: And an antisemitic troll, at that. Very sad!

      • dndnrsn says:

        Generally speaking (less aimed at our host than a general question): what is the right thing to do when someone is trolling/pulling a Gish Gallop, and making false claims? Is it better to ignore, or to contradict falsehoods? The former may make you complicit; the latter may prove of value to bystanders, and prevents the conspiratorial claim “look, they’re suppressing what we’re saying; they must have something to hide.” Because there are certainly some false claims being made below.

        • John Schilling says:

          If they are trolling as politely as NIP did, in a forum where you would normally respond to honest argument, it is probably worth charitably addressing a few of their strongest claims and then bowing out with something along the lines of “…and I hope this explains why I don’t agree with your position, but I really don’t have time to address it further at this time”.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Something where the person doing it certainly spends more time than the people responding doesn’t seem like classic trolling. But dealing with Gish Gallops is annoying – the effort needed to address a string of half-truths and falsehoods is annoying, and I’m not sure anybody’s going to be convinced of anything.

            EDIT: additional thought: it is really bad that what the average person learns about the Holocaust is the “Hollywood version” that is prey to this sort of thing. An actual scholarly version tracking the progression of the Holocaust from shootings in Poland in ’39 to larger and larger shootings in the East in ’41 to death camps in that year and later is far more interesting and robust.

          • Matthew S. says:

            If one is operating specifically in rationalist space, there is already a relevant SOP for this situation. You ask them, “What sort of evidence would cause you to change your mind?” If they give you an answer, it will probably be limited in scope to their strongest claims anyway.

            (In the case of Holocaust denial, this might include linking to some of the Nazi archives which have been digitized and put online, although given that they ask you to acknowledge you have a legitimate research interest when logging in, because of privacy concerns for the victims and their descendants, I’m not sure how I feel about pointing trolls in that direction.)

            If they refuse to offer any answer, they’ve essentially conceded the argument, and one should treat the subject as closed.

          • Jiro says:

            You ask them, “What sort of evidence would cause you to change your mind?” If they give you an answer, it will probably be limited in scope to their strongest claims anyway.

            That’s bad practice.

            1) Epistemic learned helplessness makes it a bad idea to change your mind after hearing evidence but before seeing if other people can poke holes in the evidence.

            2) If he says that, he invites you to find loopholes in his description of what evidence can satisfy him. Humans aren’t perfect at describing such things, so there’s a good chance you’ll find one. He’s then stuck either changing his mind because you found a loophole, or looking foolish because he said he’d change his mind and didn’t.

      • skef says:

        Those people who are expressing something like “we should have continued the discussion, maybe we would have learned something important about the Holocaust” should harder about the epistemology of massive conspiracy theories.

        • Urstoff says:

          Right. If you’re interested in the holocaust, go read the scholarship, not conspiracy theories.

        • ebil_nahzee says:

          should harder about the epistemology of massive conspiracy theories

          All of which would appear to apply to the holocaust conspiracy theory itself. How is the theory that nazis conspired to gas jews different?

      • ADifferentAnonymous says:

        Y’know, underneath the militarized language and constant slurs, it sounds like NIP just wanted to sincerely try to persuade people who would try to listen. Insofar as a shit storm is touted, it seems to be a way of marketing to the skeptics–NIP wanted real debate. And he’s now being mocked on that thread for having been so idealistic.

      • Oh this is terrible. NIP did a great thing in turning the four hour video into a transcript. I read the transcript about a third of the way through, and it wasn’t very impressive, and I am somewhat amenable to dissension of Holocaust orthodoxy. But I was looking forward to further discussion.

        Do you really know that NIP is the one on the nasty linked site of Scott’s? I certainly can’t tell they are the same. I certainly would have preferred to not ban NIP even if it is certain. It seems to me it shows that SSC is pretty safe against so called concern trolling. IF NIP acted like a true troll, we would have ignored him or at least his arguments. Instead he tried to infiltrate this somewhat moderate forum with the pretty far out idea of Holocaust revisionism. If he had convinced many of us that he was right, then I think it would have been deserved. As it it was, the transcript was just a bunch of random shots at some of the proponents of traditional Holocaust theory, and I saw no one very convinced. Although the language on the web site Scott linked was pretty nasty, I say let them come in do their best. Only their good ideas will get anywhere, and so far we haven’t seen any.

        • Said Achmiz says:

          That NIP is the person on the linked thread is clear, yes. I mean… read it. He’s not, like, hiding it or anything.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            I want to just post “False flag!” and be done, but that seems in poor form.

            But the idea that /pol/ is going to get their jollies by pretending they are NIP seems extraordinarily convoluted.

          • Douglas Knight says:

            The 8ch thread is before the NIP post (and says so).

    • Vermillion says:

      As you predicted the server seems to be down or somesuch because your site isn’t loading for me. I’ll try again later, no guarantee I’ll have anything useful or interesting to say about it.

    • Deiseach says:

      I will definitely give it a go, it just happens that this weekend is going to be crazy busy at my place of employment so I haven’t time right now for more than some hit-and-run commenting. But you did the work and put your money where your mouth is, so the least we can do is respond in kind 🙂

    • AnarchyDice says:

      I read fairly in depth up to about chapter 8, then skimmed to the conclusion. I have to say that this is fairly well argued, although I get the whiff of cherry-picked or at the very least biased reporting of the same type the mainstream media does of not giving the whole story, although it could well be the case, my inner referee just starts throwing flags whenever witness credibility is called out on weird unrelated things like the author of that youtube video argues about the no-wound-from-bullet story that is weirdly focused on in the first chapter (although later, Wernick is shown to be unreliable regarding corpses, gas chambers, and others).

      However, without delving into the research or cited pieces myself, the arguments presented moved me much closer to the belief of “6 million is likely a heavily inflated number, but rounding up jewish people into camps with the resultant starvation, violence, deaths, and disease was still terrible and had a large body count. Although it maybe wasn’t -gas the jews- level bad in the manner of the industrialization of murder it was still a terrible mark on history with genocide still as the functional intended result”

      • Said Achmiz says:

        I’m going to reply in a lot more depth to this, but for now, let me just comment that yes, this video’s sources are indeed quite cherry-picked (which is not nearly the least of its sins). To give a simple example from near the start:

        The narrator cites Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, whose research showed 5.1 million Jews killed (yes, just Jews, not all Holocaust victims, as the narrator says—that part is actually … let’s charitably say, accidentally poor wording on the narrator’s part).

        And it’s true: Hilberg is a respected Holocaust historian, and his estimate for the number of Jewish Holocaust victims is 5.1 million. (Wikipedia has all of this, I won’t bother linking)

        But he’s not the only Holocaust historian! There are many others; and all the others disagree with Hilberg’s figure. Hilberg’s estimate is, in fact, very nearly the lowest among mainstream Holocaust historians (and by far the lowest among those who wrote later and had access to more sources):

        The early postwar calculations ranged from about 4.2 to 4.5 million in The Final Solution (1953) by Gerald Reitlinger (arguing against higher Russian estimates),[339] and 5.1 million from Raul Hilberg, to 5.95 million from Jacob Lestschinsky.[340] Yehuda Bauer and Robert Rozett in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust estimate 5.59–5.86 million.[341] A study led by Wolfgang Benz of the Technical University of Berlin suggests 5.29 to 6.20 million.[336]

        Martin Gilbert arrived at a “minimum estimate” of over 5.75 million Jewish victims.[343] Lucy S. Dawidowicz used the prewar census figures to estimate that 5.934 million Jews died (see table).[12]

        (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Victims_enumerated)

        Why does the narrator pick Hilberg, out of them all? Is it a coincidence that he picked the historian whose estimate for the number of Holocaust victims was the lowest available? In fact, why use just one source, when there are many? Why does he not even mention that other estimates exist, that other historians disagree?

        Filtered evidence is how these sorts of conspiracy theories work.

        • NIP says:

          let me just comment that yes, this video’s sources are indeed quite cherry-picked (which is not nearly the least of its sins).

          I look forward to seeing you prove that assertion when you have the time, fam.

          Why does the narrator pick Hilberg, out of them all? Is it a coincidence that he picked the historian whose estimate for the number of Holocaust victims was the lowest available? In fact, why use just one source, when there are many? Why does he not even mention that other estimates exist, that other historians disagree?

          I think I can answer those questions pretty easily. First, though, allow me to correct you. He doesn’t just use Hilberg as a source. You did read the whole transcript, did you not? Hilberg is his main authorial source, yes, but he also looks at Yitzhak Arad’s “Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps”, and he specifically mentions in the first few minutes of the film that he does this for reasons of cross-verification in case Hilberg is uniquely wrong. Then, besides the two mainstream historians he pulls sources from (and I should remind you that it’s the sources he’s ultimately criticizing, sources which many other Holocaust historians also use), there’s a whole bibliography’s worth of sources he pulls data from. I don’t actually have a full bibiography, but just from memory I know he looked at:

          – Websites like the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yale’s Avalon Project, nizkor and deathcamps.org, etc.
          – Books like “The Death Camp Treblinka” by Alexander Donat, “Voices and Views” by Deborah Dwork (which is full of excerpts from historians’ works), the Nuremburg transcripts, etc.
          – Magazine articles, periodicals, etc.

          …and this is setting aside the primary sources he digs up from Hilberg and Arad’s biblographies. So when you say

          why use just one source, when there are many

          You’re being a little more than disengenous. Please stop that, ol’ buddy ol’ pal. It’s beneath you.

          As for why he picked Hilberg as his first source, it probably has something to do with the fact that Hilberg’s “The Destruction of the European Jews”, according to Wikipedia:

          …is largely held to be the first comprehensive historical study of the Holocaust. According to Holocaust historian, Michael R. Marrus (The Holocaust in History), until the book appeared, little information about the genocide of the Jews by Nazi Germany had “reached the wider public” in both the West and the East, and even in pertinent scholarly studies it was “scarcely mentioned or only in passing as one more atrocity in a particularly cruel war”.

          In other words, the Narrator picked it because it’s chock-full of some of the very first comprehensive looks at primary sources. So when you say:

          Is it a coincidence that he picked the historian whose estimate for the number of Holocaust victims was the lowest available?

          …I have to say, quite probably. Considering it’s the very first comprehensive, in-depth look at Holocaust history and that, as I mentioned, it certainly is not the only source he looked at, as well as the fact that the “final tally” of the entire Holocaust isn’t the focus or scope of this film, at all, I’d say it’s entirely coincidental that he picked Hilberg and that Hilberg’s estimate was the lowest.

          Filtered evidence is how these sorts of conspiracy theories work.

          It’s also how erroneous historical narratives can work 😉
          Also, objection, your Honor! Conspiracy theory? Assertion without evidence!

          • Said Achmiz says:

            Does he cite any of those other historians listed in the Wikipedia article I quoted? (Lestschinsky, Bauer, Rozett, Benz, Gilbert, Dawidowicz)

            Does he cite any other estimates for the total number of Jewish victims, other than Hilberg’s estimate? Does he acknowledge that there are other estimates, from other mainstream historians?

            Does he use any source other than Hilberg to establish the number of Jewish victims?

            We’re talking about just the claim about the number of victims, now. Nothing else.

          • NIP says:

            @Said

            No to all of those. Would you mind explaining why that’s relevant?

            I should also remind you that if Hilberg’s estimate is the lowest, and if that estimate is wrong and the true number of total victims is higher, that actually strengthens many of the Narrator’s arguments, particularly those regarding burial space, killing effieciency, body burning, etc.

            But as far as I can tell, since the focus of the film is on only three camps, the total number of victims is largely irrelevant, unless Hilberg’s figures are ridiculously out of step with other historians. And from the numbers you yourself cited, while their totals differ, they’re all in the ballpark of 5-6 million.

            EDIT: Should have said “if the purported number of total victims is higher.”

          • Said Achmiz says:

            Ok. So, just so we’re clear, let me reiterate:

            The narrator made a claim: that while the usual figure cited for the number of Jewish victims of the Holocaust is 6 million, in fact the number was 5.1 million.

            In support of this claim, he cited a real and apparently reliable source.

            The narrator emphasized the reliability of this source.

            What he didn’t mention at all, however, was:

            a) this source is not the only available reliable source; many other experts exist;
            b) this source disagrees with all other experts in the field.

            The claim that in fact, the number of Jewish victims of the Holocaust was 5.1 million, not 6 million is presented as true; and if we take the narrator’s words at face value and don’t do our own research, it appears to be well-supported; but in reality, it’s not only not well-supported, it’s actually just false (according to the expert consensus).

            Set aside why this is relevant. Do you contest my summary?

          • NIP says:

            @Said

            Do you contest my summary?

            Yes, in one particular:

            The claim that in fact, the number of Jewish victims of the Holocaust was 5.1 million, not 6 million is presented as true;

            The Narrator himself isn’t claiming that the 5.1 million number is correct. The whole point of his film is dispute Hilberg’s and other people’s sources for three camps in particular. He stating that 6 million is a commonly quoted figure for the number of Holocaust victims, which is true. And then he’s saying that Hilberg, who is one of many Holocaust historians, has a figure that differs (though not significantly) from that number or from numbers given by other historians – which is also true.

            You seem to be implying that the Narrator purposefully chose Hilberg’s death total because it’s the lowest compared to the commonly quoted figure of 6 million, in order to…do what, exactly? As I mentioned, if Hilberg is (considered to be) wrong by other historians in his total death tally, and if the tally is in fact higher, that actually strengthens a lot of his arguments.

      • Said Achmiz says:

        Addendum to my above comment:

        this is fairly well argued

        The key to this—to this entire genre of claims/arguments/theories/etc.—is that how well-argued it is, is almost irrelevant.

        1. I present you with a big pile of facts.
        2. I make an argument based on these facts.

        Is my argument good, bad? Convincing, not? It doesn’t matter, if that pile of facts is cherry-picked, full of distortions, or filled with outright lies.

        If you take my pile of facts at face value—if you trust that I haven’t simply lied to you (about the facts themselves, about their provenance, about the existence of other facts that might be relevant)—then you’ve already been deceived. By the time you’re picking apart my argument, judging whether it’s convincing or not, you’ve already bought into the lies.

        This sort of video (and similar things in this genre) works by exploiting viewers’/readers’ natural tendency to take facts at face value, while scrutinizing verbal arguments. You naturally assume: “well, he wouldn’t just lie, or cherry-pick, or fail to mention something like ‘this source I selected disagrees with literally all other sources in this field'”. It’s not even a conscious assumption—it just doesn’t occur to most folks to think of that sort of thing. So you focus on how good the argument is, because the argument is right there in the open.

        But the argument is the tip of the iceberg.

        • Jiro says:

          You know this connects with the argument at the top of the thread about concern trolling. Nazis are motivated to argue that the Holocaust was exaggerated. The fact that the argument was made by a Nazi is a good reason not to listen to it, because just the fact that it was made with someone with those motivations means it’s probably crap.

          “Look at this argument, examine it on its own merit and ignore that I’m a Nazi” is really not the way to go, even though rationalists like to think that the validity of an argument is independent of its source.

          • Said Achmiz says:

            @Jiro:

            “Look at this argument, examine it on its own merit and ignore that I’m a Nazi” is really not the way to go, even though rationalists like to think that the validity of an argument is independent of its source.

            There’s a subtlety here:

            The actual validity of an argument is, indeed, independent of its source. (Thinking otherwise is the genetic fallacy.)

            Your epistemic state w.r.t. the validity of an argument, however, is not independent of its source. When someone tells you a true fact, you have to condition your new beliefs, not just on the fact itself, but also on the fact that this person has told you this. (This is the notion of filtered evidence.)

            But yes, you are quite right when you say

            The fact that the argument was made by a Nazi is a good reason not to listen to it, because just the fact that it was made with someone with those motivations means it’s probably crap.

            … with the caveat that “probably” is the operative word here. The reasoning is not “a Nazi said it, so it is thereby false“; it’s “a Nazi said it, therefore it’s probably false“. (formal probability-theoretic derivation available upon request)

            (Of course, we can also—if we’re so inclined—actually examine the argument, and the alleged facts, etc., and do our research on the topic, to correct for framing/filtered. etc.; this examination and research would then screen off the fact that we originally heard the argument from a Nazi.)

          • NIP says:

            Nazis are motivated to argue that the Holocaust was exaggerated. The fact that the argument was made by a Nazi is a good reason not to listen to it, because just the fact that it was made with someone with those motivations means it’s probably crap.

            Where are you getting the idea that he’s a Nazi? Is it because….he’s criticizing the Holocaust narrative? I’ve never heard that definition before. If that’s true, that makes me a Nazi, but I wasn’t the last time I checked. You learn something new everyday, around here.

          • Said Achmiz says:

            @NIP:

            I didn’t say the video’s narrator is a Nazi.

          • NIP says:

            @Said

            You’re right, you didn’t. Jiro did. Which is why I quoted him.

          • Said Achmiz says:

            @NIP:

            No, no he didn’t.

          • Anatoly says:

            Suppose I’m a Nazi and I happen to think that the evidence I was able to examine, even after allowing for my own motivated reasoning and honestly trying to correct for it, shows that the Holocaust was exaggerated.

            Is there anything I can do to present my argument in a way that’d make you weaken the influence of my Nazi prior and give my argument a fair hearing? For example, would it help to start with “I understand how my being a Nazi might make you think it isn’t worth your time to even read this, but please consider that I value reaching the truth higher than my Nazi ideals, and I’ve tried very hard to correct for possible Nazi biases etc.”?

            Are there ways for me to buttress/present my argument so that it’d even become irrationally prejudicial for you to dismiss it merely because I’m a Nazi?

          • NIP says:

            @Said

            No, no he didn’t.

            Okay, let’s take another look at what Jiro said.

            You know this connects with the argument at the top of the thread about concern trolling. Nazis are motivated to argue that the Holocaust was exaggerated. The fact that the argument was made by a Nazi is a good reason not to listen to it, because just the fact that it was made with someone with those motivations means it’s probably crap.

            “Look at this argument, examine it on its own merit and ignore that I’m a Nazi” is really not the way to go, even though rationalists like to think that the validity of an argument is independent of its source.

            I suppose you’re technically correct. He didn’t outright say that the Narrator is a Nazi. He’s merely discussing why we shouldn’t trust anything a Nazi says, in a thread about Holocaust revisionism. He totally isn’t implying anything about anyone in particular at all. Glad we cleared that up.

          • Said Achmiz says:

            @Anatoly:

            I already addressed your points implicitly, but to reiterate:

            Is there anything I can do to present my argument in a way that’d make you weaken the influence of my Nazi prior and give my argument a fair hearing?

            There are many things you could do, yes. (Such as the ones you listed, sure. They wouldn’t have much of an effect. But they’d have nonzero effect.)

            Are there ways for me to buttress/present my argument so that it’d even become irrationally prejudicial for you to dismiss it merely because I’m a Nazi?

            I never said anything about dismissing your claims merely because hypothetical-you are a Nazi.

            What I said was that your interlocutor must condition his conclusion (i.e., his posterior probability distribution across possible accounts of the relevant facts/etc.) on all the facts, including the fact that you’re a Nazi and you’re the one making the claims and presenting the evidence and so forth.

            Nothing you, or anyone else, can do, can change the fact that correct belief-updating can only result from conditioning on all the (relevant) facts. Conditioning on only some of the relevant facts, and ignoring some others, makes the conclusion necessarily less likely to be correct.

            You could say other things, such as “I know I’m a Nazi but please consider my arguments anyway”. That, then—the fact that you said this—would also be a fact your interlocutor have to condition on, in addition to the fact that you’re a Nazi.

            And, as I’ve said—if I did my own research on the topic, from scratch, ignoring everything you said and approaching the matter from a blank-slate starting point—then that would screen off all the aforesaid facts about you. They would no longer be relevant.

        • NIP says:

          Is my argument good, bad? Convincing, not? It doesn’t matter, if that pile of facts is cherry-picked, full of distortions, or filled with outright lies.

          Okay, true. But surely you will come back with some evidence to support all or any of these claims?

          This sort of video (and similar things in this genre) works by exploiting viewers’/readers’ natural tendency to take facts at face value, while scrutinizing verbal arguments.

          I’m confused. Is your argument here that, because this is “the sort of video” or the “sort of genre” that is untrustworthy, that…it’s untrustworthy? Isn’t that a circular argument, a la Bulverism?

          But the argument is the tip of the iceberg.

          I’m looking forward to seeing what’s under the water, because you’re blue-balling us pretty hard, fam.

          • Said Achmiz says:

            I’m confused. Is your argument here that, because this is “the sort of video” or the “sort of genre” that is untrustworthy, that…it’s untrustworthy? Isn’t that a circular argument, a la Bulverism?

            Please don’t be dense.

            Not literally every sentence said in a conversation on a topic is an argument for a position.

            Sometimes people say things that are:

            – explanations;
            – comments;
            – asides;
            – etc.

            When I say “this sort of video is …”, I’m not claiming that it’s untrustworthy. I’m not trying to prove anything. It’s not an argument in support of a point.

            I’m explaining how videos (and they are usually videos; it’s much harder to pull off in text, for what should be obvious reasons) of this kind work, how they convince people. I’m commenting on the rhetorical/persuasive mechanisms that they use.

            Refuting the video’s points is a separate matter.

            —-

            Separately from the above (yes, it’s possible to make more than one point, on different things, in the same post!):

            Talking about whether a video (or essay, book, etc.) is “trustworthy” or “untrustworthy” is borderline-nonsensical. It’s certainly not even close to the level of precision required to make any progress on a tricky or complex topic.

            The video makes claims. Are those claims accurate or inaccurate?

            The video provides facts. Are they true facts? Or are they lies, inaccuracies, mistakes, distortions?

            Are important facts omitted?

            Are the sources cited real? Are they quoted faithfully? Are the sources cherry-picked? Are the quotes cherry-picked?

            Are disagreements among experts faithfully reported? When speaking of a field of study (be it Holocaust history, occupational psychology, metallurgy, or theoretical mathematics), is the consensus in the field (or lack thereof) accurately reported?

            Are the arguments given valid? Are errors committed? Are fallacies or distortions of reasoning indulged in? Are biases corrected for?

            Is evidence properly updated on? Are priors and base rates taken into account?

            These are specific issues. “Trustworthy vs. untrustworthy” doesn’t even begin to suffice, to encapsulate all of them.

          • NIP says:

            @Said

            Please don’t be dense.

            I’m afraid I can’t oblige you there, my friend. Don’t go falling for the typical-mind fallacy, now. I’m not very smart! Perhaps I simply didn’t understand your point. Also, there’s no need to be so defensive! Relax. Take it eaaasy. Make a soothing beverage. We’re just having a conversation.

            When I say “this sort of video is …”, I’m not claiming that it’s untrustworthy. I’m not trying to prove anything. It’s not an argument in support of a point.

            Well okay, if you say so. But it seemed an awful lot like that you were implying that the video was untrustworthy via classification.

            I’m explaining how videos (and they are usually videos; it’s much harder to pull off in text, for what should be obvious reasons) of this kind work, how they convince people. I’m commenting on the rhetorical/persuasive mechanisms that they use.

            Videos of what kind? Documentaries? Do they all have the same rhetorical techniques in common? Have you watched a lot of them? From your initial suggestion to turn this film into a transcript, you don’t seem like you’d have the time. But if I’m mistaken, could you go into detail about how all Holocaust revisionist videos are the same, and what techniques they use?

            Refuting the video’s points is a separate matter.

            And one that I’m much more interested in!

            Lots of questions

            All very good questions, that I’d love if you began to provide answers to, if possible.

          • Said Achmiz says:

            @NIP:

            Well okay, if you say so. But it seemed an awful lot like that you were implying that the video was untrustworthy via classification.

            This is SSC; sometimes we just make comments that seem relevant and topical. Not every sentence of every comment is an argument for a “side”, even by implication.

            I understand that there are internet communities where this isn’t the case, and where it’s customary to engage in back-and-forth verbal battles where every word uttered is a round fired at the opponent.

            This is not such a place.

            Videos of what kind? Documentaries? Do they all have the same rhetorical techniques in common? Have you watched a lot of them?

            I have watched and read a good number of things. Many things have many things in common.

            All very good questions, that I’d love if you began to provide answers to, if possible.

            You took four months to post this transcript! It is acceptable if I take more than one day to post a considered response, yes? 😉

            (That response will not take the form of an SSC comment; I have a blog of my own, where I’ve got considerably more freedom of word count, formatting, etc.)

          • NIP says:

            @Said

            This is SSC; sometimes we just make comments that seem relevant and topical. Not every sentence of every comment is an argument for a “side”, even by implication.

            That may be true, but for future ease of communication I’d appreciate it if you could make such distinctions a little more clear in your posts.

            I have watched and read a good number of things. Many things have many things in common.

            That’s, uh…true. Thanks for clarifying.

            You took four months to post this transcript! It is acceptable if I take more than one day to post a considered response, yes? 😉

            (That response will not take the form of an SSC comment; I have a blog of my own, where I’ve got considerably more freedom of word count, formatting, etc.)

            I apologize if I gave the impression that I was pressuring you to give a response, because that wasn’t my intention at all. I was merely stating my interest in your future response.

            Though if I may make a suggestion to make the discussion (at least between the two of us) a tad more amicable in the future, I’d appreciate it if you could try to focus as much as possible on providing concrete counter-evidence rather than essays on meta-points. I know I said I’m not all that smart, but I do understand the importance of methodology, priors, etc. in historical research. I just would like to see actual examples of how this film fails at that, in future.

            EDIT: I should add that going on these sorts of tangents without presenting counter-evidence paired with it comes off as bloviating and dismissive to some people, including me. Just fyi.

          • Said Achmiz says:

            … I’d appreciate it if you could try to focus as much as possible on providing concrete counter-evidence rather than essays on meta-points.

            This being a public forum, you are not the only one who may read my comments. Consequently I am not writing only for you—even when my comments are addressed to you!

            Counter-evidence is forthcoming. More commentary on meta-points is also forthcoming.

            Anything I say that you feel is irrelevant—feel free to ignore! 🙂

          • NIP says:

            @Said

            This being a public forum, you are not the only one who may read my comments. Consequently I am not writing only for you—even when my comments are addressed to you!

            Oh, I know that very well. This is part of my concern.

            Anything I say that you feel is irrelevant—feel free to ignore! 🙂

            If I feel that piles of irrelavancies are being used to appear to make a point without actually making one, I’ll feel free to point that out, as well.

          • Jiro says:

            it really frustrates me that, when I see the question mentioned, there seems to be a whole lot of questioning the motives of Holocaust deniers, censoring Holocaust deniers, debating whether it’s even worth addressing Holocaust deniers, going off on tangents, etc., and relatively few attempts to factually dispute the central points deniers make.

            One would expect that “debating whether it’s even worth addressing Holocaust deniers” would have to come before factually disputing their points.

            Factually disputing their points and *then* arguing that it’s not worth factually disputing their points would be useless.

          • J Mann says:

            For what it’s worth, I find it both (a) informative and (b) delightful that an 8chan effort to see how rationalists respond to holocaust denial resulted initially in a discussion of how rationalists approach factual questions.

            Said, I’m also looking forward to your blog posts, whether they’re on the evidence for holocaust denial or the methodology by which a rationalist might approach the question.

    • dndnrsn says:

      On the subject of bringing up possible inaccuracies in eyewitness accounts: this one is a favourite of Holocaust deniers, but it runs into the problem that for everything, eyewitness accounts run into this trouble. If you read soldier’s memoirs, for example, you will come across stories and details that aren’t correct from time to time. Is the correct conclusion to draw from this that the wars in question never happened? No. The correct conclusion is that people make honest mistakes, memory is unreliable, people will repeat stories for effect rather than for information, etc.

      Ultimately, Holocaust denial posits a theory that is harder to believe than the reality. The effort needed to perpetuate a deception of that scale would be greater than the effort involved in murdering five or six million people by shooting, gas, disease, and starvation.

      • baconbacon says:

        I read a little bit of the transcript and was going to post something similar. In regards to the claimed escape getting shot in the shoulder there are dozens of possible explanations (he saw the guard raise his gun and fire, the bullet missed him, he escapes and later has an unrelated injury to his shoulder that he assumes must have been from the bullet, or something other than a bullet hit him at that time etc).

        A lie is very different from a mistake.

        • NIP says:

          In regards to the claimed escape getting shot in the shoulder there are dozens of possible explanations (he saw the guard raise his gun and fire, the bullet missed him, he escapes and later has an unrelated injury to his shoulder that he assumes must have been from the bullet, or something other than a bullet hit him at that time etc

          Mmm, see, that would be a good argument if Wiernik had either made any of those assertions himself, or had been at all unclear or equivocating in what he said happened. But neither of those are true. Let’s quote Wiernik himself, in full:

          The pursuer was gaining and I heard his running feet close behind me. Then I heard a shot and in the same instant felt a severe pain in my left shoulder blade. I turned around and saw a guard from the Treblinka penal camp. He again aimed his pistol at me. I knew about firearms and I noticed that the weapon had jammed. I took advantage of this and intentionally slowed down pulling the axe out of my belt. The guard, a Ukrainian, ran up to me yelling, “Halt or I’ll shoot!” I came up close to him and hit him savagely with my axe across the left side of his chest. He collapsed at my feet with a vile oath.

          I was free and ran into the woods. After penetrating a little deeper into the thicket, I sat down among the bushes. From the distance I heard a lot of shooting. Believe it or not, the bullet did not wound me. It went through all of my clothing and stopped at my shoulder, leaving a mark. I was alone, resting.

          Nooot a lotta room for alternate explanations there, I’m afraid. To quote my own comment on the transcript:

          Note that he didn’t say that the guard missed, which would have been believable. He doesn’t say that the guard was unable to fire due to a jam, for the first shot, anyway. That too, would be believable. He doesn’t claim that it grazed him, which would have been believable. He doesn’t even claim that what happened was a miracle, which would be unbelievable but perhaps not impossible, depending on your metaphysics. No – he just straight up *doesn’t know that what he just described is impossible,* because he is lying. He says, in the second-to-last paragraph of the book, that he “knew about firearms”, yet he offers his incredible tale of being shot point-blank unscathed with a meek “believe it or not”. Well, Jankel old boy, what if I don’t believe it? What’s more astounding is that neither this, or his other impossibilities regarding body-burning, are ever brought up by Hilberg, Arad, or other so-called historians as worthy of discussion. As we’ll see, neither did anyone who used his testimony to sentence people to death and imprisonment.

          Seems pretty cut and dry to me.

      • NIP says:

        On the subject of bringing up possible inaccuracies in eyewitness accounts: this one is a favourite of Holocaust deniers

        Probably because, as I’ve unfortunately learned, it is depressingly easy to do.

        it runs into the problem that for everything, eyewitness accounts run into this trouble. If you read soldier’s memoirs, for example, you will come across stories and details that aren’t correct from time to time. Is the correct conclusion to draw from this that the wars in question never happened? No. The correct conclusion is that people make honest mistakes, memory is unreliable, people will repeat stories for effect rather than for information, etc.

        That would be a good point, except that eyewitness accounts are literally the only evidence whatsoever for the existence and function of Sobibor, Treblinka, and Belzec. Moreover, these camps were supposedly secret and known only to a few until the war was over, unlike your example of a war with unreliable accounts from soldiers. Also, wars tend to be big and have a lot of participants, which means for every unreliable account there’s like five believable ones. There were supposedly a lot of people involved in the three death camps that are the subject of the film…but not a lot of eyewitnesses.

        Ultimately, Holocaust denial posits a theory that is harder to believe than the reality. The effort needed to perpetuate a deception of that scale would be greater than the effort involved in murdering five or six million people by shooting, gas, disease, and starvation.

        Not really. Considering that the most powerful nations on Earth conquered the territory on which the supposed crimes occurred, tried and executed or imprisoned any witnesses who’d be able to contradict the story, and then had direct control over the media and educational institutions of the countries involved in disseminating the story in the first place. And, as the documentary goes into detail to prove, the effort required to kill all those people in the manner described by historians would have been a lot more.

    • Deiseach says:

      I’m still only on the first part, and the narrator has got my back up because he’s so dogmatically sure every source he quotes is lying. He doesn’t put a tooth in it – “Rajzman even begins lying the minute he hits the witness stand.”

      What he does not seem to understand is the psychology of the method. When you’re dealing with eliminating a source of what your political philosophy is telling you are sub-human wretches responsible for undermining and polluting your nation and your culture, it doesn’t happen all at once. You have to include a programme of dehumanising them so that natural sympathies won’t be raised in the guards and soldiers and all the rest of the forces required to run the operation. So things like turning a guy into a caricature to be mocked, and shaving the hair of women so that they look strange and odd and laughable is all part of it. He considers the “hair for mattresses” story to be a blatant lie, but he doesn’t seem to consider it could be a coarse, mocking joke indeed told by “the masters” to the inmates working to cut off the hair of the women. It doesn’t have to be true, even from the point of view of the Germans.

      Looking at a website about Auschwitz, they say that hair was cut off (in this case from the bodies after they had been gassed) and was packaged to be sent to a factory in Bavaria to make “various products”, including cloth. So it is indeed possible that at these different camps, they cut off women’s hair (because women tend to have longer hair than men) before gassing them for similar use. The “use it to stuff mattresses for German women” could be the ‘joke’ told to the workers as to why they were doing this.

      Regarding the cutting off hair to control typhus (so the “mattress stuffing” was not the real reason, so the testimony given using that story is a lie, runs the reasoning of the narrator), it was body hair that was shaved off; head hair could have been cut off before/after gassing the victims for use:

      Prisoners in all the Nazi concentration camps, who were selected for work, had all their body hair removed immediately upon arrival, in an effort to prevent typhus, which is spread by body lice.

      He raises some questions but doesn’t seem to look for the steelman explanation of “why did he/they say this”; he simply pulls the quotes, says “this is a lie” and then, satisfied that he’s proven this, goes on to build on his conclusions that “all this so-called testimony is lies, the histories written using these sources are therefore contaminated and unreliable even where they’re not lying themselves, and so my view of the matter is the only feasible true one”.

      Re the book by Wiernik – maybe he’s correct that the guy is a fantasist. Probably there were a few after the war who exaggerated or invented stories in order to (a) explain how they survived when others didn’t (b) get acclaim and sympathy. Maybe some of the things he says never happened, maybe none of them did. But maybe some of them did, and our narrator isn’t impartial enough to look for the “sounds unlikely but it could have happened like this”, e.g. in the “shot at point-blank range and it didn’t wound me” story of Wiernik’s escape; there are plenty of “miraculous escape” stories recounted from war-time experiences of being shot and the bullet was stopped by a cigarette case or other item. People do have unlikely escapes and near-misses.

      I don’t know. There’s just something about the whole tone of this, even in the transcript, that is off-putting and makes me not want to read on. I do feel he went into this with “I don’t believe all that stuff about what happened, I’m going to investigate the real truth” rather than a neutral “so I decided to check some commonly-accepted facts in wide circulation to see if they added up” attitude.

      • NIP says:

        I’m still only on the first part, and the narrator has got my back up because he’s so dogmatically sure every source he quotes is lying. He doesn’t put a tooth in it – “Rajzman even begins lying the minute he hits the witness stand.”

        I’d say that he’s so sure, in that particular case, because he goes on in the very next paragraph to explain why the first thing out of Rajzman’s mouth at the witness stand is a lie. To quote the transcript:

        Rajzman even begins lying the minute he hits the witness stand.

        Here he reads his oath to tell the truth, and then he says: “In August 1942 I was taken away from the Warsaw ghetto.” But at the University of California Berkeley we find an article Rajzman wrote that was included in a United States House of Representatives hearing transcript.

        Rajzman writes on page 121 that on September 17 he was taken to the train and deported. But at Nuremburg, a year later, he says he was deported in August. It’s likely he changed his story after realizing that his September 17th date didn’t fit with Warsaw deportation train records, as seen here in Yitzhak Arad’s book.

        …and all of that is in fact, true. And meticulously sourced.

        When you’re dealing with eliminating a source of what your political philosophy is telling you are sub-human wretches responsible for undermining and polluting your nation and your culture, it doesn’t happen all at once. You have to include a programme of dehumanising them so that natural sympathies won’t be raised in the guards and soldiers and all the rest of the forces required to run the operation.

        You seem to have put a lot of thought into this. Do you have an experimental result to back up this assertion? 😛

        shaving the hair of women so that they look strange and odd and laughable is all part of it

        Or, if you prefer to use Occam’s Razor, it might have been because there was a typhus epidemic going around. Oh, wait…

        it was body hair that was shaved off; head hair could have been cut off before/after gassing the victims for use…

        Prisoners in all the Nazi concentration camps, who were selected for work, had all their body hair removed immediately upon arrival, in an effort to prevent typhus, which is spread by body lice.

        …you already know that. Also, where did you get that quote? I never encountered a single mention of body hair being shaved off in my research. And wouldn’t it be strange to try to prevent the spread of typhus among people who are about to be gassed to death?

        People do have unlikely escapes and near-misses.

        Not like Wiernik’s, they don’t. And this is setting aside the fact that if Wiernik had indeed been a laborer at an extermination camp for as long as he claims, he would have known that bodies don’t burn on their own, that they don’t merely leave ashes when consumed, that water wells surrounded by hundreds of thousands of pounds of rotting flesh in the ground can’t be drunk from, etc etc etc…

        I don’t know. There’s just something about the whole tone of this, even in the transcript, that is off-putting and makes me not want to read on.

        To quote the Narrator himself:

        This will be repulsive to some, but sometimes you have to look at things that are unsettling in order to quit believing a lie.

        • Nornagest says:

          And wouldn’t it be strange to try to prevent the spread of typhus among people who are about to be gassed to death?

          It’s in the quote you quoted:

          Prisoners […] who were selected for work

          These prisoners were expected to die eventually, but the Nazis wanted to get slave labor out of them first. You get more labor out of a slave if they’re not dying of typhus.

          • NIP says:

            @Nornagest

            Okay, but none of the eyewitnesses I’ve looked at say that it was just those selected for work. I’ll ask again: where is that information Deisach quoted coming from?

        • Jiro says:

          Eyewitnesses are known to be unreliable on details. The fact that an eyewitness said something contradictory doesn’t mean he’s “lying”.

      • Aapje says:

        People do have unlikely escapes and near-misses.

        And way more people don’t have unlikely escapes and near-misses, but for some reason those people are not as vocal.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      I’m not engaging with the movie, but thank you for doing the work of making the transcript.

      • NIP says:

        You’re welcome! It was quite a lot of work, but I couldn’t have done it without help. Thanks again to those who assisted (they know who they are, but I won’t mention them myself in case they don’t want to be tarred with the “denier” brush.)

    • NIP says:

      As was pointed out way back when I dropped the video, it was simply a cultural misunderstanding. Not everyone agrees that putting information in video format is inherently propagandistic. Some people process information visually. Not everyone is a speed-reader, or even a reader at all. I underestimated the degree to which SSC users are dismissive of audiovisual content, especially of a controversial nature. That’s all.

      a real philosopher like Scott Alexander writes essays

      Scott’s a psychiatrist, not a philosopher.

      • Said Achmiz says:

        Scott’s a psychiatrist, not a philosopher.

        Wait, what?

        Of course Scott’s a philosopher. What’s him being a psychiatrist got to do with it?

        • NIP says:

          @Atlas

          Professionally, yes, but I meant in the context of his writing, and I think “philosophy” is a better way to describe what Scott writes about on SSC than “psychiatry”. (Like how in a recent interview with Ezra Klein, Tyler Cowen, an economist by training and profession, said that he thinks of himself more as doing philosophy than economics.)

          Fair point. I was merely being a tad autistic myself for a moment. You guys are rubbing off on me 😉

          I didn’t and wouldn’t say it’s inherently propagandistic, just that I think the comparative advantage videos have over text is their ability to stir emotions, rather than convey information.

          I would agree with you, generally speaking. But in this particular case, the documentary we’re talking about is extraordinarly dry. There’s not even any music tracks that aren’t part of video clips he’s excerpted. I’d wager that 50% of the film is just still shots of pages of books. Sort of a compromise in terms of meda, you may say. But that’s just my opinion. I realize now that I should have considered my audience a little more carefully. In the end, that’s why I followed Said’s advice and made a transcript.

          @Said

          Wait, what?

          Of course Scott’s a philosopher. What’s him being a psychiatrist got to do with it?

          See above. Just a touch of the ’tism, fam.

        • Said Achmiz says:

          Ah, well. It happens 😉

        • Jiro says:

          If being autistic makes you act evil, people are going to treat you as evil.

  24. Anonymous` says:

    I would like to continue the dark-side-of-quantum-immortality discussion from the last open thread.

    • ADifferentAnonymous says:

      The issue is very much akin to anthropics and SSA vs. SIA. The quantum immortality idea is the SSA-like one, and says that you should only care about your average utility over branches where you’re alive and conscious, so you can happily play quantum Russian Roulette. The mainstream MW view is more like SIA: that you should care about your total utility over the tree, weighted by the Born probabilities, and thus playing quantum Russian Roulette is a horrifying waste of 1/6 of a life.

      The latter view leads to normal behavior, mostly indistinguishable from what you’d do under Copenhagen. The former view leads to all the weird eternity-of-torture stuff.

    • lvlln says:

      Kind of an aside: I would recommend the Zero Escape game series (999, Virtue’s Last Reward, and Zero Time Dilemma) as one that touches upon this topic, in a video game-specific way. Also plays with some related concepts like the Sleeping Beauty paradox and the anthropic principle

      • secret_tunnel says:

        Strongly second this recommendation. They don’t deal with any concepts that would blow a person who already knows all about this stuff’s mind, but they’re awesome mysteries that use the gaming medium to do some really really cool stuff with how they tell their stories.

    • rahien.din says:

      Ugh. The idea of quantum immortality presupposes general immortality.

      The formulation of the original problem is misleading and is prone to overextension. Suppose the following :
      – Instead of a vial of lethal gas, the box contains a gumball machine.
      – If radiodecay is not detected, the machine will dispense a gumball.
      – If radiodecay is detected, the machine stops dispensing gumballs.

      Are we forced to conclude, therefore, that in a single world of all possible worlds, the machine will dispense gumballs until the entire universe is subsumed in a giant black hole, formed from condensed gumballs, a la the mole of moles?

      No. Eventually, the machine will run out of gumballs.

      Same thing with a human life, the duration of which is not merely determined by an arbitrary experimental apparatus. Eventually, we all die. So unless the experiment has a defined length, every lifetime ends in death. One of those deaths will occur via dehydration, starvation, disease, or old age (depending on the parameters of the experiment). We can not even allow that an experimental apparatus could somehow confer immortality.

      We can only conclude that, unless the quantum suicide experiment has a limited duration, it will maximally last as long as the researcher’s natural life. Quantum immortality is possible iff general immortality is possible.

      If we are baseline immortal… then the reason why quantum immortality is worse than general immortality is precisely because you are trapped in a box for the rest of your life with a suicide machine. It seems to me that this situation is bad for a similar reason that being a non-immortal trapped in a box for the rest of your life with a suicide machine would be bad.

      • random832 says:

        I think fully general quantum immortality relies on the idea that spontaneous random changes to atoms (i.e. one of your DNA molecules rearranging itself to have longer telomeres) have a vanishingly small, but technically nonzero, probability. (but the probability of such changes resulting in you being fully healthy rather than merely technically alive is much lower) And the more certain your classical-physics death, the more proportional weight weird quantum events contribute to the timelines in which you are still alive.

        • rahien.din says:

          Ugh, that’s Science as Attire.

          Besides, that idea proves too much. By that logic, literally anything is possible, including the researcher spontaneously developing tolerance to the toxic gas, in which case they survive forever in every world. It pays no rent. You can’t take it seriously.

          • ADifferentAnonymous says:

            The quantum immortality position, that one should maximize average utility across possible futures containing oneself, is mathematically coherent and leads to dramatically different behavior if taken seriously.

            And it’s true full stop that weird possibilities like spontaneous macroscopic changes have epsilon, rather than zero, probability.

          • rahien.din says:

            ADifferentAnonymous,

            Beliefs and ideas must pay rent by constraining expectations. Claiming that “even really weird things like macroscopic changes can have non-zero probability therefore we have to take those probabilities seriously” literally permits anything. That claim is a fake explanation.

            Mathematical coherence can not forge truth from error.

          • random832 says:

            My understanding of quantum immortality is that the point of it is that weighing events by their probability within the branches in which you are alive is as legitimate as weighing them by their probability within all possible futures including the ones where you are dead.

          • ADifferentAnonymous says:

            Rahien: If you’re maximizing average utility on branches where you survive, then weird tiny probabilities can become relevant. These aren’t lawless: physics tells us which chances are more miniscule than others. (For the rest of us, these tiny chances are implied invisible)

            Immortality people expect to experience immortality, possibly in a mangled state. They absolutely do anticipate experiences as a consequence of their belief.

          • rahien.din says:

            random832, ADifferentAnonymous,

            Back up a step.

            If we are going to be doling out probability mass, then we have to start with a reasonable idea of the base probabilities, so that we can calculate appropriate proportions.

            But epsilon is not a reasonable probability. To describe epsilon as “tiny” is to arbitrarily assign it a definite and meaningful value. In doing so, we permit everything with epsilon probability to occur and our reasoning proves too much. For instance, the probability of a metal plate becoming staying cool on the side facing a heat source, but getting hot on the other side, due to handwave-heat-conduction-handwave, is epsilon. Saying “epsilon > 0” amounts to saying “I believe that this actually could happen and you aren’t allowed to dispute that” under the guise of mathematics. It’s a fake explanation.

            Even if the underlying claim is merely “Given sufficiently numerous worlds, every thing with nonzero probability will happen,” it’s an error. It is equivalent to “It is meaningfully possible that anything with nonzero probability could happen in our world.” This claim does not merely permit us to widen our anticipations to consider that any thing could occur, it attaches an enormous caveat to any idea that does pay rent. The claim actually erodes rationality.

            Edit: sorry, wanted to include everyone

          • ADifferentAnonymous says:

            There are quantitative laws determining all of the tiny probabilities I’m talking about. If I accepted quantum immortality I could set about determining which seemingly-impossible extensions of my life are more probable than others, and which interventions, if any, will make it so that they’re happy ones. I would then expect to probably experience those after my natural lifespan ended. Rent would be paid.

          • Anonymous` says:

            Even if the underlying claim is merely “Given sufficiently numerous worlds, every thing with nonzero probability will happen,” it’s an error. It is equivalent to “It is meaningfully possible that anything with nonzero probability could happen in our world.”

            It is not meaningfully possible that particle-bouncing incidental immortality can happen in our world. The idea is that there could be an anthropic engine that reliably gets you to the ludicrously rare world where that does happen, and NOT the other ludicrously rare worlds where e.g. the metal plate warms on the wrong side or gumballs teleport into the gumball machine from other planets. This is what random832 and ADifferentAnonymous are referring to when they talk about averaging/weighing futures/events over only futures containing your alive self.

          • rahien.din says:

            ADifferentAnonymous,

            There are quantitative laws determining all of the tiny probabilities I’m talking about.

            This is a conceptual error.

            Epsilon is not a tiny number that we can calculate from known quantities. Epsilon is a positive number so small that if Xn falls within X∞ ±ε for a sufficiently-large n, then Xn converges to X∞, no matter how small ε becomes. It is a boundary, not a zone. If you can derive a probability from some natural law, it isn’t epsilon.

            If I accepted quantum immortality I could set about determining which seemingly-impossible extensions of my life are more probable than others, and which interventions, if any, will make it so that they’re happy ones. I would then expect to probably experience those after my natural lifespan ended. Rent would be paid.

            Incorrect.

            You can’t assume quantum immortality is true so that you can grant meaningful probabilities to seemingly-impossible circumstances in order to figure out how quantum immortality is true. This is a logical fallacy.

            Moreover, if you have somehow gotten yourself to the claim that “all seemingly-impossible circumstances are up for grabs,” you can’t then claim “we could then rule out certain circumstances as seemingly-impossible.”

          • > It pays no rent.

            MWI versus Copenhgaen pays no rent, yet the faithful are supposed to believe. Why>

          • rahien.din says:

            TheAncientGeekAKA1Z,

            That’s different. The thought process in Copenhagen vs MWI is :
            1. We have observed something weird for which there is no apparent physical explanation
            2. We must start to entertain weird hypotheses in order to develop experiments

            It pays rent once it helps us design experiments and constrain expectations.

            The thought process I object to is different :
            1. Spontaneous human immortality is seemingly impossible, but there are wildly improbable scenarios in which it could occur
            2. If spontaneous human immortality is credible, then examining the problem on vast timescales is permitted.
            3. If examining the problem on vast timescales is permitted, then we can give credence to wildly improbable scenarios
            4. If we can give credence to wildly improbable scenarios, then spontaneous human immortality is credible.

            There’s a circle in that there logic. And, it is a deadbeat idea because the statement “If examining the problem on vast timescales is permitted, then we can give credence to wildly improbable scenarios” deliberately de-constrains expectations. It is fallacious.

          • episcience says:

            rahien.din, do you deny that under quantum mechanics it is theoretically possible for the atoms in my body to spontaneously quantum tunnel in the form of a healthy 18-year-old? I’m trying to figure out the root of your disagreement here.

          • That’s different. The thought process in Copenhagen vs MWI is :
            1. We have observed something weird for which there is no apparent physical explanation
            2. We must start to entertain weird hypotheses in order to develop experiments

            To steelman it (substituting “no classical expalantion for no physical explanation”), you aer talking about quantum versus classical, not MWI versus CI. Of course QM gives you and advantage over classical: I was talking about interpretations. Interpretations do not produce differing predictions.

          • smocc says:

            @episcience

            I certainly deny that it’s obviously possible. Quantum mechanics does not say that anything is possible with a certain probability. For one thing, QM still respects conservation laws, like conservation of energy, and mass (roughly). It respects laws about entropy pretty well too. And there are transitions that are forbidden for other reasons too, just because of wave-function forms.

          • rahien.din says:

            TheAncientGeekAKA1Z,

            Whoops, I erred. It would have been more correct to say “In either Copenhagen or MWI, the thought process is see something weird, formulate testable hypothesis, take measurements…” And even if that is more correct (and insofar as you would believe, my intent) I think it still fails to address your question. I blame hypocaffeinemia.

            Your mention of interpretations makes me think I may not understand your question entirely. Would you elaborate a little further?

            episcience,

            How seriously do you take the idea of “theoretically-possible spontaneous macroscopic quantum tunneling”?

            It is not to say that there is no hyperexpansive and overcredulous interpretation of scientific humility that permits spontaneous macroscopic tunnelling, or spontaneous human immortality. But that type of thinking is anti-rational. That type of thinking literally permits everything. It permits that end-stage pancreatic cancer could be cured by interpretive dance. It permits that the universe could gradually transmute itself into a uniform block of gruyere.

            It permits that the universe could change itself so that spontaneous macroscopic tunnelling and spontaneous human immortality are no longer permitted. Once you have invoked magic, everything is up for grabs, even the spontaneous annihilation of magic.

            We must understand what it means to think rationally, and why it is so important that beliefs constrain reality. The initial section of Sequences is instructive, particularly the entry on Fake Explanations.

          • How seriously do you take the idea of “theoretically-possible spontaneous macroscopic quantum tunneling”?

            It’s known to work microscopically, and the theory doesn’t put any hard cut off on it: that means that whether or not there is macroscopic tunnelling is not a separate theoretical proposal, but a quiantitative issue, a question of how much “stuff” of various kinds is available.

            In small universes (single branch, limited time) , you can round of very low probabilities to impossibilities, but QI arguments are explicitly based on large universes, so appelalng to the rounding-off rule looks like question begging.

          • rahien.din says:

            TheAncientGeekAKA1Z,

            QI arguments are explicitly based on large universes, so appelalng to the rounding-off rule looks like question begging.

            I make no such appeal. Nor do I need to.

            As above, the “sufficiently-large and sufficiently-long” universe line of argumentation, as it pertains to spontaneous human immortality, is definitively an example of question-begging.

          • Th Large universe doesn’t beg the question all by itself. And an argument whose conclusion is jointly imlied by its premises is a normally called a valid argument, not a circular argument.

          • ADifferentAnonymous says:

            rahien,
            You are mistaken about spontaneous macroscopic tunnelling. Quantum mechanics as we understand it explicit permits it, and assigns it a probability. (Calling it ‘epsilon’ was an abuse of notation on my part. For a given scenario, the probability of such an occurrence would be a real, finite, very very small number).

            Tiny probabilities of apparently impossible events aren’t just a quantum thing, either–thermodynamics also allows things like half the ocean freezing and the other half boiling spontaneously.

          • rahien.din says:

            TheAncientGeekAKA1Z,

            an argument whose conclusion is jointly implied by its premises is a normally called a valid argument, not a circular argument.

            This is not such an argument as you describe.

            The argument is :

            A = Spontaneous human immortality is credible
            B = Examining the problem on vast timescales is permitted
            C = We can give credence to wildly improbable scenarios

            1. If A, then B
            2. If B, then C
            3. If C, then A

            That is an argument whose conclusion is one of its premises.

          • rahien.din says:

            ADifferentAnonymous,

            I see your point regarding the prior use of epsilon. I think your “very very small number” is doing the job of “unlikely but of real significance.” That seems arbitrary/dismissive to me, but I would cede the point that I haven’t done that math[1] per se and so I don’t specifically know what miniscule probabilities could emerge from equations thereof.

            However… I am exceedingly skeptical.

            As I said before, math can not forge truth from error. For instance, the idea that half the ocean could boil while the other half freezes is a terrible misconception. There is a vast gulf of difference between “the superficial math of the problem does not disallow X thing” and “X thing has a real probability and we can count its occurrence as rare-but-credible.” Traverse it at great hazard to your rationality.

            Even if we grant tiny finite probabilities to these purported occurrences, it does not resolve the circularity of the spontaneous human immortality argument.

            [1] Have you? It would be very helpful if you would supply those calculations.

          • random832 says:

            A = Spontaneous human immortality is credible
            B = Examining the problem on vast timescales is permitted
            C = We can give credence to wildly improbable scenarios

            Why do you think B depends on A rather than being an axiom?

            You can make any argument circular by taking away its axioms.

          • Jiro says:

            As I said before, math can not forge truth from error. For instance, the idea that half the ocean could boil while the other half freezes is a terrible misconception.

            It is possible that half the ocean could boil and half freeze. It’s not impossible–just very, very, very, unlikely.

            What is confusing you is that normally, “very, very, very, unlikely” is treated as “not possible”. But there are specific contexts in which it can’t be treated like that.

          • ADifferentAnonymous says:

            I haven’t done any such calculations, and I don’t really see how they would help this discussion.

            You seem to be suggesting that sufficiently low probabilities aren’t “credible”, messing we should behave as if they were zero. But this isn’t a function of the probability alone; it also depends on how much the outcome would matter and whether adjusting our behavior around it has costs. Whether to play the lottery depends not just on the odds of winning but also on the size of the payout and the price of the ticket.

            The quantum Immortality argument involves putting tiny probabilities in the denominator. That’s why it matters that they be nonzero and doesn’t matter how close they are to zero. You can’t foreclose this reasoning by pointing out how small the probabilities are.

            (For what it’s worth, I do think that paying attention to such miniscule chances is a big red flag for QI, but that’s a heuristic, not a logical refutation.)

          • John Schilling says:

            A = Spontaneous human immortality is credible
            B = Examining the problem on vast timescales is permitted
            C = We can give credence to wildly improbable scenarios

            I don’t much follow the quantum immortality debate, so I may be missing something, but I believe the usual argument is more properly:

            B = Examining the problem over vast ensembles of universes is permitted

            So, if B then C. If C then A. B is the premise, imported from the MWI, leading to A as the conclusion. Vast timescales come with A, and possibly with nigh-eternal suffering.

          • rahien.din says:

            random832,

            The question of human immortality relates to a single life. If everyone dies within a century or so after their birth, then a century or so is the longest timescale we can examine.

            If we want to consider spontaneous human immortality, that can only be because of very unusual and rare things. These would have very small frequencies in time, and thus could only exert “real” effect over bizarrely long timescales. A century or so is not long enough. Likely, a human would have to live an astoundingly long time in order to even encounter one these events.

            Therefore, if we want to consider the situations in which rare events cause spontaneous human immortality, we have to start with the cases in which a single human being lives an astoundingly long time.

            That person’s chance of encountering immortalizing events depends on their already being immortal.

          • random832 says:

            Likely, a human would have to live an astoundingly long time in order to even encounter one these events.

            I don’t see where the disagreement is. For most people, for the vast majority of the probability space that exists for them at any moment, the only one they will ever encounter will be their own.

            MWI is that all timelines exist. QI seems to be based on the idea that, almost by definition, whatever “continuity” exists of the self, it only “continues” into the ones where that person lives. The answer to “Why don’t “I” continue into the ones where I halt” is “because, like you just said, in those you halt rather than continuing”. It’s not a circular argument to point out that the opposite is a contradiction in terms.

            For the ones where you live forever to not exist at all isn’t just a rejection of QI, it’s a rejection of MWI. If you cannot come up with a rejection of QI that does not reject MWI, then “MWI implies QI” is probably true.

          • rahien.din says:

            All,

            I understand the arithmetic : events with incredibly small probabilities will occur, given sufficiently large time, space, and/or branching-world-ensemble scales. Yes: if you multiply even a miniscule number by a sufficiently-large number, you get 1.

            It is an error to do so. It is anti-rational. Not irrational. Destructive of rationality.

            MWI as we have been discussing it here literally permits anything to happen. If every event has a finite non-zero probability, and there are sufficient worlds to make everything happen, then for every event there are worlds in which that event occurs.

            Could I wake up tomorrow morning a saltwater crocodile? Something something quantum tunneling something something probability – yes and in fact this will happen in some worlds. Could the earth “quantum tunnel” into the sun in the next 15 seconds, leaving us all behind in the vacuum of space? Yes and and in fact this will happen in some worlds. Is there a world in which the Hawking radiation from Sagittarius A spontaneously reorganizes into ATP that “quantum tunnels” into every cell of my body, preventing my need to eat food for energy? There are infinite such worlds. So there is no way for you to tell me, “You will not wake up tomorrow a saltwater crocodile.” And given that we can not predict which world we will find ourselves in, MWI (as defined here) predicts that literally anything could happen to anybody at any time.

            It can also explain any observation. If a flag waves in a breeze, the explanation would be “We’re in a world where that happens.” If I wake up tomorrow and my children have been replaced by pygmy marmosets, the explanation would be “We’re in a world where that happens.” If I wake up tomorrow, and the particles in my brain have “quantum tunneled” into a configuration that makes me believe my children should be pygmy marmosets, “We’re in a world where that happens.”

            It also tells us that literally anything could have happened. We could be in a world in which, ten seconds ago, the universe consisted of a uniform block of strawberry cream cheese, or in which we were all saltwater crocodiles, but through something something quantum something something, it instantaneously achieved its current form with all the molecules and particles in our brains arranged in such a way that none of us is the wiser. There are infinite such worlds, according to MWI.

            And you can’t say or imply “Well, weird things happen in some worlds, but those worlds are distant.” There is no “default world,” or if there is, you can’t prove we are in it, were in it, or will stay in it. There are only worlds, and other worlds, and other other worlds.

            These are necessary conclusions of this version of MWI we have been discussing. This is why MWI is a fake explanation. It is equivalent to “magic.”

            The error that underlies it is a disguised infinity. If we permit that there are as many worlds as there are potential events, we are effectively allowing for infinite worlds because there are infinite things that could happen. Multiply anything by infinity and what do you get? A conceptual error.

          • random832 says:

            Yes: if you multiply even a miniscule number by a sufficiently-large number, you get 1.

            You’re not multiplying it by an arbitrary large number, you’re dividing it by itself. Which should make it more clear that these are things that naturally fall out of a worldview (i.e. the idea of considering only futures in which you live in the first place) rather than something that is purporting to be proven from logical first principles.

          • ADifferentAnonymous says:

            Rahien,
            I didn’t realize you were against all MW.

            I think you’re getting tripped up over how to have probability in an ontology.

            Classically, we have the idea that there’s a tiny probability of things like the oceans half-freezing half-boiling. Nevertheless, our expectations are constrained, by the very fact that we do assign such low probabilities to these outcomes. We do not expect to see these happen; we expect to see the physics we’re accustomed to.

            Under MWI, we believe that things like the earth tunneling into the sun do happen, but that the configurations have very low amplitudes, and therefore correspondingly low Born probabilities. Our expectations are constrained by this; we do not expect to see spontaneous macroscopic tunneling.

            Quantum immortality is the belief that makes things weird–it states that we should condition our expectations on our survival. Once we enter a situation where our survival requires tiny-probability events, then we expect to see tiny-probability events. This still doesn’t leave explanations completely unconstrained, because if you really knuckle down and do the math it’ll turn out that some tiny-probability events are not as tiny as the others.

          • rahien.din says:

            ADifferentAnonymous,

            I’m not against any interpretation of MW, and in fact, I am fully and deliberately agnostic. I truly meant it when I qualified “MWI” with “as we are discussing it here,” IE, it is not that all interpretations of MW are wrong, just that the one we have been discussing here. That should have been pretty clear.

            Neither do I misunderstand QI. I know what you are saying by “we condition our expectations upon our survival.” I have been trying to explain why the reasoning you describe as “we condition our expectations upon our survival” is an error.

            The issue is far more fundamental:

            we have the idea that there’s a tiny probability of things like the oceans half-freezing half-boiling

            No. We do not have this idea. It is an entry-level conceptual error in physics.

            Asserting “the math predicts a non-zero probability for…” is totally insufficient. Our equations might fail to rule it out, but that does not mean it is definitely true or possible. Math can not forge truth from error.

            If your understanding of QI allows you to give credence to these errors, then either QI is false, or your understanding of QI is false, or both.

            And, I hold by my points that the case for QI rests on circular reasoning, that QI is a fake explanation, that the math behind the calculation is erroneous, and that if we accept QI then we are abandoning rational thought.

          • Soy Lecithin says:

            The issue is far more fundamental:

            we have the idea that there’s a tiny probability of things like the oceans half-freezing half-boiling

            No. We do not have this idea. It is an entry-level conceptual error in physics.

            Not at all. This is an entry-level conceptual truth, rather. It’s common to find such examples as water spontaneously boiling, the air molecules in a room spontaneously flowing to one side, etc. in introductory quantum mechanics (and thermodynamics) textbooks.

            Asserting “the math predicts a non-zero probability for…” is totally insufficient. Our equations might fail to rule it out, but that does not mean it is definitely true or possible. Math can not forge truth from error.

            Finding a non-zero probability for an event and failing to rule out an event are, at least in this context, very different things. Quantum mechanics does much much more than “fail to rule out” macroscopic tunneling. It straight up says it will happen some of the time. This idea isn’t up for discussion without quantum mechanics being up for discussion.

            If your understanding of QI allows you to give credence to these errors, then either QI is false, or your understanding of QI is false, or both.

            Some of your arguments against quantum immortality sounds suspiciously like arguments against quantum mechanics. For the record, I think that the idea of quantum immortality is nonsense. But any arguments against quantum immortality that don’t presuppose the truth of quantum mechanics aren’t going to be very effective.

            Could I wake up tomorrow morning a saltwater crocodile? Something something quantum tunneling something something probability – yes and in fact this will happen in some worlds. Could the earth “quantum tunnel” into the sun in the next 15 seconds, leaving us all behind in the vacuum of space? Yes and and in fact this will happen in some worlds. Is there a world in which the Hawking radiation from Sagittarius A spontaneously reorganizes into ATP that “quantum tunnels” into every cell of my body, preventing my need to eat food for energy? There are infinite such worlds. So there is no way for you to tell me, “You will not wake up tomorrow a saltwater crocodile.” And given that we can not predict which world we will find ourselves in, MWI (as defined here) predicts that literally anything could happen to anybody at any time.

            Yes! (at least for rhetorical purposes). Quantum mechanics changes the paradigm for predictions in physics from “This will happen, and that will not happen,” to “This has probability x of happening, and that has probability 1-x of happening.” And to be clear, this isn’t a feature of many-worlds interpretation; it’s a feature of quantum mechanics, itself.

          • ADifferentAnonymous says:

            Ah, so I do seem to have misunderstood your views on MWI.

            Let me try one more time to get a handle on how you’re seeing this:
            Do you admit the idea of an extremely low probability?

            If we forget about weird physics phenomena and just deal in normal probabilities, and I say that I have a nonzero chance of flipping a fair coin heads 1,000 times in a row, do you object? Am I failing to constrain my expectations, if I believe that this ‘could’ happen (with probability 1/2^1000)?

            As far as I can tell, you think there’s some level of improbability where a chance is no longer ‘credible’, and any reasoning that makes reference to the chance being greater than zero is automatically wrong.

          • rahien.din says:

            ADifferentAnonymous,

            Not to worry. I have probably misunderstood you, as well. If SSC permitted us signature lines, mine would be a link to the Illusion of Transparency. Also, this will be the last I write in this subthread. I’ve probably put down three or four thousand words.

            I am not throwing out MWI, nor quantum mechanics in general. I am saying that, if we are to believe in MWI, our belief must be rational and appropriate. I will describe the version of MWI we are discussing here (that in which we find such things as QI or spontaneous macroscopic quantum tunneling (SMQT) to be credible) as MWI*.

            I am not even arguing for a threshold at which probabilities become finite-but-non-credible. Your coin is an example of extremely-low-but-finite probability. Even if a coin landed on heads 3^^^3 consecutive times, it would be astounding, but we would not be forced to reinterpret coins. That is an entirely credible scenario, and insofar as we can fit it into an experiment, there is no number of consecutive heads-es that would exceed the bounds of credibility.

            I should clarify what I mean by “credible.” Let’s go back to epsilon. It is a finite positive value such that, no matter how small ε becomes, if Xn ±ε = X∞, then Xn converges to X∞. So (like ∞) the proper use of epsilon is not really as a number but as a concept. It is “a finite number so small that it is indistinguishable from 0.” Though not precisely the same mathematical situation, I would loosely analogize epsilon to : 1 – 0.999… One can conceive (as do some mathematical trainees, high on intuition) of a finite positive number that emerges from that calculation, like 0.000…1, but it would be an error to postulate 0.000…1 as an instantiated quantity or ratio that we could multiply by some finite constant to get 1. Instead, 0.999… = 1. Their difference is 0, or, in some metaphorical sense, ε.

            There are credible events which have low finite probability, and non-credible events that have epsilon probability. My assertion is that there are some events that we should and do consign to the domain of epsilon probability. And the consignment thereof is a deliberate and instrumental constraint on anticipation.

            Physics is basically the study of the consistent behavior of masses, as acted upon by energies and forces. The only way we know about the consistent behavior of masses is from observations of the movement of masses, as demonstrated by replicable experiment, by direct experience, and by practical application. We have seen masses consistently move in X fashion, therefore, we infer X relationship between masses, energies, and forces.

            If we assume that things like SMQT are possible, their effects can not be ignored in our conceptualization of physics. Consider Galileo’s experiment at Pisa. There is only a single way that the outcome thereof could have arisen from the interaction of masses and forces. There are many more ways it could have resulted from SMQT, including: the apparent movement of the balls is due to them incrementally SMQT’ing once a Planck-second, in apparent obedience to the actual relationship between masses and gravity ; prior to the moment in which the balls rested on the ground, the universe was a uniform distribution of elementary particles, but by SMQT, reinstantiated itself Omphalos style in the configuration of an Italian genius, looking at two balls on the ground, with the physically-encoded memory of two balls of different weights hitting the ground at the exact same moment ; some combination thereof.

            In the same way, every single event anyone has ever occurred could have been due to SMQT simulating real physical relationships in real time, or, due to Omphalos-like reinstantiations of the universe. In either of those categories of events, the simulation could occur in a manner faithful or unfaithful to the true physical relationships. If we are not permitted to assign these scenarios epsilon probability (as I have described it), we must conclude that, by MWI*, each such event does occur in its own world. We can term them “false worlds,” as opposed to “true worlds,” in which these effects do not occur as I have described and instead, the apparent physics is the result only of the underlying relationships between masses, forces, and energies[1].

            We can further describe these worlds. If there are false worlds, then there are “accurate worlds” and “inaccurate worlds.” SMQT events could appear to violate the natural order, or could be effectively invisible by simulating the true natural order. Accurate false worlds are false worlds in which SMQT events invariably simulate the true underlying relationships between masses, forces, and energies. Inaccurate false worlds are those in which SMQT events simulate something else. If there are false worlds, then there are also “continuous worlds,” and “discontinuous worlds.” Though they are permitted to do so, SMQT events are not required to occur the same way every time. Continuous false worlds are those in which SMQT effects do occur the same way every time, creating the appearance of a different physics. Discontinuous false worlds are those in which they do not.

            Any of these descriptions could apply locally or generally, in that a world could be described as overall inaccurate, discontinuous and false, but there could be periods in which the world is true, periods in which it is accurate discontinuous, etc.

            Consider that there is a set of worlds which are true. Even if we grant that each of the false worlds has a miniscule finite probability, we must also grant that there are sufficient number[2] of these worlds that we assign them a large total probability mass. And this probability mass is much larger than for true worlds, because there are far more numerous ways that SMQT could simulate or violate the apparent natural order than ways in which the natural order could proceed unperturbed. This is as simple as mere entropy. Therefore, the probability mass of accurate continuous false worlds is vastly larger than that of true worlds. These are then dwarfed by the rest of the full set of worlds, including accurate discontinuous, inaccurate continuous, and inaccurate discontinuous false worlds. Thus, there is a low likelihood of finding oneself in a true world[3].

            It is impossible to verify that you were or are in a true world, even experimentally. Not only is very instance of observation subject to manipulation of the experimental apparatus by SMQT, mental process have some basis in chemistry and physics and are just as vulnerable to SMQT. If we can’t verify that our observations were not subject to SMQT, and if there is a substantial probability of finding ourselves in a false world, we can not reject the null hypothesis of “any and/or every event is due to SMQT, including our perceptions of SMQT and non-SMQT events.” It is further impossible to conclude that, even if we are in an accurate false world or a true world, that we are in an accurate continuous false world. Whatever their source, we can not claim that the predictions made by our experiments will hold, or if they do appear to hold, that this is even true or accurate.

            So, to hold to MWI* requires that one embrace the non-falsifiable null hypothesis that nothing in one’s perceptions, experiments, or interpretations has any basis in or interpretive power for the past, present, and/or future.

            This includes the experiments, theory, and mathematical efforts that led to the supposed conclusion of MWI*. If you believe in it, and consign no probabilities to epsilon (as I describe it), MWI* itself requires that you strongly consider MWI* to be almost certainly false.

            That’s the danger of an idea that can literally explain everything. These ideas invariably dismantle themselves. If you get to such an idea via math, then you either did the wrong math or you are misinterpreting/misapplying correct math. Math can not forge truth from error.

            I avoid that danger by assigning epsilon probability to certain scenarios, prior to any observations. Mississippi River turning to magma? Epsilon. Oceans half-boiling half-freezing? Epsilon. SMQT? Epsilon. QI? Epsilon. We can envision ways in which those could happen, but we also know that they won’t, even if the math could lead us down a weird rabbit hole. Yes, this is arbitrary. But it’s also the only correct, rational course of action.

            [1] I am not thus required to reject quantum mechanics wholesale. Our knowledge of quantum mechanics, including its inscrutable and counterintuitive weirdness, is verified by experimental replication and practical application. (In fact, SMQT could accurately or inaccurately simulate quantum mechanical experiments.) I am not arguing for some kind of immature Laplacian determinism. I am arguing against certain things being a feature of quantum mechanics.

            [2] If y’all are permitted to do so then by golly so am I.

            [3] If you prefer : there is a substantial and meaningful and significant probability of finding oneself in a false world of some kind.

            [4] I emphasize : PRIOR TO ANY OBSERVATION. I will update my beliefs if we observe multiple instances of macroscopic quantum tunneling that we can replicate with the right apparatus. Then I might start to give more credence to SMQT, albeit with extreme caution.

          • Jiro says:

            It is impossible to verify that you were or are in a true world, even experimentally.

            No, it’s not. “Verify an experiment” doesn’t mean “verify with 100% certainty”. When you conduct your experiment, there’s always the chance that your result is due to SMQT and not due to the original hypothesis being true, but it’s such a small chance that the experiment can still be verified to almost 100% certainty, even if not exactly 100% certainty.

            SMQT only matters when
            1) the result is impossible in more likely ways, yet
            2) we can ignore the cases where the result doesn’t happen.

            This is almost never true and certainly isn’t true for normal experiments. It is only true for quantum immortality because in quantum immortality, only the worlds where you are conscious still count–so the fact that you have a 99.9999..99% chance of dying doesn’t matter, making SMQT actually important.

          • rahien.din says:

            Jiro,

            This is almost never true and certainly isn’t true for normal experiments.

            What is your basis for this claim?

          • Jiro says:

            If you can think of an experiment where both those conditions hold true, feel free to tell me.

          • rahien.din says:

            You can’t reject the null hypothesis – spontaneous macroscopic quantum tunneling hasn’t contaminated the experiment – for any experiment. This includes the experiments that helped describe quantum mechanics.

            There are infinite worlds in which that has happened. You have no basis for claiming that we aren’t in one of them.

          • Jiro says:

            You can’t reject the null hypothesis – spontaneous macroscopic quantum tunneling hasn’t contaminated the experiment – for any experiment.

            You can’t 100% disprove the null hypothesis. But you can reject the null hypothesis.

            “Reject” doesn’t mean “reject with exactly 100% confidence”.

          • rahien.din says:

            You can’t reject it at any significance level.

          • Jiro says:

            You can’t reject it at any significance level.

            Where are you getting this from? A quantum random result that verifies your experiment is extremely unlikely. If the unlikelihood is less than the significance level, why would you not be able to reject it?

          • rahien.din says:

            Jiro,

            Where are you getting this from?

            We’re not allowed to say “SMQT is rare because of X experiments, and we can trust X experiments because SMQT is rare.”

          • ADifferentAnonymous says:

            Rahien,
            First, thanks for the big write-up. I did find it helpful.

            Second, the statement footnote 2 is attached to is the problem. An infinite series can have a finite sum. The aggregate probability of all false worlds is likewise finite, and in fact still extremely low.

            If any QI argument claims that an infinite collection of possibilities must have a high aggregate probability, attack the argument there because that premise is wrong.

          • Jiro says:

            We’re not allowed to say “SMQT is rare because of X experiments, and we can trust X experiments because SMQT is rare.”

            By this reasoning, we could never trust experiments anyway, because we couldn’t ever tell that experiments didn’t involve mistakes (any experiment to check the frequency of mistakes could itself have been affected by mistakes).

          • rahien.din says:

            Jiro,

            Well, sure. That too is a necessary consequence of your line of reasoning.

            But it’s your line of reasoning that I argue to its necessary logical consequence. If you are considering that a human being could conceivably live for an infinite duration, you’re multiplying the miniscule-but-finite probability of spontaneous human immortality by an infinite number of world branchings. You aren’t allowed, then, to claim that any event is too improbable to occur.

            And thus you can not reject the null hypothesis : all of our quantum mechanical experimental and practical data is tainted by SMQT, such that our data/perceptions are totally incorrect and SMQT is actually tremendously common. IE, SMQT could appear to violate the natural order by simulating a low rate of SMQT. Experiment and observation can not reject this null hypothesis – not even to support the claim that SMQT is rare.

            ADifferentAnonymous,

            The aggregate probability of all false worlds is extremely low.

            Says who, and on what basis?

            Merely describing something as an infinite series does not mean it converges to a large number, a small number, infinity, or zero. At the most basic : even if we describe the probability mass of false worlds as the sum of an infinite series, we don’t know and can’t know what series to use.
            – If SMQT is rare, then the correct series converges to a small, finite number and our experiments are (our world is) accurate.
            – If SMQT is common, then the correct series converges to a much larger number and our experiments are (our world is) inaccurate.

            Experiments can not help us choose.

            Math can not forge truth from error.

          • ADifferentAnonymous says:

            Says who? Says the mathematics of quantum mechanics, irrespective of interpretation.

            I can’t give you a mathematical argument for this, but it’s a consensus in physics that as scales approach the macroscopic the probability of classically-expected outcomes approaches one. If it were ever shown otherwise, it would be the result of the century.

            ETA: see #4 here for a simple mathematical argument about the probability of SMQT.

          • ADifferentAnonymous says:

            Okay, just reread that last Rahien post… “Experiments cannot help us choose”.

            I guess I didn’t address the claim being made.

            The short answer is basically occam’s razor/universal prior/Solomonoff Induction, which you can look up the sequence posts on. In short, quantum mechanics as we formulate it is a simple theory that predicts our observations with high probability. QM with frequent SMQT would predict our observations with extremely low probability.

          • rahien.din says:

            ADifferentAnonymous,

            Thanks for charity. I make no claims to transparency!

            The short answer is basically occam’s razor/universal prior/Solomonoff Induction, which you can look up the sequence posts on. In short, quantum mechanics as we formulate it is a simple theory that predicts our observations with high probability. QM with frequent SMQT would predict our observations with extremely low probability.

            Okay!

            Now imagine a high-SMQT universe in which SMQT suddenly becomes extremely rare, allowing the universe to proceed in the manner of a low-SMQT universe. How would we condition our expectations?

          • ADifferentAnonymous says:

            You mean a universe where SMQT is likely according to the laws of physics, but by chance happens rarely if at all? The prior for being in such a universe is equal to the prior of being in the high-physical-probability-of-SMQT universe, times the (tiny, tiny) probability of SMQT occuring rarely for a long time in such a universe.

          • rahien.din says:

            No, I mean, assume we observe a high rate of SMQT for a while, and then abruptly, a low rate of SMQT such that the measurable laws of physics then predict a low rate of SMQT. How do we condition our expectations when the situation turns from unpredictable to predictable?

    • Anonymous Bosch says:

      I actually had some idle thoughts about this almost a decade ago on a long-abandoned livejournal. My conclusion was that the best way to avoid such a situation was to attempt suicide in the most total and foolproof way possible. In other words, manipulate the odds so that any mundane, crippled course of survival is much less likely than you having undiscovered crazy superpowers. Nothing that people have survived in the past like shooting yourself in the head or jumping out of a plane. Only absolutely deadly stuff like lowering yourself to the Challenger Deep in a bathysphere and hitting an exploding hatch so the only way out is for you secretly be Aquaman.

      • Anonymous` says:

        Assuming QI (which despite instigating this thread I don’t necessarily believe in yet), in the Challenger Deep scenario, your head starts getting crushed by water pressure and then after pain but before death the water particles start missing you.

        To really escape the trap you’d have to set up a scenario where you no longer have the ability to suffer but are still conscious, I think, not just a scenario where escaping death is even more unlikely than normal. But then you get into the profound weirdness of how many/which changes you can make to your brain before you’re “dead” from the perspective of QI and this branch “doesn’t count anymore”.

        There also might be a “make something positive more likely than particle-bouncing escape” exploit, but it’s going to have to be really clever.

  25. rahien.din says:

    Thank you to everyone who answered my questions in OT 76.75. I really enjoyed reading your generous and thoughtful responses.

    Here’s to another installment. As always, I want to learn more about modern conservatism. To that end, I want to ask specific questions, and I’m hoping you will answer. If there’s an obvious follow-up question, or I need clarification, I will ask other questions. Otherwise, my default setting is shut up and listen.

    Next questions :
    1. What would you like me to read? Books, essays, blogs, magazines, historical texts, etc.
    2. What do you think are the major threats facing America, from within and without, in terms of existential risk and in terms of unacceptable societal change?

    As always, I would ask two favors, because if this erupts into a massively multiplayer online mutual blowtorching, I will not learn anything and might get banhammered. Firstly, Red Tribers : I think it would be easiest to learn from conservative ideas allowed to stand on their own, without resorting to mere opposition to liberal ideas (though, obviously, if I ask what you don’t like about a certain liberal idea, that’s unavoidable). Second, Blue Tribers : I hope you will let any responses stand on their own, without any attempt to rebut them / pick a fight / sneer / etc. Even if you think something is flat wrong, please try to hold your peace in my subthread.

    Edit: Thanks, Vermillion. If I can find a good link to Heaney’s “Terminus,” I’ll put that somewhere.

    • Vermillion says:

      That link to the poem doesn’t work FYI.

      Edit: Glad you noticed before the edit timer was up, looking forward to the upcoming responses.

    • bintchaos says:

      I would like to point out Dr. Hsu ‘s climate science thread…as a window into conservative thought.
      Its pretty fascinating.. a beautifully articulated window into the science/anti-science issue.
      https://infoproc.blogspot.fr/2017/06/epistemic-caution-and-climate-change.html

    • commenter#1 says:

      1. It’s realllllllly long. But I’ve always considered Atlas Shrugged to be Grey Tribe’s magnum opus F-You to the Blue Tribe. As in: this is the logical extreme of what happens when a society elevates compassion over reason as a guiding principle.

      For more traditional conservative perspective, A Tale of Two Cities or Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France are classic take downs of utopian impulses.

      2. Idiocracy – i.e. exponential breeding of the permanent underclass. I personally know multiple men who are between 30 and 35 years old, have between 6-7 children, with 3-4 significant others, and they’re not done yet! All of the children are on welfare. All of the mothers are on welfare. There is an actual line to get child support because the fathers don’t make enough to support all of the children through wage garnishment. For some of them, this behavior is already 2-3 generations in.

      I’m all for welfare to support the unfortunate and the unlucky. But reliance on public support requires giving up some options. People on the public dole should have mandatory, long-lasting birth control – either depo shots or IUD’s.

      • Nornagest says:

        Hopefully I have enough Gray Tribe bona fides around here to say this without it coming off as sneering, but: the first third of Atlas Shrugged would be an outstanding Gray Tribe manifesto. But when you pull in the other two thirds, it’s no good — the message the plot ends up pushing is effectively “we’re fucked, and the only thing that can save us is class warfare”. Not Marxist class warfare, but class warfare nonetheless — and where the standards for being part of the productive class are set so high that practically no one meets them. It is incredibly alienating, and for a lot of people I can see it subverting the book’s best and most important point up to then, which is “it’s okay to work for yourself”.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          An important secondary point is that there’s a difference between getting money and getting paid for useful work, but it’s quite possible to get rich doing useful work.

      • People on the public dole should have mandatory, long-lasting birth control – either depo shots or IUD’s.

        Way to reign in the power of the state!

        • Anonymous says:

          Just give the females an education and the males an ample supply of video games and porn. That’ll take care of most instances of reproduction right quick.

      • Garrett says:

        As a Gray Triber, on Atlas Shrugged:

        Atlas Shrugged is a very important book for me in that it bootstrapped my journey into philosophy and also pushed me into atheism. I agree on its importance. At the same time, I’m a person who re-reads books routinely for fun and I’ve never managed to re-read Atlas Shrugged because it’s a pretty terrible book as far as writing goes.

        If your goal is to engage in one of the shared experiences of the Gray tribe, by all means, read the book. It’s got one of the highest pages-per-dollar ratios you’ll find in a mass-market paperback.

        If your goal is to understand Ayn Rand’s philosophy, I’d highly recommend Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. This is a pop-philosophy book which goes into great detail the underlying ideas. The first 3 chapters are a bit of a drag because there’s a lot of argumentation that “A is A”. But after that point things become much more relatable. And you’ll quickly be able to see how much public presentation of her arguments is just … wrong.

    • Space Viking says:

      For me, conservatism flows from biology, which, as a former left-libertarian – now alt-right – I was insufficiently familiar with. Read Greg Cochran’s book, The Ten Thousand Year Explosion, and then read his blog, West Hunter, including the archives. They’re not long, and were endlessly fascinating to me even when I was on the left. You’ll also see West Hunter in Scott Alexander’s blogroll. The implications of biology formed the intellectual root of my conservatism.

      The emotional root of my conservatism comes from art, and the sense of continuity with Western civilization. See Lord Clark’s classic art history series, Civilisation.

      As for threats to America, this is what keeps the right up at night:

      1. Nuclear war. This has been the primary threat unceasingly since 1949, and is the main reason I and others in my conservative bubble voted against Hillary Clinton.

      2. Demographic change. Low-IQ mass immigration, unless halted, will change America into a middle-income country. If you import Mexico long enough, you become Mexico. This threatens our culture, our standard of living, our physical safety, and our crucially important global role as the engine of scientific and technological progress. Mexicans are bad enough, Muslims and Africans are worse. It must be stopped soon, as immigrant birth rates are high, and even then, we’ll need incentives for recent immigrants to leave.

      3. The Left. I don’t mean left-libertarians and classical liberals – they are few in number and harmless enough – I mean the rising left: socialists and SJWs and ethnic identitarians. What we see in universities today is the future. Unless stopped soon, their attacks on us and everything we believe in will lead to civil war: not now, but once they’ve locked in a permanent majority due to demographic change, and lose all constraint. Immigrants vote mostly for the Democrats; young immigrants, overwhelmingly so.

      4. Terrorism, mostly due to tail risks: suitcase nukes and bioterrorism. It also strengthens the surveillance state.

      5. Tyrannical government. The Deep State grows in power every year. Perhaps Trump can slow it down, but I doubt that he can stop it.

      As a transhumanist, I’ll add aging and AI risk, but those are not common positions on the left or right.

      • sidewalkProf says:

        Do you mind clarifying your thinking behind the 1st bullet point (nuclear war)? I feel like that point in particular is arguing by assertion. Per the spirit of the original post, I want to underscore that I’m not trying to spark a debate about the validity of the claim, I’m just interested to hear what specific evidence/beliefs/models you’re using to make the claim (assuming I’m reading it right) that “Hillary Clinton as President implies a significant increase in the risk of nuclear war, which is not implied by the Presidency of any other candidate”. (If I misunderstood your claim, please correct me too!)

        PS. I’m a conservative from a very blue state, so while I think I’ve done well at broadening my thinking about social and philosophical issues, I readily caveat that in terms of my thinking about international-relations I’m generally stuck in a Blue Tribe bubble. So please accept the possibility of me missing something that to you is obvious.

        • Nornagest says:

          Hillary was perceived as a hawk; in particular she’d favored a no-fly zone over Syria, which would have brought a point of contention with Russia (which was, and still is, providing air support to Assad’s side and might understandably be peeved if their aircraft were being shot down).

          That particular issue probably wouldn’t have amounted to much besides the usual posturing and saber-rattling. But actual issues were scarce enough in the last election that any objective policy proposal was being interpreted far out of proportion to its object-level significance, and this was no exception. And to be fair, increasing tension with Russia probably does incrementally increase the probability of nuclear war.

          • bintchaos says:

            HRC was a hawk alright– she had seen the sims.
            ANY no-fly zone topples Assad in the simulations.
            Obama’s Red Line would have toppled Assad.

          • Hillary was perceived as a hawk;

            Was she perceived as someone who would do reckless and not listen to advisors?

          • Sandy says:

            Was she perceived as someone who would do reckless and not listen to advisors?

            She was perceived as someone who would be doling out the reckless advice herself, given that she was the one who pushed Obama into a Libyan intervention he didn’t want.

          • Nornagest says:

            @TheAncientGeek —

            From the OP:

            Blue Tribers : I hope you will let any responses stand on their own, without any attempt to rebut them / pick a fight / sneer / etc.

            I would rather honor OP’s intent in this subthread and not play gotcha games.

        • Space Viking says:

          Sure. The claim, in expanded form, is: Hillary Clinton made various brazenly anti-Russia comments during her campaign, e.g. support for a no-fly zone in Syria, support for overthrowing the Assad regime, support for providing arms to the Ukrainian government, calling a potential Russian cyberattack on the US an “act of war”. That’s all that I remember, but there were more.

          These comments are believable because Clinton is a known hawk: she was pro-Iraq War, she pushed for the Libya intervention as Secretary of State, and she tried to convince Obama to overthrow Assad.

          Compare this to Donald Trump, who expressed support for getting along with Russia and potentially allying with them against ISIS.

          Also, the Democratic Party is considerably more anti-Russia than the Republicans, except for a few neocon holdouts, so Clinton in office would have been pressured by her base to increase US-Russia tensions. If you doubt this, see the polls.

          Also, we on the right had concerns regarding Clinton’s temperament, her possible alcoholism, her health, and her good judgment — overthrowing Gaddafi was her baby, and it was disastrous. We did not trust her to make decisions of war and peace. We know that the left say similar things about Trump, and we don’t believe them.

          Note that this issue is more about individual politicians than it is left/right. Bernie’s foreign policy would have been terrible, but at least he would not have caused a nuclear war. But if John McCain were president, I would fear for my life. Conservative thinking on foreign policy is moving toward isolationism, away from neoconservatism, and toward realism, away from pro-democracy liberal interventionism.

          All of these things gave us pause. Russia is and always has been the only power capable of physically destroying the United States, so good relations are paramount, literally more important than anything else. I’m not saying that Hillary Clinton would have started a nuclear war, she probably wouldn’t have, but she would have raised the risk, and that is unacceptable.

          • sidewalkProf says:

            Thanks for expanding on this! Definitely found it valuable.

          • albatross11 says:

            An interesting question (on which I don’t have the answer, but I did think about this before the election): Were we more likely to have a nuclear war under Trump or under Clinton? It’s not obvious to me which one is more likely–Trump seemed less belligerent toward Russia[1], and maybe less enthusiastic about bombing people. On the other hand, Clinton clearly understands how to play the diplomatic/foreign policy game the way the US has always played it, and would be a lot more predictable to our allies and enemies than Trump.

            [1] At this point, Trump is probably less able than Clinton to make concessions to Russia that would make sense for keeping peace or improving relations, because anything he does will be attacked by the other side as evidence of his Russian ties. This probably makes a war with Russia slightly more likely.

          • John Schilling says:

            Much more likely to have a nuclear war under Trump. Slightly more likely to have a nuclear war with Russia under Hillary. Nuclear wars with Not Russia are about two orders of magnitude less catastrophic than nuclear wars with Russia, so on the balance I think Trump comes out the winner in this one category.

          • random832 says:

            [1] At this point, Trump is probably less able than Clinton to make concessions to Russia that would make sense for keeping peace or improving relations, because anything he does will be attacked by the other side as evidence of his Russian ties. This probably makes a war with Russia slightly more likely.

            A few weeks ago, someone here made a comment that, if not for that, Trump would make a nuclear war ultimately more likely as a future president would have to claw back whatever concessions Trump had given to Russia, after Russia had already started taking them for granted.

          • Aapje says:

            I think that the Russians are too cynical to take anything for granted.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Aapje

            ?

          • random832 says:

            Maybe not “take for granted” in the conventional sense, but I (and whoever made the original comment I’m thinking of, stated in a more explicit way than my summary) meant more along the lines of “considering it part of the new status quo, and considering its removal as ‘taking something away’ rather than ‘not giving something'”

          • bintchaos says:

            The Doomsday clock is only 2 1/2 minutes away from midnight.
            The Qatar crisis is real, complex, immediate, and was started by ONE SINGLE COMMENT from Trump.
            Israel has ~200 nukes right?

          • Aapje says:

            @random832

            I think that Putin works from an adversarial/zero sum model, where he considers people who help him to be fools who are confused or manipulated into harming themselves for the benefit of Putin/Russia.

            With such a model, you can never trust the other person to keep hitting himself.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @John Schilling

            Much more likely to have a nuclear war under Trump.

            With whom? How does the nuclear exchange play out in your mind?

          • bean says:

            The Doomsday clock is only 2 1/2 minutes away from midnight.
            The Qatar crisis is real, complex, immediate, and was started by ONE SINGLE COMMENT from Trump.
            Israel has ~200 nukes right?

            So? The Saudi nukes are in Pakistan, who hasn’t taken action against Qatar. The Israelis are probably just content to sit back with their popcorn. Why would this turn nuclear?
            The fact that the ‘doomsday clock’ is at the second-highest setting ever is just absurd, and is more a way of booing Trump than anything else. The idea that we’re closer to a global catastrophe today than we have been since 1960 is absurd.

          • bintchaos says:

            The Clock posts once a year in January– before inaugration usually– How can this be about booing Trump?
            Do you understand the extreme risk involved in the Trump/Kushner “strategy” for ME peace?

          • John Schilling says:

            With whom? How does the nuclear exchange play out in your mind?

            Most likely with Trump ordering a preemptive attack on North Korea after some ICBM test, SSB deployment, or more violent provocation. Whether because he genuinely believes North Korea is about to launch a sneak attack on the US, or because it is the only way to make good on four years of tweets about how North Korea is going to be Dealt With, Real Soon Now, or both. Trump’s preemptive attack might not be nuclear, the Pentagon would push back on that, but the North Korean response would likely escalate to nuclear levels before it was over.

            Same deal in Iran is a lower-order possibility.

            These are not, to be clear, likely outcomes. Just less unlikely than Hillary’s hypothetical nuclear war with Russia.

          • bean says:

            The Clock posts once a year in January– before inaugration usually– How can this be about booing Trump?

            You must not have been watching the same election I was. The booing started on November 9th, and hasn’t stopped since. It has nothing to do with Trump’s actual policies as implemented, and everything to do with the expectation of his policies by those who run the clock. Obama got the Peace Prize for being Not George Bush, even though he hadn’t done anything yet. This is pretty much the same.

            Do you understand the extreme risk involved in the Trump/Kushner “strategy” for ME peace?

            No, I don’t see the extreme risk. It’s a mess, but that fits both the ME and the Trump Administration.

          • bintchaos says:

            “Booing” is not a recognized input to the clock simulation. Popular vote might be. Number of protest marches probably is, but those will be incorporated into next years run.
            The Clock is a complex large scale simulation– there isnt a place to put a liberal thumb on the scales.
            BTW have you heard of Trump Repellent Theory?

            The extreme risk in the Trump/Kushner plan for ME peace (carrot and stick for covert alliance with Israel, KSA & vassals will do it, Qatar and Turkey wont) is if the general ME population realizes what is happening, and the Defenders of the Faithful and the Guardians of the Land of Two Holy Sites (House Saud) either collapses or is forced to go “full-Ottoman” to retain power. There’s a reason US has 2 airbases in Qatar and zero in the Kingdom.

          • Gobbobobble says:

            The Qatar crisis is real, complex, immediate, and was started by ONE SINGLE COMMENT from Trump.

            Evidence, please? For someone so into complexity theory, you seem to be willfully ignoring any non-Trump factors that would have gone into this situation. Qatar and the other Gulf States have agency and their own agendas that helped get them into their mess.

          • John Schilling says:

            Donald Trump has made a grand total of two tweets that even mention Qatar, the earliest of which was on June 6, 2017 at 07:06:35 AM (presumably EDT). That was the day after Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Yemen, Egypt, the Maldives, and Bahrain had all separately announced that they were cutting diplomatic ties with Qatar.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            I’ve wondered whether cutting off Qatar is Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Yemen, Egypt, the Maldives, and Bahrain trying to show they’re willing to do something about terrorism while not actually doing anything difficult.

          • John Schilling says:

            “Booing” is not a recognized input to the clock simulation. Popular vote might be. Number of protest marches probably is, but those will be incorporated into next years run.
            The Clock is a complex large scale simulation– there isnt a place to put a liberal thumb on the scales.

            “Sitting in a room is more or less how these decisions get made. Despite science being in the Bulletin’s name, its methods are more Socratic than anything else. Every year, the ten scientists and security experts on its board gather for a one-day discussion where they review what worried them last year and anticipate new concerns. There are no minute-hand-divining devices and no instability-predicting supercomputers: ”
            R. Meyer, 2016, on the methodology of the Doomsday Clock.

            There’s nothing but thumbs on that scale. Seventeen, at last count, and with a bit of quick googling I’ll wager that ten of them are on the liberal wing of the US political spectrum with the rest more apolitical than conservative.

          • Nornagest says:

            And now I have an Iron Maiden song stuck in my head.

          • bintchaos says:

            @John Schilling
            I’m sorry, but my experience of the Clock was in a theory of computing class where we were studying large scale multimodular simulations of complex adaptive systems. I have no experience of it being instead a star-chamber of liberal extremists with their thumbs on the scale. I thought it was a large scale heavily parameterized simulation.
            Trump said he caused the split with Qatar.
            Tillerson is on today trying to do damage control.
            @Nancy Leibowitz is correct, this is really a 30 year old internal fight among GCC members, and Trump has been used to advantage KSA position. Worrisome, isnt it?
            KSA can’t change their support for Wahhabism. They tried to have a US airbase in the Kingdom and almost got toppled.
            That is why Incirlik (Turkey) and Uhdeid(Qatar) are the major bases used in the fight against IS.
            Trump just jeopardized that with a tweet.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            bintchaos, thanks for the credit but my name is Lebovitz.

          • bintchaos says:

            oh pardon…its that german W or V thing I have phonetic trouble with.
            Wont happen again.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            @Nancy Lebovitz

            I’ve wondered whether cutting off Qatar is Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Yemen, Egypt, the Maldives, and Bahrain trying to show they’re willing to do something about terrorism while not actually doing anything difficult.

            Well, also Qatar runs Al Jazeera which frequently serves as a propaganda arm for the Muslim brotherhood, al Qaeda, Hezbollah, basically every terrorist group trying to undermine the other Sunni states in the Middle East (and Israel). It’s not exactly a good neighbor, so this seems like a good bit of detente: the other ME nations get to bring Qatar to heel with the approval of the US.

          • bintchaos says:

            Except it is thoughtless and …well stupid to alienate Turkey and Qatar which have ginormous military airfields at Incirlik (also home to the NATO nukes) and al Uhdeid (critical in the airwar against IS) by getting scammed into taking sides on a 30 year old internal GCC slap fight.
            And Trump did it at the suggestion of KSA which can neverneverever host a US base.

          • bean says:

            And Trump did it at the suggestion of KSA which can neverneverever host a US base.

            They did it in 1990. And there are lots of other options to fight ISIS. There’s Kuwait, Bahrain, Cyprus, and these weird ships with flat tops we seem to have a lot of.

          • bintchaos says:

            The problem with bombing is that because of SNT you create more terrorists than you eliminate. For example, droning. Each kill creates a minimum of at least 2 more terrorists because negative influence propagates along multiple networks including both social and kinship trusted networks.
            So US isn’t even running in place…its running backwards.
            And US only had a that base for a heartbeat– because it was destabilizing the Saudi government. Let us also remember that OBL used that (extremely short-lived) base as rational for 911, to drum up anti-US fervor among the mujahideen.
            UAE is a KSA vassal so US could conceivably build a new base there– at great cost lol… but theres still the NATO nukes at Incirlik.

          • Controls Freak says:

            Each kill creates a minimum of at least 2 more terrorists

            Interesting claim. Do you have any methodology to support this estimate?

          • bintchaos says:

            yup.
            But its classified.
            Remember COIN? US invested heavily in SNT applications to build trusted networks in Anbar?
            All those guys got fired.
            Some of them work for the Atlantic or for Brookings now.

          • Controls Freak says:

            …mind if I ask which agency you work for?

          • bintchaos says:

            pas du tout.
            But I cant tell you.
            Coates and Rogers testimony before congress was really fascinating to me.
            They had the same panicky deer-in-the-headlights look and they were supercareful about what they said–every word.

          • Controls Freak says:

            Ok. Are the reasons why you seem to treat drone strikes different from other kinetic activities also classified?

          • John Schilling says:

            But I cant tell you.

            For those who don’t know how this works: Almost everyone with a high-level security clearance is allowed to tell you which agency or contractor they work for. The ones who aren’t, also aren’t allowed to talk openly and freely about even the broad aspects of their classified work

          • bintchaos says:

            @John Schilling
            Truedat.
            For interested parties I recommend carefully scrutinizing the Weds pre-Comey testimony from Coates and Rogers.
            They have that deer-in-the-headlights look for a reason.

          • The Nybbler says:

            The ones who aren’t, also aren’t allowed to talk openly and freely about even the broad aspects of their classified work

            And, regardless of whether you work for one of those sooper-sekrit organizations, going around in public talking about how you have a security clearance is one of those things a security officer would specifically frown upon.

          • bintchaos says:

            Again…if you are curious about this.
            rewatch Coates and Rogers and see what they can and can’t say in public.

          • Deiseach says:

            The claim, in expanded form, is: Hillary Clinton made various brazenly anti-Russia comments during her campaign, e.g. support for a no-fly zone in Syria, support for overthrowing the Assad regime, support for providing arms to the Ukrainian government, calling a potential Russian cyberattack on the US an “act of war”.

            These are the reasons which would make claims of Russian state interference (Putin knew/ordered/oversaw/whatever) about the hacking and/or interference in the election believable to me – not that he was pro-Trump but that he was anti-Clinton, and for very good (from his view) reasons. That Trump managed to get the Republican nomination was just gravy on top; the main target was Clinton because of the Russian perception that if she won the election, she would be an anti-Russian hawk.

            Trump doesn’t need to be in the Russians’ pockets for this; it’s enough that he’s perceived as friendly, or at least friendlier, (and of course would like to do business with/in Russia) but the Russians would have been happy for Anyone But Hillary to win, even if it hadn’t been Trump.

          • Controls Freak says:

            I was going to be slow to call bintchaos a liar, but John kinda jumped in and did it for me. I agree with him, and I really think bintchaos is simply lying. I don’t recall Coates/Rogers talking about drone strikes, and a ctrl-f of the transcript returns zeros hits for “drone”, “strike”, “predator”, “reaper”, “UAS”, or “unmanned”. Of course, I’ll leave open the possibility that I missed something, so if you would like to point to a specific section of the transcript that is remotely relevant to a discussion of the terrorist multiplier of drone strikes, I’ll go look at that section of the video. Until then, I’m operating on the assumption that you’re just completely full of it and have no methodology to support your estimate.

          • bintchaos says:

            I’m sorry… I’m talking obliquely about clearances, loyalty oaths, and who holds your billets for your SCI/EBI. This is what I was talking about.

            The ones who aren’t, also aren’t allowed to talk openly and freely about even the broad aspects of their classified work


            That is what I meant about Coates and Rogers.
            I cant give you any specifics about drones or civilian casualties…are you nuts?
            I have said enough.
            If you are too thick to figure it out, thats okfine with me.
            @Deiseach
            remember NO ONE thought DJT would win. Not the Russians, not Trump’s own team. That is why no transition team, no lined up appointments. The Russians were just messing with us, trying to delegitimize democracy.
            I don’t think Putin is all that crazy about the randomness Trump brings to the equation, especially on Assad.

          • Matt M says:

            the main target was Clinton because of the Russian perception that if she won the election, she would be an anti-Russian hawk.

            Eh, I dunno. I see no particular reason to believe that a Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush would be any better for Putin than Hillary would. Remember, back in 12, Obama was openly mocking Mitt Romney for suggesting that the Russians were probably up to no good, with the media gladly jumping on board “lol these dumb conservatives are still fighting the cold war, DONT THEY KNOW ITS OVER NOW?”.

          • John Schilling says:

            A Cruz or a Rubio seems less likely than a Clinton to have thought the poor suffering moppets of Aleppo were worth risking superpower war over.

            More importantly, if you are going to be facing a hostile president, you’d probably rather face a weak hostile president than a strong one. At the time the hacking was going on, the best bet was that Hillary was going to win, and revealing that she had conspired with the DNC against Sanders wasn’t going to change that. But it might give her a fractured base when she took office.

      • Schibes says:

        Hi Space Viking! Just as you moved from left-libertarianism to the alt-right, in perhaps a similar timeframe I have moved from conservatism to left-libertarianism. Since you judge me “harmless enough” here are some cheerful, mild rebuttals to your threats:

        1. Nuclear war. This has been the primary threat unceasingly since 1949, and is the main reason I and others in my conservative bubble voted against Hillary Clinton.

        Voting against Hillary Clinton seems to have reduced the odds of a nuclear war with Russia while greatly multiplying the risk of a nuclear exchange (let’s not call it a war per se) with North Korea. I suppose we’ve made the American mainland somewhat more safe at the expense of making our allies in South Korea and Japan significantly more vulnerable. Seems like a bit of a wash, although an amoral one.

        2. Demographic change. Low-IQ mass immigration, unless halted, will change America into a middle-income country. If you import Mexico long enough, you become Mexico… Mexicans are bad enough, Muslims and Africans are worse.

        Mexico is a Christian country and a developed country. There are many, many worse fates to befall a nation then becoming Mexico. A lot of countries would LOVE to become Mexico. Have you ever been to Mexico? I have. It’s not half bad, and if you know a little bit of Spanish you might actually enjoy yourself. As for Muslims and Africans, I don’t have any rebuttal to that other than that I was in a hospital a couple years ago being treated by a Dr. Ali who was born in Somalia and at no time was I ever in concern for my life, and I was very glad at the time, as sick as I was, that he decided to make the trip over here, because he did a fantastic job. I realize that a single Muslim terrorist attack completely negates the caring and skill of a thousand Dr. Alis, but perhaps for future generations this need not be the case.

        3. The Left. I don’t mean left-libertarians and classical liberals – they are few in number and harmless enough – I mean the rising left: socialists and SJWs and ethnic identitarians…

        Well you saw this with the Sanders campaign, every time he tried to steer the conversation back to class warfare he got derailed by identity politics. I think the moment I realized Sanders was finally toast was when Black Lives Matter hijacked one of his rallies. Don’t worry, at some point we’ll have an election based around good old fashioned class warfare again, maybe after Dodd-Frank gets repealed and the banks bugger up the economy again like in 2008 except twice as bad. Until then yes, it’s identity politics all the way down.

        4. Terrorism, mostly due to tail risks: suitcase nukes and bioterrorism. It also strengthens the surveillance state.

        I think it’s right to be concerned about those things but they would be 6th or 7th on my list of left libertarian nightmares, below things like climate change and the opioid crisis (35,000 dead last year! As many as car crashes. First time that’s ever happened. Let’s see how much that drops in 2017 now that Barney Fife General Beauregard is the attorney general).

        5. Tyrannical government. The Deep State grows in power every year. Perhaps Trump can slow it down, but I doubt that he can stop it.

        It’s been amusing me to no end watching Trump and his minions toss around the phrase “Deep State” like it’s some sort of new conspiracy to undermine America that they just uncovered when really it’s been more or less running things in this country for the last 40 years or so, if not longer. Perhaps THE seminal essay on the Deep State was published on that most solidly liberal of sites, Moyers & Company back in 2014 when Trump was still fussing over birth certificates: http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state/ It’s just a sexier way of saying “Professional Bureaucracy” or if you’re feeling less charitable, “Apparat”.

    • sidewalkProf says:

      As with last time – thanks for asking this. Providing my originally-blue-tribe-now-mostly-libertarian opinions, but also excited to see what everyone else offers here.

      1. I wish I could recommend some specific really solid thing for #1, but sadly don’t have any single reference to point you at. I’d just advise reading a lot of psychology and economics, especially ones that acknowledge the divide between normative and descriptive models. Things like Freakonomics, Thinking Fast and Slow, Misbehaving, etc may or may not change your political stance (depending on your deep-seated values), but it will inevitably make you (this is the generic you, not making any assertions about where you specifically are on this spectrum) able to spend more time discussing things in effective-tactics space rather than in emotional-space. I think Freakonomics’s discussion of things like how Roe v Wade decreased the crime rate is a great example (and, if we’re forced to classify it, is actually a blue-tribe anecdote, as most reasonable people will read it as an argument in favor of allowing abortions) – it demonstrates how what looks like a discussion about values, sanctity of human life, etc has huge side effects – which sometimes are (arguably) large enough in scale to become more relevant than the first-order consequences of the decision entirely.

      Re: 2, honestly I think it’s just scale/complexity/ego depletion. In my particular values system, my happiness is deeply intertwined with the degree to which I’m able to model the world around me accurately. So for me, greater complexity is *always* a huge negative, and of the time spent thinking about the “big” questions, I’m usually focused on “how can we reduce this problem to something where a single human fully understands what’s happening to them?” (For a bit of grounding, this leads me to beliefs like “we should enforce every single law on the books every single opportunity we have”, because I’d much rather live in a world where the model is simple – what’s written down explicitly – compared to one with intricate, maddening complexities of human nature, precedent, interpretations, etc.

      To reframe that in the context of your original question – the threat facing America (or at least its citizens) is our need to maintain ourselves in *all* respects as a single entity.

      Apologies, I’m prone to rambling so trying to be concise here, but please speak up if you’re confused about what I’m saying here and I’ll try to clarify.

      • Deiseach says:

        if we’re forced to classify it, is actually a blue-tribe anecdote, as most reasonable people will read it as an argument in favor of allowing abortions

        Yeah, but doesn’t that cut across other Blue Tribe values, if the solution to the problem of poverty and disadvantage comes down to “kill the poor”?

        • Loquat says:

          Probably depends on your prior view on abortion, IMO. If you already think of abortion as killing a baby, then it’s “killing the poor”; if you already think of abortion for financial reasons as a morally acceptable choice then it shows abortion results in fewer unwanted children growing up in poverty and turning to crime plus maybe the women who aborted went on to have other children later in life when they could give them a better start.

          So, the word “reasonable” is maybe not the most accurate option in the above sentence, and might be better replaced with “pro-choice”.

    • albatross11 says:

      I’m not exactly a conservative (more of a lapsed libertarian), but I will recommend Thomas Sowell’s book _Knowledge and Decisions_ as one that I found useful in understanding the world from a conservative perspective. A major theme in the book is how a lot of decisionmaking processes get broken because the people pushing for the decision don’t have any way of knowing how it’s working out–they get no effective feedback. (I recall he talked about this w.r.t. judicial activism in particular–a judge ends up making a decision in court without any real way of gauging how that decision actually works out, and no mechanism for any effective feedback to arrive to tell him how to make better decisions next time.)

      (It’s important to distinguish Thomas Sowell the newspaper columnist, whose columns were mostly generic bashing of the other side, from Thomas Sowell the writer of deep and interesting books. Same guy, but very different quality of output.)

    • massivefocusedinaction says:

      What should you read?
      Proverbs from the Bible.
      Anna Karenina, because the family and family life are central to conservatism and the novel explores all the problems that prevent good family formation.
      Les Employes,/i> Balzac followed by The Firm and The Problem of Social Cost by Coase

      Biggest threat is likely the various pension systems over the next 30 years, as multiple societies both age and grow slowly.

      However, the threat I suspect we’re least prepared to deal with would be global agriculture over the next century if solar cycle 25 follows 24’s and trends toward a grand minimum or the overdue mega quake/tsunami on the Juan de Fuca Plate.

    • SamChevre says:

      I’m a very conservative libertarian, and strongly religious: I think if you let people alone, and use force only to sustain exit rights, the societies they build will be very conservative.

      In ascending order of required commitment, reading I’d suggest.
      Doug Muder, Red Family Blue Family: Making Sense of the Values Issue. From the left, but gives a very fair description of the right. (Note that I think that describing the key conservative constituency at this time as the “married working class” rather than the “white working class” captures the key difference better.)

      Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions, well summarized here. The book is higher-commitment, but the link is a good starting point.

      The last chapter of The Bell Curve; not the part about intelligence, but the final chapter, saying “so, if intelligence varies, and isn’t really mutable, what kind of society should we build? We should build a society with clear, understandable rules, in which you don’t need to be smart to have a valued place.”

      Erik von Kuenelt-Leddihn, Leftism: from de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse, the introduction and the first four chapters. It’s available as a PDF download. It provides a very useful guide to some distinctions that are important to conservative thinking (freedom vs tolerance, fairness vs equality). It is not hard to read, but it’s a dense book.

      On number 2, the major threat facing America is the break-down of the institutions that support family formation and maintenance. The out-of-wedlock birth rate has skyrocketed (3.1% and 24% for white and blacks respectively in 1965, 18% and 64% respectively now), and the divorce rate has risen hugely over the same time frame. As a result, the percent of children under 18 living with both parents has fallen from around 85% to around 65%. Key institutions, in my mind, are a strong stigma for divorce and cohabitation outside marriage (say, as strong as for smoking in the office); a labor market designed to prioritize two-parent, one-income families; and churches that can mobilize the needed support for caring for a small child.

    • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

      If you can tolerate partisan writing, a good sample of the conservative blogosphere can be found at National Review and at the Federalist.

      NRO uses a huge variety of writers, of widely varying quality – some are thoughtful and insightful, some are mostly bomb-throwers. Each has his or her own hobbyhorse that she relentlessly promotes. They do a good job representing a broad spectrum of conservative opinion on the news of the day, but they’re also heavily anti-Trump (they even devoted a whole issue to attacking him), so I can’t say that they’re representative of the entire right wing.

      The Federalist is similar. I like their content, but they’re often less wonky and more social war-y than NR. They trend more towards traditional social conservatism, I think.

      Reason, of course, is a popular libertarian site.

      As for books, I can only echo what others have written. Thomas Sowell. Charles Murray. Victor Davis Hanson does great ancient history, but also insists on analyzing modern culture as if he were a 5th-century BC Mediterranean olive farmer. William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale is a good intro to “mainstream” conservatism as of the ’50s, and lots of right-wingers are heir to that tradition.

    • acrimonymous says:

      I think you need to define what you want more precisely.

      I, for one, don’t see much continuity between what I thought of as conservatism when I was in university circa 1995 and what is called conservatism today.
      Also, I went to a well-regarded but extremely liberal university and often had cordial discussions with people. Today, I never talk to anyone about politics except very occasionally, as now, as a fly-by Internet comment.

      Do you want to understand conservatism as a political movement? Then there are books like The Unadjusted Man and The Roots of American Order that can give you a taste of where things were in the past. Are you looking for a book that provides a cogent “pro-conservative” argument in the context of modern US politics? I don’t think such a thing exists. If you can hold your nose long enough, you can try We Are Doomed by the infamous John Derbyshire. This is an interesting book because it was written before his ouster from National Review magazine, and as such represents a bridge between the NR coalition that William F. Buckley created (that is now, I believe, defunct) and the modern-day “alt-right” movement. I think it probably is a fair demonstration of what refugees from the NR coalition were thinking about at the time and how they ended up drifting away.

      The notion that there is a series of readings that can convince one of Conservatism the way one might be convinced of Utilitarianism is mistaken. People end up as conservatives because of their total life experiences. That said, Tom Wolfe and Peter Singer had notable influences on me. I recognize From Bauhaus to Our House and some of Singer’s essays as prompting inchoate perspectives to be more structured. In the case of Singer, I got to some point at which I couldn’t argue with Singer’s reasoning but his conclusions I regarded as crazy, and so I decided to reject some of the premises. That’s how I ended up on the new right. In the case of Bauhaus, as you may know, there is nothing in there that comes close to a political program. Just, if it prompts you to think, it prompts you to think.

      As far as threats are concerned, “existential” has to be defined more specifically as well. AI is a different kind of existential threat than immigration and both are different from the rise of China. The question is complicated by the fact that much of what concerns me as “threat” has already taken place. For example, the replacement of an agrarian society with a Western frontier by a non-agrarian society with 2 coasts and no frontier has already made the US a fundamentally different place than what I grew up perceiving it to be. Likewise, demographic change has already happened. It’s just working itself out now. I’ve already given up on the idea that a nation that is recognizably continuous with the historical US of A will exist into the future. What I am most concerned about now is the encroachment of laws designed to control expression, as these appear to be growing in popularity in the Anglosphere and Europe.

      • albatross11 says:

        Yeah, I think media culture overemphasizes the political controversy of the minute (changes to details of Obamacare) at the cost of ignoring long-term stuff that matters a lot more, and is making irrevocable changes. Very often, we sleepwalk into huge permanent changes to our society with little debate, while we’re all yelling at each other about some burning issue that has little impact on the world.

        Our immigration policies are one example–it’s not clear the changes we’ve made to our society this way were a bad idea, exactly, but we’ve substantially changed the makeup of our country (hispanics are now a larger group than blacks) over the course of a couple generations, with very little actual discussion of the matter in public. Sometimes, the discussion was suppressed by calling opposition to immigration racism, but more often, it was just that more immigration was in the short-term interests of most of the powerful people in our society, so there wasn’t really a large well-funded opposition. In general, if the leadership of both parties is in favor of something, it really isn’t up for debate, even if much of the public opposes it. (See also: bank bailouts, the war on drugs, the ever-growing surveillance state.)

        Another example is the growth of the use of the criminal justice system as a local revenue source, with all the corruption that implies. It’s happened quietly over many years, but seldom become a major political issue, I guess because both Republican and Democratic local governments do it.

        We do sometimes talk about the growth of entitlements, but it seems like almost no surface-level political controversy considers the fact that the discretionary budget gets smaller every year, leaving less and less room for any kind of new policies or response to a current crisis. A large chunk of the budget is tied up in things we’ve promised to various interest groups–social security, medicare, medicaid, etc, that almost can’t be changed. This is probably more important than the next 30 political controversies of the moment, but it’s kinda boring and hard to visualize, so we mostly ignore it.

        • hoghoghoghoghog says:

          Interesting point about the discretionary budget. This could form part of a vicious cycle with partisanship: (1) When your party is in power, you want to commit as many resources as permanently as possible, since the other side is just going to blow it all on tax cuts/handouts anyway. (2) Since so much of the budget has been committed, every policy change activates someone’s loss aversion, so everyone feels under attack from the other side all the time.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      Another conservative blog I find worth reading is The American Interest. This is Walter Russell Mead’s usual haunt; he wrote another worthwhile book: Special Providence. Any time you see references to Jacksonians, Jeffersonians, Hamiltonians, or Wilsonians, they’re almost certainly references to the major schools of American foreign policy thought which Mead identified in that book.

    • hoghoghoghoghog says:

      Further question on reading matter: what do the conservatives here think of The American Conservative? Are they crypto-liberals? Or is it like The Intercept where they’re too purist to map onto party?

      • Alemo says:

        I read TAC daily. I wouldn’t call them crypto-liberals (maybe Millman and Larison fit that bill), but rather a mix of paleoconservatives, traditional religious conservatives, and mainstream conservatives who all oppose foreign intervention as a distinguishing point with respect to neocons.
        Their opinions slanted toward “Never Trump” with thoughtful consideration of some unique ideas he “espoused” during his campaign (isolationism, trade protectionism, skepticism of federal education policy, etc.). Rod Dreher has some interesting ideas re: traditionalism in the country’s social fabric, and his “Benedict Option” theory which calls for traditional Christians to shore up their faith in the face of Moral Therapeutic Deism, currently America’s most widely practiced form of Christianity. One idea that I’d say percolates through most of the columns is a skepticism of modernity’s (progressive’s?) desire to rework reality to fit their needs, rather than conforming to “ancient truths/traditional order/things we know to work.” Lots of material to be dissected.

    • Civilis says:

      1. No idea. Most of the places I used to recommend have dropped in relative value since the 2016 election. Best I can say is get a good spectrum, and read some of the comment sections, even (especially) a few of the ones filled with the low-information flame wars. If you want to pull America together, these are the people you’re going to need to persuade.

      2. Biggest long term risk is the erosion of trust at the center of American society, which can be traced back as a root of a lot of American problems. I don’t think there’s any existential threat or external problem the US faces at this point absent this social breakdown of American society. (Yes, some Russian bunker operator could accidentally cross a few wires and trigger a missile launch, or the SMOD could finally show up, or any number of other rare catastrophic things we can’t really do anything about could occur. Worrying about those won’t make them go away, and won’t really help.)

      Society only functions when people trust enough in society to make small sacrifices for the greater good because it will work out better for them and their descendants in the long term. We’ve gotten to the point where that trust is basically gone for enough people that society is starting to fail. The US has never been perfect; there were valid reasons to have shame for our ancestor’s treatment of blacks and native Americans, for example. The problem is that we’ve gone from ‘what did we do wrong and what do we need to change’ to ‘what did they do wrong and what do they need to change’ where there is no reason to change one’s self.

      In the interest of not turning this into a blame game, as that’s not the point of this exercise and contributes to the very problem I’m describing, I’m going to leave it at that for now.

      • Gobbobobble says:

        Most of the places I used to recommend have dropped in relative value since the 2016 election.

        Ditto. If you’d asked me a year and change ago, I’d’ve recommended The Economist. But their Trump hysteria pushed me away pretty hard (“fucksake, I was counting you guys to be the ones who actually know how to fight this guy, but noooo, you’re just doing shriller and shriller pearl-clutching like everyone else”). I’m hoping that it’s gotten better post-election, but haven’t quite emerged from my Non-political Podcasts detox to check yet.

        • albatross11 says:

          Amen. Trump strikes me as a uniquely awful choice for president, and yet, the most visible and loud of the people pushing back against him are nuttier than a boxcar full of fruitcakes. I suspect this has to do with the feedback loop created by social media and the attention economy, but there’s probably a lot else going on, too.

          I’d like a rational resistance to Trump. Fortunately, he’s his own resistance (inductance?)–so far, he’s ineffectual at governing and mainly good at getting attention. But he can still damage institutions and alliances that we will miss when they’re gone, and help drive the country toward ever-less-rational political debate.

          • Gobbobobble says:

            Yep. And, like Dan Carlin says (ok fine I have one exception to no-politics), Trump getting elected has been really damaging to the cause of those who want a [competent] outsider elected. It’s really rather depressing to think that for at least the next 20-30 years the response will be “What? No. No no no. Did you see what happened last time we tried that?! We’re sticking with the swamp candidates from now on.”

          • hls2003 says:

            I look at Trump as a symptom of a decayed electorate, not a cause. That’s the electorate as a whole, not just the conservatives, so the unbearable nuttiness of the portion of the electorate who opposes him is equally predicted.

        • bintchaos says:

          Has anyone recommended the Unz Review?

          • dndnrsn says:

            Are they really a modern American conservative source?

          • bintchaos says:

            You tell me…
            Dr. Cochran, John Derbyshire, and Steve Sailer are contributors.
            Razib Khan was until recently.

          • dndnrsn says:

            I would say that modern mainstream American conservatism is much more finance-friendly, less nativist, etc. The Buchanan wing of the Republican party has shrivelled, Derbyshire got booted from NR, etc.

          • bintchaos says:

            Derbyshire and Dr Cochran and Steve Sailer are at Unz.
            So was Razib Khan until very recently.
            How are these people not a part of the conservative coalition?
            Are they somehow excommunicated from the church of conservatism?

          • dndnrsn says:

            I think we can call Derbyshire getting booted from NR an excommunication, can’t we? Modern mainstream American conservatism looks rather different than Derbyshire or Sailer. Compare the Republican 2012 postmortem to the Sailer Strategy.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @dndnrsn:

            I would say that modern mainstream American conservatism is much more finance-friendly, less nativist, etc.

            CoughTrumpCough

            I’m not sure the modern conservatism you are espousing is as dominant as you think it is. The nativist streak has been there for quite a while, in uneasy alliance with finance, and social/religious conservatism and some elements of libertarianism.

            The modern Republican, of whatever stripe, has had to play ball with the white nativists. Remember that the big things Bush couldn’t get while he was still popular were immigration reform and SS privatization.

          • bintchaos says:

            well we certainly cant talk about that here… aich bee dee is a ban word.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @HeelBearCub:

            I read Trump as a party base revolt, in large part. You’re right it’s not absolutely dominant. But the Republican party is a lot less nativist than it used to be, less (effectively) social conservative, etc.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @dndnrsn:
            On what are you basing the idea that the Republican Party is less nativist now than it has been? Since when?

            Reagan passed an immigration reform bill, and fairly easily IIRC. The steady movement of Southern (and rural) white conservatives into the Republican camp over the last ~60 years should have made the party more nativist, not less.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @HeelBearCub:

            Consider how Pat Buchanan has moved from someone with influence in the Republican party to a fringe figure. Also, there’s the “What’s The Matter With Kansas” thesis – that there’s a big gap between what the Republican base wants, and what they get. For both parties, there’s a huge gap between the leadership’s position on immigration (as measured by law and policy) and what the base wants. It’s especially dramatic with the Republicans. Remember when Jeb! was going to win easy by getting Hispanics to vote Republican, and then it turned out that the Republican base disagreed with the 2012 postmortem?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @dndnrsn:
            Pat Buchanan is not actively involved in anything in particular, to my knowledge. I think he was a fringier figure when he was more active, which will tend to leave you on the fringe even as your ideas tend towards mainstream.

            Folks like Steve King and Jan Brewer don’t seem to me to be really unrepresentative of a mainstream segment of the Republican Party. Look at the differing fates of Jeb and George W. (and the overall reception to their immigration proposals) to see an example of which way the party is moving.

            Your example of “the base” vs. “the elites” seems to support my contention, not yours. The primary landscape is littered with RINO scalps over the last decade. Almost of all of the “Never Trumpers” have bent the knee or are on the outside looking in. Boehner tried to get some piece parts of immigration reform through and he couldn’t do it (and eventually gave up his seat and his gavel because the party had moved out from under him on too many issues).

            Reagan got immigration reform. W. proposed immigration reform and was lauded by the party in general, but couldn’t get it passed. Rick Perry was booed (figuratively) off the stage when he proposed immigration reform.

            And Trump is president with an 80% approval rating among Republicans.

            I think the movement is pretty clear.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @HeelBearCub:

            Buchanan was an advisor to three presidents and ran for the nomination twice. Now he writes for online magazines that sit exactly where alt-lite turns into alt-right.

            As for the rest of your points, I think that the elites usually win over the base. Sure, RINO scalps everywhere, but do the people complaining about RINOs ever get what they want? The Tea Party hasn’t led to smaller government, etc. And Jeb! was undone by the Bush name becoming toxic thanks to his brother’s awful foreign policy as much as anything else.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @dndnrsn:

            Now he writes for online magazines that sit exactly where alt-lite turns into alt-right.

            And Steve Bannon is now in a more powerful position than Buchanan was. Buchanan caused a minor dust-up as a candidate and Trump won the primary.

            As to the elites “always winning over the base”, why didn’t immigration reform come anywhere close to passing?

            I think you are engaging in an argument that would mean that if, say, single-payer didn’t pass, it means the Democratic Party is moving right. This is a huge error. Ideological movement usually means compromised victories, not crushing conquest.

            Again, Reagan to W. to Trump. What direction is that on the immigration in terms of actual policy?

          • Matt M says:

            Didn’t Buchanan once have approximately the same role to Nixon that Bannon now has to Trump (some token official position, but mainly an informal advisor on how to reach a particular group of the electorate)

          • acrimonymous says:

            Unz hosts some conservative writers, but UR is not conservative.

            This is an interesting post, though. So far, we have got people recommending “conservative” outlets like The Economist, NRO, and the Unz Review. Thus proving my point that “conservative” today has nothing in common with the Reagan era or before and probably can’t be reasonably defined. I mean, come on–The Economist??!!

          • albatross11 says:

            Unz gives a platform to a really wide range of people, whose beliefs maybe kinda-sorta fall into a very broad “conservative” bin, but who are not in general part of the mainstream of conservative thought.

            I think Steve Sailer’s blog is one of the more interesting ones around. Muggle-realist + traditional Republican. The comment threads are usually at least somewhat worth reading.

            Greg Cochran’s blog is also worth reading, though you just have to accept that he’s going to call anyone who disagrees with him, for good or bad reasons, an idiot.

          • bintchaos says:

            I would recommend Dr. Hsu’s blog over Cochran’s or Sailer’s.
            He really rare– a theoretical physicist PhD with observable conservative tendency.
            Although he doesnt actually do theoretical physics, but adminstration and genetics.

          • CatCube says:

            @acrimonymous

            It’s worth noting that the person “recommending” the Unz Review as representative of conservatism is one of the furthest-left people on SSC.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @HeelBearCub:

            So, I think you are making a good point. I did not admit enough nuance when I talked about “modern mainstream conservatism” – the wing that currently leads is not truly dominant, and the way I spoke suggests it is. It’s more like a plurality.

            That said, if a majority of D voters or party members wanted single-payer, but the elected representatives didn’t work for that, it would suggest that the elected representatives are to the right of the D voters (and single payer is far more practical than “deport all the illegal immigrants”).

  26. Matt M says:

    The more I read about the Portland stabbing, the more certain I am that it’s worth questioning the original narrative. A few things jump out to me in this article.

    1. Why is he in one of those glass cases like he’s Eichmann or something? Are they worried someone in the crowd is going to shoot him? Who might it be that might do that? Or perhaps they want to visually depict him in a manner typically associated with Nazis such that everyone will associate him with Nazis?

    2. He seems to be intelligent enough to realize that self defense + free speech is the only chance he has. I don’t think he has a chance in hell at getting out of this, but IF he could establish that his behavior towards the women in question was in fact lawful and was not intimidation or menacing, AND could establish that he did not start the physical confrontation and had legitimate reason to fear for his life, he may have a case here.

    3.

    Another man, Shawn Forde, also defended the girls and tried to deescalate the situation, police said. Two of the charges against Christian — unlawful use of a weapon and menacing — relate to his alleged interaction with Forde, court documents show.

    This is the first I’ve heard about this one. Apparently there was a fourth guy who was not stabbed. The only thing we know about this guy is that he tried to de-escalate the situation, apparently in contrast to the other three? And the other three were stabbed, and he was not. This suggests the motives were, in fact, at least a little bit defensive in nature and not based in hate or white supremacy or whatever.

    4.

    Police have said they were investigating a May 25 incident in which video shows Christian on a Portland train, aiming pejoratives at a conductor.
    “It looks like we have a Christian or Muslim (expletive) bus driver. I’ll stab you, too, (expletive),” he said on the video, which CNN affiliate KOIN obtained.

    If he’s such an Islamophobe, why would he use “Christian or Muslim” as if they are interchangeable? Given that we also know he spoke positively of Bernie Sanders on Facebook, perhaps instead of being a right-wing Trump supporter, he’s a Bill Maher style leftist who hates all religious people? This particular brand of hate is not at all uncommon in Portland, while being a militant white supremacist definitely is…

    • herbert herberson says:

      re: 1: Do you really think that they installed a glass box in the courtroom for this particular case just to make a oblique political association? At any rate, here’s an article discussing a crime with no particular political implications where the defendant is pictured in the same sort of box.

      re: 3: Or it suggests that he was subdued before he could attack the fourth person, or that whatever burst of emotion that had prompted his violence began to fade at that time, or even that he was acting only against the people who continued the fight after the fourth person disengaged, but that it was a fight he started and he is therefore barred from any legal or moral claim to self defense, or any number of things that didn’t occur to me in the 90 seconds I took to think about it.

      re: 4. That does support the “psychotic” case some, but it’s not like anti-Christianity is uniquely leftist. Plenty of neonazis out there who think all the trouble started when people traded in Woden for a peacenik Jew.

      (also, while Portland is famously liberal, inland Oregon is famously a hotbed of radical rightism–and his time in prison likely would have exposed him to those types)

      (also, also, there’s no question that he was at least some kind of Trump/alt-right supporter based on his social media and protest activity. the questions before the jury are whether he was some kind of Bernie-or-Bust person that went to Trump after Bernie lost, which appears to have been the case, and/or whether the basic fact is that he’s psychotic and any political activities are just outlets of that psychosis)

      • DrBeat says:

        the questions before the jury are whether he was some kind of Bernie-or-Bust person that went to Trump after Bernie lost

        I am very, very scared and despondent over this being a relevant question before any jury.

        • albatross11 says:

          I’m pretty sure the actual question before the jury will be “Did this guy, in fact, stab two other people to death?” Maybe “Does he have any reasonable claim to having acted in self-defense?” I’m not sure whether the jury or the judge decides if he’s mentally incompetent in Oregon, but that’s another question that may come up. His political leanings will probably only be of interest if the prosecutor is trying to get a sentence enhancement for hate crimes, but since he’s murdered two people already, that’s probably the difference between in prison for the rest of his life or the rest of his live + epsilon.

          • Matt M says:

            Is it even technically possible to get convicted of a hate crime for murdering heterosexual white males?

          • johan_larson says:

            @Matt M

            At least in Canada, I don’t see anything that precludes hate crime statutes being used to prosecute someone who, say, advocates mass murder of specifically white people. There isn’t anything in the text that for example says the target group has to be disadvantaged.

            I have no idea what’s in case law, but I can’t imagine there’s a lot of it; these laws are pretty new.

            Here’s a good place to start:
            http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/what-counts-as-a-hate-crime-in-canada-1.3307395

          • CatCube says:

            Oregon does still have the death penalty.

          • albatross11 says:

            Matt M:

            The FBI’s report on hate crimes in 2015 shows about 19% of hate crimes where the motivation was racial/ethnic hatred were against whites. So it looks like the answer is yes.

          • Eltargrim says:

            @johan:
            There’s weak evidence that, in practice, racially motivated violence against white people will not be taken as seriously as one against a minority demographic.

            That said, one data point, one judge, and the crown advanced the racially motivated theory, so it really could break either way in a given case.

    • Deiseach says:

      Going off the topic you raise in your comment here, but this part brought something to mind:

      Or perhaps they want to visually depict him in a manner typically associated with Nazis such that everyone will associate him with Nazis?

      I don’t know if you guys know about the new Wonder Woman movie. I haven’t seen it (and am not really planning to see it) but seemingly it’s set in the First World War (isn’t that a change from canon where WW was involved in the Second?) Anyway, someone on Tumblr approvingly reblogged stills from it of the Amazons taking out a German machine-gun nest on the White Cliffs of Dover(? so it looked to me, maybe it was meant to be on the French side of La Manche? But definitely white cliffs!) with a tag about “taking out Nazis”.

      This is the First World War, remember. But it would seem that “German soldiers = Nazis” no matter what, either that or they were trying to make the political point by associating that with the whole “punching Nazis” meme.

      • herbert herberson says:

        I mean, sometimes people are just ignorant.

        The choice to do WWI instead of WWII was pretty important to the plot and theme of the movie, which was Wonder Woman marveling at the senselessness of war and trying to stop it via a deus ex machina–harder to pull that off when one of the two sides are Nazis.

        • Deiseach says:

          I wondered if perhaps the film makers thought the Second World War and Nazis were over-done, so they picked the First World War instead, plus with all the Captain America movies, the Nazi-punching is associated with him so they wanted to avoid stepping on those toes, never mind that having both Cap and Wondy slugging it out with the Germans on the same battlefields at roughly the same times would be over-egging the pudding 🙂

          But yeah, looks like for some people it’s “Us versus the Germans is Us versus the Nazis alla time, alla place”.

          • Sandy says:

            There is actually a bit in the movie that shows how even the German generals were sick of the war and the whole thing was just the project of a few rampant egos.

      • John Schilling says:

        Canonically, Wonder Woman’s origin story starts in World War II; this movie shifts it to World War I specifically to avoid having Naziesque Evil Villains for most of the story. WW winds up fighting on the allied side, albeit in Belgium rather than Dover. There’s a Dover scene, but it’s where she’s waiting for a ship to the front and seeing the mangled human remnant returning from it. For most of the movie, she is on a naively optimistic quest to find and defeat the One Evil Supervillain who is making the generally good and decent German people fight such an incomprehensibly horrific war against the generally good and decent people on the allied side.

        Spoilers Below:

        She identifies what she not-unreasonably believes to be the one evil supervillain responsible. Defeats him in a brutal fight that ends with her sword run through his chest, very non-superheroic. And they don’t stop. Not the German soldiers, not the Allied ones, and not because any of them are Evil Nazis but because all of them are humans and killing each other in bloody senseless wars is part of what humans do. What she just did herself. It very nearly breaks her, and when she reinvents herself as a superhero it has to be one who brings her own very strong core principles to the fight because neither “side with the Good Guys” nor “defeat the Supervillain” is a useful guide.

        Also, because this is a Hollywood Comic-Book Movie, they then say “just kidding” and in the last act introduce an entirely new Evil Supervillain for her to kill and so immediately end World War I and save the day. I wish I were not making that up, and I wish they hadn’t have done that. But for the 80% of the movie that is really good, it’s important that the story be set in the World War that didn’t have Evil Nazis opposed by unambiguous Good Guys.

        But if Tumbler has this as Wonder Woman vs The Nazis, Tumbler is missing the point.

        • Nornagest says:

          Huh, I might actually see this now. That’s a superhero plot I haven’t seen done before, which definitely isn’t what I was getting from the trailers.

          Shame about the last 20%, though.

        • Matt M says:

          Tumbler is missing the point.

          oh, say it isn’t so 🙂

        • CatCube says:

          I can’t help but wonder if the whole “killing one guy” thing as ending WWI immediately could have been fixed with a little better storytelling. When they left Themyscira, Diana fell asleep in the Aegean sea and woke up when they were in the Thames, about to pass under Tower Bridge.*

          I think they just didn’t want to spend a few minutes explaining the travel through the Mediterranean, getting on an Allied ship to get back to the UK. Then Diana’s first exposure to Man’s World would have been making a connection in some random Italian port, plus they would have had time to discuss what they were going to do in London and couldn’t have done the fairly ridiculous spectacle of trying to herd Diana through the necessary discussion with Allied leaders about the gas factory.

          Similarly, they could have showed that killing Ares didn’t actually end the war, but that more fighting and negotiation had to happen in the time between Diana being in Belgium and her showing up in London in civilian clothes. I get the sense they were just trying to wrap the movie up and didn’t want to spend the 10 minutes.

          * I did have to go to the bathroom around this time, so maybe I missed something that explained away the sudden cross-continent jump in location. If that’s the case, I’d wonder why they didn’t use it to get to Belgium closer to their intended target.

        • Brad says:

          **** Spoilers ****

          On the “just kidding” point, it is true that after WW kills Ares the two sides throw down on that particular battlefield throw down their weapons and embrace each other. And the armistice goes through, ending the war. But we the viewer know that an ever more bloody war is coming in a few short years. I think we and WW are both supposed to be at least partly convinced by Ares speech that it isn’t him, the evil is inside man. That’s what the intro and extro are about.

          I’m sure a great story could have been told ending at the point where she kills von Gas Attack, but it would have left untied the question of whether the whole mythos of the Amazons was all nonsense or not. If you want to have a super hero movie you need some kind of explanation for the super powers, like being a Greek (demi?)god. Otherwise you are off in the land of mysterious magical realism, and that’s a whole different genre with a whole different target audience.

        • John Schilling says:

          I can’t help but wonder if the whole “killing one guy” thing as ending WWI immediately could have been fixed with a little better storytelling.

          “Fixed” in the sense of conveying useful information to a key character so she doesn’t make a big mistake, yes. Not clear that this is better storytelling, though. The ancient Greek storytellers understood that sometimes you get the best dramatic mileage by standing back and letting your prideful heroes go make their big mistakes. Since Diana of Themiscyra actually is a very proud ancient Greek about whom great stories can be told…

          If you want to have a super hero movie you need some kind of explanation for the super powers, like being a Greek (demi?)god.

          Like being sculpted from clay and infused with a divine spark by an actual Greek god, to be the champion of her people in a style of warfare that went out of style with Achilles and company, so now she has to redefine herself for a new mission in a new world?

          Works for me, and works better if we don’t have “and oh yeah, there are still Evil Demigods lurking about that have to be defeated in single combat by a Divine Hero” as a copout lurking in the wings for every unimaginative writer to come. Works better if the Old Gods are simply gone.

        • Brad says:

          Well, I’m convinced. I now like the movie less than when I left the theater.

        • Nornagest says:

          Watched it tonight. I agree with most of John’s review; I think that it was made pretty clear that killing the bad guy at the end isn’t what ended the war, but it would still have been a stronger movie without a direct confrontation with said bad guy. He’s part of the Wonder Woman mythos and he’s too heavily foreshadowed to cut totally… but there’s nothing that says we have to have two superhero fights at the end, and it’s not like there haven’t been superhero movies made before where the man behind the man gets away clean. Or they could have just ditched some of the foreshadowing.

          On the other hand, I also think they made too much of the Germans as villains — sure, it’s very explicitly a WWI movie, but we see that side using slave labor and conducting unethical experiments, and all the mooks wear (historically correct for 1918, but still) stahlhelms. They’re not Nazis, but they’re definitely Nazi-coded, and I think that weakens the plot overall. There’s more than enough horror in WWI to make convincing antagonists without delving into that stuff.

          Still, that was an hour and a half at least of A+ superhero movie — better than anything DC’s done since Dark Knight, and Marvel since… depends on your taste, but it’s been at least a couple years. So I’m not too disappointed.

    • CatCube says:

      This story at least has a very basic narrative of the events. It still elides a lot of stuff, but not nearly as much as other stories, including that CNN one.

      BLUF is that Christian was drinking on the train and started yelling epithets at the two girls. The two younger guys intervened (Namkai-Meche and Fletcher), Christian pushed Fletcher, Fletcher pushed back, then Christian started stabbing. Best (the Army vet) then moved to intervene and was himself stabbed.

      I haven’t dug up the story to post a link, but when the guy was arrested he bragged about stabbing people in the neck. Like Jared Lee Loughner, trying to get a coherent narrative out of this guy is going to be a lost cause. Contra your point 2, I don’t think there’s any considered defense here. He seems to have a…let’s say idiosyncratic view of what his rights are, similar to how sovereign citizens think that a court can’t prosecute them because of the fringe on the flag.

      For your point 4, Portland is pretty leftwing, but the rest of Oregon is not. It’s eminently believable that there are right-wing hate groups in and around Portland that filter in from the surrounding areas. There are also moderate right-wingers here (I know because I am one). As far as left wing nonsense, it’s frustrating, but it seems to be confined to protests and the like. I wore an Army uniform every weekday on the MAX during my commute to work for two years, and never once had a problem. The left wingers are out there, they’re crazy, but they only get themselves wound up in large groups and not on an individual basis.

    • J Mann says:

      Does anybody have background about the “March for Free Speech” that Christian attended? I’ve heard it called “right-wing” and “alt-right,” but I can’t find much contemporaneous coverage about who organized the march or what it was about.

      Christian seems like a nut. Some of his postings are clearly anti-racist, others look fairly racist.

      http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2017/05/who_is_jeremy_christian_facebo.html

    • carvenvisage says:

      This suggests the motives were, in fact, at least a little bit defensive in nature and not based in hate or white supremacy or whatever.

      It’s only ‘defensive’, if you ignore the part where he (allegedly) harassed a whole carriage shouting for ages then stabbed the first guys to get angry about it. What’s the guys excuse, ‘he felt unsafe’? Well what about the whole carriage of people he was acting like an unhinged lunatic in close proximity to?

      If I’m determined to keep abusing people, and escalate situations so that people who try reasoning/deescalation give up, it’s not ‘defensive’ for me to reescalate the situation when people are finally provoked to try more active measures, because them doing so is predictable and my fault.

      • The Nybbler says:

        The rules are, if you’re a crazy homeless guy in our society, you’re allowed to be as verbally abusive as you want and if anyone does anything about it, they’re at fault for poking the crazy. You’re also allowed to be physically abusive to a limited degree, slapping anyone who comes within range, for instance. The authorities will do nothing about this, because as a crazy homeless guy you’re too much of a pain in the ass to deal with. If anyone does anything to you, they _will_ be punished, as it is society’s purpose to protect the weak from the strong. If they start something verbally and you escalate to violence, THEY will be punished, again, because they should have known better.

        So no amount of verbal abuse matters a bit, because crazy homeless guys are _allowed to do that_.

        • skef says:

          This is roughly in the spirit, but you’re missing the liberty angle. Matt M should start a freedom patrol. They will ride the buses and light rail looking for injustice. When men start screaming at teenagers, they will do nothing. It is only when someone gets up to try to run interference that they will spring into action: “Excuse me, this is public transportation! Let the man have his say!”

          • Matt M says:

            Society distinguishes between physical and verbal confrontations, and for good reason. If you choose to escalate a verbal confrontation into a physical one, you do so at your own risk, and I don’t feel especially sorry for you if the result goes poorly for you.

            Don’t start a fight you aren’t equipped to win.

          • AnonYEmous says:

            Matt, you are talking like they physically attacked him and he retaliated. I have found no proof that this is so and it’s hard to believe that he would be on trial for murder if this is what happened; at the very least there would be the argument of self-defense, despite the political atmosphere.

            If not, then they escalated a verbal confrontation into a verbal confrontation, and he killed them.

            As a side note: just take the loss. The man was an avowed white supremacist, he murdered people after harassing Muslim girls. That’s a loss. I took it; you can take it too.

            Oh, and an edit:

            Prosecutors who have reviewed videos and interviews with witnesses say in court papers that Christian yelled hateful comments at two black girls, one of whom was wearing an Islamic head covering called a hijab.
            When the girls moved away from Christian, he made a sudden move toward Namkai-Meche. The two got into a confrontation, prompting Fletcher to stand up.
            Christian shoved Fletcher in the chest and then pulled out a knife that he concealed in his right hand, prosecutor Ryan Lufkin wrote. Fletcher pushed Christian back, causing him to stumble.
            Christian asked Fletcher to “Hit me again!” as Fletcher kept telling him to get off the train.
            Christian then stabbed Fletcher, Namkai-Meche and a third man who intervened, Best.

            Looks like he himself escalated the situation by shoving someone. That person did shove him back, obviously, but he was the one who escalated the situation, and apparently took the return of his shove as a cue to start knifing away. Fuck this guy.

          • Matt M says:

            I’ve never claimed he’s innocent. Merely pointing out some questionable holes in the established narrative. It can have a few holes and be over-exaggerated and the guy still be guilty of murder.

            There’s probably some middle ground between “this guy is probably a murderer but surely the people he killed didn’t make the wisest decisions themselves” and “the guys who confronted him saved those poor girls from an evil assault and are truly heroes”

          • AnonYEmous says:

            I’ve never claimed he’s innocent. Merely pointing out some questionable holes in the established narrative.

            OK, then let’s go over those holes:

            1. Why is he in one of those glass cases like he’s Eichmann or something?

            Explained upthread, though of course he might as well be a Nazi anyhow.

            2.AND could establish that he did not start the physical confrontation and had legitimate reason to fear for his life, he may have a case here.

            Yes, this is technically true. Unfortunately, as I noted, this is not what happened; by all accounts he shoved first.

            3. This is the first I’ve heard about this one. Apparently there was a fourth guy who was not stabbed. The only thing we know about this guy is that he tried to de-escalate the situation, apparently in contrast to the other three? And the other three were stabbed, and he was not. This suggests the motives were, in fact, at least a little bit defensive in nature and not based in hate or white supremacy or whatever.

            From the quote you posted,

            Another man, Shawn Forde, also defended the girls and tried to deescalate the situation, police said. Two of the charges against Christian — unlawful use of a weapon and menacing — relate to his alleged interaction with Forde, court documents show.

            It sounds like he tried to de-escalate the situation and was menaced with a knife. At the very least, as a result of this interaction the killer was also charged with unlawful use of a weapon and menacing. Does that really sound like self-defense to you?

            If he’s such an Islamophobe, why would he use “Christian or Muslim” as if they are interchangeable?

            Because he’s a white nationalist and an atheist? The two aren’t mutually exclusive, you know.

            Given that we also know he spoke positively of Bernie Sanders on Facebook, perhaps instead of being a right-wing Trump supporter, he’s a Bill Maher style leftist who hates all religious people? This particular brand of hate is not at all uncommon in Portland, while being a militant white supremacist definitely is…

            On his Facebook page, Christian shared a post with a video and photo of him performing a Nazi salute during the march. In a comment on his page Christian proclaimed, “I am White and a Nationalist for Vinland.”

            It’s fine to ask questions. But try asking Google, instead of Slate Star Codex. And be advised: sometimes, there is no middle ground, and you’ve just got a man stabbing necks for no good reason.

          • Matt M says:

            And be advised: sometimes, there is no middle ground, and you’ve just got a man stabbing necks for no good reason.

            Sure, although I’d suggest that the “good” is doing some work in that statement. He stabbed necks because some Portland dudes decided to “stand up to hate speech” or what have you. And this was the result.

            I’m not trying to say Christian is a persecuted hero. But I think I am trying to say that his victims probably aren’t heroes either. And the way that this incident is being used as an excuse for the mayor of Portland to deny the constitutional right of free speech and assembly to right-wing groups bothers me a lot.

            But it doesn’t really matter. You and I are already 10x more informed on the specifics of this case than the average person is. The media narrative is “deranged Islamophobic Trump supporter was assaulting Muslim girls and these guys heroically gave their lives to protect them” and I don’t think that narrative is accurate. So long as we can agree that said narrative is at least highly exaggerated and generalized, I’m satisfied here.

          • AnonYEmous says:

            Sure, although I’d suggest that the “good” is doing some work in that statement. He stabbed necks because some Portland dudes decided to “stand up to hate speech” or what have you. And this was the result.

            They stood up to harassment on public transport. Let’s ignore the aspect of hate speech for the moment; look at this quote:

            They had tried to intervene, police said, after another passenger began “ranting and raving” and shouting anti-Muslim insults at two young women.

            He was ranting at them, raving at them, and insulting them. Why shouldn’t bystanders attempt to intervene? Maybe it was a dumb move because they got killed, but there was nothing morally wrong with it. These kids tried to be heroes, and got killed for it.

            But I think I am trying to say that his victims probably aren’t heroes either.

            Yeah, there’s a reason I called them heroes to preface this quote. You can argue that what they did was dumb heroism, but heroes are dumb. On top of that, such dumb heroism is our best hope to solve these types of problems without resorting to constant government interventionism, in the form of increased law enforcement. So I support it, and I imagine you do too.

            And the way that this incident is being used as an excuse for the mayor of Portland to deny the constitutional right of free speech and assembly to right-wing groups bothers me a lot.

            Yes, me too. But it is a powerful excuse. You cannot deny this.

            But it doesn’t really matter. You and I are already 10x more informed on the specifics of this case than the average person is. The media narrative is “deranged Islamophobic Trump supporter was assaulting Muslim girls and these guys heroically gave their lives to protect them” and I don’t think that narrative is accurate. So long as we can agree that said narrative is at least highly exaggerated and generalized, I’m satisfied here.

            We can’t.

            I haven’t seen a lot of people call him a Trump supporter. In fact, I just Googled again and I can’t see that. But either way, he did at points support Trump and seemed very much “anti-globalist”. What I have seen people call him is a “white nationalist”. This is true.

            On top of that, the guy clearly had a hatred of Muslims. And a hatred of Jews. That’s usual for white nationalists. The hatred of Christians seems semi-conditional, but even so; he hated all three major religions. But he only ended up harassing one, and seemed to have far stronger condemnations of it.

            So sure, the media narrative is slightly overblown. But it’s basically 90% accurate.

          • CatCube says:

            @Matt M

            And the way that this incident is being used as an excuse for the mayor of Portland to deny the constitutional right of free speech and assembly to right-wing groups bothers me a lot.

            Is there an incident here I’m not aware of? I knew about the cancelling of a parade due to refusals of the police to make an effort to protect the Republican Party marchers, but that was before the stabbing; AFAICT it was the main reason for Christian’s actions.

            There were marches last Sunday by “right-wing” groups and counterprotests, but since I was out of town with a shitty internet connection I didn’t bother reading news stories about who it was, and CNN can’t be trusted to honestly report the stances of right-wing groups so I don’t know the breakdown of who it was, exactly. I didn’t get my train from the airport delayed late in the day, so it probably didn’t devolve into riots.

          • Matt M says:

            Maybe it was a dumb move because they got killed, but there was nothing morally wrong with it. These kids tried to be heroes, and got killed for it.

            I mean fine. I guess in a general sense it’s cool for people to think this is a good idea. But I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to any of my friends or family.

            “Shouting anti-Muslim slurs”, to me, does not rise to the level of “this is a situation where I must intervene.” But maybe I’m just a coward. Then again, I’m an alive coward.

          • Matt M says:

            Cat,

            The mayor of Portland has refused to grant permits for alt-right protests on city property, and has urged the feds to do the same (they won’t) while invoking the completely incorrect “hate speech is not protected” lie that we keep hearing more and more often.

          • John Schilling says:

            What about, e.g., people shouting at their waitress for being five minutes late with a cup of coffee, or airline gate agents for saying that the flight is overbooked? You just never speak up for those being verbally abused, and speak of this here with self-approval rather than shame?

          • carvenvisage says:

            @John Schilling

            There’s no way a normal red faced guy in a restaurant is as threatening as this guy. You can watch videos of him ranting the day before about how he was going to stab people, and as well as the crazy he’s also a hulking neanderthal-looking dude. Crazy is another level from belligerent.

          • carvenvisage says:

            “Shouting anti-Muslim slurs”, to me, does not rise to the level of “this is a situation where I must intervene

            This makes it sound like the guy was just minding his own business but sadly suffering from tourettes.

          • albatross11 says:

            I’m not sure of the wisdom of intervening with the obvious crazy guy, but I’d much rather live in a society where screaming insults and threats at a couple women on public transit gets the men in the car to get between you and them and tell you to shut up. My guess is that this guy was one of the many crazy people walking the streets that should instead be in some institution somewhere, so that public spaces and public transit is safe for everyone else.

  27. phil says:

    Any thoughts on the phrase “concern trolling” as used here http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/06/bret_stephens_is_an_expert_concern_troll.html

    I don’t have any particular opinion on the root argument here, but its hard for me to not equate the use of “concern trolling” with “Person disagreed with me, was polite/nice while doing so, other people might be positively inclined to consider his ideas due to his politeness/niceness, therefore, I am against his politeness/niceness”

    “Concern Trolling” as a concept, doesn’t seem like a helpful concept for anything other than political point scoring

    am I thinking about this wrong?

    • dodrian says:

      I’m also skeptical based on the repeated claim of “Person carefully selected data and points to disagree with and ended up misrepresenting the original view they were arguing against.” Hmmm, that sounds to me like, I dunno, all of journalism?

    • ADifferentAnonymous says:

      So here’s an oversimplified model that I think captures the idea: we can’t engage with every argument, so we have to triage. We try to listen to some number of arguments from people who basically agree with us but might have insights we don’t and some​ number from those who disagree and want to change our mind on a large scale. A concern troll is someone from the latter group who tries to make us count them against the former quota.

      • gbdub says:

        But then aren’t you just triaging based on who’s making the argument, rather than whether the argument is any good? Only listening to people who don’t want to change your mind isn’t exactly a virtue.

        • ADifferentAnonymous says:

          I think it’s a practical necessity to sometimes use info outside the argument. For one thing, deciding which arguments to read in the first place has to be based on something other than their contents. But also whether to debate with someone can depend on whether you think they have an open mind on the issue.

          • gbdub says:

            You don’t have to engage directly with a concern troll to engage with the concern raised. It’s either worth considering, in which case you should answer it, at least for yourself, or it’s not, in which case you should say so.

      • Douglas Knight says:

        Yeah, I think that’s what “concern trolling” originally meant, people invading an advanced forum and trying to make it re-litigate basic topics. But this particular article is about a NYT columnist. But Stephens isn’t an invader; the paper invited him specifically for long-distance engagement. If Oremus wants the NYT to be an echo chamber, he should condemn the editors, not Stephens. Moreover, the NYT is a focal point for long-distance engagement. People who want to do it should engage with Stephens, instead of being tempted by all the local “concern trolls.”

        So I think Phil’s equation is quite accurate for this piece.

    • gbdub says:

      The only objectionable thing about concern trolling is the disingenuousness – claiming to care about something you don’t, in order to persuade people who do care about that thing into doing something you want for other, unstated reasons.

      But armchair psychoanalyzing to “prove” that someone is concern trolling is, to me, equally irritating, and that Slate article has that in spades.

      The thing about concern trolls is that they might well be raising valid concerns. If they do, an accusation of concern trolling is just an ad hominem that doesn’t address the concern raised. And Oremus (the Slate author) even admits that Stephens does raise a real concern! But rather than focusing on the much stronger part of his argument, namely that he believes Stephens’ concerns can be adequately addressed, he just links to those better arguments and goes off on an extended ad hominem rant about how it’s “clear” what Stephens’ “really believes”, simply because Oremus disagrees with the arguments raised in Stephens’ earlier columns.

      Oremus also does another annoying rhetorical trick – he writes something like “concern trolling is that thing wildly over diagnosed on Twitter”, thus casually deflecting any critiqueson the form of his argument (oh no, you’re thinking of those crazy Tweeters, not me) without ever fully explaining why his accusation of concern trolling is much better.

      Anyway the whole piece comes off as basically “Bret Stephens is a dangerous nonbeliever – shun him!” rather than a rational counterpoint to Stephens’ actual column.

      I think concerned contrarians are important contributors to a healthy ideology, particularly one that hopes to make progress on a controversial topic in a democracy. When the movement stars trying to eject them for being impure, that’s a bad look, and leads to dogma, not truth.

      TL; DR closing thoughts: “I disagree with A, because reason X, which I know you don’t care about. But you do care about Y, and should disagree with A for that reason” is a perfectly valid argument. That’s just targeting your pitch to your audience – I don’t see any reason why someone must feel strongly about Y to be allowed to raise it as an issue.

      “Concern trolling” only happens when you intentionally conceal X as your major motivation. And even then, an accusation of concern trolling is just an ad hominem, it doesn’t sufficiently address Y.

      • Brad says:

        “Concern trolling” only happens when you intentionally conceal X as your major motivation. And even then, an accusation of concern trolling is just an ad hominem, it doesn’t sufficiently address Y.

        It’s true that accusing someone of concern trolling is ad hominem and doesn’t strictly go to the merits, but concern trolling doesn’t go to the merits either.

        When someone says “I’m one of you, I agree with what you are trying to do, but here are my concerns” that’s not logical reasoning. That’s an appeal to emotion. So at that point both sides are playing rhetorical games.

        • Odovacer says:

          When someone says “I’m one of you, I agree with what you are trying to do, but here are my concerns” that’s not logical reasoning. That’s an appeal to emotion. So at that point both sides are playing rhetorical games.

          I really don’t understand concern trolling. What’s wrong with voicing one’s concerns? Does a person have to agree with everything in a group/party/whatever so as not to be labeled a “concern troll”.

          Edit: I understand this definition. That “concern trolling” is someone lying to you about supporting something or being part of a group. However, many times people can support/be a part and still have reservations or different ideas. That doesn’t mean they’re trolling!

          • Matt M says:

            What’s wrong with voicing one’s concerns?

            The point is that the concerns are probably not legitimately held.

            Say I go to a left-leaning climate change blog, and I don’t believe in climate change, I’m a big free market guy who wants the private sector to sort it all out and it’s probably a hoax by the Chinese anyway.

            I know if I say THAT, everyone will dismiss me as a stupid troll.

            But I also know that if I say something like “My concern with these global emissions treaties is that they place an undue burden on developing nations who have suffered too long at the hands of colonialism, capitalism, and other western evils” they may in fact listen to me and re-evaluate their support for such a treaty. It is at least a little disingenuous, on my part, to make an argument I don’t truly believe for the sole purpose of getting the other side to agree with my positions under reasoning more palatable to their own sensibilities.

          • Aapje says:

            @Matt M

            The problem is that many people fail to believe that certain positions can be genuinely held, so there is a large risk that the accusation of ‘concern trolling’ simply becomes a generic accusation of all beliefs that are just outside the Overton window of the accuser. Then the result can be that the slightly heterodox people are run off, shrinking the Overton window. Then the new slightly heterodox people are run off, until the community counts 1 person.

          • gbdub says:

            How is that any more disingenuous than “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”? You and I both want something, but for different reasons. You’re saying it’s disingenuous of me to appeal to the reasons that matter to you in order to convince you – I don’t buy that, unless I’m deliberately concealing that I don’t care about your reasons, or don’t honestly believe that your reasons will be affected.

            Consider the old tagline for Miller Lite – “Great Taste, Less Filling”. You and I are debating which terrible beer to purchase for a party, Miller Lite or Coors. I prefer the taste of Miller Lite, but don’t give a damn about the “filling” part. But you’re on a diet and counting calories.

            Is it disingenuous of me to appeal to your calorie counting as a reason to choose Miller Lite, simply because I care more about the taste?

            The “worst” case scenario here is that I convince you to choose Miller Lite – and we both get something we want. That seems like a poor reason to reject this form of argument offhand.

            Or is it more disingenuous than steelmanning or “playing Devil’s Advocate”? In that case you’re explicitly arguing for things you don’t believe or don’t care about, but trying to bring up the best opposing arguments you can. We recognize the value of that – why not the value of having otherwise unraised concerns brought up? Maybe I don’t care about the concern. But if you would, aren’t I doing you a service by raising that concern?

          • Jiro says:

            Is it disingenuous of me to appeal to your calorie counting as a reason to choose Miller Lite, simply because I care more about the taste?

            It’s not disingenuous… as long as you tell me “well, I want you to have it at the party because of its taste, but….” The argument probably isn’t “it has fewer calories and everything else about it is exactly the same as the other choices”. Rather, you’re proposing a tradeoff, which is a matter of judgment. If you’re proposing a tradeoff and I know that the benefit you’re claiming is one you don’t care about but which you have motivation to praise, I can discount your judgment appropriately.

          • gbdub says:

            Why am I required to run off all the arguments only I care about before I can talk about the arguments only you care about?

            If I don’t care about calories, but you do, my telling you “Miller Lite has fewer calories” does not harm you in any way and in fact helps you, in that it gives you information you may not have had otherwise.

            Me telling you “I like the taste of Miller Lite better, choose it for that reason” and leaving out the calorie part, on the other hand, does harm you by leaving out information that I know would be relevant to your decision making.

            You are of course in either case entirely welcome to say “well I care about the calories but not that much, there are other things I like more about Coors”.

            Now, of course the most complete statement is “I prefer Miller Lite because of its taste, and you should prefer it too because it’s lower calorie”, but that first clause is ultimately irrelevant to your decision (except insofar as you care about my taste preference) so why does it matter if I include it or not? How does whether or not I care about Miller Lite’s calorie content affect whether or not you do?

          • Jiro says:

            Why am I required to run off all the arguments only I care about before I can talk about the arguments only you care about?

            You aren’t required to do that (not even in the narrower sense of “required to do that, if you want to be honest”).

            You are (in order to be honest) required to not conceal your bias.

            it gives you information you may not have had otherwise.

            It is trivially true that giving me extra information won’t hurt, since I could always ignore the information. But you’re not asking me to ignore the information, you’re asking me to consider it. Considering information and arguments from you may harm me, and this harm is likely to be higher if you have external motivations.

        • lvlln says:

          When someone says “I’m one of you, I agree with what you are trying to do, but here are my concerns” that’s not logical reasoning. That’s an appeal to emotion.

          I don’t see how the part I bolded necessarily follows from the previous statement. That’s entirely dependent on the actual content of those concerns. If those concerns are along the lines of, “what you are trying to do makes me feel bad, and you should care that I feel bad,” then absolutely it’s lacking in logical reasoning and a complete appeal to emotion. If those concerns are along the lines of “what you are trying to do has XYZ unintended consequences for ABC reasons, and I believe you would prefer not to do XYZ,” then that’s logical reasoning. There’s no guarantee that it’s good logical reasoning – ABC reasons might not exist, or they might not actually imply XYZ, or XYZ might not be something worth caring about, or any number of other problems – but at the very least, it’s a logical argument based on merits, not an appeal to emotion.

          It’s definitely possible that the vast majority of cases that are labeled “concern trolling” are cases of the former, not the latter, which would mean it’s a reasonable heuristic just to round anything labeled “concern trolling” to an appeal to emotion. But that doesn’t say much about any given individual case of something labeled “concern trolling,” which can be inspected on its merits, i.e. whether it’s an argument based on logical reasoning rather than an appeal to emotion, whether it’s a good argument based on logical reasoning rather than one filled with holes, etc. So attaching the label “concern trolling” to any specific case cannot serve to discredit that case as an appeal to emotion – at best, it opens it up to more scrutiny and skepticism to inspect its merits.

          • Brad says:

            The first part is always an appeal to emotion. It may or not be followed by logical reasoning. By the same token, it’s possible that an accusation of concern trolling can be followed up with and you’re wrong for reasons X, Y & Z. But in either case the part under focus (“I’m one of you” and “no, you are lying about being one of us”) isn’t strictly speaking germane.

          • lvlln says:

            The first part is always an appeal to emotion.

            Ah, I see. Yes, you’re right. The proper response, then, would be that the fact that you’re one of us and that you agree with what we are trying to do is a completely irrelevant point with respect to the merits of your concerns, and I don’t care that you’re one of us.

            But the concerns that are raised still need to be engaged with on their merits. Just because the 1st part is an appeal to emotion doesn’t at all discredit the actual concerns which may or may not be valid on their merits. That is to say, the statement “An accusation of concern trolling is just an ad hominem, it doesn’t sufficiently address Y” is true.

            Now, if every time something is labeled a “concern troll,” it’s of the form above where people are objecting ONLY to the “I’m one of you” part as being irrelevant, but never implies by itself that the concerns raised are incorrect (though perhaps disingenuous), then I don’t think labeling something a “concern troll” would actually be an ad hominem. But I think the reason people do consider it to be an ad hominem is that it IS sometimes – perhaps even often – invoked as a means by which to dismiss those concerns that are raised, without actually engaging with those concerns on their merits.

          • Brad says:

            But the concerns that are raised still need to be engaged with on their merits.

            Not necessarily. One could reasonably conclude as heuristic matter that it isn’t worth the time to engage on the merits with someone utilizing such a tactic. Further they might point out the tactic for the benefit of third parties that could come to a similar conclusion.

          • lvlln says:

            One could reasonably conclude as heuristic matter that it isn’t worth the time to engage on the merits with someone utilizing such a tactic.

            Whether or not such a heuristic is reasonable is up in the air, though. For it to be reasonable, at a bare minimum we’d need knowledge that some high proportion of cases that get labeled “concern trolling” posit concerns that are actually fallacious arguments or not worth engaging with for some other reason. This is, of course, regardless of the “I’m one of you” part being an appeal to emotion, since that fallacy doesn’t imply that the concern raised after is also fallacious (indeed, even the concern raised being disingenuous doesn’t imply that the concern is invalid or not worth engaging with).

            Now, the value of that “high proportion” is going to vary from person to person depending on how much they value their time versus engaging with arguments that may improve, say, their understanding of reality or their effectiveness at accomplishing their goals, etc. Someone might not want to engage with a concern unless they’re absolutely 100% sure that the argument raised in that concern is worth engaging with, while others might be willing to do so with even a 0.001% chance they might come out of the engagement without having wasted their time.

            But regardless of the subjective nature of that threshold, I don’t think there’s evidence that anyone knows the actual value of that number to such an extent to make such a heuristic a reasonable one.

            I can certainly understand someone adopting such a heuristic for the benefit of their own mental health or to preserve their free time or to optimize for pleasurable/agreeable interactions instead of conflict or some other personal reason. But then it must be acknowledged that such a heuristic isn’t designed for getting at the truth, but rather for the health/time/pleasure/etc. of the person using that heuristic. So that case wouldn’t actually tell us anything about whether or not the concern raised was valid or not.

          • gbdub says:

            But in either case the part under focus (“I’m one of you” and “no, you are lying about being one of us”) isn’t strictly speaking germane.

            Exactly, which is why I think the accusation of concern trolling should be made rarely, if at all. It immediately moves the conversation from the germane (the validity of whatever concern the concern troll raised) to the irrelevant (whether or not the concern troll is really “one of us”).

            As we see in the example: Oremus spends a whole column arguing about Stephens’ sinister hidden motives, instead of actually answering the (I would say interesting) question of how to deal with the regressive nature of carbon taxes. I personally give zero damns about what Stephens “really believes” but several damns about how a carbon tax would be implemented in practice.

          • Brad says:

            @lvlln
            We develop heuristics with incomplete information all the time. That’s part of what it means to be a heuristic in the first place. To put it into the local slang, it’s a form of Bayesian reasoning.

            And such reasoning is absolutely necessary. You can dismiss time considerations as lesser than searching for truth, but leaving yourself open to denial of service attacks is de facto a very poor strategy for seeking truth.

            Consider the math professor that reads every unsolicited manuscript that comes in the door — because after all even if such manuscripts tend to be filled with crank reasoning no one knows the precise probability than a unsolicited manuscript will be fallacious. Do you think, all other things being equal, such a professor is more or less likely than a colleague that doesn’t read unsolicited manuscripts to contribute to our understanding of mathematics?

            Maybe the heuristic is a bad one, I don’t know for sure. But given that you don’t either I don’t think you have to grounds to criticize its use when heuristics exactly like it (if not that one itself) are an unavoidable requirement for moving through life.

            I think the best response for a third party in the actual group, but with a different heuristic for the value of reading potentially good arguments, is not to try to convince those dismissing the concern troll but rather to read the concern troll’s further points yourself and rescue any which are worth rescuing.

          • gbdub says:

            Everyone has heuristics of course, but the devil is in how strict you set the filters, so “some heuristics of this form are okay, therefore this heuristic with the same form but higher gain is equally okay” is not totally valid.

            If your filter is set strict enough that an NYT columnist making an argument that you yourself admit is a relevant one is the dialogue equivalent of a denial of service attack, then I think your heuristic is too strong. And that’s the heuristic Oremus is proposing.

          • albatross11 says:

            It’s easy to feel like someone on the other side is making an argument in bad faith, and a little of that feeling can make discussions a lot harder. That’s one reason we really need discussion fora where most people are actually arguing in good faith.

          • Deiseach says:

            But often the “I’m one of you, I agree with your aims” part is to try and defuse any anticipated “well, you’re one of those dirty no-good Others, of course you’d say this!” reaction. It’s trying to establish bona fides to get the person to listen to you in the first place.

            I agree it’s an appeal to emotion, but unless it’s a lie or a cover for the real reasons someone is making an objection, I don’t think that alone marks something out as “concern trolling”.

          • lvlln says:

            Consider the math professor that reads every unsolicited manuscript that comes in the door — because after all even if such manuscripts tend to be filled with crank reasoning no one knows the precise probability than a unsolicited manuscript will be fallacious. Do you think, all other things being equal, such a professor is more or less likely than a colleague that doesn’t read unsolicited manuscripts to contribute to our understanding of mathematics?

            I think a math professor would have some rationale for concluding that the heuristic that any given unsolicited manuscript isn’t worth reading, based on observed reality. That is, the observation that writing novel papers in math is pretty darn hard and is almost never done by people who aren’t both highly intelligent and highly educated. As such, any given manuscript from someone whose education level or intelligence the professor has no knowledge of is unlikely to be worth reading.

            One enlightening thing about this example is that engaging with a paper isn’t an all-or-nothing deal. The professor could read the names of the authors of the manuscript and let that guide them on whether or not to proceed reading more. And the professor can divide it even further: read the abstract, then decide whether or not to proceed; skim the rest of the manuscript, then decide whether or not to proceed; read the entire manuscript, then decide whether or not to proceed with checking references and/or deep diving into arguments.

            And indeed, I believe that a professor who follows such a heuristic would tend to be more productive than one who just throws away every manuscript. Maybe I’m wrong about the typical experience of a typical math professor, but at least my experience with math professors at my college didn’t give me the impression that they were handed random manuscripts at such a high rate that simply reading the title and authors of every manuscript that came in their doors in order to filter them out would have a noticeable negative impact on their productivity. Maybe some superstar professors whose names are known to the layman might experience that, but those people due to their celebrity have to follow different rules than the rest of us.

            In the case of something labeled a “concern troll,” it seems unlikely to me that, for most people who encounter things labeled “concern trolls,” they’re so inundated by arguments labeled “concern trolls” such that skimming the concern that’s raised in order to ascertain if it’s one worth engaging with is a significantly high cost. For someone of the stature of, say, Paul Krugman or Anita S, sure. They’re so famous that I doubt they have time to even read the names of the people who send them things that might get labeled “concern troll.”

            And, of course, pre-committing to doing a deep dive into every argument that gets labeled a “concern troll” leaves one open to abuse via DDOS or even just DOS. But no one’s talking about a deep dive for every argument they encounter that gets labeled a “concern troll.” Merely that they not dismiss it just because someone labeled the argument a “concern troll.”

            I think the best response for a third party in the actual group, but with a different heuristic for the value of reading potentially good arguments, is not to try to convince those dismissing the concern troll but rather to read the concern troll’s further points yourself and rescue any which are worth rescuing.

            I think it’s possible and good to do both. I definitely agree that the best thing to do is to engage with the point and raise them yourself if they’re valid. Unfortunately, my experience tells me that that’s a near sure-fire formula for getting one labeled a concern troll oneself. Which is why I think it’s good to do both; it may be that the only way to actually get a valid argument through to someone engaging in the “argument gets labeled ‘concern troll’ -> argument isn’t worth engaging with” heuristic is to get them to – however briefly – override that heuristic in favor of actual fundamental analysis.

            Lastly, again, I think such a heuristic of ignoring arguments that get labeled “concern trolls” can be a very healthy and good one to follow for one’s individual health and satisfaction. And it’s entirely reasonable that one would optimize for that rather than for getting at the truth or for maximizing the effectiveness of achieving political change. This isn’t a “lesser” consideration, merely a different one. It’s only “lesser” from the perspective that finding the truth is the most important value worth pursuing. In some contexts, this may be the case, but I believe that in many – likely most – other contexts, it’s not. The only issue is when someone claims to be getting at the truth while following this heuristic. If all you’re saying is that such a heuristic may be personally healthy for the individual following it, I don’t think we disagree. If you’re making the case that such a heuristic useful for landing at true conclusions, I disagree; I don’t claim that it’s certainly wrong, since I don’t have access to the underlying statistics, but I don’t think there’s enough evidence to claim that it’s true.

          • lvlln says:

            @albatross11

            It’s easy to feel like someone on the other side is making an argument in bad faith, and a little of that feeling can make discussions a lot harder. That’s one reason we really need discussion fora where most people are actually arguing in good faith.

            I agree. I’d add that, if one decides that dismissing arguments that one feels someone on the other side is making in bad faith is a good thing, then it seems likely to quickly lead to one honestly believing that every argument for a position one disagrees with is being made by the other side in bad faith. I think one way to combat that is to engage with arguments on their merits, and I think another way to combat that is to use a heuristic of requiring a very high bar before concluding that an argument is being made by the other side in bad faith. At the very least, to clear the bar should require input from some minimally invested 3rd party.

            That’s only if one is interested in getting closer to having true beliefs via valid arguments. If one wants to prioritize personal health or comfort – very worthy priorities, undoubtedly – then such a heuristic might not be ideal, and the one Brad suggested may be far better. But I think, either way, one should be honest about what one is interested in.

          • At the very least, to clear the bar should require input from some minimally invested 3rd party.

            Another solution is to argue with people you disagree with in one area but already know in another, and so can be reasonably sure that their arguments, whether or not correct, are made in good faith.

            I’ve been involved in that situation on both sides. Quite recently I had an interaction on climate issues with someone I had interacted with in the SCA context. It was clear from her FB posts that her automatic response to anyone questioning her “we are destroying the planet” views was to assume the questioner was stupid, ignorant, or evil. I don’t know whether I shook her faith in her position, but I think she at least paid more attention to my points than if she had not already had reason to know I was none of those things.

            Someone else I know from SCA and think highly of is seriously involved in online regulation issues and pretty clearly strongly in favor of policies I am inclined to be against, which makes me less sure of my position.

          • carvenvisage says:

            Do you think, all other things being equal, such a professor is more or less likely than a colleague that doesn’t read unsolicited manuscripts to contribute to our understanding of mathematics

            Bearing in mind that maths ‘cranks’ aren’t concern trolling (that implies malice), so answering yes here doesn’t apply 100% to engaging with hostile actors, yes of course such a professor is more likely to contribute to our understanding, because all else won’t be equal when someone has the ability and the willingness to engage with well meaning but confused actors and set them on the right track.

            the professor who does this will be smarter, more determined, more curious, more generous, and have more love for the field, than the average one who doesn’t, and especially than the one who makes a big show of their contempt for cranks.

            -which I think is the equivalent of the ‘concern troll’ crier, not the average professor who quietly ignores the crank because they don’t have the time/energy/interest to set them straight.

            Public discussion also isn’t a ‘field’ where you go off and solve problems by yourself using your solitary genius, or where ‘cranks’ are few and far between. (-most people are “cranks” when it comes to these kind of arguments)

            It’s one where the point is showing yourself to 1. be trustworthy, 2. have thought things through, 3. be honestly/well intentioned, 4. engagable.

            That isn’t like making discoveries in maths. It has little to do with individual undistracted intelligence.

        • AnonYEmous says:

          When someone says “I’m one of you, I agree with what you are trying to do, but here are my concerns” that’s not logical reasoning. That’s an appeal to emotion. So at that point both sides are playing rhetorical games.

          But this appeal to emotion is, essentially, an appeal to get past emotion. It’s saying “look, you can consider what I’m saying on the merits, and in fact have no reason not to”. Or at least “What I’m saying is in fact important, so please listen to it”.

          This type of group signalling pisses me off. But it’s unfortunately effective, or at least somewhat so. Unfortunately many are all too eager to keep their ingroup pure, especially these days.

      • phil says:

        This clarified my thinking here significantly, thank you

      • Anonymous Bosch says:

        But armchair psychoanalyzing to “prove” that someone is concern trolling is, to me, equally irritating, and that Slate article has that in spades.

        The Slate article is pretty bad, but there’s plenty of extrinsic evidence that Bret Stephens’ NYT climate article was a concern troll. Namely everything he’d ever written about climate for the WSJ. Stephens previously had no problem expressing certainty about the lack of anthropogenic global warming. He called it “discredited,” a “mass hysteria phenomenon,” and confidently predicted temperatures would be about the same in 100 years. To an observer familiar with his past positions, it’s pretty clear that his real objection is the underlying theory, not the degree to which overenthusiastic activists elide uncertainties when discussing it.

        Now perhaps Stephens’ opinions have changed since his move from the NYT to the WSJ. But if that’s the case he should’ve made his own views the topic of his opening column and explained clearly what caused him to move off them. Then people would’ve had more confidence that his arguments weren’t just soldiers.

    • Alex Zavoluk says:

      I mean, bringing up reasonable seeming-concerns *can* be a fallacy. It’s one that has been discussed on this blog multiple times, under terms like “isolated demands for rigor.” I wouldn’t call it trolling, but if you bring up arguments not because you want to thoroughly discuss all the possible costs and benefits of a proposal but because you want to present a facade of unbiasedness while actually arguing for one side, that would be epistemically unvirtuous.

      Now, I have no idea if that’s what Stephens is doing, and certainly I don’t expect Slate to be capable of distinguishing between the two. In fact, it would probably difficult for anyone to say with confidence that someone else is making an isolated demand for rigor, and probably most accusations of concern trolling are unfounded. But the concept is not without merit.

      • Jiro says:

        It’s one that has been discussed on this blog multiple times, under terms like “isolated demands for rigor.”

        Or motivated reasoning.

        Concern trolling is sort of like deliberately motivated reasoning.

    • meh says:

      I feel like this is a valid way to change peoples minds. We know arguing directly opposed to someones beliefs is almost never effective, so ‘concern trolling’ is likely more effective at nudging people. The issue here is that the troll in question is nudging in a direction you are opposed to.

    • AnonYEmous says:

      as with every possible argument to sincerity, it depends if the person is being sincere or not, and also if the person is correct or not

      as usual, sincerity is indexed in a bayesian sense to correctness, under the assumption that these usually correlate and correctness is difficult to spot – in other words, someone insincere shall be assumed to be wrong. People on this site prefer the epistemic approach – is this person actually right or wrong – and so do I, for the record.

      does that clear it up sufficiently

    • hls2003 says:

      This does not at all comport with my understanding of the term “concern troll.” Concern trolling is not the same as opposition; not even the same as dishonest opposition with isolated demands for rigor, etc.

      The gravamen of concern trolling, in my opinion, is a facetious offer of advice to a party, couched in terms such that it purports to be “for their own good,” but which advice is offered by an opponent. The advice is usually either (1) deeply counter-intuitive or contradictory to what the party is currently doing, or (2) calls for the party to “save themselves” by agreeing with / acting in conformity with the opponent’s position, or (3) mocking a current strategy as being advantageous to the opponent.

      It is almost always deeply insincere, but even if it is arguably sincere, it is concern trolling if it purports to know, value, and protect the interests of the party better than the party himself.

      For example, if a hardcore Democrat partisan says “I am deeply concerned for the future of the Republican Party. I really appreciate having a healthy Republican Party in my country, and they are becoming captured by white identity politics. Therefore, for your own good, you need to repudiate this by changing your political platform to embrace affirmative action for blacks, denouncing White Privilege in a public speech, and having all current office holders in Southern states resign” – that is a concern troll.

      If a partisan Republican says “You’re cracking up, Democrats. Your rabid shouting, mobbing, and obstruction to the fairly elected President is making you look like insane idiots to the ‘Silent Majority’ who decide elections in this country. If you don’t immediately cease all this talk of ‘Resistance,’ the Democratic Party will be moribund for a generation” – that is a concern troll.

      If Mark Steyn (currently defendant in defamation lawsuit more or less for calling Michael Mann’s hockey stick graph “fraudulent”) says “Please, climate change activists, keep on trying to silence your political opponents through the courts. It makes it clear to everyone who’s embracing the thought police. It proves you don’t have any confidence in your arguments, or else you should stop litigating against people like me and embrace robust public debate of policy” – that is mostly a concern troll (also partly just invective).

      If Bret Stephens says “I don’t think the arguments supporting climate change are sound, for X reasons. Here are some other arguments to consider” – not a concern troll. That is opposition.

      • rlms says:

        Agreed. See wikipedia here. The classic example is the Republican staffer who pretended to be a Democrat on left-wing blog comment sections suggesting that it was a waste of effort running against the Republican candidate. The Democrat ultimately won.

      • rlms says:

        Agreed. See wikipedia (apparently I can’t link, it’s the internet troll page). The classic example is the Republican staffer who pretended to be a Democrat on left-wing blog comment sections suggesting that it was a waste of effort running against the Republican candidate. The Democrat ultimately won.

        • hls2003 says:

          That example (including the deception) is so extreme that I’d almost put it outside the bounds of concern trolling. From my perspective, it would have been more “the very definition of concern trolling” if the Republican staffer had admitted to being Republican, and then “advised” the Dems not to waste their resources because it was so important for them to save their dollars to compete against Bad Candidate X.

          Even though I actually thought the argument not to filibuster Gorsuch made some political sense (the argument being that Dems should have reserved the remaining institutional capital of the filibuster for a more controversial nominee, horse-trading for some concession or keeping their powder dry for the eventual replacement of Ginsberg or Kennedy), any Republican publicly making that argument to a Democrat was concern trolling.

          For me, the heart of concern trolling is not trying to pretend you are “one of them,” it is asserting that you are not “one of them” but nevertheless are going to tell them what to do out of disinterested, charitable, Christian concern for their well-being (which advice usually ends up looking like “do something that helps my side because in reality it’s for your own good.”)

          EDIT: Note that in my definition, the idea a concern troll offers may sometimes genuinely be wise. But any time you see a column begin with “A little free advice for…” it’s usually a concern troll, whether the free advice is smart or not.

      • AnonYEmous says:

        but i think it’s also worth noting that some of those statements at least appear to be true

        which is, of course, the problem; concern troll is an ad hominem shortcut (basically, “you have reason to lie) to assessing the truth of the issue.

        • hls2003 says:

          Right, absolutely. As I noted above, concern trolling doesn’t have to involve anything false or incorrect. It simply is inherently subject to heightened skepticism, on the grounds that the person offering the advice has reason to wish you ill, yet purports to be “helping.” As I understand the definition, concern trolling doesn’t get at the merits except obliquely on a heuristic level for assessing confidence; it is properly a description for an obnoxious mode of discourse.

      • carvenvisage says:

        even if it is arguably sincere, it is concern trolling

        if it’s actually sincere it obviously can’t be trolling. It’s pretty aggressive to have an accusation of malice in your name for ‘ordinary human hypocrisy, which people find it hard to escape’.

        _

        “You’re concern trolling”= you have attacked with malice towards me, you owe me.

        Sometimes it’s *actually true*, most of the time it’s just someone clumsily trying to engage with people who’s concerns they don’t understand or priorities they don’t share.

    • J Mann says:

      It’s pretty remarkable.

      To take the first accusation as an example, Oremus argues that Bret Stephens is literally lying about his opinion – that Stephens claims:

      (a) to be concerned about the possibility that a shift to a carbon tax would disproportionately burden the poor and

      (b) to intend to do some more research and update his opinions,

      when Oremus knows that:

      (a) as a former opinion editor for the Wall Street Journal, Stephens does not give a shit about the poor and quite possibly is a serial killer who preys on them in secret, known only to police as “the monocle”; and

      (b) Stephens knows full well that designs for a carbon tax are totes awesome and would not possibly be regressive once implemented by the US Congress, which has a reputation for getting this right.

      OK, if Oremus is right, then I’m not too worried about the concern trolling, which I would classify more like challenging Collins with something like “Gail, but what about the poor – aren’t you worried that cash for clunkers deprived them of cars they needed for jobs.” I’m more worried about the actual lying, which is not something I look for in a journalist.

      On the other hand, it’s a pretty serious accusation – I’m inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt, at least until Oremus comes up with something from Stephens showing that he does indeed hate the poor and wish them ill.

      And of course, those are only relevant questions to an inquiry into whether Stephens is a liar. If you want to know whether a carbon tax hurts the poor, you pretty much need to look at the evidence pro and con. A tu quoque attack on Stephens isn’t super illuminating on the question, except to the extent it encourages you not to rely on appeals to the authority of random journalists’ opinions.

      • Chalid says:

        Well, if Stephens had as a WSJ opinion editor repeatedly pushed to make the tax code more regressive (seems likely, as lowering the top marginal tax rates is pretty much the #1 priority of the WSJ editorial page) then it looks pretty suspicious for him to claim that he’s very concerned about the regressivity of this particular tax. I’d certainly suspect dishonesty.

        • J Mann says:

          That’s definitely possible. I think the analysis overstates the number of supply-siders who think that it would be good policy to tax the poor, and in hundreds of columns, Stephens doesn’t ever seem to have personally endorsed raising taxes on the poor.

          It’s definitely possible that Stephens doesn’t give a shit if the poor pay more taxes, in which case he isn’t concern troll, he’s a liar. On the other hand, it’s also entirely possible that he thinks that shifting the burden off the middle class and onto the poor is bad policy.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            he isn’t concern troll, he’s a liar

            Concern trolling is a form of lying.

          • J Mann says:

            @HeelBearCub: I don’t think necessarily.

            I think the classic concern trolling would be a challenge to the other party – “Gail, aren’t you concerned that a carbon tax would be likely to be regressive?”

          • dndnrsn says:

            @J Mann

            Isn’t the classic form of concern trolling something like “I’m just as worried about global warming as you are, but we shouldn’t propose a carbon tax, because it’s regressive”, when the person doesn’t really care about global warming?

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @J Mann/@dndnrsn:

            “Gail, aren’t you concerned that a carbon tax would be likely to be regressive?”

            My understanding of the classic concern troll is that they operate as follows:

            When a carbon tax is proposed: “I’m just concerned about the regressive affects of a carbon tax”

            When cap-and-trade is proposed: “I’m just concerned that caps will be set too high to make a difference.”

            When direct regulation of output is proposed: “I’m just concerned the regulatory agencies will be captured by the polluters”

            Every single proposed solution is rejected because of these concerns, and the aim is to take advantage of the human tendency to engage in no action in the face of uncertainty. The concern troll wants to induce uncertainty not as a means to provoke better solutions, but as a means to induce a hidden desired course of action.

          • J Mann says:

            @HeelBearCub – Huh, that definitely wasn’t how I had used it, but looking over recent internet usage, you’re absolutely right that that’s how the term is used. Thanks!

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @J Mann:
            You are welcome and thanks for the acknowledgement.

    • onyomi says:

      The problem I see with this is that while it may, sometimes, refer to a real thing (people disingenuously pretending to care about things you care about in order to convince you of something, a la this meme), it is too likely to be abused in the following way:

      There are many if not most political issues where the difference is not a difference in desired outcome but a difference in ideas about how to bring about those outcomes. Believe it or not, most conservatives don’t want the poor to die in the streets due to lack of access to basic healthcare and most liberals don’t want the US to be like Venezuela. They just have different views about cause and effect.

      So if a conservative says “look, I care about the poor too, but I disagree about the best way to help them,” the default assumption should not be that the conservative’s care for the poor is fake (after all, how could anyone who cared about the poor oppose raising the minimum wage??), but that he has different ideas about how to help them. The idea of “concern trolling” justifies assuming your ideological opponents are being disingenuous when, in most cases, they probably just disagree with you about how to get where you’d both like to go.

      • Kevin C. says:

        after all, how could anyone who cared about the poor oppose raising the minimum wage??

        Speaking of which:

        Democratic party leadership has united behind a call to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour