This is the bi-weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit or the SSC Discord server. Also:
1. Comments of the week are Douglas Knight on how “eclipse season occurs like clockwork, about every half of a solar year”, and . on how ant colonies sometimes settle wars through ritual combat.
2. I’ve been getting a lot of questions about whether I still endorse my old post “You Are Still Crying Wolf” in light of recent events. I’m not up for causing more controversy right now, so I’ll hide this here instead of writing a full post, but the short answer is: yes. If this ever changes, I’ll put it on my Mistakes page – if you don’t see it there, I still endorse it. I don’t think anything has changed significantly since I wrote it. Trump continues to condemn white nationalism; his opponents continue to condemn his condemnations as insincere or not good enough. White nationalism continues to be a tiny movement with a low-four-digit number of organized adherents, smaller than eg the Satanists; people continue to act as if it’s a gigantic and important social force. I don’t want to get drawn into another ten thousand words on this, but you can probably piece together where I’m coming from from some of the following: this estimate of about 500 people at the Charlottesville rally; this estimate of about 1100 people at a recent Satanic rally, this poll showing more blacks and Latinos agree with the white supremacist movement than whites do (probably a polling error based on random noise; my point is that the real level of support is literally unmeasurably low), the constant Obama-era claims that Obama’s half-hearted condemnations of Islamic terrorism proved he was a secret Muslim or just dog-whistled some sort of vague spirit of not really opposing terrorism (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10), and this analysis of Trump’s completely unprincipled and stupid way of deciding what opinions to have on things. I continue to think crying wolf is a major danger, with the worst-case scenario being a sort of repeat of the War On Terror, where rampant fear of terrorism (even in the general absence of any real threat) transformed our society and our politics for the worse in various ways. And as always, I continue to believe that Trump is a terrible person and a terrible President, and that any attention we focus away from his gaffes should be redirected to all the terrible laws and policies he’s promoting.
3. I’m trying to stay off Twitter and seriously limit my exposure to Facebook for a while, so if you send me any messages over those platforms, I might not see them.
4. New advertisement on the sidebar for Breakdown Notes, an online tool to make notes, diagrams, or mindmaps in your browser with paid and free+ads versions.
So, here is a question which I wonder if the community can help me with:
How does one sharpen up one’s ability to continue to have a conversation with someone over a long period? (and by ‘someone’ I mean one’s romantic partner or someone you’d be interested in romantically empartnering)
I am not great at sustaining a conversation with someone when there are no third parties around to do more than their fair share of the burden of conversation, and, while I do have a bit of Andrew Hunter’s problem from a few threads back, I am perhaps a bit more hopeful in that regard. Even when explicitly asked ‘what are your thoughts?’, quite often the answer will just be ‘no thoughts, my brain was just replaying a tune’ or something similar. People who have started from a position of being bad at this, and have improved: how did you do it?
I sort of had the opposite problem as a kid – I’d go on about anything I found interesting, without any regard for what the other person thought of it. I was a horrible bore sometimes, I’m sure. What helped me was a better understanding of when they do or don’t care, and acting on it. It also helps to have other outlets – if I have a really funny D&D story, I won’t tell my wife(who’s never played), I’ll drop a Facebook message to a gamer buddy. It releases the tension of wanting to share a cool experience with someone, without boring those who aren’t interested.
The part of this that’d apply to you, I think, is trying to really understand people as best you can(note: this is really hard). If you have a better sense of what they’ll find interesting, you can go off semi-randomly and still be entertaining. For example, there are friends where I can start talking about the tune that was in my head, what I think of the drummer on that track, and turn that into a 10-minute discussion. Often, “nothing” is code for “I think I’d be embarrassed if I said what I was thinking out loud”, so figuring out when it’ll be embarrassing and when it’ll be safe lets you turn a lot of “nothing” into conversational hooks.
If you want to talk but have trouble generating topics, keep a notepad of topics, assorted little things that popped into your head during the day. When you see that romantic partner and need conversational topics, check your list. The right potential romantic partner will probably find this “endearing” rather than “dealbreaker-weird.”
You might be better served by developing listening skills. Great listeners are valued in conversation since most people seem to like to talk, and active listening is a skill that is weakly associated with men but seems highly sought in romantic partners. You do not need to generate your own topics if you are willing to encourage someone else to take the conversational lead. Asking good questions can sustain conversation.
Interesting idea; I may have to see if I have space for a notepad along all the other clutter I carry in my pockets. To be clear though, I am talking about ‘when the other person is also a quiet type’, so good-listenerdom on its own is not likely to be enough.
(Also, I seem to have been promoted to first place in the thread. Did two people both delete their top-level comments after I posted mine?)
You need two things, a stalling tactic and a PRTG (pseudo-random thought generator). My stalling tactics are work topics or recent reading, whatever’s more incomprehensible to the person I’m talking to. My random thought generator is mentally going through my day. So if somebody asks me what’s on my mind, if something not too dull is on my mind, great. Otherwise I talk about some obscure programming difficulty while mentally replaying what I did that day. At some point, I remember something interesting I did/thought or some part of the sequence reminds me of a decent topic to talk about, and I apologize for boring them with coding troubles and segue into that. It starts out awkward and forced, but naturally gets easier (honestly, every response should probably just be talk to a lot of people, especially people you like talking to, and keep practicing), and sometimes the stalling tactic is basically unnecessary since it only takes a couple seconds to get a thought.
For maintaining a conversation, rather than starting it up smoothly, complimenting whatever they just said can be a pretty good strategy when you’re not sure what to say next. Just saying something like “that’s an interesting take, I’ve never thought of it that way *pause as if reexamining your worldview, (or actually reexamine it)* ” is not a bad way to get people to keep talking.
I stopped reading at “PRTG” to google what that meant, didn’t find anything, guessed that it meant “pseudo-random topic generator”, and was partway through writing a complaint that people shouldn’t use single-use acronyms when I read a bit more and realised to sort of explained it later on – though still, “pseudo” is not something people can get from what you read unless phrases like “pseudo-random” are close to the front of their brain already.
I don’t want to take this out on you so much since it’s not a big deal here, but this is something that really, really, gets to me – people using uncommon (or entirely unique even) acronyms. We’re all fast typists, what’s the point? I see this pretty often without many complaints from people, am I in the minority for finding this annoying? I suppose I understand the appeal of talking in a way only people in some ingroup will understand (for that purpose alone rather than the precision that jargon can bring), but if that’s what’s subconsciously going on I think we can agree it’s something to be avoided. Sorry for the rant, I hope this doesn’t come across as mean. I do mean it as more general point, not specifically a dig at you, no offence is intended.
About your strategy for conversation – I think it’s a good one and I’m going to adopt it but with the notebook approach. I actually found myself today thinking “gosh I wish there was someone around for me to have a conversation with about this thing I’m witnessing, I hope I don’t forget it before I next have a skype call with my long-distance partner!” I *do* forget most of the time though. The fact that we’re not having the experiences together is something my brain is not prepared for. It genuinely thinks it has nothing to talk about when in reality there are loads of things, if only I could prod the mental pathways to them.
Sorry, I agonized over it for a minute, but decided I thought PRNG was well-known enough that people would get that it was a play on that. (edited the original post)
I don’t mind unknown acronyms, but I think you are in the majority on that.
There’s at least two of us.:-)
AAAaAA*
*Also Against Abnormal and Atypical Acronyms
> PRTG
Pseudo Radioisotope Thermal Generator?
Already edited in response to a previous gripe. Pseudo-random thought generator.
Have a child together. Having a child with someone will create a vast set of joys/concerns/coordination problems that you share and often find interesting to talk about.
Are you also of the “get a dog” school of dating advice?
No offense, but I thought having a child with someone with whom you have an already shaky relationship in order to cement the relationship was classic bad relationship advice.
Yes it probably is. But having a child most certainly gives you lots of stuff to talk about.
A) Ask some questions about her life or interests, follow up a bit using active listening, continue in that vein if the topic seems interesting. If it’s not interesting (be honest here), find some angle on it that interests you or ties back to your interests, and talk about that. See if she engages with that or gets bored.
B) Just start talking about things you like or thoughts you have. Not the weirdest ones, at least initially, but you don’t have to stick to your mental list of totally safe socially approved small talk topics. It’s better not to, actually. See if she engages with that or gets bored.
Repeat some combination of A and B until it’s clear whether you have enough in common that it’s worth trying to date (or continue dating). You don’t need to have identical interests, and you won’t, but you don’t want to end up spending thousands of hours together with someone whose every interest bores you and vice versa. This is much more important than physical attraction, shared social group, or whatever else you’re considering important.
Oh good, it’s my named problem now.
Sorry. I didn’t mean it in a ‘type specimen’ way…
I read the thread that Winter Shaker linked. Did you end up doing the Cyrano experiment? That would be a lot of fun.
I cannot resist giving my two cents, perhaps because I am also romantically unlucky. I posted my comment on that thread.
On first dates I like play a game where you take turns asking personal questions to each other. Whenever the conversation stops, whoever was just asked a question asks another one. No matter whether it’s been one sentence or ten minutes since the last question, the continues the conversation when it stops — maybe on a different subject, maybe not. You usually start with generic questions, like “what are your hobbies” but eventually turns to more interesting stuff.
I read about this conversational technique once (I think in Leil Lowndes’ “How to Talk to Anyone”) where you repeat the last few words your conversational partner says to you before a pause. e.g.
When I first read about this technique, it felt super-weird, but I tried it anyway and it always worked. People seemed really happy that I was doing this, and no-one ever objected. So I thought about it a bunch and I realized that it’s basically pure signalling: “I am listening to your story. Please proceed.” There is almost never a time when signalling that is a bad idea. The actual echoing of their words seems to function as a conversational upvote, significantly more powerful than “yeah” or “wow” or “uh-huh”, any of which can easily be taken as “wrap it up” or “I’m not really listening” signals.
Note that in the story above, the dog’s fluffy vest and the Mondale slogan were basically just filler details for the main story. You might not have a strong opinion on either of those things, and that doesn’t matter at all. You’re just acknowledging what was mentioned and allowing your interlocutor to proceed with the story, which is >90% of the time exactly what someone telling a story wants.
One way to think of it is that a conversation’s natural flow is
P1: talk, talk, talk, pass conch
P2: talk, talk, talk, pass conch
P1: talk, talk, talk, pass conch
P2: talk, talk, talk, pass conch
etc
Conversation has several failure modes. e.g.
Monopolizing conversation
P1: talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk
P2: …
Interrupting
P1: talk, talk, ta-
P2: talk, talk
This technique is basically Preferential Conch Passing (PCP for short? I am terrible at neologisms.)
P1: talk, talk, talk, pass conch
P2: upvote, pass conch
P1: talk, talk, talk, pass conch
P2: upvote, pass conch
It’s kind of analogous to letting other cars merge in front of you – you have the legitimate power of the conch, and you graciously yield it.
Eventually, your partner will ask you a direct question, or you’ll have something particularly valuable to say. Hop right in. But you can easily do three or four (or ten) PCPs between each actual contribution and your conversation will likely be greatly enriched by your doing so – your partner will feel heard, and will in turn be far more willing to listen to you.
Good luck.
So that’s what Snake was doing that whole time.
Apparently doing this is a natural expected form of conversation in Japanese. Interesting.
I have an acquaintance who does something like this, but just says “oh yeah?” instead. It makes it blatantly obvious that he is neither interested nor really paying attention.
Conversations with significant other has a few advantages over conversations with most of the rest of humanity.
The main advantages are the opportunity to use shared reference points and the benefit of lots of iterations.
Couple suggestions –
– Try to be mindful of which conversations topics your partner is truly interested, topics that they will talk at length about. Then be mindful about things that come up that relate to those topics. Those pings tend to be good conversation starters.
– Keep up with their life. Most of the life situations that they describe to you will first be described mid-situation. At some point in the future, that situation will resolve itself. Guess the right time, then ask what happened? Did that situation resolved itself?
– One of the great parts of being in a long term relationship is the opportunity to develop inside humor. Situations that only the two of you experienced can serve as the setup for humor that only the two of you will get.
Work with the medium, use the advantages of the medium.
I have always brainstormed before conversational opportunities; just something my social anxiety makes me do but which hopefully makes me more interesting. I tend to think of stuff like,
“How was your day/what did you do at work today?”
“What do you think of the weather/sportsball event/news item today?”
“Last time I saw you you mentioned X was going on in your life, how is that going?” (Everyone loves this one. It proves you were listening AND remembered, which is obvious proof that they are an important person in your life.)
“After we talked about X last time, I had a further thought about that. Here it is and what do you think?”
“I read a news story/blog post/book that seems to overlap with some of your interests, here is a one-minute blurb about it, what do you think?”
“A funny anecdote happened to me today! Feel free to reciprocate with one of your own!”
“Here’s something I don’t know about you, which I’d like to.”
Interesting thought question — “what superpower would you pick?” “what animal would you be?” “would you rather time travel to the future or the past?” Sometimes you can find things like this online; I think they’re fun and explaining why each of you picked what you did can be a fun conversation and reveal a lot about each other.
If you rely on happening to be thinking of something interesting while you are hanging out with your friend, you’re likely to come up empty. Interesting thoughts worth sharing aren’t generally what float uppermost in your brain at all times.
Most people are mentioning how to think of topics of conversation and/or listen if your conversation partner is fairly talkative. I’d add that it helps to do some kind of activity together that you can talk about – go to a museum, play a game, try to make a kite, anything that sounds interesting to you or the other person in its own right. This lets you talk about whatever it is you’re doing, but it also makes it less awkward to have conversation die out and restart later.
Marry someone who won’t shut up.
I think that’s the opposite of useful. Your conversational skills atrophy because you can’t get a word in edgewise anyway.
Also, don’t marry people as part of a self-improvement project.
Or, don’t marry people primarily as part of a self-improvement project. From what I’ve heard, a good marriage does improve you.
How very non-rationalist of you.
Sorry. I’m already taken.
But you role-play a Muslim at least part of the year, do you not?
A Muslim with a Christian wife. In persona I am prone to comment on the oddity of Nazarene arithmetic in that context: one plus one equals one.
That sounds like the kind of observation a Trinitarian may make, but it does not sound like the kind of observation an observant Muslim would make. Is your comment based on one by a Muslim, current or historical?
It took me a bit to parse, but I think David Friedman was talking about husband and wife being one flesh, not the Trinity.
I get that. But if a husband and a wife can be one flesh, then it is not so blasphemous to say a God and His Son can be one, no? I assumed that’s what “Nazarene arithmetic” refers to, which a Muslim, being strict on monotheism, finds more than an oddity.
Also, Muslims, being less strict on polygamy, seem like they would not really think along the lines of one flesh, which gets odd if it is transitive.
(1) Choose environments conducive to conversation (different for different people). Even after 2 years, I still have trouble taking to my girlfriend if we go places with a lot of noise or that make me annoyed or uncomfortable.
(2) Pay attention to body language. Are you signaling that you don’t want her to talk?
(3) Use props. (Generalized from “get a dog” and “see a movie”.)
(4) Don’t underestimate alcohol as an ice-breaker. It can make something seem interesting/funny that isn’t so much–for the speaker and the listener.
(5) Be self-aware when you are with people with whom you speak more comfortably. What are you talking about?
Insofar as anything works for me on the same problem it’s knowing the other person well enough that things I see as I randomly browse the internet remind me of them and then I can send them a link and we can talk about stuff based on that.
Historically I have had some of this problem. I hated calling anyone on the phone, for example, because I didn’t know what to say. I am still terrible at small talk with acquaintances, or networking at conferences.
My job has helped me a lot overall. I spend a lot of time in meetings with clients and coworkers presenting things, discussing things, brainstorming. For years, I’ve had no choice but to develop and sustain ongoing professional conversations and relationships with more than an order of magnitude more people than I ever had in my social circle.
My wife and I definitely talk a lot less now than when we first met. (That’s almost tautological in our case. The day we met wasn’t planned as a date but we ended up sitting on a park bench and talking for about 10 hours). To an extent, I think that some reduction over time is normal and even healthy. How much depends on what the people involved decide they want.
If you want to generate more topics: I expect you and your partner have a mix of shared interests, separate lives you both care about, and aspects of each of your lives the other is completely uninterested in. I never talk to my wife about the sci-fi or fantasy i’m reading, or a game I’m playing, or physics; she doesn’t care. But in the course of my day at work, and socially, I come across and generate stories – people I encountered, the stories they shared with me, quirky coincidences, things I learned, and news items, all of which are shareable in conversation. We live together and have pets, so there’s always daily life to discuss. We like to hike and paddleboard and travel, so talking about and planning trips and adventures and outings is often fun, especially if either of us has come up with a new idea.
We have also accumulated a lot of in-jokes that get recycled, re-used, and applied in new ways. Sometimes they become kind of stock conversation filler, but they can also be conversation starters, triggering either of us to think of a different but related idea.
Totally different direction: A few months ago I got a waterproof notebook w/ suction cups and a pencil and put it in the shower, and now we write each other notes back and forth. All kinds of things: complaints, compliments, musings, ideas for plans, jokes and silly poems and drawings, whatever. Lots of spontaneous conversation fodder comes out of that. And because each individual note is small, and I have time to think and write it out instead of it being live, it’s relatively low-pressure. A white board can serve the same purpose.
At some point, it can become a question of “Are we really likely to be happy together given the kinds of people we are?” rather than a simple skills question, but I don’t know how to define the line between “improve your skills,” and “don’t force what isn’t there.”
Do you agree with Trump’s claim that there were “fine people on both sides” of the Charlottesville riots? How does that claim affect your view that Trump is not a racist?
It seems plausible that there were one or two people there whose primary motivation was actually the preservation of history, or free speech, or something equally reasonable. Obviously most of the march was using it as a cover story, but any group that big will have a misguided dolt or two who got dragged along by friends, or someone who showed up randomly that believed the cover story.
(This doesn’t excuse very much, of course – showing up cluelessly is one thing, but when the Nazi chants come out, that’s when you GTFO. But they probably do exist.)
To be honest, I’m a bit surprised how there’s near-zero coverage of the pro-statues side outside of the actual white supremacists. I heard on the Tom Woods podcast that in New Orleans there was a non-radical anti-demolition organization that was actually led by a black woman, you’d think the contrarian-sphere in general would’ve picked up on that more than once.
I’m not surprised at all.
If I’m being charitable, I would say “maybe there were nice peaceful protests to save the statues, but the media is selectively only showing the ‘BLOOD AND SOIL’ and ‘Jews will not replace us’ protests.”
But if those nice protests exist, surely the nice peaceful protestors were recording themselves and would have brought them forward.
I haven’t seen them. Or maybe they exist are just aren’t in my bubble. Do they exist?
My expectation is that they happened, but in different cities at different times. Free speech rallies that are about actual free speech, not about coded fascism, are things I see from time to time.
As far as I remember, I haven’t heard about them at all?
@Edward Scizorhands:
There’s a video going around (I can’t currently find it – maybe someone else can?) in which an elderly reporter gives her impressions of the rally and then talks about how when she was trying to report on it she tripped and cracked her head on the sidewalk and some nice men rushed over to help – got her water and a washcloth, got her cleaned up, held her hand, made sure she was okay. Then she noticed the men helping her were wearing big guns and part of a militia. It turned out the group she encountered was a (multiracial!) militia group that had come down to neutrally help keep the peace. Since most people (including her) would have counted any armed militia members *near* the protest as being *of* the protest, I’d say that group counts as either “fine people on that side” or “fine people on both sides”.
I don’t think it would be possible for those videos to exist. The rally was supposed to begin at 12:00 and the “unlawful assembly” decree shutting it down happened at 11:30, so the “nice peaceful protestors” (if they existed) never had a chance to do any nice, peaceful protesting.
You just don’t say that there are “fine people” in a crowd of KKK and Nazis, unless you are a racist or Nazi. Even a racist like Sessions knows not to say it out loud.
Refusing to cooperate with what you “just don’t do” seems to be one of Trump’s major schticks though, so I don’t think his intentions can be read via that line of reasoning. I wouldn’t be surprised if he said it *because* it’s what you “just don’t” say.
Or more likely, he wanted to criticise both sides and complimenting them both too was a clumsy way of making sure he wasn’t solely dishing out criticism, since criticism is usually better received if it’s paired with praise.
His personality type is described as having a, when less than fully healthy, psychological trait of poking people to see how they respond.
Honestly, calling Trump a Nazi gives him too much credit. I don’t think he has an ideology that consistent.
I strongly endorse this opinion.
+1
Related: fascism is an ideology which has as much internal consistency as other political traditions, and poli sci ought to treat fascism as a distinct ideology for analytical purposes. Back in the day (this was more than 20 years ago in the UK, I don’t know if this is different now) poli sci textbooks analysed movements/ ideologies in terms of a tripartite typology i.e. socialist, liberal, conservative. This struck me as wrong. The implication is that either:
1. fascism is unworthy of consideration – but poli sci is meant to be analysis, not endorsement. Recognising fascism as a distinct ideology doesn’t imply liking it;
2. fascism is merely a variant of conservatism – but this is at best arguable, and probably offensive.
I would say that in that triangular typology, fascism is opposite liberalism (between socialism and conservatism, kind of). Libertarianism is opposite socialism, and social democracy/mainstream leftism is opposite conservatism.
IMO, Fascism is clearly a variant of socialism – it treats race the same way communism treats class, by picking one semi-arbitrary group to lionize and another to demonize. The primary difference between the two is that fascism is national while socialism leans international, and that communism uses more explicit methods of controlling the economy, but those are pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. Treating people as nothing but anonymous members of a large group, acting surprised when this doesn’t work out very well, and then killing a bunch of them for being part of the wrong group when you need a scapegoat is pretty much identical between them.
(Of course, since fascism is so universally loathed that everyone plays a giant game of ideological keep-away to pin it on their opponents, and I’m a conservative/libertarian, this viewpoint really shouldn’t surprise you.)
Alternatively, and probably marginally less historically wrongly, fascism is a variant of libertarianism that takes a different view on what actions are morally permissible in support of property rights.
Leftists who move from focusing on class to race are still leftists. Libertarians who move from supporting individual defensive violence (i.e. 2nd amendment) to collective and/or offensive violence can be unquestionably fascist without changing their opinion on anything else.
@1isoru1
What about people who move from socialism to fascism? (True of many fascists in the 1920s and 30s.)
I’d agree that back then that was a plausible transition, mostly a matter of moving from ‘we are allied with the Russian state elite’ to ‘we are allied with the German (or wherever) national elite’. And then either coming to agree that the alliance has become more important that the reason for forming it, or getting stabbed.
@Alsadius
Nazism treated race that way. I don’t think Mussolini or Franco had nearly the emphasis on race.
An issue with trying to define it: Fascism was not hugely ideologically coherent. Fascist ideological statements, etc are far more likely to be post-hoc justifications than the equivalents for liberalism, conservatism, and Marxism are.
The “Big Lebowski” Trump criticism?
Trump is a master persuader, and I believe his goal was to persuade marchers to disassociate from the racists/Nazis. Telling someone: “You are racists scum. Stop associating with Nazis.” is probably less effective than telling them: “You might be a good person. Please stop associating with Nazis.” Trump decided to prioritize reducing the number of future Nazis over winning virtue signaling points.
I would agree. So much of left wing belief revolves around saying what you think everyone else believes. Actually believing or thinking out your stance is unnecessary.
i.e. logic supporting your beliefs is secondary to being an accepted member of the group. So virtue signaling is the most important thing. As an individualist libertarian, virtue signaling and it’s completely vapid worthlessness makes my skin crawl.
Every side engages in virtue signalling. I have seen some top shelf virtue signalling from anarcho-capitalists and libertarians.
It’s not about saying what ‘everyone else’ is saying, it’s about saying what ‘your peer group’ is saying.
I want to agree (the Master Persuader model of Trump helped me win a few bets last year) but I also am not sure whether or why Trump would care about there being more or fewer Nazis in the future. And since Nazis seem to support him and he undoubtedly notices that, your hypothesis would make even less sense.
It does make sense, if you think that Trump recognises at some level that every real-life Nazi is a recruiting tool for Trump’s opponents/ enemies. Let’s posit a counterfactual: suppose the number of actual, active US Nazis were to increase from (say) 1000 to 10,000. That would probably generate at least 100,000 more votes for the Democrats.
Maybe the guy just doesn’t like white supremacists just like the rest of 99.99% humanity. I don’t think it makes sense not to assume he has basically the same moral background as everyone else in the U.S.
I mean, in the past he’s publicly denounced groups he was in because he saw too many white supremacists hanging around…
How would you falsify “master persuader”?
—
It wouldn’t surprise me if Scott Adams is paid off by “someone.”
This will take a while to happen but, I suspect that within a few decades we are going to learn a lot about the science of persuasion; how words can effect beliefs and emotions. I predict that future historians using advanced psycholinguistics will recognize Trump as having been a master persuader. In the recent past I won a few thousand dollars betting on Trump becoming President at terms consistent with him having an 18% chance of winning. I make the following short-term prediction: Trump is going to pick his Democratic opponent, someone with so little chance of winning that the Democratic party professionals are horrified that he/she gets the nomination.
@James Miller…
+1 to Ilya Shpitser’s point.
Also, as a matter of epistemic hygiene, I would recommend you stop spending time with Scott Adams’ blog, if you are. (I recognize the phrase “master persuader.”)
Scott Adams writes about some things I don’t know very much about. But when he writes about things I do know a good bit about (e.g. climate change), I see him using rhetorical tactics that even my conservative friends have conceded are patent sophism–that is, knowing use of rhetorical technique to make bad arguments look good–intended to let him continue to cultivate a large audience by saying what Red Team already wants to hear without sounding stupid. By analogy, his writing on climate change is like he had written about tooth-brusthing and said, “Sure, 98% of dentists all agree tooth-brushing is good for your teeth, and your teeth are important for your health. But they are all basing that agreement on the models they use for how teeth work–and models can be wrong! And you don’t understand the models, so if they’re wrong, you wouldn’t know!–so you shouldn’t feel like you need to change your behavior.” If you didn’t know at least a little bit about tooth-brushing, or if you tended to relate to the folks whose team made a virtue of skepticism re: teeth-brushing, or if you weren’t pretty sure that your dentist’s opinion is worth something, you could actually be persuaded by that–and people do find his comments on climate change persuasive, but *only* people who lack some relevant background knowledge. My experience is, if someone is being sophist on one thing, they’re being sophist on a lot of things.
I kind of despair of talking with people online about this kind of thing–I don’t know if this comment will be productive, but dammit I’m trying.
Maybe take it as just my two cents, I guess?
amen to Scott being the worst
that doesn’t mean Trump is or isn’t a ”master persuader”. I think he’s at least good at something…persuasion, or maybe knowing what people want to hear, or just being entertaining. I don’t think there’s nothing there. Not sure how much is there, though.
The big problem with the master persuader hypothesis is that it conveys a sense of superiority (“lol Trump doubters just don’t understand his amazing 11-D chess moves” without actually making useful predictions. One would THINK that you could predict that a master persuader is successful at endeavours requiring persuasion, but Trump has actually done quite terribly on that score — couldn’t persuade more than 46% of Americans to vote for him against the most unpopular Dem nominee in history, can’t persuade Congress to repeal Obamacare, can’t persuade more than 40% of Americans that he’s doing a good job, can’t persuade establishment Republicans to stop backing Flake et al. Of course, the hypothesis is infinitely versatile at explaining past failures (or should I say successes that us sheeple just can’t comprehend?) but if it can’t make any testable predictions for the next 3 years (until 2020) then it doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job.
@AnonYEmous: Trump is good at nothing at all. He won because he EPITOMIZES a good portion of the Republican base, who naturally voted for someone they accurately see as representing them. Unlike all the other racist and unintelligent randos that identify with him, he happened to also inherit a large amount of money, giving him the capacity to generate wide name recognition before running. In the general election, he faced a candidate who was not only super-unpopular, but didn’t even bother to conduct polls in swing states in the last three weeks of her campaign. Combined with his aforementioned appeal to large swathes of America (many of whom weren’t exactly loyal Republicans before), this was enough to squeak out a win.
One other major factor was that, for whatever reason, he actually understood that there are a lot of things wrong with America, and offered all sorts of terrible plans to fix it. This also probably persuaded a lot of reasonably rational yet desperate people to vote for him — if one candidate claims that there’s no problem at all (“America is already great!”) and the other candidate knows that you’re hurting and offers some dubious solution, which would a rational person vote for? I know I’d vote for Trump.
Scott Adams has been selling cynicism by the barrel for 30+ years. I wouldn’t be surprised if he took up the thesis as a thought experiment and ran with it.
It is only half true at best….T’s hucksterism revolts some as it persuades others.
Trump is definitely good at some stuff — he’s good at “one off transactional interactions” (classic example is selling used cars).
Trump is a very transactional dude — he once wrote/said that he likes to just show up in the morning to work, and wing it from there.
—
Dr. Miller: I am not asking for your predictions, I am asking for what experiment would falsify the claim.
—
Re: falsification, read Scott Adams recent post on how failed prediction of “6 months in, it will be awkward to be anti-Trump.” He ate crow, but basically said “this only failed because anti-Trump people are so bad.”
The fact that Adams failed to predict something wasn’t what was interesting — everyone everywhere ever will fail to predict the future, because predicting the future is very difficult. The interesting part was how he handled being wrong in his prediction.
Adams is not playing the epistemic rationality game, he’s a shill, as I said before.
Master persuaders would not play the epistemic rationality game.
I don’t find Adams very persuasive.
—
The thing with shills is they are predictable — I know exactly how they will respond. I don’t need Scott Adams to tell me what Scott Adams will say, I already know.
Scott Adams’ position as a salesman for various startups he invests in as well as his own products means he doesn’t have to be paid off by anyone but himself: The more he gets noticed the more money he gets.
I find myself again writing +1 to Ilya Shpitser, this time for the point that there’s no real need to read Adams, because you already know what he’ll say. (At least, insofar as he’s talking about politics.) To the extent it contains facts that are inconvenient for redteam, they are the ones redteam has already become aware of, and are mentioned only for the purpose of explaining them away.
One of my smartest conservative friends (who recommended Adam’s self-help book to me) immediately conceded (and this is a quote): “he’s so cynical he’s more fascist than most fascists, but his self-help stuff works pretty well.”
I’m not saying Adams isn’t smart, or that nothing he’s written has value. For example, I actually think his self-help book is much better than average, as compared to the usual “personality-type” self-help book. (By personality-type, I am invoking the distinction I learned from the introduction to The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which points out that there are “character” self-help books, which focus on habits of excellence (like honesty with oneself and others, hard-work, pro-activity, etc.) and “personality” self-help books, which emphasize tricks or gimmicks to get others to like you/trust you/promote you.
For examples, the Autobiography of Ben Franklin and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People are proto-typical “Character” books, while “How to Win Friends and Influence People” and “How to Make People Like You in Ninety Seconds or Less” are proto-typical “Personality” books. I think Adams’ self-help book is pretty good–maybe even the best I’ve seen–but very, very strongly on the side of containing personality-schema tips, and at least a little corrosive to the character side, so I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone unless they mix it with a heavy dose of something more character-focused.)
James,
Just having the raw belief that he is a master persuader doesn’t buy you much. If you know what his goal is, like winning the election, it tells you something. But the whole point is to guess what his goal is in that utterance. If you think it accomplishes a particular goal, just say that, and don’t bother to make claims about his competence.
On the other hand, it does give you a strong prior that Trump is effectively accomplishing some goal. So, rather than accept that he’s incompetently going toward X, you keep looking around for another Y which it lines up better with.
I used to think Trump was a master persuader, but then toward the end of the campaign, I decided that hypothesis was gaining too many epicycles to account for his passing up wide-open opportunities. Since he gained office, I’ve seen even less evidence for it.
Right — it feels like the “God has a plan” argument. Given that God is all-powerful, and that shit happens, you must conclude that the shit that happens must be according to a plan. But if there is a plan, one would expect that there would be some kind of pattern pointing to some kind of goal. And that’s not what we see, either in the world at large or in Trump’s method of governing.
If he has a goal, it’s “getting everyone to love him so he’ll win a second term,” and so far I’m not sure he’s doing very well at it.
Or stupid, or just plain ignorant, or if you are trying to win the support of racists, or to reward the racists who have already supported you in the past, or trying to distract people from something, or signaling your immunity to accusations of racism, just off the top of my head. There’s lots of reasons to defend a group of mostly-racists, not just being a racist yourself.
I suspect you haven’t really thought this through, don’t really understand how the game of
thronespolitics is played, and are just looking for an excuse to label Trump a racist because you think that’s an instant checkmate.I think the point is that it wasn’t a “crowd of Nazis,” it was an anti-crushing-the-culture-of-former-enemies rally that got taken over by white supremacists.
I don’t necessarily think this is true. I’m still not convinced that Trump is racist, since everything that could be considered racist that he has done or said could also be explained by him pandering to his base. Condemning the crowd at Charlottesville as Nazis means alienating the people who voted for me, and more importantly some of the only people still supporting him.
The original claim from “Crying Wolf” wasn’t that Trump, personally, is racist. It’s that he backs racists politically more than other Republican presidents because racists like him.
Of course I don’t agree with it. I’ve grown up in modern Blue Tribe culture. I know that if I agree with it, everyone I know will hate me and I’ll never be able to show my face in polite society again. The commenter above me gets this exactly right.
But if I didn’t know that, I might answer the same way as if you asked me whether there might ever be good people in Hamas, or in the Chinese Communist Party during Mao, or in the IDF, or in the Mafia. I would default to my belief that goodness doesn’t clearly and evenly divide along political lines. I would remember stories like the one about how a black guy befriended KKK members and has so far convinced over 200 of them to leave the organization, and so there was apparently some fundamental decency lurking in those people. I would think about how many people join organizations without really understanding them, or how many people get raised with really weird beliefs and have trouble shaking them off. I would think about how many incredibly bizarre beliefs I hold that most people throughout history would think are evil. And then I would just roll my eyes at you.
Trump isn’t a part of modern Blue Tribe culture, and so he doesn’t realize that all decent enlightened people have to admit that Hamas has some good-but-misled people in it, but only a Nazi bigot could believe that a protest against removing a Confederate statue could have the same. So instead of doing the correct thing and pointing out that they are all inhuman vermin who have no redeeming qualities and can only be met with violence, he foolishly applied the cultural norms suitable for someone like Hamas in this situation. Oops!
But on a more fundamental level, I just hate this question and this whole class of questions. Defend this thing Trump did, or else he’s a Nazi! Okay, now defend this thing Trump did, or else he’s a Nazi! Oh yeah, then defend this thing Trump did or else he’s a Nazi! I think many people do weird and horrible things for reasons other than them being Nazis, but if you ask me to justify a couple hundred of them on an individual basis, they’re all going to come off as me being mealy-mouthed, and saying it’s just a weird coincidence, and making excuses (see the Atlantis metaphor on the original Wolf post). Finally you’ll conclude that he’s a Nazi. And probably by that point you’ll add that I’m biased in favor of him and also a Nazi.
All I can say is that this is how individual and cultural differences work. I think George Washington, Pericles, Ron Paul, and King Abdullah of Jordan are neither Nazis nor monsters, but I’m sure you could find a hundred statements by each which are so foreign to either of our moral systems that I couldn’t defend them, and I’d look Soft On Evil if I even tried. I think it’s hard for some people to conceive of a culture that treats pro-Confederate-statue protesters with the same level of grace that it treats Hamas members, and that it’s definitely hard for them to conceive of a really different worldview, that would cause non-monster people to do things that only monsters would do from within ours. And that’s not even taking into account different mind-designs (I’m not allowed to say this officially, but unofficially Trump is an obvious narcissist and narcissists choose their words and actions in ways very different from the rest of us), and the fact that Trump is a monster in certain ways which just aren’t the exact same ways people are accusing him of being one.
If you just lack that fundamental understanding that people really thinking different from you is possible, then every time someone does something you wouldn’t, you’re going to interpret it as you + secretly evil. And then you’re going to ask me to defend it, and since I don’t have the superpower to instantly understand every other worldview and mind-design and inject that understanding directly into your brain, I’m just going to be able to come up with some kind of pathetic “Eh, maybe it’s not what it seems”. And I’ll lose status for having to defend the indefensible, and you won’t be convinced.
All I can do is ask you to remember all those people using Obama’s poor condemnations of terrorism as proof that he was secretly pro-terrorist. Which is more likely: that the one person you hate the most happens to hold an incredibly evil position that almost nobody does (and that he’s shown no other large-scale signs of in his life outside weird ambiguous statement-making) but which would be incredibly useful to your political side in tarring him with the worst accusation with which one can possibly tar someone? Or that you don’t really understand other people that well, and sometimes they say things that would be awkward or bad in your ontology?
I’m not going to answer these kinds of “WELL HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN TRUMP SAYING X?” questions further on an individual basis, and any time someone asks me to I’m going to link them back here.
I completely agree with everything you say in this comment, but I think it’s worth insisting on one specific point you make, namely that people who seriously think Trump is a white supremacist because of a few ambiguous statements he made are essentially committing the base rate fallacy. There are really very few white supremacists and this should inform the inferences we make based on what Trump says.
I think it might also be that they genuinely believe the base rate is way higher than it is, “white supremacy is everwhere” and all.
Yes, I think you’re right, and this is probably at least in part because they implicitly use a much broader definition of “white supremacist” than the traditional understanding of that expression. See my reply to Nikolai below.
Part of the reason is that their definition of “white supremacy” includes anyone who notices that race does in fact correlate with lot’s of important stuff, e.g., intelligence, criminality.
White supremacy and racism mean entirely different things based on the tribe they originate from (http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/antiracism-norms-and-immigration/).
If you believe, as many do, that 20-40% of the US population is generally somewhere between implicitly and actively racist, then it becomes much easier to believe 2-5% of the population are secret, hidden, white supremacists. With more growing daily.
Whereas red tribe generally views white supremacy to be something that requires people to say “I hate black people.”
I think people on the left should be pretty worried that the new Nazi-mania is going to make it harder to discuss implicit racism – ie “Racism? Isn’t that the thing where there are Nazis around everywhere? Good thing I’m normal.”
This isn’t really helping the “racism is a subtle thing implicit in structures of social domination” narrative. If 90% of the anti-racism energy gets focused on some random skinheads who don’t actually care about it, that’s a pretty big waste compared to the places where it might actually matter.
Sure, people on the left increasingly use a very broad definition of “white supremacy”, which is no doubt partly why they see white supremacists everywhere. But not all definitions of “white supremacy” are equally good.
Here is how “white supremacist” is defined in Merriam-Webster dictionary: “a person who believes that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races.” I think this is how the expression has traditionally been understood and that it’s a pretty good definition. It requires not only that one believes white people to be superior, but also that, as a result, they should have control over non-whites, presumably through some kind of coercion.
By contrast, liberals/progressives increasingly call “white supremacist” anyone who only satisfies the first conjunct, and often people who don’t even satisfy it but e. g. sell burritos while being white. Such a broad definition of “white supremacy” makes it harder to distinguish between run-of-the-mill racist or even people who arguably aren’t even racist and people who not only are racist but who think that coercion should be used to ensure the social domination of white people.
Insofar as the point of language is to allow us to describe the world in a sufficiently informative way, this broader definition is defective compared to the traditional, more restricted one. I think it’s a pretty good argument against changing the traditional meaning of “white supremacy”. Note that leftists have no problem recognizing that about language when they (correctly) criticize conservatives for calling Obama a “socialist”. They just forget about it when it comes to “white supremacist”, because it’s politically convenient for them.
Now, if people insist on a much broader definition/use of the term, I guess they can do so. But then it’s less clear why we should worry if Trump is a white supremacist, because in that broader sense, it can include things which are relatively harmless.
To all the people arguing about “white supremacy”, is someone who believes that whites have higher average IQ than blacks a “white supremacist” (btw, the evidence points very strongly in that direction)? Would about someone who also believes that social organization should take this fact into account?
I would say that is a fair description of anyone who believes black IQ is:
– _significantly_ lower
– in a way that is immune to _legitimate_ political interventions
– to a degree unsupported by _non-speculative science_
Anyone who says ‘they are not equal because you can’t test real numbers for equality’ is more an annoying pedant. Even in a worst-plausible-case scenario where 10% of the populace were proven to be 10% less productive on average, that’s ~1% of gdp, and you’d have to be a very strict libertarian to believe there is no legitimate state action that could fix a problem on that scale.
The thing is, most white supremacists will happily quote some scientific paper showing a non-zero IQ gap while actually proposing policies that only make sense given at least a sub-species boundary, and probably some kind of glowy racial essence.
And then they use the fact that people object to the concentration camps and the skulls as evidence they are being persecuted for simply saying what the science is.
Well the science supports an average difference of ~10 points does that count as significant?
What kind of “political intervention” would you expect to raise IQ?
Productivity at what job? For jobs requiring high intelligence like, CEO, scientist, or computer programmer the difference in productivity between the top and bottom 10% is orders of magnitude.
See, that’s the trouble. How do you even measure racism when actual KKK generally say they aren’t racist? Everyone says they aren’t racist. And you can’t actually prove whether someone has negative *feelings* for black people, because you can’t read minds.
Yet, racism actually exists, and I guess I’d really like to taboo the word “racism” and find out what percentage of people fit in various categories like –
*doesn’t believe racial discrimination exists, so black people who say it does are just whiners
*believes discrimination exists, but thinks it is sufficient to simply not discriminate oneself, actually working to lessen or counteract it is not important because black people can suck it up
*really only likes and trusts white people, but doesn’t say so, and tries not to be obviously prejudiced in behavior
*believes false and hateful things about various minorities, says so in private company, also has minority friends (always weird to be a minority friend of these people, so they can tell you “well, you’re one of the GOOD Hispanics, but all the rest are criminals and rapists”)
*in private, agrees whites are the only ones who should have rights in this country, quietly discriminates against all others, but doesn’t speak on it publicly
*demonstrates in a white hood
*shoots up a black church
I don’t know which of these categories count as “racist,” but I do know that I know people who fit in all these categories but the last two. So they can’t be THAT rare.
Obviously if anyone picks the exact value which is the highest possibly compatible with known science, they will correspondingly land on the exact border between partisan and supremacist.
Banning lead in petrol does seem to have made a measurable difference. It’s hard to see how all possible further reductions in environmental toxins could end up doing nothing.
That aside, IQ is a test score, not of any inherent significance in itself. To the extent it effects real-world things, like skills needed to do a job, other things, like education and training, can substitute. You could do this in a race-neutral way by supplying overall more education than strictly optimal. Or you could take a shortcut and give the target subgroup preferential access to additional years of education.
Either would do the job; the US seems to be in the process of shifting from the latetr to the former.
It is kind of a problem for this approach that some jobs aren’t very trainable, at least within the existing university system. ‘Computer Science’ has a lot to answer for.
Improving the quality of education available for those jobs would be a major overall win, independent of distributional effects.
The evidence suggests otherwise. At the very least despite over half a century of attempts no one has yet figured out a way to actually make this work.
A University is not a trade school.
A University teaches mathematics (a field of inquiry), it does not teach accounting (a type of work one does involving some types of mathematics).
A University teaches computer science (a field of inquiry about computation), it does not teach trade skills involved in jobs that use computers (version control software, working in teams, etc.), except insofar as teaching these is helpful for its primary mission.
@Philippe Lemoine
I think I will use John Derbyshire’s definition here. So the phenomenon you describe is White Dominionism, not White Supremacism. I believe WS only refers to the first conjunct. I consider WS to simply be a harmless opinion.
White Dominionism is no longer viable without a nuclear war because of the existence of China.
@ghi No. Consider that many actual white nationalists don’t consider Ashkenazi Jews white yet believe that they have higher IQ compared to white Europeans. Does that make these people (John Derbyshire, Rushton, Lynn, Murray, etc) Ashkenazi Jewish Supremacist
s? Nope.
@1soru1 The B-W IQ gap is still around. Furthermore Ashkenazis and Northeast Asians seem to have no problem with the “white European” IQ test. So we can’t simply dismiss the gap as racism. It has to be something real such as effects of malnutrition, lack of intellectual stimulation, whatever. A fact is a fact is a fact. Facts aren’t racist. Not facing facts on the other hand can cause racism.
There’s also the issue where finding one axis with racial differences is construed as believing a race that, on average, does better on it is wholly superior to others below it on that axis. It’s much like the blunt misrepresentations of privilege as one-dimensional.
Quite frankly, even if you showed me convincing evidence that whites score non-insignificantly higher on IQ than blacks, that would not cause me to believe whites are inherently superior. Even setting aside that IQ is a garbage metric, raw intelligence isn’t everything. And there’s a whole host of factors that could be behind it. And even if it were pure biology, it doesn’t explain smuggling in the notion of “lower IQ -> lower rights”, unless we’re living in a nerd fantasy land where meathead jocks are also afforded fewer rights. It takes so many bizarre leaps to get from racial differences to racial superiority that the folks that assert that noticing the former implies belief in the latter are uncharitable jackasses – and the weakmen who actually do follow that insane troll logic are idiotic to the point of belonging near the bottom of the nerd fantasy totem pole they’re preaching.
@Gobbobobble I agree that “Low IQ -> Few rights” idea is completely immoral (note that I don’t use “wrong” or other ambiguous terms).
As for IQ differences we need to admit that they exist. Furthermore if blacks do have lower levels of intelligence than whites or others due to biological reasons that still does not justify discrimination against them. Instead that simply means we need to give them free nootropics instead of EBT. That will be a good transhumanist project as well (IQ-boosting).
It’s not. It correlates rather well with tons of metrics for everything from any other attempt to measure what is commonly called “intelligence” to life outcomes.
Except it correlates between parents and children, and adoption studies show it doesn’t correlate with adopted children.
@ghi
Admittedly it wasn’t exactly the best-structured paragraph I’ve ever written, but you seem to be ignoring the immediately following bit starting with “And even if it were pure biology”. I don’t care to litigate how accurate the ${banned-terminology} axis is, my point is that that axis is dramatically insufficient for determining some sort of overall superiority.
Hell, since each racial grouping is a distribution – you’ll have plenty of intelligent minorities and dumb-as-bricks white folks – even if you buy into the pretense that “intelligence -> superiority” it does not logically inform black&white (pun not intended) race-based policies. If one wanted to start an IQ-supermacist movement based on such a pretense I suppose that follows, but I don’t get the feeling many white nationalists would be qualified to get on board.
I don’t feel like getting into pointless semantic arguments about what “superiority” means.
However, the people in positions requiring intelligence, including a lot of leadership positions, would be filled overwhelmingly with whites. As far as policy positions would you support elimination of all affirmative action and especially disparate impact programs?
@ghi I agree. Racial quotas only make problems worse.
There has been no racial quotas in favor of Ashkenazi Jews but they never stopped succeeding.
As I said below, persecution and racism can not destroy a strong group while affirmative action can not save a weak one.
IMO a good litmus test for actual white supremacy, rather than mere race realism or whatever you want to call it, is what someone claims about white versus Asian intelligence.
Someone who is just a fan of the Bell Curve, or a believer in racial differences generally, will acknowledge that east Asians have higher IQs than white people and that this does basically mean they’re smarter.
An actual white supremacist will claim that white people have some ineffable additional advantage that still leaves them ahead of Asians. This can take the form of believing in greater creativity, or greater variance (neither of these is supported by actual research), or at the more mystical extremes belief in some animating spirit a la Miguel Serrano.
Except that’s not the test the people “fighting white supremacy” are applying.
For example here’s the first video YouTube in partnership with the ADL sandboxed for “white supremacy”.
@ghi I agree. “White supremacy” is a weird phenomenon that only seems to be harming blacks, mestizos and Southeast Asians. An alternative hypothesis is race realism.
In fact to achieve racial equality we have to embrace race realism at least as a hypothesis so that we can understand what actually causes racial inequality so that it can be alleviated. Western leftism won’t be able to hide reality if reality happens to agree with race realists for there is almost no race PC in Russia, China and Japan. They will figure out reality regardless of whether Western liberals close their eyes. And….screaming racism at these people don’t work. You can’t go to Moscow to picket homes of Russian scientists or go to China to protest what Chinese scientists have discovered.
@1soru1
Speaking of annoying pedants, I think your example doesn’t make sense. Why would the scale of the problem indicate whether government can solve it? There are a number of problems much larger that seem intractable to solutions given current technology.
If we didn’t have to sleep, that would mean 33% of GDP. Does that mean that people who don’t believe that the government can eliminate sleep are even more radical libertarians then people who believe that the government can’t close the achievement gap by boosting low achievement? If the government could just sustain itself without taxes, that would mean 40% of GDP. Is it only radical libertarians who believe that the government can’t come up with a way to fund itself without taxes?
This was actually a Doctor Who episode, although one that left the idea kind of hanging. 33% would actually be enough to determine the outcome of conflicts or races between nations, and so hard to avoid on cultural or moral grounds without efficiency forcing the issue. You might well find yourself wanting to sleep, but unable to.
1%, not so much.
What episode? I remember hearing about a SF novel with it as the premise, but hadn’t heard of a Doctor Who episode.
sleep no more
As the link explains, the idea was there, and then they threw it out and did something else instead. What the article _doesn’t_ say is that the thing they did instead was terrible and derivative.
I don’t think Trump is a white supremacist, but I think the biggest argument in favor of that position would be that white supremacists are enthusiastic about Trump in a way that never happened for Romney or McCain or any other recent mainstream Republican.
Seems to me like the reason white supremacists think he’s one of them is the left-leaning media constantly going around saying “he’s definitely a white supremacist.”
I’m sorry, I have to push back on this. White supremacy does not mean swastika tattoos and KKK hoods. Those are relatively rare. But as recently as the 1960s — within my parents’ adult memory — major portions of the USA had white supremacy coded into law. It would be extraordinary if in just a few decades a society went from 30-40% actively supporting white supremacy in law to a fringe position. Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence.
My enumeration of “white supremacists” would work as follows: if full-on Jim Crow racism were brought back tomorrow, what percentage of the US population would not object? These are the white supremacists. My suspicion is that we’d be talking about tens of millions of people, not just a few bad apples. Whether Trump is one of them, I don’t know. But I do suspect these are the people Trump is speaking to.
It did decline a lot: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/are-white-republicans-more-racist-than-white-democrats/
Why? The median population of the US is 38. That’s 1979. The means almost half the population doesn’t even have living memory of a time when MLK Jr day wasn’t a national holiday.
There are plenty of examples where a shift in opinion of the magnitude that you are considering took place far more rapidly than what would be necessary for my claim to be true. For instance, between 2001 and 2017, the share of Americans who oppose gay marriage went from 57% to 32%. At this pace, even if we assume that 40% of Americans were white supremacists in 1960, it would have reached 0% by 1987. Of course, the share of people who support white supremacy probably does not decrease linearly, but this back-of-the-envelope calculation should nevertheless make it clear that the kind of change we are talking about is not particularly surprising. Moreover, it’s very unlikely that, even in 1960, 40% of Americans were white supremacists. It would mean that not only every American in the South was a white supremacist, but also that plenty of Americans in the rest of US were, which is very implausible. Of course, if you define “white supremacy” more broadly, then it’s a different story, but see my reply to Nikolai above.
@Matthew Green Jim Crow is just segregation. It won’t harm successful groups a bit.
People such as Northeast Asians and Indians will just successfully cope and if real Nazis show up they will just pack up and evacuate.
On the other hand the unsuccessful ones have remained unsuccessful even with affirmative action.
What age is the median voter? What happens to that number after adjusting for the bias in the electoral college?
The specific question was about the population, not voters. That aside. Median voting age is 45. The numbers aren’t meaningfully different. MLK was voted as a national holiday in 83, first observed in 86. That’s 31 years ago. Your median US voter wasn’t even able to drive when MLK day was first observed.
It seems unlikely this pool of voters harbors a deep desire to go back to Jim Crow.
There is no reasonable scenario where 40% of the population is white supremacist. Whites make up 65% of the voting demographic. To get to 40% white supremacist means that almost two thirds of whites are actually white supremacists. This does not pass the smell test. Not even 2/3 of whites in the 1960s were white supremacists.
Well said Scott.
Agreed. Well done.
Seconding this.
Is there any specific behavior that would push him over the line into racist/fascist/etc territory? I would think if so, something would have qualified by now.
Somewhat related tangent: I dislike the immediate post-terror attack articles to the effect of “It was a tragedy, but we as a country need to be careful and not further disenfranchise those groups in retaliation, that’ll just make things worse etc.” These articles are well intentioned, but at the same time they’re kind of victim blamey and put more fault on the country/victims than is really appropriate (as opposed to the terrorists killing people).
I felt the same way about Trump’s “Well there were bad apples on both sides” comments. It’s literally true both sides had bad apples, but saying this immediately after the tragedy strongly implies both groups were at comparable fault, which is untrue (in this case) and rather victim blamey. Obviously that doesn’t come close to justifying the Trump Supports Nazis positions, but I still think his statements were rather misleading and worthy of criticism.
Or am I just reading way too much into these things?
but saying this immediately after the tragedy strongly implies both groups were at comparable fault, which is untrue (in this case)
Ehhh. Depends on what you mean by “at comparable fault” – at fault for what? Rioting? I’d say heck yeah, both groups were responsible/contributed. Being unpleasant people? Meh. More assholes in the antifa, by the numbers, but there were also more decent people in the anti-Nazi crowd. For killing that woman and hurting the other people? That’s the responsibility of that guy, just as the responsibility for hurting all the other people injuried that weekend is on the people who struck the blow.
Did Trump speak inelegantly in a way that could be easily misconstrued? Heck, I could have just stopped at “Did Trump speak?” and the answer would be the same.
Trump’s comment was after the car attack, I’m pretty sure he was referencing that in particular? I think? Lord only knows with Trump? But if we’re assigning any part of the car attack blame to the groups themselves, their shares should not be remotely equal.
The Right : alt-right : Nazis :: The Left : Muslims : jihadists
I question this equivalency. The “alt-right” is a fringe movement with views far outside of what is acceptable*, while Muslims are adherent to the world’s second largest religion. If you look for it closely you may find similarly unacceptable views in the Quran, or expressed by prominent Muslim leaders throughout history (which this is true for most religions), but the average Muslim is a nice person who just wants to live their life in their community and without trouble, following the customs they’re used to. The average Alt-Righter actively chooses these values explicitly, and actually swims against a strong current of social pressure while doing so.
Maybe there is some equivalency somewhere with a group who is just fed up with “PC culture” etc. (maybe “alt lite”? I really don’t know the nomenclature very well), and similar people on other political ends who hold views outside the mainstream but don’t really wish much harm on anybody.
* ETA: I have to admit though, I don’t know to what degree many / most people at the protest stand behind this, and to what degree this is a mischaracterization by someone who happens to own the domain ‘altright.com’.
I think the analogy is X:Y:Z meaning “X is criticized for supporting Y by characterizing all Y as Z”.
I’m assuming the number of Americans who accept Muslims but don’t accept Jihadists is far greater than the number of Americans who accept Alt-Righters but not (Neo-)Nazis. I expect that characterizing a Nazi as an Alt-Righter, or an Alt-Righter as a Nazi, wouldn’t make much difference to most people. Is this different outside my bubble?
Now it probably wouldn’t. A while back it could have been explained differently, but I believe that ship has sailed.
My understanding of the life cycle of the term “alt-right” is thus. In 2007 or 2008, Richard Spencer wants to rebrand White Nationalism to be a strictly pro-white interests group, and you cannot do that while shackled to the legacy of defeated anti-other groups like the KKK and Nazis. So he coins the term “alt-right.”
No one cares because identity politics weren’t as virulent at the time. Gradually the term expands to include other right wing but non-mainstream ideologies, like monarchists. I first heard the term applied to Death Eaters.
Then Trump comes around and suddenly lots of people are interested in right wing politics but still hate Jeb Bush. By the time Milo publishes his article on the alt-right it’s essentially everyone who’s opposed to the left who is not a neocon is dragged under the alt-right umbrella. Also, this is the context in which Steve Bannon said Breitbart provided a “platform for the alt-right.”
Then Trump wins and suddenly Spencer’s on TV heiling Trump and alt-right just means White Nationalists again.
And then I think in Charlottesville he destroyed any plausible deniability that WN/alt-right was just pro-white and not anti-other by not kicking out KKK and Nazis from the rally. If the entire point of your movement rebrand is to disassociate yourselves from hateful, anti-other ideologies, rule #1 should be “no klan or Nazis.”
I don’t see how the brand recovers.
I think both groups were at comparable fault though.
Of course the ultimate fault in the specific incident was the individual who caused it.
But on the question of who was responsible for creating the situation that enabled and encouraged that, then both groups are at comparable fault. The white nationalists came in there looking for trouble. The counterprotesters came in there looking for trouble. Trouble ensued.
And I think that right after the tragedy is the most salient time to bring up this issue. Because most people there are not like the murderous car driver. And the potential murderous car driver type is very unlikely to be persuaded not to do such things: he’s looking for an excuse to go off on someone. But the majority of the people invovled are collectively going to be much more ‘normal’ (I’m sure they skew pretty strongly toward the ‘looking for trouble’ types, but again it’s a question of degree) and therefore you might be able to meet them with the message of “don’t go whipping these kind of things up. It creates the perfect envoronment for actual, real, physical, lethal violence to occur. And isn’t ‘stopping the violence’ what you all supposedly want?” I think it’s the best time to try to guide things into avoiding it from happening again.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/08/15/january_daily_caller_video_demonstrates_how_to_plow_through_protesters_with.html
Admittedly, there are a lot more revenge fantasies than there are people acting on them, but this was a revenge fantasy which included encouragement to act.
The worst of it is, they are STILL having this revenge fantasy. Whenever someone plans a liberal protest online, there are always comments of “I’m going to be there with my big truck and drive through the crowd.” A guy lost his job over one of those comments the other day, and while he insists it was a joke and he wasn’t actually going to run anyone over … how is anyone supposed to tell beforehand if you meant it or not?
I wonder if the normalization in rightwing circles of “jokes” about running protesters over with cars is what encouraged the guy to try it. A lot of people also seem to think it’s legal to run people down if they’re in the road, which perhaps the killer believed.
On the other hand, I heard a lot of people “joking” about car-attacking right-leaning rallies too in college. I think it’s just people say “there are a bunch of Bad People standing in a group, I own a big heavy self-propelled object, there’s an obvious opportunity here” and it doesn’t occur to people that that’s a really fucked-up thing to joke about.
Don’t forget “The local government and police did nothing to prevent trouble (and arguably willfully abetted it)”
I would think the reasons why you shouldn’t say it officially would apply to saying it unofficially as well.
It’s unfortunate that the best science of mind people work with crazy people. This skews them. Hard bargainers and political people say wild things out of calculation, and from hard experience with what works. So do crazy people, but they don’t have as much experience with what works, and their calculations are unstable. If Trump was unstable, the hard bargainers he dealt with for a half a century in NY real estate would have exploited his instabilities and taken him for every dime. Perfectly sane poker players and dice players and hard bargainers bluff and posture and, over time, leave with the loser’s money. Crazy players lose.
Trump has some real vulnerabilities in his back trail. NY real estate is a snake pit. Casino money is mafia money. An adult opposition to Trump would do story after story on the evils of NY real estate and mafia casino dealings, mentioning Trump whenever he was involved. It’s not impossible. The real left in NY hates landlords.
I’ve seen one or two stories about Trump being an evil landlord, but buried in a sea of Cheeto hair, small hands, didn’t oppose Nazis in exactly the D party talking point way stories. If no adult opposition to Trump surfaces, I will vote for Trump again.
But if I didn’t know that, I might answer the same way as if you asked me whether there might ever be good people in Hamas, or in the Chinese Communist Party during Mao, or in the IDF, or in the Mafia.
This is a good way of putting it. Whether you’re looking at communism or white nationalism or any kind of fringe ideology, you are probably going to find some violent crazy people and also some non-violent, non-crazy, generally decent people who just believe odd things.
Though I also think in all those cases there is a certain amount of violence baked into the ideology itself. Like, it would be impossible to achieve the goals of communism or white nationalism without large quantities of state violence, no matter how much individual adherents might say they want to do it peacefully.
I’m not sure that is true of either of them, although it depends what you view as their goals. Communism can exist in the form of voluntary communes, such as the 19th century Oneida commune. Worker ownership of the means of production could be produced by workers buying, over time, a majority share in their companies.
A white ethnostate could be produced by lots of believers moving to some low population country or state and acting in ways that made it more attractive to whites than to blacks. That wouldn’t require any more state violence than presently occurs in most states, just somewhat different state violence.
Small groups can exist that follow these models peacefully, but whole societies realistically cannot.
But the failure mode of such systems is state violence. The White Nationalists say they’re not nazis because if everybody just saw things their way the races would choose to separate. Of course not everyone is going to see things their way, so some eggs may have to be broken.
Anarcho-syndalists think well naturally if you eliminate the state and just let workers act they’ll self-organize in a socialist way. Of course some people are going to not want to do that and so perhaps they need visit to gulag for re-education.
Yes, I can believe there were white nationalists at the rally who honestly believe that they can peaceful separate the races into happy homogenous societies with no concentration camps, and I can believe among the people I saw in the pictures waving the red flags, black flags, and red and black flags there are people who honestly believe they can form worker’s paradise without gulags. But I think these people are naive.
Probably one of the best things Scott has written on a value-per-word basis.
I thought about whether Trump could mean the same thing Scott wrote (there are probably good people in white supremacist groups because there are good but misguided people in all groups). He might have, we can’t read his mind, but it doesn’t fit with the context of the argument he was having with the reporters and it seems too interesting a thought for him to actually have. It’s also possible he honestly but mistakenly believed that the rally was a mainstream pro-monument rally with a few alt-righters in the midst, rather than specifically an alt-right gathering. My guess though is that he learned that some participants had MAGA hats and love him, and as the Reddit poster put it, he has a tendency to defend anyone who says good things about him and hate anyone who doesn’t. And if they like him, they can’t really be Nazis or white supremacists (a kind of narcissist reverse no true Scotsman, if they are my followers they can’t believe horrible things I don’t believe). Again, I’m guessing, but it seems in keeping with his character and his general inability to criticize odious people who claim to like him.
My worry is that it almost doesn’t matter if he is racist down deep. If he decides that Gary Cohn and John Kelly and Rex Tillerson don’t really value him but that various hard right figures do, he’ll find himself on their side defending their views. I don’t think that means death camps, but it might mean pardoning lunatic sheriffs and worse things down the road, like mass deporting undocumented immigrants or putting David Clarke-like figures in positions of real power.
So being willing to actually enforce immigration law now qualifies a sheriff as a “lunatic”.
Faking assassination plots against yourself is not a sign of sanity.
Arpaio has done some pretty weird and/or obnoxious things that would still be weird and/or obnoxious if it was some other area of law that he was famous for focusing on.
No, that’s really not the concern. Sadism, prisoner abuse, large numbers of needless deaths of people in custody, active and enthusiastic racism in policing, and getting a guy to fake an assassination attempt on you and then ruining his life – those are much bigger concerns.
Trump: It’s fine, you’re changing history, you’re changing culture, and you had people – and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats – you had a lot of bad people in the other group too.
REPORTER: I just didn’t understand what you were saying. You were saying the press has treated white nationalists unfairly?
This seems most consistent with Trump having the belief that the protest was primarily about the statue removal, and that the white supremacist segment was more of a fringe that the media focused on to make them look bigger than they are. While this is definitely something that the media does, from my understanding they weren’t doing it here. The protest was actually full of white supremacists.
My comment was about the media who wanted to interpret “there are people here besides nazis that are being treated unfairly” as “nazis are being treated unfairly.” Trying to parse context out of that discussion is doomed.
This is why I come here. Well said, sir. Well said.
I don’t think that’s a fair representation of the claim here.
Trump likes people who like him. If those people happen to be White Supremacists, then *whatever*. They are enthusiastic supporters and they are saying nice things about Trump.
Seeing this escalate all the way up to swastika-carrying Nazis was something else. I really don’t think it’s crying wolf to be alarmed that Trump cares so little about anything as long as he sees them as on his side.
He condemned the neo-nazis and the white nationalists. This does not fit in with “he will say nice things about anyone who says nice things about him.” He said there were fine people there on both sides except for the neo-nazis, the white nationalists, and the antifa types.
Begrudgingly. In the second statement. Read off of a script.
It’s clearly not very important to him to firmly disassociate himself from the white-nationalist elements. He doesn’t do it unless prompted. And then he goes back to being very vague about who exactly he is talking about.
Are you saying Trump was pressured into saying something others wanted him to say? That’s not exactly known Trump behavior.
One can choose to not believe what he said, one cannot choose to believe he never said it.
What level of dissociation would you like?
Remember, it’s very important to him and his base to condemn the left-wing violence, because that’s the violence that was directed at him and his supporters during the campaign. The same sorts of people who left their homes to confront the Unite the Right rally, with masks and improvised weapons, are the same sorts of people who beat up people at Trump rallies, stomped on cop cars, tried to take a cop’s gun and shoot Trump, or rushed Trump’s stage (and then got rewarded with a positive CNN interview).
Commies and nazis are fighting in the street. The devil on my shoulder says “MOAB” but that pesky angel says “all of this violence is bad, everyone has the right to speak, and I don’t want any of these people to have political power” which is basically what Trump said.
It is, in fact, known Trump behavior which, while infrequent, is also usually repudiated by his next extemporaneous remarks. This is a pattern.
@Conrad Honcho:
I would like the level of disassociation that comes with him sincerely placing a priority on actively preventing the appearance of association. The kind of disassociation where your first impulse isn’t to claim you do not to know who David Duke is. Something like the kind of disassociation that Trump instinctively makes immediately and forcefully every time he hears about a putative terrorist attack that may have been carried about by a jihadist Muslim.
Trump’s history on David Duke
2000: “Well, you’ve got David Duke just joined — a bigot, a racist, a problem. I mean, this is not exactly the people you want in your party.”
Trump’s not presidential as defined by what the educated class wants. Everyone understands this. However part of his appeal is that he doesn’t stick to a script 24/7. HRC et. al. are much better at this (exception deplorables). If that’s what you want.
Personally I’m rather tired of robotic polished politicians. They seem like human simulations by a mediocre coder (Gore, Romney). I don’t particularly like the Trump version of the opposite of this, but that was the only choice on Nov 8th. I’d prefer a kinder, gentler, honester version of Trump, like 99% of his supporters probably do.
Over the past few decades the media’s gotcha game has become exhausting. I don’t care what somebody said yesterday if they correct it today. I care what they really think, not that they are super good at never ever making a mistake in front of the press.
Obama: bitter clingers
HRC: deplorables
Trump: Fill in something he said yesterday
Trump loses this game by a thousand miles. It’s not the game that matters to me. Eloquence has value, but not that much in my view. Screaming “Trump is flawed” is only met with “yes we know, you’ve pointed that out”. I’d still rather have a conservative justice than robo-HRC who does global politics better.
@tscharf:
Trump in 2015 –
I mean you are making a laughable argument at this point.
If Trump was regularly making today the kind of statements he made in 2000, he wouldn’t have this particular problem.
Trump is either lying or doesn’t actually remember his prior statement from 15 years prior. This is the exact game of gotcha that is ridiculous and pointless.
What do you think Trump’s view on David Duke is?
@tscharf:
I think his view on David Duke today is about what it was in 2000, which is “How can I position myself in regards to David Duke in a way that I perceive to be advantageous.”
He doesn’t really care whether David Duke or the KKK is racist, at a moral level. He only cares how he can leverage them.
Multiply known evidence by zero and add what your ideological leanings are. That usually results in an emotionally satisfying answer.
How much do people who don’t follow David Duke know about David Duke? I don’t see anything inconsistent in what Trump said.
I understand these people to you are an outgroup. They are in direct opposition to you, you hate them and they hate you. To me, a conservative, Red Tribe, capitalist, republican, small government American, they are a far group. They’re completely irrelevant. They have no political power. They have no influence. No one references them or respects them or even notices them. Richard Spencer has never been introduced as a “friend of the show” on Hannity. Ann Coulter does not cite the “scholarly research of Dr. David Duke.” The only time I’ve ever seen her mention him is to wonder if he exists in cryo-freeze to be thawed out by CNN every time they need to associate conservatives with a boogey-man.
We simply don’t care about these people. How much hatred do you want us to muster for irrelevant morons? On the other hand, the left-wing rioters are actively beating up or trying to murder the people I support politically and culturally (Trump, Trump rally goers, police, Republican congressmen). And those people are not at all ignored by left-leaning media, but given cover as “peaceful protestors.”
Yes, I disavow the far group. I do not agree with their politics, but I don’t really need to engage with them otherwise because they’re thankfully irrelevant. Now the other people, though, they seem to want to enslave me to the state, or perhaps beat or kill me for my resistance to being enslaved to the state. How much emotion can you summon to distance yourself from Antifa, and from the people who showed up to riot at Trump’s rallies in Chicago, San Jose, etc? If you don’t produce enough invective, and disavow them loudly and frequently enough (basically every time I demand you do) that means I get to accuse you of being a Stalin-loving Bolshevik who wants to murder me and my entire family in a gulag and all politicians and political causes you support are tainted by association.
I think you have the wrong model of the relationship of folks in the black block to folks with true levers of power on the left.
This is useful reading also:
http://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org/
@Ilya Shpitser
My model is that the black block folks are the useful idiots of the self-interested generally leftist political elite. For instance, the Chicago
riotspeaceful protests were organized in part by MoveOn.org, which is funded by people like George Soros, who also fund the DNC and funded Hillary Clinton’s campaign.Essentially it’s the elite paying to incite and organize the lumpenproletariat against the working and middle class. No, the government can’t beat dissenters in the street and stifle free speech, but the business interests that fund the politicians can pay people to incite the desperate to do it for them.
Accurate or no?
@Conrad Honcho
I think you are both getting the class element wrong. I would wager that the average antifa is more likely to have a university degree than the median American. I also think that the right-wing notion that there’s this “incitement” by George Soros or whoever that’s a necessary condition is completely wrong. When you look at the modern antifa movement, it started off as leftist punks using their fists to drive nazi punks out of the punk scene, and since then has become people who use their fists to deny a platform to/just plain mess with the far right (for varying definitions of “far right”). If there’s some shadowy Uncle Moneybags somewhere funding this, he’s an idiot wasting his money, because people were willing to do it for free anyway.
@Conrad Honcho:
C’mon. He knew exactly who Duke was in 2000. Knew he was a member of the KKK.
He also had been reminded of this fact multiple times already in 2015 when he gave that quote. The “I don’t know who Duke is” holds no water at all.
So, he didn’t want to come out and say what he said in 2000. David Duke is a bigot, a racist and a problem and he doesn’t want him in his party.
“Essentially it’s the elite paying to incite and organize the lumpenproletariat against the working and middle class.”
This is definitely not right. If by the “lumpenproletariat” you mean the classical Marxist sense of the word, then folks running around in black masks are definitely not it. Marx _defined_ the lumpenproletariat as the permanently politically passive part of the proletariat. Regardless of what your feelings about the black mask folks, they are certainly the opposite of politically passive.
—
(This is a joke.) You know what you sound like? You sound like the Illinois Nazis from the Blues Brothers: “The Jew is using The Black as muscle against you. And you are left there helpless. Well, what are you going to do about it, Whitey? Just sit there? Of course not! You are going to join with us. The members of the American Socialist White Peoples’ Party. An organization of decent, law abiding white folk. Just like you!”
—
Like most people, I don’t run in their circles, but my guess is most black mask folks are fairly privileged white kids from liberal parts of the country.
—
From the point of view of the elites on the left, folks who engage in violence are an enormous problem because all they do is feed the alt-right, while accomplishing precisely zero useful things for them. Nobody is funding them.
—
In general, I see a lot of insanity from the right, re: Soros and funding. Things like “oh these signs are manufactured, therefore these protests are paid.” It’s like these guys haven’t done their basic reconnaissance of the enemy and gone to a leftist protest even a single time.
—
You should read my securedemocracy.org link sometime.
Less comparing me to neo-nazis, comedic or otherwise, please.
I’m talking about class not race. Yes, I can agree people who identify as Antifa, specifically, are liberal college students who wanna be hardcore. But that is a subset of all the people who show up to these events. At the San Jose rally the people waving Mexican flags and jumping on cop cars do not seem like white liberal college kids. Same with the BLM rioters. They seem like Marx’s description of the lumpenproletariate:
They may have been no use to Marx, but Marx didn’t have the mass media and leftist organization that exists today. Consider the guy from the Project Veritas video bragging about how he pays mentally ill people to disrupt Republican events.
Somebody’s paying for those signs. Somebody’s paying for the websites listed on the signs. Somebody’s paying for the organization that maintains those things. Somebody’s paying to keep records of the people interested in showing up to these events. Somebody’s paying them to get the word out where and when a protest is going out. Somebody’s paying to make sure people are there to hand out the signs.
I’m not saying the protestors themselves are paid, I’m saying the protests are paid for. That is, they are organized and arranged by organizations which have paid staff. They do not spontaneously generate. The people doing the generating are receiving paychecks, even if the bodies they’re turning out in the street are not. If you removed the money from the organizations doing the organizing, the protests/riots would not exist. So what is gained for the people writing the checks?
When someone points this out, suggesting they’re a crazy neo-nazi conspiracy theorist seems like a form of gaslighting.
As for your link, I looked at it. I agree propaganda exists, but I’m slightly more concerned by the massive corporate and corporate-left propaganda machines run out of CNN, NY Times, WaPo, etc, than some retweets from RT.
Even granting that this is true, it does not mean that “the bodies they’re turning out in the street” don’t have legitimate feelings and concerns. Which is why most people who talk about paid protests do claim that those people are being paid, because their explicit goal is to suggest that nobody (or not enough people to matter, and certainly not enough people to fill the streets) actually holds those views.
Also, you’re talking about the money in the abstract, without making any differentiation between the often explicit claim that it’s being driven by rich activists vs grassroots donations. You talk about what the money’s spent on because there is no evidence for the right-wing claims about where the money comes from.
This is not in any way a legitimate steelman of the standard “paid protestors” claim.
There’s probably a mix of people in Antifa just like any of these extreme groups. The recent swelling of their ranks is probably a bunch of bored liberal college students who want something to yell about and don’t want to miss out on the revolution (whatever that is). If it comes down to actual dangerous violence my guess is this group will decline to be members anymore and go back to class. The hardcore members who jump on cop cars and attack people with knives are less likely college students, some mix of common criminals looking for a good time and hard core devotees.
Their media apologists have turned on them since the latest Berkeley beat down. The media find it very hard to support a group actively and violently opposed to free speech, they do have priorities. It is kind of humorous that the violence for the alt-right is pure evil, while violence on the alt-left is just bad tactics.
The new chancellor at UC Berkeley is showing some spine (good for her) and is committed to allowing conservative speakers. They be using fightin’ words.
Alternately the mayor of Berkeley seems to think Free Speech Week should be cancelled because he is afraid Antifa will be violent. Heckler’s veto. A conservative is scheduled in a couple weeks, that should be interesting.
@Conrad Honcho
To what degree is money and a logistics system required for people to put on bandannas and hoodies and punch people in MAGA hats?
“Less comparing me to neo-nazis, comedic or otherwise, please”
Less repeating of things that sound like ancient Neo-Nazi memes, please?
—
My advice is go undercover to a single leftist protest. Just one. I promise nobody is going to brain wash you. You might then know what you are talking about.
@Ilya Shpitser
Do you want to call George and say we need the good signs because we’ve got a guest, or should I?
Pretty sure my appearance screams “narc.”
Anyway, if you’re not going to
apologize forabstain from comparing me to neo-nazis for noticing that organized protests are organized by organizations that have budgets for organizing then there’s no point in continuing.You literally said the elites use the lumpenproletariat against the middle class.
This is (a) not true, (b) an ancient neo-nazi meme, so ancient that the blues brothers, a silly non-political musical picked up on it, (c) wouldn’t even be a useful thing for the elites on the left, assuming maximal evil on their part.
You are just not reading the situation correctly, but then it’s not really to my advantage to educate you.
@Conrad
I’m paying for them. I send twenty bucks a month on auto-withdraw to a group called Missouri Jobs with Justice. They’re one of the organizers of the “Fight for 15” campaign. I’ve shown up to one of the rallies as well. Maybe two. I have a shirt somewhere.
You’re correct. The signs cost money and they have paid staff (I think the shirt was a fundraiser.) But the money doesn’t come from some nefarious foreign billionaire. It comes from me and people like me.
What am I getting for my money? Hopefully a better country. That’s what I’m hoping for anyway.
I confess I don’t expect much. The labor movement has been dying for decades. But I mourn its passing, and I think the country will be much worse off for it. This small thing is what I try to do to help. It’s not much, but it’s what I can do right now. (In my defense, my wife is much more involved in this sort of thing. Probably my biggest contribution is watching the kids while she goes out and does stuff.)
“You literally said the elites use the lumpenproletariat against the middle class.”
I’ve seen something of the sort in Disney movies, if you’ll grant that lower class criminals count as lumpenproletariat.
The only one that comes to mind is 101 Dalmations, but I think there was at least one more.
@Nancy Lebovitz
Well, there’s the Lion King, where scar uses the hyenas against the rest of the pride.
“I’ve seen something of the sort in Disney movies, if you’ll grant that lower class criminals count as lumpenproletariat.”
Quite. I think if your theory about the outgroup elite has them behaving as a cartoonish villain in a Disney film (literally!) probably your analysis could use some honing.
@Conrad Honcho
*ahem*
So where exactly does that leave the notion that a significant portion of their funding comes from mysterious “elites”?
And, regardless of where the money comes from, the core narrative being pushed by right-wing commentators is “You aren’t advancing your own interests, you’re being used for their interests” – sometimes with various numbers of brackets implied or explicitly written around the word ‘their’. That’s incredibly offensive and it’s important to be careful about repeating or justifying those claims with no evidence.
Ilya Shpitser, I find it more interesting that Disney was using a neo-Nazi meme, though admittedly in toned down form– just one wicked elite person rather than a society-wide conspiracy.
There is probably a name for this blind spot: folks consistently underestimate grassroots support in the outgroup. This is common on the left also with e.g. the NRA being postulated as an evil brainwashing org., whereas in reality there’s just a lot of support for gun rights in more rural areas.
It seems like you’re moving the goalposts a bit, honestly. The claim you argued against back in “Crying Wolf” wasn’t that Donald Trump was a Nazi, it’s that he was more friendly to white supremacists than previous Republican presidents or candidates.
As it happens, we have some evidence here! Since Charlottesville, every living Republican president before Trump, and most of the living candidates, issued statements specifically as a reaction against Trump’s. In very strange ways that former presidents and candidates do not normally do, almost as if they saw something really weird going on that required abnormal action.
“Trump is in the KKK’s corner because he’s a narcissist and they say nice things about him” isn’t a refutation – it’s what the left pretty much believes too.
Thank you for the post and the extended comment. May it encourage more of us to make an attempt to be reasonable about these issues.
I’d like to make a minor point about the extended comment. As far as I can gather, Hamas is being used as an example of a group that it is widely considered condemnable but in which open-minded people might find decent members. I don’t know much about Hamas, and I presume the same is true for most of the readers here. What one passively absorbs from mass media in a single country does not count as knowledge, though perhaps some average of what you absorb in a variety of countries and languages is enlightening. So it is hard to know if Hamas is being given a fair characterization without doing a lot of research. Moreover, Hamas should be almost irrelevant to a discussion of American politics. In general, it seems better to choose examples from a more distant but somehow more relevant history with which the readers are expected to be familiar. Since the American Civil War is apparently still controversial, maybe the American Revolution would serve better.
+ Preemptive: I’m not trying to start a conversation about Hamas. This seems neither the time nor the place. I am simply suggesting that Hamas as an example is a distraction.
Scott, I think you’re making some sort of projection bias here. If you said that, I’d assume you were being honest and trying to accurately represent your beliefs, because you have a long history of attempting to be honest, charitable in your representations of others, and both accurate and precise in your manner of thinking about others.
On the other hand, Donald Trump has never demonstrated any ability to express nuanced thoughts or beliefs whatsoever. Things, people, and groups are GOOD, or they are BAD. I don’t really believe he thought carefully about those claims at all.
But he said the Mexicans were bringing drugs, crime, rape, and some, he assumes, were good people. Isn’t that nuanced, and true? What I got from the media instead was “Trump says all Mexicans are rapists.”
Same thing with Hillary’s campaign commercial about how Trump called “women” “fat pigs,” when no, he called Rosie O’Donnell a fat pig. I think it’s Trump’s critics who can’t tell the difference between Rosie O’Donnell and all women, when Trump has no trouble telling the difference between Rosie O’Donnell and other women, and is even observant enough to classify women into “fat pig” and “not fat pig” categories.
The phrase “some, I assume” does a fair amount to dissuade one from thinking this was a nuanced take. Especially with the rhetorical tactic of placing special emphasis on “I assume.”
@Conrad Honcho:
Are you seriously trying to claim that “some, I assume, are good people” is nuanced? Where I come from, we normally call that “transparently covering your ass”. If I were to say that Trump is an incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue with some (I assume) good traits, would you give me credit for thoughtful nuance?
(Also: nobody ever claimed that Trump called all women fat pigs. They claimed that he is the sort of person who calls women fat pigs, which is indisputably true. If you don’t have a problem with that, it’s on you.)
Edit to add: as a first stab at drawing a principled distinction between nuance and ass-covering, I would say that you don’t get credit for nuance unless your admission that the issue is complicated has an actual impact on your conclusion.
What would you have said in his place?
Let’s assume the steelman version of what he meant to say is that there’s a selection effect: that people who immigrate from Mexico are those of the lowest economic status rather than an equal cross section of all Mexicans, and furthermore that people who illegally immigrate disproportionately include people who are willing to break other laws, who cannot enter the country legally because of criminal records, etc.
How would you get that point across in a political speech that can’t be misquoted and misinterpreted?
@random832:
Well, first off, by not making a speech that clearly implied that the “good people” were a tiny minority whose existence could not be known but could only be theoretically assumed.
That steelman is transparently not what Trump was saying: for one thing, the speech in question never even gestures at a distinction between legal and illegal immigration.
If he were actually trying to make that point, he could have taken some time to talk about the good hard-working, law-abiding immigrants who followed the rules and waited their turn, and how they are making America stronger, as a contrast with the horrible evil no-good very bad illegals. (Of course, he still probably would have been called out, because his entire premise — that illegal immigrants have a tendency to commit crimes beyond the obvious one — is false, but I find it hard to extend much sympathy.)
My take on this (at a time when I had zero intention of voting for Trump) is that he wanted tougher illegal monitoring to screen out criminals and there are US citizens who are victimized by some illegals and these victims count too, in fact US citizens count much more. He is unwilling to help illegal Mexicans at the expense of US citizens.
NOTE: I’m not agreeing with any of this, it is just what I thought he was saying.
I still see more nuance on Trump’s side than the opposition. Trump repeatedly says there are many great immigrants, who come legally, who are wonderful workers, he’s been friends with or employed many Latinos and Hispanics, etc etc, but that there are also bad hombres who have to go back. That is nuance.
The opposition does not seem to want to acknowledge the existence of bad hombres, nor even the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants, to the point of making up euphemisms like “undocumented Americans” and “dreamers.”
I do not buy “my side is nuanced and your side is not.”
Under Obama, DHS had a specific focus on deporting criminals:
The Obama administration also focused on formal removals over returns. Removals leave a lasting legal record and make recidivism much harder.
Or see this, from the same link:
That is exactly the sort of policy that you would design if you were interested in protecting the American people from “bad hombres”. Instead of trying to rack up higher numbers by deporting kids who moved to America when they were six, the Obama administration focused on a) getting harsh on actual criminals, and b) recent arrivals. (If you want to reduce illegal immigration, the latter makes a lot of sense: your goal is to dissuade people from trying in the first place. The more you focus on recent arrivals, the less enticing it looks for people who are thinking about giving it a shot.)
So, “my” side is pretty clearly okay with targeting the bad guys. It is also, however, able to tell the difference between a bad hombre and a childhood arrival who grew up American. What is the benefit of deporting the latter? Since your side is no less nuanced, I’m sure you will be able to find plenty of examples of people honestly grappling with that issue. (Sneering at “dreamers” as a euphemism is not a good start.)
Cynically, I suspect many right-wingers do not consider these people’s upbringing to be sufficiently “American” for this description to apply.
I think that not acknowledging bad hombres is more of a media indictment?
This is a selection bias in the media where they will flood the zone with anecdotal police shootings but totally ignore crimes by illegal immigrants. It’s a preferred narrative bias.
Trump would highlight these crimes but the media wouldn’t touch them in their coverage. I follow the NYT and they covered this exactly once in over a year to my knowledge.
Shockingly, the NYT also refuses to cover the heinous crimes of cardiologists.
Studies consistently show that illegal immigrants (and, indeed, immigrants in general) commit crimes* at lower rates than native-born Americans. So why should the NYT highlight murders by immigrants? Why not schoolteachers, or plumbers, or Jews?
* Other than the obvious one, of course.
The simplistic logic here is sound. If we didn’t let any illegal immigrants in then we wouldn’t have any illegal immigrants committing crime. The children of Trump’s props would be alive.
It’s the same mentality with Muslim terrorists.
The debate over whether it’s a net plus or a moral obligation can continue from there. My understanding is crime is a wash and the first generation is an economic negative.
I don’t really have strong feeling on this subject, but the media pushes a narrative that illegal immigrant are nothing but a positive, their overselling of this is obvious. I think CNN’s coverage of stronger immigrant laws was 30:1 negative while the nation is 50/50. Tell the whole truth. They do commit crime, they do suppress wages in some areas, they do tax the safety net. They also add value in lots of ways. It’s a trade off.
The NYT times would cover it for the same reason it covers victims of anecdotal cop shootings. It’s a controversial election issue and people care. Stories like this aren’t helpful to the cause.
And if we didn’t have any plumbers, we would have no plumbers committing crimes.
Four in ten Americans believe that God created humans in their present form within the past 10,000 years. Should CNN’s coverage of evolution be balanced accordingly?
Empirically, wage suppression is not really a thing. (More here, on the lack of a wage suppression effect following the Mariel boatlift in Miami.)
Moreover, illegal immigrants are prohibited from accessing most of the social safety net, even thought they contribute in a variety of ways: for example, this government report estimates that unauthorized immigrants contributed net $12B to the cash flow of Social Security. Do you have any sources showing that illegal immigrants are a net drain, or are you just repeating talking points?
In regards to wage suppression, the Vox article is interesting and warrants further attention but Time appears to be playing the old use national averages to erase local variation card.
@hlynkacg:
Fair enough. But do you know of any empirical studies that don’t fall into that trap, and actually find an effect? This is not my area of expertise, but I just spent some time searching and found nothing of interest.
@Iain,
I’m not going to play dueling articles with you. Activists and advocates say the exact opposite of each other. You are proving my point, the media representation is clearly biased. There are other sides of the argument, good luck finding that at Vox. When we educate illegal immigrants, when they use our emergency rooms, when they use our roads, etc. etc. etc. it costs real money. Border patrol costs money. Deporting people costs money. Until such a time as they pay enough taxes to cover these costs they are a net negative. If you want to let high skilled immigrants in then that’s another conversation.
Roads are mostly paid for by gasoline taxes, which immigrants who drive pay.
Border patrol and deporting people are costs of immigration restrictions, not costs of illegal immigration.
If this is really your argument, have you looked at the per capita cost of emergency rooms, the cost of border patrol and deporting people? Compared it to an estimate of what illegal aliens pay in sales taxes, social security taxes for benefits they can’t get, and the like? Given the resources of the internet, it shouldn’t be that hard to figure out whether you have a plausible case or not.
I provided links. Is The Economist, Wikipedia, a professor of economics from Harvard not a good enough “resource of the internet” or shall I go to Vox and Time? The problem you get here is that diametrically opposed viewpoints are almost impossible to sort out on this subject. The experts don’t agree, it’s complicated, and the media is one sided.
I made no assertions they pay nothing. Is your view they are a net plus and it’s not controversial in economics?
Is it reasonable to just compute this in tax money without including the large amount of work that illegal immigrants do?
Different people make different assumptions, which is why anybody can find the answer they like. Illegals pay sales tax, property taxes one way or the other, gas taxes, car registration fees, employment taxes when they work on the books, add value for their employer, etc. They spend money they make in the local economy, they have children who are just as likely to become upstanding citizens, and they might actually be “fine people”, ha ha.
If 100M immigrants came in and paid employment taxes our social security deficits are solved for the time being.
It’s become too polarized and I don’t know any info I can really trust here.
My guess is most people’s opinion probably doesn’t hinge on the cost/benefit ratio anyway. It’s morally based.
Commenting for the first time because I’m honestly baffled by this, in a way that I almost never am from your writing.
Hamas is a murderous, genocidal organization. If a President said “There are some good people in Hamas,” and didn’t follow it up with something like “…who have ignorantly associated with a monstrous group,” I would be justifiably outraged, as would most other people. What would be the purpose of saying that without the necessary context (that those “good people” should get the hell out)? It would basically be a moral hand-out to Hamas.
I seriously have no idea what you’re getting at here:
Is the Mafia a “political line”? Should the President say that there are good people in the CCP, and just leave it at that? Forget the President – I would seriously be weirded out by any person who said “Hamas has some good people” without condemning Hamas in the same sentence. Especially if Hamas was part of a “both sides” with good people, implying moral equivalence. People don’t just say things for no reason – especially not the President. Statements indicate values, and a powerful person’s statement can influence values.
Again – what? I was raised in Fairfax County (64% for Hillary). I went to school in Falls Church (75% for Hillary). In none of these “blue” areas did I feel that “all decent enlightened people have to admit that Hamas has some good-but-misled people in it.” Where are you getting this idea from? Do you really think Obama could say the slightest positive thing about Hamas, or antifa, or Communism, and not cause a massive controversy? You note that he was criticized for not condemning terrorists hard enough. But at least he never said anything actively positive about them!
(Also, Trump has lived most of his life in NYC – 80% for Hillary. He’s deeper in “blue tribe” territory than I am!)
Ironically, you seem to be saying that I ought to be way more outraged about Trump’s statement than I am (I’ve barely paid attention to it). Because if a President said “Hamas and IDF both have good people,” or “The Chinese Communist Party and anti-CCP protesters both have good people” – without condemning the former – I’d be livid.
@Scott:
Yeah, but I heard Trump once had someone sign a consent form in pencil.
Definitely a Nazi. Checkmate.
It doesn’t. Trump is not a racist, he’s a power-focused and hungry person who believes in playing groups against each other for the benefit of himself and his immediate family/friends, and he doesn’t care about the externalities.
You know, I used to think that, but then why do his family and friends get so little benefit? Which of them benefitted from his Charlottesville remarks? My guess is he’s just dumb and narcissistic – see the “this analysis” link in the main post above.
The puzzle with your interpretation of Trump is that he won two contests we all expected him to lose, first the nomination and then the election. It’s possible that he was just lucky and won them in spite of acting on a pattern that made him less likely to win. But I think you have to give significant weight to the alternative hypothesis–that he is a competent demagogue, and most of the things he does that look stupid are tactics with a reasonable chance of getting him political gains.
Further evidence is that he has engaged in extensive and potentially risky business activities over a long period of time and still has money. It isn’t clear whether he was a successful businessman but he wasn’t a catastrophically unsuccessful one, which is what one would expect on your reading of him, here and in the link in the main post.
David, whatever algorithm Trump is running doesn’t seem to translate into any legislative wins given full control of the government.
Who says Trump has full control over the government?
I think he’s (trained and deliberately) good at getting media attention, and (coincidentally, his natural style just perfectly matches this) good at resonating with people who are angry at the current system.
Other than that I don’t think he has many special talents beyond the average businessman, and neither of those two talents seems good at governing or navigating crises.
I think the only thing anyone needed to win the last election would be to respond to utterances like “basket of deplorables” and “America needs a new people” with “no, America has a fine people, it’s the jerks in Washington who wants you all gone that is the problem”
Did Trump do this well? no. Would a dead badger still have won if you could make it appear to say the same? probably yes.
And his approval ratings are abysmal. If he loses reelection, then I think we can say he isn’t a competent demagogue.
Then why didn’t the RNC pick anyone but him? They had a choice of plenty of competent politicians if just anyone could have won.
The unlikely part was winning the nomination, not the general.
The party Trump ran with controls Congress, recently nominated a conservative Supreme Court judge, and will likely nominate more.
This is literally the best case scenario one can hope for in the current US system of government.
—
Much time and much noise has passed since January. What has Trump to show for it?
The RNC picked Jeb Bush. Unlike the DNC, they couldn’t make their choice stick once the voters got involved – and for better or for worse, both parties have committed to allowing the voters to pick their nominees.
@Brad
If winning the election was unlikely, why was Hillary largely predicted to win? Before the election, Nate Silver was getting flak for giving Trump what people saw as “too high” a chance of winning, and he still had Trump at an under 50% chance.
@dndnrsn:
The proper way to consider this problem is to first think about the prior. Who was favored l, given all one knew is that the candidates were R and D?
Considered this way, the Republican had the advantage. Hillary was favored to win largely because she was up against Trump, not because of the fundamentals.
We can debate the details of the exact probabilities at each point, though in some sense that’s not even well defined, but at the end of the day the general election was one Republican and one Democrat. And the President for the prior eight years had been a Democrat. Whoever the Republican nominee was bound to get a great many votes. Maybe not win, but at least be competitive.
The primaries were a different story. There the default was flaming out and ending up a footnote to the race — like Scott Walker, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Carly Fiorina, or Chris Christie.
I’m not saying the general was a slam dunk, but in June 2015 when I Trump announced I think everyone would have put a higher probability on winning the general conditioned on winning the nomination than on winning the nomination in the first place.
Putting money on Trump would have given something like a 3 or 4 to 1 return. What % of people now saying Trump was the more likely winner than Clinton put money on Trump? Even if I didn’t have money on Trump (nor did I have money on Clinton – I figured Clinton was the likely winner, but I only like betting on things I think are 90+% due to loss aversion). In retrospect, I can come up with all sorts of reasons why Trump should have been the favourite, but hindsight is 20/20. Going into it, I figured Nate Silver’s “most likely outcome is narrow Clinton victory” was correct.
I couldn’t agree more. But this is entirely compatible with him being (perhaps somewhat accidentally) good at resonating with in particular people who are angry at / hate racial minorities. This is troubling. And I believe that is a steelmanned version of a lot of the anti-Trump outrage coming from the SJ left.
With the benefit of hindsight, i still believe this to be correct. We didn’t get the most likely outcome, it happens.
@Ilya Shpitser
Outgroup homogeneity bias. There is a difference between Trump Republicans and McCain/McConnell/Ryan Republicans. The next step will be primary battles in midterm elections as Trump voters attempt to oust neocon establishment Republicans and replace them with populist/Trump Republicans.
“Outgroup homogeneity bias.”
I am not saying Republicans aren’t diverse. I am saying full Republican control of government leads to the easiest job a president will ever have in our political system. Trump is supposedly a “master persuader” being given an easy (or at least easiest possible) pitch by circumstances.
Regular old Joes (past presidents) who weren’t master persuaders were able to get stuff done in more difficult political climates. Why can’t Trump? I thought he was a master?
Because persuading masses and dealing with entrenched political interests are two different skill sets? The next persuasion will be, as I said, persuading the masses that the agenda they voted for (his) is not being implemented because some sitting Republicans are not on board with it (despite their campaign rhetoric to the contrary).
I don’t think it will be difficult to persuade the masses of this, as it’s obviously true.
When Jesus argued with the Pharisees, he wasn’t trying to change their minds. The Pharisees knew they were lying. Jesus’ rhetoric was designed to expose the Pharisees’ duplicity to the crowds.
“Because persuading masses and dealing with entrenched political interests are two different skill sets?”
Hey now, the claim being thrown around isn’t that Trump is “a master persuader of the masses.” The claim being thrown around is he’s a “master persuader” end of sentence.
These are different skill sets in persuasion (e.g. getting the world to do what you want), indeed, but persuasion is something Trump is apparently a master of. It wouldn’t be too much to ask of a master of the craft to be good at persuasion in general, right?
If it would, one might be cornered into thinking Trump was a run-of-the-mill demagogue. “The masses” are indeed easy to persuade for a demagogue.
I think that’s basically a “freedom fighter versus terrorist” distinction. Obama was a “gifted orator” but Trump is a “demagogue.”
I think when Scott Adams was talking about “master persuader” stuff he was talking about the masses, not hardened and motivated political foes. You cannot “persuade” John McCain or Chuck Schumer. You can make a deal with them, or you can replace them.
I think you’re weak-manning Adam’s “master persuader” argument by claiming he meant that to include motivated political enemies rather than voters. Do you have a link to an Adam’s blog post where he stated he thought Trump could persuade political enemies to join him?
Adams is a cynical demagogue himself. He’s not speaking clearly, he’s using loaded positive valence words like “master persuader” as a kind of lexical token in an effort to elicit a certain reaction.
It’s a rhetorical trick, and because he is resorting to tricks rather than trying to speak clearly and in good faith, I am going to punish him via running the conventional definition of the word “master” (master of the craft), and how it doesn’t mesh with what Trump actually is.
—
Demagogue definition on google first link:
“a political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational argument.”
You can’t have it both ways. If Obama is a swamp creature he’s not a populist.
—
Since Trump can’t fly, don’t call him Superman. Since Trump can’t convince Congress out of a wet paper bag in the easiest political environment in a long time, don’t call him a master persuader.
Btw, not to put too fine a point on it, but the GOP controlled Congress shouldn’t by any reasonable measure be “motivated political enemies” of Trump’s. If they are, that’s sort of on Trump, isn’t it.
Democrats certainly hate Trump, but who cares about Democrats? Democrats don’t have majorities right now.
He did get elected President of the United States, there is that.
Master Persuader: “I am president and you are not.” Very persuasive. No wonder he couldn’t get Congress to fall in line.
Trump won’t be bullied by SJWs, that’s for sure.
He will not allow himself to be seen being bullied by SJWs.
You answered your own question below:
He can’t see beyond his worldview, and has done his best to set his children up within his current power edifice. Unfortunately for him, the US Executive branch isn’t that amenable to nepotism. On the backside, whatever ‘true believers’ he can cater to today will end up buying tons of stuff from the business empires his children will inherit tomorrow.
Trump is definitely a narcissist. So much so that his first instinct is to defend anyone he believes is on his side. And to the extent he absorbed any of Bannon’s lessons on political strategy it was the right play. Keep the focus on Identity Politics because Democrats will gladly paint themselves into a corner of appearing to only care about 30% of the country. Which is crucial since the other aspects of Bannon’s agenda that might actually help his base (raising taxes on the rich and redoing trade deals so that they help Joe 6 pack instead of Joe CEO) are anathema to most of the GOP and are non starters. The only other thing he might make progress on that his base will love is immigration, of course since immigrants are more of a scapegoat than an actual reason his base has seen no gains in 30 years, that will only get him so far.
That no gains in 30 years is the real reason Trump won and why there has been an uptick in racism. Ever since Reagan and Thatcher revived the economics that created The Great Depression there has been no gains made by anyone that has to work for a living and inequality has skyrocketed. When that inevitably exploded in 2008 Obama’s response was to evict main street and bail out Wall Street (a decision that Republicans could only dream of enacting without backlash, kinda like NAFTA or Welfare Reform). Which leaves us where we are now. A country that has more people killing themselves with opiates every year than had soldiers die in Vietnam and Iraq combined because they see no way of improving their life while both parties argue over who can fellate the billionaire class the best.
Oh, and why does the ‘left’ call everyone a racist / sexist? Because there is no solution to that, which makes it safe to talk about without pissing off any billionaire donors. Make no mistake, being on the left is no defence against being labeled a racist or sexist. This is one of my favorite articles because it called out those nominally ‘left’ people who are all too ready to call people a racist…. He killed himself earlier this year. Exiting the Vampire’s Castle.
has there been an uptick? because i’m not seeing it.
Reagan and Thatcher brought back high tariffs, price controls and the gold standard?
Except that it seems to be alienating a lot of people, and costing the left elections, so it’s not that safe. If safe to the donors is all that matters, why not talk about something that doesn’t alienate the majority of the country
Or, to be correct, the economics that would’ve probably stopped the Great Depression in its tracks if only Hoover had followed them.
(Paging David Friedman…)
Yes. Take your pick.
No, they brought back the Gilded Age with their insistence on Laissez Faire fundamentalism.
Good point. They don’t care about winning elections.
@userfriendlyyy
Ah, yes, the SPLC. They’re totally a reliable source. tell me, how many of those hate crimes turned out to be hoaxes?
In the US, taxes in the 1920s were less than 5% of GDP. After years of rooseveltian largess, they soared to 7.5%. Under reagan, they were never less than 17%, and on average, were exactly the same as they had been from 1950 to 1980. So please, what was it you were saying again about laissez faire fundamentalism?
It must be a fascinating world you live in, where elected politicians don’t care about winning elections.
> Ever since Reagan and Thatcher revived the economics that created The Great Depression there has been no gains made by anyone that has to work for a living and inequality has skyrocketed.
As others have said, you really don’t understand the Depression at all. Trump is bringing back the economics that caused it, arguably(high tariffs), but Reagan and Thatcher really didn’t.
The one point that hasn’t been brought up yet is that the lack of gains in median income is mostly an American phenomenon, and it’s mostly a statistical artifact based on the US healthcare system – in other countries, the middle class has done pretty well. In the US, they have as well if you look at total compensation instead of total wages. Problem is, all the extra compensation has gone into health insurance, not into cash money. So when an insurance package costs an extra $10k/year for the average worker, and average compensation growth is 20% = $10k/yr, they see nothing extra in their pay. Conversely, a hypothetical lawyer making $250k who sees the same wage growth will have the same $10k hit from healthcare, but it’ll be out of a $50k compensation bump, so they’ll be $40k better off in wages. Both have done equally well on growth rate of compensation, but wage inequality has grown.
Wait, since when is lack of median gains only an American phenomenon? The erosion of the middle class, both in gains and size, seems like a pretty prevalent phenomenon in Europe too.
I like this analysis of Trump. It explains him and the historic Marcus Crassus:
http://theenneagraminbusiness.com/politics/donald-trump-and-the-enneagram-what-makes-the-donald-run/
the theory that Donald Trump’s life is dedicated to proving that Donald Trump is not a loser has a great deal of predictive power.
Cassander: The word people use as a go-to insult is often the one they fear most. For a lot of us here it’s some variant of “idiot”. For Trump, it’s “loser”.
+1
That’s the uncharitable take. My more charitable take is that Trump wants immortality. What he wants is his face on Mt. Rushmore, and you only get that if you Make America Great Again and everybody loves you for it.
I dunno, most of the Trump supporters I know LOVE what he said. Because they have been seeing everything in terms of a conflict between left and right, and if the Nazis are standing in for the “right” in this one,* then obviously all the problems were the left’s fault and FINALLY we have a guy who is properly blaming the left for everything.
*I think this is where they went wrong, but I understand that it looked in many ways like a standard left vs. right protest — they’ve still got Baltimore and Berkley on the brain; if BLM and antifa are on one side, well then the other side must be “the right” and “the good guys.”
Thus, despite how outraged it made the Blue Tribe (perhaps *because* of how outraged it made the Blue Tribe) I doubt it actually harmed his standing with his supporters. They just want to stick a finger in the eye of the left (and, to a lesser degree, the GOP establishment) and his statements absolutely did that, so they loved it.
While we’re on the subject why haven’t left-wing politicians condemned the alt-left? Does that make them communists and opponents of free speech?
Quit trying to make fetch happen.
Of course it is because of how outraged it made the Blue Tribe. I think there is very little evidence that Trump supporters are racists. But it is definitely true that “racism” is the thing that Blues are most outraged about, and a love of outraging the Blues is really the only attribute that is pretty universal amongst Trump supporters.
It is probably true that a large majority of explicit racists and white supremacists support Trump, but I think this is because those supremacists are influenced by the media as everyone else, so they think that they finally have one of their own in the White House. Whereas in reality Trump doesn’t even think enough about ideology to be a racist. He’ll follow anyone’s ideas that will get him ahead. In today’s world, expressing explicit racist ideas will not get him ahead, so he doesn’t do it.
I use the phrase “explicit racist” to be those that consciously know that they believe one race is better than another, and will act on those beliefs. I think there is maybe 1-5% of the US population that are explicit racists, so no where near enough to elect anyone. I have no citation for this, just gut feel.
Implicit racists are those who believe subconsciously that one race is better than another, but in most cases won’t even admit it to themselves. I think this is a much larger group, but much harder to gauge — maybe 10-50%? And I also think the Left has as many implicit racists as the Right. I think much of the Left’s clamor to provide more opportunities for Blacks is because they don’t believe they have the smarts or the inner fortitude to do it on their own. Well, even I believe that Blacks on average have lower smarts than Whites, because that’s what statistics tell us, but I admit that I believe it. And I don’t think it makes Whites better people.
The version I read of his remarks, it seemed like he had the mistaken impression that the pro-statue side was bigger/broader than it actually was – maybe he heard the name “Unite the Right” and thought it was actually accurate? So he seemed to me to be thinking it was more like the crowd at a typical Trump rally, just with a higher percentage of baddies making the rest look bad. If that was his thinking, it’s obviously totally wrong, but not racist.
That sounds rather plausible to me in that, for the first day or so after the riot, I thought the exact same thing.
Yes, that’s the most plausible explanation I can see. The pro-statue side in general definitely doesn’t contain many baddies, it just happens that this rally here did. Trump not checking the details and making a statement based on a reasonable but incorrect assumption wouldn’t exactly be out of character.
Pax Dickinson was there, and while he might not be a really fine person he’s at least not a neo-Nazi or a white supremacist, to my knowledge. I expect other non-neo-Nazi non-WS groups were there; it is no surprise they were not reported on. On the counter-protestor side, you had the usual zoo of protest groups, most of which were not Antifa. So I’d say for a very low bar of “fine” (meaning not actual neo-Nazis, white supremacists, or Antifa), there were fine people on both sides. I don’t accept guilt-by-association claims because _everyone_ in the culture war is associated with unsavory people; if you hold the non-Nazis to be Nazi-equivalent for being there with the Nazis, then you must hold the women’s rights marchers (one of the zoo) to be Antifa-equivalent.
The press clearly wanted to force Trump to agree that the Unite the Right marchers were solely responsible for everything which happened in Charlottesville because they were Bad People (and therefore justifying the violence of the counterprotesters), and Trump was having none of it. That has seriously made me consider voting for him for re-election.
I’m done defending Pax Dickinson (I’m not sure I ever did, but before this I probably would have if asked).
I realize this might seem to conflict with what I said about Trump above, but the key thing about Trump is he’s never openly supported these people, and he’s always eventually condemned them (even if half-heartedly) when asked. Actually showing up to their rallies seems like a whole different level. The prior against anyone being a white nationalist is super-low, but not so low that when somebody says “Hey, which way is the white nationalist rally where they’re protesting in favor of white nationalism?” you can just ignore it because of the low priors.
Actually, I’ll amend that. If Pax says so, I’m happy to believe that he’s not a white nationalist in some principled believing-in-white-nationalism way. But he clearly believes in something that gets furthered by attending a rally put on by David Duke and Richard Spencer, and I’m not sure what that could possibly be that isn’t indefensible.
But he clearly believes in something that gets furthered by attending a rally put on by David Duke and Richard Spencer, and I’m not sure what that could possibly be that isn’t indefensible.
I dunno Pax from Adam, and what I know of Duke and Spencer is that they’re bigoted people with notions that I don’t agree with who are afraid of demons that I can’t see, and who want a vision for the country that I don’t hold with.
But at this point, I’m really tempted to show up to a rally to link arms and march – firstly on the grounds that ALL AMERICANS HAVE THE RIGHT OF FREE SPEECH AND PEACEFUL ASSEMBLY and secondly just to piss off the sort of rabid antifa and SJWs who already hate me *and* are trying to burn the Constitution to the ground.
You might not find either of those defensible, but hey. It’s a free country, and I’m not gonna tell you what to say.
Keranih, I feel pretty safe in a country where only 500 people show up to a well-publicized rally where they shout “Jews will not replace us”. I would feel a little less safe if there were 5,000 and still less so at 50,000. Not because the march itself hurts me, but it’s a barometer for what proportion of the population secretly wants me expelled or in an oven. I support these guys’ right to march, but adding to their numbers for idiosyncratic reasons is misguided and helps scare people who are neither SJWs nor antifa.
On the other hand, when a group with a whole lot of support in the media and Internet starts calling anyone who supports immigration limits a Nazi with one hand, and violently fighting Nazis with the other… I’m really sorry for you, Ivan, because I totally sympathize with your fears. But there’s a large part of me that starts looking around for barometers of what proportion of the population wants me silenced and punched.
Fair enough Evan, but do you think that going to a pro-ogre rally with a bunch of ogres will help make people realize you are not an ogre? There are a huge number of people who oppose both immigration and white supremacy (judging from the fact that Trump won the election while Spencer can’t draw a significant crowd). Why associate your cause with a tiny, insanely unpopular group?
Ivan, if you and I support their right to march, and then when they do march, and are beaten bloody – not for anything they’ve done, just for speaking – and you and I sigh, and say, isn’t that a shame…
…well, free speech is that much less free, and the people with bloody clubs are going to start asking each other, so, who else is oppressing by speaking?
If it comes to that fight, I’d rather be already warmed up. And I don’t want them to refrain from beating me up because I’ve convinced them of my non-orgeness, but because nobody is an orge, you freaking morons.
i believe when he was asked a question similar to “are you a white supremacist” he pretty much said “no, I want to throw out of helicopters more than just minorities”
so just ultra far-right sounds like the right label. I think identity politics really gets in the way of describing this; he wants to murder a lot of people to advance his political agenda, but probably only because of their politics and not their race. Do whatever you want with that.
So, if I’m getting this right, you won’t defend people who were at the rally (Pax Dickinson), but you will defend people who defend people at the rally (Donald Trump).
Have I got that right?
It’s actually not a bad place to draw the line. Going too far into the “You must condemn all who do not condemn those who do not condemn”-land is like one of those really bad breakups between old friends, where everyone has to take a side, and social contact between old friends is seen as treachery.
+1 to Alsadius. This is how we avoid war-of-all-against-all.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/42/tolerate_tolerance/
Rather than start a new thread about the “fine people” comment, I’ll just pivot off Nybbler’s, because I think it’s partially right.
There were many groups who showed up for Unite the Right. One of the groups to show up were the Oath Keepers, a militia that’s made up of ex-law enforcement and ex-military, and who have been around since the Tea Party, and the “fake birth certificate” days of the Obama administration. They’re right-wing, but not even remotely white nationalist or neo-nazi (there was an an incident that enraged the alt-right at a statue protest in Houston, because the Oath Keepers, including Latino Oath Keepers, kicked an alt-righter out of the protest). It’s been surreal to see this memory-holed by almost all media and commentary, but based on everything I know about Trump, he was most likely talking about these ex-law enforcement, ex-military guys that he saw on Fox News when he made his “fine people” remark, not the people walking around with literal Nazi flags.
Be against groups like the Oath Keepers all you want. Ex-cops and military carrying around rifles, and ominously articulating since 2008 that they swore an oath to the Constitution, not the POTUS, is somewhat unnerving (though should be perfectly legal!). But you are strawmanning Trump’s comments when he says there were “many fine people” there, and you immediately find the worst of the worst and assume he was defending literal Nazis, as opposed to the groups that he was probably vaguely familiar with, the ones who have been featured on cable news for years.
TIL the Oath Keepers were only founded in 2009.
For what it’s worth, though, I was a teenager at the time, and my parents were good friends with someone involved in the John Birch Society. So, I can say with confidence that the tradition the Oath Keepers draw from was already live and active long before then, opposing President Bush’s alleged plans to overthrow the Constitution and surrender our sovereignty to an oligarchic one-world government.
Were you confusing the Oath Keepers with the Promise Keepers?
If that’s true, Trump really really should have clarified that at some point following the first tweet. He doesn’t even need to be deferential, he could be like “I said ‘some’ fine people, like the patriotic Oathkeepers blah blah blah. OBVIOUSLY the Nazis weren’t included in that ‘some’, good god these liberals are so thirsty for scandal am I right?”.
That’s what you, or I, or anyone in this thread would have done, sure. But we’re not Trump.
And you could argue that it’s strategically unsound and rhetorically negligent. But he’s gotten pretty far doing things that I think are strategically unsound and rhetorically negligent (not even getting into the ethics of it). In his universe this might seem so obvious that it doesn’t even require a clarification.
He DID.
I rather doubt his expressing support explicitly for the Oathkeepers (if that’s indeed who he meant) would have played well at all.
@The Nybbler
Ah so he did. Apologies, I stopped following closely after the first 24 hours for sanity reasons and this was three days later. Though he still should have clarified a wee bit more promptly (was there not a press conference before Tuesday?), but that’s more of a strategic/political concern.
One thing that struck me is that I am unable to find any references in the mainstream media to antifa violence at Charlottesville until after Trump’s statement. The only references within those two days seem to be from very right-leaning sources and a couple of blogs and people posting on Medium and Reason and so on.
The references that come after Trump’s statement are mostly obfuscatory and dismissive in nature, but before then antifa violence was simply memory-holed; the presented picture was that of a crowd of peaceful counter-protesters suddenly assailed by Nazi ram-raiders. While Trump may not have been right about the “fine people on both sides” part, he was certainly right that there was significant violence employed by both sides, and for recognising that at least he deserves more credit than the mainstream media.
—Washington Post, August 12, 2017
Appreciated.
It’s worth noting I’m in the UK; the only footage shown here was of ominous tiki-torch wielding body armoured Nazis looming over poor helpless minorities.
Also from August 12, here is an editorial on fair.org complaining about all of the media outlets that talked about violence on both sides:
http://fair.org/home/for-media-driving-into-a-crowd-of-protesters-is-a-clash/
Lots of news articles cited within.
So basically your argument comes down to anyone who attends a rally that someone brings a swastika to can’t possibly be a “fine person”, but going to a rally with communist flags is perfectly reasonable?
No.
In that case let’s hear it, because that’s what all the arguments I’ve heard boil down to.
The Unite The Right rally’s organisers publicised David Duke’s endorsement of them.
So? Alt-leftists are perfectly willing to publicize endorsements by open communists, and no one seems to care.
The counterprotest wasn’t organised by “alt-leftists”. Additionally, the open communists you talk about are almost certainly more links removed from murderers than David Duke.
But our supporters of a vicious totalitarian movement with a history of killing millions are slightly better than your supporters of vicious totalitarianism!
@CatCube
Your comment is bad and irrelevant to my main point, and I now think less of you because of it.
What does “more links removed from” mean here?
Bernie Sanders had a deal with Hugo Chavez to get discounted oil for people in Vermont. Is that a link? If you are willing to count Hugo Chavez as a murderer, does that mean that anyone who campaigned for Sanders is two links from a murderer?
If you try to quibble about how there might be fewer links with murderous ideology represented by a hammer and sickle, I’ll take this as a point of pride.
So Vasily Blokhin was sent to Poland in 1940. He carried a suitcase full of pistols with him, because he had so many murders to perform he expected to wear them out. If you carry a hammer and sickle around, you own this.
This is no different from the fact that if you carry a swastika around, you own this. You don’t get to talk about how you don’t really stand for murdering the Jews, you just want some other nationalist-type stuff; you know Goddamn well what the symbol you carry around means.
If somebody is carrying around a hammer and sickle flag, they’re a monster. Are they as much monsters as the dudes marching around in Charlottesville with swastikas? I’ll grant that they aren’t if it makes you happy. But they’re evil enough. “Nazi” vs. “Communist” isn’t even like “Do you want to be stabbed to death with an 8-inch knife or beaten to death with a 2-inch diameter pipe?” It’s more like, “Do you want to be beaten to death with a Schedule 40 or Schedule 80 2-inch diameter pipe?”
I do not subscribe to the nonsense that plenty of alt-righters are trying to push of “no enemies to the right.” I have plenty of enemies to my right, where if they were to “win” I would consider it an unmitigated loss. But I am getting really, really, fucking tired of people marching around with communist symbols, and a whole mess of people will just ruffle their hair and say, “Ah, look at you, you lil’ scamp!”
@David Friedman
As a member of the Klu Klux Klan in 1967, it seems likely that David Duke had friends, or friends of friends, or maybe friends of friends of friends who bombed black churches, murdered civil rights activists etc. I don’t believe that many of the people who wave hammer and sickle flags at present day rallies have equivalent connections to any of Stalin’s goons.
@CatCube
Symbols mean what people think they mean. Does waving a crucifix mean you endorse Roman torture-executions? More pertinently, does waving the Confederate flag mean you own slavery? Since you want to argue by naming individual atrocities, does waving the American flag mean you own My Lai?
No, they would be connected to the Weathermen or SDS or perhaps the RAM or BPP instead. You are deliberately choosing a proximate (in time and space) group for David Duke and a less proximate one for today’s Communist sympathizers despite the fact that there were actually plenty of marginal and nominally Communist organizations around in 1967.
Certainly possible.
“In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, at a gathering in the Hyde Park home of former Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.”
@David – also worth reading:
http://reason.com/blog/2014/04/14/jay-carney-communist-propaganda-connoiss
@bbartlog, @DavidFriedman
Firstly, I said “murderers”, not “terrorists”. Some ex-Weathermen took part in an armed robbery that killed 3 people, but apart from that I don’t think they actually managed any murders. They aren’t comparable to the KKK on that basis. Secondly, we aren’t comparing David Duke to Bill Ayers or even Alice Palmer/Barack Obama. We are comparing David Duke, who led the KKK, with random people waving hammer and sickle flags at protests, who might not even have been alive when the Weathermen were active, and even if they were probably had no connection with them and certainly didn’t lead them.
I think a good way to frame the factual dispute is this: was the average M number of the protesters or counter-protesters lower? Where a person’s M number is defined similarly to Erdős substituting any murderer for Erdős and friendship for co-authorship.
I suspect it was the protesters, but then that’s a convenient suspicion for me.
@rlms:
You object to people attending an event endorsed by Duke because he once had friends some of whom had probably committed murder. I’m not sure the “probably” is fair–most KKK members didn’t commit murders, although some did.
Obama prominently participated in an event hosted by people who certainly had friends who had committed murders. Do you reach a similarly negative conclusion about him?
No.
@rlms:
Why not?
Your view is that someone attending a rally endorsed by someone who may have had friends who were right wing murderers fifty years ago demonstrates by doing so that he is a bad person (lots of potential subtlety omitted). I point out that Obama was a prominent part of an event hosted by two people who certainly had friends who were left wing murderers much less than fifty years before the event.
You decline to draw a similar conclusion.
I think intellectually, Trump’s statement is almost certainly true, assuming that you don’t think that merely disagreeing with the movement to destroy statues disqualifies someone from being a fine person. This is particularly true if Trump meant both sides to include everyone in the country who is for or against statue destruction, but it’s probably also true if he just meant people at the rally.
It seems like there’s a general dynamic that if you hold a lefty rally and, say, some communist revolutionary groups or eliminate Israel by force group show up or a bunch of people advertise for days that they’re coming specifically to beat up right wingers, then it’s still important to point out that those radical elements don’t represent the vast majority of marchers, but if you hold a rally and one guy shows up with a swastika, then everybody at the rally is a Nazi unless they either beat up that guy or immediately leave. (Or sometimes even if they do).
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-berkeley-protests-20170827-story.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/portland-train-stabbing-suspect-jeremy-christian-free-speech-organizer-joey-gibson/
This might be more persuasive if the rally in question hasn’t been arranged by white supremacists for the specific purpose of uniting various right wing factions with neo-Nazis and the KKK.
This wasn’t some normal, perfectly upstanding hey-we-like-the-Confederacy-but-we’re-totally-not-racist-guys-we-swear rally. This was a neo-Nazi/alt-right mixer.
I think that’s probably fair. The rally organizers certainly don’t seem to have done anything to try to prevent the KKK and Nazis from joining in, so IMHO it’s fair to lump them together barring some clear evidence to the contrary.
If so, I guess the best you can say for Trump’s position is that at best, it’s the mirror of the normal protest where some bad people show up and are permitted to stay; it’s a protest by bad people where at most some normal people showed up to protest the statute removal.
I am sympathetic to Scott’s point upthread, though. If you told me that there were some fine people in a protest in support of Hezbollah or Sendero Luminoso, I’d buy it. I’d wonder how many and how clueless, but so be it.
“The rally organizers certainly don’t seem to have done anything to try to prevent the KKK and Nazis from joining in”
Not only that, but if you look at the rally twitter account you can see they positively welcomed it. Nevertheless, while I don’t think Trump’s comment is defensible, I don’t think it indicates support for Nazis either. The most plausible explanation (supported by his comments that he wasn’t saying Nazis and the KKK were fine people, but rather the alleged other people at rally) is that he wrongly, but reasonably, assumed the rally was representative of all the people who opposed the statue removal and therefore didn’t contain many Nazis (unobjectionable people with emotional attachment to Confederate icons heavily outnumber white supremacists).
Doesn’t that basically kill the entire point of Spencer’s rebrand of White Nationalism as “alt-right?” I thought the entire point was to disassociate pro-white advocacy from anti-other (KKK, Nazi) advocacy. Nobody pays any attention to him or the alt-right for about a decade, he finally gets some media attention, and first big rally (and for a cause that’s object-level popular…the vast majority of Americans do not want Confederate statues taken down) and he teams up with KKK and Nazis.
Does this not kill the alt-right as a brand distinct from KKK and Nazis?
@Conrad
Yes, it kind of does, and I’m honestly surprised that the organizers didn’t institute a “no swastikas” rule.
I’m also astonished that the alt-right race whiners don’t try to push some kind of “we’re for white equality, not white supremacy”* line, then list some of the privileges they think minorities have that they don’t, rather than going full throttle about white genocide. Maybe they’re worried that if they were reasonable, noone would come at all.
* PS: I’m not for that, I’m just surprised that the alt-right aren’t.
Maybe they made a bet (which they lost) that nobody would be dumb enough to bring them and that they didn’t want the optics on having to say it explicitly since they (wrongly) thought it wouldn’t be a problem.
@random832:
That’s like inviting staunch leftist/communists and expecting them to leave the Che Guevara shirts at home.
If you think the people who frequent The Daily Stormer are going to leave the Nazi imagery behind without a coordinated push to prevent them from bringing it…
@This wasn’t some normal, perfectly upstanding we like the Confederacy but we’re totally not racist-
Heinlein said KKK stuff was often funded by D and Communist stuff was often funded by R. I don’t think antifa is funded by R, though I’d look twice at any mysterious black bloc stuff that provokes a perfectly timed police response with every police reporter chanting exactly the same take on the story. Unite the Right was founded by two guys who were D party workers until less than six months ago. It’s declared purpose is to tell everyone the right and neo-Nazi’s are united. D party media has exactly the same take on the story- ‘Trump doesn’t denounce Nazis’.
It’s still a step up from D party hacks inciting the murder of R party hacks like it’s a D party hack’s job. Or D party sending guys with clubs to beat R party convention attendees. Or maintaining a semi-legal helot class of tens of millions to lower American wages.
“Heinlein said KKK stuff was often funded by D and Communist stuff was often funded by R.”
Where did he say that?
Hmm. Thought Expanded Universe, skimmed it, did not find it. Take Back Your Government? Grumbles From the Grave? Tramp Royal? Or I missed it, or I’m wrong.
Wrongly invoking the name of the mighty dead. Not wrong to think Neo Nazi, Klan, Communist, Antifa are at the opposite pole from a transparent political marketplace in the Lady’s Home Journal, and open to cash from mainstream politicos making their mainstream enemies look bad.
Another perspective: Trump’s claim was probably true. But “some (literal, 1930s) Nazis are fine people” is also probably true.
This fellow is one hell of a dude.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe
Thank you for sharing that link.
Obviously Trump meant the Nazi’s and KKK are fine people, because that is how one reasonably gains more support as a President. Especially right after one of their members runs overs a bunch of people and kills one of them. That’s the most reasonable way to interpret that comment.
Some crazy people think he might have been referring to the debate over statues, but given Trump’s prior eloquence and very carefully spoken lawyerly demeanor pretty much rules that out. I can’t recall Trump ever commenting on something before he fully understood the facts.
Unfortunately he wasn’t given a chance to clarify what he meant or we would be able to better settle this dispute. If he had been given this opportunity then the naysayers wouldn’t be able to claim he really meant Nazi’s are fine people because his words would directly refute this.
“Unfortunately he wasn’t given a chance to clarify what he meant or we would be able to better settle this dispute.”
Wasn’t given a chance? He can tweet anything he wants to say.
I’m pretty sure that’s sarcasm; Trump did indeed clarify what he said. When he said it, no less. The Narrative is far more important than the actual words spoken, however.
“Racism is evil and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans,”
“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence. It has no place in America and as I have said many times before, no matter the color of our skin, we all live under the same laws, we all salute the same great flag, we are all made by the same almighty God,”
How far does the crying wolf (about Trump and his supporters’ alleged racism) go? Is it possible that Trump, and economic nationalism, could be less racist than previous GOP presidents and their platforms?
According to a common narrative, Nixon and Republicans since won the votes of Southern segregationists and used their support to push a pro-business agenda that didn’t benefit these voters. If economic nationalism actually helps a lot of the “Angry White Men” who elected Trump, Trump doesn’t need to rely on racism to hold their support.
This narrative is demonstrably false. As I have discussed before, the south didn’t go republican in the 70s. The southern congressional delegation was almost entirely democratic until the 90s. While it’s true that republican presidents won in the south in this period, that’s because they won everywhere, winning an average of more than 40 states per election from 68 to 88. Despite this, the share of southerners voting for republican presidents was consistently lower than of the rest of the country.
As for economic issues, if you are a white guy with no college degree, what economic benefits do the democrats offer you? Not the subsidies to higher education, you didn’t go, and if you do try, you or your kids will be actively discriminated against in applying. Not the means tested welfare state, you, as a rule, make too much money to qualify for most of it, and if you don’t you probably will soon. Not regulation, you’re far more likely than any other demographic to work in the sort of brown industries the democrats openly brag about trying to regulate out of existence. Even if you don’t work in those industries, you probably know people who do. The democrats do want to tax you to pay for those things though, and to lecture you about how privileged you are, when not calling you a bunch of racist hicks.
White men without a college degree are, far and way, the most republican demographic in the country. That doesn’t happen because of trickery, it’s because the democrats offer this group almost nothing besides condescension.
You clearly know more than I do about southern electoral politics, so maybe I used a bad example. I am thinking specifically of the Lee Atwater tape, where he says that “cutting taxes” in 1980 had the same political meaning that the n-word did in 1954 to some voters. And Reagan’s tax cuts did not benefit white men without college degrees as much as they benefited higher earners.
The interesting thing to me is that Trump/Bannon economic nationalism seems to offer more to these non-college-educated white men than the economic policies of GWB and Paul Ryan, or anything else coming out of the establishment GOP, let alone the Democrats.
I replied more generally further down, but this:
Is specific and not quite right. In 1979, the top 1/5 made 45% of income and paid 55% of taxes. Today they make 50% of income and pay 69% of taxes. So taxes haven’t gotten less progressive, but a little more. As for the total amount of taxes, tax revenues averaged a little under 18% of GDP from 1950 to 80. From 81-2011, they averaged…..just a little under 18% of GDP.
the actual effect of the reagan “tax cuts” are exaggerated by almost everyone. They shaved a maximum of about 1% off the total tax bill, and at least that much was added back by bush II and clinton. They did not make the code radically less progressive, but were fairly neutral in that regard, because while they lowered rates they also eliminated deductions, and deductions disproportionately benefit those paying higher rates.
We’ve been through this before Cassander.
The degree to which a tax system is progressive is the degree to which higher earners pay higher average rates.
In the presence of changes in the distribution of income, average rates do not necessarily track the percentage of income paid by the top x% of the population. You are wilfully using a metric which doesn’t measure the thing you say you are measuring.
pdbarnsley,
Obviously if a group is paying a higher share of taxes than its share of the income, it MUST be paying a higher average rate than the rest of the population.
I’m interested in reading more about this. Can you point to places where you discussed this more at length and/or to articles which defend that view? I’ve always been suspicious of this narrative, because I also noticed that the shift of the South toward the GOP occurred pretty late, but I’d like to read more.
For what it’s worth, I largely agree with the rest of what you say, but that’s another topic.
A quick look through Wikipedia articles on the elections says that of the 11 ex-Confederate states in 6 elections(so 66 total decisions), Republicans won 49, Democrats 12, and George Wallace(a former Democrat running as a third party anti-civil-rights candidate) 5. That’s 74% to Republicans. Of the 300 total state decisions in those same 6 elections, Republicans won 241, or 80%. Now, a fair bit of that is probably regionalism – Carter won his native Georgia in 1980 despite getting thumped nationally, for example, and he did run up the score down south in 1976 in part for the same reason.
Congressional data is harder to pull good stats from, but for example, this is what Texas looked like in the 70s – almost solid blue. It doesn’t turn majority-red until the 2004 election, despite having a Texan Republican in the White House at the time, and a House that had been majority-red for a decade.
Isn’t that exactly what you would expect from executing a successful regional political strategy?
soru, I’m not following your argument here – can you elaborate?
The Republican position of ‘you are not racist, you simply have a preference for lower taxes’ is obviously vastly more attractive to its target audience than the alternatives. But most people don’t change their vote per-election, they pick it once in a lifetime and stick with it. The few exceptions cause most of the uncertainty in elections, and so get all the attention.
But to take a state from being definitely blue into the zone of uncertainty and then beyond it to definitely red, you can’t just run a charismatic, competent and scandal-free candidate. You need to capture new core voters who will reliably turn out for every subsequent election, because they agree with your parties fundamental principles. And then you still need to wait for the opposing base to die off. This takes generational timescales, so a change made in the 60s will bear fruit in the 90s at the earliest.
@1soru1
This is a plausible argument for some sort of southern strategy, but not “the southern strategy.” “The southern strategy” is defined as winning over those old voters with coded racist rhetoric in the 70s, not adopting new arguments that appealed to a new generation of southern voters that arose in the 90s. It also doesn’t explain why. if this rhetoric was tailored for southerners, it was even more efficacious in the non-southern parts of the country, and led to the largest string of presidential electoral victories in history. If the rhetoric works everywhere, how can you call it a southern strategy?
‘you are not racist, you simply have a preference for lower taxes’ has two constituencies:
1. those who take it as coded racist rhetoric
2. those who are not racist and want lower taxes.
Group 2 can be larger than group 1 without group 1 being insignificant.
It’s worth noting that the US has the lowest overall taxes of any rich democracy. So politically, the case against taxation has been more politically successful than elsewhere. You’d expect any argument over taxes to settle at an equilibrium where equal numbers would be hurt as helped by a change in either direction, and that that point would be the same for similar economies. A deviation from that requires an explanation.
The Southern Strategy is one such; I have not not heard of a better alternative.
@1soru1 says:
By this logic, “There should be affirmative action for african americans” has 2 constituencies, those who take it as coded racist rhetoric, and those that are not racist and want to help a historically disadvantaged community.
Group 2 can be larger than group 1 without group 1 being insignificant, do you claim that racism is a significant motivator of support for AA?
when you take into account tax expenditures, which the US relies on far more heavily than any other rich democracy, and state and local spending, the US is on the low end, but not the lowest. Ireland, switzerland, and japan are all lower, in addition to some smaller countries.
Well, there isn’t really much of a deviation, but even if there were, this argument only holds if you assume people everywhere are identical, with no variance in culture, political tradition, political structure, or personality that might lead to different outcomes.
A tradition of limited government and the culture that goes with it. A constitution that establishes a complicated system of checks and balances that makes sweeping legislation more difficult than in other countries. Lower social trust brought about by a very large and culturally diverse country.
There are 3 better alternatives. And I know they’re better because, unlike the largely mythical southern strategy, they aren’t largely mythical.
Yes, this is broadly accurate. After all, the Democrats are an electorally-competitive party.
Per wikipedia, Ireland has 30% of GDP as taxes, Switzerland 29%, Japan 28%, the US 26%, so I don’t know what set of figures you are using.
You could also note that within the lower tax, the US has a higher percentage of GDP spent on defence than any other democracy. Which is compatible with the theory that the anti-tax argument becomes politically weaker when applied in a situation where it cannot be supported by racial resentment.
Lower efficiency leading to lower costs is hardly conventional economics.
How is that not simply restating the essence of the southern strategy using slightly different language?
It seems to me that you are using the fact that you believe a thing as evidence of the fact that it is true. That seems unwise.
@1soru1 says:
I staretd from there, then added in this. But I grant you, I was looking at spending, not taxation, on the theory that the bills eventually have to be paid.
it’s also compatible with the theory that aliens drip chemicals that cause anti-tax feelings into the American water supply in order to keep our government cash strapped and thus unable to fund a space program capable of returning to the moon.
no, but it’s very basic political science.
I wasn’t speaking specifically of racial diversity, just the sheer size and heterogeneity of the US. But frankly, you can leave the heterogeneity out of the question entirely. Sheer size matters, government spending is negtively correlated with country size, and the US is far larger than any other developed democracy.
It isn’t inconsistent with conventional economics.
Lower efficiency means that the cost of government services is higher. When the price of something goes up, people consume less of it. If demand is elastic, as it could be, quantity goes down by more than price goes up, so total expenditure, which in this context is total cost of government, goes down.
All of that is complicated by the fact that we aren’t talking about consumption decisions by an individual but the outcome of the political market.
The link to OECD report covers not expenditure but ‘tax expenditure’, i.e.
And it doesn’t even mention Ireland or Switzerland. So its not exactly obvious how you can get from that to your conclusion.
You mean like ‘sorry officer, I have considered your offer of arrest, but having looked at the figures, I am afraid I am going to have to take my custom elsewhere’?
In any case, the existence of unresolved efficiency issues suggests that the pure low tax lobby lacks the political support to resolve them. And one explanation for that, when it has been so successful elsewhere, is that it when it tries to do so, it misses the support of the racial animus faction.
@1soru1 says:
Again, this is true only in the sense that the theory of the aliens poisoning the water is true.
I mean like “It would be nice to have a well functioning and not too expensive government health care system like the British do [I don’t know if this is true, but obviously many people believe it is], but if we had government health care it would be an expensive mess so lets keep it private.”
One day, the two thoughts ‘electing politicians like Trump’ and ‘expensive mess’ will interact, and american politics will be something other than what it is.
That day may not be this day. It may well not be this decade. But only the Doom of all Nations could delay the time of its arrival.
@1soru1 says:
yes, if only we could elect smart technocrats like barack obama who pass masterfully crafted legislation like the affordable care act.
I think the first half is more effectively accomplished by mentally redefining anything you do receive as “not welfare”, but it’s the back half that’s key – “one day, I’ll be well off too, so why would I want to hurt my future self?”. Which requires a certain amount of ignorance about recent growth in median wages.
Being more likely than other demographics to work in a coal mine would explain higher relative support, but not really higher absolute levels of support. That would require that these groups are more likely to work in brown industries than other industries, not more likely than other people. That’s only true for a super narrow definition of “these groups”.
You’ve also tried “they know people in these industries” in the past, and that’s true, but they likely know a lot of people, including some people on food stamps. It doesn’t really explain why “coal miner” is such a political touchstone – I think it’s symbolic rather than materialistic, which I guess is a metonym for the whole argument about whether Trump supporters neglect their material interests.
I don’t follow that. Even if median wages are holding constant, most people have increasing income over their employed lifetime.
That’s a fair point David, but Cassander’s narrative requires those expected wage gains to be sufficient to permanently move most/all current welfare recipients out of the income bands in which they qualify.
I think that expectation is common and wrong, but I can’t say I’ve crunched the numbers.
As a side note: even an accurate belief that “I oppose the welfare I currently receive because I may someday have to pay for it when I don’t receive it” is not particularly rational. You rationally pay for a lot of stuff you expect not to need for large chunks of your life.
Saying “even the ones who receive welfare will one day not need welfare, therefore why should they value welfare?” is, I think, factually wrong, but either way it’s not a good way to think about the value of welfare to its recipients.
it isn’t. I showed you the median wage figures below. I will grant you that I don’t have figures broken down by age, race and education level (any two of those is easy to find, but I’ve not found all three), but some back of the envelope math will show that the vast majority of whites in the lower income quintiles are either young or temporarily unemployed, not slaving away at minimum wage their whole lives.
It isn’t, but “I oppose a welfare state that will cost me more than it is ever likely to benefit me” certainly is, and that is the calculation they are making and their math isn’t wrong.
In order for it to determine the material choice between Democratic and Republican policies, this needs to show both that the voter will get limited lifetime benefits from the additional welfare associated with Democratic policies (ideally broadly defined to include all public goods) and that they will end up paying increased tax (again, broadly defined FWIW) under Democratic rather than Republican policies.
Modelling lifetime welfare receipt is tricky. As you note, there will be some people who move in and/or out of the relevant income brackets, so lifetime will certainly be greater than mean annual.
Modelling the difference in taxation is pretty easy – we can see exactly how much less tax each demographic in, say, Kansas can expect to pay following Brownback’s cuts, or how much they can expect to gain from extending the Obama tax cuts (side note: Holy shit, Kansas’ pre and post Brownback tax regime is barely progressive at all, the top marginal rate kicks in at $30k for a single filer – so just about everyone saves something I guess).
I’m going to suggest that the set of people who can reliably expect to make up in tax cuts what they lose in welfare cuts under republican policies (state and federal) is a lot smaller than the number voting for republicans.
Just because Paul is opposed to taking resources from Peter to give to Paul doesn’t mean Paul is some kind of idiot. He could have an actual principle. Just like if Peter thinks his taxes should go up to help Paul, it doesn’t make Peter a moron.
@ Cassander,
I feel obligated to point out that Clegg was explicitly reffering to “the common narrative” not objective fact. Clegg’s description of the narrative is accurate regardless of whether the narrative itself is true.
@clegg
Lee Atwater, in his famous tape, is extremely misquoted. what he actually says after the famous quote is this this:
Now, you can say that he’s full of shit, or you can take him at his word. What you (the royal you, I mean, not accusing you of doing this Clegg) can’t do is say that he’s obviously telling the truth in paragraph before this one, and openly lying in this one.
throughout the period in question, republican support in the south builds slowly. throughout the same period, the salience of racial issues declines in the south. This makes it very hard to make a case that the republicans have gotten ahead by exploiting racial issues. If anything, the evidence runs the other way, that republicans only succeeded as race became less important.
@Philippe Lemoine
there was an extensive thread about it several months ago, with the voting data from wikipedia. As I recall, the share of the southern presidential vote that was republican (southern defined as the confederate states+west virginia and kentucky) was lower than the rest of the country in 68, 76, 80, and 84. in 88 it was tied, and in 92 and 96, southern voters were both more republican and more democratic, because of the 10 states ross perot did worst in, all 10 were southern. Note, it’s important to compare the southern totals not to the national total, but to the totals of the non southern states, other wise you artificially lower the average of the other states. If a candidate gets 45% in every southern state and 50% in every other state, republicans did 5% worse in the south, but only 3% worse than the national average, and this small difference was enough to dramatically alter the picture for closer elections.
@pdbarnlsey says:
Quite the opposite. the average person sees very strong growth in his wages as he ages. Most americans will spend time in the top 20% of income, and an even higher share of white people. Income is strongly correlated with age for obvious reasons. even if you’re right that median incomes are stagnating (and I think that can be disputed) that doesn’t meant that everyone in the country is making the same amount they were 20 years ago.
I do not believe that is mathematically correct. If you work in fossil fuels, you’re overwhelmingly more likely to vote republican, let’s say 90% compared to 50/50 for every other industry.. if group A is 20% fossil fuel workers, it will vote 58% republican, compared to 54% if only 10%.
Well I didn’t try to explain that, but the issue can be both material and symbolic. miners famously live in mining towns, where the industry sustains not just those working in it, but indirectly everyone else. that makes the material issue important even to those whose job isn’t coal miner.
That said, I think the better example is the keystone pipeline. that was a project that rather visibly through thousands of construction workers under a bus driven by the environmental lobby. Whatever the merits of the particular pipeline, it made it absolutely clear where democratic priorities lay, and it wasn’t with the blue collar welders.
@cassander
Thank you for the additional information on Atwater, Reagan, etc.
I am really interested in the question of how much a Republican platform of economic nationalism relies on racism, especially compared to a Republican platform of small government (or whatever you want to call the platform of Reagan/Bush/Ryan/etc). If you don’t think the small government platform relies on racism at all, that is fine, but then you are probably not interested in the particular question that interests me.
I think either platform relies on racism a hell of a lot less than a democratic platform that involves explicit handouts to favored racial groups.
@Clegg
You might be interested in Powerlineblog’s discussion of some more context and quotes from the Atwater interview.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/06/what-did-lee-atwater-really-say.php
Powerline is definitely writing from a right wing POV, so the best thing to do would be to listen to the whole interview to check them, but if their excerpts are accurate, Atwater gave a much more interesting interview than I think most people give him credit for.
If Powerline’s quotes are representative, Atwater wasn’t saying that “cut taxes” was a dog whistle to hint to racists that Reagan was on their side, he was saying that racism didn’t play in the South any more, so that Reagan was able to win on economics and defense.
Atwater conceded that (a) racism did play in the 60s and 70s, especially bussing and the voting rights act; (b) that economics had some racial impact, in that cutting welfare and taxes hurt blacks on average more than whites and helped less; and (c) that there were certainly some racist people in the south, but if you read the quotes together, he’s saying that people aren’t voting for the Reagan tax cuts because they don’t like black people, they’re voting for the Reagan tax cuts because they want to pay less taxes.
Now let’s try to find a definition of “Trump Supporters” which is 20% fossil fuel workers. Or even “brown industries” generally.
Thanks for this. Do you by any chance have a link to that extensive thread about the Southern Strategy from a few months ago? And again do you, or anybody else, know of a good article that makes the case for your position?
For a second opinion, see my responses to Cassander elsewhere, as I think some of his claims are not well-supported. In particular, this claim that started the thread off:
I think is mostly wrong; Nixon dominated the south in ’72, and Reagan won southern whites who are of course the relevant group more strongly than he won any other region in 1980.
Also, as a counterargument to the claim that Nixon won the south by appealing to segregationists, it really needs to do more to reckon with the fact that explicit segregationist third parties won the south in 1948, 1968, captured the electoral votes of southern states in 1960, and that Republicans won the south in a year that was historically unfavourable to Republicans when they fielded a candidate who opposed civil rights in 1964.
In short, the evidence seems to me that from 1964-1980, Republicans outperformed in the white south relative to the rest of the country, except when white southerners had the option to vote for an explicitly racist party in 1968, and this is exactly the sort of evidence consistent with the theory that the south realigned to vote Republican over civil rights.
I didn’t deny that. In fact, I flat out said it. but one election does not make for a decades long strategy.
No, it doesn’t. the segregationists WEREN’T republicans, and implying that they were doesn’t change that. the existence of explicit segregationists is evidence that republicans aren’t courting them, not that they are.
In other words, they under performed in 68, under performed in 76, and under performed in 80, so in 3 of the 5 elections in your highly specific period, they did worse, and you call this “over performing”.
you’ve stacked the deck in your favor, and the evidence still doesn’t support your claim.
To be honest, I’m a little disheartened at this response, I think it’s highly misleading, and isn’t really engaging with the course of the debate so far.
Here’s what you said above that I’m responding to
Elsewhere you claimed that
and
But I pointed out that Republicans did not perform worse in the south in 1964, 1972 and 1980, if you look at white republicans, which is surely the relevant group. And while 1968 doesn’t show that Republicans were popular in the south it certainly shows that segregationists were.
Hence, it is not true that white southerners were lukewarm Republicans (in 1964, 1972 and 1980, they were well above average temperature). Inasmuch as 1964, 1972, and 1980 contradict your claim that Republicans did worse in the south, you did deny that.
Well, Goldwater was, and by the 1968 campaign, so were Thurmond, Dent, Callaway, Clarke, etc., etc., whose names have all come up before. They were also Nixon advisers, ‘southern coordinators’, and people with powerful roles in the Nixon administration.
I’ll refer anyone reading this to my other comments to see what these people thought a Nixon presidency meant for them and their issues; search for “Bo Callaway”.
Anyway, the argument is that Republicans won the south by courting segregationists, so of course we should expect that at the beginning of the process the segregationists are not Republicans, or only intermittently so. Wallace was not a Republican, but many of his voters in 1968 voted Republican in 1964, 1972 and 1980–in the latter years, after being deliberately courted by the Republican campaigns.
First of all, they overperformed in 1980 when restricted to white southerners. And in 1976 white southerners were still Ford’s best group if broken out as a separate region, only not by an amount that looks imipressive. But Republicans did not underperform with white southerners in that election.
Also, Republican underperformance in 1968 is not really evidence against the southern strategy.
Let’s phrase it this way: the campaign most opposed to civil rights overperformed in the white south in 1948, 1960, 1964, 1968, 1972, and 1980. That looks like more of a pattern, and it spans three decades, so a less highly specific period.
(Whether 1976 is an exception or fits the pattern depends on how you view the Ford/Carter campaigns; the common wisdom is that Carter tried to win back some ‘Wallace’ voters by rhetorical opposition to busing, and Ford tried to distance himself from Nixon’s retreat from civil rights. I think this is also seen as the first election where black southern votes played a large role. In all, I don’t think 1976 is necessarily an exception to the above pattern, so much as a case when an opponent of civil rights could reasonably be indifferent between the two parties, but I’m not committed to defending this point; anyway, don’t forget white southerners were still Ford’s best group, just not by such a flashy amount as in the other listed elections).
Then let’s point out that in 1964, 1972, and 1980 the campaign opposed to civil rights the most was the Republican campaign, and that in 1968 the Republican campaign was much more opposed to civil rights than it had been prior to 1964, only it had to compete against a maximally segregationist campaign.
Now I think things look very different. Now it looks like white southerners can consistently be appealed to on the basis of civil rights issues, and that starting in 1964 and continuing through 1968, 1972, and 1980 Republicans made attempts to do so; unsuccessfully when competing against someone even more opposed to civil rights, but successfully otherwise.
I should also say, stopping at 1980 is a little artificial, since I don’t know that 1984 doesn’t fit the pattern; only I couldn’t find data on white southern support for Reagan compared to other regions, and I didn’t even look for 1988 and beyond.
Thanks, Eugene. I’m equally interested in a defense of the traditional view about the Southern Strategy, so if you know a good piece that looks at the evidence, please let me know.
I don’t know of one article that makes the case; I’ll take a look. I should also say, I’m not wedded to the traditional view, at least not in its maximalist form; but I think some of the evidence given in this thread against it is either incomplete, misleading, or doesn’t really attack the central claims of the southern strategy.
@Eugene:
This is sort of cassander’s “white whale”. He works, IIRC, at a Republican organization of some sort, and I think that effects how he views the issue.
First, you are flat out wrong on 80, reagan did less well in the south than elsewhere. Second, you ignore 84, where republicans also did less well, and 88, where they did almost exactly as well. Third, I have asked you several times to explain how segregationists refusing to vote for republicans somehow indicates republicans, and you have not done so.
Again, that nixon ran a presidential campaign in the south is not proof that he was narrowly appealing to southerners.
once again, you cannot name actual policies nixon pursued, just nice things he once said about someone.
“Many” of his voters is a disingenuous phrase here and you know it. I could equally say that “many” of them voted for carter. that doesn’t prove carter was narrowly appealing to segregationists.
you’ve not shown evidence of this.
Again, you have shown no evidence of your claim in 80. And I reject the claim that nixon was against civil rights in 72. Nixon passed a lot of pro-civil rights policies in his first term, and demonstrably refused to run away from them in 72. I grant you that the anti-civil rights campaign won in previous years, but except for 64, all those campaigns were run by democrats or dixiecrats, not republicans.
Now I think things look very different. Now it looks like white southerners can consistently be appealed to on the basis of civil rights issues, and that starting in 1964 and continuing through 1968, 1972, and 1980 Republicans made attempts to do so; unsuccessfully when competing against someone even more opposed to civil rights, but successfully otherwise.
I should also say, stopping at 1980 is a little artificial, since I don’t know that 1984 doesn’t fit the pattern; only I couldn’t find data on white southern support for Reagan compared to other regions, and I didn’t even look for 1988 and beyond.
Sadly, I agree. You are picking highly specific years, you continue to conflate segregationist with republicans, and still have not addressed the fact that nixon, or any other republican except goldwater, actually addressed segregationist issues. All of your arguments are circumstantial.
@HeelBearCub
Wrong on all counts HBC, and a really lazy ad hominem at that.
It seems the comment I tried to post is too long; mercifully, it didn’t get lost, so I’ll divide my response up:
I am not flat out wrong on ’80; see here for a table derived from CBS and NYT data in 1980 showing that Reagan won white southerners 60-35, as compared to his second best showing in the far west, which he won 53-35. I have already linked this, and we’ve discussed it, so you knew that I was not wrong on this claim, unless you have some criticism to make of the data or my interpretation, neither of which you have done.
I did not ignore 1984, I specifically mentioned it to point out that I had not seen data on the white southern vote, which is of course relevant in understanding the appeal of the southern strategy. You seemed to think it was “a good point that the racial mix of southern voting might have changed” before being shown data that in fact, the mix had changed enough for Reagan to win white southerners dramatically while still underperforming in the south as a whole; do you still think this is important? If so, what does the fact that Reagan won white southerners by a landslide say about the plausibility of the southern strategy?
Anyway, I still haven’t been able to find a chart or anything like that on the white southern vote, but this Atlantic article says Mondale only won 28% of the white southern vote in 1984; since there was no third party candidacy that year, this seems to imply that Reagan won 72% of southern whites; this source says
and that
i.e. his share of the white vote in 1984 wasbetter than the 60% in 1980.
If Reagan won white southerners with 72% of the vote, then the only two states where he outperformed this percentage are Utah and Idaho; so no, Reagan did not underperform with southern whites in 1984, he seems to have performed about as well as Nixon did in ’72: a landslide win, even compared with his impressive totals elsewhere.
And, just to keep going, the data I see for 1988 shows Bush winning the south 59-4, compared to 53-47 in the west and midwest, and 51-49 in the east. So you are wrong that Republicans did less well in the south in 1988 even ignoring the fact that it is the white southern vote that matters, not the southern vote. But, of course, if we look at the white southern vote, your data becomes even less exculpatory:
here is a table showing Dukakis’s share of the white vote in various southern states. His highest share is Texas, with 39%. In the deep south, he won 28% of the white vote, and in the south as a whole, 33%. Again, this doesn’t give us Bush’s share of the vote, but given no strong third parties, we should expect that Bush won close to 72% of the white vote in the deep south and 67% in the south as a whole. Each of these totals is better than his draw in his best state: Utah, where he won 66% of the vote.
Again, unless you have some criticism of the data or my interpretation of it, the data seems to show that Republicans were vastly more popular in the white south than elsewhere in the country.
Thirdly, I have explained a number of times why the Wallace vote fits the southern strategy story, but once more:
the Wallace 1968 vote shows that white southern voters could be won, and could be a bloc big enough to swing the south’s electoral college votes by appealing to them on civil rights issues. The fact that, in one election, the Republicans did not make the strongest appeal along these lines shows, if anything, that the rest of the Republican message was not inspiring enough for white southerners to vote for if the alternative was opposition to civil rights. Once Republicans became the sole owners of the anti-civil rights message in 1972, those white southerners were willing to vote for them–since the only change was that no there was no party even more opposed to civil rights, but otherwise the two parties were broadly the same as the previous election, the inference is, those Wallace voters moved to Nixon because, in the absence of Wallace, he moved from second to first choice on the issue of segregation, and this issue dominated their decision making. As long as Republicans continued to appeal on this issue, they could continue to win this segment of the vote.
I of course did name a number of these policies in a comment elsewhere; you haven’t disputed the relevance of these policies, so I’ll just quote myself
The thing about Bo Callaway isn’t that Nixon “said nice things about him”, it’s that Callaway, who was an adviser to Nixon, thought that Nixon had
i.e., he was a Nixon adviser who thought that Nixon’s campaign promises had included a promise to the south that he would stop integration.
True enough. On the other hand, in 1968, 1972, Reagan’s primary campaign in 1976, and 1980, Republicans targeted ‘Wallace voters’ in the south. (Carter did too in 1976, so I actually would accept that Carter made an attempt to appeal to segregationists).
For example, one of Wallace’s campaign managers, realizing that Wallace had no chance of winning the 1976 Democratic nomination, cut an ad for Reagan, saying
Reagan started his campaign in 1980 at the Neshoba county fair on the advice of the Chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party, who told him it would be a good way to attract “George Wallace-inclined voters”.
Before the 1972 election, according to the NYT Gallup and and Harris showed the Wallace vote going either 2-1 or 3-1 for Nixon, the article says that
From after the election, the Post confirms that Nixon won 75% of Wallace voters.
A 1981 paper in Presidential Studies Quarterly, The Direction of the Wallace Vote in 1972 and 1976 by Richard McDonnell summarizes the results as follows
Further on, it says
and closes by noting
So, I think the evidence is both that Republicans did indeed deliberately court Wallace voters in 1972, 1976 (Reagan’s primary), and 1980, and that they had notable success with this.
It’s in the Wikipedia link at the top, and I brought it up elsewhere in our discussion; it seems Reagan won the white southern vote 60-35, his best total in any region.
See above for 1980; this was also something I had mentioned in our previous conversation.
Also see above for Nixon on civil rights; though for a little more nuance you can see my thoughts in my comment on Leon Panetta’s book. The idea is: Nixon’s administration was split between those who hoped the south would be happy with rhetorical support for segregation but no substantive action, and the Dents, Callaways, Thurmonds, who staffed his administrative and who wanted real substantive action. Nixon was constrained not just by factions in his administration, but by the Supreme Court, by Democrats in the Senate, and by ex-LBJ staffers manning various departments. One has to be careful to separate the influence of these factions on the actual policy to determine the administration’s stance; it would be absurd to say that because courts have held up Trump’s travel ban, that Donald Trump didn’t pursue a policy of limiting immigration and travel from Muslim countries. Or that Donald Trump supported and advanced transgender integration into the military, just because it seems the military bureaucracy is holding up his order to remove trans soldiers from service.
Similarly, if the Supreme Court orders busing, but the Nixon administration fights the ruling and delays implementing it, but is forced in the end, it seems perverse to count this as the Nixon administration pushing civil rights–the truth is, the Nixon administration pushed against civil rights, and lost.
The only thing I agree with here is that my arguments are circumstantial since, when dealing with shifts in voting in a population of millions of people over a period of decades, I’m not sure any other kind of evidence is reasonable to expect.
I should maybe say something about the choice of years. I think there’s an implicit argument here, that if one can’t show that the Republican vote in the south over the course of the decades since 1964 has in every case been decided over civil rights issues, then the southern strategy is false.
My point of view is this: most peoples’ votes are habitual, and follow their parents. A perfectly good explanation for why the south votes Republican in 2016 is: they did in 2012, and 2008, and 2004, and 2000, and ….
What needs explanation are changes in voting behaviour. Especially if those changes persist. The southern strategy argument is not, “because the Democrats passed civil rights in 1963, southerners continue to this day to support Republicans to express their continued opposition to civil rights”, it’s “because the Democrats passed civil rights in 1963, southerners spend the next two or so decades voting Republican to express their opposition; after a while, they were so habituated to voting Republican that even after opposition to civil rights died down, they persisted in their Republican vote”.
This is why I think focusing on the era from 1948, when civil rights started climbing back on to the Democratic agenda, to 1980/1984, when civil rights started to die down as an issue, is entirely appropriate.
I’ll close by saying that my intent here is not necessarily to prove that the southern strategy as commonly believed is really a true description of affairs. I started responding to this thread because I objected to people describing it as “debunked”. The arguments supposedly “debunking” this claim were:
– the south only went Republican because the whole country did; in fact, Republican support in the south was weaker than in the country as a whole
– the south only went Republican on the presidential level, not the congressional level
for some reason, we’ve avoided the second part of this, but almost all of my arguments above are directed at the first part. I think I have shown that the Republicans had their strongest support in the white south, which is the relevant population for discussing the southern strategy and that white southerners started moving Republican before the big landslides (see Goldwater).
In the course of debating this, I think I’ve also provided evidence that Republicans deliberately courted ‘Wallace voters’, often advised or helped by southern politicians, and that ‘Wallace voters’ responded to this appeal.
One of my first comments touches on the congressional argument as well, but since no one has picked that up, and I’m sure this comment is obscenely long, I’ll just mention that anyone interested can go find that comment.
Anyway, I think I am done with this argument; I think Cassander has ignored the data I’ve pointed out that doesn’t agree with his argument, and I don’t see us making any headway on this.
this quote is emblematic of the problematic nature of the evidence for the southern strategy. You cannot reclaim what you don’t have. if the republicans didn’t reclaim Wallace country until 1984, you can’t claim that they were winning it prior to 84. so which is it?
Again, I didn’t dispute that. but, again, republicans doing better in the south as time goes on is not evidence of a southern strategy, it’s more evidence that there was a lot of room for improvement in the 70s, i.e. the exact opposite of what is claimed.
my claim was that in 88 republicans did as well in the south, not better, which is what the wikipedia vote totals say.
Again, you assume the object of your argument to prove your case. Republicans did not take up an anti-civil rights message. At best/worst, they offered a slightly less pro-civil rights platform than the democrats.
I have. Delaying de-segregation in 5 counties while pursing a nationwide integration policy so aggressive that northern cities started objecting is not taking up the anti-civil rights banner. You’re making mountains out of molehills.
If by target, “we mean target with a racial appeal”, then no, according to lee atwater, they didn’t, and since we seem to be accepting the statements of campaign workers as gospel, do we not have to trust his?
ugh, this old chestnut. It’s absurd. what percentage of voters do you think knew what county reagan started his campaign in? if it was 1%, i would be shocked. this is more assuming the object then hunting for confirmation, not actual evidence of anything.
the basic Nixon strategy is aimed at: (1) Consolidating and holding 1968 Nixon sup port; (2) Maximizing Walla cite support; and (3) wooing conservative Catholics, senior citizens and other traditional ists.
It’s in the Wikipedia link at the top, and I brought it up elsewhere in our discussion; it seems Reagan won the white southern vote 60-35, his best total in any region.
that some people in the administration wanted X is not evidence that the administration did X.
Except he didn’t do that.
Jesus this shit again.
Form 1948 forward the Democratic party’s support for civil rights began fracturing the South from the rest of the party. This is incontrovertible and was repeatedly stated.
This led first to the loss of votes for Democratic candidates for president, but not for statewide or local offices. Both 3rd party candidates and Republican candidates for president were the beneficiaries of this. This is to be expected as the Democratic local candidates were still running as supporters of segregation, the main issue causing the fracture at the national level.
Yeah, I know. People keep repeating that stupid “Southern Strategy” as if it was actually a true description of Republican politics, even after it’s been debunked.
One day I will hear someone use the word ‘debunked’ in some sense other than ‘I already heard that argument and I don’t like it’.
I think ‘debunked’ is too strong; rather, I think the story where Democrats support civil rights in the 1960s —-> the south votes Republican forever more is too simplistic, and only captures a tiny part of the change. I think a story that goes like this:
Democrats support civil rights —-> prominent conservative democrats switching parties, and lets Republicans start making inroads into the south for the first time in generations —> Republicans move to assemble a coalition that includes these new southern voters, but also appeals to suburban white voters outside of the south + black voters enfranchised by the Voting Rights Act allying with liberal southerners to vote Democrat in the south
is a more sophisticated version of the story that’s a little harder to rebut directly.
It’s true that the Republican appeal was not only segregationist, and did not only take hold in the south, but that doesn’t mean that appealing to southerners over segregation wasn’t the start of the realignment.
One pretty good way to get Southerners to stop voting for your party is to go on and on about how anyone who gets the votes of Southerners must be wicked, because Southerners.
@Paul Zrimsek
I’m not sure if your comment was directed at me, but I never claimed anyone was wicked for voting any particular way; I’m just pointing out that the claim that the “Republicans won the south using ‘Southern Strategy’ has been debunked” is only true on a fairly narrow definition of ‘Southern Strategy’.
@eugene Dawn
Except it wasn’t a segregationist appeal, the Republicans never promised anything vaguely like that. And it didn’t just “appeal elsewhere”, until the 90s, it appealed LEAST in the south. Your assertions are completely at odds with how the voting and campaigning actually went down. So yes, the southern strategy has been refuted, and not in a narrow sense. A theory that Republicans successfully appealed to explicitly southern interests is bunk if Republican appeals did worst in the south.
@cassander
See my response to you below: it certainly is the case that the south voting for Thurmond in ’48 and Wallace in ’68 was responding to an explicitly segregationist appeal; it’s not as clear-cut with Goldwater in ’64, but I think the facts that: the south was won on segregationist appeals before and after 1964, the fact that Goldwater was against civil rights, and the fact that Goldwater was the first Republican to win the south, inaugurating an era where the south was reliably Republican in the presidential vote is consistent with the basic story of the Southern Strategy.
As to the claim that whatever message the Republicans ran on appealed least in the south; it depends on which elections you are referring to: for 1968, for example, this is easily explained by the fact that Wallace, an explicit segregationist, obviously would have appealed more strongly to the segregationist vote than Nixon. Is your claim that Republicans performed worst in the south in 1972, 1980, etc., as well as 1968?
If I’m reading this Gallup data correctly, that seems incorrect: it has Nixon winning the south 71-29, compared with 60-40 for the midwest, 59-41 for the west, and 58-42 for the east.
Also, I’m skeptical of arguments along these lines that don’t take into account the fact that the south would have had large populations of African Americans newly enfranchised by the Voting Rights Act; even if there were elections where Republicans running a ‘southern strategy’ underperformed in the south relative to elsewhere, depending on the numbers it may still be entirely consistent with a scenario where white southerners are enough to swing the region to the Republicans, but large minorities of black voters make it a narrower win.
@eugene
It’s also the case that neither of those men was a republican.
again, the south WASN’T reliably republican. it remained the least republican part of the country until the 90s. It was just that republican presidential victories were so consistently overwhelming that they won the south despite being weak there.
As to the claim that whatever message the Republicans ran on appealed least in the south; it depends on which elections you are referring to: for 1968, for example,
yes, that’s my point. the republicans didn’t cater to the segregationists and the voted for someone else.
in 72, no, that is the one election between 68 and 88 where republicans do better in the south. but in 68 and 80, yes, republicans do worse.
about 70 million people vote in the 1960 election, about 73 million voted in 1968, 76 million in 72, which means the increase was less than the increase in population. you make a good point that the racial mix of southern voting might have changed, but there don’t appear to be massive new numbers of voters showing up.
@ Cassander
Of course neither Thurmond nor Wallace are Republicans, but Goldwater was; what explains his support in the south?
I think maybe it’s worth stating what I think is the basic claim of the southern strategy:
the south going from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican was motivated in large part by Republicans appealing to white southern voters on racial issues.
From this point of view, the fact that in 1968, Republicans did not appeal as strongly as an explicitly segregationist third party to racially-motivated voters is hardly evidence against the southern strategy: it shows that appealing to white southerners on racial issues was a winning strategy at the time the time. The standard story is that Nixon in ’72 took advantage of the absence of a Wallace-type candidate to win people who were Wallace ’68 voters. The Wallace campaign was, if you like, proof-of-concept for the southern strategy: see, you can win the south by being against integration!
I think everything I’ve mentioned supports this theory: the Thurmond/Wallace campaigns show that white southerners could be motivated to vote on racial issues; the Goldwater campaign shows that racial issues could even be strong enough to overcome the historic voting pattern in the region; then, in ’72 the Nixon campaign wins the south much more strongly than he won any other region…this basically is the southern strategy claim.
The only thing missing is to argue that Nixon won those Wallace ’68 voters by means of some deliberate strategy, unlike Goldwater who won the south ‘accidentally’ on racial issues.
While I agree that after ’72 the picture isn’t as clear, I think someone who believes the story above, who points out the role of Harry Dent, Strom Thurmond, and other segregationist southerners in Nixon’s campaign as ‘southern coordinators’, and who can find some damning-sounding quotes by Kevin Philips and Lee Atwater to show that the story above isn’t the result of accident, has a pretty serious case for at least some version of the southern strategy. It doesn’t prove that Republican strength in south since then is solely due to racially-motivated voting, but it makes a solid case that the switch in vote in the mid-late sixties really was racially motivated, and you can put together an argument that it was deliberate strategy.
For the rest: it seems that black voter registration in the south really did spike around the late ’60s early ’70s, so I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility that Reagan was less popular in the south due to the black vote out of hand (I guess someone should find voter data by state in the south, or at least see if Reagan’s voter share in the south is anti-correlated with the black population, but I’m too lazy); I also once read somewhere that Carter won the south largely on the strength of the black vote, but can’t find numbers on that.
I agree that after this point, your objections become stronger, and it’s harder to argue that civil rights is the only thing going on: Reagan pretty clearly broadened the Goldwater coalition, and even segregationists like Thurmond started to abandon hardcore opposition to civil rights. But I think the number of defections of segregationist Democrats to Republicans shows that there was still some draw for segregationists in Republican politics, and you can come up with plenty of examples of racially-motivated appeals on the part of Reagan, Bush I, etc. It just gets harder to argue that they’re the only part of the appeal, and that the appeal is felt strongest in the south.
This is why I don’t think you can call the southern strategy ‘debunked’. I think it’s fair to say people have a naive version of it, in which Republican opposition to civil rights in 1964 was like flipping a switch that brought all the racists over to them, and that this version of events isn’t true. But I don’t think your arguments are enough to dismiss the claim that southern white voters abandoned the Democrats and then moved to the Republicans in the ’60s and ’70s primarily over civil rights. Why they’ve stayed there, and why it took longer for the congressional vote to catch up are more complicated, but that basic part of the southern strategy doesn’t seem debunked to me at all.
@Eugene Dawn
Goldwater explicitly ran on stopping civil rights legislation. He’s the only republican that did that, however.
.
it does. it also, however, shows that republicans WEREN’T doing it, because if they were, there wouldn’t be a segregationist party.
A good theory, if Nixon had run against integration, but he didn’t.
Except for the minor detail of Nixon not taking up segregation as an issue.
You mean like, for example, running against someone who advocated giving up on the Vietnam war and that not going well in the most pro-war segment of the country?
You can do this, at best, for a single election, 72, and that does not make for a decades long strategy, which is the claim the traditional story makes.
You can tell a much more coherent story where black voters become an essential block in the democratic party, this causes the party to increasingly give into what we now call identity politics, and this slowly alienates the non-identity portions of the country, driving them into republican arms. this fits actual voting patterns far more closely, there is a huge shift in black voting in 64 that they never look back from, and doesn’t require assuming that the country is full of secret racists straining to hear dog whistles.
Nixon didn’t run on segregation explicitly, but consider the Nixon administration’s stance on Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, a school desegregation case; though it was decided not to delay desegregation, Thurmond praised Nixon for “having stood with the South”. The argument is that, with Thurmond, Dent, etc. advising Nixon, they were well placed to reassure southern whites that the Nixon administration would side with southern whites on issues of desegregation.
Now, I don’t want to get too far over my skis here: one court case doesn’t prove too much; just, I don’t think you can claim that Nixon was pro-integration, and it’s clear that southern segregationists felt like Nixon was reliable on issues important to them. This was in 1969, by the way, so it’s not at all unreasonable to suppose that issues like this would have convinced southern whites that they could vote Nixon even without a Wallace in the race.
As to the claim about black voters moving to Democrats first, this is actually the mechanism posited by one of the architects of the southern strategy, Kevin Philips, in 1970: “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.”
From this point of view, there isn’t much strategy; rather, the Democrats enacted an ‘anti-southern strategy’, that pushed Republicans away. This is still completely compatible with the idea that southern whites moved to vote Republican over racial issues, though; it just means that the Republican party was more passive than active.
This, by the way, is the version of the southern strategy I think is truest: I think Nixon and Reagan made some efforts to appeal to southern whites on racial lines, but it was hardly the whole of their campaigning, but that southern whites were appeased by even these minor gestures as they were so disenchanted by Democrats embrace of civil rights.
Possibly, but then Nixon started integrating schools, endorsing the ERA, and busing. The more plausible read is that nixon was trying to tread a middle line and offend as few people as possible.
Phillips might have said that, but by 68 that process was done. and even if he’s absolutely correct, that says nothing about republicans changing positions, and fits my theory of democrats driving people away as well as republican whistling.
If we accept the word of campaign managers, you can make case for this case for Nixon in 1972. but you can’t make it for 68 or any subsequent election, and that this strategy played out over decades is an explicit claim of the traditional narrative.
Allow me to follow up with what I think is a position that reconciles us: I think your posited mechanism and mine are essentially the same, up to an identification of “rejecting identity politics” and “responding to racial appeals”. I think the reason Nixon as opponent of desegregation looks strongest is because the kind of stuff that a white southerner only four or eight years off a vote for Wallace would consider “identity politics” is the kind of stuff that is almost uniformly regarded as a “racial appeal” today; this is I think the real point of the famous Lee Atwater quote.
Essentially, an unspoken corollary to the traditional argument is that what counts as an appeal to racism has changed; so what starts off as appeals to defend segregation become appeals to oppose busing become appeals appeals to support states’s rights …
this I think is the real bone of disagreement. It’s why I tried to say “racially motivated appeal” rather than racism; I think “I stopped voting for Democrats because of their idiot identity politics over race” counts as ‘left the Democrats over racial issues’, and thought this more neutral phrasing might help. But I guess euphemisms work both ways, and it’s impossible to read ‘racially motivated’ as anything other than ‘racist’.
@Eugene Dawn says:
I agree, but, again, we have the problem of nixon not actually being an opponent of de-segregation. by the standards of racism at the time, nixon wasn’t race baiting, and he started busing and pushed de-segregation. At most, can be accused of not de-segregating as vigorously as some others might have.
Again, I have to ask, what appeal? what policies did he pursue that the segregationists actually wanted? Sure, he said a nice thing once about some segregationist, but that on its own tells you almost nothing. Bush II probably said nice things about hugo chavez at some point.
Sorry, one more thing on this:
this NYT review of the book published by Leon Panetta after being fired from Nixon’s department of Health, Education, and Welfare, from 1971 is worth a read, and possibly may help clear up some debate.
It starts by noting a complaint from Howard Callaway, one of the southerners who did southern outreach for the Nixon campaign
Notice that even in 1971, it was understood that the southern strategy referred to Nixon promising southerners he would oppose desegregation, and argues that this is pretty good evidence that white southerners really did hear that message.
It also, I think, presents a way forward for understanding how much the Nixon administration really did for these white southerners:
So, part of Nixon’s strategy was to offer only rhetorical support for segregationist positions and hope that would be enough; others wanted genuine material support.
The article ends by saying that the southern strategy failed, as it didn’t lead to widespread GOP support in the south. Recall, this is from 1971–the year before Nixon won the south with 71% of the vote, much higher than his totals elsewhere in the country. Should this later fact change our the NYT’s assessment of the strategy’s success?
So, the defense of Nixon is: he never really did much to oppose segregation, he let desegregation go on around him, occasionally taking a rhetorical pose against it, or using some symbolic action that would only slow it down to burnish his credentials in the eyes of racially motivated southern white voters, and it probably didn’t work as a strategy anyway.
The prosecution is: his administration was partially staffed by true believers in the segregationist cause, who regarded some of the so-called ‘symbolic’ victories as substantive victories (if not as comprehensive as they might have liked), his rhetorical pose offered support to segregationists, and it paid off a year later in huge support in the south.
I can’t convince you to believe the prosecution, but I hope I can convince you that the facts support the prosecution about as well as they support the defense: Nixon really did have an administration that took action to appeal to white southerners over issues like segregation, and there is some evidence that some important southerners really believed they were getting something from Nixon.
Does this prove that the only reason Nixon won the south again in 1972 is because of this wishy-washy support for segregation? No, of course not, but given the dramatic change in voting behaviour in a region that had previously seen dramatic change in voting behaviour over precisely the issue of segregation; given that Nixon won the south with much higher margins than elsewhere in the country in 1972; given that a number of white southern Democrats became Republicans at the same time as they aligned themselves with the Nixon administration; given that we know at least some of these people genuinely believed that Nixon had promised to “change the law” and “change the supreme court” to support them, that it’s not at all unreasonable to believe that latent segregationist beliefs were a major factor in Nixon winning the south in 1972.
Given that this is the core of the “southern strategy” claim (notice the NYT reference to it in 1971; clearly not referring to a decades-long continuation of this pattern), I think it is very much not debunked.
A little more: Wiki on the Reagan coalition says that Reagan won white southerners 60-35-3 (Jon Anderson was a 3rd party candidate) in 1980; his next best is the west where he won 53-35-9. Compare to Ford/Carter in ’76 when Ford won white southerners 52-46.
I can’t find the same data for 1984, but it seems that Reagan really did have outsize support among white southerners at least in 1980, so the claim that Republican appeal was weaker in the south doesn’t seem to hold up in general.
So, now we start to get to stuff that I probably don’t know well enough to make a strong case for, but, the basic idea is that, though desegregation happened under Nixon’s watch, that’s not an argument that he ‘started busing and pushed de-segregation’, so long as one can show that he opposed these measures as much as he could. The argument along these lines focuses on his supreme court appointments, including two nominees who were rejected by Senate Democrats for “voiced support for racial segregation and white supremacy”, and the successful nomination of Rehnquist, who wrote a memo defending Plessy and arguing against Brown v. Board of Education.
More generally, on desegregation, I’ll quote, since I can’t make the defense on the strength of my own knowledge. This is William Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II:
“In pre-inauguration meetings with Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, he pledged to seek the lifting of HEW guidelines that called for terminating federal funds to any school district that refused to desegregate. Since cutting off federal monies had provided the most effective instrument of promoting integration, Nixon in effect was offering the power of the presidency to delay, if not halt completely, federally imposed school desegregation”.
“Thurmond’s close aide, Harry Dent [one of the southern segregationist advisors on the Nixon campaign – ED] became deputy counsel to the president with the specific assignment of protecting white southern interests. In January, HEW delayed one desegregation plan for five school districts in South Carolina. Then, in July, HEW head Robert Finch intervened on behalf of thirty-three school districts in Mississippi, requesting that federal courts slow down the process of desegregation already agreed to. Six weeks later, for the first time since the Brown decision in 1954, the Justice Department entered a federal court, not to argue for school desegregation, but rather to press for delay–all this in violation of the Supreme Court’s order a year earlier insisting on immediate school desegregation everywhere.”
Other examples are Nixon’s pushing of the Student Transportation Moratorium Act, his firing of Leon Panetta as Director of the Office for Civil Rights, his response to the Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg decision by saying he “opposed busing of our nation’s schoolchildren to achieve a racial balance”.
Anyway, this is probably an obscenely long comment already, so I’ll stop, but I’ll just say, I don’t think the evidence is clear that Nixon “pushed de-segregation”, or that at most he wasn’t as vigorous as others might have been in opposing it.
The above is meant as a partial answer as well to the “what appeal?” question: Nixon was not a committed segregationist, and anyway, the Supreme Court, plus LBJ holdovers in various civil rights departments, plus public opinion elsewhere made a push to reestablish full Jim Crow impossible, but you can make a solid case that Nixon, in alliance with southern white politicians, including some at the leading edge of the transition from Democrat to Republican, worked to oppose desegregation where possible.
The Democrats managed to have a hold on the South for a hundred years, even when a popular Republican like Eisenhower ran. The fact that Nixon was able to get every southern state is pretty significant.
This seems, at best, incomplete. There is more evidence than just the presidential vote in the south going Republican during Republican blowouts:
– The Dixiecrats won the South in 1948, a party that specifically split off of the Democrats over segregation
– Segregationists in the 1960 election got faithless electors to vote for (segregationist) Harry Byrd in southern states
– The south backed Goldwater in 1964, a decidedly non-Republican blowout (other than his home state of Arizona, it’s the only place he won)
– Segregationist George Wallace won the south with a third party in 1968
So there is a long trend of the south moving away from Democrats over segregation before Nixon/Reagan that I don’t think can be written off by noting that some Republican wins of the south were as part of Republican landslides.
Also, the point about congress is also incomplete. It’s true that it took longer for the south to move to Republicans in the congressional vote, but some of this is attributable to the fact that Democratic representatives who had seniority in congress didn’t want to give it up by changing parties; a good example of this is Mississippi congressman William Colmer, a Democrat who opposed integration, and so endorsed Nixon and Goldwater for president; but who stayed a Democrat to avoid giving up his chairmanship of the Rules committee. When he retired, his assistant Trent Lott became his successor–running as a Republican. Dynamics like this helped Democrats persist in the south longer than in the presidential vote, and so the fact that it took the congressional vote longer to flip isn’t necessarily evidence against the Southern Strategy hypothesis.
Also, I would be curious if the fact that the Republican share of the southern vote being smaller than average would still hold if restricted to white southerners, which is surely what matters.
Your insistence that the Southern Strategy couldn’t possibly have been real given the electoral results is less compelling than the multiple RNC heads who have admitted it was real, and apologized for it:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/13/AR2005071302342.html
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/steele-african-americans-really-don-t-have-a-reason-to-vote-gop
At best you’re quibbling over whether it was a strategy that worked or not. Using it to claim the strategy didn’t happen, when Republican leaders have been quite explicit that they did it, is giving me this weird picture of Adnan Sayed confessing that he did it in the first episode of Serial, and then the show still spending like ten episodes obsessing about whether Best Buy had a pay phone or not.
They admitted it. We can stop theorizing about other possible scenarios now.
Because politicians are bold truth tellers who never pander to popular prejudices? I mean seriously, we aren’t children.
No, I’m saying that the actual voting results tell a very different story. The southern strategy thesis is at odds with the facts, and nothing Ken Mehlman can say can change that.
putting aside the truthfulness of politicians, they said that OTHERS did it, not them. if they had said they did it, I might listen, but that’s not what they’ve actually said. Instead, they’ve thrown others under the bus for their own advancement.
Based on your knowledge of this topic, I assume you’ve seen the infamous Lee Atwater quote. That wasn’t talking about others, that was speaking for himself. Did you know he gave it a year after he pioneered the practice of push-polling? His particular method was to call southern whites and ask them if knowing his opponent was a member of the NAACP affected their opinion of him.
(On the strength of that 1980 campaign, he was hired by Reagan’s White House.)
But if you’re sick of Atwater, how about Nixon’s people talking about their own campaign (and policies post-campaign).
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. […] You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
John Erlichman
http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html
As another aside, as has been pointed out by others on like the past 3 threads where you have brought out this argument, the electoral results are also far less compelling than you seem to think they are. Nixon failed to win the South… because George Wallace was also in the race running on an openly racist platform.
If you doubt that, here is John Sears (who also went on to work for Reagan in two presidential campaigns) in a memo to Nixon, planning their reelection campaign, from the Nixon library, on the topic of Wallace:
“The important thing is to draw a clear line delineating how far we will go to fight his candidacy and then religiously adhere to it. He senses that he has us in a bind since (1) if we chase him too far in an effort to hold onto Southern votes, we lost support in the rest of the country; (2) if we don’t chase him far enough he might hurt us more in the South than he did the last time. In either case there would be more of a chance that the election would wind up in the House than was true in 1968. Look for Wallace to run a strictly Southern campaign this time since (1) it costs less money (2) he can focus his positions better and (3) he will feel this is the best way to get us to chase him.
We have gone as far as we can on the race-school-crime-law and order issue. For a fair amount of time we should keep quiet about this. A fair number of people in the Middle and Far West are beginning to wonder whether we aren’t a little too Southern in our view of the “social issue” to fit local prejudices. Talk of a “Southern Strategy,” appointment of Southern judges to the Supreme Court and compacts with Southern politicians in Congress only add credence to assertions made against
us in the Middle and Far West.
If Wallace finds a successful issue to use against us this
time, it will be populism, not race. Improving the economy as
it relates to the white lower-to-middle class American will do
more to defuse Wallace’s impact than anything further on race.”
https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/virtuallibrary/documents/contested/contested_box_20/Contested-20-17.pdf
But isn’t he arguing against the Southern Strategy? Yes – as a change from what they did previously! This is an internal strategy document discussing the matter as a pure issue of strategy.
(By the way, you might notice the ‘Contested’ label there. The veracity of the document is not contested, their publication was due to their private and personal/political nature. See here: https://nixonlibrary.gov/virtuallibrary/documents/contested/index.php )
My post appears to have been eaten, not sure why – trying a repost:
Based on your knowledge of this topic, I assume you’ve seen the infamous Lee Atwater quote. That wasn’t talking about others, that was speaking for himself. Did you know he gave it a year after he pioneered the practice of push-polling? His particular method was to call southern whites and ask them if knowing his opponent was a member of the NAACP affected their opinion of him.
(On the strength of that 1980 campaign, he was hired by Reagan’s White House.)
But if you’re sick of Atwater, how about Nixon’s people talking about their own campaign (and policies post-campaign).
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. […] You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
John Erlichman
http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html
As another aside, as has been pointed out by others on like the past 3 threads where you have brought out this argument, the electoral results are also far less compelling than you seem to think they are. Nixon failed to win the South… because George Wallace was also in the race running on an openly racist platform.
If you doubt that, here is John Sears (who also went on to work for Reagan in two presidential campaigns) in a memo to Nixon, planning their reelection campaign, from the Nixon library, on the topic of Wallace:
“The important thing is to draw a clear line delineating how far we will go to fight his candidacy and then religiously adhere to it. He senses that he has us in a bind since (1) if we chase him too far in an effort to hold onto Southern votes, we lost support in the rest of the country; (2) if we don’t chase him far enough he might hurt us more in the South than he did the last time. In either case there would be more of a chance that the election would wind up in the House than was true in 1968. Look for Wallace to run a strictly Southern campaign this time since (1) it costs less money (2) he can focus his positions better and (3) he will feel this is the best way to get us to chase him.
We have gone as far as we can on the race-school-crime-law and order issue. For a fair amount of time we should keep quiet about this. A fair number of people in the Middle and Far West are beginning to wonder whether we aren’t a little too Southern in our view of the “social issue” to fit local prejudices. Talk of a “Southern Strategy,” appointment of Southern judges to the Supreme Court and compacts with Southern politicians in Congress only add credence to assertions made against us in the Middle and Far West.
If Wallace finds a successful issue to use against us this time, it will be populism, not race. Improving the economy as it relates to the white lower-to-middle class American will do more to defuse Wallace’s impact than anything further on race.”
https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/virtuallibrary/documents/contested/contested_box_20/Contested-20-17.pdf
But isn’t he arguing against the Southern Strategy? Yes – as a change from what they did previously! This is an internal document discussing the Southern Strategy as a pure issue of strategy, pros and cons. What else were you looking for?
(By the way, you might notice the ‘Contested’ label there. The veracity of the document is not contested, their publication was due to their private and personal/political nature. See here: https://nixonlibrary.gov/virtuallibrary/documents/contested/index.php )
No, he wasn’t. to quote atwater on what he actually did “But Reagan did not have to do a southern strategy for two reasons. Number one, race was was not a dominant issue. And number two, the mainstream issues in this campaign had been, quote, southern issues since way back in the sixties. So Reagan goes out and campaigns on the issues of economics and of national defense. The whole campaign was devoid of any kind of racism, any kind of reference. And I’ll tell you another thing you all need to think about, that even surprised me, is the lack of interest, really, the lack of knowledge right now in the South among white voters about the Voting Rights Act.”
and again I am forced to point out that this proves my point for me. If nixon was accommodating those voters, they wouldn’t have voted 3rd party. the existence of dixiecrats is proof that republicans weren’t courting them, not that they were.
To summarize this quote, they are planning a presidential campaign that involves the south. they are quite sure they will win a plurality of the electoral votes but are worried that the election might go to the house because because they aren’t racist enough to win the south, and aren’t willing ot be. That, again, sounds like evidence against a southern strategy. The one you quote says nothing about secret appeals, it even flat states that race is becoming a less salient issue! You’re playing a game of quoting every time nixon or someone who works for him mentions the south as evidence of some nefarious plot, when they are nothing of the sort.
You neatly avoided the important bit:
“We have gone as far as we can on the race-school-crime-law and order issue. For a fair amount of time we should keep quiet about this. A fair number of people in the Middle and Far West are beginning to wonder whether we aren’t a little too Southern in our view of the “social issue” to fit local prejudices. Talk of a “Southern Strategy,” appointment of Southern judges to the Supreme Court and compacts with Southern politicians in Congress only add credence to assertions made against us in the Middle and Far West.”
Sears is arguing against the use of their 1968 Southern Strategy in the 1972 campaign, because he thinks it has drawbacks and won’t work; but in doing so he is explicitly acknowledging that they did it in 1968!
Huh? Where? The Southern Strategy means the GOP explicitly stoked racial tensions as policy in order to win white votes. No where in your links is that supported.
Let’s extract this:
So Reagan running on Law and Order in 1968 was running a “Southern Strategy”?
This the quote from the article:
Where in this does the “Southern Strategy” fit in?
Ken Mehlman was 2 years old in 1968. He is not the expert on electoral politics in the 1960s.
See the thread above with cassander. About 10 minutes of Googling the Nixon Library turned up an internal campaign memo talking about the pros and cons of the Southern Strategy.
And like, that was just literally searching “southern strategy Haldeman” because I know there was a Haldeman quote about this too that I couldn’t find. It’s not even hard to find this unless you are working really, really hard not to believe it.
Oh, and also, check out the reason Sears is arguing they should chill out on the stoking of racial tensions for the re-election campaign – it was because even back in the late 60s it was so obvious that people all over the country were being repulsed by Nixon’s “chasing Wallace” (Sears’ words, not mine) by catering to Southern racists and they were losing votes over it everywhere but the South. And again, this was an internal assessment by the Nixon campaign.
That’s a pretty big if. Two actually: first that he can actually implement any such policies (not much sign of that so far), and second that those policies will really help his base (evidence there is mixed at best).
The data show attempted illegal crossings of the Mexican border fell significantly after the election, which suggests that his rhetoric alone has been effective at cracking down on illegal immigration. (The linked WaPo article confuses people trying and failing to cross the border, which is what DHS reports, with illegal immigration; I don’t know of any usable data on actual number of people entering the country illegally.)
There have been numerous articles this summer with farmers complaining about the labor shortage. So whatever Trump is doing on immigration, although it isn’t much yet, it is having an impact.
I acknowledge that it remains to be seen whether increases in commercial farm labor costs will create new market opportunities for independent small farms, or otherwise help Trump’s core supporters. But the combination of reduced competition from large farms (due to a labor shortage), reduced foreign competition when/if Trump successfully implements trade protections, and reduced regulations (which are coming here and there) seems in general to have a chance of creating new opportunities for some Americans.
what is “economic nationalism”?
The narrative that Trump relies on racism for support is problematic.
Perhaps constantly labeling “White Men” as racists turns them into “Angry White Men”? I’ll have to check the social sciences to see if this narrative is how to win hearts and minds or if this is counterproductive and makes people defensive and less accepting of arguments.
It’s possible people hold views on terrorism, immigration, abortion, freedom of speech, size of government, crime, education, and economics where race plays very little role in their opinions even if the preferred polices have disparate impacts racially. One way to find out would be to ask them but it is far easier to simply assume what lies in their soul.
There may be confusion over whether racism is an accusation of motive (as it is normally received). It is apparent that some believe a person is racist if they support policies that have disparate racial impacts even if the policy is legally race neutral.
If all the terrorism was coming from Iceland, would people still be wanting a Muslim ban? Or would they want restrictions on immigration from Iceland? It is more likely they seem to be bigoted against terrorists, not Muslims. It’s a valid debate over whether using such a blunt immigration tool is wise policy, but inferring someone dislikes Muslims and is using terrorism as a cover for this bigoted discrimination is not likely to be true most of the time and will alienate almost all the time.
I think what you are describing there is more the _mechanism_ by which Trump relies or racism for support.
The two parties are in a bidding war for white votes. Both agree racism is bad. Both know positive messages are good, and criticizing potential voters is a failing strategy.
This is a bidding war the Republicans will always win.
Democrats can say ‘you are not racist if you have reasonable concerns on immigration’ and Republicans can outbid them with ‘you are not racist even if you think building a wall is a proportionate response’
Democrats can say ‘you are not racist if you want effective law enforcement’ and Republicans and counter with ‘you are not racist even if you want a corrupt buffoon running racial internment camps’.
There is nothing the Democrats can say to reassure white voters than can’t be outbid by the other side. Which means the message getting through will always be ‘they think you are racist’.
The same dynamic applies within the Republican party, in primaries. Which is how we end up with Trump saying ‘you are not racist even if you cross the country to join a torchlight rally with the goal of starting a fight over a Confederate statue’.
Which may, or may not, turn out to be a step too far…
If the process becomes too transparent, people will come to realize they are being tricked. Once they do, they will see that they are being sold policies that are not merely racially biased, but _deliberately_ chosen to be stupid, expensive and ineffective, in order to get that sweet ‘_this_ is for you; _they_ are against it’ dynamic.
This is the exact form of the argument “Democrats will always win with poor/minority voters” ie, no matter how much stuff Republicans promise, Democrats will always plausibly (in terms of intention, if not fiscal possibility) promise more.
I’m not sure if that makes the argument more or less true.
Yeah I considered adding an aside on that.
It’s not completely symmetrical, though, because of the obvious mathematical properties of the word ‘minority’. Consequently, there very much is a limit on how high Democrats can bid:
‘You are still oppressed even if slavery has been abolished’ works great.
‘You are still oppressed even if civil rights laws are on the book’ starts to lose white voters.
‘You are still oppressed even if you are rich’ is about where it would lose more than it gains. So you rarely see that, and when you do it is not from successful national politicians.
So in the comments on the recent post on EA, Scott mentioned that there wasn’t much focus put on causes with payoffs more than 100 years in the future, because of the huge expected step change from the singularity. That got me thinking on how focused we should be on global warming as a problem, if the singularity is expected within the next 100 years, which is usually the time frame for when the really bad outcomes from catastrophic GW are predicted. Any thoughts?
The singularity is dumb and won’t happen.
But trying to figure out what will pay off 100 years from now is still next-to-impossible because of the confluence of many smaller changes.
(Edit: All irony from my username aside. It’s a cool concept to noodle about. But it won’t actually happen.)
There seem to be many smart people with relevant expertise on both the “it will happen” and “it won’t happen” sides of the singularity question. Is this a semantics problem? Why don’t you think it will happen?
The singularity seems to assume that 1) an arbitrarily-advanced computer will be arbitrarily smart, and 2) an arbitrarily smart computer can make arbitrary advances, that is, raw thinking power is the only rate-limiting step in the advance of knowledge.
I’ll leave it to others to debate the first one, but the second isn’t true. Computer modeling is incapable of accounting for phenomenon before they’re discovered in the real world and programmed into the model. So the computer can develop beautiful mathematical hypotheses about physics, most of which are wrong, but it will have to wait for boring old physical tests to figure out which ones are correct.
For example, the aeroelastic flutter that destroyed the Tacoma Narrows bridge didn’t show up in the (pencil and paper) models used to design it, because the engineers didn’t realize it could happen. So an in-silico linear algebra model of a bridge won’t dump the wind load on the girders when they reach a certain deflection unless the model is specifically programmed to dump the load, and this isn’t apparent from inside the computer. The only reason we program computers to do it now (or, more specifically, engineers develop mathematical models that do this, and then programmers build them into design software) is because we watched a bridge gallop around in the real world.
So, no, Robot Jesus isn’t going to rapture people into the Machine soon after intelligence is developed; the computer might be able to figure out several possible ways that brains work, but regular boring ol’ lab work, the kind that’s limited by the supply of lab workers and the time necessary to grow rats, will sharply limit the advance because the computer can’t figure out if it’s correct without physical testing.
That explanation seems obvious now that I’ve read it, and I’m surprised I haven’t seen it elsewhere. To recap: our technological advancement doesn’t happen by sitting around thinking up new things or even modeling them, we also have to try things in the real world and learn from mistakes. Computers, at best, can only sit around thinking and modeling, so that’s as far as they’ll get.
Makes sense to me. But doesn’t the singularity-will-happen-and-turn-us-into-paperclips argument also include something about computers commandeering hardware?
A lot of the problem is that right now, and for the foreseeable future, commandeering hardware doesn’t really get you far. To keep going on with the bridge example, sure, maybe the computer suborns a milling machine or a 3d printer to make a model of a bridge, but how does it move that model into a civil engineering lab many miles away, and then install and run all of the strain gages, load cells, load cylinders, etc.?
I’d go further, but XKCD already did a good analysis of this problem: https://what-if.xkcd.com/5/
I guess, if the computer is hooked up to other computers via some kind of network, those computers all work together to commandeer what they need?
I’m beyond my depth here already, but I can sort of imagine the argument.
To continue with the bridge example:
At present, to build a bridge, you need a lot of heavy construction equipment and building materials. AFAIK the necessary equipment is not currently 100% automated – you still need human operators who know what they’re doing. Same goes for the acquisition of the materials – they need to be gotten from somewhere, and almost certainly go through one or more processing steps between the original raw harvesting and delivery to your bridge site, and pretty much all of those steps currently require human operators as well.
TL;DR – there’s a whole lot of automation that would need to happen for computers to effectively commandeer everything.
@Loquat
To be fair to Well…, I was only discussing the computer doing research, that is, it only needs to do work with a scale model of a bridge, which is a much more tractable problem. I think it’s still beyond what the Internet Incarnate can handle without human assistance.
Humans are already designing and operating simplistic remote labs.
@Loquat: Isn’t the automization of everything + IoT part of the narrative though? Like, the machinery that acquires the materials and hauls it and installs it, even if right now it just helps humans do that stuff, could theoretically be equipped with powerful- and connected-enough computers to upgrade to some post-singularity superbrain and then just build the experimental bridge on their own.
Not that I believe this will occur, mind you. Just that this is supposed to be how the paperclipping process happens.
Ability to achieve arbitrary advances is not necessary for a smart computer to achieve world domination. Achieving world domination is a matter of finding the weakest link.
“Humans will never be able to achieve dominance over gorillas! That would require humans to do experiments!”
@anonymousskimmer
I’m aware of that. Remote data collection is very robust. I can log on to a website right now that is gathering data from 64 strain gages at 10-s intervals for a lock gate I’m working with. But those gages were placed by a human being crawling around on the structure. There is no robot in existence that our hypothetical intelligence could suborn to place them.
I’m saying that physical experiments that our hypothetical God Intelligence would require to actually validate any hypothesis it generates will, with current technology, require a lot of human beings to actually set up and conduct. I maintain that this step will limit any proposed rapid advance, since there are likely to be many possible hypotheses for poorly-understood physical phenomena (like much of our current biological understanding) and computer modeling cannot choose between them, since all of them are merely math.
@Reasoner
You’re going to have to articulate this “weakest link” that will allow world conquest through pure sweet reason alone, since merely writing those words doesn’t imply that such a weakest link exists.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say with the gorilla thing. Ancient humans may not have required the scientific method to conquer gorillas, but a computer attempting to advance on the current state of the art will have to conduct some experiments. Like I said before, a theoretical model requires validation in the real world.
But if you built a sufficiently sophisticated model of the physical forces and components themselves? So the flutter is an emergent property of the underlying equations describing the bridge, it’s just that the equations used were simplified in a way which assumed away that possibility?
Maybe I’m just assuming away your objection, or maybe I’m calling for a computer with more bits than atoms in the known universe or something, but it doesn’t feel insoluble once you move past just teaching the computer to use your equations, but faster…
@Reasoner
Computers also have weak links and humans can be expected to target those.
The argument that rapid increase of intelligence isn’t the same thing as rapid increase of knowledge is pretty strong.
I don’t know how much good a GAI could get from finding correlations in existing knowledge that people haven’t noticed.
I’m not sure to what extent a GAI could get people to go along with its projects just by pretending to be other people and/or a normal human organization. Probably a fairly large extent, but I’m not sure how much it adds to the threat.
This, pretty much. Computer simulations that don’t involve more bits than atoms in the known universe, instead involve educated guesses as to which 99.9999+% of reality will be ignored and/or replaced with fudge factors. These guesses can’t be based on analytic proof because that takes you back to more-bits-than-atoms territory. So some of them will turn out to be wrong, and the models won’t match reality.
If you validate the models, by comparing them to real-world experiments, then you can refine your guesses and your fudge factors until you have a useful model. But it’s only useful within the range of validation, because that’s where the fudge factors are properly calibrated and that’s where you know that the parts of reality you ignored don’t really matter. To do anything new, there is no substitute for experiment.
So if Boeing wants to build another subsonic airliner, they’ve got validated structural and fluid dynamics codes that can do most of that work in silicon. If they want to build an SST, they’re going to need a lot of wind tunnel time. And if Skynet wants to Take Over the World, I’m pretty sure there aren’t any validated codes for evaluating world conquest strategies.
@CatCube
I agree with you on the raw science front (and I frankly think the singularity is a wish-fulfillment fantasy), but this is merely a reason for the AI to use its ‘brainpower’ and Bitcoin to develop faster hypothesis testing robotics. And to specialize in limited areas of science (with respect to research outputs, not information inputs).
CatCube points out that even “very intelligent” AI will have a difficult time taking over the world. I agree with his arguments.
But I also just don’t agree with the idea that we’ll get superintelligent AI anytime soon. And I don’t care what “many smart people with relevant expertise” think, because it turns out that trying to predict decades of advances in a field is not something you can reason through or simulate out in your head, no matter how smart you are. Especially you can’t reason through “how we’re going to power through unknown unknowns like how intelligence really works.”
What you can do is look at the history of how people predict advances in fields. And it turns out that what they always, always, always do, and it’s always, always, always wrong, is they predict quick extrapolations of the current technologies to absurdly extreme levels with no detours along the way.
2001: A Space Odyssey was reasonable near-future science fiction when it was written in 1967 or so. It featured a manned mission to Saturn with an AI in 2001. People were like, “Yeah, 35 years or so, pretty much checks out.”
Obviously insert your own joke about fusion being the technology of the future. In Heinlein’s The Door into Summer, written in 1957, he predicts general-purpose robots in the early 1970’s, and essentially roombas (I think better than we actually have roombas) in the late 1960’s.
The Singularity itself was popularized by Vernor Vinge in 1983. That was about 35 years ago, guys. If technology has been advancing exponentially since 1983, then… it sure doesn’t seem obvious to me.
The whole “technology is advancing exponentially” meme was very popular in the science fiction of my youth. The technological singularity is a manifestation of that same belief. It’s been spectacularly wrong for like 50 years at this point. It’s not getting any more plausible.
I hear that back in the 70’s a team of grad students was put in charge of “teaching the computers to be able to speak and understand natural speech.” They thought it would take five years. LOL.
Then again, back in the 50’s no one predicted the internet *at all,* so it’s important to remember that technology progresses in directions other than you expected as well.
Exactly. The reason we can’t predict the world in 100 years has nothing to do with ultra-intelligence becoming godlike, and everything to do with our inability to predict 100 years of sharp right turns coming out of nowhere that nobody even thought to think about.
>The whole “technology is advancing exponentially” meme was very popular in the science fiction of my youth. The technological singularity is a manifestation of that same belief.
This line of reasoning has an obvious flaw: the exponential function has no singularities.
The singularity is a metaphor for a real thing that doesn’t have the literal properties that a mathematical singularity does.
What it actually represents is the pragmatic impossibility of writing and selling commercially-viable long-form written fiction within the SF genre, but set in a scientifically-plausible future.
Given that it has been nearly 30 years since the last time any American succeeded in doing so (Islands in the Net came out in 1989), it’s unsurprising people have mostly given up on trying.
_The Martian_ is the exception that ‘proves’ the rule, by not being a work of genre SF.
John Sandford’s Saturn Race came out last year. Great book, as good as the old Niven/Pournelle’s in the 1980s.
Just because Tor has no SF chops doesn’t mean the chops aren’t out there.
In what sense is “The Martian” not a work of genre SF?
My impression is lots of things from global warming can still get really bad within the next 100 years. At the very least lots of people will die and we’ll lose cool things like Venice. As for the really bad outcomes, I would guess we’re not going to activate any feedback loops that turn our planet into Venus II before that time, but I’d hate to have to stake civilization on it.
My problem with the “things will get really bad within 100 years, therefore we must do X” line of reasoning is that very few people are promoting steps that will actually change the rate of warming to the point of “in 100 years, things won’t get as bad”.
(For instance, people invested in climate change continue (for the most part) to refuse to push for more nuclear power plants.)
Secondly, there’s quite a bit of room between “lose civilization” and “lots of people die.” And we *are* going to lose Venice, no matter what we do, short of a large seawall and constantly running pumps.
One notes that the more we spend on efforts that will have trivial effects, the less we will have to cope with the effects that they concede will happen even if we adhere to all their recommendations.
Particularly bearing in mind that *everyone* is going to die.
I don’t know enough about the situation of Venice and the cost of engineering projects to save it to judge where reality is between “we will lose Venice anyway” and “we can save Venice even with AGW,” but where do you get “lots of people will die”?
One way of seeing the scale of SLR is by the effect on the coastline. The high end of the high emissions scenario projection from the fifth IPCC report for 2100 is about one meter. The rule of thumb for the U.S. Atlantic coast is that a foot of SLR shifts the coastline in by about a hundred feet. So we are talking, on average, of shifting the coastline by about a hundred meters in the most extreme version of the IPCC projection. That’s invisibly small on a geographical scale. There are places where it will be more, of course, and places where it will be less. And that’s assuming no diking.
Warming means hotter summers, which will increase mortality, ceteris paribus. It also means milder winters, which will decrease mortality. I can see two reasons to expect the latter effect to be larger than the former, none to expect it the other way.
CO2 increase increases crop yields–that’s one of the elements of the change we can be most certain of, since it’s the CO2 increase that drives the warming and the effect of CO2 fertilization has been established by multiple experiments for a long time. Climate change might have adverse effects in other ways, but that seems quite unclear–the IPCC retracted the claim of increased drought in the latest report.
I can see arguments for believing that climate change might result in lots more people dying–or lots fewer. But where do you get “At the very least lots of people will die”?
One reason the increase in heat deaths might be larger than the decrease in cold deaths is there are more deaths due to heat. So I would expect “hotter” to be the more dangerous direction to move in. What are the reasons it would go the other way?
I don’t think this is accurate. Currently almost everything I have read shows cold kills many more people than heat.
Future deaths are uncertain but most people think it will be less overall. Cold weather deaths will be reduced and heat wave deaths can be reduced with air conditioning, etc. There is some question about whether increased disease might be a factor but the trend in these diseases is downward over the 20th century while it has been warming.
@Charles F:
Your link is to figures for the U.S. The Lancet article that tscharf links to is for the world.
But I’m dubious about the U.S. figures. The page you link to doesn’t explain how it generates its numbers or what they represent. Look at U.S. mortality rates by month The high is in January, the low in August.
Eh, I’m probably wrong about this.
But, if I were going to argue about this, I’d start by saying that those US death rates include right at the start a not-really-cold-related explanation for the extra deaths in colder months, namely influenza. (though this study says milder winters actually *do* mean less flu except in Britain.)
And I think the Lancet data must be being very generous when it decides what to call a death due to non-optimal temperatures. If we look at the top causes of death according to the WHO we can see that a cause of 7% of all deaths would place third on that list. This could mean there are a lot of subtle ways cold causes people to die indirectly, but I can’t see their methods so I don’t know.
And in the articles you link, it starts by saying that it’s going against a common and hopefully somewhat well-supported position that heat kills more people, and finding that, no, it’s a factor of 20 in the other direction. It’s possible, but fishy. It’s got to have something to do with different definitions.
It does seem off to me, just because cold has always been way easier to prepare for than heat. Dehydration and heat exhaustion are sneaky and it’s hard for me to take a threat as amenable to proper clothing as cold weather seriously. Can you give me a reason to take the idea that A/C is an important factor in reducing heat deaths seriously? Do people really die of heat-related causes indoors, with access to shade and water? Or is the idea to roll out A/C to third-world communities who don’t have plumbing?
In terms of what that all means for the changes a warmer climate would bring, it looks like the cold deaths averted would probably outweigh the heat deaths added, but I would want to look into what the more direct causes were for cold deaths, in case some of them might not be very affected by a shift of a couple degrees, if your rainy months happen to be your cold months, making them warmer might still keep road conditions bad and people indoors. (Obviously there are unknowns on the heat side too, and I’m sure given enough time I could make either side’s unknowns look bigger depending on my bias, so I’ll just stop here.)
And I’m still interested in reason number two why the cold side would result in the larger difference. Assuming reason number one is just that it was the one with the larger starting number.
A further point on the cold vs heat mortality. AGW tends to raise temperatures more in cold times and places than in hot, due to the interaction with water vapor, which is also a greenhouse gas. The more of one greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, the less the effect of adding another–you can’t block more than 100% of the long wave radiation coming up. The colder it is the less water vapor is in the air.
I got that point from something Freeman Dyson wrote, and I think it is correct.
Raising temperatures when it’s hot is generally a bad thing, when it’s cold generally a good thing, so that is a way in which AGW is biased in our favor.
The more of one greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, the less the effect of adding another–you can’t block more than 100% of the long wave radiation coming up.
I had long been under the impression that this was actually false, so I checked again. I now think this is still mostly true, and false in a way that can be misleading, and checking this proved illuminating enough for me to share.
Consider a graph of which gasses absorb which wavelengths, particularly the section for 10-70 micrometers. Water vapor absorbs most of that. CO2’s largest absorption band spans a section that appears roughly half covered by water vapor already.
Conclusion: the more water vapor there is, the less total radiation will be absorbed by CO2. However, the more water vapor there is, the greater an increase in CO2 will have on the percentage of remaining radiation absorbed. This is the way in which I felt the above claim was false. It’s not really false – that overlap between CO2 and water vapor does exist.
This could still be important. Suppose we had a granary full of corn. We want as much of that corn to be good as possible. But gremlins inevitably come in and spoil most of it. We’re living off the rest. We can’t stop the gremlins. However, there’s also the village kids who like to jump into the granary from time to time, and they cause a bit more of it to spoil. We can stop the kids from doing that as often. The town spinster says we ought to, because even though the gremlins spoil the most corn by far, they aren’t as controllable as our kids, and they could make the difference.
That said, if someone has reason to believe we could mitigate the gremlin problem as easily as the kid problem, then the shoe’s on the other foot. Alternately, if gremlins ebb and flow, and a normal uptick in gremlin infestation swamps whatever the kids are doing, then it also makes sense to not spend so much energy on controlling the kids (and instead, say, look into making ourselves more adaptable to fluctuating corn supply).
Meanwhile, we’d also want to know how much of each wavelength is being emitted by the sun. Top graph appears to show that, but I think it’s actually showing what’s *not* absorbed, and by percentage. I’m looking for absolute volume of incoming radiation, regardless of what happens to it. If most of it came in at 15-20, for instance, then CO2 would be a really big deal. However, that’s deep in the infrared – the sun does emit that, but emits much, much more at visible and UV wavelengths – neither of which is affected much by either gas (Rayleigh scattering picks up a fair bit of UV, and that’s most of the effect).
This all gives me the strong impression that the gas absorption issue mostly involves marginal effects (which might arguably still be significant – human life exists in an arguably marginal condition).
I’m not an expert in this area, but my understanding is most heat related deaths are cardiac related and basically pushes already sick people over the edge. Healthy people generally don’t die in heat waves.
For the future heat waves will be better forecasted and communicated. Wealthier nations suffer fewer extreme related deaths for a lot of reasons, and if the future is wealthier then we should be better prepared. For example in FL high school football has mandatory water breaks now when conditions warrant it.
As with all things, one can construct a model to determine any result one wanted. I always find it best to extrapolate from current trends first as a baseline.
Third world? Famine? Migration? War?
Modern famines are practically always political–either due to policies of the ruling government (Ukraine famine under Stalin, Great Leap Forward under Mao) or due to a conflict where one side is keeping food from reaching the other (Biafran civil war). The world has gotten a lot richer over the past century.
Further, why would you expect increased CO2 to cause famines? The one effect we can be sure of is CO2 fertilization, which gives about a 30% increase in yield for a doubling in CO2 concentration for C3 crops, which most but not all food crops are, a smaller increase for C4. The IPCC claimed a link with drought in the fourth report, retracted the claim in the fifth.
As best I can tell, the famine talk is based on guesses about indirect effects of AGW. They could be right–changing climate changes various things relevant to agriculture. But why would you expect them to be? People currently grow crops across a very wide range of climates.
On the margin, AGW puts pressure on political systems, leading to more political strife.
You can’t dismiss famine and war as “merely” political in that context.
@HBC
Thanks. Politics isn’t going to suddenly magically get better, so the kind of stressors that are known t cause war and famine, in conjunction with politics, will do so again.
@David
The countries least likely to benefit from GW are the hottest ones , the ones that are already maxed out. If there were a wonder crop you could grow in the Sahara, people would be growing it. The Co2 fertilisation thing also has a ceiling, which we are close to. We are facing difficult conditions in countries which are already unstable,already highly populated, and already populated with young men.
This is the type of throwaway statement that makes me scream out, “How in bloody hell do you know that?!” I mean, sure, you can say it. I can say the opposite. “On the margin, AGW alleviates pressure on political systems, leading to less political strife.” Without an extremely good model of political systems (which is valid on the fast timescales which political systems evolve and also valid at pretty far future timesteps), how can you possibly compute such a thing?!
@Controls Freak
I think that it’s at least a reasonable first approximation to assume that changes in external factors -> political systems needing to respond. Unless the system though some weird fluke is currently better tuned for a post-AGW world than the current one.
It’s not a data-driven or computed view, but it’s hardly an asspull. “Political systems prefer ossification” is not an unreasonable prior to hold and “change, being the opposite of ossification, causes stress to political systems” logically derives from it.
It is far from a nuanced axiom, and could very well lead to an incorrect conclusion in this instance, but I dispute that it warrants apoplexy.
Improvements in technology can likewise be considered a change in external factors. Political systems need to respond to them. Can we immediately conclude that, on the margin, technological improvement puts pressure on political systems, leading to more political strife?
@Controls Freak:
To a first order approximation, yes, we can say that.
This does not mean that technology is net negative, far from it.
Why?
Because technological change (roughly) always has losers. It has a re-ordering effect on the social pyramid.
Are we to assume that global cooling would have made all these things better and we just got unlucky that the change is in the wrong direction?
It sounds like you’re expressing a combination of two ideas: 1) The social pyramid is a zero-sum game, and thus 2) Pareto improvements probably don’t exist.
Is that correct? If so, I’m not sure why you’re expressing the particular, “Climate change probably isn’t a Pareto improvement,” instead of just saying, “Pareto improvements probably don’t exist.” More importantly, I don’t see why you tried expressing this in terms of “pressure on political systems” and “political strife”. Those things seem to be something else than what you’re arguing for here. I don’t see any conclusion, “…and therefore, pressure and political strife.” I see a really banal tautology: “Assuming that Pareto improvements probably don’t exist, X probably isn’t a Pareto improvement.”
If I’m missing something, I’m going to have to ask you to spell out the details. I know I’m a bit too used to formal proofs, but I really don’t think I’m asking for that. I really just think there are some pretty big unexplained gaps in the chain of reasoning that I’m seeing.
@Controls Freak:
David Friedman claimed that famines could not be the result of any changes in climate patterns as a result of AGW because all famines today are really the result of political strife. I merely pointed out that this chain of logic is faulty.
Changes brought on by climate change will, on the margin, lead to political strife. This will be especially true where local food scarcity is created or amplified, irrespective of whether food is abundant enough to theoretically prevent famine world wide.
And we have evidence of ancient cultures that were wiped out completely by forms of climate change.
@ControlsFreak
Like this:
The countries least likely to benefit from GW are the hottest ones (africa and the middle east).
,…the ones that are already maxed out. If there were a wonder crop you could grow in the Sahara, people would be growing it. (GW will increase temps, increasing temps will increase desertification, desertification will reduce food supplies).
the A&ME countries that will be affected are already politically unstable,already highly populated, and already highly populated with young men.
@HBC
That doesn’t fix the faulty chain of logic you used. You went through some weird tautological route that could equivalently be used to say, “On the margin (to a first order approximation), HBC’s comments on SSC puts pressure on political systems, leading to more political strife.”
I can get way more on board with claims like this. That said, what David Friedman said is actually really important at this stage. Can climate change actually be the proximate cause of local food scarcity, or is modern technology good enough at producing/distributing food that the proximate cause will instead be the faster-timescale political dynamics? If one can plausibly believe the latter, then we’re back to the question of how you could possibly model climate change’s affect on these political systems?
@1Z
What does their political state look like in 2060? If you find it easier, you can first estimate this in the case without climate change. Also, please provide a description of the dynamics of their political system that is valid in 2060. (I’ll allow you to reference the literature here. Something like DICE would be a good example of someone trying (and failing miserably) to do this type of really complicated modeling for economic systems instead of political systems.)
@Controls Freak
You seen to be demanding a complete model of the world’s political system. That is both unreasonable, and unnecessary to make predictions. I can’t tell you who’ll be US president in 2060; I can’t even tell you which countries will be in the EU or even whether it will still exist; and I have no idea what North Korea will look like. But given that the Middle East has been an unstable mess since at least the fall of the Ottoman empire, and there is no sign that this will change any time soon, I’m going to predict it will still be a mess in 2060.
Holding them constant is bad enough.
As for the rest:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/
@Controls Freak
See this is much more constructive 🙂 I don’t know enough game theory to properly fit this in with your suggestions, but fwiw my model is that political systems looove local minima for their problems. Various effects (like technology) can shove them toward a globally lower position but it requires an intermediate increase in strife to get there.
It’s been warming for a 100 years. Examine the trends in agriculture, yields, etc. Here’s just one example, all the others are similar.
Average Corn Yields since 1850
Corn yields are up 600% since AGW started with about 1C of warming (and actually accelerating). A theory that states another 1C of warming will cause widespread famine and decreased food supply is completely counter to the evidence. Agriculture technology effects are far greater than anything climate change does, and it is quite unclear that climate change doesn’t actually improve the situation.
IPCC AR5:
“In summary, the current assessment concludes that there is not enough evidence at present to suggest more than low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the middle of the 20th century due to lack of direct observations, geographical inconsistencies in the trends, and dependencies of inferred trends on the index choice. Based on updated studies, AR4 conclusions regarding global increasing trends in drought since the 1970s were probably overstated. However, it is likely that the frequency and intensity of drought has increased in the Mediterranean and West Africa and decreased in central North America and north-west Australia since 1950”
@rlms
You’re predicting a set of coupled, timescale-separated dynamical systems. I’m pointing out that you’re probably doing it the wrong way round in your head. We have possible ways to do some things without complete models, but you’ve picked one that doesn’t work.
For full disclosure, this is literally the field in which I have a terminal degree. The basic, first graduate course citation for the remainder of this comment is Khalil’s book. He was the first one to really lay down good theory for timescale-separated systems.
@1Z
Aha! You are doing them the wrong way round! I thought so. You see, the first thing you learn about timescale-separated, coupled systems is that you let the fast system converge first, then take a small step forward in the slow system. You’re holding the fast system constant, taking a huge leap in the slow system, and then saying, “Wouldn’t that be terrible for the fast system!”
Since my degrees are from aerospace departments, I like to use aircraft as an analogy. They have timescale-separated, coupled dynamics (orientation/velocity dynamics are fast; fuel consumption dynamics are slow; position dynamics depend). What you’re doing is akin to saying, “By the end of the flight, we’ll have consumed a lot of fuel. That will change the weight (and more importantly, the distribution of weight) of the aircraft. If we hold the orientation dynamics constant and then apply this big change, it could be problematic.” Sure. That’s true. I can do that in my flight simulator. Low and behold, after the sudden change, my orientation gets kicked around, my velocity is nowhere near the desired value of the appropriate lift/drag quantity, and I’m certainly not at the right altitude for efficient operation. I can even make the fast dynamics go unstable if I do this type of thing! (I can make the velocity and orientation dynamics each go unstable, using different mechanisms!) It should be obvious that this type of analysis is simply doing it the wrong way round.
Conversely, I have much fewer problems with doing the other problem (predicting the slow system). With an aircraft, you must assume that the pilot is not an idiot who will crash the plane into the ground (and this is an assumption). But the point is that you can make some decent bounding assumptions on how much throttle she will apply through the course of the flight (and it’s important that we can map this down to something like one output variable). Since we can show that the slow dynamics are insensitive to small perturbations in throttle, we can map out a range of possible fuel usage predictions. But note how it’s really important that we’re just predicting fuel usage. If you tried to walk down this path and say, “Therefore, the pilot will be in a steep climb,” or something else about the fast dynamics, you’d just be blowing smoke.
(Instead, you can do well to make assumptions on fast-system dynamics, justify those assumptions (which we can usually do for aircraft), and proceed in the theoretically-defensible fashion. DICE was an attempt to do this for the coupled climate/economic system. The only problem is that their assumptions on the fast system were bloody stupid and completely unsupportable.)
Similarly, climate dynamics are relatively insensitive to small perturbations in emissions (which we can decently collapse into a one-dimensional, or at the very least, a low-dimensional output variable). Assuming that we don’t nuke the planet or otherwise create an emission trajectory completely outside of the domain of consideration, we can construct a range of scenarios and see how the slow system responds. As such, I have very little problem with the IPCC predictions on climate. It’s when people start doing stupid things like trying to predict fast-timescale economic/political systems based on a slow-timescale input that I get upset.
Since this comment isn’t quite past absurdly long yet, I’ll include a recent news example. I recall various stories about the danger posed by the Mosul dam collapsing – millions of deaths! However, someone pointed out that if the dam collapsed, it would take days for the water to reach the city, and the longest distance someone might have to walk to reach safe ground would take a few hours, max. Yes, the particular timescales involved in this problem still result in lots of damage and bad things happening (just not millions of immediate deaths by water), but it still serves to illustrate a particularly common failure to think fourth-dimensionally!
As I hope is now clear, this is not an isolated demand for rigor. It’s the exact level of rigor that is demanded by my background, and that which I apply as consistently as I can to timescale-separated, coupled dynamical systems. The reason why we can do the correct calculation for an aircraft is that we have a good model of the fast dynamics (with good assumptions on pilot behavior and such), which is not only accurate at each timestep we’re considering – it’s also suitably parametrized in terms of the state of the slow dynamics. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to point out when people make bloody stupid assumptions which trash the validity of the entire thought (whether it is the DICE assumptions on economic systems, holding political systems constant, or assuming that everyone is just going to sit on their hands in Mosul waiting to be drowned by floodwaters). I mean, it’s even worse here, because you’re starting off by disclaiming any dynamical political model, and then simply asserting that the obvious dynamical political model means that climate change -> strife… trivially! It boggles the mind!
Increased CO2 concentration not only increases crop yield, it reduces water requirements for crops, because the plants don’t have to pass as much air through the leaves to get the CO2 they need, so lose less water to evaporation. Increased CO2 over recent decades seems to be associated with a general greening of the planet–the opposite of your claim.
Or in other words, I think the situation is much more complicated than you imagine, with multiple effects of change, often in opposite directions.
Kinda makes you wonder if one could try, say, genetically engineering/crossbreeding cacti (say, prickly pears; I seem to recall those being edible) to be less spiny/tastier/faster-growing.
Or doing genetic engineering on, say, tomatoes so that they can use saltwater irrigation rather than fresh.
We already do. See dragon fruit.
@Controls Freak
I’m well aware of the correct and incorrect way to simulate coupled, timescale-separated dynamical systems, from having this argument with you at least once before! I’m sure you are right about the technicalities, I think you are wrong about the applicability. You say it’s not possible to accurately predict any aspect of political systems, but then how can it be the case that if I’d said “in 2017, the Middle East will still be a mess” 50 years ago I would have been correct? And how do you define the timescale of your systems anyway? Why can’t I say that the environment is a fast system, with all those gases whirling about every second, and politics is a slow system, because there are only elections every 4 years?
If you examine research on AGW effects on agriculture and food supply they typically say things like “the rate of food supply increase will be slowed by AGW”, not that the food supply will diminish overall.
There may be localized supply disruptions and possibly those will increase with AGW but the current trend is the opposite. This Population Bomb mentality was proven wrong so far but its best not to test that at 20B people.
I didn’t say that. It’s probably extremely difficult to do in general, but I’m open to letting attempts to model specific aspects convince me (…and then convince me that those aspects are relevant for the coupled climate system). “Everything is going to stay constant, honest guize,” isn’t very convincing.
Sometimes people guess correctly? I mean, we don’t have to revisit the underpinnings of the scientific revolution and ask, “But if you say astrology is false, then how come my astrologer could have said something 50 years ago that is now correct?”
This is tricky, actually. A tiny snippet of my comment above alluded to this. I mentioned that position dynamics depend. Assumptions will matter, and frankly (and unfortunately) there aren’t always super hard rules here. In strict mathematical theory, people derive asymptotic error terms which shrink as the timescales get further apart. If the timescales get closer together, the error term grows, and we end up in trouble, because we have to simulate both systems simultaneously with pretty high fidelity. The fact that climate systems are much slower and relatively immune to small perturbations in input is important to believing climate models. So…
…if we do this, I’m going to throw out IPCC projections as bunk. Anyway, like I had mentioned, there is some artistry here to make a convincing argument. I’m not a specialist in climate science, but I’ve come to believe the claim that climate is distinct from weather. Instead of starting from gasses whirling about every second, we can have our starting point at the geophysical model (which is a somewhat familiar starting point for me, given the bit of astrophysics I’ve taken). Major drivers of things like temperature are solar irradiance, albedo, heat capture mechanisms, etc. (adding in more complicated and detailed mechanisms as the climate science goes over my head). Specific gasses whirling about are super fast timescale and are averaged out (like individual molecules in a pot of boiling water or a 60Hz cycle on a tungsten light bulb filament).
Now, strictly speaking, I don’t think we can map any of this work directly onto standard asymptotic results (like from Khalil), because we probably aren’t going to be able to put everything into the right vector form and tease out perfectly valid epsilon. That’s where the bit of artistry comes in. In cases like this, there’s not necessarily a single measure yet to authoritatively say, “Yes, this is absolutely timescale-separated.” In various cases, I’ve talked about (and have heard others in the community talk about) particulars like relative natural frequency, appeals to stereotyped motions (e.g., when someone wants to apply averaging to insect wing beats, they often talk about how many wing beats it takes for the animal to execute a yawing maneuver), or a few other (weirder) measures. Yea, it’s still sketchy sometimes, and there are a few cases in the literature where I say to myself, “I’m not sure averaging really applies here, but I can’t conclusively argue that it doesn’t, either.” So right off the bat, we don’t quite have an authoritative way to say that climate scientists are right to separate timescales; we just have a decently good sense that it’s probably working (and I haven’t seen anyone make a great attempt at an argument to the contrary).
For an example of a scenario where I think economic systems aren’t necessarily timescale-separated from something climate-like, I usually refer to the Dust Bowl. It hit, wrecked havoc, and disappeared in less than a decade. That’s not a lot of time for people to move, change crops/technology/jobs, or implement large political solutions that can converge to an equilibrium within the time frame of the phenomenon. (The “good” news for this one is that there’s a lot less coupling – since it was such a short-term climate/weather thing, feedback from human behavior onto the climate/weather was weak. Another thing we need to trust IPCC-type climate modeling is that human emissions are sufficiently coupled to climate dynamics.)
I think the more obvious ‘measures’ of timescale in the last paragraph point more toward economic indicators – people moving, changing jobs, developing technology, etc. I think one of the most obvious measures is that people currently change their behavior in this fashion much faster than any relevant timescale that climatologists work in. Heck, generations literally come into existence and die off faster than any relevant timescale that climatologists work in. I will admit that ‘political systems’ are kind of variable. A lot of political activity is driven by those economic changes, and I often view politics as generally pretty reactive to the issues of the day. There are some aspects which are longer timescale (developments in the Supreme Court are generally slower than elsewhere, for example).
I tend to think I’m right that we can view it as primarily short-timescale (constitutional law may be slow, but it only took seventy years for someone to say, “Forget constitutional law entirely; we’re literally going to war with the rest of the country”), but I’ll admit that it’s a bit sketchy. I’ll just repeat that if we don’t do this, then we’re decently on our way to killing the validity of climate predictions. IPCC is running predictions out to 100 years, and even then, I’m not seeing anything that really maps as a natural frequency of the system… it’s going to be exceedingly difficult to get me to believe that political systems are so uncoupled from the timescale of economics systems and actually so exceedingly slow that we can view the climate system (with natural frequency > 100yrs) to be sufficiently slower.
@Controls Freak
Thanks for the substantial response! The part about timescales was very interesting. Just to clarify: my example where we view the climate as having a timescale of seconds was just a hypothetical, I don’t actually believe it.
From your answer to my question about predicting a mess in the Middle East, it sounds like you believe that generally you can’t make accurate long-term predictions about political or economic systems, and any predictions that do come true are just lucky guesses. But it seems to me that there are lot of predictions I could make and reliably get right on the scale of decades, and even more if I were replaced with an expert.
I’m really mushy on this. In part, it’s because we’re using mushy phrasing. Consider “a mess in the Middle East”? What, exactly, constitutes a “mess”? Can it be in any sub-region of the Middle East? How much of what? Most importantly, how does this statement map onto the two different timelines (w/mitigation and wo/mitigation)?
I’m not going to say that it’s impossible to make long-term predictions. And I could see myself being more convinced of some specific predictions than others. I’m just not sure that this can gel into a coherent model that allows us to make the type of climate change related statements we’d like to make with any sort of sense for how to gauge its likely accuracy.
The most well-known attempt to bring in experts and statistical tools is the Good Judgment Project (i.e., Superforecasters). To my knowledge, they try to word their predictions rather specifically, and they calibrate statistical estimates. Further, as far as I can tell, pretty much everything they test on is on the timescale of ones of years… and there are still reasonably substantial swings in the estimates. And while what they’re doing is cool, it feels kind of deep learning-y to me (if that makes any sense). Sure, there’s maybe some components that are doing something kind of resembling modeling, but it’s really a model-free approach (whereas most economics these days is model-based). I’m pretty skeeved out by that, and I’m definitely skeeved out by the idea of extending it past the domain in which it has been validated (because literally the only reason to believe that deep learning should work is that after you apply it to a problem, you see that it actually worked for your test cases… we have nothing even approaching a theoretical idea of robustness for these things). We may be on the cusp of turning a corner for work in these domains, but I don’t think we’re there yet.
I’ve certainly seen work by authors in the distant past who made observations about psychology, biology, or whatever, and made predictions about future politics that have made me think, “Wow, that was pretty prescient.” But often, it’s in the middle of a bunch of totally inaccurate stuff. I don’t really have methods for picking out good models except hindsight.
In sum, of the three systems we’ve talked about, I think the least-understood system is politics. I would be pretty open to developments that show multi-timescale behavior in political systems (in fact, that’s probably the case). I’m really not sure what the longest relevant timescale would turn out to be. Nevertheless, for the purposes of the instant discussion, I think this type of uncertainty should probably dissuade us from believing claims about how they couple with climate systems without a pretty substantial amount of justification. I really object to any framing that leads people to believing that these types of claims fall under the “Science Says” banner akin to how physical climate models do.
Too many black swans in politics.
Because the effects of climate change are very slow–sea level rise so far of about an inch a decade, warming of about a degree a century.
@Jaskologist- Dragon Fruit.
Those are cool. Thanks.
@DavidFriedman
So? GDP changes pretty slowly too.
Almost none of which is connected to CO2. Co2 effects are modest:-
To get a figure as low as 1C, we would have to do a lot more than we are doing now…
..so what kind of denialist are you?
So what kind of denialist are you? The IPCC isn’t saying “it isn’t happening” orr “do nothing” or “it’s all a commie plot” or “it’s nett positive”.
Feedback mechanisms can turn slow changes into fast ones.
Uh, did you bother to read any of my lengthy comments detailing exactly what things I think are supportable and what things are not supportable? To the extent that they’re predicting the slow climate system with range assumptions on a low-dimensional emissions input, I’m totally on-board with the IPCC. It’s when people start saying stupid things about economic/political systems that are coupled to climate that I get upset. I am not a lone voice in the wilderness on this (though they don’t quite realize the fundamental theoretical problem that underpins their complaints). That doesn’t make me a “denialist”. That makes me an academic who specializes in dynamical systems/control.
This is true in theory. But we have approximately no reason to believe that it is the case here. Are you denying the IPCC predictions? Are you just saying that climate science is false?
It has been pointed out that you can make reasonable predictions about political systems without having a numerical model.
I was responding to David, who proposed a feedback mechanism, namely the way politics exacerbates famines.
The kind that looks at the evidence beyond assertions at the Guardian and doesn’t think labeling people in a debate is a winning strategy.
Here’s the global temperature trend.
“further…1.4C to 2.6C by mid-century”. That statement was made in 2013. So we have 37 years for this to happen. Depending on how you choose start and end points the current trend is somewhere between 0.1C/decade to 0.2C/decade. Let’s call it 0.15.
0.15C x 3.7 = +0.56C by 2050 current trend.
So to get to the avg of 2.0C we need a rate of 2.0 / 3.7 = 0.54C per decade. The rate of warming needs to increase 3.6x from the current rate. Starting tomorrow. Perhaps it will happen, I doubt it. We will see what the future holds.
They are using RCP8.5 for this estimate which is unrealistic. Part of the problem here is the sleight of hand in the Guardian with “further”. The model numbers actually start in 2000.
As I mentioned the effects of agriculture technology far outweigh effects of AGW on the food supply. There is no reason to believe that is going to suddenly stop tomorrow. It’s very likely to get much better, not worse. People who make rash statements about food supply don’t understand the history of agriculture.
Maybe worst case scenarios will be realized, but I don’t take media assertions at their word on this subject. The Guardian is one of the worst offenders.
I wrote a lengthy comment with a paragraph that started with:
I think you should try again.
I read David as claiming that politics creates famines, not exacerbates them. Do you have a reason for me to believe that there is actually a feedback loop from some relevant climate variable?
Going back to the aircraft analogy, I think David said something along the lines of, “Pilots initiate steep climbs.” Ok, it’s still true in general that feedback mechanisms can turn slow changes into fast ones, but I don’t see anything so far that implies, “Fuel usage creates steep climbs, and pilots exacerbate them.”
We don’t know that. The IPCC high emissions projection assumes a continued exponential increase in emissions. I’ve seen it argued that that is impossible, that by the end of the century it burns up more fossil fuel than currently exists to be extracted.
I’m not sure if that is correct or not, but there are other reasons to regard that as a very uncertain prediction–rising prices of fossil fuels with resource depletion, falling cost of alternatives with technological progress in the relevant technologies, mainly solar and storage, perhaps nuclear.
Further, climate sensitivity is very much an open question. If it turns out to be at the low end of estimates and if CO2 output fails to increase, perhaps falls, for reasons unrelated to concerns about global warming, we could be under one degree of warming by the end of the century.
Or we might not–my point is that the estimates are quite uncertain.
The IPCC isn’t saying … “it’s nett positive”.
Insofar as the IPCC offers any estimate of the net effects, it’s that they are negative but small. See Figure 10.1 of the fifth report. For temperature increases of up to three degree C, the biggest estimated impact on welfare they show is the equivalent of the effect on welfare of a reduction in world income of less than three percent.
Several of the estimates for 2-2.5° are about zero, which implies some probability that the net effect is positive.
I’ve discussed on my blog reasons to think that estimates are biased towards overestimating negative effects, with some evidence with regard to Nordhaus’ work.
I’m curious whether your view differs from mine: Given the current attitudes on AGW in the academic community within which people making such estimates work, do you think their work is more likely to be biased towards overestimating or underestimating negative effects?
One of my favorite IPCC quotes:
“Some low-lying developing countries and small island states are expected to face very high impacts that, in some cases, could have associated damage and adaptation costs of several percentage points of GDP.”
How do those compare with the impression one gets from public talk about the perils of AGW?
Not all coasts are the Eastern US one (notably, Bangladesh and the Netherlands have them too).
Obviously true–that happens to be the coast for which I have a number. It’s enough to show the order of magnitude of the effect–as I said, it will be more in some places, less in others.
To see the effects more generally, take a look at the Flood Maps Page. It lets you set the level of sea level rise and see what is then below sea level anywhere in the world. At one meter, the shift in coastline is invisibly small almost everywhere unless you zoom in very close.
Judging by my playing with the page, the most vulnerable coast is actually the Nile Delta.
If people had more freedom to move, sea level rise would be less dangerous.
Open borders (or relatively open borders) would probably be cheaper than trying to prevent global warming.
What are you talking about? Is there somewhere where people are being forced to stay in an exact same location for a 100 years? Beyond a couple sparsely populated very low lying islands and perhaps Bangladesh this argument makes no sense.
I was thinking about Bangladesh, but a fast search doesn’t turn up anything about the number of people plausibly at risk.
If you look at Bangaldesh on the flood maps page, the effect of one meter of SLR isn’t all that large. Obviously some people will have to move, assuming they don’t dike, but not a large fraction of the population.
People routinely greatly exaggerate the scale of these effects. Here’s one of my favorite IPCC quotes:
I’m not arguing about climate change, but I’m interested in the fact that people can get worked up over “losing cool things” due to global warming but are basically non-plussed over losing cool things due to, e.g., developers tearing down old homes piecemeal and replacing them with 10-story cement blocks. Another example: losing fisheries due to climate change is yet another reason we need to take immediate action, while losing fisheries due to overfishing is… problematic, but, meh, I’m not gonna get off my couch over it.
To me, that is a weird aspect not only of the climate change conflict but of many aspects of culture wars.
Is this common? My impression (mostly from living in the Bay Area, which probably biases this) is that there is a LOT of overlap between “cares a lot about global warming” and “anti-development” (and/or “anti-gentrification”)
I’ve never lived anywhere that overfishing is a big local issue, but my impression is that “care a lot about global warming” also overlaps a lot with environmental conservation and “save the whales”.
In my experience, there are lots of regulatory barriers designed to prevent changes in “historic” districts. Back when we lived in Chicago, my wife had to spend quite a lot of time getting permission to have our fence repaired.
I know lots of people who are concerned about all things, but, hey,, another day another attack on straw environmentalists.
I think it is usually a mistake to worry about outcomes more than a century in the future. The reason isn’t just the singularity, which is possible but, in my view, far from certain. It’s that there are lots of ways in which the world could change drastically over that long a period, making any predictions very unreliable.
As I put it when I gave a talk on my Future Imperfect at Google, global warming is a pretty wimpy catastrophe. I have three different ways of wiping out the human race faster than that.
I recall a lecture that compared a number of proposed plans. CO2 limitations and such. Al Gores, for instance, would cost an estimated $28 Trillion over the next century, and would delay global warming by 4 years. So we all burn to death and drown (lobster-style?) 104 years from now instead of 100, for the low low cost of $7 Trillion per year of delay. Maybe there are better plans, but unless they’re more efficient by two magnitudes, they’re not worth it.
Singularity stuff aside, my opinion has generally been that while global warming is indeed a problem, the measures proposed would hardly slow it down, but would significantly hobble the economy. We should wait for more effective and efficient means to fight the problem.
Science and technological development is a luxury, not a necessity. It’s why all the rich western countries do it while poorer subsistence countries work on surviving. Who are the people using electric cars and solar panels right now? The rich people that can afford to spend extra to help on a vague existential long-term crisis.
So if we hobble our economy now, for pathetic gains, we’ll have less money and less strong of an economy later to spend resources are far more effective measures new technology will unlock. We’re on a treadmill moving backwards at 90% walking speed. But rather than exhaust ourselves to hold still or move forward at 10%, we should sit down, build an electric scooter, and actually stand a chance of getting off this ride.
Or, you know, just solve the problem by building nuclear reactors. It’s been almost 50 years since Carter was putting solar collectors on roofs. 20 years ago Global warming really started getting important to worry about, and we were promised solar and wind were the future. 20 years later, and they’re meh. Just 10 years ago solar panels were starting to actually generate more energy than it cost to make them (outside of Arizona/California). And it’ll still be 20 years at least before batteries are economical enough to run any region on only solar and wind power. Then a 20 year implementation period for the rest of the country… etc. Oh, and Fusions totally going to come along and not only be possible, but feasible, and more commercially viable than fission to boot!
Scenario 1) we have time and we don’t have good enough technology, so we should focus on keeping our economy strong and only start actively fighting global warming when we have tools to efficiently do so.
Scenario 2) We don’t have time, which means we don’t have the 40 years to wait for a solar/wind/battery grid, so we should be building nuclear plants like crazy, and should have been for the last 20 years.
The people screaming the most about global warming do not seem to go with either of these scenarios. Which is interesting.
You seem to be establishing some elaborate pyschodrama where the reactions of of a carefully-curated subset of the loudest screamer on the ‘other side’ can be used as moral justification for a particular course of action that you support.
In reality, many science-oriented environmentalists are pro-nuclear. Most others would accept it, but think solar is now going to be cheaper and faster.
Wouldn’t it be better to look at the facts and make your own decision, or at least delegate someone you trust to do so?
Speaking in generalities, democrats believe in and care about global warming and believe it’s a problem worth addressing (as people should). But they, and ‘liberal’ environmental groups even more so, are significantly more anti-nuclear than independents or Republicans. Any basic poll by Gallop or someone else will demonstrate that fact. Many environmentalists are pro-nuclear, but the fact that it’s notable that they’re pro-nuclear illustrates the problem. It’s abnormal for an ‘environmentalist’ to be so.
As far as “looking at facts and making your own decisions” that’s rather difficult for most people, as is finding someone to trust.
Most analyses of Nuclear power are based on dangers or drawbacks of nuclear designs from 40 years ago, while wind and solar always get to be judged on what they promise 10 years in the future – half a century of technology and development and subsidies.
Add on to that that most arguments for solar and wind being economical tend to deliberately obscure the reality. For instance, you will get quotes like:
Which is quoting a bid in India with lower labor costs, and quoting capacity. Quoting capacity makes sense for comparing a nuclear and a coal plant, who both average generating 90%-95% of their capacity. But when solar and wind only generate 35% under ideal conditions, the metric of capacity loses utility. Put simply, if you want to replace a 2GW nuclear plant with solar energy, you’ll need to build 6GW+ of capacity, because you’re collecting all the electricity for the day only while the sun is up, and not always at the optimal Lahaina Noon in cool weather.
And then you need the batteries to store that energy every single night, plus any stretches of days with dead winds and cloudy skies. Storing one day’s worth of emergency power (which should last 2-3 days of bad conditions since you still will generate some power to supplement) would require 50 million KWH (2GW x 24hours). If Telsa reaches their goal of $100/KWH, which they haven’t yet, that’s an extra $5 Billion in batteries on top of a $6 Billion plant in order to become still-not-quite-as-reliable as a baseload power system, and with a bigger carbon footprint.
People look at places like Germany, that has been ramping up their proprotion of solar and wind. But while they’ve been increasing their use of transient sources beyond 20%, their CO2 emissions have stagnated. People look at Germany’s progress and extrapolate wildly that 50% and then 80% is right around the corner, when in fact things get harder the more transient power you add. To quote a wise man – the electrical grid is not a big truck. It’s not something you can just dump stuff on. It’s a series of tubes pushing power at a significant fraction of the speed of light, and it must be balanced. The more transients Germany uses, the more biofuel peaker plants they have to use, which undoes a lot of their CO2 displacement and isn’t all that nice for the forest land.
There is very little honesty to be had in comparing power sources. The geographical limitations of solar and wind, the huge material costs, the lack of scale-ability, and the transient nature of the power while our society relies on base-load reliability – all of it is so often swept under the rug. And it’s done so deliberately, cheifly by liberal environmental groups.
And that’s without getting into the deliberate political sabotage towards the nuclear industry, largely done by Democrats, and accounting for the wind and solar subsidies that are being spent mass-producing substandard energy generation equipment, instead of being focused in R&D to make the energy equipment profitable at scale on its own.
It would be better, but people aren’t looking at the math, and they’re not listening to people who are trustworthy. When people on the Right are stuck in this situation about Global Warming, they’re called ‘science-deniers’, and rightly so. When the Left does the same thing about possible solutions to global warming, with science and numbers that are a lot more cut and dry, they get a pass.
I didn’t see anything in the above figures I want to argue with. If this was a game and I was playing it, I would be building a mix of solar and nuclear, with research focus on energy storage, with a backstop insurance policy of working out how to build a soletta.
My disagreement is with those educated Republicans who have an inner quiet voice that would recommend something not that different. But then ignore it and proceed to vote for Trump in the belief he might just be lying when he says the whole thing is a Chinese conspiracy.
If there is such a thing as objectively wrong in politics, they would seem to be it. Someone who was consciously lying about global warming would not burden the US taxpayer with billions of extra liabilities for flood damage on the grounds that it is not going to happen because global warming has been thoroughly debunked.
My disagreement is with democrats who are so wrapped up in their tribalism that they can’t be bothered to reach across the aisle to the people who do this.
Or, you know, we could not give away free flood insurance. But that’s the sort of dangerous radicalism that leads the way to anarchy and racism!
@1soru1
I’d agree with the same strategy. Hydro wherever I can manage it, nuclear wherever I can’t, and solar in all the sunny places for some extra energy when everyone’s awake. I think we’re personally on the same page on roughly how we’d like the energy grid to look.
But as for “voting irresponsibly.” I don’t think it’s nearly so cut-and-dry as you paint it.
If you’ll forgive me for saying so, while I think he’s going to do bunk-all to fight global warming, I think Trump is a better choice than Hillary on this one specific issue.
Democrats talk about global warming plenty, but I don’t see them actually doing anything to solve it. They throw a lot of money and subsidies at Solar industry rather than R&D. And they get behind niche projects like natural gas so long as they’re small and ineffective. I recall big blue buses down in California proudly proclaiming: “We run on clean, safe natural gas.” It was once the liberal darling of possible new alternatives to coal and oil.
Then fracking comes along and makes natural gas actually economically viable, and in under two decades its displaced half the coal plants in the country and turned back our CO2 footprint by 15 years. We refused to sign the Kyoto Protocols, but we were the closest to meeting their goals out of any large country because of fracking. Natural gas also lets us run cheap peaker-plants which is desperately necessary for backing up solar and wind operations without undoing all the good they do.
So clearly fracking should be regarding as a great, wonderful transitional power source that buys us cleaner air and more time, and should be cheered by the left. Instead, it’s the new ‘most evil thing ever.’
And nuclear power constantly gets sabotaged by Democrats as well. Carter shut down a massive, private, automated, NRC licensed, ready-to-go PUREX reprocessing plant that would drop nuclear waste mass to roughly ~3% of their currently still-negligible amounts. All the time and investment went to waste. Even though private reprocessing was re-made legal a decade or so later, banks got the message that funding anything nuclear means all your money can disappear into a black hole when a Democrat President comes to power. Good luck getting them to fund any private, NRC-regulated venture now.
And then of course Obama went and shut-down Yucca Mountain, for again arbitrary non-technical reasons, as a favor to his good friend Harry Reid who campaigned on shutting down the site. Which again, was an effective campaign promise because Nevada leans Democrat and Democrats are more anti-nuclear than the average voter.
It’s actually a very noticeable pattern. Left-learning groups and politicians will do everything to prevent proper reduction and storage of nuclear waste, and then complain about the (still safe and pathetically small amount of) nuclear waste. Hell, John Oliver just did a 20 minute bit on it a few weeks ago. He was complaining that all the commercial nuclear waste in the country could fit single-stacked on two football fields. That’s two football fields spaced with harmless, freight-train-proof, steel-and-concrete casks that represent the waste from powering the entire country for 8 years. It was 20 minutes of nothing-burger, and his demographic (‘pro-science’ leftists) ate it up. As though any other energy source wouldn’t produce 1000x as much uncontained pollution as nuclear does packaged, contained waste.
What have Republicans done instead? A little bit here and there, but mostly absolutely nothing. And that’s better than actively sabotaging improvements and solutions. All they have to do is stay out of the way and they’re better than pretty much any Democrat. Because regardless of what any individual Democrat’s personal preference might be, they will score points with the very politically active environmentalist groups, and they won’t lose any points with their base, for being anti-any-fossil fuel or anti-nuclear. That’s just the realities of the politics at this point.
Or put another way, Democrats want us to look more like Germany, while Republicans want us to look more like France.
My general opinion is that Republican policies are going to do more to stop global warming inadvertently than Democratic policies are going to deliberately.
If you want to show everyone how much you care about stopping global warming, vote Democrat. If you want to actually stop global warming, vote Republican. It’s cynical but that’s basically what 40 years of energy history says to me.
Now, if I had to pick a Republican to fight global warming, I wouldn’t pick Trump. Actually if I had to pick a Republican for anything I wouldn’t pick Trump. But if it was a choice between him and Hillary, and global warming was the only issue that mattered, I probably would’ve voted Trump. Just for four fewer years of potential sabotage.
Ok, please give me advice on how to do so. Because you seem to be reacting to ‘look at the facts and make your own decision’ as an unacceptably tribalist statement.
@1soru1 says:
It’s not the method that comes off as tribal, it’s the condescension and apparent inability to think that well meaning people might disagree with your partisan choice.
Null Hypothesis lays it out very well, probably better than I would have. there are reasons that people voted for trump (I didn’t, though I can’t say I was sad that hillary lost) beyond mendacity and moral failure. Acting as though that choice is beyond the pale is precisely why someone like him exists. I don’t vote for republicans because I like republicans, I don’t vote for them because I want gay/poor/black people to suffer. I vote for them because while the democrats have laudable goals, their methods for achieving them aren’t just bad, they’re actively harmful, effecting the opposite of their stated desires.
To be fair, Obama tried to get the left to go for nuclear early in his Presidency but was unsuccessful. Nuclear has always been a potential compromise point but this isn’t a subject that compromise is likely. Nuclear has problems, expense and perceived risk. These could be potentially managed but the left wants to make it as hard as possible so it is a non-starter for now. The industry does themselves no favors when they can’t seem to finish any plant under any circumstance.
@tscharf
interestingly the biggest gap on nuclear issues isn’t left vs. right, but male vs. female..
I think you need to check the official stance of almost every major environmental NGO in existence. It’s not even close. Probably 20:1 against nuclear unconditionally.
Not a great metric – existence of NGO’s is a lagging indicator. Here’s a poll: http://www.gallup.com/poll/182180/support-nuclear-energy.aspx
Republicans do like nuclear more than democrats. In fact democratic support for increasing the emphasis on nuclear is equal to republican support for increasing emphasis on coal, and saround half of republicans would like to see more nuclear. I was very surprised by this, nuclear power is serious Big Government. I continue to think that lefty support for nuclear power could turn on a dime if it was framed as a climate change thing and came from Bernie Sanders or equivalent, but this might be typical mind fallacy.
This gallup report: http://www.gallup.com/poll/190064/first-time-majority-oppose-nuclear-energy.aspx
Gives similar information, but it tracks Democrat/Independent/Republican opinions on ‘favoring nuclear power’ from 2016 back to 2001. It provides an easily digestible plot (scroll to middle of page).
The rough trend shown is that overall public opinion towards nuclear was on the rise and peaked two years before Fukushima, surprising enough, and now we’re roughly back to the same opinions as 2001. Republicans averaged about 60%, starting at 55% in favor, peaking at 76%, and dropping back to 53%. Independents average 50%, starting at 47%, up to 54%, and down to 46%. And Democrats averaged 40% favor-ability, starting at 34%, going up to 58%, and back down to 34%.
Or to put it cleanly, Republicans tend to be in favor of nuclear power, while democrats tend to favor it less by 20 percentage points, typically with a majority disfavoring it. Independents tend to sit right in the middle, favoring it 10 percentage points more than Democrats and 10 less than Republicans, and remain fairly neutral on the topic.
I would love for the left’s opinion of nuclear power to turn on a dime, but I don’t think it’s in the cards. John Oliver just went and did a hit piece on nuclear waste, and that alone is probably going to cement a few million Democrat’s opinions for the next 2 years.
We need to keep in mind exactly who killed nuclear power in the 1970’s, The environmentalists. No nukes. There was conflation of nuclear weapons with nuclear power as well as the scary word “radiation”. The China Syndrome. Chernobyl. I am convinced if this history did not exist and academia discovered nuclear power tomorrow that it would be hailed as the great savior for climate change. This prior bias seems to only be removable by the death of a generation.
My first thought on reading this was “Do we have to wait for them to die naturally, or can we accelerate the process with the aid of nuclear weapons?”
And now we have Fukushima. We are not going to get a bunch more nuclear power in the foreseeable future. Much additional in the way of dams is out both for environmental and “low-hanging fruit” reasons (in fact, we’re likely to lose hydro for environmental reasons). Renewable still can’t provide baseload, and any renewable which seems to be getting too good will be successfully opposed on environmental grounds. It’s fossil or freeze in the dark.
The paranoid interpretation of the pattern, which might be correct, is that the enthusiasts for doing something about global warming see it as a useful argument for doing lots of other things they want to do for other reasons. Anything that makes global warming look like less of a threat, whether other ways of slowing it or evidence that it has good effects as well as bad, undercuts the argument and so must be opposed.
Some evidence for that view.
@bean:
This comment is unworthy of you.
NGOs matter, but they aren’t a major political party. The D party has spent the last half-century gunning for any big physical capital investment and holding it hostage until the owner is bankrupt. You either cowboy around cutting and running when the lawsuits, regulatory burdens, or tax hikes rise; or you don’t invest in physical capital in America. I like nuclear power, but I don’t want nuclear plants the size of a railroad car cutting and running around the country to avoid regulations.
One would hope team science could see past these very real problems and examine the total deaths per energy produced. Nuclear power has been proven to be the safest energy source by a pretty large margin. Planes crash and they are very dramatic events but they are still the safest form of travel. Nuclear is not problem free, it is just less problems than the others by many measures. I don’t think we are trying very hard to solve those problems because the nuclear stigma is very strong.
If I’m reading this correctly, global GDP is ~$70T/yr. Pretty good ROI if you ask me.
(Note: not saying the plan is good, I know not much about it. Pointing out that “low low cost of $7T/yr” is a rather silly counterargument)
It’s a pretty terrible ROI as a stand-alone. Those 4 years of slightly-warmer-temperatures aren’t going to inflict $7 Trillion of damage anually. So we’ll be spending a ton of money over time, starting now, to save less money in the future. Doubly inefficient. When put in comparison with other plans, it becomes demonstrably worse.
$28 Trillion, using 50 year old reactor technology and accounting for no economy of scale, could purchase about 5,000 GW of nuclear energy production during that time period. Or roughly 10x the energy used in the United States right now.
Put another way, we could make the US energy grid look like France or Sweden for a tenth of that cost. And instead of cutting US emissions by 20-30% over time, we’d drop them by 70%. More if we start using more electric cars. And there should be a lot of ways a hell of a lot more efficient than building 500 PWRs across the country. This is just a lower limit for the ROI of alternatives available.
It’s a bad deal.
Sounds rather more expensive than $7T
It’s not a digital shift where global warming comes over the horizon and turns everything to lava. It’s incremental. To talk about ‘delaying’ the process by 4 years sits somewhere between pausing climate change at it’s current point for the next four years and then restarting, and waiting 100 years and then holding that climate for four years and then restarting.
The consequences of global warming could constitute more than $28 Trillion over the next 100 years. But it’s not going to cost an extra $28 Trillion in just the 4 years after that.
And I don’t even know why I’m bothering to articulate all this, because you know all this. Stop being pointlessly, stupidly glib. You’re smarter than this, and really bad at pretending otherwise.
@NH: Did you see this? https://codexplainations.wordpress.com/2017/08/11/nuclear-vs-renewable-energy/
My takeaway is (1) renewables really might shoot the moon but (2) better safe than sorry so we should be ramping up to build nuclear.
This is all academic though, we should just do a carbon tax to internalize the externalities and let the market sort it out.
I think that ‘codexplanations’ whatever thing was fairly well done, with a decent format and representation to both sides.
I would agree that the most fair way to do things would be to simply tax carbon (and other emissions as well, non CO2 emissions are bad too) and let the market sort it out.
One contention would be that the political aspect – NIMBY activism – adds some extra cost and risk to nuclear power than a pure marketplace decision.
But my bigger contention is that public opinion is against nuclear in the first place because a full accounting of projected costs for solar and wind isn’t given it’s due. Batteries are always imagined to be much closer and much more economical than they are. Economies of scale can magically make anything dirt cheep, etc etc. When compared with nuclear, the comparisons are rarely accurate or fair.
But, if you could leave it largely to a market with approximately well-adjusted taxes representing carbon and pollution, nuclear would win out. (And if it wouldn’t, it shouldn’t.)
However, my point in my original comment was that nuclear is better, provided that we need to do things now. And thus people saying this is a pressing issue and we’re out of time to solve the problem, but are adamantly against nuclear, are being intellectually dishonest and unscientific.
My general belief is that technology is going to improve quickly enough that we shouldn’t be spending that much effort on fighting the problem now, versus 20 years from now. A carbon tax would help shift R&D and industries in the right direction, but I think that would do more to just push more manufacturing to Africa and Asia, where they produce energy with a greater CO2 footprint. So even a carbon-tax might be counter-productive. I think with a carbon tax, or even before one, the US should consider a tariff on imported goods that approximately accounts for the increased cost of local manufacturing due to environmental regulations.
For something global like CO2 emissions, putting a tax here is just going to cause it to be produced elsewhere, and in greater overall quantities.
Are either of you concerned that we can’t compute this externality? Not just that we can’t compute the magnitude; we can’t even compute the sign of it.
Significantly. That’s why I’m always suspicious of pretty much any government program designed to be for “The Social Good” because in most cases people can’t even figure out what the social good is, much less how to efficiently acomplish it or not do more harm in the process.
I was raising just such a concern when pointing out that environmental regulations are only guaranteed to reduce environmental impact locally. It might globally increase pollution. Which would be a net negative for global things like CO2. So it’s as you say – one can’t even be certain of the sign of the impact for any given policy proposal. It’s a complex web of interactions, and people shouldn’t push forward a particular ‘solution’ with anything but humble caution.
One of the best parts about rationality as I’ve seen it has been the willingness of invested people to talk about possible policy answers in terms of pros and cons. I think it’s also one of the weaknesses – SSC commentators and rationalists seem to me to lean to the logic (rather than emotional) side rather heavily, to the point of not understanding emotional reactions to things.
On the other hand, there is a tendency for some groups of people to reflexively use emotional responses even when the average “reasonable man” would not. Identity activists, esp on the left, get criticized heavily for this, but so do religious sort and agitprops of all stripes.
In a recent example, ESPN changed out sportscast announcers because of concerns that people would react emotionally and negatively to the name of this sportscaster. My initial response was to think that ESPN’s PR response should have been along the lines of “If you’re so hysterical you can’t tell the difference between an ethnically Korean in sports today and a Virginian military leader who’s been dead for more than a century, you’ve got problems that we can’t help.”
On reflection, 1) there’s a reason I’m not in PR 2) even if I was, that’s not charitable and 3) assuming that “emotional overreaction to things” is a state that some people are more likely to fall into than others, what responsibilities do rational people have in dealing with the irrational?
Among the more satisfying answers I’ve seen have been “ignore them” and “punch them until they stop being irrational/awake enough to say stupid things” but I doubt that these will actually “work” in the sense of making people rational. Plus, I’m generally in favor of less punching.
Thoughts?
This is the second reference I’ve seen to the ESPN thing. Everything I know about it was in your reference. Why didn’t Robert Lee just start going by Bob Lee? Have them change his lower third, have people refer to him on-air as Bob, etc. From a PR perspective, removing the guy seems like a huge blunder.
I’m also disgusted at how Robert E. Lee’s memory has been treated. He was one of the most admirable and inspiring Americans in history.
Probably because his name is *Robert*, not ‘Bob’. Some people are particular about this.
And in the south, Robert L. Lastname is pretty common. Before the rise of the ctrl-left, few people would have gotten any traction by claiming that being named ‘Robert Lee’ was a huge crime against humanity.
Agreed. But, people in broadcasting seem to be fairly not particular about this. (No, I don’t have any data to back that up.)
Nobody ever suggested that being named Robert Lee was a crime against humanity. They just swapped the guy, with his permission, from broadcasting one thing to broadcasting another thing. They thought maybe they’d get less negative attention that way. Which is ironic given that now it’s getting a ton of negative attention as Proof the Country Has Gone Mad.
When I first heard about this, I didn’t even make the Robert Lee = Robert E. Lee connection. Robert E. Lee is so consistently stylized with his middle initial that without it I assume it’s a different person.
Yup, same here. First I heard “ESPN removes guy named Robert Lee.” Me: “I wonder what he did.” Later on: “It’s because his name was Robert Lee.” Me: “So? It’s not like he used the E.”
(BTW, use of the middle initial seems to have been common among certain classes in the mid-19th century.)
Why? From what very little I know he seems to have acted typically for a person in his position. But then I admire the pre-Revolutionary Quakers the most.
I just think he was a particularly impressive guy. His life story is kind of amazing to me. Accounts from men who served under/beside/and even opposed to him seem to be uniformly admiring and in some cases even awestruck.
Fair enough.
I’ve been told by people who were actual historians that Lee was actually not a huge fan of slavery and freed any slaves his army ran across.
He was very much a Erwin Rommel type figure, a very good man fighting for his people, even if the reason they were fighting didn’t align with his own principles.
@toastengineer
To some extent – I’m not sure to what – the “Rommel as noble paladin in service of bad cause” thing is a major exaggeration. He was not an anti-Nazi, and appears to have been rather devoted to Hitler. He never fought on the Eastern Front, so we have no idea how he would have dealt with things like the Commissar Order, death squads operating in rear areas, etc.
@toastengineer, I’ve been told by actual historians that when Lee invaded Pennsylvania, slavecatchers came in his wake – with his knowledge – kidnapping black people to sell down south.
What’s more, it seems to me that if your claim were true, Lee would’ve quickly run up against his government – he was fighting in Virginia, a place where his army would run across a whole lot of slaves on plantations belonging to rich and influential people.
The biography I read of Lee, by Michael Korda, stressed reluctance at being too rosy about Lee’s views on slavery. It seems that Lee may have personally found slavery distasteful, and he was genuine in his belief that God would ultimately decide whether America would practice slavery, but he wasn’t any kind of Oscar Schindler to the many slaves he inherited from his father-in-law’s estate.
IIRC, Lee didn’t inherit his father-in-law’s slaves, he was appointed executor of his father-in-law’s estate with instructions to free the slaves in five years. This he faithfully did. Custis (the father-in-law) deserves most of the credit and/or blame for this; Lee does not appear to have been unusually cruel or unusually kind in carrying out Custis’s instructions; mostly he seems to have wanted to be done with the whole business and back in military service where there weren’t any slaves to deal with.
If we’re tearing down monuments of generals for having owned slaves, that points to George Washington and Ulysses Grant – though both of those did ultimately choose to free their slaves.
The will instructed him to free the slaves as soon as practicably possible, no later than 5 years.
Lee appears to have interpreted that as 5 years, full stop.
It also required him to pay off the debts of the estate, which probably couldn’t be done in less than five years (or longer, though by then the point was largely moot).
That’s right, I was misremembering. He was executor of the estate, and was to free the slaves in five years. The slaves thought they would all be free as soon as Custis died, and they were used to being treated extremely leniently, which was probably part of the reason the estate itself was in such disrepair–the slaves weren’t actually doing much work. Lee had to explain to them that they were not free yet and that they needed to start doing work, and that probably didn’t go over well. He no doubt had to punish slaves for various infractions, and he probably did that according to the customs in place in situations like that, which today look pretty bad (stripping slaves to the waist and whipping them in front of the others and so forth).
I believe the statement that Lee wished the whole ordeal could be absolved so he could go back to his day job is probably true/accurate.
It’s complete horseshit, of course, propaganda spread by 150 years of slavery apologists.
That entire article reads like a one-side screed sourced by other one-sided screeds. It sounds more like “horseshit, of course” than the claim it purports to dismantle.
It reminds me of Rommel apologists. Sure he fought for a regime engaged in genocide and aggressive destruction of other states, but he did so while feeling bad about it! Both Rommel and Lee were generals for regimes who not only were the aggressors in conflicts, but had as reasons for their aggression deeply immoral practices. You can’t come out of that looking rosy, no matter how much you adhered to “rules of war”.
Yes it is one-sided. In the matter of slavery, like Nazism, people generally have to pick a side. Which side are you on?
Of course Lee, being a human being, was not a one-sided monster. Maybe he loved children and was kind to animals. That doesn’t really matter; we are talking about how to interpret his political and military role. There’s the Lost Cause narrative that has been flogged by generations of slavery apologists, and then there is the alternative narrative preferred by the enemies of the Confederacy; that is to say, people who oppose slavery. Apparently the war is still going on and thus one must pick a side; neutrality is not an option.
In the matter of slavery, like Nazism, people generally have to pick a side. Which side are you on?
The side that doesn’t advocate initiation of violence, but that also doesn’t misrepresent the other side and then make implied threats about which side I should choose. (Hint: there’s more than two sides here.)
What “implied threats”? Am I going to reach through the internet and throttle you? It’s not me but history who judges people who think they can remain neutral during great moral struggles. At a certain point, if you aren’t willing to fight evil you are complicit with evil.
We may be approaching such a moment — fascism is most certainly one of those kinds of defining evils, and we seem to be slipping rapidly towards it (I know this is contrary to the position of this blog, which seems to be that everything is fine and people should just be nice to each other).
No way! Why should I change? He’s the one who sucks.
That’s an excellent question, and I think the best answer is to work to convince people:
1. Only about things that you can convince them of;
2. With respect paid to their emotional states;
3. Weighted towards general principles; and
4. If it can be done in a reasonable amount of time.
1 requires some work to get good at, and definitely prejudices you towards talking to people you know well. 2 seems silly, but is essential. Emotions are, generally speaking, intellectual shorthand for more complicated judgments, and a serious judgment doesn’t tend to come from nowhere. Rather than dismissing emotional states, it’s better to figure out where they come from and translate them into more explicit statements. 3 is standard practice for the community, I should hope, and 4 is both obvious and very much worth reminding oneself about.
An example would be: my mother, a very intelligent person, was (understandably) outraged about Trump’s reaction over Charlottesville, and was seriously worried about white nationalism in America. I acknowledged her anger and fear as both being worthwhile, and then walked through the points about Trump and about the white nationalists (e.g. Trump’s a narcissistic moron who isn’t capable of holding even a repugnant moral principle like neo-Nazism, this was a country-wide white nationalist march that got a few hundred people in contrast to the Women’s March) to show that the worst fears weren’t a serious threat. Then, I talked about a general principle of “widening the scope” from the neo-Nazis to conservatives in general, and how it amplified hate and radicalization among Middle-Eastern Muslims after 9/11 and how the same could happen here. She acknowledged the argument, and agreed with the conclusion: that the white nationalist principles held there were awful and should be fought against, and that Trump is a despicable and weak leader, but that there was no need to panic about there being some massive representation of them in America.
I think this is a reasonable model to use. It isn’t a magic bullet, and it takes work, but things worth having tend to be just that. Does it all make sense?
I’m very sympathetic to your point of view.
On the other hand, when you’re someone like ESPN who’s trying to appeal to the masses, irrational reactions like that matter among the marginal viewer. For an example from politics – where candidates also have to appeal to the marginal voter – look how Robert Heinlein narrowly lost the 1938 Democratic primary to an opponent who was a registered Republican. Commentators point out that Sudeten Nazi politician Konrad Henlein had been making headlines shortly before the race.
…which is similar to the reason most buildings don’t have a 13th floor; even if the builder is completely free of superstition, they’re worried that potential tenants will possibly be superstitious about that, or if THEY’RE not, they’ll be worried about their customers, clients, vendors, or employees being so… so if there’s even a hypothetical person somewhere down the line who won’t want to go to the 13th floor because they think it’s bad luck, they’ll play it safe by skipping the number.
I think that’s clearly the case here – no one seems to be saying “having Robert Lee in town would really offend me”, they’re all worried about some hypothetical third party feeling that way.
From ESPN’s perspective, a whole bunch of stories saying “isn’t this Robert Lee thing a crazy coincidence, I wonder if some easily confused people are going to be offended/triggered?” is still more trouble than it’s worth.
I generally don’t use the jungian typologies but find their calling their T and F functions both rational is useful in this sort of analysis.
Extreme Ts find it rational to avoid various symbolic landmines. No surprise those of other types would as well.
This works fine so long as all of us agree on what symbols equal landmines, and which are just rocks that are part of the landscape, and have been so for decades.
I read somewhere that ESPN and/or Robert Lee himself (source was unclear which exactly) was concerned that he might become the target of internet memes, presumably from the deplorable section of the internet, if they went ahead and had him do the Virginia game. I’m not sure how much a memer could really do with such weak tea as that, but it was supposedly part of their reasoning.
Yeah. It’s worth pointing out that the whole thing started out as an internal personnel move, with ESPN offering to swap Robert Lee to a different game and Lee accepting the offer. We’re only hearing about it because somebody leaked it to Outkick the Coverage, and a bunch of loud voices on the internet saw an opportunity to get their kicks in.
I think reason vs. emotion is a false dichotomy, and I think recognising it as such can help with this. There are certain specific emotions that routinely interfere with the process of trying to believe true things about the world, such as fear of being wrong. There are also places where lack of emotion routinely interferes with the process of trying to believe true things about the world, such as when you don’t care enough about an issue to look past your first judgement.
This is particularly true when you’re trying to understand someone that you disagree with. Understanding how someone thinks and understanding how someone feels are not separate processes.
Most of the time, if you want someone to listen to you, a good first step is to listen to them. Believe them when they tell you what matters to them, make responses that address their particular concerns, stay on topic when sharing your views rather than pivoting to your favourite semi-related hobbyhorses. People like to be engaged with as people.
As an answer to the question ‘is Trump racist’, “You Are Still Crying Wolf” is unimpeachable.
There are, however, other questions that could have been asked. Ones like ‘does Trump bring any level of moral seriousness and credibility to opposing white nationalism?’.
Cal in Nazism, fascism, white nationalism, white identity politics, or whatever, there has, post-WWII, been a bipartisan concensus that there was something there that needed opposing. Now that’s a 1.5-partisan consensus, because Trump clearly does not hold that position. If only becuase that is a political view, and Trump doesn’t really have political views in the conventional sense.
How that will play out remains to be seen. The judiciary are still opposed, but Trump has the power of pardon and a demonstrated will to use it. Numbers of supporters may not be large, and smaller than counter-protestors. But the media/internet footprint inherently required to bring out those larger numbers is immense. Which risks a backlash, if only in the form of posts like this saying ‘the threat is small, why bother?’.
A lot of things are only impossible because people act to prevent them happening.
See, I’d strongly disagree that there has been a consensus that Nazis/white supremacists/etc “needed opposing” in the last 30 years. The consensus seemed much more that they were a vanishingly small irrelevance that could be safely ignored. They were a line item on The Daily Show and little more.
“I see a dangerous animal on the outskirts of town. It has fur, and is on four legs. He appears to have sharp teeth. It’s a wolf.”
“If you will notice we are in Australia and there are no wolves here. You, sir, are crying wolf.”
…
“Well then, I guess it was a dingo that just carried off your child. I tried to warn you.”
Scott does not understand how populism works.
“Well then, I guess it was a dingo that just carried off your child. I tried to warn you.”
I think if they led with “look over there, that animal has your child!” instead of lots of weirdly specific details followed by insistence that it’s a wolf, they might have gotten better results.
Maybe I’m missing the point?
Scott has always agreed that Trump is dangerous; he’d just prefer that people focus on the ways in which Trump is actually dangerous, as opposed to this weird theory that he’s a closet Klansman.
Scott spends a whole lot of time detailing the minute ways in which Trump is not a wolf.
He also spends a lot of time trying to make the case that Trump does not resemble a wolf at all. This is where he goes horribly wrong.
He thinks Trump saying things like “I’m the least racist person you know.” and “Look at this rainbow flag I’m holding.” mean that Trump is 180 degrees from bigoted. But this has never been the case.
Scott would easily recognize the form of argument if the statement made was “I’m more in favor of free speach than anyone you know.” But because the values represented by “free speach” and “pluralism” are in tension with each other, he fails to recognize what Trump does.
As to “An animal has your child” the warning was meant to prevent it from occurring, as it had not happened yet.
And, given that dingos are descended from domesticated dogs, if you just said wild animal we could have quibbles about whether they actually counted as wild. This is the problem with failing to taboo the word “racist” when considering the argument. Scott fell victim to the definition problem.
My critique of Scott is he is an American living in the US, and unlike folks from other places (South America, Eastern Europe, etc.) has not developed a nose for these things.
I recognized Trump’s smell immediately when he ran, as a USSR ex-pat.
The recognition was “olfactory,” not definitional.
I don’t think that is it. Plenty of people in the US recognized what Trump was doing.
Scott is non-neurotypical. He doesn’t process the emotional appeals intuitively.
As a fellow soviet ex-pat I call B.S. Frankly the thing that smells the most totalitarian are the people acting like Red Guards, namely the alt-left.
You call BS on what I smelled in June?
I think he’s calling BS on your entire premise that ex-USSR residents have some special power to ‘smell out’ people like Trump, whatever that means.
And I agree with him. You’re giving us a meaningless anecdote and claiming some form of group knowledge that no-one outside Eastern Europe has. And if ghi is a USSR ex-pat then I’d say he has every right to call B.S. on everything you said.
Americans never had to deal with real totalitarianism on home soil, or folks with those leanings, like our good mutual friend Donald.
Eastern Europe people have, South American folks have (because of folks like Chavez). So they recognize it, right away.
Jokes like “just cancel elections, and give it to Trump.” It’s not jokes, it’s probing for what is possible.
Asking folks for personal loyalty.
Demagoguery.
All this stuff is very familiar.
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My prediction is, since Americans are getting some first-hand experience now, they will be a lot more leery of this stuff much earlier.
Trump smells to me as totalitarian as Berlusconi, in other words, nothing like the totalitarianism in the vein of USSR or other totalitarian movements after WW1. Maybe one could make comparison to the post-Soviet political corruption.
@Ilya:
The comparison to Burlusconi also occurred to me. Do you regard him as totalitarian?
Yes, let’s see what they think of Trump. It would appear that they overwhelmingly support him and have elected similar right-wing populists as heads on their own governments.
I find it interesting that the people now comparing Trump to Chavez tend to be the same people who were until recently singing Chavez’s praises to high havens.
“I’ll take outgroup homogeneity bias for $200 Alex”
I never liked Chavez.
David: I want to make a distinction between a totalitarian system of government (which clearly neither Italy nor the US are at the moment) and people who have totalitarian leanings.
People like Berlucosi, Chavez, Putin, and Trump have totalitarian leanings. In a society with healthy institutions, like the US, they are resisted. In a society with weak and unhealthy institutions, like Venezuela or Russia, they gradually, or not so gradually, take over.
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These people, even if they don’t accomplish a full takeover, are corrosive anyways. They can burn commons and so on, for short term gain (for example cooperating norms). Witness Trump just blithely suggest the Republicans defect on all iterated games” because the Democrats will do it anyways” (regardless if true or not).
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I said this before, and I will say it again, the most dangerous thing about the hard core Trump supporters isn’t that they have bad taste in champions, or even their poor epistemic hygiene (ask_thedonald reddit is great reading for that), but that they are willing to burn everything, every shred of mutual cooperation that’s been carefully built up over time, to win.
@Ilya Shpitser
Funny, I know a lot of them who thought exactly the same thing about Hillary and Obama. I don’t say this as a gotcha or tu quoque, but to raise a more interesting question. Let’s assume that you don’t want to burn everything down, but think you’re fighting people who do. What is the proper response?
@Cassander: Definitely a hard problem, but here is one thought: keep away from the meta-level.
When you are worried that your opponents might be willing to destroy society, it can be tempting to get all meta. Instead of talking about e.g. redistribution or health policy, one might talk about corrupion, or the rule of law, or other things that everyone values. This seems like a good idea, since broadly shared values like these are a good foundation on which to appeal to sane people on the other side.
But this also raises the stakes. Rather than trying to show that one’s opponents are incorrect, the argument becomes: who is more corrupt, who defected first, who is the greater danger to peace and the rule of law. It is likely to backfire, and I think it is currently backfiring for everyone who is attempting it.
So the answer to leftists threatening to undermine democracy by ‘importing’ foreign voters is to ask the object-level questions: what exactly are the costs and benefits of immigration and to whom do they accrue? The answer to rightists threatening to increase police impunity is to ask the object-level questions: to what extent will this result in less crime, rather than more?
@Ilya
I don’t think we have serious disagreements about the concrete issues, but I think the word “authoritarian” would be more descriptive instead of “totalitarian”. To me, totalitarianism implies grand plans, and not just any plans, but totalizing, comprehensive transformation of the whole society, vision that mandates certain rigorous norms to all aspects of each individual life. (Opposed to the free society in the sense of Popper and alike.)
The motivation of authoritarianism is often simpler: seeking and maintaining (and providing ideological rationalization of) personal governmental power by any means necessary. More like the imperial rule of Napoleon or even better, Napoleon III, than the great dictators of WW2.
That’s fair.
The devil lies in the “any means necessary” clause. All politicians seek personal governmental power. What has Trump done that tips him over the line into authoritarian?
Asking for personal loyalty, disdain for existing institutions and checks on his power (the judiciary especially), pardoning people loyal to him without any kind of review, governing-via-twitter, joking about canceling elections, disdain for the free press, no show of empathy (look at his reaction to the Texas thing), nepotism, lying as loyalty check (see the apocryphal story of bringing a deer to Chinese imperial court: “this is a horse.”)
I can go on.
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Just to be clear, since you are asking for clarification: you _don’t_ think Trump has authoritarian leanings? That’s amazing!
@Jaskologist
Would it be fair to say that businesses tend to be run in a more authoritarian fashion than governments do in the developed world? Trump acts like he is the CEO of America, Inc. – he started off by trying to bring a bunch of people who would (at least in theory) be personally loyal to him, in the fashion of someone trying to stack a board of directors. The sort of division of power and checks and balances the US government has doesn’t really exist in the business world, does it?
In a way, it’s good that he is so unused to government, tempermentally unable to work within it, or both – someone who could work within the system better would be a considerably more effective authoritarian.
@Ilya
Once again, hone your critique. Piling 5 iffy criticisms on top of 5 good criticisms doesn’t make the argument heavier, it dilutes it. Governing-via-twitter is not authoritarian, and if it is, I’m not sure why I should care.
@dndnrsn
Basically, I think people are calling Trump authoritarian to try to associate him with (more) negative affect. When we think of the bad things about authoritarians, we aren’t thinking “they’re like CEOs.” When we think about the bad things about Putin, it is also not whatever resemblance to CEOs he may have.
I think the intended chain is something like this:
1. Trump is a CEO and governs like one.
2. CEOs are more authoritarian than presidents.
3. Therefore, Trump is authoritarian.
4. Putin is authoritarian.
5. Therefore Trump is like Putin.
And I don’t think those leaps are justified. If you want to tell me Trump is like Putin, tell me how without the layers of indirection. If you want to tell me he’s authoritarian, be specific, and do so listing the bad ways instead of the relatively neutral ones. (And please don’t let those reasons ways be “he enforces immigration law differently from how I want him to.”)
Like others said upstream, I think a lot of this comes down to how well you think our institutions were running before Trump, and who you think shot first.
I think Trump has a strong authoritarian streak.
To quote noted reliable source Wikipedia,
2 (Trump is clearly driven by emotion, “only I can save you” message, etc) and 4 (consider the role his daughter and son-in-law play) seem the most applicable.
Trump would probably be much happier if he could ignore all the “red tape” (checks and balances, division of powers, etc), have people who are loyal to him personally (rather than the system as a whole, the office of president, whatever).
Making emotional appeals to the voters is a good election-winning tactic, so point number 2 could probably be applied to most modern political leaders. As for ignoring checks and balances and division of powers, the power of the US Presidency has been growing since at least the 1930s, so again, I don’t think Trump is significantly worse in this respect that any other recent President.
@Jaskologist
I think it works more like this, ha ha.
0. Trump is Hitler.
1. Goto 0
@tscharf
Less of this please
@the original Mr. X
Has a previous president attempted to work around the ordinary way of doing things as much, especially with the “putting their kids in position of authority” deal? I would not disagree with the statement “presidents often have mild authoritarian streaks” but I think Trump’s is stronger than mild.
That one was famously true of the Clintons. I suspect true of many successful politicians.
@hlynkacg
Is humor banned? It’s a joke, lighten up.
FYI: Google “Trump Hitler” returns 23,000,000 results.
@dndnrsn
Again, I think the big divide here is that I don’t see the things you’re talking about as new. Every politician appeals to emotion (“They’re gonna put y’all back in chains” – Joe Biden). Most our previous presidents have put their family into positions of power. Hillary’s path to power ran through her husband’s presidency, W was the son of a president, and his brother became a governor. Obama admittedly hasn’t set his kids up, but they’re still young, so growth mindset. And I think every president expects their cabinet members to be loyal to them.
The rest of your critique, and the most directly relevant to authoritarianism, is familiar to me in that I heard it all from the right about Obama. Obama rather famously declared “I’ve got a pen and phone”, and most of Trump’s actions have been in that same vein.
In fact, most of the actions the left has been most upset about have been a simple matter of issuing edicts cancelling Obama edicts.
Remember the upset about our withdrawal from the Paris Treaty? Trump was able to unilaterally withdraw from it precisely because it wasn’t a treaty; Obama never submitted it to the Senate for ratification like one is supposed to do. That would have required compromise and Senators going on the record, but it might have also given it sticking power.
The transgender military ban? Undoing a 11th-hour declaration from Obama right before he ducked out of office, again without Congressional input.
The wall? That one admittedly wasn’t related to an Obama edict; it was declaring that he would actually execute a law that Congress had passed back in 2006 (Obama and Clinton voted Yea in the Senate).
I’ll keep reiterating this: the divide is between those of us who see this as a new thing, and those who think it is the same old with the sides reversed. I would like all my left-ish friends to understand this: the way you feel under Trump is how we’ve felt under your rule. The boot is stomping your face now, but it’s been around for a long time.
@Jaskologist:
You are somewhere between a straw man and a weak man on the subject of “Trump has authoritarian tendencies”.
I won’t try and generate an exhaustive list. Let’s just take a few examples.
Trump has repeatedly called for violence against both his political opponents and those suspected of crimes. For instance, he recently said in Boston:
Then he pardons Joe Arapio for violating court orders specifically aimed at preventing him from violating the civil rights of those of Latino decent, illegal racial profiling. Someone who has a reputation for running a police force that engages in exactly the kinds of violence he is encouraging in that statement.
This is a repeated pattern. He says things that are outrageous, people claim he is being misinterpreted or is speaking hyperbolically, but then his actions conform to the pattern set forth by the speech. These actions subvert the rule of law and challenge the existing norms preventing abuse of the law by those in executive positions.
Attempting to intervene in various Justice Department matters and the “Muslim Ban” are other examples of this.
@Jaskologist
I think HeelBearCub raised some of the points. I’m not a Democrat – I’m not even an American – and previous Democratic administrations have done things I found troubling. However, I think Trump has a stronger authoritarian streak than Obama did, because he’s used to operating in a different environment, where authoritarian tendencies can be indulged more – business, instead of politics.
I would say Trump has a more authoritarian streak than Obama emotionally, but it doesn’t really matter that much in practice. Both are going to use their executive power to its fullest to achieve their agenda.
@cassander
To build them up again. Entrench the need for a supermajority vote for federal and SCOTUS judges in the US Code instead of Senate rules. To make things run, also entrench procedures for selecting and appointing these judges which legally forces compromise when necessary in order to appoint judges. There are many ways this could be done, if one actually cared about a functioning government instead of grandstanding.
@tscharf
Obama didn’t try to recess appoint Merrick Garland, despite many encouraging him to do so.
Yeah. Racist or not, Trump is not going to combat or condemn racism, and it turns out that’s really important to do, so the country is likely to become more racist.
It took Maricopa County ages and ages to actually convict Arpaio of anything, and Trump just undid all that work. It doesn’t matter WHY. It does matter than the next racist sheriff who wants to profile minorities, beat up prisoners, and house people in inhumane conditions will go for it, because he’ll know he can get away with it. That’s concrete harm, so it doesn’t really matter if Trump is racist.
He thinks Trump saying things like “I’m the least racist person you know.” and “Look at this rainbow flag I’m holding.” mean that Trump is 180 degrees from bigoted. But this has never been the case.
He’s never made the case that Trump is a tolerant person or that he is “180 degrees from bigoted.” That’s a straw man, and one that keeps coming up over and over. His actual claim was that Trump is not substantially more bigoted than most old white conservative guys, he just has less of a filter.
There’s a whole lot of semantic tail-chasing here, because terms like racist and bigot have multiple meanings that get constantly conflated.
Is Trump “racist” in ways that involve implicit biases, sloppy thinking, and the kind of casually offensive generalizations that lots of people make? Sure. Is Trump “racist” in the sense that he supports policies that are bad for certain minorities? Sure (though the same could be said of Bill Clinton and probably Hillary as well).
Is Trump “racist” in the sense that he supports white nationalists or white nationalist policies? No.
The third question is the one on the table and the one that everyone is actually debating about. Very few people, except Trump’s supporters, are arguing that he hasn’t said a lot of offensive things, or that he’s not prejudiced in certain ways. But garden variety prejudice, while still harmful, is worlds apart from “actual white nationalist or white nationalist sympathizer.” It is qualitatively not the same thing. Both should be taken seriously, but demand very different types of responses.
But there are a lot of people who are obsessed with the idea that he is in fact a literal Nazi, that the contents of his beliefs don’t significantly differ from the beliefs of literal Nazis.
To use the wolf/dingo metaphor, I think it would be as if the conversation went like this:
“There’s a wolf over there!”
“I see it, but we’re in Australia so that’s probably a dingo.”
“No, it’s very clearly a WOLF. And the fact that you’re saying it’s a dingo means that you’re probably a secret wolf-sympathizer and that you’re part of the deep rooted pro-wolf conspiracy that controls our society. I can no longer trust you.”
“Uh…maybe we should just go check on the kids and make sure they’re–”
“No, you are dodging the real issue. You have to call it a wolf. Let me hear you say the name. WOLF WOLF WOLF.”
“Let’s just say it’s a canine of some sort.”
“You’re not even a wolf sympathizer, you’re very clearly a wolf wearing a human costume. BACK, BEAST.”
I’m concerned about a lot of stuff Trump is doing, and my personal opinion is that he’s the worst President we’ve had in my lifetime. I wouldn’t be arguing that he’s not a white supremacist if there weren’t large numbers of people obsessed with the idea that he’s a white supremacist and wanting to constantly talk about that.
If someone wants to discuss what we can do, in concrete terms, to push back against some of Trump’s more destructive policies, I am all ears. But if someone’s answer to that question is “do a lot of soul-searching as a nation about why we elected a Nazi” or “dress in all black, go to counter-protest a Nazi rally, and set something on fire” then they probably have nothing useful to say.
Someone who believes that Trump is a wolf probably thinks the Nazi/antifa clashes are where the heart of the conflict is playing out. I think those clashes are a massive distraction.
And yes, I realize that by arguing this point I am contributing to the distraction. But that’s the thing about distractions. They’re distracting.
Is he willing to listen to someone pointing out that a policy he supports is bad for certain minorities and react in absolutely any way other than doubling down?
No.
Wait a minute, I thought he was a Russian mole. I’m so confused. So he is really a Russian Nazi? I have no idea how he got elected on that platform. Amazing power of persuasion.
Like punishment for murder?
“Wait a minute, I thought he was a Russian mole. I’m so confused. So he is really a Russian Nazi?”
I know you are trying to be funny, but Putin et al are well known for using far right groups for “various ends” in the West.
I have no idea what you’re alluding to here. I’m talking about a categorical stubbornness on Trump’s apart and an unwillingness to accept criticism on any issue.
I agree with you those clashes are a distraction, and I believe a distraction of the left and corporate-left media’s own making.
Exceedingly few people on the right care at all about David Duke or Richard Spencer. You will never see “friend of the show Richard Spencer” as a guest on Sean Hannity. You will never see Ann Coulter cite “the scholarly research of Dr. David Duke.” These people would have no platform (besides their own tiny echo chambers) if it were not for left-leaning media seeking them out and giving them one.
The proper response to a handful of nazis/kkk having a march is…ignore them and go about your business. They show up, spout a bunch of crap nobody cares about…and go home. Instead people got riled up, set out to the streets to fight them, and now three people are dead and it’s national news.
“Governing-via-twitter is not authoritarian, and if it is, I’m not sure why I should care.”
Sure it is — he had a thought and spewed it out. Didn’t talk to anyone. Caught aides by surprise, etc. Random thought is now policy. If that’s not authoritarianism, what is?
Re: why you should care: how did you think governing is supposed to work, random whims?
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edit: sorry, wrong subthread.
also bad logic to be honest
you’re taking “impulsive” to mean “authoritarian”
it’s especially worth noting that he usually only does this with stuff that he has the power to do, and it’s even his job in a sense to do these things (we can quibble constitution, but it seems clear that the public and the other branches of government have allotted these duties onto the presidents, probably because it’s easier on everyone else). So what’s the issue?
We are talking about “authoritarian leanings.”
Doings things impulsively or in a premeditated careful fashion is an issue orthogonal to authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is imposing your will upon the world without asking for advice/guidance/feedback. You can do that carefully or impulsively.
Governing-via-twitter is authoritarian for this reason (and also impulsive, but that’s incidental).
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“After consulting my generals I am banning trans from serving” was authoritarian (also a lie — he didn’t consult anyone and the brass were completely surprised).
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edit: I think Jackologist above is now switching to basically defending authoritarianism, e.g. saying there are positive aspects of authoritarianism, and so on.
The fact that he’s defending authoritarianism in the political context in the US is useful info for me, re: Trump supporters.
I definitely have a model of Trump supporters as being on a more authoritarian and more xenophobic ends of the spectrum, but I try to only base stuff on things Trump supporters actually say (here and on Ask_theDonald).
agreed
So imposing your will upon the world with feedback isn’t authoritarian? Why? If I ask a dozen experts what everyone should eat to be healthy and then I make everyone eat that, is it less authoritarian? Just because it’s “correct”? And I put correct into question marks since it’s hard to be correct at that scale regardless.
Well, CEOs, presidents, military officers are, in fact, in charge, and do, in fact, make decisions that others obey.
But there are lots of styles of decision making, and when people refer to “authoritarian” styles that’s the type of stuff they refer to: doings things unilaterally, “leading from behind,” not asking for advice, ignoring advice, subverting the rule of law, pushing against norms (“informal bylaws”), and so on.
but it sure seems to me like what you’re talking about more easily fits a model of impulsiveness than just authoritarianism. Trump feels some way, and he tweets about it. In this case, apparently a fight over transgender funding was getting in the way of wall funding, so he made the decision. To me “authoritarian” has more to do with controlling people and in an illegitimate way, like “you will do what I say or else”.
Except the as e.g., current events in Berkeley are demonstrating the Alt-Left is a much bigger threat and aside from Trump, no politician has bothered to condemn them.
A new sockpuppet every thread, eh?
“I’m trying to stay off Twitter and seriously limit my exposure to Facebook for a while, so if you send me any messages over those platforms, I might not see them.”
So, as a left-leaning type who is also a civil libertarian who cares about things like free speech (grey tribe, I suppose), I can’t held but notice that quite a number of people who I appreciated from this angle have reduced their social media intake lately, particularly since Charlottesville. Freddie DeBoer – admittedly after pulling a dick move – closed down his account and announced he was going into mental health treatment. Angela Nagle got put on more-or-less a blacklist. Some Tumblr-style liberals I know are absolutely furious at the ACLU “defending nazis.” Heterodox Academy’s recent blogs seem to be about politically navigating “free speech” waters in the post-Charlottesville era. This has coincided with SJW clickbait mongers on the right getting a similar boost – further polarizing the issue. And all that isn’t even getting into Google/Youtube crackdowns or antifa boosting.
Not to overread Scott’s pretty justified idea to reduce social media intake, but I’m a little despondent. It actually seemed like the left was moving on from the old witch hunts and search for heretics, but…it’s back in full-force. Someone tell me I’m wrong?
My read was not that Scott is cutting back on those things because of fears of being doxxed, but because social media all tend to crescendo toward “The Sky Is Falling!” and he’s tired of it.
In addition to unfollowing all posts by (Thinkprogress, SPLC, etc.) I have been unfollowing Facebook friends’ posts (that is, remaining “friends” but choosing not to have any of their posts show up in my newsfeed) at a steady clip since Trump’s election, even after literally installing a plugin which automatically hides all posts with the word “Trump.” Charlottesville sparked a new round of unfollows. I myself stopped posting anything political on social media years ago, but my friends’ posts on political matters only became intolerable (due to their profusion and high heat-to-light ratio) since the election.
Perhaps I’m creating a bubble for myself, but if the outside of the bubble is a radioactive wasteland, I’ll take it. Plus, I read people who disagree with me on SSC.
Back when it was Lent, my younger son persuaded me that it was a good idea to give up something for Lent, so I gave up arguing climate issues on FB. I haven’t gone back, with the exception of a recent slip when I commented on something I saw elsewhere in a form that copied to FB.
I don’t get into a lot of frustrating political arguments online on other topics and my taste for arguing with people about things is pretty well satisfied here, where most of the arguments are civil.
You give up things for Lent??
My younger son persuaded me that it was a good idea. On the evidence so far, he was correct.
What was his line of argument?
I no longer remember how he put it. I think what convinced me was the idea that some things I was in the habit of doing might be things I would be better off not doing, and the custom of giving something up for Lent was a heuristic for experimenting on that possibility.
Also, religious fasting traditions are a good way of reminding yourself that you may not always have things as good as you do now, and not to take them for granted.
Also, it’s a good opportunity to practice self-control.
Catholics invented/popularized a ton of useful social technology, in general.
For me, Pennsic works better for that.
Clearly you haven’t heard that everyone agrees climate change made Harvey much worse, ha ha. Never mind it was the first major hurricane making landfall in 12 years. I’m sure if it wasn’t for climate change that drought would have been 20 years.
Michael Mann lays out a persuasive case — not that climate change caused Harvey, which he dismisses as an ill-posed question, but that it worsened Harvey’s impact. For example, six inches of sea level rise means that the storm surge is six inches higher. Do you have anything to say about the research he cites?
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that climate change is making hurricanes worse, what chance do we have of significantly reversing it if we can’t even have first-world infrastructure in our coastal cities?
You don’t have to pick one or the other. I would hope that humanity is capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time. It also seems easier to build coastal infrastructure when the worst-case scenario you’re trying to defend against is not steadily getting worse.
(Also: before we can talk about the solution, we need to agree there’s a problem. The comment to which I was replying was the hurricane equivalent of “It’s cold outside! So much for global warming!”)
Vote for Democrats and we won’t have any more hurricanes. I jest.
M. Mann isn’t my go to source for unbiased information. This doesn’t mean he is wrong here but that he is deceptive often enough that I don’t spend my time tracking down his claims.
Certainly sea rise affects total storm surge by the new sea level. Coastal building codes should take this into account. However most building codes are to 100 year storm surge levels which tend to be 10 feet or more. SLR by itself isn’t that threatening.
One area that is deceptive is “15cm over the past few decades” of sea level rise. This is ~3x the current rate of SLR which is about 1 inch / decade. You can see this was cherry picked. SLR is almost never dealt with honestly in the media. Land subsidence is bigger factor in this specific case, not climate change.
The next area is the shear dishonesty of taking the first major hurricane in 12 years in the US and instantly attributing that to climate change. What about the not-major hurricanes over the past 12 years? A record setting 12 year drought means nothing, but 1 hurricane is “compelling evidence, a fact”.
The next set of questionable linkage is that the problem here is the hurricane stalled immediately after landfall allowing all the rain to be concentrated in one area. This is rare, but not unprecedented. You do not want a hurricane to stall right on the coast. Worst case scenario for rain. This is not climate change unless you stretch this to say climate change caused the stall, a very weak case.
The next item to question is claims that climate change caused 30% more rain, or made the storm 30% worse, or storms are much more powerful now. Are they? If you examine the past 100 years of hurricanes in the US this isn’t true. IPCC AR5:
“Current datasets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century … No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin”
And yet another case to be made here is the credibility of prior claims. After the 2004-2005 hurricane seasons which included Katrina and 3 major hurricanes hitting FL in a single year the usual suspects called it the new normal and made all kinds of claims “more frequent, more powerful” etc. See the cover of An Inconvenient Truth. Next 12 years, almost nothing. It is shameless climate opportunism IMO.
What do I think? It’s been warming for a 100 years, we have a 100 years of landfall data. What happened last week is almost meaningless. It’s a very sporadic noisy data set especially for major hurricanes and no trend is discernible in this 100 year data set. If warming is making things worse, the effect size is likely small. It is likely we will need another 50 years of data to detect the presence of a climate change signal. This case of attribution to climate change is piss poor science in my view and is politically driven.
I heard a guy on NPR yesterday (On Point, I believe) guesstimate that the statistical effect of global warming on this storm was about an inch and a half of rain. So, definitely not helpful, but also definitely not a significant component.
Since about 1911.
One point I haven’t seen discussed. Everyone talks as though all the experts agree that the warming is mostly due to human action. But if you actually look at what the IPCC says, it only makes that claim for warming since the middle of the 20th century, a little over half the total period and a little under two thirds of the total warming.
I’m not sure what their view is of the earlier warming, perhaps that it was in large part continued recovery from the little ice age.
Iain says:
herbert says:
These are fundamentally different mechanisms. The first is purely sea surge; the second has effects due to something like what you probably saw back in a calculus course (a series of containers with defined flow rates upstream and between containers). There’s a pretty important question that immediately comes to mind – which mechanism is the primary driver of damage?
I wasn’t trying to rebut Ian, for the record, just replying to tscharf.
The guy on the radio was talking about precipitation (which is the main problem in this storm, moreso than the surge or the wind), and I believe his estimate was just based on a [relatively] straightforward imagining of what the storm would look like if it had been 1.4 degrees cooler during the storm’s development.
@Iain
You would hope, but you might be wrong.
And if walking costs 100 million dollars and chewing gum costs 100 billion dollars, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to ask you to prove you can walk before I give you 100,100,000,000 dollars.
I didn’t take it as a rebuttal – just an elucidation of two different mechanisms.
This was what I was after. Why is this the case?
Because it was just parked there. Basically spent three days hovering over Houston; my understanding is that they don’t usually stall like that.
I’ve been doing the exact same, onyomi. There was a moment of inspiration a while back when I realised that what felt like an unstoppable wave of bullshit posts was actually coming from about 6 or so people out of several hundred. There’s been a couple more times when I’ve needed to expand that list, since every time there’s a new bete noir another couple of friends go off the rails and start demanding skulls, but overall it seems to work well.
There is nothing more refreshing than taking a two week vacation out of country and realizing that other people exist that don’t cover Trump obsessively everywhere.
I wish all media outlets put a “No Trump” filter on their pages that would remove all but the most serious articles. As it is I feel like I am in one of those Guantanamo Bay torture rooms where they show 9/11 videos 24/7 at high volume.
I’m really not trying to start a discussion about this topic on this blog, but I’d like to know if readers of this blog have any links to non-hysterical, well-reasoned coverage of “Russiagate”, from the dossier to the hacking to anything else.
I’d like to get an update about it, but I can’t bring myself to wade into news reports on the one hand and don’t really trust the skeptical commentary on the other, either.
Any ideas?
P.S. I’m looking for links to off-SSC sources, not your opinions on the topic. Thanks.
Tell me I’m wrong?
Can’t. I’ve got IRL friends posting things on FB like “If you say “both sides” and one side is Nazi’s then you’re a Nazi sympathizer” and “Free speech wasn’t meant for a political weapon” and the like. Not to mention the more vicious anti-Republican and anti-conservative things.
Part of me wants to dump them as friends, because it seem to me that the friendship is pretty one sided if that’s the sort of thing they’d say, but so far I have just dialed back off FB again.
I have seen people who think — or at least say — that if you notice they are using the term “Nazi” to mean “anyone I want to punch”, you are a Nazi sympathizer.
I’ve had people outright claim that by opposing politically motivated violence, I am supporting politically motivated “violence”. (Scare quotes mine.)
I’m pretty furious at the ACLU for partially caving. I don’t care at all about gun rights, I don’t think the ACLU should be doing second amendment litigation, but their new policy doesn’t seem to depend on it even being illegal to protest armed. They are announced that they will turn away clients with concededly valid pure free speech claims. That goes against everything they are supposed to stand for. Lots of people quit the ACLU over Skokie, but they kept to their beliefs. The current leadership apparently doesn’t have the intestinal fortitude of their forbears. That being the case they should step aside for leadership that still believes in the mission.
I don’t know whether to be disappointed, or amazed by the fact that they held out for so long. Being nonpartisan on highly political issues as a large organization is a really unstable equilibrium; at one point or another one side is going to have the upper hand, followed by sympathizers of the other side leaving, tipping the scale even more.
The ACLU, like all organizations, is limited in funds. The NRA exists to pick up the second set of lawsuits.
I think it fair that the ACLU recognize that defending rights against the government does not extend to the threat of violence against one’s fellow citizens in order to pursue those rights against the government, even if such threat is legal.
Like I said I have no interest in gun rights. We aren’t talking about gun rights, we are talking about free speech and assembly.
What threat of violence? Being armed alone is not a threat. The ACLU has extensively litigated what exactly constitutes a “true threat”, “incitement”, and so on. In favor of the narrow definition in every case. They can’t turn around now and pretend to be a risk-adverse what-about-the-children organization.
It was cravenness and avarice pure and simple. The leadership was worried about losing donations and staff and put that above the fundamental mission of the organization. This would not have happened under Ira Glasser. Anthony Romero should be resign or be fired. But he won’t. The board will go along with the transformation of the ACLU from a civil liberties organization into a vaguely left wing lobbying and litigation group.
The only silver lining is that the move will backfire, vaguely left wing lobbying and litigation is a much more crowded niche and so this is going to mean real diminishment for the organization. Cravenness and avarice won’t end up working out for them.
Maybe that’s my European instincts, but armed far-right groups protesting is not that hard to be construed as a threat.
What about masked far-left groups beating people up?
Know of any orgs out there that have a shot at picking up the actual-civil-liberties-org mantle? Mayhaps I should redirect my funds…
Someone who thinks the NRA exists for second amendment rights doesn’t understand the situation.
DC v Helleris the biggest win for gun rights in at least a generation and the NRA declined to represent Heller. The actual victors only had bad things to say about the NRA and the NRA’s attempts to derail their lawsuit.
@Gobbobobble
There are other organizations that do great work on the 4/5/6 amendments, organizations that handle freedom of the press litigation, and ones that do establishment and free exercise cases. But in terms of the to the speech/assembly clauses, they’ve been so dominant there for so long that there hasn’t been much room for others. The only organization I’m aware of that overlaps somewhat on those cases is the EFF, but they have a narrower focus.
I would add FIRE to the list.
A sincere alternative to the national-level ACLU would be welcome. I wonder what are the chances that state level offices will formally split off/renounce the parent organization at this point? That would be even more welcome.
This was a cave-in for sure. It will remain to be seen how much they truly adhere to this standard. One could argue that civil liberties are under attack from the left much more often lately with free speech, so this seems rather confusing. It’s not helpful for them to be seen as yet another left wing special interest group in the long term. Not everything needs to be adjudicated on a red/blue tribe basis.
It would have been encouraging for them to just stand up and say we will not move on these principles, but make sure everyone understands they have no sympathy for violence.
I’ve thought about doing the unfollow thing on Facebook, but the reality is I’d end up unfollowing such a high percentage of people it just makes me wonder why I’m even using the site at all. I have the same experience as Zorgon where it’s probably a dozen or so people out of hundreds that are truly, mindlessly toxic, but there’s probably around 3x that many who can be pushed by current events into thinking, “Oh, this is the type of situation where I should express myself toxically, like everyone else on Facebook does.”
I truly think it’s just a gross platform, that brings out the worst in (mostly) decent people. Rather than have to use a variety of tools just to make the experience tolerable, I’d like to just delete my account as a statement (however minor that statement might be). But it’s done such a good job of wrapping it’s noxious tentacles into so many aspects of life, that it seems difficult. I have LinkedIn if I need to contact ex-coworkers, and I can give people my email if they need to get in touch with me (although I expect I’d mostly just fall off the radar for a of people). I could manually save my photos (although that seems like a pain). But things like current and former coworker social groups have entirely migrated to Facebook, which would be an unfortunate, unavoidable loss. And I’d probably get way less event invites, since that’s another aspect of life that Facebook seems to have cornered. But if anything, that makes me want to unravel my life from these social media sites even more.
All that said, does anyone know of a method of scraping a Facebook account that can preserve photos, posts, and lists in a relatively simple way?
There’s an option to download all of your facebook data, see: here.
Wow, that’s incredible. I didn’t know they offered this feature themselves (I assumed somebody probably would have written a script or something).
Thanks!
Last time I looked at that, it required verifying your identity. Is that still the case?
Update: I tried this last night. Yes, you have to jump through some email verification hoops, but nothing onerous. It takes a bit to compile your data, then they email them to you in a zipped file.
I’m very happy with the result. The photos and videos are placed into subfolders for your albums, a subfolder for pics you posted on other people’s timelines, a subfolder for cover photos, etc. All text data is in simple html files. It’s decoupled from the photos that live in the folders, and a lot of it is out of order chronologically, but it’s all there.
Considering the alternatives I was thinking about (some sort of manual scraping, learning code to write a script to do it, and just straight up losing all my data), this was pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Thanks again Charles F!
Ooh… i was paranoid that they would require you to actually verify your identity with a pic of ID (something I seem to recollect they’ve done to people before)
You can hide individual posts. Or, let’s say someone you know posts stuff from some unpleasant FB page – you can hide all stuff from that page.
Yeah, I’m aware, but see my comments above. I think at this point I feel like the cons outweigh the pros for even having an account. I just want to take my data and go home (which, it turns out, is actually something they support, which is cool).
Something is wrong around the ant colonies link.
Edit: Nevermind, no it’s not. Still, it’s very confusing-looking. Any chance you could write that in a less confusing way? Thank you!
I thought for a moment you were using our local alias for the group that may or may not be about ethics in gaming journalism, and actually scrolled up to see what link I’d missed from Scott’s OP, and then I saw that this time he really had put in a link about ants.
I’ve started picking up freelance ghost writing gigs on Reddit, in the $15 per 1000 words range, and made a few hundred dollars so far.
The people I’ve worked for seem honest, and willing to pay in steps. So far, so good, and I don’t particularly care if I get stood up for pay once or twice, since I’m losing nothing but spare time.
• Is there anything I should be doing to protect myself identity-wise or legally?
• Should I be worrying about committing libel/slander? Should I avoid writing on some topics, like, say, medical or legal topics?
• Are there some magic words that I should be using to stop people from holding me responsible for what I write?
• Is PayPal’s lack of anonymity something I should care about? Should I be using some other payment system, or using cryptocurrency?
I’m not so worried about doxxing, since don’t have a reputation in real life. I don’t have close friends or a romantic partner, and the only public reputation I have is with a crappy minimum wage job, so even if I have some bright future I’m cynical and embittered enough that if someone threatened to dox me, I’d literally say “do your worst.”
Long story short… I don’t have much of a web presence, so above all: am I just being paranoid?
Stay away from topics that require genuine expertise – if you’re writing on how to avoid plane crashes, step back, but if you’re writing on how evil Kim Jong-Un is, then go for it. If a sector is heavily regulated(medicine, finance, law, etc.) then tread carefully, and see what sort of disclaimers people who write about it professionally always throw in. If it’s something everyone natters about nonstop, you’re probably fine.
As for avoiding your real name, you can probably register an official business name for at most a few hundred bucks if you really want to, and starting a Paypal account with a name like that might be doable? I’ve never tried.
Just looked into it, PayPal does let you change your account to a business account. Thanks for the tip.
My brother did this for a while, writing English papers and stuff like that for college undergrads who had more money than they had inclination to do their homework. It struck me as immoral, but he’s my brother so I was inclined to be struck by it some way or another. So all that is to say, you might want to avoid doing people’s work for them when it’s expected they will be the ones doing it.
What kind of ghost-writing are you doing?
So far, I’ve been writing how-to guides about “beer money” sites, my experiences with anxiety, advertising copy, and emails that pitch search engine optimization to the recipient.
I don’t personally have a problem with ghostwriting humanities essays, and I don’t have an academic reputation at stake. That’s one of the few things I’m not afraid of, actually. I doubt that the college would punish anyone besides the person who bought the essay.
I’d certainly think twice about writing a STEM paper–nobody wants to think that their heart surgeon paid for his academic work to be done by someone else!–but college STEM courses give out busywork sometimes too.
I do–it’s assisting at fraud. The student is getting a grade based on the false claim that he wrote the paper. I don’t think there is any significant risk that you will get punished and only a very small risk that the student will, depending how careless he is.
Yeah, exactly. I guess it’s more of an ethical objection than a moral one.
First, I’ve read a lot of your posts on SSC and want you to know that you’re one of the people I do respect and who I believe has a lot of integrity.
However: I’ve been through high school and college, and I don’t have enough respect for the humanities as a whole to believe that most humanities instructors have much integrity. The instructors honestly don’t care: I’ve seen instructors change deadlines based on pressure from students, give passing grades to students who don’t participate in group projects while insisting that everyone contributes equally, and share one student’s confidential academic record to another. The humanities instructors that did questionable things far outnumbered the ones who did things by the rules, and the worst part is this is, everyone likes the instructors who appease the students.
So writing someone’s paper may be fraud, but I have no problem committing fraud against humanities instructors until I have good reason to think that the instructors have more integrity than the students.
I don’t know much about STEM, so I’m far less prejudiced against that field. But I think I would know make-work assignment when I see it: if the assignment involves little more than looking up answers in your biology manual, I don’t see any need to respect that. I’ve been in those biology classes. I’ve done it. Yes, intro-level workbooks help you learn the basics of biology. But a teacher assigned it the workbooks arbitrarily, probably because they don’t want to have another thirty to fifty essays to mark, and the student which choose which assignments are worth doing honestly…well, they chose just as arbitrarily.
If something involves inventing fraudulent data or misinformation, that is obviously a problem, and I wouldn’t do that. As I said, it would be different if I’m actually writing something that will actually make a significant difference–I wouldn’t write a threat or blackmail an instructor.
Much as it makes my teeth grind to say it, there are honorable and respectable humanities professors and courses out there. A few of them anyway.
But even if there weren’t, it’s the same principle behind why you shouldn’t steal from Walmart even if you can enumerate logical reasons why Walmart deserves no respect, or why you shouldn’t punch someone in the face even if he’s an asshole for saying he’d meet you at 8 and not showing up until 10:15 because he’s a forgetful idiot who needs to get his life together–at that point it’s more about not contributing to a society where punching is how we tell people we’re angry at them for being late: we won’t fix higher education with selective fraud.
I was probably being a bit harsh when I said I had little respect for the humanities. Humanities are “my” field. I enjoy the humanities, I love writing, and the teachers with little integrity are usually otherwise kind and decent people working in a place that’s a little too cozy and prone to apathy. I also take it upon myself to decide what’s worth investing your integrity in, and what’s mere busywork.
Whatever I do, it’s not about revenge, and it’s not about righting wrongs. It’s about not being able to get a job thanks to the academic system that I spent time and money on, despite earning a diploma and doing a ton of networking that all led to dead ends. It’s about having to work outside the rules with the qualifications that I spent time getting.
Your examples are a little disproportionate. Sure, you don’t steal from Walmart, as a general rule. But if someone was stealing from Walmart because Walmart kept their overtime pay, I’d be understanding if the employee stole–assuming that they’re stealing food and not luxuries, and assuming that there’s no food bank that will accept them.)
I’d probably suggest that they take food that’s been thrown away in the dumpster (as I’ve done when I worked retail and was barely making enough for basic groceries) rather than steal it from the shelves (which I’ve never done) in order to reduce the chance of repercussions.
tl;dr I have a mildly overactive sense of entitlement, and I don’t have fantasies of bringing down the humanities/academia.
I also wouldn’t want my child to have a 1st-grade teacher who paid someone else to do their academic work.
I don’t think it could make much of a difference in that case.
My thinking is that your child is bound to have a mix of teachers who do things by the book, and teachers who break the rules. Children will build their own moral code/beliefs over time, both rejecting and accepting various authorities, whether that authority is right or wrong. (Peers come into it too, of course.)
With heart surgeons, on the other hand, well, you may only get one chance to have the operation done right.
Caution here. It’s not just academic reputation. If anyone finds out you’ve been helping students cheat, you could seriously limit your future employment options. The risk is probably not worth what you’re getting paid.
Does “ghost writing” in this context mean, as it does elsewhere, that you compose the text and someone else publishes it over his name? If so I don’t see much risk.
There is the issue of whether you feel responsible for promoting ideas that might be wrong. But there is also the benefit of getting practice writing.
Yes, I compose the text and someone else publishes it under his name.
Re: promoting wrong ideas: I’d be asking the same questions whether I’m ghostwriting or publishing under my own name. I believe in spreading accurate information, but don’t care about getting credit for it, so I’d be perfectly happy paying small damages assuming that (a) I actually did hurt someone’s reputation, ie. that I agreed with the accusation to my own satisfaction and wanted to make amends, and (b) the money is a reasonable amount based on what I have, and what they have. I just don’t want to be sued for saying that Shreddies are squares because it undermined the advertising campaign that said they are diamond-shaped.
I’d hope that reasonable conflicts could be settled out of court, but I don’t know how often that happens. Just curious, do you know of anywhere that tries to mediate conflicts between public figures? It’s unfortunate we only hear about bitter cases. I’m sure that there’s lots we don’t hear about because people reaching pleasant resolutions doesn’t make the news.
We only ever hear about the big court cases it seems. (Simon Singh and the American Chiropractic Association was particularly ugly, from what I’ve read of it).
Dude. Not a good thing that you’re doing here.
Lots of reasons noted by other people, but consider this: you are helping dishonest and incompetent people get a college degree. This certificate will allow them to apply for (and in some cases be hired for) positions for which they are not qualified, which they reached through deliberate fraud. They will be hired for those positions over more honest and/or competent people without college degrees.
Some of those positions will even be in the government. Which will now – through your efforts – have more corrupt and incompetent people in it than it would otherwise.
Please reconsider earning your bread in this manner.
I’m not convinced fraud and rule-breaking are transferable skills. Getting people to write, say, a verbal presentation for you is totally unacceptable in academia, yet having a speech written for you and not crediting the author is totally normal in politics. Not because politics is sleazier, just because it’s how politics works. Actually, in most real world situations, people don’t generally remember the provenance of ideas.
I’m pretty sure that the only reason that humanities bans plagiarism is because (a) STEM fields do it with good reason* and (b) it makes it easier to assign grades. It would be totally possible to have an humanities system that functions if thirty people handed in the same paper: punish nobody, talk to every single student as they hand their paper, and whoever understands their paper gets a significantly higher grade. If plagiarists and non-plagiarists understand their papers equally, who cares who wrote it? Then do actual fact checking on the paper. But humanities instructors aren’t up for making every assignment into a mini-thesis presentations, probably because of time restraints.
On the other hand, if you want to commit fraud in government, you have to literally lie, cheat, and steal, which don’t apply to intellectual property in any literal sense, as per my thought experiment in the previous paragraph. To commit government fraud, you need to actually know who to trust, expect to be backstabbed, or at the very least be opportunistic, instead of going onto Craigslist. I know people who have plagiarised, and I’ve never seen a student publicly humiliated for plagiarism, even though instructors claim it will happen. On the other hand, almost every government worker seems to have been accused in some scandal or other, whether they’re guilty or not.
tl;dr I am convinced that it takes a lot more effort and connections to commit fraud in government than it does in low-level academia. Emphasis on low-level academia, like community college and cheap universities. I expect punishment is harsher in Ivy League schools.
*The reason I wouldn’t ghostwrite for STEM students in most cases: I know that in STEM fields you need to know who the original authors of a paper are so that you can actually repeat experiments, and that banning plagiarism facilitates replication by allowing you to track down who’s falsifying data by looking at their track record over various experiments. In humanities, facts are only dependent on what’s been written before, not on actual findings in experimental settings. In humanities, only the paper matters, not who wrote it.
Except when it comes to funding, tenure, etc….
I can’t speak to public humiliation, but I have graded students down for plagiarism in three different universities over my career. In the extreme case of a class where the major requirement was a paper and the student bought the paper online, that meant not passing the course.
Failing a student is a proportionate response, and I believe that plagiarism rules are quietly enforced.
My point is that from what I’ve seen, the professors who most vocally condemn plagiarism do so in order to not actually have to enforce it. The ones that say plagiarism will ruin your entire academic career, and who say that plagiarists will be made an example of, are the ones who don’t enforce it, and they’re the professors who seem to gain the affection of the students.
(This particular comment from me isn’t a defense of ghostwriting/plagiarism, just an aside.)
1. Part of what undergraduates are being graded on is their ability to write.
2. Part is their ability to do research.
3. It requires more understanding of a subject to write a paper than to read it.
I think that’s where we differ the most. I strongly suspect that anybody who can excel at verbally explaining a paper is less likely to plagiarize.
On the other hand, someone who can “sort of” explain their paper at least made an effort to plagiarize in the “patchwork” sense, copying the work of others in such a way that they gain at least some understanding of the topic, albeit with flagrant disregard for the formalities of academics.
And someone who can’t explain the paper verbally almost certainly purchased it.
And sure, fail the latter two categories if you like. My point is simply that certain parts of academia can probably function no matter how prevalent or open plagiarism is. I’m admittedly thinking more about the “creative arts” half of the humanities* and a few introductory STEM courses that don’t teach much of anything beyond giving college students workbooks to do.
*I grant that history is based on real facts, so authority is needed there, but writing stories or working in the visual arts isn’t based on anything real. Literary history and artistic history falls into this category, I guess, but people deep into any given field are a probably minority of students, and almost certainly a minority of the students who are purchasing papers.
So, I’ve been thinking a little about The Kolmogorov Option. It sounds incredibly attractive, and, from the individual point of view, is absolutely rational. However, I believe that, in the end, it might constitute a tragedy of the commons. Of course, in the spirit of the original post, I must hasten to point out that the discussion of political science in Stalinist-era USSR has no applications to the modern world whatsoever, so please don’t bring up any.
So, firstly, the Kolmogorov option works really well if you’re studying something totally abstract, like mathematics. But what if your interest lies in genetics, or in “cybernetics” (what we’d call “computer science” today) ? Well, then the Kolmogorov option is not for you, because both of those fields of study have been declared subversive by Stalin. It’s easy to say, “well then you should go study something else”, but what do you do when you’re 20 years into your scientific career, studying particle physics, and the Communist Party decides that particle physics is now Western propaganda, just like genetics ?
Secondly, even pure scientific research does have real-world consequences. Ban genetics, and later down the line you get famine. Each person who chose to toe the party line is responsible, in a tiny way, for all those deaths. Admittedly, if you multiply all those deaths by your own personal contribution factor, you’d probably get a very tiny number that’s not worth worrying about; but because everyone else performs the same calculation and comes to the same conclusion, famine is all but assured.
And finally, the original article says:
These are moving words, and I agree that any individual who does not follow this advice may very well be considered insane. And yet, when we look at the history of the Soviet Union, we see people like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, chipping tirelessly away at that iron wall, at great personal cost to themselves. Did they make any appreciable difference ? Would the USSR have lasted even longer without their influence ? I honestly have no idea. However, if your entire population spends all of its time endlessly reinforcing the party line, it seems reasonable to assume that the party line would endure forever (or, at least, until your country is conquered or suffers total economic collapse on its own).
So, in the end, I think the situation looks pretty similar to the traditional Tragedy of the Commons. Each individual is strongly incentivized to act in a certain way; and yet, if everyone does act this way, everyone’s utility is reduced by an amount that is much larger than what their individual losses would’ve been, had they chosen a more cooperative path. I have no idea how to resolve this paradox.
I was thinking of something that’s kind of in the opposite direction–looking from the present to the past and how strong ideological positions are forgotten, rather than how to ensure that unpopular but true ideas are preserved for the future. Anyway:
I’ve always wondered how something like heart transplants became widely accepted. Surely there must have been opposition and outrage at the time–they were putting animal hearts in humans for heck’s sake!–but it flies completely under the radar of history. It’s been overshadowed by abortion ethics and teaching evolution in schools.
And the first transplant happened in 1964! Animal-human heart transplants are in living memory, yet nobody on the street today could name a single person who opposed it, nor a single person who advocated for it.
And it was something that actually happened, and wasn’t just an idea. The layperson could probably tell you more about the Scopes Monkey Trial, which was entirely over what to teach in school, and that happened in 1925.
So, I opened up the newspaper this morning to find out that Trump had pardoned Arpaio, and learned something important about myself. I can see someone make crude and hateful comments, I can see them treat our allies with disrespect, I can see them slack off on the most important job in the country, I can see them show all the mental refinement of a concussed slug, and I can still keep my cool. I can strongly disapprove without descending into hatred. What I can’t do, is see them treat the rule of law like so much trash. That’s my tipping point, and it outrages me.
I can’t fully describe how much it infuriates me that he did that. To break sharply with tradition and use the pardon seven months into the presidency, for someone who hadn’t repented or even been sentenced, for the sake of backing up some of his already deplorable policy and rhetoric alike? To treat the law, the most valuable part of any society, that feature which keeps us on this side of violence and destruction, as a simple matter of convenience? There’s no hell deep enough for that reckless disregard for civilization.
I’m still enough in control to not demand ridiculous penalties, of course. Trump is obviously not sane, and there’s nothing worse that he can possibly be sentenced to than being himself. I just want him out of office and every stain of his on our government expunged, and that can’t happen soon enough. I will stay patient as long as I have to, but the fact that this was permitted means that America has much corruption that needs to be excised. There is a long, long road to recovery, here.
As an additional point towards Scott: I think that an action like this is starting to seriously blur the crying-wolf line. I was initially convinced by your argument, but pardoning Arpaio of a deliberate racial hate crime is making it really, really hard to say that Trump isn’t harboring and expressing racist sentiment. The only thing keeping me even close to the side of Trump-is-not-a-racist is the thought that he might not be consistent enough to have a real pattern of hating any given race. I think it’s beyond a shadow of a doubt, now, that his presidency has made things a lot worse for racial minorities (as well as LGBTQ community members), and that’s certainly worth talking openly about. At the very least, your argument needs serious revision.
As an additional point towards myself: I’ve been thinking more and more about FDR lately, and in particular his coercion of the Supreme Court. I appreciate much of FDR’s policy, and think he was a good president, with only a few (admittedly major) blemishes on his record. While keeping much of that sentiment, I think I’ve really turned the corner on the Supreme Court decision, and in order to stay consistent with myself, think it wasn’t a dangerous but justified move so much as an incredibly perilous and totally unjustified move. It’s joining up with the Japanese internment camps as things-I-deplore-about-FDR’s-presidency, and is now a member of things-that-past-presidents-have-done-which-probably-should-have-gotten-them-impeached. It’s a little weird to say that and that I still support a lot of what FDR has done, but hey, that’s meta-level thinking for you.
How do you feel about Lincoln packing the court–actually doing it (he added one justice, a pro-war Democrat), not just threatening to?
I had much the same reaction to Trump’s action, but I’m still not sure if it was justified. How does this differ from any other pardon, other than the fact that you and I think it was entirely unjustified? Suppose the President pardons someone who got a long sentence for drug use, which I would approve of. Isn’t that also subverting the judiciary and equally bad from the standpoint of a supporter of the War on Drugs?
My initial response was that cancelling the penalty for disobeying a court order is worse than cancelling a criminal verdict. It reminded me the quote attributed, possibly falsely, to Andrew Jackson, who Trump in some ways reminds me: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” But I’m not sure there is an adequate argument behind that.
So, I had to look up the Lincoln expansion, and what I seem to find is that it was part of a much longer procedure which took the Court from 6 to 10 judges starting in 1807, with the previous installment being in 1837, to match the increasing number of US circuits. I’m not seeing any mention of a political motivation for it, and it certainly wasn’t a massive expansion like adding six would have been for FDR. There were previous kerfuffles between Lincoln and the Supreme Court, and the battle over the expansion of slavery is definitely worth talking about, but I’m not sure that Lincoln did anything which flaunted tradition and seriously threatened democracy and the rule of law. I would be willing to look at more evidence and revise my opinion, but I don’t think at present that it was a travesty.
That said, I do believe there is a category-level difference between Trump pardoning Arpaio and a recreational drug user getting pardoned, not just an issue-level difference. The most critical difference is that the pardon has traditionally been used for clemency and forgiveness, not for explicit support of the crime being committed. (For this reason, I would say that pardoning someone who openly sold drugs and never repented for it would be wrong, as it would be political soapboxing by means of the pardon.) Arpaio is not repentant, hence, the pardon is either supporting what he did or saying he didn’t do it, neither of which really falls under the scope of the presidency. There have been other questionable pardons in recent decades, from Ford pardoning Nixon to Clinton pardoning some sleazy donor (thanks, Bill!), but at least they were done with some nominal attention to the penance principle and were done at the end of the presidency. Doing it now is really, really bad.
I agree with your initial response entirely, by the way. I think you even left a part out: part of Trump’s platform was the kind of immigration-restriction that this guy supported. That is, you get a pardon on disobeying a court order, if and only if you’re disobeying it in a way that agrees with Trump. That means that the only real rule of law is doing what Trump wants – meaning the executive gets the power of dictator. It’s really, really bad for the courts to have no sway over the executive’s goons, and that should be more than enough to say that Trump should be ousted as soon as possible.
I agree with Sam Reuben that Lincoln’s appointment of a tenth justice to the Court wasn’t court-packing. Everyone had agreed for a decade or so that the Court needed reform. Since 1789 (with the brief exception of the 1800 “Midnight Justices” act that was promptly repealed), one justice had been assigned to each circuit court of appeals to “ride circuit” as a member of that court’s bench.
Over time, there had arisen a lot of district courts that weren’t part of any circuit just because the existing circuits were busy and forming a new circuit would mean naming new Supreme Court justice. (Many of them were out west, but some were even in the Deep South.) Finally, in 1855 – five years after California had joined the Union – a Circuit Court for California was finally organized. For the first time, that circuit court judge didn’t sit on the Supreme Court. By appointing Field as a tenth Supreme Court justice for the new Tenth Circuit (covering California and Oregon), Lincoln did nothing more than rectify this anomaly.
You can definitely fault Lincoln’s treatment of the judiciary (e.g. ignoring Taney’s writ in Ex Parte Merryman; regularly trying accused Confederate supporters by military tribunal). But, Field’s appointment was not problematic in the least.
I would argue that both the presidential pardon and the judiciary’s need to rely on the executive to actually enforce its decisions serve as a useful check on the power judiciary, which is after all the least accountable of the branches of government.
I considered this pardon a significant step towards authoritarianism for this reason. Then I found out Arpaio has already been voted out. That doesn’t change the fact that this signals the President’s contempt, or, at best, total apathy, towards the laws Arpaio broke (in a way most if not all pardons do not) but it does make it much less substantively/structurally concerning than it would be if he were enabling a currently-serving public official to ignore the judiciary.
Someone had made this point on a different thread here, but the issue is that this pardon signals to currently-serving officials that they too can get a pardon by breaking the same laws in the same ways.
This objection applies to illegal immigration amnesty as well.
Also if you’re an 85 year old man with 50 years of law enforcement service.
How do you feel about illegal immigrants? I mean, there’s a reason they’re called “illegal”. It has something to do with law.
I can’t say I really approve – I would like to try and control immigration, but I think the best way of doing that would be by legalizing drugs and helping to end the nightmare that we’ve been indirectly funding in Mexico. However, there’s a difference between breaking the law and flaunting the rule of law. Trump did nothing illegal (at least, with the pardon); he obviously is not breaking the law. I was never claiming that he was. Thus, other people who simply break the law are not comparable cases. What Trump has done is to act such that the law does not apply as an organizing and ordering force over this country. People who violate court orders may suffer no penalty, so long as Trump approves of them. Court orders, then, mean nothing. All that matters is whether Trump approves of you. That is not the rule of law, but instead is the rule of an individual. Illegal immigrants, on the other hand, tend to follow the law assiduously outside of their single most notable breach: they drive carefully, they pay their taxes, they never do anything that would get the police involved, because if they do, they’re going straight back to the hell that they had tried to escape. That conduct is very much in keeping with the rule of law. (An exception would be if a commune of illegal immigrants formed and decided to apply its own law within its own borders – these are uncommon, but if I learned of one, I would be angered by it in proportion to its relevance to our country on the whole.)
So, in conclusion, I’m not particularly concerned with illegal immigrants, because their presence doesn’t undermine the assumption that we’re going to be treated equally under the law. Trump’s pardon does.
Isn’t that equally true of Obama deciding that certain categories of illegal immigrants would be ignored even though they were illegal? Of the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment that prohibits the justice department from spending any money enforcing a law (marijuana prohibition in states where marijuana is legal under state law, illegal under federal) that the people who voted for the amendment don’t like?
Those are both examples of things I happen to be in favor of.
Mind quoting me the Obama list? I’d be interested in seeing it. I believe I’ve heard of it, but I never knew exactly who was on the list.
However, I think both it and marijuana are on a bit of a different footing from the contempt pardon. Both are declaring a new, yet consistent, state of law: it is now acceptable to be such-and-such type of illegal immigrant, or it is now acceptable to be a state that legalizes marijuana. This is, quite arguably, an overstep of the executive, and I would certainly rather not see it happen, but neither were matched with blanket pardons of currently detained illegal immigrants or people locked up on marijuana charges. That is, it was acknowledged that even despite the new policy, the judiciary was correct in sentencing the people who were arrested before. Trump’s pardon is the exact opposite: there has been no grand change in policy, no new state of law, and yet this person who has gone against the current law deserved to be pardoned. This means that the law does not apply evenly any longer.
The immigrant decision could possibly be bad (I need to know a lot more about it), because it takes legislative authority on the part of the president, and that’s not where it should be. The marijuana decision is not nearly so bad, because it’s an acknowledgement of states’ rights insofar as something which does not horrendously oppress people or threaten the union is concerned (which is exactly where states’ rights ought to flourish). The pardoning of an unrepentant individual is incredibly bad, because it means that one person is above the law for no reason other than that the president thought so. If you draw the first to its logical extreme, you get a president who decides a lot of minor legal elements and gets slapped down by the judiciary every so often (because they still obey court orders). If you draw the second to its logical extreme, you get a looser federal government and stronger state governments. If you draw the third to its logical extreme, you get a class of individuals who can do whatever they want with no repercussions. I would say they’re on different orders of magnitude.
@Sam, look up “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.”
I see the difference you’re pointing to in the case of marijuana, but regarding illegal aliens, it can at least be argued either way. Here are people who have broken the law in the past by illegally entering the country, and continued to break the law every day by illegally remaining in the country, and Obama is in effect pardoning them and letting them continue to break the law (which continues to be on the books) by remaining in the country.
The difference is that the ignore-certain-immigrants order is not a blank check. It is a very specific change in law: namely, that certain kinds of illegal immigrants are not deported. The crime which Arpaio was pardoned of is contempt of court. Trump is not eliminating contempt of court as something he’s enforcing, but simply saying that it doesn’t apply to at least one person who he likes. The extension of this is that Arpaio can do many, many things without having to fear legal repercussions. Hence, the pardon does not show an even enforcement of one codified law, but rather selects one specific group as being above any codified laws. This is what is absent in the immigrant policy.
I stand by what I said: the immigration policy is an unwise overstep of executive power into legislative power, and using the pardon to allow a follower to ignore the law is a blatant breach of the rule of law.
I mean, it isn’t even that.
Congress has never appropriated enough funds to deport all immigrants, therefore the executive branch has to prioritize whom to deport.
I could as easily call the affected subgroup of illegal immigrants “one specific group” and claim that they are being singled out. And on the other hand, it wouldn’t be too hard to define some category that Arpaio fits in (maybe tough-on-crime policies affecting immigrants) that more specifically characterizes his pardon than just a generalized pardon from all lawbreaking.
The crime statistics say otherwise. Also, RE: taxes, the whole reason people like hiring illegal aliens is that they can pay them below minimum wage and off the books.
‘flouting’ is the word you want here.
So when Trump undermines the rule of law simply by “flouting” it, even under his constitutional powers, it bothers you. But 10 million people breaking the law and people advocating amnesty for them doesn’t? What about Obama pardoning a terrorist responsible for 120 bombings? Where does that fall in undermining the rule of law? Are you sure it’s the rule of law part that bothers you?
The DNC has had illegal immigrants speaking at their national conventions multiple times now. That seems to me like a flagrant disdain for the rule of law.
On the other hand, use of the Presidential pardon is entirely legal.
Is the point that cops should be allowed to break the law until all other crimes have been eradicated? I’m not seeing it.
The point presumably is that cops should be allowed to break the law in passing while trying to arrest criminals. For example, they could break into your house without a warrant, seize your cash on suspicion that it was drug money, and beat you to try to get you to confess. Perhaps this’s a defensible argument, but it runs completely contrary to the Bill of Rights.
A more specific argument would be that over the last fifty years, courts have stretched the Eighth Amendment’s guarantee against “cruel and unusual punishment” and the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection” far beyond their original intent, and therefore by the original intent, Arpaio committed no crime. I’m rather congenial to this argument in general, but it strikes me as very possible that what he did would’ve been considered “cruel and unusual” and “unequal” even in the 1790’s and 1860’s.
Which law did Arpaio break? The reason he was prosecuted for the BS “crime” he was, is that, contrary to all the rhetoric against him, he didn’t actually violate any laws.
You are a tedious troll. Arpaio repeatedly violated court orders to cease unconstitutional policing practices, both in terms of arrests and in terms of prisoner treatment. Contempt of court is an actual crime with an actual definition — putting it in scare quotes convinces nobody.
I don’t like the way that half the government ignores enforcing our immigration laws and laughs about it.
That said, Arpaio has done so much nasty shit 1) not related to enforcing immigration laws and 2) that attacks all Hispanics instead of illegal immigrants that he is not in any way an ally of people who merely want immigration laws enforced at some level.
As I understand it, the misdemeanor and associated pardon are SPECIFICALLY for disobeying a specific court order, correct?
Sherriffs are political figures and not really connected to any law enforcement chains of command, but surely they are not literally a law unto themselves? From my limited knowledge of Arpaio’s conduct, it seems like any would be “clean up law enforcement” State AG would be spoiled for choice when it came to finding charges to bring against Arpaio, at least some of which have statutes of limitations longer than Trump’s likely term of office.
The specific court order was “stop racially profiling people,” which makes things worse on the whole Trump ship.
I do hope Arpaio ends up seeing some jail time for what he’s done, because I don’t want him walking the streets as a symbol that his kind of conduct is untouchable. I don’t want him setting an example as the first of his kind.
Are you sure? I saw, possibly here, possibly on FB, a fairly detailed account of the case according to which that wasn’t what it was. It was “stop arresting people for minor traffic offenses and then, when they turn out to be illegal aliens, turning them over to the feds.” He was racially profiling people, but I don’t think the court order was to stop doing so.
I don’t swear the account I saw was correct, but it sounded well informed. Have you checked that your view of the legal issue is correct?
The judge overseeing the case:
From the contempt order:
The problem was not that he was arresting people for minor traffic offenses and sending them to the feds. That’s Arpaio’s line, and the judge here is explicitly rejecting it. The problem was that he was stopping and detaining people based on their race, and then (without having ever put charges against them) taking them to the feds. Any Latino-looking person in his territory would permanently have to be afraid of being pulled over and carted around, regardless of whether or not they were illegal. It was this racial targeting which was the problem.
There are a lot of people who have a vested interest in having what Arpaio was doing be legal and permissible. They’ve been dedicating a lot of resources towards doing so. I’m sorry to say, but I do think you’ve been hoodwinked by them. It is true that there was an initial court order, while the trial was going on, to just stop all turning people over to the feds, but that was a temporary measure intended to stop the bleeding while judicial procedures were ongoing. The final measure was in light of the race issues, as is clear when you check who was suing the sheriff’s office.
On the other hand, the Wikipedia article, which is hardly pro-Arpaio, says:
Does anyone here have a link to the actual court document saying what he was being held in criminal contempt for? He seems to have violated a variety of court orders.
Here is one relevant document. From which I quote:
” The essential facts constituting the charged criminal contempt are as follows: In December 2011, prior to trial in the Melendres
case, Judge Snow entered a preliminary injunction prohibiting Sheriff Arpaio and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (“MCSO”) from enforcing federal civil immigration law or from detaining persons they believed to be in the country without authorization but against whom they had no state charges.
…
THEREFORE
, the Court issues a notice to show cause as to whether Joseph M. Arpaio should be held in criminal contempt for willful disobedience of Judge Snow’s preliminary injunction of December 23, 2011. ”
The document includes “The MCSO continued to stop and detain persons based on factors including their race,” but that seems to be a description of what he was doing, not of what the injunction was forbidding.
Others may want to read the document themselves, or see if they can find something from later in the legal process.
Although this is from earlier in the process it lays out the facts in a much more complete fashion:
https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/1677.pdf
And from even further back, here is the original, quite lengthy court order to stop racial profiling, the violation of which eventually led to Arpaio’s conviction for contempt of court. The conclusion:
Yes, I know, Sam, my point is that at minimum his other potential crimes include:
-entrapment.
-False imprisonment
-systematic/mass Abuse of prisoners under his jurisdiction
And those are just off the top of my head. I find it hard to believe that that court order was the absolute best anyone could bring against him.
Well, they got Al Capone for tax evasion. But who cares, if they get Arpaio for something else Trump can just pardon him again.
Not if he’s convicted in state court for a state crime. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for Bill Montgomery or Mark Brnovich to prosecute.
We’ll see. If his misconduct is as severe as a quick review of recent allegations makes it out to be I would be surprised if a would-be county or state AG -didn’t- make it an issue if Arpaio continues to be on the Arizona political stage.
Then why didn’t they? You may want to update your beliefs based on the evidence.
This is orthogonal to the crying wolf thing and also to the racism thing. But I agree that it is very bad.
Tradition was the only thing preventing presidents from giving their supporters a license to break the law. The tradition has been broken (regardless of whether Trump intended to end it). This particular slippery slope is in a strong gravitational field: pardons will be a powerful tool to circumvent the courts and reward supporters.
Therefore the pardon power must be curtailed. It doesn’t matter what one thinks of illegal immigration or Trump or Arpaio.
Hamilton discussed this briefly in Federalist #74, and his argument was that sometimes society needs offenders to be quickly pardoned after, e.g., rebellions (which he described in terms reminiscent of Shay’s Rebellion and anticipating the Whiskey Rebellion.) This probably doesn’t cover your argument, but how would you curtail the pardon power? It seems to me pardons are already much too rare in comparison to the broad sweep of Federal criminal law.
I can’t tell you how it ought to be done, but the way it’s likely to be done is by requiring both the head of the House and the Supreme Court (by majority) to sign off on it.
There’s excellent reason for having the pardon power, but if it starts to be used to allow supporters to break the law, then it simply cannot be allowed to stand.
You mean sort of like how left-wing Mayors are allowing their alt-left supporters to violate people’s free speech rights.
Citizens cannot violate the free speech rights of fellow citizens. And mayors should be leery of interfering with either side beyond riot control.
Of course they can. By literally physically attacking them when speaking.
That’s an interesting way of describing “strategic withdrawal” of the police force when the black-clad anarchists show up to crack some right-wing heads.
@ghi: yes, exactly like that. Can I take it that we have you on our side?
Sorry, at this point I’m playing tit-for-tat on this issue.
“If we assault you the power structure will stop us from being punished” is fucking terrifying. And yes, I’ve been super-pissed about Antifa precisely because of this. “har har har you got hit in the head with a bike lock shouldn’t have been carrying a pepsi. Yet we continue to surround Eric Clanton with friends and try to stop people from videotaping him.”
Like the OP at the top of this subthread, this feels like a tipping point for me, from “Trump’s an asshole but he’s not threatening the republic calm down you idiots” to “this is how shit goes sideways really fast.”
@Evan: I’m not really sold on pardon power being needed. It might be something that is useful in a young unstable republic and dangerous in a mature one, like martial law.
Most of my concerns would be allayed if presidents could only pardon, say, 5 crimes per term. Then there is no danger of them making something de facto legal.
Let’s say for the past 20 years POTUS didn’t have the pardon power. What’s the worst thing that we can say happens?
Currently there’s no way other than a presidential pardon to clear a federal conviction off your criminal record (unlike many states, which let you apply for an expungement after you’ve served your sentence). For some time this has been the primary use of the pardon power – there’s a bureau of the Justice Department that handles applications and they generally require the applicant to be out of prison for five years with no subsequent convictions. So, without the pardon, federal felons are branded felons for life, with no way of getting their rights restored even if they’ve been model citizens for decades.
However, judges abusing their power to not just ignore laws they don’t like, but actual arrest those attempting to enforce said laws, is perfectly fine with you and poses no threat to civilization.
You had better spell your argument out thoroughly, and explain why a judge ordering Arpaio to not racially profile was somehow against the law. Hint: the judge’s order cited the 14th Amendment, and he was quite explicitly banned from racially profiling. It was absolutely nothing to do with deporting illegal immigrants, and everything to do with selectively stopping and searching people who looked Latino. This is what Judge Snow, who gave the order, had to say about it:
So I would advise you explain how a defense of the 14th Amendment was a judicial overstep.
So basically your trying to argue that using Bayesian evidence is against the law.
You seem to be unaware that the Constitution is superior to immigration statutes.
Can you quote me where in the constitution it bans Baysean reasoning.
@ghi, how about the Fourth Amendment, where it requires warrants supported by probable cause (a word richly-defined in English legal history), specifically describing the place to be searched and the person or things to be seized? Or how about the Fourteenth Amendment, which requires equal protection of the laws and guarantees you the privileges and immunities of citizenship no matter what Bayesian evidence there is against you?
@Evan
So by your argument traffic stops are unconstitutional, and putting out a description of a suspect is illegal profiling.
@ghi
Consider learning a little about US law, rather than trying (and failing) to play “gotcha”.
That does not appear to be the case. I quote from the document I linked to above:
” The essential facts constituting the charged criminal contempt are as follows: In December 2011, prior to trial in the Melendres case, Judge Snow entered a preliminary injunction prohibiting Sheriff Arpaio and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (“MCSO”) from enforcing federal civil immigration law or from detaining persons they believed to be in the country without authorization but against whom they had no state charges.”
As I reply above: if you look at the original court order in Melendres, rather than the contempt of court charges for ignoring that order, you will see that it is very clearly about racial profiling.
@Iain:
Thank you for the link. It does not support the claim that
Page 3 lists five issues. Three have to do with racial profiling. Issue 5 is:
“(5) whether being in this country without authorization provides sufficient reasonable suspicion or probable cause under the Fourth Amendment
that a person is violating or conspiring to violate Arizona law related to immigration status.”
On page 4:
And the actual injunction, on page 5:
As you can see, while the injunction does cover deciding who to stop on the basis of Latino appearance, it also covers other activities engaged in for the purpose of deporting illegal immigrants. And the application to selectively prosecuting Latinos is where it is for the purpose of “making law enforcement decisions pertaining to whether a person is authorized to be in the country.”
The case is about things the sheriff’s office was doing in order to enforce immigration law that the court found unconstitutional, of which racial profiling was only one.
The original claim to which your quote was responding was:
In context, “it was absolutely nothing to do with deporting illegal immigrants” clearly means “Arpaio was not arrested just because he wanted to deport illegal immigrants; he was arrested for trampling all over the Constitution while doing so”. There are many people besides Arpaio working to enforce laws against illegal immigration. Very few of them have been taken to court. It is therefore incorrect to say that Arpaio was arrested for “attempting to enforce said laws” — he was actually arrested for the racial profiling and the violations of the Fourth Amendment.
From what I can tell racial profiling is pretty easy to overcome. It’s very surprising how many “not profiled” people get pulled over for failure to signal, brake lights out, tag lights out, expired tag, improperly mounted tag, illegal window tint, failure to maintain a lane, and a whole host of other minor offenses. Then the cops seem to have the world’s best noses and almost always smell pot or alcohol. I watched a few episodes of Live Cops (guilty pleasure) and this pattern repeats over and over.
On the other side of the story they follow a department in Arizona and it is obvious they don’t care about immigration status during stops. You will get a ticket for no license or registration, you don’t go to court, a warrant is put out, next time you get stopped you are arrested, then I suppose the crap can hit the fan.
I think there is a problem with some illegals simply not knowing what the rules are, and what will get them deported, and what won’t. They live in fear and end up sabotaging themselves (not going to court for example) which escalates to a more major offense that gets them deported.
I’m all for making a set of rules in the US for immigration that everyone follows instead of the confusing mess we have now.
In terms of the rule of law, I’m not too offended on that point since this is theoretically a thing that the president is allowed to do. (Though him breaking tradition to do it is one more offense in the long line of Trump breaking-traditions-upholding-society.)
No, what gets me is that of all the people he could have handed out his pardon to, it went to this guy.
https://static.currentaffairs.org/2017/08/wait-do-people-actually-know-just-how-evil-this-man-is
Please, if you haven’t take a few moments and read that. It’s horrifying. But to save you time I’ll quote the bit that really sums up everything:
“Arpaio knew the kind of police state atmosphere he was creating, but didn’t care: “If they’re afraid to go to church, that’s good,” he said.”
Scott makes a fairly narrow claim in the “crying wolf” post, which is that the white nationalist movement just isn’t very big. And by any sane accounting he’s right, but it’s a red herring because as Scott himself points out the myriad other ways in which Trump is horrible are still valid. This is one of them. I know it’s a loaded word burnt out beyond all credibility these days, but Arpaio’s actions as Sheriff are unamerican. Someone who sincerely wants to make his fellow man afraid to go to church, abuses his power to intimidate anyone who opposes him in any way, arrests those who disagree and lets his subordinates hurt them in jail, has such a flagrant disrespect for the rule of law that they’re willing to inflict whatever cruel and unusual punishment the gray area of the law will allow for people who haven’t been convicted of anything..
Someone like that might be an american citizen in the legal sense, but they’re not an American. They’re not part of the American family and Trump providing them aid and comfort genuinely enraged me in a way nothing else he’s done yet did. It was his moral event horizon, I have no sympathy for him now.
Your interpretation is exactly why I feel this is an attack on the rule of law: not because a law was broken, but because it helps to dismantle a lawful society.
If “this” means Trump’s election, I think this happened despite the powers-that-be’s desires. If “this” means Trump’s pardon, I don’t see what anyone can do about it, given that the presidential pardon is in the constitution (Article 2, Section 2).
So, I’m not really sure how this is evidence deep-seated corruption. I’d say that Trump is corrupted for some reasonable definition of corrupted, but, then, it seems like removing the corruption will just require one presidential election.
In short, I think this particular part of your comment is overly pessimistic.
“This” referred to the presidential pardon. The fact that we’re getting people coming in here and supporting the use of the pardon to overturn the decisions of the judiciary is solid evidence towards my pessimism.
Why is “use of the pardon to overturn the decisions of the judiciary” automatically a bad thing? That’s what the pardon was instituted for.
What I find disturbing is people conflating “rule of law” with “acting as if judges are infallible even when they make ridiculous interpretations of the law”.
@ghi, perhaps you can explain why the judge’s interpretation was so ridiculous, in a way that does not assume that the color of one’s skin is probable cause to believe they are committing a crime?
Seriously; I’m interested. Eight years ago I believed that Sheriff Arpaio was a hero single-handedly enforcing the rule of law. There’s still a significant part of me that emotionally wants to have that back.
@ghi: Evan has explained above what the pardon was intended for, and it issn’t this. I agree that Trump was perfectly within his rights to do this, but there are lots of things that presidents are allowed to do which they really, really shouldn’t. If this is going to become part of the standard presidential toolkit we need to change the law.
From my point of view, there was one good thing about the Arpaio pardon: it signals that Trump has not yet caved completely to the radical left crowd, as had I feared after Bannon was ousted. Furthermore, Arpaio’s popularity in his home county, and his repeated winning of elections, indicates that there is something going on that he is seen as the best response to.
I see Arpaio in much the same way as I see Rodrigo Duterte. From my own vantage point, their actions seem horrific and brutal. And yet, if the Philippines is willing to actually elect someone who promises to just kill all the drug dealers and a lot of junkies to boot, then clearly there is some sort of gigantic problem which requires some sort of solution – regardless of whether I think Duterte is doing right or wrong. Just concluding that Arizona is full of racists or something (which I see a lot of) is arrogant as hell (it would be the same as concluding that the Philippines is just a country of moralistic psychopaths).
Nevertheless, I view the damage done by this to be greater than the damage mitigated. I would prefer in every way that Bannon be kept on and Arpaio punished for his various misdeeds.
In what world is ousting Bannon “caving to the radical left crowd”? The people opposing Bannon within the administration, etc, are hardly radical leftists.
Standard rhetorical Dark Arts. If you start referring to the mainstream right as radical leftists then you can make naive people who are trying to keep an open mind move rightwards.
I think a tactic has to be effective to be a Dark Art, rather than just make the user sound edgy.
it signals that Trump has not yet caved completely to the radical left crowd
Yes, I was really worried that Antifa and the SJWs were controlling Trump. Glad he disabused me of that misconception!
FFS, you can’t run The United States Of America on an ethos of “what will make my enemies mad.”
Like just about everything else Trump could have handled it better. At least waiting until the guy was sentenced for example. I think extrapolating this pardon of a misdemeanor into a menacing world of Trump FutureCrime where all is lost is a bit much.
To the extent that pardon power exists to prevent politically motivated courts from exerting undue power this matches only if you squint very hard. Clearly this is about signalling his supporters that he plans to enforce immigration law and that he isn’t going to put up with Sheriffs in jail “for doing their job” while sanctuary cities overtly refuse to enforce the same law and get away with it penalty free. It probably needs to be examined in that sense, not that two wrongs make a right. There’s nothing pretty about immigration lately.
I’m fairly ambivalent on the immigration issue but believe the existing law should be followed until the law is changed, because that’s the law.
If you believe that the law should be followed until it is changed, you should be staunchly opposed to Arpaio. Illegal immigration is against the law, but so is racial profiling, and abuse of prisoners. Moreover, if you read the actual court order, Arpaio was dramatically overstepping the bounds of immigration law: starting on page 31, there is a description of the ways in which he was exceeding his legal authority (up to and including citing a non-existent section of the United States Code to justify immigration-related arrests after ICE had told him to stop).
And he wasn’t even good at enforcing the law. This is a very harsh take, but it is well-sourced, and even after adjusting for hyperbole it is quite damning.
Two wrongs don’t make a right, and correcting only one side of that doesn’t make it right it either. This is the basic isolated demand for rigor. We have a system where current law is ignored with respect to sanctuary cities and the non-enforcement of illegal employment is rampant. As long as you are for enforcing the law against offenders across the board, I’m with you.
I want immigration laws enforced as more than a joke. That doesn’t mean Arpaio is on my side. Is there no one else I can turn to?
@tscharf
I don’t think your position is consistent as you are making it sound. The entirety of law doesn’t consist of don’t abuse prisoners, don’t racially profile, and the immigration system. There are tens of thousands of pages of laws.
Do you think each and every single federal law should be vigorously enforced? Are you prepared to support orders of magnitude increases in federal law enforcement budgets and personnel to accomplish that?
I think that getting infuriated over Sheriff hard ass and also maintaining a position that sanctuary cities are OK is inconsistent, and if that is the case I am interested in the explanation. My guess is both sides of this are very much politically motivated.
I’d prefer Congress figure out a compromise instead of this chaos.
I don’t see how they are inconsistent.
First of all it is perfectly legal for states to refuse to allow their employees to be deputized as federal immigration officials. The 10th amendment forbids the federal government from commandeering state officials in that manner (see Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898 (1997)). The federal government is entitled to withhold certain payments if they choose not to cooperate but no city officials are breaking criminal law, because any such law would be unconstitutional.
On the other hand the federal government is fully entitled under the 14th amendment to forbid state officials from violating the rights of people in custody. Indeed the Constitution itself forbids that.
Second, even if the two situations both involved violations of federal law, unless you take the position that every single clause of all of the tens of thousands of federal laws are equally important and weighty, then it is entirely possible — reasonable even — to think that the rules against beating and killing people in custody are more important than the rules against turning over illegal immigrants to ICE.
One thing I wonder is if Trump is taking steps to make future abuses easier. For example, if he had pardoned a bunch of business associates who were going to cooperate with the Mueller investigation, it’d be a hugely unprecedented and indefensible step that might actually impel Congress to do something. Whereas if he drops a series of really bad but not-quite-as-indefensible pardons like this, he weakens Mueller’s leverage by reminding anyone who Mueller might be threatening that he has a literal get-out-of-jail-free card and he is willing to use it. And it also gets partisans into the habit of defending controversial pardons.
On the other hand a pardon removes the ability to take the fifth and the President can’t pardon continuing contempts.
Why can’t he pardon continuing contempts?
They are considered civil and not criminal and so don’t count as an offense against the United States. Incarceration pursuant to them can also be indefinite and don’t require a jury.
Thanks.
But I’d presume he he could pardon perjury, which might be just as good?
What I want is “law & order.” The status quo of essentially uncontrolled mass illegal immigration was neither lawful, nor orderly.
What Sheriff Joe did was orderly, but at times unlawful. This seems like a step in the right direction from “no law, no order” to “some law, order” and where I would like to be now is “law and order.”
If you want to go back to pre-Trump, pre-Joe days then you’re not offering me law & order, you’re offering me no law, no order.
“What Sheriff Joe did was orderly”
If that’s so, and order means setting up concentration camps, burning puppies, and spending your time organising elaborate fake assassination plots to make yourself more popular rather than investigating sexual abuse of children, I find it difficult to see it as a particularly positive thing.
If essentially uncontrolled means no border checks, guards ,etc whatsoever, it wasn’t essentially uncontrolled. If it means imperfect, everything is imperfect, and that doesn’t justify law enforcers breaking the law. The law is good because coordination is good. Problems with law enforcement need to be solved in a co ordinated way.
I do not believe the opposition to Joe and Trump have any interest in solving the law enforcement problems associated with illegal immigration. This seems like an isolated demand for law.
Thank you, Scott, once again, I am vindicated in my decision to never use tumblr. (Functional programming? <shudder>)
Excuse me sir, do you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior SICP?
https://aphyr.com/posts/340-reversing-the-technical-interview
SICP is a multiparadigm book on computer science, not a functional programming book.
Only in the sense that A Canticle To Leibowitz is a novel and not a religious text, that DnD is a form of storytelling and not a game, or that a tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable.
No. SICP is what they teach intro computer science with at Berkeley. I took that class. The class was not a functional programming class. SICP has chapters on OOP, on declarative programming, on message passing, on lots of stuff that has nothing to do with functional programming.
Scheme is not a pure functional language.
—
Have you read SICP?
Sorry, that was a bit of a glib reply.
I meant that, while it is technically true that scheme is not purely functional, it is functional and it is a lithp, and while it is technically true that SICP is not a book about functional programming, it almost immediately launches into recursion and consistently teaches a functional outlook throughout the book.
Similarly, tomatoes are technically a fruit, but a can of tomatoes is more likely to be found next to the cans of peas and carrots than the peaches and apricots.
I am just trying to say that I think SICP basically contains all of computer science, not just recursion, etc. It’s really quite amazing.
Also: recursive functions and functional programming are not the same thing.
You can program in the functional style without recursion (for example by function composition, or even in an “imperative style” as in monad shortcut “do” syntax in Haskell) as long as you don’t modify state, and you can program recursively in a way that is not functional (for example if you have a recursive function that modifies state as it goes.
My school also used it in the (Honors) Intro class; the section on Streams made a big impression on me, and that was a quarter-century ago.
When I went back to re-read the book a few years ago, I was astounded to realize that the first two chapters (out of five), including some OO stuff, were functional. No state. “Referential transparency” achieved.
That whole series of posts (Reversing, Hexing, and Typing the technical interview) is solid gold.
Those are possibly the best things I’ve read in all 2017.
Heartily endorsed. I think the Clojure one might be my favourite, but type-level Haskell is a close second.
The Gibson parody in the comments of the first one is great, too. The guy manages to squeeze in about twenty of his very specific, highly recognisable tics in about a dozen lines.
Basics of the airline industry:
I’m soon to leave the airline industry for the defense world, but I’ve learned a lot in my two years here, and thought some of this might be of interest. Also, I don’t feel compelled to research as thoroughly as for my battleship stuff. I’m going to try to explain why airlines work the way they do, so that next time you travel, you’re hopefully less annoyed and actually understand what is going on around you.
First, I’m going to discuss how and why they sell seats the way they do. The basic principle is that they want to get paid as much as possible to move people between A and B, and do so as cheaply as possible. But there are lots of combinations of A and B, and lots of different kinds of people who want to go between them, so the airlines have very complicated rules in place to maximize their revenue.
At a high level, we can assume there are two kinds of travelers: business and leisure. Business travelers have to go somewhere specific at a specific time. They may or may not have a lot of warning, and they’re pretty insensitive to price. So airlines want to charge them as much money as possible. Leisure travelers are the opposite. They make plans long in advance, are very sensitive to price, and are much less firm in terms of when and where they are going. So an airline is going to build rules in an attempt to sell tickets to both groups. Obviously, it could decide not to bother with leisure travelers, but bigger airplanes are more efficient to operate, and there is rarely enough demand on a given route for an airline to sell exclusively to business travelers. Once a flight is being operated, the marginal cost of a passenger is pretty low. But it also doesn’t want to sell the entire plane to leisure travelers, leaving it with no seats for businessmen.
So what airlines do is to create fare rules and fare classes to sort out the different travelers. There are a lot of ways to do this. We could increase the price as we get closer to departure. We could impose conditions on our cheapest fares, such as requiring a stay over a weekend (which business travelers aren’t likely to accept) or restricting flexibility (again, businesses might be willing to spend more on changeable tickets). We could only sell a certain number of our cheapest fares, and then as the plane fills up force people to pay more. All of these are actively practiced by airlines, although the details have changed over the years.
Obviously, our 2-type model is rather simplistic, and we see a sliding scale between the types. Holiday travel is a good example of this. I want to be in a specific place (where my family lives), at a relatively specific time (Christmas day, plus a few days around Christmas), but I’m much more price-sensitive and somewhat less time-sensitive than a business traveler might be, and I’m booking far in advance. So they can get more money out of me than they could if I was just trying to fly somewhere warm and sandy, but not as much as if I need to go look at an airplane on my employer’s dime. So now we might raise the prices for most of our fares around Christmas, although we also will suffer from decreased last-minute business. (I’m not actually sure how much airlines do this. They don’t talk much about the specifics of their revenue-management practices.)
However, not everyone is just interested in going from A to B, and some of them are willing to pay extra for better service. Some airlines, most prominently Spirit, EasyJet, and Ryanair, operate entirely a la carte, selling everything besides the basic seat for a premium. These airlines focus on leisure travel, where they have learned that the most important part of getting someone to book is the ‘sticker price’. People make their decision on the price displayed on whatever travel search engine they use, and then are more willing to pay extra for luggage, better seats, and even in-flight drinks.
This even affects legacy airlines, which introduced checked bag fees as a sort of stealth price increase during the recession, as opposed to raising prices directly. (It also helps that these kind of fees are exempt from the 7.5% federal tax on airfare.) Fuel surcharges were a similar tactic, although one thankfully blunted at least in the US by regulations requiring that advertised ticket prices include all mandatory fees and taxes. The airlines occasionally try to get this repealed, but I personally think it’s a good thing.
Southwest has taken the opposite tack, not charging for checked bags or change fees on even the cheapest tickets. This is basically a marketing decision on their part, differentiating themselves from their competitors. Personally, it’s one I really like, and I fly them preferentially.
This also leads us obviously to premium cabins. Some people are willing to spend more money to make their flight more comfortable (which in practice translates primarily into more space), and so long as they’re willing to spend enough extra to make up for the cost of the extra space, we might as well oblige them. Some of these people are just tall and want a few more inches. Some are businessmen flying from LA to New York overnight who need to give a presentation in the morning, who want a good seat to sleep in. We’ll sell a few rows of economy with more legroom to the first group, and a few first class seats to the second.
Now, in the years since deregulation, airlines have learned a lot about how customers buy tickets. I mentioned that leisure travelers are most concerned by sticker price, and don’t take into account fees very well. But all travelers book primarily on price and schedule/convenience. It’s not uncommon for an airline to charge a premium for a nonstop flight, particularly when one end is at a hub, and most of the competitors on the route would require a connection. (Sometimes you’ll have a nonstop premium within an airline, depending on their route structure.) This also means that the airline with the most flights on a given route has a major competitive advantage.
For all that people complain about legroom, American tried to differentiate itself by offering more legroom throughout coach for a few years, and found that not only were they unable to charge a premium for it, it didn’t even drive bookings to them at the same price. So airlines instead offer a few rows of economy with better legroom for a premium, or for their elites, usually with priority boarding thrown in. (This is usually only available as a buy-up after booking, presumably because that drives more sales than letting people book it on the front end.)
I hope this has been helpful in understanding what the airlines do and why. There will probably be a couple more of these, interspersed with my normal output on ships.
This was really cool. Can’t think of anything in particular to say about it, but I’d like to express my appreciation for the post!
So answer me this. Why on earth can’t airlines put another half inch of foam on the goddamned seats? If you want to cram me into a tiny seat, fine, I get that. But what reason is there for crafting a seat that feels like bare metal after you’ve been sitting in it for 2 or three hours? That 737 costs, what, 70 million? And they can’t slap 2500 bucks worth of memory foam on those seats?
Sorry. I work for the company that builds the planes. Seats are furnished by different companies, and chosen by the customer. I can’t speak to this very well, as it’s not something I have professional contact with, and it hasn’t really been something I’ve looked into for fun, either.
I do know that the seat manufacturers pay close attention to their ergonomic scores. But when it has to be light, relatively cheap, and meet an absurd number of regulations, I suspect they’re doing the best they can. For all we know, memory foam is too flammable, or they can’t make the seats too thick. It’s probably the FAA’s fault one way or another.
Edit: I’ve heard rumors that companies are unwilling to upgrade seats because they can’t swap all planes at once, and passengers on old seats would complain way too much. I rather doubt this. But I suspect it ultimately comes down to the same problem as legroom. Yes, you’d like more of it, but it’s not actually going to drive buying decisions, so the airlines are very limited in their willingness to pay for extra comfort.
When in doubt blame the FAA is generally a sound rule of thumb.
I was being facetious, but I suspect you’re correct.
Man, all this time I thought your job was being a tour guide on some kind of battleship-turned-museum.
No, that was my hobby. (Sadly, emphasis on the was, as I was there for the last time today before I move.) I’m an engineer doing aftermarket support for a major airline manufacturer. For the next week. Then, I move to a job doing aftermarket support for a major military aircraft.
That sounds pretty interesting. Did you ever do technical writing?
Yes. That was the problem. My job resembles technical writing more than proper engineering, which is why I found a new one that didn’t. Also, it helped that it’s on the defense side, which I find more interesting.
Technical writing always seemed like a fun-in-a-super-challenging-way kind of job to me, but one that might also contain a lot of tedium and not-fun tasks. I don’t have enough technical background in anything to find out if my impression is correct (except by talking to my technical writer friends, and to people like you), but I’m glad you found something more to your liking.
One thing I’ve never understood is the enormous premium they charge for first class. When I’ve looked at it, it seems to be two or three times the price of regular fares. I think the premium may have come down some in the last few years so maybe now it is only double or even less. The difference obviously doesn’t relate to cost differences, because there is no way ti could cost that much more for a few more inches and more attention by the flight attendants. I presume the airlines do this as a profit maximizer, but I don’t get it.
You did mention that American tried to get more money for more space and were unsuccessful. My guess is that a small incremental change won’t have a lot of effect, especially since pretty much everyone doesn’t believe what the airlines tell them, so there is time needed for a learning curve. But people do buy first class, and there is certainly a great mystique about it, so I think more would buy if it wasn’t so outrageously priced. I would think if they had planes that were half first class and they lowered the premium to 50% over regular fares, then the airline would make out like bandits. Or even entire planes being first class. Of course these would have to be frequently traveled routes so they would have enough passengers to do this upgrade. like New York to Chicago or New York to LA.
The worst thing about flying these days is TSA, and the airlines can’t do much about that. I really try to avoid flying if I can.
here’s a seating chart for a 737
in place of those 8 first class seats you can fit 15 economy plus seats or 18-21 economy seats. So pricing them at double to triple is definitely about right in terms of opportunity cost for that square footage even before you get to side benefits like perks, baggage checking, meals, free booze, etc.
It’s not that simple. If we assume that the plane is limited by floor space instead of weight (may or may not be a good assumption, and I’ve promised myself I won’t spend too much time on research for this series), then the minimum premium they need to charge to keep revenue constant is 1.78 for the last plane I flew on. A factor of 2 seems pretty reasonable. They might be able to do better on widebodies, where you have more room to play with seat width.
That said, there has been a significant change in the way airlines deal with first class. Up until 5 years ago or so, most people in first were elites who had been upgraded. But they’ve been pushing more and more to monetize those seats, with Delta going from (IIRC) ~30% of first-class being sold to ~70%. This has caused a lot of distress in the frequent-flier community, and might well be bad for the airlines in the long run. (Frequent flier programs are a topic for later.)
It’s been tried. Notice what almost all of those airlines have in common. The only really successful all-business-class (international business is equal or better than domestic first) is the BA route from London City to La Guardia. And that’s special for a lot of reasons. Basically, it’s usually more profitable to attach a coach cabin to the plane.
Edit:
To explain, BA001-004 are routes from an airport in the heart of London to the closest commercial airport to NYC. This is a banker’s route, and there’s no competition on it, because London City has a very short runway, and La Guardia can only take flights that have gone through a US pre-clearance facility. (The westbound flight refuels in Shannon, which has such a facility.) So you have a massive convenience bonus in a market where there’s going to be lots of people with lots of money. And because of the limits at London City, they can’t use a plane bigger than the A318. Normally they’d attach 200-300 coach seats to the 32 business class seats they have, but they just can’t do it.
Get PreCheck. I got it a couple months ago, and it is fantastic.
I’ve gotten it a few times by random airline vagaries, and once the halfway version where they swab your hands and run it through the bomb sniffer but is otherwise the same, and it is good; almost like flying pre-9/11. But actually seeking the favor of the TSA feels like a pretty big violation of my integrity to avoid an inconvenience.
If it’s the TSA specifically you have trouble with, you can spend a tiny bit extra and get Global Entry ($100/5 yrs instead of $85/5 yrs), and get fast customs on return to the US. There, you’re dealing with CBP instead. Of course, given the nature of this board, some people might think that’s worse.
(Personally, I’m not a fan of the TSA, but I’m not going to subject myself to serious inconvenience to protect a tiny bit of integrity.)
Why is it that domestic is so much crappier than international in each of the cabins? I understand not wanting to pull out all the stops for a two hour flight, but JFK – SFO is not that much shorter time-wise than JFK – LHR.
I’ve covered a lot of this below in my second reply, but it comes down to the fact that special fleets have costs, and airlines don’t particularly like having to split their fleet into ‘longhaul’ and ‘shorthaul’ when they can avoid it, and they know that the minimum route length on the international fleet is long enough to justify good premium cabins. That said, American, Delta, JetBlue and United all run special fleets for JFK-SFO and JFK-LAX. (Well, United goes out of Newark. You know what I mean.)
I’d also question if economy is that much worse in domestic. I’ve checked a bunch of seatmaps on SeatGuru, and there’s no clear trend on a given airline as to who has more legroom. I’d suspect that there’s more bundling on international fares (with things like luggage), but that has more to do with expected demand than anything else. For premium cabins, I suspect it has a lot to do with international routes having a much higher percentage of business travelers, and generally people willing to spend more money. Also, you know you aren’t going to be wasting those planes on shorthaul routes where people are less willing to buy up.
I’m not entirely satisfied with my response to this the first time around, so I’m going to have another crack at it. Basically, there are two problems here. First, you need frequency to attract business travelers, and it’s usually economical to fly big planes, so you might as well attach a coach cabin and sell seats there. Second, airlines like flexibility. They don’t like being stuck with a bunch of planes in different configurations, because it limits operational flexibility. There are a couple examples of this. We’ll take American. They run 3 different A321 configurations, one each from legacy American and legacy US Airways (the later are terrible, and American really should at least fit them with power ports), and one specially configured for the transcon routes, basically NYC-LA and NYC-SF. These are three-class planes, with 10 lie-flat seats in the front, and then 20 domestic first and economy (including a lot of main cabin extra). There’s enough premium traffic on the route that a special fleet is worthwhile, with a total of 17 planes.
Another example is the shuttle fleet. There’s a historical shuttle service between DC, New York, and Boston, run by a number of different airlines over the years. (Trump actually owned what is now American Airlines Shuttle in the late 80s.) Particularly back before airline security became what it is, it was much more like a bus than air travel as we know it, and Eastern (who owned it before Trump) for a long time had a policy that anyone who bought a ticket would be flown, which occasionally meant dragging out a second airplane for one person (and great PR). The planes were configured as all-coach, and for a while tickets were paid for after the plane took off.
But when US Airways was running the shuttle, they stopped configuring the planes as all-coach, and put premium seats in. Actually, what they did was stop using special planes, and reconfigure the planes in the normal configuration for whatever model they were flying on the route. The flights were rarely full, and it wasn’t worth the mess that it made of scheduling to have special planes. For instance, let’s say they have a plane go mechanical, and the only available airplane is a shuttle-configured plane. Suddenly, you have to deal with a bunch of passengers who were booked into first (and who you probably really want to keep happy, because they’re likely big spenders) who now have much worse seats.
The only really interesting experiment being carried out with better seats is on Spirit, who offer the Big Front Seat, basically a domestic first seat. But that’s all you get. You don’t get lounge access, priority boarding, free luggage, or a meal. Spirit just sells you a better seat, for a $32 premium. Just to be clear, this isn’t necessarily a reflection of the economics of doing this on other airlines. The base fare for Spirit is often $10-20, and on the cheapest fares they actually give more to the government than they keep. They make their money on auxiliary revenue, and when you factor in getting the same service, it’s often cheaper to go with another airline. In terms of economics, Spirit has 4-10 of these seats, which costs them the same number of regular seats. So it’s a question of how much money they’d make from those extra seats, because that $32 is basically pure profit. (Also, the A319s, which are the only planes with 10, have 145 seats, which means that in practice they’d only get 5 extra seats, because going above 150 means they need an extra flight attendant.)
There’s probably more room to sell the premium seats a la carte, particularly on routes with poor demand for premium cabins. And I suspect that we may see that going forward, but ultimately those cabins have to pay for themselves, and that’s just not achievable at a 50% premium over economy.
Edit:
Thinking this over more, another interesting parallel is JetBlue’s initial model. They offered 34″ legroom on their A320s (actually they still do, but they’re down to 32″ on the new A321s), and a bunch of customer-friendly policies, like not overbooking, not charging for checked bags, and good food. They recently started charging for checked bags, and the new planes are getting about .1″ more legroom than Southwest offers so their marketing people don’t get sued, which suggests that it hasn’t worked all that well as a revenue-optimizing strategy now. It helps that planes are full and demand for air travel is high. They don’t need to fight as hard to fill their planes.
(Also, not overbooking didn’t help them when they had to swap a bunch of 321s for 320s, leaving them with 50 people/plane to deal with.)
Since you are to some degree an insider, can you offer an explanation of something that has puzzled me about airline procedures?
The standard procedure for loading passengers seems very inefficient, since someone seated in row 5 is blocking everyone in higher rows while he puts his luggage up and gets into his seat. Why not line people up in row order before boarding?
Southwest actually does line people up before boarding, so it’s doable, but they don’t have assigned seats.
Sorry. Not that much of an insider. This puzzles me, too. I suspect that the modern status hierarchy has helped here somewhat, as the Super (Precious Thing) Elite in the back boards before First, and isn’t in anyone’s way, while Basic Economy is dead last, and they’re scattered in middles throughout the cabin. What really annoys me is the difficulty in getting people off.
But I also suspect that it’s a matter of elitism, at least a tiny bit. Making your customers line up like that is something Southwest does, and Southwest hasn’t quite shaken the image of the old “Cattle Call”, even though it’s not true these days.
Also, on the last few flights I made with American, we sat at the gate for quite a while after general boarding was done, so that may not be the rate-limiting factor these days. Also, American at least does general coach boarding groups based on how you check in and not where in the cabin you are (except main cabin extra, but those are kind of spread out).
@DavidFriedman
Why bother? It’s not as if the passengers getting into their seats is the factor that’s delaying when they can leave. After you’re in your seat you still have to wait for a bunch of other stuff, so loading passengers more efficiently doesn’t help timelines any, and enforcing any degree of discipline would add some unpleasantness to the boarding process when people do it wrong.
On what basis do you say that? Reducing turnaround time was a major innovation for Southwest.
It was, but even Southwest is taking a lot longer to turn than they once did. They used to do the 10-minute turn, but even their -700s are up to 30-40 mins now. I don’t have a good explanation of this.
Speculation:
1. The planes are bigger. I think the 10-minute turn was done on -200s, which carried a lot fewer people.
2. Load factors are up. Since 2002, Southwest’s load factors have gone from 65% to 82%. So each plane, even of the same size, has 25% more people on it, and I suspect that means more than 25% more turn time.
3. A change in the passenger population. When the majority of passengers are businessmen going to Houston for their weekly meeting and flying back tonight, you’re going to load and unload more efficiently than you do when the majority of passengers are families with small chlidren and lots of luggage who don’t fly very often.
This link has some nice youtube animations showing simulations of ways to load planes, and links to MythBusters real trials. https://www.vox.com/2014/4/25/5647696/the-way-we-board-airplanes-makes-absolutely-no-sense
In reality, boarding first is sold on the basis of being able to snag the limited overhead space. That should be sold separately, by making checked baggage free and charging for carryons.
I find it hard to take that analysis completely seriously, because Mythbusters didn’t test the SWA method. They tested a complete free-for-all, which is not what SWA does these days, although I think they used to. Not assigning seats is something that’s definitely associated with low-cost carriers, and none of the legacy carriers will touch it.
I don’t think this is quite such a good idea. People carry on bags for reasons other than simply not wanting to pay for checked luggage. The people who are most likely to not care about the cost of checking bags, airline elites and business travelers, are also the people most likely to not check bags, because, in a frequent flier community proverb, there are two kinds of bags, carry-on and lost. Spirit actually charges more to carry-on than to check, although given how horrible it is to check a bag with them, this may be an attempt to raise revenue. Again, I did this when I last flew Southwest, simply because I only needed a carry-on sized bag, and I’d rather have it with me and not have to wait at the baggage claim. Also, there are recent overhead bin designs that improve capacity about 50%.
Thought this over more, and I’ve just noticed a serious problem with the Mythbusters test, and a related reason why the Steffen method will never work. I’ve seen the episode of Mythbusters, and the volunteers they used were all adults ‘traveling independently’. They did not have any kids at all, and the adults in question were Mythbusters fans, who are probably not a particularly good representation of the population as a whole. (If you doubt this, Adam Savage once said that they were up against the Super Bowl a couple of times, and you couldn’t see it in the ratings. But they got absolutely hammered when up against the Presidential debates.) They don’t have the person who has never flown before, or the person who is really bad at following directions. They did include a couple of ‘jokers’ (people with coats and such, IIRC), but probably not enough. (I’m not really criticizing the mythbusters for this. They were trying, but we shouldn’t base policy decisions off of their work alone.)
Steffen does not work with parents with kids, which kills it immediately so far as the airlines are concerned. I’ve often pondered something similar to it for getting people off the plane, but it runs into the same problem. I do wish there was a stronger norm for letting people behind you who are ready go, but I can’t see a way to formalize it.
So what are we calling your aviation blogs? Bird Watching?
We aren’t. This is a limited series, done because it’s a lot easier to write these than it is the Naval Gazing ones these days. (I have to do quite a bit of research for those, and I’m in the middle of moving.) Probably.
Related to Naval Gazing:
Bean has asked me to do some guest posts or two on Naval Aviation while he gets settled in to his new digs. Are there any particular questions people have or topics they’d like covered?
When will the U.S. Navy phase out human pilots?
Sometime after Top Gun 2 comes out.
Edit: in all seriousness though, adding drones to the topic list.
Not Navy, but I spent 5 years in the Army as a UAV operator, and the RQ-7 Shadow is fairly closely related to the RQ-2 Pioneer the Navy and Marines used until 2007, so I may be able to help with some drone-related questions for comparable systems (i.e. not the strategic/long range, real-pilot-operated ones like Reaper, Predator, Global Hawk, etc)
I have heard that helicopters are able to fly because they are so ugly that the ground repels them. So how do navy choppers work?
Less shitpost-y: we’ve heard all about the Iowa(s) from bean. What is your favorite boat (or class) and why?
In regards to the first question, it’s looking like a my Naval aviation post will be getting split into two posts one on carriers and another on non-carrier aviation (helicopters and float planes).
As for the second question; I’m inclined to agree with bean that I think the late generation US BBs like the South Dakota and Iowa classes with thier flared bows clean lines and big guns, peg the meter on sex appeal, though I also have a soft spot for late war carriers like the Yorktown and Midway.
That said “favorite class” is going to be heavily influenced by my own time in. Perry’s are wonderful until you have to spend more than weeks at sea and water rationing kicks in. Meanwhile Burkes are the classic hot chick with a shitty personality. 2nd generation Ticos on the other hand are ugly as sin but I love them so.
Care to expand on this? I’ve only been aboard one briefly, and not into any of the living spaces.
Burkes look sexy as hell, but despite being signifigantly larger than a FFG thier accommodations are more cramped. Their flight-deck is a PITA as is the hanger arrangement and the fact that thier berthings are accessible only via ladder was giving me nightmares long before the recent handling incidents.
When over water, they are repelled by their own reflections.
Nobody wants us, not even gravity 😉
It sounds like helicopters are suffering. I think I have my next EA talk.
Helicopters are made to suffer. I only fly remote-control ones, and even I know this. (One did try to kill me a few weeks ago; it suffers no more).
That’s not true. Hlynkacg himself told me that they were held up by the pilot’s belief, which is why helo pilots are so…different.
Naval helicopters are very much like Orc Trukks in that regard.
Then why are they painted with greys and blacks? Surely paint color would be a low hanging fruit in Kopta’ technology.
There are two competing schools of thought here. One paints thier birds in bright colors and gives them racing stripes to make them go faster while the other paints thier birds gray to effort to make them look like particularly ugly clouds, hopefully tricking the sky-gods (and your average SWO) into thinking that they actually belong in the air.
How do modern warships and their crew handle bad weather? Does the crew need to stay on deck for anything, or does everyone hunker down? Would a typhoon/hurricane be a serious threat? Big waves?
Modern ships handle bad weather much as thier predecessors did. Turn into the wind, batten down the hatches, and hold on for dear life. IE hunker down.
Whether a storm poses a threat is dependent on sea-state/wave-height. A carrier or amphib with 75 ft of freeboard can weather a lot more than a Burke with 20.
Would something on pre-WWII carrier doctrine/what the military theorists thought would work versus how it evolved during the war be in the cards?
If hlynkacg doesn’t want to do that, I just might. I know something about it.
I’ve always found it interesting to compare what prewar theorists thought would happen with what happened. I know less about the navy than other fields; I’m under the impression that the dominance of carriers came as a bit of a surprise, but I may be mistaken.
I’ve got a solid handle on the “what happened” side but I’d need to do more research on “what the theorists thought would happen” to make a detailed comparison.
History of helicopter usage in the Navy–how’d we get to this state and where did you get your roles from?
Some sort of long discussion of fueling and its implications–range, drop tanks, aerial refueling, loiter time, etc.
Osprey: brilliant advance with problematic development or still a white elephant?
Effect of Marine amphibs on Navy doctrine/history: people sometimes say the F-35 sucks because of needing to work for the navy’s army’s air force. Is this the first time this has caused problems?
My opinion (because this isn’t quite a full topic), is that while it falls short of ‘brilliant’, it’s a significant advance with a fairly typical development for a new technology. We’re just not willing to expend lives and airplanes like we used to be to develop new types of aircraft.
I talked with a V-22 pilot last year, and he said that he’d come from Harriers, and never flown a plane without an ejection seat before, and he was more confident in the V-22 (no ejection seat, a bunch of Marines in the back) than he was in anything else he’d ever flown. He was very complimentary of the engineering, and I suspect there are a couple of people who want to be V-22 pilots today because of talking to him and seeing how passionate he was about the airplane. Operationally, it seems to work OK. It’s not a panacea, but it’s a useful piece of equipment.
The real test will be in seeing how the next generation of tilt-rotors and compound helicopters currently in development compare mechanically and economically to more conventional designs.
As I said above it’s looking like I’ll be doing multiple posts and your questions already comprise the meat of the “non-carrier aviation” material.
As for the Osprey, my opinion largely mirrors bean’s, though I suspect that I may be a bit more skeptical of it’s long-term viability than he is.
Thanks for sharing, Bean!
It sounds like you’re not quite on the marketing or business side, so you might not be able to answer all of these questions, but some that come to mind:
1. Operations-side: What’s the value/purpose of a “hub” in the first place? Is it just because it is easier to centralize maintenance operations? I figure it’d be easier to send planes to some small, out-of-the-way airport for that kind of thing, and have it managed by a third party. Is it really important for flight crew transition or something? It seems like airline companies could hit a lot more routes if they just didn’t have a hub.
2. What’s the normal % increase in price as flight time approaches? Does this change as you get into different markets? My thought is that competition makes it lot more difficult to capture the extra fare from the business customer, and that I, in Chicago, have access to a lot more options than someone living in, say, Charlotte. Interested in your thoughts on this.
3. It seems like business customers have preferred airlines, thanks to the frequent flyer programs. You said you’d be covering this in a future post, right? Seems like it’s a big feature of the airline market, so definitely curious about the economics behind it.
4. Why does Southwest offer free baggage when no one else does? Is this an operations piece to this? From what I understand, Southwest does a real good job at turning planes over quickly. Is this part of why they can offer free baggage check-in? Does anyone else have a decisive operations edge that allows them to price a bit more competitively?
5. What’s the biggest problem for these firms? They seem to go bankrupt, like, all the time. Huge capital outlays? Any idea if this is going to be a continuing trend?
6. It occurs to me that the actual limiting factor might be airport space, not the number of airliners. O’Hare can only handle so many planes at once. So the airports themselves are the ones capturing the producer surplus, if any. Who owns the airports? Are they typically private or gov’t owned? If gov’t owned, do they typically charge extremely high prices and take advantage of their scarce resource?
I work for a manufacturer on aftermarket support, so I have no formal contact with the operational side. But I’ve read a fair bit, and used what I know to write a post about airline operations, which I have scheduled for next Sunday.
1. This should be answered next Sunday.
2. I have no clue on the actual numbers in terms of price increase. Competition within a market is definitely a thing, and I’m a bit chagrined to go from LA (where everybody flies) to OKC, where it’s either a hub or Southwest.
3. Frequent flier programs are another thing I’ll write on at some point. They’re really fascinating.
4. Southwest’s structure is pretty unique. This is going to be dealt with Sunday to some extent. I genuinely don’t know how it impacts their operational performance vs having more carry-on baggage. That’s the sort of thing you have to dig out of obscure trade journals (if it’s public at all), and I’m not to that level with airline-watching. The last time I flew Southwest, I went carry-on only to avoid the hassle of baggage claim.
5. The big problem the legacy carriers had was high labor costs, in many cases left over from the days before deregulation. Combine that with high oil and a weak economy, and bankruptcy was inevitable. These days, their labor costs are lower, and they’re making money like crazy. Warren Buffet famously said that investors would have been done a favor if someone had shot Wilbur and Orville, but he’s recently moved into all of the major US airlines.
6. They’re government-owned. The only US airport of any size that isn’t is Branson, MO. Airport space is limited, but often it’s even more a problem with airspace. LGA, JFK and DCA are probably the most slot-restricted. Allocation is a contentious issue, and we could probably do a lot better if we bid for them, because right now it’s mostly politics. The airports aren’t capturing the surplus very well. This may or may not be a good thing. I believe the airport charges run $5-20/passenger, depending on the airport.
Bean I’m not sure if you’ve seen this but there’s more bad news from DESRON 15 and the 7th fleet it appears that one of thier ships has collided with the Bank of America Center.
Wow. They got really lost. I’m really looking forward to the investigation that shows how they got into the wrong ocean.
(For those who don’t know, duffleblog is
the military equivalent of the Onionthe world’s best military news source.)I am curious what SSC commenters think about capital punishment. I have mixed feelings myself, but I am surprised at the strong anti-capital punishment beliefs of some people. It seems to be the consensus in Europe that it is a barbaric practice of the past, which mystifies me. I sometimes give money to Amnesty International, but I sometimes hold back because of their strong belief that capital punishment is somehow equal to torture.
I find the moral arguments completely unconvincing. Some say that people don’t have the right to take the life of another person. But we take away the freedom of other people all the time — I don’t see the difference. Society has to make judgments about individuals as criminals, to provide any deterrence at all. In my opinion, people who have committed mass murder have given up their right to life. I certainly don’t think the Norwegian murderer who killed so many no longer has the right to life. I hate the thought that he may go free some day.
There are some practical arguments against capital punishment that are more convincing.
1) They say that capital punishment has no deterrence value. In my opinion, the only rational reasons for punishing people (prison or death) are for deterrence or just to keep them off the streets, so this is an important issue in my mind. But even though the article claims almost unanimity amongst criminologists, I’d like to see studies, or at least the reasons they believe this.
2) The Innocence Project has used DNA evidence to prove that a large number of those in death row are actually innocent. It does make me nervous about executing innocent people, but it makes me even more nervous about the state of criminal justice overall. Maybe there are hundreds of thousands we’ve put in jail for decades that are innocent. It isn’t really an argument against the death penalty.
3) I have also heard that it costs more to execute someone than to put them in jail for life. But again, this sounds more like an indictment of our criminal justice system than of the death penalty. We should spend just as much to verify that those we put in jail for life are guilty as we do for those on death row.
Mixed feelings also.
Argument against capital punishment I agree with most: carries a huge risk if the State, with the sanction of The People, kills an innocent person by accident (or more accurately, very deliberately by accident). I do think this is very different from accidentally incarcerating an innocent person even for life.
Argument for capital punishment I agree with most: humans in societies might have an evolved psychological need to know that the worst transgressors are being killed–especially as opposed to kept alive, housed, and clothed and fed at public expense. (In fact this argument seems to suggest executions in public spaces would be even better. Related: I’ve heard intelligent arguments that if we’re going to have capital punishment then we ought to be executing people by firing squad or some kind of blunt force trauma if we want the combination of humane and visible/definitive death. I saw one guy on Quora–yeah yeah, I know–say we should do nitrogen gas asphyxiation if we wanted to maximize humaneness.)
The argument that it’s really terrible if the state kills an innocent person by accident also applies to the state sentencing someone to life by accident.
(The usual non-rationalist reply to that is that there’s some chance of discovering that the person with the life sentence is innocent, but that argument only works if either the chance of discovering innocence is 100%, or you accept some losses of innocent people who get life sentences and are not discovered. And if you accept some losses, you ought to accept some for execution as well.)
As I said in my comment (but it was an edit so maybe you had already typed your reply) I think killing an innocent person is fundamentally different from incarcerating them, even for life.
Yes, but I (and perhaps many people) would rather be imprisoned for life than killed. Similarly, just because you accept some rate of uncorrected false convictions doesn’t mean you should accept a higher rate of uncorrected false convictions.
The argument is that imprisonment produces less of those bad effects, not none of them.
On the other hand, if you believe that capital punishment provides more deterrence than life in prison–as best I can tell, it’s still unclear whether it does–then you are trading (say) two executions for three life sentences.
I’ve heard nitrogen asphyxiation mentioned as a humane option as well – in fact, I vaguely recall seeing a discussion on SSC one time about how dangerous it can be to work at a job that for technical reasons has to keep something in a chamber full of inert gas because if you have to go in there yourself you won’t notice you’re low on oxygen until you pass out, at which point you’d better hope your co-workers were keeping an eye on you and can help.
I have been working in that sort of environment (as a scientist) for several years now. Normally, the hazard is large quantities of liquid nitrogen used either for storing biological samples at very low temperatures, for “cold traps” in vacuum lines to keep solvent vapours out of the vacuum pump, or for cooling NMR magnets (the superconducting magnet itself is cooled by liquid helium , but there is a jacket of much cheaper liquid nitrogen around that so the helium boils off more slowly), but cylinders of nitrogen or argon for inert atmospheres for chemical reactions are common.
Any room where large quantities of inert gases are used has an oxygen depletion alarm- when it goes off, you get out (and open all the doors to ventilate the area).
You’ve completely skirted around the most important difference between the death penalty and any other form of punishment: there’s really nothing you can do to take it back once it’s been delivered. With every other punishment imaginable, there’s at least something that can be done to compensate for the punishment (even if it often fails to really make up for it). There’s nothing you can do for someone who’s dead. They will stay dead, now and forever, and that fact is incontrovertible. That’s a really big deal. (Notably, the other “barbaric” punishments are things like mutilation, which are also very difficult to reverse. This is not a coincidence.)
As for my own stance on the death penalty, I believe it to be improper in a modernized society that can afford to keep people in prison, mostly because it legitimizes on the largest scale the idea that there are things that people can do that they ought to die for. Once that’s been acknowledged, a murderer isn’t categorically wrong for killing someone, but simply wrong on the details. I would prefer for the sake of law and order that killing be firmly beyond the pale as a reasoned penalty. In societies where you can’t effectively imprison someone for life, then I’m all for the death penalty or exile, as one or the other may fit the circumstances. America is not one of those.
I’m not sure I fully understand your concept of the “right to live,” by the way. Do we have a right to live? Is it something we exercise, or not, as we choose, like speech or association? It seems to me that it’s more of just a state of being, rather than a right. People are living, or they aren’t living. They aren’t granted the right and then have it revoked under certain conditions. They won’t live forever so long as the right-to-live amendment is in the Constitution. It seems like a mistaken classification to try and call it a “right.” Something that does seem reasonable as a right is the ability to move freely about the country and determine one’s fate more-or-less as one wishes, and it seems quite severe enough to permanently revoke that. At the very least, a spot in a supermax prison ensures there will be no repeat offenses. Could you clarify what other reasons you have for considering the death penalty to be a useful answer to some crimes? At the moment, I have only the abstract concept of the “right to live” and an emotional response to the Norwegian mass-murderer to go off of.
That would be an important difference if, when someone was falsely convicted, there was a substantial chance that the error would be discovered. Unfortunately I don’t think there is. When it happens it makes the news–which suggests how rare it is, given how many people are convicted each year of serious crimes.
It still stands as a difference in kind. I won’t argue that overturning convictions is anything but rare, but killing someone gets to a much higher level of can’t-take-it-back. It’s similar to why we shouldn’t surgically castrate sex criminals (leaving chemical castration to the side).
I’d also be willing to lean a little on the emotional response to killing as supporting evidence. Humans already do treat killing people as a serious line that’s crossed. That’s not purely random, nor part of a cost-benefit equation, and I think it’s right to treat it as having some different character to other kinds of harm. I wouldn’t put it as the ultimate harm, but when we’re talking about societal consequences, I’d certainly like to see it off the table. I wouldn’t mind admitting that part of this is emotional reaction: I’d be much happier when watching the responses to high-profile cases if we had the bloodthirsty mob baying for the suspect to be thrown in prison rather than taken to the gallows. It’s so brutal and primitive.
This seems like a pointless distinction. Even if you just put them in jail for life, you can only take back the punishments of the innocents whom you can detect. And you can’t detect all of them.
In other words, there are life sentences that you can’t take back either.
In order to distinguish life sentences from execution here, you need to use an artificial definition of “can’t take back” where being able to take back some members of a set exempts the other members of the set.
Jiro,
Under either system, some small, but non-zero proportion of persons thought to be guilty will subsequently be shown to be innocent, while the rest will not.
Under capital punishment, these people are shit out of luck.
Without capital punishment they will be freed and potentially compensated (at a cost to the state, but establishing improved incentives to avoid doing it again).
Option (b) is much better for the small number of persons found to be innocent, and this particular distinction is irrelevant to everyone else. That’s a pretty clear Pareto gain, and I can’t really see what you’re getting at with the objection that many people will not benefit.
It’s not a Pareto gain, for two reasons:
1. Keeping someone in prison for life costs a lot of money, which someone has to pay. In a system that treats capital punishment as a normal alternative, it’s a lot cheaper.
2. It’s at least arguable that capital punishment provides more deterrence, in which case you don’t have to convict as many people if the punishment is capital. If a conviction provides more deterrence, you can raise your standard of proof, convict fewer people, and so convict fewer innocent people due to both the smaller number and the higher standard.
Also, if you imprison innocent people, this means the guilty person is both unpunished and free to continue committing more crimes.
I’m not sure why this isn’t highly salient to the many people who just want the person who has been identified as guilty to be punished.
Hypothesis: when someone has been identified as guilty, it’s easy to imagine them committing the crime, so it’s natural and satisfying to want that person punished. It’s harder to imagine some unknown person committing more crimes or getting punished.
There may also be a matter of loss aversion– if you let someone who you want to punish go, you lose that particular imagined punishment.
Another piece of loss aversion might be loss of status by admitting that one’s representatives have made a mistake.
“Every person has some chance when we’re using life sentences” expresses our lack of knowledge as a probability. It is, in fact, equivalent to “every person has a 100% or 0% chance, and a certain percentage of people are in each set, but we don’t know who they are.” The fact that you choose to characterize it in one way and not the other is only a matter of framing.
The idea with number 2 is that, while putting someone in jail for forty+ years isn’t really reversible, it’s more reversible than killing them. It points out a cost of capital punishment – innocent men are killed, which is probably worse than imprisoning them falsely, and shortens the window for correcting such decisions considerably. This extra cost will exist as long as there are any false convictions for capital offenses. You may not consider that cost large, or you may think the benefits of capital punishment outweigh that cost, but it is an argument against capital punishment.
I suspect the kind of people who argue against capital punishment would mostly agree with you that the criminal justice system needs other, farther-reaching reforms, but as far as I can tell such reforms are incredibly risky, politically speaking (“soft on crime”). Banning capital punishment seems like a potentially achievable way to reduce the harm of some defects in the system until said defects can be improved upon, so I can see why people who don’t think capital punishment has many benefits would pursue it.
I very, very, seldom see opponents of capital punishment say “there’s an acceptable amount of life-destroying error, but life sentences are under that level and capital punishment is over”. It’s always some absolute.
If you want zero, less is still better than more.
We’re committing “life destroying errors” all over the place, though. Inmates kill each other in prisons. Gangs get out of control and kill each other (and innocents) in shootouts. People get depressed in prison and kill themselves. And so on.
The death penalty is only even considered for (roughly) a triple digit number of people per year in the US anyway. And not many of those people ever actually receive it. So it seems like a weird cause to be passionate about, just from that point of view.
Yes, but people are generally against all those things, too, that’s why they’re illegal. If you have a great idea about how to reduce murder or suicide, people will be very pleased, and happy to implement it (as long as the side effects aren’t terrible). In the meantime, death penalty opponents know how to stop the death penalty from killing innocent people – get the state they live in to stop executing people.
The other major difference between capital punishment and the examples you give is that capital punishment is done under color of law, in the name of the people. People want their government to be just, and in a democracy are responsible (to a degree) for keeping it just.
And we know how to prevent people from having gang shootouts or killing themselves in prisons: Get the state they live in to stop imprisoning people.
I think this is an isolated demand for rigor, unless you actually think that that’s a legitimate objection to prisons.
Not imprisoning anyone would not, as far as I can predict, reduce gang shootouts. But not imprisoning anyone would certainly reduce the amount of harm from false imprisonment.
The reason most capital punishment opponents do not argue for that is, as I suspect you may have guessed, they believe imprisonment has some benefits that outweigh those costs. The permanence/irreversibility of execution is one cost of capital punishment, but if they thought it had benefits that outweighed that cost (and the others) they would not oppose it.
This is not the One True Argument against which no factors can be weighed, it is simply one argument against capital punishment which may be overshadowed by more important and pressing downsides of capital punishment, or overturned by more important and pressing upsides of capital punishment.
I don’t believe this for one moment for most death penalty opponents. Arguments against the death penalty tend to be nearly entirely absolutist arguments against which nothing can be weighed.
If someone really believed you couldn’t execute someone even if it, e.g. eliminated all crime forever, then I’m guessing you’re dealing with a non-utilitarian. Which can be frustrating, but I can’t make their arguments for them. Maybe it’s something about the sanctity of life.
Pretty much any argument can be considered utilitarian in the sense that “it should be our highest priority to X” can be equated to “X should be assigned the highest utility”.
Perhaps. If you prefer, you can append “or utilitarians with extremely unusual ideas about how to calculate utility,” and the rest of my post will still apply.
As best I can tell, the deterrence effect of capital punishment really is an open question, with the supposed unanimity reflecting politics not statistics. The first serious statistical test, by Isaac Ehrlich, found a strong deterrent effect. That set off both a whole lot of politically motivated criticism and serious statistical criticism, and I don’t think anyone ended up with a result strong enough to convince those who didn’t want to believe it, in either direction. For reasons people here are probably familiar with, doing statistics correctly when you can’t do controlled experiments is hard, biasing the results to what you want to find pretty easy.
As some evidence of what is going in in the criminology community on the subject, the following anecdote may be relevant.
Back when I was a faculty fellow at the University of Chicago law school, I got into a conversation with a colleague who was strongly against the death penalty, mentioned the Ehrlich piece. His response was to claim that research showed that deterrence didn’t work and that Ehrlich had refused to share his data, making it impossible for other people to check his results. He offered to lend me a volume on the subject edited by people he knew.
I read it. The only thing in it against deterrence (in general–the book wasn’t all on the death penalty) was the introduction, which offered reasons why the evidence for deterrence might be misleading but offered no evidence in support of any of them. Various articles found evidence that criminal punishment did indeed deter. One of the articles was by someone who had been given Ehrlich’s data by Ehrlich and had duplicated his results.
I told my colleague that. He conceded that he had not actually read the book he lent me. My conclusion was that he had been persuaded to believe what he wanted to believe by a very one sided professional culture that he was part of, believed what his friends told him without any serious attempt to check it.
I should add that the colleague was both prominent and, in my view, an unusually reasonable person.
One argument against capital punishment that I think only I make is that it’s too cheap–not in our society, which has very strong legal barriers against it, but in a society that takes it seriously. That means that if, for political reasons, the welfare of those potentially convicted has little weight in legal decisions, you may get too much punishment on too low standards of proof. It’s part of my old article on the inefficiency of efficient punishment. You have to take account of the incentives on the people making and running the legal system as well as the incentives on potential criminals and potential victims.
A point made in a Larry Niven short story a decade or so before I made it in a JPE article.
One thing I’ve long suggested is more corporal punishment. Yes, really.
I don’t have real data on this, admittedly. But my strong conviction is that ten lashes administered now is *more* deterrent than N years in prison, especially to the median criminal, but is in fact more humane. Having considered it extensively I’d certainly rather be flogged quite badly than go to American prison for even a year (but I expect it’d have more effect on putative criminals.) It’s also dramatically cheaper, and avoids creating a breeding ground of crime.
This isn’t quite the same issue as capital punishment but it feels relevant.
I don’t have real data on this, admittedly. But my strong conviction is that ten lashes administered now is *more* deterrent than N years in prison
Have you read In Defense of Flogging by Peter Moskos? He makes this exact case.
I would agree that it’s more humane and cheaper. Saying “it’s a better deterrent” while also saying “it’s what I’d choose, personally” feels kind of contradictory, but I suspect that once someone went through it the desire to not go through it again would be quite strong.
I guess the obvious objection is “it would mentally fuck up a lot of people and probably give them PTSD,” but that’s also applicable to prison. Probably even more so.
I mean… I’m pretty explicitly claiming I’m smarter than the average bank robber or what have you, hence the inconsistency in preferences.
Other than that I agree with your comment entirely. (I’m not sure I’ve read the particular work you mentioned–writing this comment from plane WiFi on a phone–but I’ve definitely read other defences of the concept and I didn’t come up with it.)
No, the objection is that modern states should not use brutal punishments in order to send a message that violence is wrong.
That’s like saying the state shouldn’t lock people up to send a message that kidnapping is wrong.
Not all numbers are equal. States have to employ some violence to perform their function, but less is still better. You think your opponents are all absolutists, but we are not.
I don’t think it’s about message sending.
Could you expand?
The main thing to do before re-introducing corporal punishment would be to review the arguments against it that led to its abolishment. Unfortunately I can’t find the relevant essays right now but I do remember that some of the early 19th century writing on the topic was quite compelling.
https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-2f5c-The-killing-that-swung-public-opinion#.WaUymzCGNhE
TheAncientGeekAKA1Z
That’s quite an interesting piece, and I recommend it, but it’s about miscarriages of justice which led to abolishing capital punishment rather than why corporal punishment is no longer used.
>Saying “it’s a better deterrent” while also saying “it’s what I’d choose, personally” feels kind of contradictory, but I suspect that once someone went through it the desire to not go through it again would be quite strong.
Criminals generally have higher time preference than non-criminals, meaning that bad thing all at once right now is worse to them than bad thing spread out over the next 5 years. To the low time preference non-criminal, the latter would be worse than the former.
This will only work when we get robo-floggers. (Perhaps re-purposed sex bots?) Imagine the optics of a white corrections officer whipping a black thief. That would sink if even if all involved agreed that high levels of incarceration is bad all around.
Imagine the optics of a white corrections officer whipping a black thief.
Or a man whipping a woman. Or an able-bodied person whipping someone in a wheelchair.
Easy fix: just make all the professional floggers black disabled women. Ideally lesbians.
Kinky
Robin Hanson agrees.
Corporal punishment would be progressive in the sense that rich people are weenies who fear physical violence more. When I was in grade school parents could opt out of having their kids spanked; the only family that took advantage was the rich family on my block. It was taken as a sign that their son was a weenie.
I think Heinlein used flogging in Starship Troopers as part of his ‘include plenty of sex and violence’ writing plan, mostly. But also he really idealized the American Pioneers of the nineteenth century. They flogged felons, so he figured there had to be something to it.
It is an interesting model, and it seems to work in Singapore. I think the weakest point of using flogging instead of prison is that a major benefit of prison is we keep the bad guys off the streets for a period of time. That is an important function of prisons, perhaps as important as the deterrence principle. I’ve heard it theoroized that much of the decline of US crime is directly due to the higher level of criminals in prisons. They can’t commit more crimes when they’re in prison. The flogged guys can go right back and commit crimes. Flogging has to have a much greater level of deterrence value to offset the value of getting criminals off the street.
My only qualms about it are tied to the fallibility and potential manipulation and abuse of the justice system.
I feel pretty strongly that there are times and circumstances where killing another human being or beings is not only “not immoral”, but where it is actively morally praiseworthy. If this is true for individuals, then it follows that it should be true for societies.
I’m in a similar boat, my current ambivalence towards Capital Punishment has much more do with the way it is currently implemented than the philosophical/moral grounds.
This is my main objection to the death penalty. If you put an innocent person in jail for decades, then at least they have a chance to live to see their names cleared, but if you kill them, then they lose that chance. I’m not opposed to the death penalty in theory, but I feel that we should hold off on executing many people until we figure out how to reduce our rate of erroneous convictions. If it turns out to be impossible to do that, then I’d be willing to abolish the death penalty.
As I pointed out above, “everyone has a chance” is equivalent to “some people have a 100% chance, some people have an 0% chance, but we don’t know who they are”. Whether everyone has a chance is a matter of framing, not an actual fact about the situation.
Yes, that’s kind of the notion of chance. When I roll a die, the outcome is 100% to be one of the faces and 0% chance to be the others, but I don’t know which is which.
I don’t see why reframing the concept of chance should change which course of action is more morally correct.
Say that, from a certain perspective, 10% of the convicts have a 100% chance to see their names cleared (as long as they aren’t executed before then), and 90% of the convicts have a 0% chance.
Since we have no way of knowing in advance which of the convicts are in the 10% and which are in the 90%, I prefer to delay or cancel the executions, and allow those 10% to eventually be freed, rather than killed. Regardless of how you frame it, that’s definitely the system I’d want in place, should I ever find myself on death row.
(Realistically, I expect the rate of exonerations would be less than 10%, but it makes a nice clean number to use as an example.)
That’s my point.
Because “everyone gets some chance” can be reframed as “some people get 100% chance and some people get 0% chance”, the presence of the 0% chance cannot possibly make any moral difference.
Death penalty opponents act as though having an 0% chance in there does make a moral difference.
Except in the case of the death penalty we know who has 0% chance: all of them. I’m really confused by your insistence that using probabilities to talk about unknown events in the future is incorrect because, once those events happen, we’ll know for certain what their outcomes are.
I don’t find it compelling that “we know who has the 0% chance” makes it immoral but “we don’t know who has the 0% chance” leaves it moral.
Except for at least 159 of them.
Those condemned to death and those sentenced to life in prison have, qualitatively, the same chance. A period of time between when they are sent off to prison and when they die, during which they might be acquitted and released, after which they cannot be.
Quantitatively, there is almost certainly a difference, but it isn’t clear who has the advantage. Time is a significant variable in that equation, but so is intensity of effort. We have a well-defined appellate process to try and make sure we get the death penalty right, and people who are motivated to work real hard in the time available. I see rather less of that where life in prison is concerned.
Morally, I count as the clear winner the people who say, “We are going to do this, and so we are responsible for doing it right”, not the ones who say “there’s a chance that somebody else can fix our mistakes thirty years from now, so our hands are clean”.
Are the death penalty opponents who don’t care about miscarriages of justice made out of the same substance as the envoironmentallists who are opposed to nuclear power and geoengineering.
I’m mostly concerned with the death penalty opponents whose concern with miscarriages of justice ends with “…and now someone else will come and fix the actual problem”, and I suspect they are made from the same substance as the no-nukes environmentalists who expect someone else to put together an adequate non-nuclear but carbon-neutral energy infrastructure.
I agree with other commentators (Sam Reuben inter alia) that I can’t follow your logic there.
Some additional reasons why I tend to be against capital punishment and even for strong legal checks against introducing it:
* Because of the total irreversibility of capital punishment, the justice system that utilizes it may be extra disinclined to admit the chance that conviction is wrongful. Wrongfully jailed people can be paid with money, so the system has a chance to “save face”.
* I also find it plausible that if past some point the perpetrator knows that they will be killed anyway for the crimes they have already committed, they have no reason to surrender or cease (they may even try to achieve so called suicide-by-cop). I believe this is a part of the rationale why our police shoots even machete-wielding terrorists at legs if possible.
* If the capital punishment is in the books, in exceptional circumstances an exceptional government will have less hoops to jump start misusing it to (for example) murder political undesirable persons, conscientious objectors, and alike (which has happened many times in many countries during the 20th century). If there’s instead strong anti-capital punishment legislation, on the same par as the constitution (as currently we have after concluding that murdering people is reprehensible), the government that would like to do something like that will either have to admit they are no longer governing by the rule of law (and everyone, especially the bureaucrats and officers will know it) or they have very strong support to able to legally overturn the constitution.
(edit. To address John Schilling’s issues below, here the life sentence that actually is for life is reserved for the very few very terrible criminals, and I’m content with that.)
If someone dies in jail, compensating him with money is as hard as compensating someone who was executed. (And if your reply is “*some* people in jail can be compensated, if they are discovered early enough”, see other comments about accepting 0% when you don’t know who the 0%-ers are, and not accepting it when you do. The fact that you don’t know ahead of the time who’s getting the uncompensatable punishment shouldn’t make it okay.)
Also, you can’t really pay someone back for the years anyway. You can’t give a half of a life worth of years back any more than you can give a whole life worth of years.
Nevertheless, considering the very low probability of dying in a prison, I’d prefer being wrongfully prisoned than wrongfully executed.
And also tangentially related to my point at best. Compensation is not perfect, but it’s still an available route for the state if they realize they have the wrong person. The dead person you can’t even compensate. After killing someone, the system might very well be very disinclined to admit they did it because wrong reasons.
(Further, I don’t understand your concept of probability.)
My memory of Actual Innocence (book on the DNA reversals) is that the authorities were disinclined to allow DNA testing that might reverse past cases even when they had not led to execution.
Which is the fault of the DP opponents?
Which means that
may not be an argument against the death penalty, since it may also be true after convicting and imprisoning someone.
I am largely indifferent to capital punishment itself, but I view life imprisonment as capital punishment for moral cowards and I want no part of it. Either commit to returning someone to the human race, or commit to removing them from it.
And in any case, make damn sure you’ve got the right person. Eschewing capital punishment doesn’t get you out of that responsibility. The plan is to lock someone in a cage until it is time to drag out a corpse. There will be a finite period of time in which any mistakes can be corrected, after which it will be too late. But mistakes won’t be corrected, unless someone goes and does it. I’m much more interested in what someone plans to do in the first three months to make sure they’ve got the right guy, than in their claims to moral superiority on account of they have arranged things so that someone in thirty years can fix their mistakes for them. If they care, which they probably won’t, and if they can, which they probably can’t, and if the innocent victim hasn’t been raped to death, which almost nobody cares to prevent.
Well said. I think I’m going to use this going forward.
It’s a very fine thing to say, but I believe it also manages to avoid what the argument actually is about. Does anyone who is against capital punishment advocate for not striving to decrease the sentencing error rate?
After bold statements, the issue that judicial systems are not perfect remains. The cases where the imperfections cause more dead people than necessary will increase faster then linearly wider the category of crimes warranting the death penalty is, because police has limited resources to throughly investigate all crimes.
And thinking a bit more I must walk back on my words. Claiming that nobody cares about preventing raping innocent victims to death is anything but fine thing to say, because I’d tempted to believe that actually people do care. Even the people who oppose death penalty.
If anything, I would expect people who oppose the death penalty to be more concerned than the general population is when it comes to thinks like prison rape, false convictions, and other problems with the American justice system.
What if you feel that a swift execution is more humane than life in prison without possibility of parole? I can’t be the only person who’d prefer the former, given the choice.
This is easy enough to accomplish by giving a jailed person the opportunity to kill themselves (in such a way that it can’t be used against anyone else).
Yet it appears that many hardened criminals who live by the credo ‘get rich or die trying’ seem very motivated to avoid the death penalty once it becomes a choice between life without parole and the needle. Have you asked yourself why? Why would you be more cavalier with a likely 4 decades more of life compared to a career criminal with a consistent pattern of nihilism and extreme risk taking?
I suspect max-security for life would be quite the fall from grace for any SSC-commenter, and shame aversion is what’s driving your hypothetical decision making. But after you adjusted to your new situation you might not be as brash; to paraphrase Tyrion: “plenty of principled minds have been persuaded to compromise after a few weeks cooling off in the brig.”
Fake executions are used for torture.
I’ve never heard of fake opportunities to commit suicide being used as torture. Any examples?
Phantom of the Opera, Saw #1
I think that it doesn’t work well as a deterrent, and that many people arrested today have a non-insignificant chance of surviving until the Singularity, after which they will live a vast number of happy years, which I think is a great thing no matter how weird someone’s values are.
If I was innocent, by my best understanding of current statistics, it might be better to have the death penalty than life imprisonment, because of all the additional legal attention received; it is hard to find exact figures for reversal of conviction, but a slight majority of death penalty cases are at least reduced to life imprisonment, suggesting that innocence might be more likely to come out in a death penalty case.
In this above-averagely-transhumanist internet community, I’m rather surprised that no one has brought up the obvious possibility: If you are still in favour of the death penalty in principle, but worried about our ability to avoid false positives in conviction, then instead of shooting/gassing/lethally injecting someone, cryogenically preserve them. That way, if technology later improves to the point of being able to a) thaw them safely, and b) accurately tell whether they were actually guilty (possibly with some sort of brain scanning that we cannot currently do), then they can be thawed out, scanned for innocence, and if so, released … with the added bonus that the people you would be freezing would be less dead at the point of preservation than the people that can currently legally be cryo-preserved, and therefore better candidates for future thawing technology.
And if they were, guilty, well, they haven’t lost anything that they wouldn’t have lost with the regular death penalty anyway.
😛
Isn’t that (kind of) the plot of The Demolition Man?
Good point. I haven’t seen that film in years.
I notice there’s a similarity of methods between opponents of abortion and opponents of the death penalty. That is, if they can’t ban it, they try to make it inconvenient. E.g., pressuring labs not to manufacture chemicals used in lethal injections.
Seeing the comments above, I would say that my position on death penalty would be somewhat unusual, but here it is:
1) As was already mentioned, yes, while death penalty is more irreversible than life sentence, but life sentence is pretty rarely reversed and and it can easily be more humane.
2) Policy-wise, I would argue for more lenient policies for less-violent and less socially-dangerous criminals, and death penalty for more violent and socially dangerous ones.
3) Lenient policies – as in, not jail, but more like home imprisonment with a right to work or study (or not work) under supervision at a house and job picked by the judiciary system.
4) Jails, as they currently are, are not really places where people get rehabilitated or resocialized – they are a cruel and unusual punishment for good people who are not systematic criminals, a “crime university” or “home sweet home” for bad people and a place where medium people get turned into bad ones (plus, don’t forget the damaged psyches of the prison guards – it’s probably psychologically easier to kill a criminal once than fuck with him for n years).
5) The death penalty should be given to the… you know, actual criminals. An average person on the street can, by being shown a photo of a suspect, tell whether he is a criminal or not with like 90% accuracy at a first glance. I don’t think that it is impossible to get a scheme that would tell a criminal from a non-criminal with a 99% accuracy or better. (Not talking here about a 100% proof that the suspect commited some particular crime – just that he is a criminal. For example, back in good old USSR mafia dudes would draw some very special tattoos on themselves. A dude with such tattoos commits a crime, any crime – just execute him and be done with it).
As for what we currently have – criminals don’t even get taken out of the circulation, not really. Not even when they are in for a life sentence.
I’m with you. The pragmatic arguments against the US’s current implementation seem reasonable, but I just don’t buy into the deontology that most progressives seem to feel around the issue.
Something that seems obvious to me, but I’ve never heard proposed: Require a higher evidentiary standard for capital punishment (“beyond a shadow of a doubt” rather than “beyond a reasonable doubt”, perhaps?)
I am against the death penalty, and I *do* believe it has deterrence value. I am also convinced it’s not as good as reasonable incarceration, because the deterrence is very front loaded. The reason we don’t have death penalty anymore except for egregious murder is because if the state executes people for rapes or stealing horses, it removes the disincentive once you’ve passed the line – better to kill everyone who saw it and get away, because you’re not getting killed multiple times for multiple death sentences, and because even if you get 130 years or something you’re not gonna serve it. The value to the Nordic European system where you’re getting 12 years for a murder is that there’s still headroom to keep punishing people for doing *more* bad after that. Killing 2 people and getting 24 years is a significant enough increase to make you really think about that second capital crime after you’ve done the first. (This is all assuming you’re a rational person and prone to considering deterrence, there’s nothing you can do about the real true psychopaths so you just have to bracket them off)
I’m in favor of capital punishment for the normal reasons. It’s an elegant combination of retribution and incapacitation which we shouldn’t abandon.
If it was actually used, it could keep the worst criminals off the streets much more cheaply than locking them away. And unlike a prison sentence it can’t be reversed after the fact, eliminating the possibility that a criminal will be let out partway through his sentence.
Beyond that, there are a lot of crimes which you shouldn’t expect to survive committing. Murderers, rapists, drug dealers, and thieves should live in constant fear. It’s not necessarily about deterrence so much as an emphasis of our values as a society.
Honest question, why do rapists, drug dealers and thieves make the cut? It’s not retribution in those cases, and it’s no more incapacitating than being in a cage[*]. I’ll admit I’m biased: a friend of mine is a perfectly nice drug dealer and I’d strongly prefer that no one kill him.
[*] for the most casual drug dealers it’s no more incapacitating than begin given a stern talking-to, but I assume you’re not talking about them.
The following is an explanation of my thought process, not a rigorous argument from first principles.
Rapists and thieves make the list in my book because a victim of attempted rape or attempted robbery/burglary who killed their attacker in self-defense would be justified. In general that seems like a good starting point: whenever the victim of a crime would have the right to kill their attacker, the state has the same right.
Drug dealers are the odd man out there, since you can’t justifiably shoot your dealer. I don’t really have a moral justification so much as a practical one: places like Singapore have managed to control drug abuse by executing dealers while we have utterly failed using every other conceivable tactic. If it works it’s a simple fix and if it doesn’t it’s not a huge loss trying it.
Some of my friends were low-level dealers. Hopefully they would have been smart enough to switch careers in the face of the death penalty. But if not they weren’t exactly America’s best and brightest to begin with.
Can=/=must. Also note that you are incentivising these types of criminal to kill their victims.
Can doesn’t equal must, that’s true, but it definitely doesn’t equal mustn’t.
The argument against capital punishment is that it mustn’t happen at all. My argument is that it should happen more often. If I’ve implied that I think it should be universal then that’s a miscommunication on my part.
It’s funny how quickly people shift between execution being a weak disincentive and a strong one depending on whether or not it serves their argument to do so.
If the death penalty is frightening enough that some criminals would rather kill than risk facing it, it should also be frightening enough to keep some people from committing crimes in the first place. And given that murders are much easier to solve than rapes or thefts, it seems that we should expect the latter incentive to quickly win out.
Well, it’s not a shift. In general, it’s either an assumption that a large number of cases where people who kill someone or commit other crimes think about the repercussions only after the deed is done and even then not very clearheadedly, or considering probabilities: Assuming there’s death penalty in place for thieving, a thief still may reasonably think (or at least think they are reasonable) that they can get away with stealing a telly as long as they do their business undetected. But if the family who lives in the house wakes up, suddenly they are witnesses who will get you dead if they alert the police and the situation must be resolved within a minute, no room for careful thinking (rational or ethical).
And death penalty for something so trivial as stealing stuff is way over my Overton window, I feel slightly nauseated about about discussing it.
I was a bit surprised at your comment until I reread and saw the word telly. If you’re not British please disregard the following.
With respect, your attitude is part of why the UK has between two to five times more home invasion robberies than the US.
If you break into a home in the US there’s a small but very real possibility that you’re leaving in a body bag. Criminals take this into account and try harder to make sure that nobody is home. This extrajudicial death penalty has probably prevented quite a few murders rapes and assualts over and beyond protecting property.
There’s nothing trivial about a break in or a mugging. And behaving as though it’s trivial is how you get more of them.
@Nabil ad Dajjal
“With respect, your attitude is part of why the UK has between two to five times more home invasion robberies than the US.”
Source?
I believe nimim is Finn, so he probably learned British English.
A hodgepodge collection of the internet English, really. Though my autocorrect defaults to US English because I don’t usually bother to tinker with language settings.
For the record, the most prominent form of thievery that I’d be concerned about in my everyday life is stuff like … having a bike stolen, maybe a car … at worst, pickpockets. Home break-ins are not unheard of, but the prominent target would be unattended summer cottages or suburban houses during the workday. Large number of which would be committed by “professional burglars” who travel all around the Schengen area and pick “easy” targets.
These days, the stereotypical “Hollywood break-in” that happens a) at night and b) the family is likely to be present …I couldn’t find statistics, but I believe that would be relatively rare. Nobody I know is particularly worried about that scenario. [The latest burglary statistic: ~0.040 burglaries per capita during the latest 6 mo period; does not differentiate whether the occupants were present or not.] The prominent case would be animal right activists breaking in into livestock outbuilding to take pictures of the cows, but that’s probably affected media / perception bias. I can’t remember any prominent news items about serious violence in connection with burglaries, though.
Anyway, having your stuff stolen is only stuff and often covered by the insurance to some extent. Taking the US-UK numbers, a culture where you’d be expected to engage in possibly lethal fights with thieves with the benefit of pushing the number of burglaries down by only a factor of 5 does not sound like a good deal to me.
And I’d like to remind the particular scenario we were originally discussing was an official death penalty for thieves. While I dislike death penalty in all cases, I admit that in case of murder it can be argued to be proportional to the crime committed. But for stealing things? Unimaginable.
it’s not a shift, It’s pointing out that the DP generates incentives going in both directions, imprisonment in only one direction.
Depending on how well calibrated the risk-reward calculations of the criminal are, and how finely tuned the punishments are.
A robber might still kill a witness to avoid time in jail, just as they might to avoid being killed.
Assuming robbers are the type of people who take foolish risks for a chance at short term gain, anyway.
A criminal might well kill a witness to avoid a $50 fine, if they think they are likely to get away with it and if the penalty for murder is a $100 fine. In order to dissuade criminals from killing witnesses, in a world where you don’t have omniscient policemen and killing witnesses often actually works, you need a punishment for murder that is substantially more severe than your punishment for e.g. armed robbery.
It seems unlikely that the average criminal is going to consider a 30-year prison sentence to be substantially more severe than 20 years, or life imprisonment substantially more severe than being put in jail until geezerdom and then “released” into a nursing home. So, what’s your proposed penalty for a career armed robber on his third conviction, and what’s your proposed penalty for murder?
The technical term for one of the issues discussed here is “marginal deterrence.” For any interested, I coauthored an article on it a very long time ago.
What’s the penalty for being late?
Death.
What’s the penalty for rebellion?
Death.
We’re late.
That’s a famous story about the end of the Ch’in dynasty, the first to unite China. It’s probably Han propaganda. At least, when they excavated a Ch’in tomb whose documents provided legal information, the system appeared to be much less severe than in the accounts of the Han and later historians.
You consider that a uniformly bad thing? Of course it is a part of the system. People are released early as a reward for good behaviour. If you think reform should not be part of the system, maybe you could say so explicitly.
Parole and appeals aren’t inherently bad. As you said, they’ve been part of the Anglo-American legal system for centuries.
The problem is that for the last half-century an alarming number of judges have completely lost their minds. I don’t know how or why this happened but dangerous criminals keep being let out because of it. Until the underlying issue there can be fixed there needs to be a workaround.
I’m theoretically in favor of reform. If a criminal can be rehabilitated then they should be. But the way reform advocates behave in the real world, I’d rather keep them as far away from the criminal justice system as possible.
Are you sure this is a problem with an objective basis? Bear in mind that the media are incentivised to report failures and ignore successes.
I know that the next open thread has already been posted, and that you’ve already partially addressed this, but:
One of these things is extremely not like the others. The fact that many drug dealers are thoroughly shady types is true because and only because our societies persist so bone-headedly in insisting that no lawful actors can enter the market, and in pretending that all drug use is pathological, so that all instances of using, or enabling others to use drugs can justify punishment.
I understand that Singapore is quite effective at keeping their levels of drug use down. I expect that if they were to apply the death penalty to sugar importers, alcohol importers, heck, raw milk importers if there’s demand for that, then they would be successful at reducing their population’s exposure to those health hazards as well. Doesn’t mean that death is a remotely proportionate response to people’s desire to decide for themselves what health risks they’re willing to run on their own bodies.
And unless I’m mistaken, Singapore applies the death penalty to even cannabis importers, while alcohol is still legal to import (if somewhat more restricted in terms of public consumption). As I’ve mentioned on these threads before, anyone who has it that way round, who would respond with lethal violence to what is almost certainly the less dangerous of those two drugs, while giving the more dangerous one a pass, is either utterly deranged in their understanding of relative risks, and therefore unfit to be deciding what risks people ought to die for, or is optimising for something almost perfectly uncorrelated to the goal of protecting their society from health risks in the first place.
A better question might be whether more people agree with your “crying wolf” post now that our country is going crazy and gnawing ferociously at its first amendment leg to get off the speck of white nationalism.
Why is White Nationalism a problem at all if it does not include White Dominionism (in the sense of John Derbyshire)? Japan, Poland, Russia, Israel and China have LOTS of nationalism but few people actually believe that this is actually a problem.
Nazism was a real problem not because it contains German Nationalism but instead because:
1.It was violent.
2.It contains German Dominionism.
3.It contains eliminationism.
Unless WN contains any of the things above it is not a problem.
Because there are black and hispanic people in the USA.
One King can rule a country, but two Kings of the same country is a recipe for a civil war. The same applies to forms of nationalism.
There are also non-Poles in Poland and non-Japanese in Japan. Yet there are no potential civil wars.
Not anymore, after the 1945 ethnic cleansing of Eastern Europe reduced the minorities to more manageable numbers. Plus, being oppressed by Communists and then going full speed ahead to join the cosmopolitan European Union probably helped matters too.
There’s a difference of degree, though. Japan has 1.5% non-Japanese people, but the US has 13% black people.
@Evan and alawisunjust I agree.
So what are we supposed to do? Can we reliably help black Americans improve and let them feel that they are not left behind?
Many people would stop their anti-black attitudes if the black crime rate can be lowered to the white one and black neighborhoods can become generally safe and interesting just like Chinatowns. Can we give this a try? We are rationalists so let’s think about methods that do work, not methods that sound great but don’t work.
I mean we will certainly de facto shut down the most rabid anti-black hate sites such as Chimpmania, nwordmania, etc if these can happen. These sites are in fact multiracial with Jews, whites in mixed marriages with non-blacks and a significant amount of Northeast and South Asians but are also much more hateful than real white supremacist and white nationalist websites. They literally cheer when a black person dies. So the problem is not just about white racists.
@HFARationalist, I agree you’ve picked the right goal. I’d recommend looking more at the examples of past American immigration and integration; I’m reading a book right now – William Stuntz’s The Collapse of American Criminal Justice – that has a very interesting argument on that score. Basically, he talks about how police and court procedure are now imposed upon communities from outside (with the best of intentions), while before c. 1950 they were organically grown from within. I’m not sure what I think of the argument yet, but it’s very interesting.
@Evan The problem is really just about blacks. In the worst case Hispanics can always flee to Latin America instead of getting caught in a concentration camp. Furthermore Hispanics don’t attack whites for being white and work more than blacks.
Blacks have nowhere to go, not even Africa. In black Africa there are many ethnic groups. They probably won’t just allow tribeless black Americans to settle there en masse and become a new ethnic group that breaks the tribal balance. Most blacks aren’t criminals, nor do they kill whites simply for being white. However there are indeed blacks who attack whites for being white and blacks who call for such attacks. If the two-way race riot Thomas Sowell worried about ever happens it will be a one-sided massacre. The election of President Trump actually made this scenario less likely, not more likely.
Affirmative action has been tried and it does not work. What works?
First of all I think to solve a problem we have to be able to face facts. That includes whether H.BD is correct and whether reducing single motherhood rate can reliably reduce the amount of crime in black neighborhoods. Facts can’t be racist or sexist. On the other hand acknowledging facts is necessary before we can work with them. We can’t fix problems if we aren’t allowed to find out what they are and what exactly caused them. This procedure can be uncomfortable just like an operation. However the patient will feel better in the long run because the operation is done so it’s worth it.
“Blacks have nowhere to go”.
Liberia is a country expressly formed for this exact purpose. I mean, it’s pretty much a disaster of a country, but still. Not every ethno-nationalist project can be Israel.
I agree that facing facts would be a huge help. It’s possible to stumble into an answer without that, but much less likely.
My own supposition is that the three most important fixes would be reducing single motherhood, increasing employment at legal work (which includes both making jobs more accessible and getting more people to want them), and increasing trust in institutions.
Unfortunately, the only way I can think of to do it in less than another century is for God to come down and change people’s hearts. As other commenters have said here about other societal trends, we’re in a high-entropy state. Trust in institutions and good habits are much easier to destroy than to build.
@ashlael Liberia does not work any more. After the civil wars natives probably don’t want even more Amero-Liberians.
There are things that can be done to increase trust in institutions:
1) Body cameras on police
2) Investigations of police to be handled by the next town or state over
3) Increased police deployment to Black areas
Only number 3 is particularly expensive, and all can be accomplished on the county level.
@. Then it needs to get started. Start from Washington, DC and Chicago.
Will President Trump send the Feds to fix Chicago?
Luckily there is a grassroots movement devoted to these goals. Unfortunately a terrorist terroristed on their behalf and they said some mean things on Twitter, so now everyone hates them.
@. Who are these people?
BLM. Especially Campaign Zero which is some sort of intellectual vanguard for the movement.
@. The key weakness of BLM including Campaign Zero is that they tend to focus on the wrong problems.
What they should do instead of asking for reparations etc (these don’t work. In fact reparations won’t help them more than winning a lottery ticket will) is to try to understand what’s wrong with their community itself and fix it.
The universe is a cruel place. I’m not sure whether black leaders have ever realized this fact or not. Asking for mercy or compassion does not work in the long run. Making oneself more competent does. In order to succeed in this cruel universe you have to do it in spite of racism instead of asking for racism to be removed. That’s the path taken by Jews, Poles, the Irish and Northeast Asians and it actually works.
By the way, I hate to say it but the only people who can save black Americans are themselves. We can help them but only up to a point. They will have to go through all the ups and downs by themselves. I agree that America is a bit racist. However the rest of the world is considerably more racist than America. If you can not survive some racism then you can not survive on this planet. If you can not thrive when some racism exists then you can not thrive on this planet. It’s much easier to make oneself more racism-proof (think of it as something similar to being drought-proof) than making the entire society less racist. As Nietzsche said, anything that does not kill you, yes that includes racism, makes you stronger.
@HFA:
I highly reccommend that you, especially, don’t start dividing things this way. Your autistic head would be on the proverbial chopping block quite a bit faster than you would like.
My point being, if you start wanting to divide things into us and them, don’t be surprised when you are all of a sudden on the outside,as one of them.
@HeelBearCub I do not have any ill will towards blacks in general and black Americans in particular. If they will one day no longer be overrepresented in crime and underrepresented in STEM my life will also become more secure. On the other hand if open race war happens everyone will suffer including me.
We are all on the same team.
Hell what if Detroit suddenly becomes a prosperous city while it remains black it will be good for its black, white and other inhabitants, it will be better for Pistons fans, it will be better for me because I will be able to visit Detroit, it will be better for America both economically and socially. And…it can shut certain rabid racist websites such as chimpmania down and make others such as Stormfront unpopular.
That will be a win-win scenario.
Since the goal is pretty clear (and it is not to make ghettos even worse or start a race war) we need to think about how it can be achieved and what shall we do towards the goal. Liberals tried affirmative action plus curbing racism. That already failed. So let’s try something else.
If the socioeconomic problems related to blacks can finally be over America will achieve true racial harmony. That will indeed be wonderful. 🙂
@HFA: I’m not an expert on Black politics but I think this understanding of their aims and rhetoric is mostly wrong. As far as I can tell demanding reparations is atypical. Certainly BLM is not about reparations, but about the conduct of law enforcement.
@. Unfortunately that won’t work either. The main reason is that a community should not prioritize protection of its members who are more likely to commit crimes than others. Start from those who aren’t in trouble with the law or the community will look bad and encourages even more racism. Why not start from encouraging black-owned businesses and help black students study? There is no shortage of people who are willing to tutor them to earn some bucks. Why not accept donations and use them to pay tutors to help black students? Instead of lowering standards why not help them meet the standards? 🙂
By the way the reason why reparation doesn’t work is that the ability to earn and keep money is more important than money itself. I’m sure those who artificially persecuted Jews or other market dominant minorities, stole their properties and then ended up losing their spoils due to mismanagement know this fact. If we can help black Americans manage their money better there will be no need for any reparations.
@HFA:
You still are very confused about my point. By excluding people who are black from your idea of “we”, you are making a mistake.
You encourage me to exclude you from “we”.
@HeelBearCub I see. 🙂 Exclusion isn’t my idea.
@HFARationalist
But it does: The reason BLM has such wide support, at least in liberal circles, is empathy for the injustice that black people in America have to suffer.
Did it, though? According to NYT, black happiness saw “one of the most dramatic gains in the happiness data that you’ll see” (also Scott: “Things Probably Matter). Just because we (all races) are not at the goal yet doesn’t mean we haven’t come far.
Maybe some of the Left’s obsession with “microaggressions” has trivialized this a bit, but racism can very much fall into the category of things that “kill you”, or at least make your life significantly worse. It is not about being virtuous in the face of adversity, but simple utilitarian calculus–if “being racist” brings less utility to whites than “being victimized by racism” takes utility from blacks, the level of racism should be lowered, whether that helps decreasing the racial gap in other respects or not. In some communities with already low racism it is possible that the policing against perceived racism is doing more damage than the racism thus avoided does good, but I expect this not to be the general case.
It is very much possible that these facts will prevent us from ever achieving true equality, and it is hard to know how far along the path of diminishing returns we’ve come.
@The Element of Surprise
I didn’t saying that racism is harmless. Instead I said that the ability to survive despite malice is necessary for a group.
For example antisemites murdered many Jews but they can never break their will to succeed again. Hence Jews always managed to rebuild everything evil mobs destroyed.
Poles, the Irish and Northeast Asians were persecuted as well. The persecution was actually sometimes lethal. However they used the strategy Jews use and it turns out to be a good idea.
I’m not suggesting that compassion is harmful. However one needs to be prepared for a scenario with no compassion at all but instead only malice. Black American leaders are putting too many of their eggs in the basket of liberal compassion and I disagree with this strategy.
If affirmative action actually works we should let it continue in some way.
I disagree that facts about racial differences will prevent us from achieving true equality. On the other hand it will make true equality achievable by identifying the exact bugs to fix through transhumanism or medicine.
@. The policing problem can be solved by making all the police officers in predominantly black areas black so that racism won’t be an issue. The unsafe areas that happen to be predominantly black need more (non-racist) policing, not less.
@HFARationalist:
Yes, this is why the Vichy government was fully committed to resisting the Nazis.
You don’t understand how non-autistic humans work.
@HFARationalist
That is a major BLM demand and it’s actually already true that relatively many police officers in black neighborhoods are black. It’s also true that black police officers are more likely to shoot black citizens.
The idea that black policing black solves the policing issues seems like a pipe dream.
@Aapje I agree with them on that demand. The main point of making police officers in predominantly black communities black serve two purposes:
1.It generally eliminates racism in policing.
2.It makes it harder to reasonably blame police-related incidents unrelated to racism on racism.
By black police officers I mean police officers in predominantly black communities should be black, especially the police chief. We should even allow the communities to turn a blind eye to minor crimes they don’t care about that much and first focus on violence if necessary. We may also arm black civilians with no criminal background so that they can defend themselves if attacked by criminals.
Let the black community police itself and take pride in making itself safe and prosper. 🙂
One thing that would be interesting would be to examine the data on police force racial composition and seen whether having a police force that does not mirror the composition of the community actually leads to worse effects. Some data on the topic has been collected for other purposes (analyzing the impact of residency requirements), here: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/reexamining-residency-requirements-for-police-officers/
@bbartlog Sure. However I still consider black self-policing a good idea. It reduces the amount of racism and prevents attempts to claim that legitimate policing is actually racist persecution of blacks. If it actually make black communities safer it will be black police officers who take the credit which can shut racists up.
It is bad for real racist police officers, it is bad for thugs who happen to be black, it is bad for Stormfront and chimpmania and it is good for all of us, black and non-black alike.
As I said before if black underachievement can be corrected true racial harmony will follow.
Counterpoints to Scott on white nationalism and Trump:
Trump seems very lite on solid opinions for things most people view as being important to politics: NAFTA (is it bad / are we leaving?), NATO, probably some other abbreviations starting with N too. My guess is he does not have an opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict other than “it’s a tough situation but Jared will work something out that makes everyone happy”. I have no reason to dispute the common perception that his opinion on these is the same as that of whoever last spoke to him about it.
But he does seem to have well defined ideas that fall under what we might call “right identity politics”: bringing back coal jobs, the Muslim ban, the trans-in-military ban, building the wall to keep the bad Mexicans out. He’s tried to reissue the Muslim ban, he’s following through on the trans ban, and is now pushing for Congress to pay to build the wall, presumably because he views wall-we-paid-for as better than no-wall. (I fully expect him to come out with “The main important thing is to get the wall built now to stop all the Mexicans from coming in, and then we can strong-arm Mexico into reimbursing us later”; frankly, I’m surprised he hasn’t said it already.) He’s now pardoned Arpaio as well.
Under that guise things start looking, well, sinister. Obama may not have been a secret Muslim just because he wouldn’t call things “radical Islamic terrorism”, but he certainly was (or chose to behave like) the kind of leftist who doesn’t want to condemn Islam at all due to concerns about multiculturalism etc. Basically, there are people out there who would respond to name-dropping Islamic terrorism as “that’s Islamophobic!”, and regardless of how he felt about the issue, Obama knew this and was choosing not to provoke them. It’s not secret Muslim-level, but it points to something more than just random noise in what words Obama chose to speak at press conferences.
Trump has behaved analogously about white nationalism, refusing to call them out at first, very grudgingly call them out later, and then letting us all know how he felt off-the-cuff at the infrastructure press conference. Sure, maybe he was upset with his aides / the media for making him call out white nationalism by name just because he doesn’t like being pushed around. But in the same way that this said something about Obama, it says something about Trump—there are groups he is being careful not to offend.
I don’t think it’s meaningless that David Duke went on camera at the rally basically saying he was Trump’s evangel; can you imagine him saying that 10 years ago about George W. Bush? I don’t think it’s meaningless that white nationalists seized on Trump’s original words as “this is good for us, he likes us but can’t say it”.
The infrastructure press conference gave weak evidence—”many sides”, comparisons of statues of Robert E. Lee to those of Washington and Jefferson, and “I’m waiting until I have all the facts about this before I condemn anyone”.
“Many sides” is not inherently wrong—the antifa people are pretty nasty, and from the sample of Berkeley they do seem to enjoy excuses to punch people and break things. But they do seem to be more focused on hurting property than on people. The statement “radical leftists have killed much fewer people recently [whatever that means] than radical rightists” seems to be mostly true. Antifa notably had not just murdered someone with a car, unlike the other side. There may be two nasty sides, but one of them seems appreciably less nasty.
The Lee vs Washington comparison is something I doesn’t think holds merit, due to Washington being famous for some good things (founding America, being the first President well enough for there to be a second) and Lee being famous only for betraying his country to fight for slavery.
Still, these are two arguments that I don’t agree with but have seen from the mouths of people I view as intelligent, and I have not decided that they are unintelligent based on that data alone. Basically, these are weak points against Trump, and forgivable in the absence of other points against them.
As for “I’m waiting for more information”, I commend him on his newfound intellectual restraint and am sure we’ll be seeing more of it in the future.
In summary, Trump seems to be alt-lite himself—doesn’t like Muslims because their culture is too different from ours, doesn’t like Mexicans because they suck, wants to “fight for the real Americans”. Opinions that are within the range of “we’ll still visit grandpa, just try not to talk about politics around him”. He probably doesn’t hate Jews or anything crazy like that. But I think he views the white nationalists as merely extreme members of his own team, of the sort that are present on all sides in all conflicts and whose sins are glossed over or magnified in history books corresponding to whether or not their team won. Either Scott disagrees with this conclusion, or finds it less troubling than I do.
From a practical point of view, of course white nationalists don’t pose an existential threat to America, and terrorism in general is vastly over-feared. But I don’t think tying Trump and white nationalists uncomfortably close together is intellectually dishonest, in the sense that the conclusion is false, and I’m interested in doing so because I want his approval rating to decrease further.
To quote Samuel johnson, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Washington being both a prominent liberty yelper and negro driver, it seems to me that this description applies as much to him as Lee.
Had Lee won, he would have been considered a founding father of the Confederacy. I don’t see how you can condemn Lee for treason, but not Washington, unless you actually think that “it’s only treason if we lose” is a moral as well as practical argument.
I think it is a bit of a stretch to say that Washington was fighting for slavery, but sure.
I don’t believe in “it’s only treason if we lose”, and I appreciate the correction to what I wrote. I think a better way to argue for my point there is as follows:
Lee is famous in the United States for betraying the United States. It is discordant to have so many statues of him and schools named after him in the US today. As discordant as it would be for there to be many tributes (as opposed to just one) to George Washington in England; moreso, given that in the end Washington had some sympathetic goals.
I think it’s in any country’s best interests not to glorify traitors (a practical, not moral, argument). I think the right understands this well from their general opinions of recent traitors Snowden and Manning. Benedict Arnold, who actually did do some good things for the country before turning traitor, has (AFAIK) exactly one statue relating to him here, and it very carefully avoids naming him due to the traitory business.
So when the right makes an exception to have tons of commemorations for the traitors Lee and Davis, my thoughts turn towards the unsympathetic goals they were fighting for.
How do you feel about Oliver Cromwell? He seized power by force, ruled as a military dictator until his death. Should the U.K. remove all statues of him?
Checking the history, it appears the British ruling class was actually smart enough not to build a statue of Cromwell in Ireland. Had they done so, I would certainly not expect it to stand today, any more than the staues to Nelson and Victoria do.
On the other hand, apparently Wellington is ok.
American, so not super familiar with him, though I’ve heard the name. If England (yes I know he ruled over other places too, but in traditional English fashion I will pretend they don’t exist) was England I before he took over, and England II afterwards, is it more reasonable to think that present-day England is descended from England I or from England II? Or do people not generally think of the distinction in those terms?
@entobat
Cromwell (protestant-aligned) rebelled against Charles I (Catholic-aligned). Following his death, Charles II (Catholic-aligned) was restored to the throne. He was succeeded by his Catholic brother James II, who was then defeated by William of Orange, who was protestant (as were all the monarchs after him). So in that sense, England is more descended from Cromwell than Charles I. But it is a monarchy, not a republic as Cromwell wanted, and the present queen is related to Cromwell’s enemies.
England isn’t much of a monarchy.
This history seems complicated, and I’m not sure how my principles apply after only the two-minute introduction to it.
You are merging the two civil wars.
Parliament rebelled against the king, there was a civil war which parliament won, largely due to the New Model Army in which Cromwell was, I believe, second in command and a dominant figure.
The New Model Army then rebelled against Parliament, there was another civil war which the New Model Army won, resulting in Cromwell being installed as Lord Protector aka military dictator. A job he seems to have done pretty well.
He died, the attempt to continue the dictatorship with his son was defeated, and the son of the king who had been executed was brought back into power. The eventual result, after a successful coup to prevent that king’s Catholic brother from succeeding him, was a monarchy with a powerful parliament.
You might argue that England II was a continuation of the outcome of the first civil war (parliamentary rule) but not the outcome of the second (military dictatorship).
@DavidFriedman
As far as I know, the second civil war you describe is a relatively minor part of the overall conflict: it was more like a coup than a war.
The victory of the Parliamentarians certainly could have heavily influenced the style of government after Charles II’s restoration, but my understanding is that it didn’t. The monarchy’s power decreased moderately under each king from James I, until Walpole became Prime Minister and it decreased more sharply.
How much of a stretch is it really to say Washington was fighting for slavery? Somerset vs. Stewart was 1772, and was much discussed in the colonies; the worry that anti-slavery forces in England might grow strong enough to extend the policy to the colonies was certainly a motive for some who supported the revolution.
@entobat says:
So did lee. By his lights, be fought honorably and skillfully to defend his home and country from invaders, in defense of his constitutional rights and democracy. Was slavery a part of that? sure, but it was also part of what washington fought for.
This is the crux of it. the definition of traitor is highly subjective. Lee was only a traitor because he lost. As a rule I tend towards consequentialism, but I have a hard time saying that Lee is a vile traitor in this universe, but a great and noble figure in a universe where Sergeant Bloss smoked some cigars before examining them.
I don’t disagree with your moral judgment. I am not saying that being a traitor makes him a bad person per se—but that being a traitor to the US makes him a person who should not (as a practical matter) be celebrated in the US, because I like the US and support norms that would tend to increase its longevity. Much like Arnold—whom the Boot Monument celebrates for things he did while still loyal to the country! I think this is something like the same reason that other people often oppose celebrating traitors, and this leaves their support of Lee et al a question in need of an answer.
Does this logic apply to John Brown? I grant you that he has fewer statues than Lee, but far from none, and I doubt there will be a campaign to tear them down.
I don’t think vigilantism is a good thing to glorify. Law and order are delicate constructs and “vigilantism” by itself is wielded as ably by the righteous as by the wicked; if our society allows people to use weapons instead of words, they should at least be legendary swords that can only be removed from the slabs they rest in by someone pure of heart.
I would not have put the monuments up in the first place, and on sane corners of the internet I might admit to supporting tearing them down. Politically it is of lower magnitude (fewer tributes), not relevant to a currently harmful brand of identity politics, and probably harder to argue for in the public sphere (“Why does that jerk hate John Brown, the abolitionist’s Batman?”).
I for one think it’s totally irrelevant that Lee was a traitor. Suppose in 1860 the Democrats were able to broker a backroom compromise for a single national ticket, and Breckenridge or Douglas or whoever they ended up choosing narrowly defeated Lincoln in the election. Suppose then that radical abolitionists in Pennsylvania continue to sabotage the operation of the fugitive slave laws, and it escalates to the point that President Breckenridge orders General Lee’s army into Philadelphia; in response, the Northern states secede, and Lincoln and Grant are among the leaders of the “treason.”
I submit that this doesn’t change the moral valence of anyone involved.
That is an excellent point, one that I wouldn’t have thought to make but will likely use in the future.
To the moral calculus, yes, “traitor” is irrelevant; see other threads. Washington was a traitor too.
It is not in the interest of the United States to glorify traitors to the United States; many of those who glorify Lee et al have internalized this principle to some extent; their support for glorifying the Confederate traitors is therefore a question in need of an answer.
No it’s not.
The current conception of federal supremacy did not exist until the civil war made it so. An answer you don’t like is not the same as not getting an answer.
My view is that morality controls over “national interest” in determining who is to be glorified. I say tear down the statues of Lee not because he was a traitor, but because the cause he fought for was “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”
Nobody on the right had recently opened fire on a group of congressmen of the other party at a baseball practice.
Alternatively for refusing to betray his state. You are taking it for granted that loyalty to the nation trumps loyalty to the state, considerably less obvious then than now. In the 19th century, of federal, state, and local expenditure, federal was the smallest.
It’s not even about it being less obvious then than now, it’s just basic historical fact. Robert E. Lee has many recorded statements about how he felt compelled to fight for Virginia, about how that was his primary loyalty, etc. He knew he would have to defy his commanding officers in order to do so, and he was not a guy who took such things lightly.
Merely refusing to “betray” his state could be accomplished by resigning his commission in the federal army and living a quiet life at home. But mere days after he resigned his federal commission he took up arms against the United States. He’s famous for the latter, not the former.
I’m not sure that abandoning the defense of one’s state is very much better than betraying it.
You can say he’s famous for defending his state, that is an alternate way of framing the issue that is quite popular. But don’t give me this passive baloney, like Abe Lincoln sidled up and offered him thirty silver coins to sell out Virginia and poor old honest Rob just said “no thanks, I’m happy here on my farm.”
Taking up arms against his friends (to be clear, fighting for the Union would obviously have involved taking up arms against his friends, too) was a positive decision Lee made, whether you celebrate it or find it contemptible or fall somewhere in between.
The questions were about Charlottesville. Do Trump’s statements suggest that this was on his mind?
I stand by the point that Antifa is appreciably less nasty; there was a good comment thread on one of EY’s recent statuses about leftist vs rightist violence statistics.
I grant you the point on this one; see my reply to the comment above. What bothers me is the unprincipled glorification of these specific traitors to the US, i.e. our country; it is less important that the thing Robert E. Lee betrayed was the US, than it is that he is a betrayer of your and my country, and is being glorified in your and my country.
I can’t imagine why a Republican politician would have the attempted murder of Republican politicans on his mind. {/snark}
I used to hold this opinion too, until someone pointed out that the current definitions of “rightist” violence includes essentially every single vocal right-winger who commits a violent crime, while “leftist” violence pretty much consists of antifa and communists and doesn’t include violent crimes committed by, for example, minority identity-driven groups.
I should note, however, that I have a strong memory of the opposite problem existing during the Bush administration and immediately afterwards, with “leftist domestic terrorists” begin treated as a huge problem while anti-immigrant militias sprang up everywhere. I suspect it’s more of an artefact of which side just served 8 years in the White House than anything inherent to left or right.
I haven’t been politically involved for long enough to notice that trend, and I appreciate having it pointed out to me. This is something to think about.
Is this pointing to the Bureau of Land Management? Is it pointing to anyone except them?
Touting score keeping while the count is 1 death to 0 deaths may come back to haunt you in this environment.
(why is 1 death singular and 0 deaths plural?)
maybe?:
quantities are plural by default, 1 is an exception because it is singular and functions as an article (‘a’, ‘the’). 0 is less than singular but doesn’t point to a specific instance, so remains a quantity rather than an article
Yes, but aren’t living in the 19th century. It’s bizarre to be more patriotic than thou and simultaneously celebrate the memory of a traitor to the country for which you are an ultra-patriot.
If the people celebrating Lee were revanchists that to this day considered themselves Virginians first and foremost, then it would make much more sense.
It’s like being a royalist and having a bust of Michael Collins in your house.
What about celebrating the memory of an honorable and capable general of a different country than that which one is allegedly an ultra-patriot of?
Are we allowed to honor the memory of Native American leaders whose tribes were subsequently conquered and incorporated into the United States of America, or are they also retroactively defined as traitors? Are the British allowed to honor the memory of Scottish leaders who resisted British rule before the UK was U, or while the U was personal and of debatable legitimacy?
Where is the implication of retroactivity coming from? Lee wasn’t a loyalist who opposed the American Revolution. Lee was a military officer of the then long existing United States before he took up arms against it.
Most of the journalists at the infrastructure press conference seemed to share your objective, and Trump played along. Presumably he figured that people who didn’t believe his disavowals of white nationalism wouldn’t be persuaded by more robust disavowals, while his supporters like that he doesn’t let the media push him around (or whatever).
As for “I’m waiting for more information”, I commend him on his newfound intellectual restraint and am sure we’ll be seeing more of it in the future.
This. If there’s one thing Trump is really good at and which he loves doing, it’s condemning things. When he refuses to do that, it gives us information.
In contrast, look at Scott’s example of Obama not condemning terrorism forcefully enough for the right. Obama generally projected a calm, even-tempered persona; his barbs at his political opponents were really mild by the standards of American politics and tended to look like sarcasm or mockery or sorrow, not rage. Condemning terrorism in a way that would have satisfied the Michelle Malkins of the world would have been really out of character for him.
Trump, on the other hand, is constantly calling things he dislikes “awful,” “worst ever,” etc. Then when literal swastika-waving Nazis crawl out of the woodwork he suddenly is all about waiting for enough information and looking at all sides. Why did he pick now to start showing restraint? It’s hard to think of a reason that reflects well on him.
My charitable reading of this was that he wants to distinguish himself from Obama who, while calm and even-tempered in many ways, was sometimes quick to jump into the fray and condemn parties in racially-charged news stories, sometimes before we really knew who was at fault or what all the details were.
So, if Obama can be restrained in general but in certain instances be unrestrained–say, when commenting on the recent shooting of some unarmed black person–then Trump can be unrestrained in general but in certain instances be restrained. In both cases you could make a cynical reading and say it’s about playing to some political base (this is the reading I find most plausible), or else say it suggests where the president’s true loyalties lie.
This seems way too charitable, and in particular doesn’t jive with how he acts about Islamic terrorism.
When I wrote “racially charged” that was too generic. See my cynical reading: Obama wanted to position himself a certain way with regard to some racially charged news stories, and Trump wants to position himself a certain way with regard to other racially charged news stories. They both have different groups they’re positioning themselves for.
http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Donald-Trump-Rally-in-San-Jose-Draws-Protesters-381728251.html
You’re going to have to be more explicit about whatever point it is you’re trying to make with that link. A woman had bottles and eggs thrown at her at a rally over a year ago, and some cars were damaged, and Trump called Hillary Clinton “pathetic” and said Mexico would pay for the wall, and what is the relationship of any of that to the quoted text?
Given that Trump has an enormous ego and may be a narcissist (note: I am not a psychiatrist and cannot diagnose mental illness), the fact that HIS rallies were disrupted by people very much like those who disrupted the Unite the Right rally is probably relevant to his reaction.
I don’t think you even need to refer to Trump’s ego or possible narcissism here: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is a very common sentiment, and is held, explicitly or implicitly, by loads of people across the political spectrum.
Consider whether the groups that Trump is condemning are American or non-American.
From the start of his presidential campaign, Trump has gone hard after non-American groups (Mexicans, Islamic terrorists, China, etc). He has had strong words for American individuals. But he has not really condemned groups of Americans.
This was in contrast to his opponent in the general election, who was willing to condemn a very large group of Americans (see “basket of deplorables”). Or Mitt Romney in 2012 writing off the 47%. I get the feeling that Trump will go after non-American groups, but he has a different standard for Americans.
All Americans deserve to be represented by their government, even if they don’t hold the approved opinions.
What do you think about felony disenfranchisement?
Is “the media” not an American group?
Except for Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Tashfeen Malik, every Islamic terrorist that has killed someone on US soil in the last 5 years has been an American citizen, so calling Islamic terrorists “non-American” is a bit of a stretch, especially in this context.
Lee being famous only for betraying his country to fight for slavery.
That’s a very…regionalist statement. In other parts of the country, that’s not the general (or complete) understanding.
But I don’t think tying Trump and white nationalists uncomfortably close together is intellectually dishonest, in the sense that the conclusion is false, and I’m interested in doing so because I want his approval rating to decrease further.
The reasoning that most quickly leads us to the opinion (or end) that we most want is the reasoning we should most closely examine for errors.
Wikipedia says he distinguished himself in the Mexican-American War, was a good Superintendent of the Military Academy, quashed John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, and briefly led Union troops against the Confederacy (before Virginia left). As far as I know he is not famous for any of these; certainly he’s not famous to me, since I had to look them up, though that’s still possibly explained by regionalism. How big a deal are these things? Did I miss any?
I don’t think I’m on this side of the argument for non-rational reasons. I’m pursuing the argument, as opposed to any of the million other things I could be doing, for non-rational reasons, and I’m open about that.
Absent the Civil War, the number of statues of Lee would be almost infinitely reduced in number.
Re the Lee v. Washington comparison, the full argument isn’t that they’re essentially the same; it’s that the popular bailey of the arguments deployed against Lee – essentially, “He was a slaveowner!!! And arguably not such a great general at that!” – apply with equal force against Washington. Yes, you can make more theoretical distinctions, but does the popular clamor care about them? Or the theoretical Leftist clamor, where voices have been calling for years if not decades to dethrone Washington and all the other Founding Fathers from their perch and indict them for slavery?
Noted. I was only hearing the second half of this exchange.
This is is a weak-man summation of the argument against Lee in comparison to Washington. Honestly, people should be embarrassed to trot it out.
The South seceded over the issue of slavery and its future provenance. Lee supported that secession.
Washington did not support a secession primarily intended to ensure the continuation and flourishing of slavery. King George was not an abolitionist.
Tell that to the people calling for the removal of Washington statues.
Heck, in some universities simply being white is enough for your statue to be tron down.
You’re one of today’s lucky 10,000! https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/
Theoretically, it’s a weak-man.
Popularly, it’s the bailey I’ve been hearing outside our small rationalist circles.
Lee is an interesting character. While he probably wasn’t ‘against’ slavery in the way a lot try to paint him these days, it’s pretty clear that he wasn’t fighting the war for slavery. He was fighting the war for Virginia, damn her reasoning. Lee was a member of a smallish group of men who had the explicit choice near the end of war between slavery and independence and he chose independence. The Confederacy was organizing black regiments in Richmond when the Army of the Potomac marched into the city because Lee had asked Davis to do it.
Lee gets the admiration he does because of this kind of character trait. A self-sacrificing patriotism that we tend to admire no matter what country the patriot is so in love with. That he was otherwise an American who fought out of patriotism for his state in a time when loyalty-to-state competed well with loyalty-to-nation makes that admiration even stronger. Combine that with a man who anyone with any familiarity can recognize as extremely admirable and it becomes obvious why people…admire him. Even people who are otherwise extreme American patriots.
That’s why I feel a bit miffed that this whole dust-up is happening surrounding Lee. He was a slaveowner and he wasn’t rushing to free his own slaves or advocate for abolition, but couldn’t this whole mess be about Forrest (literally KKK member after the war) or someone else a little less personally dazzling?
Oh, it’s vaguely possible that Lee’s image could have been saved, if those who were interested in keeping the monuments up had been pro-active about it. But of course the monuments were never about remembering how tragic it was that the South decided to fight a war to keep and defend the practice of slavery. Trying to repurpose some of these monuments as such might have held water at some point, but you can’t do that by continuing to insist that they were never intended to convey any message about the enduring glory of the Anglo-Saxon race.
There is an old saying “lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas”.
I’ll be honest, I don’t care deeply about the statues as statues. If the locals want to take them down, people who aren’t from there, using that public space should keep their noses out of it.
But this is how the popular narrative is written. It bothers me when the popular narrative is wrong about things and slanders people who don’t deserve it.
I agree that Lee is a complicated character, and had admirable character traits. But you can’t call Lee a patriot, he raised the rebel flag after all. That’s not how patriotism works. Maybe he was a Virginia patriot, but that’s not how we use that word today.
Few people seem to have such difficulty calling George Washington a patriot — or, for that matter, calling Benedict Arnold a traitor for fighting against the American rebels.
That’s true. Washington was a patriot to the US, and a traitor to the British Empire. It would, therefore, be weird if modern day Brits considered Washington a patriot.
Same with Lee. We live in the US, not the Confederacy. So Lee is a traitor.
Unless, of course, your loyalties do not lie with the US. Which would be very helpful to know, if so.
Englishman: British history is a history of military success.
American: What about the American Revolution?
Englishman: A fine example. Heroic British colonists defeating a Hanoverian king and his Hessian mercenaries.
Scott had a post some time back explaining why it wouldn’t happen that way. If you want your campaign to get attention, you need people on the other side fighting you. So it makes sense to attack the most defensible target instead of the least.
Ilya, did you know there’s a statue of George Washington in Trafalgar Square?
David: Yeah, I read that post. The reasoning makes sense and, while I have some doubts about how deeply considered the whole circus surrounding this statue was, I’m really more just expressing frustration at a topic of deep care and some expertise on my part (American history in general, rather than Bobby Lee in particular) being twisted and contorted for political theater. Popular American understanding of our own history is so wildly offbase in many instances its a bit sad seeing another bad set of memes germinate.
And, can I say, it’s a bit thrilling to be having a conversation with you, I don’t think I’ve ever interacted directly with someone who is only as degree of separation from speaking with Presidents and Senators. I sometimes wonder if Scott appreciates how lucky he is to have you as a regular commentator on his blog.
Only the pundit class gives a damn about NATO or the Palestinian conflict, and the only reason NAFTA rises above that level is that it codes so well for pro/anti-immigrant. But then, the reason Donald Trump is President of the United States and so many pundits are still in denial is that Trump has the superior understanding of what most people view as being important to politics. So, try again.
Anecdotally this seems wrong. I lived for 6 years in flyover country and I know people there who don’t read the newspaper and are primarily concerned with their jobs, friends and families. Many of them care about NAFTA and the Palestinian conflict, and these (especially NAFTA) appeared to factor into their voting decisions.
Of course flyover country is a big place, and I was somewhere near manufacturing and Jews, so maybe these issues were especially relevant there. And I only hang out with people who I enjoy talking to, which is a powerful filter.
Yeah color me skeptical. I don’t buy that any substantial portion of voters know what NAFTA is, much less care about it.
Revised claim: maybe, but that is probably the case for any particular political datum. I don’t think that NAFTA is any more obscure than H1B visas, or pizzagate, or the Carrier air conditioner factory, or Trump’s Atlantic city shenanigans, or Clinton’s future-trading shenanigans, or the the warm huskiness of Trump’s voice, or the steely glint in Sanders’s eye.
I highly doubt that NAFTA is an unknown quantity among most Americans. It was a major campaign issue in the 90s and was brought up multiple times in the last election. They may not have a full grasp of what NAFTA is, but they probably know that it at least has trade provisions with Mexico.
Plus, as you can see here, NAFTA is now a tribal issue, so both sides will know what it is, even if they don’t know any of the specifics about it:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/204269/americans-split-whether-nafta-good-bad.aspx
Tell that to all the leftists calling for Washington and Jefferson statues to go as well.
Lee being famous only for betraying his country to fight for slavery
How about “Lee not leading an insurgency post-war, as some Southerners seem to have hoped, and instead working for some kind of reconciliation in however limited a fashion”? At least, that seems to be the view of some people in this story about “a parish is named in Lee’s honor, on the edge of the campus of Washington and Lee University.”
Bug report to Scott: after submitting my last comment I was redirected to OT82 instead of the current one.
0/10, would not comment again.
(Edit: this comment failed to reproduce the error, seems safe to ignore)
Anyone else watching the GOT finale?
I’m on the west coast, so it won’t be on for another hour. I will be watching it, though.
Actively avoiding it, as I have with the show ever since it passed the books.
It took me two or three episodes, tops, into Season 1 to realize it was a garbage show propped up by immense production values and a willingness to depict nudity and gore. Part of those production values was in making the plot alluring. Superficial, shallow, what-happens-next-ist hooks pulled me along very begrudgingly until somewhere through the 3rd season when I finally said “enough of this crap” and quit watching. A couple years later I was surprised to hear it was still going.
Sorry. Unsolicited grumpy opinion. It’s late.
I actually thought Season 1 was quite good since it hewed so close the books. It did go downhill from there, though.
I would say the books went downhill, too, though 5 is somewhat better than 4.
Book 1 was good enough that even with quite a bit of slippage, I’m still reading the series.
Martin read the beginning of book 6 in a video (sorry, can’t find it), and it was very promising.
We’ve had a couple of chapters released now over the years, but I’ve been keeping away from them in anticipation to read the full book. (I dunno if the chapters Martin read in that video were the same chapters released.)
What do you think was better about book 5 then book 4?
As of book 4, I was concerned that Martin had lost control of the plot. In book 5 it seemed as though the plot threads were starting to come together.
What impressed me about book 1 (aside from the willingness to kill main characters and the cynicism, both of which seemed a lot fresher back then) was excellent control of information being given to the reader.
Also, what was going on was just plain interesting, for all that I wanted to reach into the book and shake the characters and say, “Don’t you know winter is coming?”.
My memory isn’t extremely good, and I can lose track of complex plots and large casts of characters. In The Game of Thrones, Martin did a brilliant job of reminding me of who was who and what was going on without excessive redundancy. He hasn’t met that standard since (fails on both counts in later books– both not telling me what I need to remember and repeating things I do remember), but I also haven’t seen any other books by anyone else which are as good that way.
I wonder if there’s some way of integrating insights from Anki cards with writing long complex novels.
This is the reason I didn’t bother with the last book or two. Given the length of time between releases, I would have had to reread all that came before. Given the the length of books, it wasn’t worth it.
@Nancy Lebovitz
Yeah, that’s a good point. The pacing got all muddled while writing, so book quality took a hit too.
I need to re-read since it’s been several years, but if memory serves: books 1 & 3 were excellent, 2 & 5 were good, and 4, while certainly adequate, felt like a bit of a placeholder.
I thought 1, 2, and 3 were strong, then the 4th really slows down, and the 5th starts flailing around adding new stuff instead of tying things up.
For me, book 5 suffered from many of the same problems book 4 did: unimportent charecters doing unimportent things (Quentin spending half the book on the way to propose to Dany when the reader knows full well he has no chance, and then he is just killled off; Theons uncle sailing on a boat; Theons subplot itself etc.),
charecters you do care about not doing anything interrsting (Arya, Jon, Dany,Tyrion…)
And a new subplot that felt like it came out of nowhere (so you thought Dany and Jon where the last Targarians? Nope! And now he has an army! And now he is in Westerose! Man, if Dany took such initiative we would be done by book 3).
Yes, it’s my favorite TV show. Anyone else think that a big theme is the value of consequentialism? Tonight Jon Snow did something that seemed anti-consequentialist, but then he defended his actions on consequentialist grounds.
I feel like GoT used to be more about actions having consequences than it is now. Ned being executed for his refusal to play dirty, the Red Wedding because Rob chose love over honoring contracts. Now I feel like the “good guys” get to have their cake and eat it too — in the end Cersei gave them the agreement that they wanted (and probably would have breached it even if Jon had lied) so no real consequences for Jon. This is probably expected in some way if you want to have a satisfying ending soon, but I think it takes away a bit of the initial appeal (although I still enjoy watching it).
Agreed.
SPOILERS. Ohg Prefrv jnf tbvat gb cergraq gb qb guvf ab znggre jung, naq jung Wba fnvq nobhg gur pbfg gb fbpvrgl bs ylvat ybbxf ba genpx gb xvyy rirelbar va Jrfgrebf. Prefrv punfgvfvat Glevba sbe xvyyvat gurve sngure (rira gubhtu ur pyrneyl qrfreirq vg) jnf rkcyvpvgyl pbafrdhragvnyvfg.
Yeah, there have been a few moments this season where I’m left thinking “George would have killed them.” – D&D just lack the stones to follow through and it cheapens one of the main draws for GoT.
I feel like GRRM would have killed Tyrion, and let that be the thing that pushes Jamie over the wall.
…also Jamie should have been captured at the wagon-train battle. Instead of Tyrion sneaking into King’s Landing, releasing Jamie then becomes part of “the carrot” offered to Cersei.
Lrnu, be unq Tertbe npghnyyl bss Wnzvr orsber ur pna tb jnea Glevba gung Prefrv yvrq. Ohg na vzcbegnag pnirng vf gung Trbetr jbhyq unir xvyyrq gurz *unq ur npghnyyl jevggra gurz vagb gubfr fvghngvbaf gb ortva jvgu* juvpu V guvax vf engure qhovbhf.
Nyfb, Gbezhaq ba gur rkcrqvgvba. Oevatvat nybat 3 anzryrff pebjf whfg gb qvr ng pvarzngvpnyyl nccebcevngr jnf ynml jevgvat. Grnfvat Gbezhaq qlvat naq gura erfphvat uvz whfg fgeratguraf gur creprcgvba gung punenpgref gur nhqvrapr yvxrf trg cybg nezbe.
I’ve had similar issues with “actions have consequences” not working as well, but I think to some degree that’s inevitable as we get to the endgame – they’ve killed off so many characters that basically everyone left (probably) has a key role to play in the final episodes. There’s no time to introduce new characters either (at least not ones that we’ll care about).
What bothers me more is the repeated last second deus ex machinas. Beyond the wall featured TWO! At this point it is clear that Jon Snow is going to survive at least to the finale. Quit making cheap drama with his near-death.
V guvax Oebaa arrqrq gb qvr va gur jntba genva, nf zhpu nf V yvxr uvz. Gubhtu V ynhturq n ovg jura ur jnyxrq bhg jvgu Cbq va gur ynfg rcvfbqr (uvf npgbe qbrf abg trg nybat jvgu Yran Urnql, gb gur cbvag jurer gurl nccneragyl ershfr gb funer fprarf).
V jnf qnexyl ubcvat gung gur jvtug gur rkcrqvgvba oebhtug onpx jbhyq or n mbzovsvrq Wbenu. Be znlor Wbenu ghearq vagb Pbyqunaqf 2.0. Jbhyq unir orra qnexyl vebavp va n tbbq jnl sbe uvz gb or fnirq sebz tenlfpnyr bayl gb snyy ivpgvz gb mbzovsvpngvba.
Gur snagurbel V fnj sybngvat nebhaq nsgre rc5 jnf gung vg jbhyq or mbzovr Ubhaq sbe Haqrnq Pyrtnarobjy (trg ulcr)
I find myself oddly enjoying this trainwreck of a season. When the show was just getting worse in seasons 4 and 5, it annoyed me, but now, well, I guess if the writers have stopped giving a fuck I can to.
I find myself oddly conflicted. On one hand we have plot holes big enough to sail the Iowa through. On the other I think the show has done more to make characters who pass the Turing test than GRRM ever dreamt of. There were several moments in in tonight’s episode most notably with the hound, Jon Snow”s big moment, and the conflict with Little finger (and Sansa’s conversation afterwards) that I don’t think GRRM would have handled half as deftly as D&D did.
It’s also nice to see a long standing fan theory confirmed
I find the show oddly inconsistent. It has consistently done a lot of really great, original character work. The relationships between robert and cersei, for example, or the tywin/arya exchanges, all fantastic. It wouldn’t be possible to write those bits without a nuanced understanding of the characters, but this nuance seems to be paired with a willingness to totally disregard it whenever it proves even slightly inconvenient. (do we really imagine, for example that littlefinger wouldn’t znxr fher gb tb gb gur abegu fheebhaqrq ol yblny ergnvaref?)
As a rule, I like my fiction highly structured, with setups that feed to coherent plots that pay off satisfactorily, so I can’t rate D&D really highly on that front, but when they step back from the big set pieces and just let the characters talk (without trying to move the plot forward) they usually do a pretty good job.
Yvggyrsvatre qvqa’g unir rabhtu yblny ergnvaref gb cebgrpg uvz vs Abegurearef ghearq ba uvz.
Jryy, ur qbrf va gur obbxf. Ur rkcyvpvgyl tbrf nobhg ohvyqvat hc n ohapu bs crbcyr va gur inyr yblny gb uvz cerpvfryl gb cerirag guvf fbeg bs guvat.
cassander,
Then I was in error.
I don’t think this Season has been anywhere near as bad as 4/5. Those seasons had way too many plot lines going on at once, IMHO. Maybe fine in a book, poor for a television show.
They’ve rushed a lot this season, but at least it’s moving, with only a few plot-lines. I thought half of it was fine (eps 3/4, Frozen Lake Battle itself, and the last episode was okay except for the LF part).
Exactly. It’s not canon so who cares.
I am shocked, shocked to find that plan “Get Cersei Lannister another pet zombie” somehow inexplicably failed to convince Cersei Lannister to actually join Team Good Guy in their war against the Army of the Dead. Her sudden but inevitable betrayal should serve as proof that absolutely everybody on Team Good Guy is literally too stupid to live, but I doubt that D&D will have the stones to kill more than one or two of the minor ones.
The actual dialogue, I actually enjoyed. This show still has the knack for putting interesting people in a room together and having them talk in a way that makes me want to listen. It merely has to resort to wholesale idiot plotting to get them there, which doesn’t quite spoil the entire effect but close.
Similarly, I enjoyed Littlefinger’s fall from the ladder of chaos. I’d have enjoyed it more if setting it up hadn’t been a matter of “Arya is ignorant. Sansa is stupid. Bran is unhelpful. Arya remains ignorant. Sansa remains stupid. Bran remains unhelpful. Arya is still ignorant. Sansa has somehow stopped being stupid. Bran is actually telling people useful stuff”, with no justification beyond a self-depricating crack about Sansa being a slow learner.
The finale had a better ratio of good moments to crap plotting than most of the season, if only because many of the plot lines came to an end. I’m not optimistic about the next season, though.
Eh, the GCLAPZ plan was only stupid from the perspective of the audience which has both more information and more genre saviness than the famously ignorant Jon Snow. Tyrion really should know better, but then I don’t think the Tyrion was trying to convince Cersei so much as he was trying to convince his brother.
Tyrion should have known better, Varys should have known better, Sansa should have known better and Jon should have been listening to Sansa from the start, and that’s just counting the ones with extensive firsthand knowledge of Cersei Lannister.
Basic knowledge of human nature, plus the detail that Cersei is a member of the “conniving politician” subset of humanity, should have been sufficient to roundfile this proposal from the start. No conniving politician is going to change their fundamental beliefs and/or sacrifice local political presentation over a show-and-tell presentation, no matter how shockingly staged. And really, that’s not limited to conniving politicians. If Cersei marches into Daenerys’s court with a leashed Gregor Clegane and says “you must sail back to Essos and give up your claim to the throne, or all Westeros will be consumed by zombies such as this!”, would we expect Daenerys the Good and her Wise Councillors to back down? Might as well expect the GOP senate delegation to all become Global Warming true believers because of Hurricane Harvey.
John Schilling has the right of it, Danaerys offers Cersi less than nothing. they won’t even promise not to immediately start trying to murder her as soon as the zombies are dead. They don’t even threaten to burn down KL if she refuses. Why on earth would cersi accept such a deal? They show has always been pretty weak on the actual politics when not cribbing directly from martin, but this was especially so.
I know nothing, least of all how to depreciate a 8,000 year old 300 mile wall of magical ice.
But I totally convinced AIG to underwrite that shit. Congressional bailout in 3, 2, 1….
I’m sticking with the theory that the GCLAPZ plan will not exist in the hypothesized Martin Original. (It will exist someday! I have faith!)
In fact, the finale made me even more confident Martin would have the expedition north of the wall actually be after the Horn of Winter – fbzr zvtug guvax vg jnf jbegu vg gb ybfr n qentba gb xrrc gur cbjre gb qrfgebl gur Jnyy bhg bs gur unaqf bs gur qrnq… yvggyr ernyvmvat gung gur JJf pbhyq mbzovsl n qentba vagb fbzrguvat gung xabpxf qbja gur Jnyy NAQ qbrf rirelguvat ryfr n qentba pna qb.
Were you shocked by the History channel show on that so-called World War II in which Churchill and Stalin managed to put asside their differences to work together to stop the Death Heads?
You mean the one in which Stalin and the Death Heads were on the same side, right up until the Death Head invasion of Stalin’s domain?
I absolutely believe that when a horde of zombies is actually attacking King’s Landing, Cersei Lannister will be looking to a temporary alliance with the Targaryens to actually stop them, and preferably one that has her armies occupying most of Westeros for the immediate post-zombie-apocalypse renegotiation of status.
I’ve been more annoyed by the show playing very fast and loose with the size of Lannister/Crown loyalist forces. It would seem like the invaders have such a dominant military position, that Cersei’s only/best option would be to forge a truce and spend the entire truce rebuilding her armies. But the show seems to wish to pretend that she could actually make more than a token effort against Dany, and I’ve yet to see how she could.
One more plot device I’m not really fond of: The “Golden Company” or whatever it is. An army of mercenaries that can turn the tide against the combined might of the United Dothraki Horde, the Unsullied, the Bannermen of the North, and
threetwo dragons, available for whomever has the gold to pay for them.What, exactly, has this Company been doing the past few decades? The Iron Bank mentioned using them as debt collectors, but that would require Kingdom-level debts being collected on a reasonably constant basis. I don’t think there’s room for that in what we know of Essos geopolitics, and definitely not Westerosi. And mercenary companies don’t tend to last very long if they aren’t being regularly paid. You generally don’t find standing mercenary armies except in eras of relatively constant conflict, e.g. late Medieval / early Renaissance Italy, and even then scaled for the relatively modest level of conflict that can be sustained for years on end among many squabbling city-states or the like.
IIRC parts of Essos have a political situation similar to late medieval/early Renaissance Italy, with squabbling city states. This doesn’t explain the size of the Golden Company, but then Everything’s Bigger In Essos.
They are also not the standing army of the Iron Bank, though the Bank may have hired them (or provided the money for their enemies’ enemies to hire them) before. They are just the largest and best-regarded of many mercenary companies.
Their behaviour and loyalties in the books mostly relate to a plot that was written out of the show, so it will be interesting to see what they do…
Commenting in order to follow the thread
I laughed at the image far more than was nice, necessary, or charitable.
How far can individualism go?
I want to have as much individualism as possible as long as no violence is commited and the living standards are preserved. The Non-Aggression Principle should be a guideline of interpersonal relationships. All individuals should be only subject to the state, be allowed to withdraw from any social group including families and tribes and be free from any non-legal rule they have not voluntarily agreed to.
Please point out weaknesses of my idea so that it can be improved. Thanks!
Sorry for going off-topic, but did you delete your other thread on political correctness? It’s gone.
I didn’t. I believe Scott did it.
OK. Well, I was just going to say you might have benefited from or been protected by political correctness and not realized it, and taken it for granted as a result. Since you ostensibly have autism I suspect this is very likely true.
I agree. Things could have been much worse in a more un-PC, conformist or mean environment.
I love intellectualism and knowledge. However I know that a society with too many people like me can not function. People like me provide novel ideas but also weaken social cohesion by fighting against basically any form of social consensus and agitate against any form of conformism. I can.not be satisfied by changing how societies work. Instead as long as shared values I disagree with or taboos that impede intellectualism exist I won’t ever stop complaining.
That is a radical departure from your most recent previous statements on this topic. Seems like your mind has been completely changed.
@Well.. I agree. Usually I pursue intellectualism without considering real life consequences of my ideals if actually put to practice.
For example if my attitude towards sexuality becomes the majority view humanity will experience a serious depopulation.
What counts as violence?
Okay, we can probably agree that pro-Nazi speech doesn’t (but we’ve already gone beyond universal consensus there.) But does blowing cigarette smoke in my face count? Does playing loud music at midnight count? What about blowing your garbage all over your lawn, making my view unsightly and stinking up the neighborhood?
Sure, you can fit most of these in under “preserving living standards,” but the questions – along with hundreds of others – still need to be answered, and there’s no one answer everyone will agree on.
I think all three have exceeded what should be allowed. Nazi speech isn’t inherently a problem, however if it is directed at Jews and others with the intent to threaten or intimidate people it is now a problem. Being a Nazi is a right. Wearing SS uniforms is a right. Writing pro-Nazi speech on Ironmarch is a right. Threatening to gas a Jew is not because it violates the rights of the Jew.
In generals if you do something that affects others then regulations should be introduced at some point. However one person’s rights does not involve control over another person so that nobody can argue along the lines of “Person A does not obey me hence I feel that my right to dominate others is violated”.
I agree that these are all interesting questions.
A lot of things we do affect others in ways that aren’t obvious.
For example, people with unusual taste often find ourselves having to spend more, or travel farther, or otherwise make compromises in order to purchase the unusual things we want. These things don’t necessarily cost more to make or transport, but the fact that they are not in high demand means that we are inconvenienced. This should be clear to anyone who’s been in the market for a used (non-sports) car with a manual transmission. Other people’s private individual purchasing decisions have affected me.
What? Threatening “I want to get together this large apparatus that pretty much can only be done by a government, with the end goal of killing you,” violates your rights? As I understand it, this’s a huge departure from current law which says that only plausible threats are banned. See, e.g., how “If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.” is totally legal.
If you hold to that – would “I wish adultery were a capital crime,” said to an adulterer, also be a violation of his rights?
@ Evan. I don’t know what HFA’s answer to this is, but the concept of threatening in criminal law involves plausible “threats.” (I am not an expert in criminal law, so anyone please let me know if I am blowing smoke). Saying “I am in favor of the government putting all of your type in camps,” is not a threat, it is an opinion. A threat is telling someone you will commit violence on them in such a way that the recipient plausibly feels personally threatened by your behavior (and not “threatened” because they are scared of what government might do if it took up your suggestions). This definition of threats sounds like a pretty good guideline for criminal behavior vs. speech.
@Mark, I agree with the standard you’re talking about, and I view killing people with gas chambers as inherently implausible to do on a personal level.
What makes the state special, such that it gets to subject individuals to rules they have not voluntarily agreed to but other groups don’t?
Because the state has to exist. Otherwise who is going to keep the peace?
Heh.
I think he may have had cause to consider this question before…
I’d recommend googling his book. For something that trips the Absurdity Heuristic, it’s surprisingly persuasive.
You may also want to read Leviathan if you haven’t already, for a classic and detailed exposition of your own view.
I will when I have time. I tend to agree with Hobbes on his view of humanity.
Seriously, David Friedman, author of The Machinery of Freedom, it’s like you’ve never even considered this.
Wait I thought this was David Friedman ambassador to Israel, or is that the “carrying a duck” guy 😉
I’m confused while reading this exchange. Which one you think is being silly: D.F., for asking this question (because the author of The Machinery of Freedom can be suspected of having thought about it) or HFA, for responding to D.F. (for the same reason)?
For something shorter than The Machinery of Freedom, you might want to read the chapter on feud law in the webbed draft of my current book. It describes at least one mechanism for decentralized private law enforcement that has functioned in some past societies. If sufficiently interested, other chapters describe some of those societies.
I don’t know pop culture well enough to answer this question myself, but your one big qualification jumped out at me – how many of the works you mentioned earlier with Nazis as the villain would pass the analogous test of “are they just nominal Nazis or is their Nazism really part of the story”? Would even Casablanca pass that test, if it’s administered strictly enough?
Casablanca didn’t really bother too much with the ethnic cleansing part of Nazism, but the bureaucratism of it got a serve.
The only two movies I can think of off the top of my head that go into the crimes of Fascist or Communist regimes in a serious way are Schindler’s List and The Killing Fields respectively.
For every Dirty Dozen there’s a Rambo: First Blood Part 2 (with it’s inserted Russian as the main villain while the Vietnamese are mostly faceless mooks and cannon fodder), and for every Red Dawn there’s an Inglourious Basterds.
What’s the Fascist equivalent of something like The Longest Day, though?
Nazis are a really safe and easy choice for a fictional enemy. You don’t have to spend a lot of time explaining who they are or why they are bad. There’s a reason why they’re considered a cinematic cliche. Plus, the US actually fought them.
We never actually fought Russians, so it was all more abstract and “far mode.” There was also a very big focus on stability and the balance of power in the Cold War years. People who advocated open warfare between Us and Them were (mostly correctly) regarded as dangerous fanatics who might end civilization as we knew it.
Edit: Movies and fiction are also often about escapism. And talking about a current enemy (the USSR) is less escapist than about the Nazis.
Plus, CULTURE WAR CULTURE WAR CULTURE WAR something something Hollywood. 🙂
I am a rather serious Taylor Swift fan. (“Know and can sing all of the songs and have bought live tickets twice” serious, not “cosplays from the music videos” or “creepy basement shrine” serious, though it’s irrelevant to this post. For the record, Red > Speak Now > Fearless > 1989 > Taylor Swift.) I mostly follow the music, but get enough splash damage from the celebrity gossip that I am curious about thoughts here. (Before any objects that they don’t care/know who these people are [1], that’s sort of the point I’m getting to; there is no object-level gossip in this post other than enough name dropping to center the discussion.)
For those that don’t pay attention, Taylor Swift is currently “feuding” with a few people, most notably Katy Perry over some sort of backup dancer shenanigans and Kanye West/Kim Kardashian over some nasty lyrics TayTay may or may not have okayed. This is particularly in the gossipy news right now because Taylor dropped a single explicitly about drama (with a strong implication that the entire album is themed similarly.)
Now, I’ve heard a few people say something along the lines of: “Why in the world do I care? This is all made up for attention and to sell albums! Kim and Taylor are probably friends, or at least their publicists are–they’re laughing at you for thinking they hate each other!” I don’t pretend to be experienced enough to know the likelihood this is true, but an interesting thought struck me: even assuming arguendo that you care about celebrity drama at all, does it matter if it’s fictionalized?
Whether or not Taylor Swift hates Kim Kardashian is not, I think, an actionable belief (okay, I could try to John Hinckley/Jodie Foster my way into marrying Taylor–no, I’m not psychotic, there is no world where I would actually do this, anyone wondering–but short of that). I am never going to meet Taylor or Kim; I am never going to personally interact with them; neither is anyone I know. In a sense, if this is made up, someone who cares about their drama is actually a fan of “Taylor Swift” the image–and is there any reason this is more or less respectale than caring about Taylor Swift the actual factual human being?
My general explanation–without real proof–for why people care about celebrity drama is evo-psych-y: my brain thinks I’m living in a hunter gatherer [2] tribe, and if I’ve heard of two people Taylor and Kim who are feuding, they’re my next door neighbors and knowing who to support will affect my decisions about who to share food with/etc. Someone who enjoys celebrity gossip is already feeding that module false information about the “people” they’re learning about, no? Does it matter if the information is fictional because those people live far away in Hollywood or farther away in fictional “Hollywoo”? Is there any reason to care about this distinction?
[1] As a side note, I have a perhaps unfairly low opinion of people who make a point of “not knowing who Kim Kardashian is”. Like..you don’t have to care about her at all to know that, and I don’t think, in most cases, going to the effort to miss that information makes you a better person. I don’t think I care about that sort of thing at all, but I used to play highly competitive quiz bowl, and my memory is pretty good, so unfortunately I do know who a lot of unimportant celebrities are because I heard it once while paying attention to something more interesting and I didn’t forget. I would have to go to quite some trouble to isolate myself in monkish fashion to actually not know who these people are.
Now, if you’ve done that, more power to you; Anathem is maybe my favorite novel and I dream of living in a real live concent. I respect the hell out of you. I’d love to hear how you did it. But given that concents aren’t on the menu, I’ve allowed myself to pay attention to some of the better parts of pop culture (Taylor Swift music, 30 Rock, what have you…) and the worse parts sort of come by osmosis. And I hear a lot more peope sneering a bit about how little they know here who aren’t actually isolating themselves from popular culture totally for a life of the mind and more performing a bit of hipster-y signaling. (I bet there are some exceptions here. Bean has implied he’s managed this by obsession with naval history.)
[2] I really wish I *were* living around many Hunter gatherers. 🙂
I won’t say anything about evo-psych, but I think it is pretty clear that many (most?) people have a basic need / desire to know about other people and their relationships, and that one of the juiciest fruit that fulfills this need is knowing about fraught relationships.
Soap operas are the prime example. It appears to be nearly as satisfying to many people to talk and gossip about the fraught relationships of known fictional characters as real people. The soap opera review magazines occupy the same space in the supermarket and have the same covers as the tabloids.
Professional wrestling has also learned how to play on this urge.
There are two separate questions:
1. Should I care about this feud?
2. Assuming 1 is “yes,” should I care whether the feud is fake?
There’s nothing wrong with loyalties to people you never meet. That’s how we establish group identity larger than the Dunbar number, after all. But even granting that, why should I care about “Taylor Swift” image? And assuming I do, I should definitely care that it is fake (I highly doubt it is in this case, as an aside). These celebrity feuds aren’t as obviously fake as professional writing, and not obviously scripted like television programs.
If they are, then, whatever. Pure consumption value. Better to care about the drama of Taylor Swift than get into a fight with Canada over softwood lumber.
EDIT: My issue regarding Taylor Swift these days? The political left calling out Taylor Swift for not doing enough to denounce Donald Trump.
Matt Y of Vox fame, in the run-up to the election, said there were only 3 endorsements left that mattered: George HW Bush, George W Bush, and Taylor Swift.
She’s a bloody pop singer, just let her sing songs about boys and slumber parties.
Most of her fans are probably too young to vote anyway, so I have no idea why anyone thought her hypothetical endorsement was important in the first place.
I think you misjudge the age of her fan base. Her teenage fans from Fearless in 2008 are now in their mid-twenties.
That is still a group with very few voters.
@Aapje
Is it? If everyone who bought Fearless is a fan, her base has about as many people as Arizona.
The joke is that young people don’t vote.
On the other hand, they do vote based on stupid reasons, so it’s often not hard to swing them with a celebrity.
But how many of them are still fans, at least to the degree that they would particularly care about her political opinions? From what I’ve seen, the fanbases of teen pop stars tend to experience very rapid turnover. This is most visible in how far their sales numbers often fall when they go more than 3 years between album releases; see Britney Spears (2003-2007, though she did make a comeback the following year), Avril Lavigne (2007-2011), and Katy Perry (2013-2017), among others.
The trouble with making music (or really anything) for teenagers is that they don’t stay teenagers for very long.
Even if only 10% of her fans from Fearless remain, they would still be as numerous as e.g. the population of Baltimore or North Dakota. I don’t think her number of fans is the main thing that makes her potentially politically important though, since I doubt many would cast their vote purely on her opinion. I see her more as having a fairly small amount of influence on millions of people, such that if she jumped on a bandwagon she could make it a lot more popular. If she’d endorsed Clinton, I bet that would’ve swung her home state of Pennsylvania (margin 44,292 votes), and if she’d got a couple of other marginal states that would’ve changed the overall result.
Have I? I actually can’t say I’m totally isolated from popular culture. I do know the rough outlines of who these people are (to the extent of their wikipedia articles anyway), for whatever reason. I try to avoid hipster-ish signalling. I just don’t have the music understanding gene. Seriously. I’ve tried to read rlms’s posts, and they just are gibberish. That’s part of it, as is a general disinterest in most of the rest of pop culture. But it’s not total isolation.
(As to how I know what I do, I have a really good memory and lots of books.)
“Slate Star Codex is 140 IQ discussion about 105 IQ issues”
That is just plain snobbish. We could be smartest blog on the world, but that doesn’t mean we don’t like music (and yes pop music qualifies), and doesn’t mean we don’t live in the same world as everyone else. I find it refreshing to occasionally take on pop phenomena not from a snobbish perspective but still a lot more intellectual than fan magazines.
I kind of like Taylor Swift, and I love her attitude in Shake It Off. And my two 20 something kids love her stuff.
I’m not sure what mobile’s intention is in quoting that line–maybe it’s just “presented without comment”–but yes, I too will fly the flag for talking about pop music (and associated culture) without feeling embarrassed about it. It’s fascinating.
I agree that TayTay is one of the better parts of pop culture. I’ve never listened to her albums, and I only know a handful of the singles, but they’re good songs. Max Martin’s a good writer/producer, and I like the kind of song he’s doing for her more than I do the stuff he used to for Britney etc. And she’s a sweet, wholesome persona, of which I’d like to see more in the culture.
My explanation for why we care about celeb drama is a tiny bit different to yours: I’d say it’s a form of practice, play, rehearsal. Correctly navigating drama (perhaps better to say “conflict”) is very important to our fitness when it comes up, but we don’t get many chances to practice it. So we follow and discuss celebrity drama, in order to rehearse and flesh out our ideas and principles about how one should properly behave in a conflict. The same is true of fiction (in which we are also drawn to conflict).
The nazis have two traits that make them perfect movie villains. (A) They lost a war against us that was costly to both sides but where they acted with unquestionably villainy so they are universally reviled (B) they did it while dressed fantastically.
But why skulls though?
(But no seriously, what did the Skull and Crossbones represent to the SS?)
Tradition, basically. The Totenkopf was a symbol used by German military units, especially cavalry, going back several centuries. That tradition in turn is based in the same symbolism that led to its association with pirates, and the use of skulls in many other unit insignias of modern militaries or for that matter gang and motorcycle gang tattoos.
Some examples: The Black Brunswickers (napeolonic-era cavalry unit) ; A good example of the Prussian Hussar dress uniform;
I believe it’s still in use by the Royal Lancers (Queen Elizabeths’ Own) of the British Army.
@ManyCookies
The skull and crossbones/totenkopf is an old international symbol for death, the defiance of death, danger, or the dead, as well as piracy. The totenkopf was firstly used as a military emblem under Frederick the Great, for a Hussar cavalry regiment in the Prussian army. It then remained in use for various German units, including stormtrooper units in WW 1.
In the interwar period, Weimar Germany had right-wing paramilitary units called Freikorps which were in large part a precursor the the Nazi SA. Paramilitary units with the name Freikorps existed long before that though, the first example were Hussars recruited by Frederick the Great. This explains why the later Freikorps units would be interested in using the totenkopf for historic reasons.
Julius Schreck served with Freikorps Epp and was an early member of the Nazi party. He created a bodyguard unit for Hitler which used the totenkopf. Eventually that turned into a separate elite unit, the SS. Schreck wore a Freikorps Epp badge on his SS uniform, so he seemed to see the SS as a continuation of the Freikorps, which explains why he would keep the totenkopf.
Schreck was sidelined (and died) before WW 2 and Himmler took over command of the SS and kept the totenkopf. He said:
Obligatory youtube clip:
“Have you looked at our caps recently?”
I made a post a while back mentioning that I was going to try shrooms to try and combat treatment-resistant depression. Original comment, follow-up after trial dose.
I’ve taken the main “experimental” dose that I’ve been planning, here are my experiences:
I was going to have a friend tripsit me, but he had something come up and wasn’t able to, so I decided to take the 3.5g dry dose in my room by myself. It took a long time to kick in, I was sort of drunk feeling up to about 2 hours after the dose, after which the effects started to get much more potent. The main experience in this stage was giddiness/mild euphoria, with some warping visuals. This was pretty much all that happened in the first 2/3rds, me doing random things and playing video games while also shroom-drunk.
The final third happened when I got into bed, and was a bit less pleasant. My mind started racing uncontrollably through places, books, shows, movies etc that I’d been/consumed/watched before, I felt like I died several times, ate a whole apple (I mean a whole apple, stem core and all. It wasn’t a negative experience, but it wasn’t unambiguously positive like the first 2/3rds. I didn’t experience any traditionally “trippy” Lucy-In-The-Sky kinds of visuals, I didn’t have anything representing a spiritual or meaningful experience, I just kind of went nuts for a while. I remember laughing at silly things, singing Colors of the Wind from Pocahontas for some reason, biting random non-food objects (the curtains, the bed, my blanket, etc). The trip felt like it was lasting much longer than it actually did, and towards the end I started to get this burnt-out feeling, like I get when I wake up without having slept enough. I was mostly just waiting for it to be over at this point. It was fun, but did absolutely nothing to alter my depression. If anything I’m slightly more depressed after, although that is mostly due to some frustrating events that occurred after the dose.
So, takeaways:
– Magic Mushrooms don’t seem to have any magical antidepressant properties on me
– I may need to take a higher dose (5g?) to get the spiritual/meaningful effects people refer to
– It’s pretty fun and basically harmless so cultivating them has not been a waste
– I may have to try tripping outside to get the effects which everyone seems to report
Off the top of my head, you’re looking at a mix of factors:
1) The culture war factor. Specifically, the question “which of the Communists and Nazis is the lesser evil?” is actually a pretty good indicator for which side of the culture wars someone is on: if they think Nazis are worse, they’re likely Blue; if they think Communists are worse, they’re probably Red. I will freely concede that America’s artist types lean Blue; given that, they were already more likely to consider Nazis the greater evil even before taking any other factors into account.
2) Adjacent to that: Exactly how bad the Nazis were was clear immediately after World War II, while the existence/extent of Stalin’s massacres weren’t clear until somewhere between the mid 1980s and early 1990s.
3) The US fought the Nazis in World War II, and that war is popularly considered one of the two most justified wars in American history due to a combination of Pearl Harbor and the Nazis being genocidal assholes. Given that, the above factor, and the supply of “evil Japan” drying up (probably due to Cold War alliance with Japan post-Korea – West Germany was also an ally, but Germany was de-Nazified), Nazis were slightly better suited to the role of least-common-denominator villain than the Communists were. That’s not even counting the supply of straight-up war propaganda left over from World War II. (Case in point: Casablanca.)
4) Speaking of war propaganda, consider the following. You just mentioned that Communist villains tend to show up in spy fiction. How did the United States contest the Soviets during the Cold War? Exactly.
5) While both Nazis and Communists tend to be alluded to in science fiction rather than shown outright (see: Daleks and Cybermen, respectively) my impression is that the Communists are slightly more
likely to show up as allegories. (The Borg are, of course, the Communist stand-in par excellence, and in general “hive mind” translates as “Communist allegory”.)
The question was about communists, not Soviets. The U.S. fought two wars against communist opponents during the cold war.
And we had scads of movies making enemies of the Vietnamese.
Korea is harder, because, you know, we couldn’t make Koreans (full stop ) the enemy. The same goes for the Japanese.
Name one. In the most famous Vietnam movie,
it is the Americans how are the “Real Villains”.
The “missing in action” franchise? Rambo First Blood Part 2. There are more from the 80s. Frequently the US government is also cast as the enemy, or at least “the bureaucrats” are.
James Bond “Die Another Day” uses North Koreans as the enemies, as well.
It’s worth noting that First Blood Part 2 also has a Russian advisor as the central villain and climactic fight rather than a Vietnamese officer.
There were certainly a decent number, though I’d separate out those and their imitators like the infinitely risible “Strike Commando” from films like Platoon, Bat-21, Hamburger Hill, etc.
A lot of those late 70s to late 80s action movies are basically “revenge fantasy” type movies combined with the POW question that was still very much alive at the time.
@Trofim:
Films like Platoon, Hamburger Hill, etc. aren’t the kind of films that need a stand in for “other tribe I need to defeat”.
Fundamentally, Nazis, the VC, or literal Alien Predators, all occupy the same role of “outgroup who is a threat to me” in a very simplistic way. They really aren’t all that much different than the college kids in “Breaking Away”, although that is a movie about overcoming outgroup-bias, rather than defeating the outgroup.
Platoon and the like are much more about examining in-group dynamics, I think. “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
I agree, and that’s why I’d separate them out from stuff like Hamburger Hill, Platoon, etc. Though I was thinking more in terms of them being more straight up “war” movies rather than 80s Action Blockbusters that just happened to be focused around wartime foes.
You could swap “Missing In Action” to Central American rebels kidnapping americans for profit and not lose anything.
I was trying to think of war movies that took an even-handed approach to fascists and communists while still making no bones about which side the film-makers were rooting for. The main ones that come to mind for me would be The Longest Day and We Were Soldiers, respectively.
@Trofim:
I think you are misunderstanding the unique impact of Vietnam on the American psyche.
While movies like that were made (see Predator for an example of a Macaguffin that vaguely resembles this), the concept of POWs left to rot specifically in Vietnam is a powerful image. Essentially it acts as a means to simultaneously insist that America could have been victorious in Vietnam, if not for the perfidy of the corrupt in high-places, and also that we should never have sent the soldiers to Vietnam to begin with (as the motivations were essentially corrupt).
The second type of movie about Vietnam dispenses with the idea we could have won to conclude that the war was ultimately pointless.
I don’t think I am, because I referred to that very point in the first comment you replied to in this sub-thread. Again, I think there’s a clear difference between Rambo and Missing In Action and other Vietnam war movies, even ones that deal with the same ideas (The Deer Hunter, Rescue Dawn). Those action films toy with the idea of the POW question, but only at the level that action films like Delta Force 2 or License To Kill engaged with questions about the rise of central american drug cartels and the War On Drugs, or a movie like Taken is a serious examination of human trafficking.
To be clear, I’m not knocking them, at least not Rambo (I unironically enjoy the entire film series and think it comes closest to straddling the divide between the action movies and the more serious films), but I think if we’re talking about how the Vietnamese and/or Communism is depicted as the enemy in American film, it’s worthwhile to separate out the movies that are primarily driven by fight scenes and spectacle from the ones who are interested in engaging with the reality and history of the conflict on another level.
Now, as far as your interpretation of the significance of the POW imagery, let me clarify something: are you claiming that film-makers were exploiting it in an ambiguous or multifaceted way. Using an an image that means different things to different people?
Because the overwhelming majority of people who believed or believe
“America could have been victorious in Vietnam, if not for the perfidy of the corrupt in high-places”
categorically reject
“we should never have sent the soldiers to Vietnam to begin with”
and vice-versa.
The overwhelming majority of proponents of the first view agree with Domino Theory and/or the idea that opposition to Communism was sufficient cause for involvement in Vietnam, while the overwhelming majority of people pushing the second view think that Vietnam was unwinnable either from the outset or from very early on.
People who believe the truth of both those premises are rare as hen’s teeth on the ground.
@Trofim:
First, I was really just reacting to the idea that “Missing in Action” could have been first set in Central America “and not lose anything.” I’m simply saying that those kinds of movies almost had to be made. Perhaps we are simply in vehement agreement on that point.
I think you may be wrong about people believing both of those things simultaneously. I understand why you would hold that opinion and make that argument, as I think it’s rare to see the opinions actually voiced simultaneously.
But, the rise in support of the idea that the federal government is evil or to be opposed rose steadily from the 60s onward, on both sides of the political spectrum. Thus, in the 80s, with Reagan’s often misquoted “Government is the problem.” it’s fairly easy to see how someone who thought we could win the war, and was not opposed to waging war against communists, would also at the same time readily accept a sub-textual message that the Vietnam War was the wrong war to fight.
@HBC
Sorry for the tardy reply, combination of work and the site being wierd about letting me log in.
I think we’re mostly in agreement. I’d just suggest that movies like the missing in action series are probably not engaging with these ideas in a deliberate/thoughtful way. Lots and lots of movies pick up on topical parts of the national conversation, or national consciousness (Central American Cartels in the late 80s/early 90s ; Fall of the Soviet Union in the mid 90s ; Rising wave of street crime in the late 70s, etc), but many of them are doing so just because the writer saw an article in the NYT and went “huh, I could make some money doing an action movie based on that”.
As I said, Rambo may be a biiit more nuanced, but I’m not sure.
I can see how that’s possible, sure, but I’ve never seen any evidence that the combination of those two views is anything but VERY unusual, even among Vietnam-era vets. What’s more common in ones who embrace the “wrong war” idea is that they disown and disavow their earlier belief about the war’s winnability and desire to fight communists and say “I was young and wrong and stupid, and I know better now which is why Iraq/Afghanistan is so stupid.”
I’ve gotten to hear this fairly frequently at American Legion and VFW events when I explained that I was an Iraq vet.
“Enemy at the Gates” is an interesting one for this discussion:
Well-dressed, well-read and sophisticated, ultra loyal Nazi villain who murders children? Check.
“A million deaths is a statistic”-style soviet disregard for life or dignity of their own? Check.
The good guys? Those fighting to protect the helpless against both sides.
I think your perception is correct. It’s particularly striking given that the Nazis were defeated before most living Americans were born, whereas the Communists were the enemy until relatively recently.
That’s precisely the reason. After being defeated the Nazis are no longer around to defend themselves, whereas the communists had decades to spread their propaganda.
This is probably theoretical, but-
If things get much worse here in the States, can anyone think where would be a good place to move to? Preferably somewhere with what you might roughly call ‘enlightenment values’- serious commitment to free speech, robust civil liberties, etc.
I’ve never thought of myself as a Really Serious Libertarian, but… both the Neo-Nazis and the Antifa terrify me, and if either of them manage to acquire significant political power, I think this could very rapidly become a much less fun place to live.
I vaguely remember someone saying something nice about Belgium…
Assuming you’re willing to live under Sharia.
I’m not.
Was not aware of this, not sure how seriously to take it.
Any better suggestions?
Edit: To be clear, I’m worried there’s gathering cultural hostility toward free speech and Enlightenment culture in America, and I’m thinking about where to run to if the country takes a big step in a totalitarian direction. I see both the Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe as potentially tyrannous, so it’s really hard to root for either of them in the culture war. The Grey Tribe seems pretty cool, but that may be because they don’t really have the power to make tyranny tempting.
But people haven’t always been terrible everywhere- The Enlightenment was a thing that happened. Given the number of countries in the world, you’d think there’d be somewhere with people seriously committed to liberty of thought. In meatspace, I mean.
I think you should consider what evidence caused you to consider both “Neo-Nazis” and Antifa to be serious threats. If you’re a typical gray tribe member, the evidence for why Antifa is a treat is that they’re constantly trying to shut down speech they don’t agree with (including true speech) and pressuring corporations to do likewise, occasionally they beat people up in the streets of Berkley. The evidence for the Neo-Nazis is that Antifa and the people afraid of them are constantly ranting about how much of a threat the Neo-Nazis are so there has to be something to it, right?
Point.
Think I was trying to be politic- in retrospect probably not something I need to do, here.
I do think the neo-nazis would be a problem if they were to acquire serious political power, but that seems unlikely at this point.
Antifa scare me much more, at the moment.
On the other hand, I’m attending a left-leaning college at the moment, so Scott’s comments on Outgroups vs Fargroups come to mind- it’s possible I’d be inclined to underestimate the threat posed by the Hard Right just because I never seem to actually meet any of them. (Except, arguably, here, where everyone is polite and reasonable enough to disable my fight-or-flight circuitry.)
With all that said, I’d like some suggestions on where to move to- ideally, places that resemble neither leftist dystopias or rightist dystopias.
[I realize x-ist dystopia could refer either to dystopias caused by x or dystopias envisioned by x, but in this context that ambiguity kind of takes care of itself 🙂 ]
What do you mean by “rightist dystopia”? Most of the plausible claims I’ve heard would tend to imply that the whole world was a “rightist dystopia” until ~20 years ago.
It depends where the cutoff for ‘dystopia’ starts. The archetypal image would be something like Nazi Germany.
There are a lot of things about 20 years ago which I don’t exactly love, and a lot of terrible things happened, but I’m not sure it ever qualified as a dystopia. It’s possible I’m underestimating how bad it was. When we talk about the past, it seems like Social Desirability Bias causes people to to emphasize the negative- if you try to downplay how bad the past was you’re insufficiently progressive, and there doesn’t seem to be an analogous disincentive when it comes to exaggerating it, so all the pressure is on one side of the question. In practical terms, this makes it hard to really know what things were like back then without doing a lot of research.
That’s my point, you’re being overly paranoid about a “right wing dystopia”.
Mmm. Overly paranoid or just Moody-level paranoid?
I think most of us can agree that one side of the pendulum is *really scary* (even if we disagree about *which*.)
That seems like enough reason to be at least *a little* worried about the other side.
Y’know, given the whole ‘pendulum’ dynamic.
I agree that a lot of people are trying to stir up irrational fear using bad logic.
I’m not similarly convinced that good logic isn’t available.
You might enjoy the book Glasshouse, which bites the bullet on this. Part of the story involves a bunch of posthumans in a shady historical experiment to recreate the 20th century. There’s an evil conspiracy in the background, but it is typically ambiguous what is due to evil conspiracy and what is due to evil 20th century norms.
I meant in Nazi society generally, not the Camps specifically.
Obviously I’d prefer to live someplace that doesn’t have Death Camps, but that preference is so common that it’s not hard to find first-world countries to satisfy it.
The Nazi attitude toward freedoms of speech and assembly, on the other hand, seems hard to escape, at least in some measure. If Johnathan Haidt is right that support for these freedoms is declining in the US, it might be wise to find a place to run to- not just because these freedoms are nice, but because they’re a load-bearing part of the structure of protections that keeps this a pretty nice place to live.
There is no place in Belgium where anything ressembling Sharia law applies. Everytime someone (usually from outside Belgium) has claimed a particular district of a particular Belgian city is “under Shariah law and forbidden to whites/non-muslims”, multiple white non-muslim people who have lived in that district for decades have showed up and called that nonsense what it is.
Leave a ham sandwich in front of a mosque, see what happens to you.
This seems testable. Has anyone tried it?
If the answer is ‘no’, do we have reason to think bad things would happen that make testing it undesirable?
I do not believe that Sharia law has anything to say about that situation.
There was a guy in Britain who left a ham sandwich outside a mosque and got sentenced to a year in prison (he recently died in prison.)
I think there might have been more to it than just the ham sandwich, though.
Actually, Sharia law is 95% ham sandwich regulations.
Was also unaware of this.
That’s the UK, though, not Belgium.
I’m enough of a free-speech geek to have already crossed the UK off my list. I don’t think of myself as being likely to violate ‘Hate Speech’ laws, but I’ve yet to see them defined in a principled way and I worry about slippery slopes.
The men who were sentenced in the sandwich incident also yelled abuse at a worshiper at the mosque. I don’t think that incident was really connected to free speech; they were convicted for public order offences. Also, the sentence of 12 months is unrepresentatively harsh: both his fellow sandwich protestors and these guys who did the same thing were sentenced to less.
It’s a lot more likely that Belgium falls under Sharia Law than the US gets taken over by Nazis.
More likely as in 0.000001 chance vs 0.0000009 chance?
What evidence do you have for that?
That there are almost no Nazis in the US, and numerous terror cells operating out of Belgium, which has the worst policing in this regard out of any European state.
The idea of Nazis taking over the US at all, at any point in history, is moronic. It is almost as improbable than me farting myself to the Andromeda galaxy in the next 15 minutes.
If there are almost no Nazis in the US, there are almost no jihadists in Belgium. Other than that, you make some baseless claims about the improbability of a Nazi coup; that’s the opposite of evidence. I could make exactly the same statement about an Islamist coup, and it would be equally as useful (i.e. not at all).
Can you be more specific? What do you think the probabilities are for each case?
According to this Atlantic piece, 516 Belgians have fought on the ISIS side in Iraq or Syria, out of 11 million Belgian people. Proportionately, that would be as if 15,000 US residents had recently fought in a war for Aryan supremacy.
Whether that’s troubling or almost nothing is subjective, though consider that this is just the portion currently committed enough to actually fight in armed conflict, not those who might be convinced to do so or to support those doing so. I’m not sure on the differential birthrates of Belgian Belgians versus new Belgians, but I suspect it is favorable to the side more sympathetic to Sharia.
Of course, the a critical factor in relative likelihood is how loose we are being with the terms “Nazi” and “under Sharia.”
20,000 Americans attended the German American Bund rally in 1936, when the US population was something like 40% of what it is now.
Not the same level of commitment as taking up arms, but there was a time within living memory when a Nazi takeover of the US was approximately as likely as a sharia takeover of Belgium by this, uh, heuristic.
Shame you weren’t there at the time to tell them it was nothing to worry about.
It was also deliberate provocation, not someone dropping his lunch
Yes, the person was engaging in what according to Western norms is called a “peaceful protest”, and according to Muslim norms “blasphemy”. Guess which norms prevailed.
@ghi: this was in Europe, where restrictions on blasphemy is a Western norm. Unfortunately.
In England you get arrested for not blaspheming too.
It’s illegal to say “No Mosques” but probably, most of the things being said inside the mosque are also illegal.
There was a case a few years ago where a woman was arrested and charged for, basically, describing government policy – “We don’t want foreigners coming over here using the NHS taking our tax money”. The government had recently instituted NHS charges for foreigners.
If it wasn’t so silly it’d be scary.
I’ll go ahead and be scared anyway, thank you very much.
(I’m… actually not sure if I’m joking or not. This seems terrible, but talking about how terrible it is is actually kind of fun.
I wonder if I’m the first person in history to discover this dynamic.)
Would you call daubing swastikas in a synagogue a peaceful protest?
You’ve introduced a new element by having the swastikas be *in* the synagogue rather than outside in some more public space.
That was a typo for “on”…but notice how fine the lines are.
I now have the distinction of having lived in two places that are fantasised as being under Shariah by the US right.
I would recommend Chile. It has a modern infrastructure, a fairly sophisticated culture, great weather (obviously highly variable considering the latitudes it traverses), and is removed from the current culture war nonsense in a way that anywhere in Europe or the Anglosphere is not.
In addition, if there is ever a hard collapse of civilization, the relatively low population density means a higher percentage of the population are likely to survive, the geographic isolation should protect it from wandering hordes/sea people, and the climate/resources make it a likely center for civilization to begin rebuilding.
Thanks!
That helps. I’ll look into it.
Switzerland, maybe, but it’s almost impossible to become a citizen and fit in there as an immigrant. I’m afraid the US is your last and best hope. The neo-Nazis are an annoying fringe, and I suspect if you walked up to Richard Spencer and said “L’chaim” he’d jump 14 feet in the air (but don’t try this with the real 1488ers). But the Antifa, along with their allies in government, industry, and academia… they are a real threat.
Agreed, and thanks.
Let’s hope the US doesn’t fall, then.
Edit: I often enjoy reading your comments on here- I have you mentally sorted into my (very loosely organized ad-hoc) likely-to-be-educational pile. So, thanks.
Freedom House gives very high scores to the Nordics, Canada, Barbados, Australia, New Zeeland, Japan and Uruguay.
Hadn’t heard of Freedom House0 seems like a useful resource. Thanks.
My general position on this topic is: whatever change you’re trying to accomplish by moving to another country, in terms of security or isolation from some threat, is almost certainly easier to achieve simply by moving *within* the US.
Interesting…
Where within the US?
The Rationalist enclaves are in Berkeley, but I understand that’s not lacking for Far-Right/Antifa dogmatism. Which suggests it’s not lacking for purity ethics. Which I’m sick of.
Purity ethics are disgusting . They’re disgusting and they contaminate everything they touch. :\
I think it’s less geographical and more occupational or class-based. I don’t think the haute bourgeoisie takes purity stuff very seriously (if anything, bucking it demonstrates a sort of aristocratic elan). I think that occupations where thinking rigorously about society is part of the job (like social scientists, advertisers and political operatives) are also pretty based.
I am assuming you did that on purpose, but I don’t know for what purpose…
Aargh, I forgot Scott hates meta humor. Sorry Scott!
I said this to my mom the other day,in all innocence, and it was a full moment before the penny dropped and I realized I was a self-loathing abomination.
Not to, y’know, be dramatic about it.
I would suggest a town with a STEM-heavy university in or near Appalachia; Appalachia has an extremely sturdy culture, and a STEM-heavy university will be less political than a typical university while making the area less entirely Red Tribe. I’d consider:
Blacksburg VA (Virginia Tech)
Knoxville TN (University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge)
Lexington KY (University of Kentucky)
There may be other similar towns but these come immediately to mind.
(Yes, I’m prejudiced–I grew up in Appalachia, and I still like it.)
New Zealand is a pretty pleasant place, as if my visiting it a fair while back. If you happen to be of Jewish descent, Israel has the advantage that they will give you citizenship. A developed country, an active tech sector, obvious risks from terrorism or war. I’ve never lived there, so am not sure how good it is on free speech and related issues.
The nice thing about EU countries is that if you decide you don’t like the one you are living in you can readily shift to another. Estonia looks pretty good. In a fair number of them and the Scandinavian countries a large fraction of the population is fluent in English. The EU as a whole may be gradually developing into a United States of Europe, so the diversity of the member countries may decrease, but that will take a while.
You might also consider Switzerland. Or Chile.
There are a lot of countries in the world that are not strikingly worse places to live than the U.S.
Israel might not exist in 50 years. And if not in 50, then it will surely be overrun in 150. There will come a time when the country is weak vis a vis its neighbors, and in that moment, said neighbors will pounce. There is no hinterland in which to hide.
If Europe falls, Switzerland will go, too. New Zealand is infected with the same nonsense as elsewhere. South America seems like the best bet to me. I don’t know Uruguay or Argentina personally, but I (and my descendants) could probably make a go of it in Chile for a few generations.
“Israel might not exist in 50 years.”
What probability?
Sort of in line with what bbartlog said, but I’ve lived other places, also strongly dislike both Antifa and Nazis, and I prefer the US to everywhere else I’ve lived or even visited.
As for where in the US, I recommend the Midwest, not in a major city (e.g. Chicago) but not in an isolated small town either. Suburbs of small cities in the Midwest are awesome. By small cities I’m talking about ones with populations around 150,000 give or take maybe 40,000. If you need to be in a major city for work reasons, try to live in the outer suburbs, especially if these are within the commuting zone to a much smaller city. The aforementioned places are the most likely, I’ve found, to be both stable and intellectually diverse. Many of them are fairly racially diverse on top of that.
In the places like that where I’ve lived, the white people tend to be fairly red tribe but very tolerant and compassionate, while the black people and other minorities tend to be more conservative and “assimilated” than their stereotypical urban counterparts. This is a robust combination that withstands the extremism. we both dislike.
Yes, I can’t imagine moving OUT of the the US if you care about free speech. The US still has the strongest advocates of free speech of any developed country, in my estimation. Partly this is due to the First Amendment to the Constitution (does any other country have protections in law this great), and partly because it is just part of American heritage to say what you think. Many European countries have hate speech laws. As others have said, the Antifa and Nazis are both pretty miniscule in size. I do think they partly exist BECAUSE of free speech laws — it is more likely they’d be arrested for some reason or other in Europe.
I agree with others that the best approach is to find the freeest locations in the US. It is a big country, although it is true that I don’t know anywhere free speech is totally free. Busybodies that want to regulate your speech are everywhere — all you can do is minimize.
Not great for freedom of speech and civil liberties, but does anyone know what it’s like for a white, western person to move to Singapore? Do you need to learn a language, or do people speak enough English there that you can get by?
I spent 9 days there a couple months ago. Everybody speaks English. I wouldn’t particularly want to move there, as it’s expensive and they aren’t great on civil liberties, but it’s amazing to visit.
So, loads of societies (most, to varying degrees) have some members of families controlling others’ sexual activity (mostly but not only women’s). This, including the focus on women has a fairly clear ev psych justification. But does it exist in other animals? Will a chimp stop its sisters/daughters mating with ‘unsuitable’ mates? Seems weird for it to be just humans but not something I’ve seen talked about.
What is the ev psych justification? Fathers want to impregnate their daughters before someone else does?
Father doesn’t want to get stuck supporting his grandchildren if his son-in-law bails, he’d rather support more direct children.
Kill the grandchildren then.
Seems more likely to be cultural than biological.
Then he doesn’t get the benefit of having his daughter pass on her genes.
She can still breed.
Actually, yeah. What you are saying makes sense. I think in practical terms it’s more likely to be cultural though.
He doesn’t know if the grandchildren are his. Controlling his daughters sexuality improves the probability that they are.
Yes, but having an out-of-wedlock child makes it harder for her to find a man willing to marry her.
Also, it’s perfectly possible that if the son-in-law ditches her its still in his interest to support the child, but he’d obviously rather that the son-in-law do so.
Since the daughter values her son and brothers differently than her father, it might very well be in her but not her father’s interest for her to get pregnant by a high value male who’s not going to support her children.
@Wrong Species
He does know that the grandchildren are his if it’s his daughter. (Presuming his wife wasn’t unfaithful, but that should have been taken care of years before this becomes an issue.)
A good son-in-law means good support for the kids. Simple as that.
How does the daughter’s father not know if the grandchildren are (25%) his? Is the theory that the daughter is faking pregnancy and adopting/stealing a baby, or that faeries are sticking the family with a changeling?
Genetically speaking, the maternal grandfather doesn’t care who impregnated his daughter so long as he’s reasonably fit, any anyone who can seduce a married woman probably qualifies. He does, as noted, care that he gets to have grandchildren he doesn’t need to materially support(*) and so wants his daughter to have a husband who will stick around for the duration.
* Because he might not live long enough, or he might need those resources to support another set of grandchildren from a widowed daughter, or he might still father children of his own who will need support.
I’m not really sure what I was thinking when I wrote that. I think I mixed up father and grandfather.
I don’t think non-human primates have this tension that is created by the need for someone other than the mother to provide significant resources to the children.
In humans, sure: we can imagine that father doesn’t want to be stuck providing resources to help raise his daughter’s kids (maybe he’s still in a position to possibly have kids of his own), so he’d rather have her get a son-in-law that can take care of that. Whereas she might be better of, at least in terms gene propagation, by having kids with a higher quality mate who doesn’t stick around; at which point her father’s best choice is still to help her out. In this case her choice would be a kind of precommitment which her father would rather not let her undertake.
If there’s reason to select mates for yourself for maximum genetic advantage, there’s reason to do so for your gene carriers. Particularly if by having a child with ‘bad’ father genetically they can’t hacve one with a good father at the same time and area absorbing resource costs and risks.
Marriage provides allies who may be useful.
I think this is probably mostly a tribal thing. Seducers are evolutionarily more successful than providers in an unregulated sexual market. However seducing is harmful to a tribe because it causes a lot of internal strife and make the sexually unsuccessful males less motivated to do anything on behalf of the tribe. As a result more successful tribes tend to make sure that their male members have access to sex and reproduction in general so that all of them will be motivated to work for and fight for the tribes.
I also believe that the harsher the environment is (dry weather, cold weather, etc) the more likely that a tribe will emphasize provision. On the other hand, the nicer the environment is (wet, warm weather with lots of free fruits and vegetables) the less likely that a tribe will emphasize provision.
I see the wolf-crying article is tagged as something you’ll regret writing. I hope you don’t. For me it’s among your best, brilliant and highly entertaining.
When I was a child, I used to hate Tom and Jerry because of all the unnecessary destruction. It used to really annoy me.
So, I think, in the current climate, I’m just in favour of statues in general. Where do people like me go?
How would I feel if they built a statue of Martin McGuiness in Hyde Park? I don’t know.
I think I wouldn’t mind the statue – I’d be more concerned about the attitudes of the people who built it.
If you had a statue of someone who was unambiguously considered bad, like Pol Pot, it would be a great thing – focus our attention on this evil character.
Maybe we just need more statues.
I favor more statues. If taking down Lee is “erasing history,” let’s just aim for more history and not just one side of it this time. More Harriet Tubman statues. More Abraham Lincoln statues. Heck, even John Brown statues, why not? Let’s remember *all* of history and not just bits of it. And we really need some memorials to the slaves; it’s odd that this country has more Holocaust memorials than slavery memorials given that slavery is the one that actually happened here.
Best solution: replace all statues of people who aren’t Norman Borlaug with people who are Norman Borlaug. Why would you commemorate someone inferior to Norman Borlaug, when you could commemorate Norman Borlaug instead?
I’ve heard worse proposals. How about we consider others when we have as many statues of Borlaug as he saved lives? That should keep us going for a while.
We need to optimize for statues of Norman Borlaug.
But that would require melting down perfectly good paperclips to make Norman Borlaug statues.
Could we make a Norman Borlaug statue out of paperclips without melting them down? It might even be modern art, come to think of it.
Surely we can compromise, and focus on making paperclips with tiny images of Norman Borlaug etched into them?
HECK YES. Melt down the Robert E. Lees and replace them ALL with Norman Borlaug. In fact NOT having a Norman Borlaug in our town square is erasing history. How dare they erase history?!
These statues are generally not destroyed, but moved to museums. Even Germans store Nazi stuff in museums.
The general consensus is we should not destroy history, even and especially bad chapters of history.
—
Having statues out and about in public spaces sends a different signal than just “history preservation,” though.
There’s White Nights, quite a good movie, but I agree with everyone else that there’s very little.
I clicked on two of the ten links (specifically, #4 and #5) that are ostensibly examples of “Obama’s half-hearted condemnations of Islamic terrorism proved he was a secret Muslim” and they… don’t make the “secret Muslim” accusation.
Curious, I’m going to click on the rest now.
#1: a column on The Blaze. Doesn’t make that claim either, but arguably plays footsie with it towards the end: “What is Obama’s agenda? It certainly isn’t to protect Americans, our country, or our children. Does Obama suffer from complete ignorance? Crippling political correctness? Is he blinded by his childhood in Indonesia? I don’t know. But I know something is wrong.”
#2: WorldNetDaily, a known crank site. Does not accuse Obama of being a secret Muslim, but it does accuse him of being cozy with Islamic extremists.
#3: a Pajamas Media column by Roger Simon. Not only does it not make the secret Muslim accusation, it explicitly rebukes it. “As many have noted, Islam is a shame culture (the kind of society that will go berserk over cartoons) and, like it or not, our president is part of it culturally. That does not mean he is stoning adulterers or cutting off the hands of thieves or treating women like chattel, but it does mean he is genuinely and quite deeply ashamed of the religion he, in part, came from. He cannot adjust to or accept the calamities it is causing.” […] “Obama is not a Manchurian candidate and never was. He never had to be. He is just absolutely the wrong human being to be leading the West at this point in history.”
#6: A column from The Week. Doesn’t even come close to making the accusation. It’s actually somewhat generous to Obama.
#7: A New York Post column. Again, nope.
#8: news piece from Daily Mail, a trashy populist British paper. Doesn’t make the claim or quote anyone who does.
#9: New York Post again, written by the same columnist as #7. Doesn’t make the secret Muslim accusation.
#10: Breitbart! But even then they’re just relaying the TV rant of LTC Ralph Peters. But neither he nor the site makes the claim that Obama is secretly a Muslim.
So out of all ten examples, literally none of them charge Obama of being a secret Muslim. Most of them are varying degrees of the “Obama doesn’t take Islamic terrorism seriously” charge, with one arguably coming close to (sigh) dog-whistling it and one actually saying it’s Obama making a deliberate strategic choice. The preceding link before the ten examples (hyperlinked from the “constant Obama-era claims” text, and coming in the form of an accusation against Michael Ledeen from the lefty site Right Wing Watch) is actually closer to that than any of them, curiously, and it’s really more of a bit of over-the-top rhetorical bombast than a genuine conspiracy theory– e.g., Obama is “an anti-American zealot” who has “sided with the enemy” etc.
I don’t doubt there were and still are people who genuinely believe Barack Obama is a Muslim and won’t admit it (I personally can’t believe he’s anything other than an atheist, honestly), and it wouldn’t be that hard to find them. But you’d have to look a lot harder than this, especially if you want to find the charge being genuinely made by notable right-wing figures in serious publications to the same degree Trump’s partisan adversaries do with Nazism.
Which is unfortunate because I still agree with the overall points Scott makes here and he has a *crazy* good intellectual rigor when devoting more time to a post. But as it is this is an inadvertent case of false equivalence, which is ironic considering the topic.
To be fair, most of the condemnations I’ve read of Trump’s speech haven’t been calling him a literal Nazi. They’ve been calling him a white supremacist, or someone who sympathizes with white supremacy. So it might actually be equivalent – Obama’s detractors get summarized as calling him a “secret Muslim” while not actually using that exact phrase, Trump’s detractors get summarized as calling him a “secret Nazi” while not actually using that exact phrase.
Last time we had this discussion, I did the same exercise in the opposite direction, looking at a set of links that purportedly showed lefties who thought Trump was literally Hitler. My results were basically the same as yours: it turns out to be pretty hard to find anybody who will come straight out and say “Trump/Obama is a Nazi/Muslim”.
I’m willing to admit that finding people calling Trump a Nazi is not as easy as you might think if you spend too much time on comedy Twitter (the left-wing version of YouTube comment sections), which is of course a lesson for me in not speaking too loosely. I did find two immediately (here and here) right away, but it was actually more difficult after that.
It’s somewhat easier if you loosen “Nazi” down to “white supremacist” or similar (see one of the early paragraphs in Scott’s original Crying Wolf essay for examples) but again– lesson in speaking loosely.
To be pedantic, I don’t think your second article fits. Being a “Nazi sympathiser” is not the same as being a Nazi; it is essentially the same as your number 3 which claims Obama “identifies emotionally with Muslims”.
You’re right, I over-edited that post. The original claim was that people dissected his speeches for evidence that he wasn’t really against terrorism. I’ve re-edited that sentence to add that in.
It is definitely true recently, at least, as Nazis and slaveowners have definitely started to fill a “people you can kill without remorse because they’re pure evil” slot in our culture, as evidenced by the films of Quentin Tarantino. This is because these two groups committed the cardinal sin of our current civic religion, which is racism.
I’m not sure if this was always true. I definitely recall as a kid that the Russians were the baddies in everything (even the Star Trek TOS Klingons were clearly Russians). For a little while after 9/11, Middle Eastern terrorists were the go-to villain, but then that became un-PC. Not sure who filled the hatred void between the end of the Cold War and 9/11. Big companies that liked to pollute?
Besides Hollywood is super-left wing blah blah everyone has a weird soft spot for communism they don’t have for other ideologies blah blah I do think there’s also a weird thing where people who kill “others” make better villains than people who kill their own people (yes, I know many of those killed in the Holocaust were, by rights, German, but the Nazis themselves didn’t think so). Which is ironic, because I would kind of think killing your own people is worse. But even when the Russians were the enemy, it was always because they might nuke us, not because they might engineer a famine and starve a bunch of Ukrainians. This may be about how to have movie/book conflict; may also just be about “evil is a fargroup that threatens you, not a fargroup that threatens another fargroup.”
I do really, really hate the whole “punch a Nazi meme” and related Tarantino-esque justified sadism (I also found the “whooohooo!” reaction to the death of Bin Laden weird and off-putting; not that I wasn’t glad they killed him, just that I found the celebratory atmosphere disconcerting) and find it especially worrisome because seemingly new, at least to me: even during the Cold War I don’t remember any sense it was okay to totally dehumanize Russians just because they were our political enemies. Russians weren’t like zombies you could just say “score!” when you ran over them with a truck. But now Nazis and slaveholders have joined the ranks of zombies and other cartoon monsters. Not good, especially when the definition of “Nazi” keeps expanding.
I’m not sure if people are becoming more vicious lately (though I’m well aware that we’re still incredibly not bloodthirsty by standards of human history) or just expressing it differently, though.
Racism can not kill a strong group. Affirmative action can not save a weak group.
Since you live in China I’m sure that you know that some parts of China used to be occupied by foreign powers and massacres of Chinese happened. Does that harm the Chinese in the long run? Not at all.
Ashkenazi Jews have been persecuted for very long. So many massacres, discriminatory laws, expulsions. Yet they still exist and are doing well.
Poles were massacred by the Nazis and lived under German and Russian occupation for a long time. Yet Poles continue to exist and Poland is increasingly rich.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked. The Japanese simply rebuilt the cities. Now they are even better than what they used to be before the nukes.
Racism and persecution can never seriously harm any strong group in the long run. Hence we shouldn’t focus on racism when it comes to inequality and its causes.
>Racism and persecution can never seriously harm any strong group in the long run
As an individual, I care about individuals.
I agree. So do I.
That just sounds like declaring that all the extinct groups were weak.
I’m not at all a film buff, but haven’t the Nazis have been acceptable zombie targets for quite a while now, well past the current PC culture? Indiana Jones was killing the shit out of them, off the top of my head.
Yeah, sort of, though I think Indiana Jones was primarily fighting Hellboy, Captain America-type Nazis, i.e. people who make good villains both because they were an antagonist of ours in a war and supposedly obsessed with the occult. Nazis really do give you a lot to work with, don’t they?
There were also the neo-Nazis in the Blues Brothers, but I don’t think they quite reached zombie level of dehumanization. Along with the good ol’ boys, they were just sort of a bunch of assholes out to get the heroes, though knocking them off a bridge into shallow water for holding up traffic was funny.
I think it’s interesting that this changed over time, though. Consider Hogan’s Heroes. I don’t think you can make a show today where a Nazi camp guard is a bungling silly-willy like Sergeant Schultz.
This is part of the reason I don’t think the Nazis’ status as our wartime enemy, or, for that matter the Confederacy’s status as the Union’s wartime enemy, is what makes them seem good villain fodder today.
If it were about the trauma of the war itself, you’d expect the earlier treatment of the enemy to be the harshest and for that to later fade to a more nuanced/less deathly-serious treatment. This is why no Americans hold a grudge against the British anymore for the Stamp Act.
But depiction of the Confederacy and the Nazis has gotten worse over time and I think it’s because they are racist and racism has become more and more unforgivable over time.
This is not correct. The actual reason both of those groups are in that slot is because they took up arms and lost against the USA, and in two of our three most celebrated wars. More proximal to your point, “racism” isn’t quite enough. The Nazis attempted an industrialized genocide. Slavery in the US involved rape, breakup of family units and torture as punishment. We don’t have quite the same sentiments towards white suburbanites who are big exclusionary zoning enthusiasts.
I mean, okay, you can assert that, but why should I believe your theory is more accurate than mine? The British fought us in what I’m guessing you consider our third most celebrated war and we don’t seem to have an irrational hatred of the British… or the Spanish, Koreans, or Vietnamese.
Don’t we? I mean not nearly as bad, but is it a difference in kind or just degree?
Consider two outgroups on either side: World War I and the Revolutionary War on the side of “celebrated wars the USA won” and the Rwandan and Armenian genocides on the side of “Violent and systemic racism is bad”. Do we have movies and video games and other media where the USA is portrayed as great and killing British or German soldiers is justified? Sure we do. Maybe not to the same extent as Nazis and Confederates, but we still do.
Do we have media celebrating Tutsis fighting back against Hutus, or Armemians fighting back against Ottomans? We do not, or if we do they’re minor documentaries and art-house films. Because these events were far away and don’t involve Americans.
Of course, for the real test consider the genocide of Native Americans. “Actually, killing all of the Native Americans and stealing their lands was bad” is still considered a moderately-fringe belief that people have to fight for rather than an obvious conclusion. Andrew Jackson is still on the 20 dollar bill, there’s a huge park named after him here in Chicago along with parks for Lincoln, Washington and Grant. He’s still considered among the greatest presidents despite committing an act of genocide that was called the Trail of Tears at the time. Westerns featuring heroic white people fighting Native Americans were common until pretty recently.
Of course American involvement in the struggle is a prerequisite for Americans caring about it. Most Americans don’t even know who Tutsis and Hutus are. But among those enemies Americans have had, the depiction of those who can be construed as racist gets worse over time, while the depiction of others gets more nuanced or completely fades as a “villain” category.
Do Asian-American men generally have a really tough time dating? I see a lot of white men with Asian-American women (and in fact lots of white men prefer AA women over white women) but you hardly see the reverse. Just as a matter of arithmetic, it would seem that AA men would have a lot of difficulty in the dating world.
As I said before, this is just an inevitable consequence of welfare and the hook-up culture that prefers sexy people to providers.
My theory is that South Asian men should have no problem dating. Instead they should be easier to get a date compared to white men. Southeast Asians should have it better than Northeast Asian men. However labelling SE Asians as Asian certainly make their men sound less attractive due to labelling. Northeast Asian men should be unattractive because they are in a wrong dating market.
You get that impression if you browse a bit on reddit.com/r/AsianMasculinity, a thoroughly weird place being both SJW and TRP. Given how many non-Asian men complain online about their lack of dating success, though, I don’t know what that proves.
Because they aren’t actually Red Pilled. The key issue here isn’t racism so its treatment has nothing to do with racism either.
Providers don’t do well in general in a society with lots of welfare.
OKCupid data suggests that Asian men have it slightly better than black men and much worse than white men.
Oh we have to face facts. Now we need to.explain this phenomenon. My theory might be wrong.
Online dating is also different than the real world. People are much more superficial.
I agree. So do we have real world data?
My hypothesis is that different groups are different on the provider-seducer spectrum. Like Northeast Asians > Ashkenazi Jews > Europeans > Southeast Asians, South Asians, Middle Easterners, Mestizos > Blacks on emphasis on providing and the opposite on men seducing women. I believe that seducers thrive in environments with lots of free resources while providers thrive in harsh environments with few free resources.
I believer emphasis on provision and discouraging seduction is important to maintain a healthy, rich and intellectual society. Europe used to be much more pro-provider than it is now and people need to return to pro-provider values to ensure that the society remains healthy.
Yes, it’s a thing. AA men, along with black women, tend to be rated the least sexually desirable. It probably has to do with physical features — AA men are shorter and often slimmer, and many women go for the tallest, buffest guy they can get. Culturally, AA men also appear less confident to Europeans because they are socialized not to boast. Meanwhile AA women can date pretty much anybody and don’t have a particular preference (on average) for dating AA guys.
That said, the effect isn’t enormous and AA guys do in fact get girlfriends. Especially among women whose tastes don’t run toward the big, buff, and brash — mine don’t.
That only applies in a seducer-dominated market. What Northeast Asian men need to do is to recognize that they are too good for this stupid hook up culture and get spouses from provider-friendly ones. In fact this also applies to many white men, especially the ones in STEM.
Broadly speaking, I think that the prejudice goes that African-Americans are masculine and Asian-Americans are feminine (I do not endorse that prejudice, just report it). So Asian-American women and African-American men benefit from this prejudice on the dating markets, while Asian-American men and African-American women suffer from it.
@sandoratthezoo
I personally don’t believe that this is the real problem. On the other hand, the provider/seducer split does.
Northeast Asians were traditionally in a culture of arranged marriages with no courtship. Europeans were traditionally in a culture of arranged marriages but with courtship. Hence to Northeast Asian men a pure provider culture works the best. For European men it is mixed but still with a strong emphasis on provision. Modern dating culture favors seducers over providers. Hence it is bad for both groups of men but even worse for Northeast Asian men. On the other hand a seducer-dominated dating culture is good for black men.
Interesting fact: Mixed marriages in NE Asian-majority Singapore are mostly between Indian men and NE Asian women. Yet we don’t see NE Asian men marrying lots of minority Malay or Indian women despite the fact that NE Asians are politically and economically dominant.
Another interesting fact: Jewish Israeli extreme groups try to prevent Arab men from going out with Jewish women. Yet Jewish men almost never want to go out with Arab women.
Hence the problem isn’t white racism. Instead it is the fact that when people are no longer starving to death and sexual morals are loose seducers are favored instead of providers. Racially it causes certain groups to be favored instead of other groups.
You mean based on your incredible insight as an asexual autist into how the dating market functions?
Please read my modified expanded argument. 🙂
Only where there is a lot of poverty such as Brazil do Northeast Asian men get to normally date in a mixed-race environment. That means in a poor society providers still get wives despite their lack of sexiness.
Okay, for the record, I didn’t say anything about “white” racism. I think that the stereotypes exist to a greater or lesser degree cross-race.
I don’t really buy the argument that this is a legacy of arranged marriages. For one, the US dating market is now pretty far from any time of relatively pure arranged marriages in Asia. Like, the vast majority of Asian-American men are now, what, at least two generations removed from the last arranged marriage in their family, quite possibly three, and don’t actually share a language with the last person in their family to have an arranged marriage. And arranged marriages are hardly unique to northeast Asia, and in particular were common in India as well — so that kind of argues against your Singapore parallel. And how does arranged marriage play into the Jewish/Arab divide you set up? Are Jews more likely to have arranged marriages in their cultural background than Arabs are?
Why should we assume these three examples have anything to do with each other?
This seems needlessly complicated and disconnected from the reasons people actually choose partners. I didn’t pick my guy because he would be a good provider (though he is), I picked him because he was physically fit, intelligent, and made me laugh. I know my libido well enough to know these are the things it likes. I would happily have gone for an Asian guy; I think they are hot. But many American women are really attracted to muscularity and obvious dominance, and Asian guys aren’t known for having either.
Your theory isn’t needed to explain the difference — so Ockham’s Razor says you should probably abandon it.
@sconn You live in America, right? See? Here is the issue. You are attracted to men you consider sexy. You don’t really need a dude to financially support you hence you can afford to choose a partner based on sexiness.
On the other hand, traditionally there was no dating or courtship in Northeast Asia. Instead resources are what cause one to get a wife. Hence men try to be as resourceful as possible, not as sexy as possible.
That’s why South Korean and Taiwanese men are still getting brides from Vietnam and the Philippines. The shy Northeast Asian dudes aren’t sexier than the more open Vietnamese and Filipino guys. However by marrying them you move to a richer country and live a better life. You sacrifice sexuality for material gains and this is sometimes worth it even if it is no longer justified evolutionarily.
I really wonder what Northeast Asians will do if they ever become the richest race in the world. Will they try to implement some form of Jim Crow to prevent others from getting their women? Otherwise their well-educated rich women will marry foreign sexy guys and many among their men will be both rich and incel. Basically what happens to some white guys but to a much greater degree.
Any study I’d accept on this would need to be controlled for location. Asian-Americans are more prevalent in West Coast cities that also have a famously high ratio of single men:single women. Here in the land of reasonable male:female ratios (that is, the Midwest), many of the Asian-American men I know have been successful enough at dating to get married and have kids – many of them with Caucasian women.
By “Asian” you mean South Asian or Southeast Asian here, right?
Both South Asians and Southeast Asians traditionally have more seductive cultures compared to white European or Northeast Asian cultures.
Cultures that have existed for long enough have evolutionary impact on a group.
Not exclusively South Asian, although I do know some of those. My cousin is married to a 2nd-generation Chinese man. One of my friends is the son of a Japanese father and a Jewish mother, and he himself is married to a Latina woman. Another friend is 2nd-generation Japanese and married to a caucasian woman.
As a lame married person myself, I don’t tend to have conversations with my friends about dating, I mostly only hear about it when they get married or have kids. So I guess my single friends could be having problems that I don’t really know about.
Sometimes Twitter is genuninely interesting and has good information about city planning and disaster:
https://twitter.com/CorbettMatt/status/901959336850804737
Further evidence that any time Twitter happens to have something genuinely interesting it would be 100x better if presented with real paragraphs instead of shoehorned into Twitter.
I think you’re not asking whether there is fiction with Communists as villains, because you’ve found examples (like Cold War spy fiction) and ruled them out. You’re looking for fiction with the ideology of Communism as the driving force behind the villains, or where the villains used Communist symbology. There’s less of that; Chalker’s “Midnight at the Well of Souls” has Communism as a malign force, but it’s not the main enemy. Much Libertarian SF does as well, though usually ‘modeled after’ rather than actual hammer-and-sickle Communism.
Relevant to the title of this thread, as well as the culture wars, Worm fanfic author Ack has announced: “I’m putting Slippery Slope on temporary hiatus until the American political situation has calmed down (due to themes in that fic which hew uncomfortably closely to real life).”
https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/vote-thread-for-acks-omake-corner.1144/page-317
Slippery Slope is a “Taylor becomes a Nazi” alternate history fic, where the lead character of Worm gets drawn into the Empire 88.
(The other story of Ack’s that he comments about in the same message is called Trump Card, but it has nothing to do with the current US president.)
Scott Alexander wrote:
You have any comments on whether or not antifa is a gigantic and important social force? Because a bunch of your most enthusiastic commentators seem to think it is.
My theory: there really are a ton of them in the communities that posters here inhabit, and said posters don’t realize how unusual this is, but also outsiders don’t realize that these communities exist.
I work in academia, and it bears no resemblance to the descriptions that I hear from right-wingers. I wore a MAGA hat with my academia-bros (admittedly late primary rather than the general election, and not while teaching) and I didn’t get punched once. Actually it was was totally fine. And there are plenty of academics studying gender differences etc. Since “everyone knows” that academia is the most closed-minded lefty place on Earth, I concluded that right-wingers were lying about everything else.
But in light of the Damore affair I have changed my mind. Actually, Silicon Valley is the most closed-minded lefty place on Earth. Right-wingers weren’t lying, they were just extrapolating their personal experiences too far. By the same token, we who live in sane communities shouldn’t extrapolate our experience too far; there really does seem to be a lot of craziness out there, it’s probably not just conservative hysteria.
The problem is that Academia and Silicon Valley have influence disproportionate to their size.
Silicon Valley, maybe. Academia? No way, particularly when it comes to the hyper-left humanities. Probably the most influential academics are economists (with law professors and business school professors a distant second), which is hardly a stronghold for left-wing thought.
The humanities professors imposed a regime to indoctrinate all students that pass through the university whatever their major (if you’re a professor, you may not be aware of the amount of indoctrination directed at undergrads). How do you think Silicon Valley got to be the closed-minded lefty place it is today?
Plus all the extreme lefty thought we see today came from academics in the first place.
@Wrong Species: I don’t think that’s true anymore. Extreme leftiness these days is about the means rather than the ends. It’s not people supporting far-out ideas via conventional means (like writing dumb books), but rather people supporting basically mainstream ideas via far-out means like street-fighting and ostracization. They didn’t learn to do any of that stuff in class.
Maybe if schools were doing a better job of teaching them how to write books they’d be doing that instead. One can tell a story where leftist intellectuals disappeared up their own assholes, which made leftist activists dumber.
It seems to me that today the far-out means like street-fighting and ostracization do indeed come from academia, though. It’s probably not ubiquitous or even close to it, but professors in humanities do openly advocate for using violence to achieve the social changes they desire and also openly see their classes as means by which to affect such changes, with education of students either a distant 2nd priority or conflated with recruiting them into their own specific way of thinking. And more generally the idea that if certain people determined that they’re oppressed, then they basically have carte blanche to use any means they deem fit to destroy and throw off their chains, and the people they’ve determined are oppressors are wrong to obstruct that comes from academia, I believe.
So you consider things like the call for all white males in academia to resign their positions to be “basically mainstream”.
@ghi:
Let’s play a game! You try to guess my response, and I’ll tell you if you’re right. If we all get good at this game we could save a lot of time!
Sorry, I have better things to do with my time then model every mind-killed idiot I find online.
But here’s my attempt: “I don’t actually have a response, that’s why I resorting to meta-replies”.
As one of those enthusiastic commentators If we keep strictly to “wears a mask and goes to marches” I would personally place a rough estimate of antifa at around middle-four-digits; same order of magnitude as white nationalists, possibly slightly larger in numbers, and with a larger proportion of antifa being willing to use violence (at the moment; this may well be changing rapidly in the wake of recent events).
I took a large part of Scott’s point to be that the issues with white nationalists have very little to do with their actual numbers and influence, and the same thing applies to antifa, if for different reasons. There is no grand media narrative about antifa having taken over the government and/or planning to engage in mass violence against their targets, even though they have engaged in more direct violence during recent protests (and I would suggest they have avoided a Charlottesville only through sheer luck; there’s only so many times you can take a bike lock to people’s heads before someone dies).
This is an apples-to-oranges comparison in the true sense; these movements are comparable, but they are sufficiently different to make the comparison a clear one. What is most notable to me is that only one of these groups has the tacit or outspoken approval of large parts of a culturally-dominant Tribe supporting their violent acts. I am not afraid of Nazis or Antifa; but I am deathly afraid of normal people who begin to form a self-righteous mob, and that’s been happening more and more as the pendulum continues to swing.
Does the lack of bike-lock-related deaths cause you to update your priors on either a) the deadly nature of bicycle lock attacks or b) the number of times a right-wing protester has taken a bike lock to the head?
Having reviewed the videos, it updates my priors on how many people go to these protests wearing bike helmets. Bike lock guy is usually hitting people’s shoulders because they’re wearing helmets.
Not a big force, but potentially important if they’re allowed to continue shutting down speakers and getting into brawls with nazis. Escalating violence forces non-members near the margins to join up for self defense, which makes the groups bigger, which means now there are more non-members near the margins, and they’re bigger which makes them more threatening, so people are even quicker to join up. This is literally how Hitler rose to power in Germany, I do not want antifa LARPing as 1930s German communists.
Like, the problem with antifa is not their size or importance at this moment, but that they’re getting away with illegal, immoral actions. Nazis are held to the law, and in some cases their rights violated by government. Nazis are denounced by both sides of the political spectrum. Antifa use violence against speakers they don’t like, so the bureaucrats give antifa exactly what they want by cancelling the speakers. Antifa were allowed to continue their counter-protests despite the state of emergency. The cops funneled the protesters towards the antifa-filled counter-protesters. Antifa get a lot of support and defense from the left.
I’m not worried about antifa getting into government power and passing antifa-friendly laws. I’m worried the establishment is going to continue to look the other way, and the antifa get increasingly bold, until the first amendment is effectively dead because of roving not-freedom-from-consequences gangs.
In one of the OTs a few months before the election I tried to steel-man Scott Aaronson’s doom-saying by trying to come up with a plausible path from “Trumpism” to totalitarian-fascism.
The scenario I came up with was that violence like we’d seen at San Jose and elsewhere would continue to escalate with the tactic approval of both law enforcement and the media. Sooner or later Trump’s supporters start organizing armed “self defense teams” to keep the anti-fa from disrupting rallies. To the shock of everyone Trump wins the election. Protestors take to the streets to smash windows and burn businesses only to be met by “the red hats” several people (on both sides) are killed in the ensuing violence. The media lionizes the fallen on the anti-trump side and lays the blame for squarely on trump’s shoulders meanwhile trump praises the red hats as fine people doing a job that the police were either too scared or too incompetent to do themselves. A plurality of Americans agree with him. Paramilitary organizations become a part of mainstream US politics, and it’s all downhill from there.
This scenario still seems possible, though on a government schedule (i.e. late, incomplete, and overbudget). Mostly seems to be the city of Berkeley doing the heavy lifting on the “approval of law enforcement” part, though they seem to have missed the “tacit” part of that with their “strategic withdrawal”.
Telling the police to stand down repeatedly in the face of predictable imminent violence is an invitation for the beatees to arm themselves for the next encounter. I hope nobody is going to act surprised when a shootout occurs in the near future. If the government isn’t going to enforce safety during a legitimate peaceful assembly then the outcome is predictable.
If the five on one antifa beat down shown in video yesterday took place in front of an armed protester somebody is going to get shot. The guy on the ground could probably claim self defense here.
that’s maybe two seconds of footage that ends with a black dude shouldering in to stop it. Maybe you meant to post the Deandre Harris video?
The problem with this argument is that if Hillary had one the same thing would have happened, only now the alt-left rioters are met with the approval of the media and the president.
I’m curious, what makes you think this?
The fact that these kinds of riots to drive out dissent have been going on since before the election.
Sounds like we’re all having the same nightmare!
May be old news, but the Sam[]zdat author pointed to another Last Psychiatrist Diasporan: https://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com .
Not bad. I guess this will do until the second coming.
if we are discussing ants then watch this video titled ‘how to raise an ant colony’. Its so cool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiD5Sx60CVA
From a utilitarian perspective, what’s worse, clinical depression or the despair that comes from hunger, disease and war?
Add Nabokov’s Bend Sinister to your list.
There’s also We, the Living, Ayn Rand’s first novel.
I’m not sure what exactly you mean by “Communism”, but C.J.Cherryh’s Cyteen might qualify. It’s science fiction, though, not historical fiction.
Dr. Zhivago
Gulag (an HBO original movie from 1985)
We The Living (1942!)
Bridge of Spies
Moscow on the Hudson
Does anyone know if ads served on SSC (and other small sites) are paid by total ads served or based on click-throughs?
I’m an avid ad-blocker, but would still like to make exceptions for smaller blogs and websites that I want to support. I have not and will not ever click through ads though (mostly due to growing up in the 90’s and never trusting any ad to not be malware). If for some reason I see something that I actually want to investigate purchasing, I will always just google it first to check reviews. If the site doesn’t get any money if I’m not clicking the ad, then I’d prefer to just leave the blocker on so I save on bandwidth and make the sites more aesthetically pleasing.
Thanks!
Scott has his advertising policies pretty clearly spelled out. In his case they are sold for a specific period of time (neither impressions nor clickthrus).
That said, if the link contains a referral marker (?ref=ssc or similar, as the sidebar ads do), clicking on the ad can influence whether or not a site will decide to continue running ads in the future.
Thanks for showing me that page. I hadn’t even realized that my adblocker wasn’t automatically removing them, so I guess there’s no harm in keeping them there.
I can say with pretty high confidence that my ads aren’t malware – I’ve talked to the people involved, I’ve looked at them myself, and they all seem pretty legit.
It’s hard to comprehend now, but during the years the Soviet Union was around, it was widely suspected some kind of communism was, in some sense, “the future.” Now, plenty of people objected to Leninism/Stalinism/Maoism, but there was an unconscious anxiety all throughout the West (even amongst fairly conservative people without communist sympathies) that our current state was transitional, that Marx and Engels really had figured something out, that change was inevitable even if we weren’t heading for a violent proletarian upheaval. On Star Trek they don’t come out and say “we’ve accepted communism” but it was apparent what that future was, post scarcity equality and not having to sell labour time for wages anymore, etc. Even Orwell, who you rightly put as one of the biggest critics of Actually Existing Communism, dreamed of a socialist future. It wasn’t until the Soviet Collapse (which simultaneously had the effect of making communists not scary in the same way anymore) that everyone firmly accepted that liberal capitalism really had been the “End of History” this whole time.
Nazism, on the other hand, was abhorrent to us shortly after it seized power, and was extinguished fairly quickly, with very few left suspecting it was still going to have any influence on the future
+1
To continue the conversation about shaving techniques and whether or not to use product on your skin (started whether Libertarians are irrationally anti-status quo biased, but this is obviously more interesting):
@AnonYEmous
@The Nybbler
Well, no I don’t shave dry. I use cold water and a Shavette (straigt razor with disposable blades). I apply the cold water on the area, just before the blade touches it and after some hairs are on the blade, I hold it under a stream of water, to get most of them off. Sometimes, I cut myself, but only when I’m unfocussed and I’ve been using the same blade for too long (used to be cheapness + lazyness +ignorance vs caution, but now it’s vs caution + experience, so I’m doing mostly fine on that these days). I think, I’ve ‘mastered’ that particular skill (not really that hard, might be different, if I was hairier). I haven’t tried dry shaving with that razor in a while. I remember it not working very well. With lots of focus, I could probably shave off each hair individually and not cut myself, but that just takes too long and is boring. I don’t like shaving in the shower with a Shavette, bcs. I’m not going to get all the hairs without looking in a mirror.
I also saw another, much hairier person get pretty harsh razor burn using warm water and my shavette (with a new blade). Not sure, if he maybe used too much pressure with it or some skin or hair types just can’t handle that. So mileages may vary with this, I guess.
If you find shaving irritating, I recommend the following:
Use a razor blade which has not gone dull. I found that the Mach-4 razor blades were worth it for me and would last a long time, but YMMV.
Apply a liberal base of cold-cream, like Noxzema, to skin that is thoroughly wet.
Put a gel-type shaving cream on top of this.
Shave with a wet razor, rinsing/re-wetting frequently.
You will thank me.
And remember to sharpen your razor on your pants before use!
Shavettes are probably better for the whole “not gone dull” part. Blades are significantly cheaper, which means it’s alot easier to just chuck it at the end of the week. I use a DE razor, but it amounts to the same thing (expensive handle, super cheap blades).
I am a double-edged razor evangelist. Look into them, buy a nice one, you will save so much money and your shaves will be fantastic.
I’m a hirsute guy and I went from avoiding shaving with my Gilette because I didn’t want razor burn to actively looking forward to shaving every day.
@episcience
I already find my shave pretty fantastic. With a blade costing abt. 50 cts, disposing the blade after three shaves and me shaving every 2-3 days, I’m at about 7ct per day in terms of cost. I’m not a hirsute guy, but having a 2 1/4 inch long blade at my disposal is really great even for me (I used to use a 2 inch blade for learning, but I would recommend skipping that step). I don’t think there is such a thing as a ‘upscale’ shavette. It’s just a flexible, but stiff enough handle, that you fix your blade on. Throwing money at it, wont make it in any way better. A shavette’s blade is sharper than a traditional straights blade, after honing, at least for the first use or so I’ve heard.
I got about two dozen cuts over a year or so, but none of them were visible for more than a day (always applied a razor pen and healing balm immediately). It was a learning experience (the lesson always being “Pay attention, you idiot!”). If I pay attention, I can move the blade very quickly. If I don’t, I can move the blade slowly and still cut myself. So, I learned, that I’m safer working quickly, as to not get bored, bcs. that’s dangerous. I never got razor burn, except for the first couple of times of using it and I almost never cut myself, anymore.
I looked into DE blades. They look pretty neat and are apparently easier to learn (and very safe).
Though with a shorter blade, I think a shave would take a bit longer. Also, I think the flexibility of the handle, my Shavette, gives me lots of freedom, with angles, that I would loose. I shall try DE, if my skin gets more sensible with age (I am only in my mid twenties, now) and isn’t so forgiving anymore.
Traditional straights seem rather silly to me. All this extra equipment that you need and the high price. Though, they definitely look the coolest…
How long is your DE’s blade? Do you ever wish you could ‘attack’ a hard to reach spot from an impossible angle? Can you target each hair individually, if you would want to?
I also use the length of the blade not necessarily for full skin contact, but to use different parts of the blade after each other, to ‘fill’ them with hair, so I can save some time, before I rinse the blade. If I were to buy a new shavette, I’d buy one with 2 1/2 inch blades (the longest one possible, I believe). I’m now thinking abt. measuring how many hand movements I make, timing each and trying to estimate, what the fastest possible, safe shave would be for me…
My last girlfriend actively preferred bearded-me, which saved me the bother of having to shave, which suits me since I am lazy, though for reasons alluded to above, I can’t afford to limit my future dating pool to pogonophiles only, and if I need to keep a smooth face in future, I am likely to go back to the lifehack of shaving under the shower.
No product needed, just running water, and I cut myself a lot less than shaving with foam in front of a mirror, though the disadvantage is you need to feel carefully for any missed spots, or I suppose carry a mini mirror into the shower.
Random media report. No spoilers:
The Good Place is a half-hour comedy (ie, about 22 minutes of non-commercial time) that aired on NBC last year. The first season (13 episodes) is available on Netflix streaming. The second season will start to air on traditional icky television on 9/20/2017. It stars Kristin Bell (Veronica Mars, Frozen) and Ted Danson (Cheers, lots of other things).
The plot is that a woman (Bell) is sent to Heaven (well, “The Good Place”), but she doesn’t actually deserve to be there. Hijinks ensue.
My wife and I binged it this weekend and enjoyed it. obSSC content: It includes moderately weighty-for-a-half-hour-comedy-on-network-TV content on morals, ethics, and the doctrine of hell. Not “weighty for an SSC comment,” just weighty for a half-hour-comedy-on-network-TV. But I thought it was funny and well acted and fairly inventive. And it has no costs beyond opportunity for those of you who are already subscribed to Netflix.
While we’re on the topic, I just finished watching Atypical on Netflix, a show about a high-functioning autistic teenager learning how to date, and various adventures of his family. Highly cringy (prompted my questions about cringe comedy in a previous OT) but well written and fairly sympathetic. Definitely considers autistic kids ingroup.
Would recommend.
I’m probably forgetting other programs, but this is the only show I’m looking forward to in the fall.
Also, I just started watching Good Place on my flight home this morning, and second the recommendation. Quite fun. Reminds me a lot of Better Off Ted, a favorite of mine–different content, naturally, but similar sensibility.
Correction, I have finished it and so should all of you.
Heh. 🙂
Thanks for the suggestion! We have just watched the first three episodes and are loving it!
Also recently binged “The Good Place” and liked it. I particularly noted that the character who was supposed to be a philosophy professor never said anything obviously stupid and wrong when talking about philosophy. He wasn’t amazingly insightful or anything, but avoiding being obviously stupid and wrong is much better than I expect from TV representations of my profession.
The seducer-provider divide
The main ideas of I and III are from a Jewish reactio.nary from Coalpha Brotherhood. I do not endorse his views especially his more radical ones. However this one deserves to be discussed.
I.Seducers and Providers
Both seduction and provision are male mating strategies.
A seducer is evolutionarily valuable due to the sexy son hypothesis. A male who is popular with other females is more likely to have sexy sons who are more likely to mate compared to other males. Hence a female should mate with popular males. Seducers don’t necessarily provide. Their key to success is in the number of progenies.
A provider is evolutionarily valuable because a child he and the mother provide for is more likely to survive compared to a child only the mother provides for. The key advantage of a provider is the percentage of offsprings who survive long enough that they can reproduce.
II.The Environment
When the environment is harsh and inequal hence the percentage of kids who survive long enough to reproduce themselves widely differs from person to person in the environment provision is very important. It is not the amount of kids that matter. Instead it is the amount of kids who survive and breed that matter. Hence cold and dry climates are good for providers.
On the other hand when the environment is equally harsh on everyone or equally nice on everyone hence the percentage of kids who survive long enough to reproduce does not vary a lot inside a population. When this happens it is the amount of kids people have that evolutionarily matter the most. Hot and wet climates are good for seducers.
Human cultures also constitute a part of our evolutionary environment. Arranged marriages and anti-adultery laws promote provision. On the other hand hook ups, eloping, adultery and sexual freedom in heterosexuality promote seduction.
III.Seduction and Societies
Pure seducers do not provide. Furthermore seducers tend to not respect others’ mating rights and as a result cause mating-related conflicts. Seduction also leads to de facto harems with a popular man mating with many women leaving many men without mates. These mateless men have few reasons to fight for a tribe but lots of reasons to subvert it. The seduction strategy is in essence antisocial.
Sexuality and fertility are negatively correlated. Hence sexiness and lack of intelligence are positively correlated. A society of seducers tend to be unstable, violent and unintelligent.
IV. The modern Western society and Seduction
The West used to be a provider culture which is why it was and still is great. However the modern Western society promotes seduction. Modern medicine and welfare significantly lowered the number of people who do not survive long enough to produce. Sexual freedom further made the Western culture pro-seduction As a result seduction has suddenly become the norm in the West which is filled with people genetically more suited to be providers.
V. Solution: Curbing Seduction without Female Submission
Seduction is harmful, hence it needs to be curbed. It can be achieved without the completely unrelated and stupid idea that women must obey men. Voluntary submission is just absurd and no one should voluntarily perpetually subject their will to the will of another person. Women should still be allowed to work and more importantly they should be encouraged to refuse to obey their family members.
>Voluntary submission is just absurd and no one should voluntarily perpetually subject their will to the will of another person. Women should still be allowed to work and more importantly they should be encouraged to refuse to obey their family members.
What does this have to do with the rest of your post? Also, that’s a lot of shoulds out of nowhere.
Well it was really late and I was about to sleep. The basic idea here is to support the anti-patriarchy idea of feminism without supporting sexual freedom. The idea that one person has to obey another forever is evil just like seduction.
Can we oppose adultery and freedom in choosing heterosexual partners while opposing female submission and supporting LGBT rights? Lesbian sex is unlikely to transmit STDs so it might be a good idea to encourage it.
Does it?
I don’t see anything particularly original or clever in this (quite the contrary, in fact: “The West used to be a provider culture which is why it was and still is great” really? That’s the reason?).
Leaving aside whether any of this is true, what purpose does it serve?
How are you going to deprogram women from liking “seducers” without implementing full-on Sharia law?
If you are having problems dating, you should realy deal with them on a personal basis rather than trying to restructure all of society.
I’m not even interested in dating. However the seduction problem needs to be fixed or it will seriously harm the society both socially and evolutionarily.
We don’t need Sharia or other systems promoting or enforcing the patriarchy. However we have to evolutionarily fix the seduction problem.
How?
Why? You keep insisting this is some sort of a HUGE crisis, but you don’t explain why.
I think we should discourage adultery without promoting the patriarchy.
I believe it is a huge crisis because the genotypical IQ in the West has been decreasing. When seducers win intelligence is phased out.
What if promoting the patriarchy is the only, or only feasible, way of discouraging adultery?
@The Original Mr.X We can’t have few adulteries without forcing wives to submit to their husbands other than merely not cheating on them? That sounds very odd.
A law punishing adultery defined as heterosexual sex with someone other than one’s spouse without consent of the spouse in a voluntary heterosexual monogamous marriage with one year of imprisonment will work.
Note that I intentionally permit any arbitrary homosexual sex for it has no evolutionary consequences, polyamory and sex orgies if one’s spouse consent to them. The purpose of this idea is to stop cheating. That’s it.
That’s easy. Ban marriage and do not provide for civil unions.
@A definite Beta guy
Well that will make the seduction problem even worse.
Contraception has already fixed ‘the seduction problem’.
The (rather mild) selection for lower intelligence that we see is not the same problem at all. It’s driven largely by the fact that highly educated people, especially women, have few children. Mate choices that we might disapprove of on eugenic grounds have very little role, unless we’re contrasting with a scenario where poor single mothers use sperm bank donors or something.
Citation needed. Is IQ actually decreasing? Woemen have been dating however they want rather freely since at least the 50s. I really don’t think the situation is so dire.
There are some moderately good theoretical reasons to believe that genes for IQ are being selected against, revolving around the fertility of various cohorts of society, their average IQ or other correlated test scores, and the fairly high heritability of IQ. On the flip side, however, we don’t see much evidence for this in the actual test scores; selection for lower IQ *should* have been going on for the past hundred and some odd years (in the US and UK) and instead we got the Flynn Effect.
As I already noted above, however, this does not have much to do with some provider/seducer dichotomy, but with different levels of fertility at different levels of education and intellect. The availability of contraception and abortion is already a fairly crushing blow to the evolutionary prospects of any ‘seducer’ cohort in some kind of evolutionary competition.
@Orpheus Please see this article.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2730791/Are-STUPID-Britons-people-IQ-decline.html
@HFA
Citing the daily mail isn’t going to inspire confidence in anybody familiar with that publication. If they’re reporting a real phenomenon, I recommend finding just about any other article covering it, or linking directly to the study they’re covering.
FWIW the article doesn’t seem nearly as bad as my preconceptions about the daily mail would lead me to expect, but it doesn’t seem to be supporting your claim very strongly. They’re not showing data that actually says IQ scores have dropped, they’re showing data that says visual reaction time has dropped, and positing that this means our genetic upper bounds on intelligence/brain function are decreasing even as environmental factors have helped IQ scores rise, and predicting that we’re close to the point where the trend will reverse.
See this article for some links to the data/studies I think they’re discussing.
(Yeah, HuffPo is not a paragon of clear, apolitical reporting, but it does have links here)
If you’re worried about seduction problems, changing the law and social norms so that it pays to get married and have lots of children, whether by implementing Sharia Law or by some other means, seems much more doable that “evolutionarily fixing the seduction problem”.
Sharia includes submission clauses. We need pro-provider policies without family obedience which is another dangerous idea.
Family obedience is another idea that hampers intellectualism. Of course the idea to force women to obey their husbands is very stupid. The idea that anyone has to obey their parents is even worse for at least half of the population is male and is hence not subject to the “wives must obey husbands” idiocy. It is a different disease from the seducer problem but it is still pathological. In the worst case it will lead to Confucianism-like scenarios when the oldest person or even a dead person is an authority people have to obey regardless of how stupid their ideas are.
Could you expand on that? Under Islamic law, the wife has to let her husband have intercourse with her unless there is some good reason not to, such as illness. The husband has a similar but weaker obligation to the wife–he has to have intercourse with her with reasonable frequency, scholars disagreeing about exactly what that means.
In what other important ways is the wife required to submit to the husband? The husband is required to maintain the wife at the level appropriate to her family status. I do not believe the wife has any legal obligation with regard to earning money, cooking, housework or the like. That part seems biased towards the wife.
The women in my in-laws family would all have been much, much, much better off it they simply outsourced their dating decisions to their father.
Their father not only did not ban them from working, he actually paid for them all get advanced degrees.
I don’t think you have a good handle on how social shaming of dating rituals might work in practice, and how it differs simply from “listen to what men say.”
I really don’t know. I personally believe that the very existence of dating or courtship is pro-seduction. Only letting the state or some other agency arrange marriages will solve that.
However the most important reason why I hate the patriarchy has nothing to do with women. It has something to do with freedom of males from their families.
I agree that “listen to what men say” is a good idea. However “listen to what fathers say” is a bad idea for the society because men may condone their daughters going for seducers. Daughters going for seducers is at least evolutionarily beneficial so men may turn a blind eye to their daughters dating or marrying seducers unless they are somehow discouraged from doing so. Instead the state or some other impersonal entity should arrange marriages.
I feel like you’ve been posting a lot of low-quality alt-right-ish stuff for a while now. While I’m not 100% against anything like that ever appearing on Open Threads, I’d like you to limit it a little more or take it to the Culture War thread on the subreddit or something.
Sure! I will. It is your site and I respect that. 🙂
Some more information about the problems the USN has been having:
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-navy/2017/08/27/navy-swos-a-culture-in-crisis/
Random question about global warming.
Everyone talks a lot about how to generate electric power, how much this contributes to global warming and other longer term environmental effects. This is great, and certainly very important.
What I’d like to know is how much vacuum trains matter. How far are we from actually building vacuum trains, at least for transcontinental bulk freight (non-passenger) transport? Is the technology still “always thirty years in the future” like fusion power? Or is it already so close that tomorrow some big company will invest a bazillion dollars into building a vacuum train line somewhere and expect that it will return profit in like five years? If we did have vacuum trains, clearly it would reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from transport, but how significant would this reduction be?
Given how efficient rail transport already is, my guess is the impact of this specific posit is “not very much”. If you were positing replacing truck transport with vacuum train transport, it would have more impact, but I don’t think that is anything like doable in the short term, as the number of routes which require replacing are too numerous.
I think the “big money” in mass transit is always around concentrated populations.
I Googled a bunch of things, and found that trains average about 2.6 MJ/passenger-mile and maglevs get about 0.4, so they use about 1/6th of the energy.
Although one source noted that they lose a lot of their luster in mountainous terrain, because they need more energy to brake and accelerate than a diesel engine.
Couldn’t find anything on how much further you could improve efficiency by running the maglev in a vacuum (or even if it would help, seeing as keeping the tunnel evacuated costs energy).
Something seems really fishy about that. A typical railroad’s rolling resistance coefficient is only ~.002, something like a third of a car’s value. A maglev gets rid of that (and I’ll assume for the sake of argument that it’s as efficient elsewhere in the drivetrain), but it still has to deal with air resistance. Normal trains are not notably streamlined, but you’re probably looking at no more than an order of magnitude reduction in drag coefficient, and possibly less because of the influence of skin friction on such a long vehicle. And the maglev is usually going a lot faster. I just can’t see how you’re going to see a factor of 6 difference in energy efficiency unless you’re running the maglev at the same speed as the normal train. And if the savings are that great, why don’t they do it more? Because revealed preference says it doesn’t work that well. Maybe they’re normalizing the total maglev numbers to the same speed, which could hide a lot of overhead.
Yeah, I’m not sure what’s going on there, I saw that same 0.4 MJ figure quoted everywhere so I thought it was accurate. Maybe all of them are taking that figure from some single source that’s not accurate?
Or maybe maglevs tend to be installed in situations that take advantage of their qualities, and if you tried to replace other rail networks or haul freight with them you wouldn’t get the same advantage?
As everyone says, existing trains are efficient. But they are slow. Slow is good enough for freight. Also, if your tracks have enough traffic to matter, you can power them off of the electric grid. The point of vacuum trains is not to save energy over regular trains, but to be much, much faster and compete with airplanes for people traveling medium distances. Airplanes use a lot of fuel.
Thank you all for the replies. This implies vacuum trains can be economically worth only if they can transport passengers.
Physics question (kinda):
Can you combine skydiving with a trebuchet? Meaning, launch some thrill seeker from a trebuchet into the sky and then let him use his parachute at the highest point to safely land?
My intuition is that the height might be sufficient, but the accelaration would kill him.
Sounds kinda fun, though….
Given that the world record for human cannonball distance is only about 200 ft linearly, and minimum parachute deployment is about 600ft vertically, I don’t think what you propose is possible.
It is if you are launching from a 400 foot cliff!
Well, a human cannonball has some special limitations. They have to accelerate in a particular way over a short distance, which doesn’t allow you to get very fast without injuring yourself. If you were to make a really big trebuchet, the arc along which you’re accelerating could get pretty long.
(Edit: for a normal-sized trebuchet e.g. this one there’s no way you could get enough height.)
600ft is the minimum for a conventional parachute. BASE jumpers often jump from much lower altitudes. I’m not sure a human-throwing trebuchet would work, but it’s not totally impossible.
TIL, that apparently the minimum height for a base jump is about 55ft.
Much lower than that you wouldn’t even need a chute.
Maybe skip the chute and just make the jump inside a steel coffin- I think it sort of worked for partisan insertion in WWII, and when it fails, you planned ahead. Airbags on the coffin for pussies.
Haha, as much as these guys are being sarcastic, it’s not that far off. The things to note though, is that for extremely low jumps people start with their parachute already deployed like this exceptionally dedicated fellow
It’s hard to give strict minimums for skydiving shenanigans because luck plays such a colossal role. So jumping like in the video above, someone might be able to theoretically go as low as 40 feet if everything worked out just perfectly, but you sure wouldn’t have any time to steer towards a good landing spot and flare.
The Sling Shot Ride claims it reaches speeds of 160kph. Assuming that speed happens at the top of the 60m tower a released rider would reach a height of 260m (850ft) – That’s enough for your cited minimum parachute deployment and well more than a BASE jumper would need.
There was recently a video of a guy BASE jumping after being launched from a big slingshot type thing. He was successful, but as you noted the acceleration is the kicker. Not dying from the accel itself isn’t even the big worry, it’s that even a momentary blackout might prevent you from orienting properly and deploying the chute. The other problem is making sure the catapult doesn’t launch you with an unrecoverable tumble rate.
Are you talking about this one?
No, this one.
Your link is slingshotting off a cliff that was already high enough to BASE. My link is a crane-sized slingshot from ground level.
So basically trebuchet<=cannon<abnormaly big trebuchet<sling-shot. Guess, I'll wait for some more leaps and bounds in sling-shot and parachute engineering (fully automatic and redundantly deploying parachutes) and it's subsequent commercialisation and hope this will come to a place near me, then.
Probably still too dangerous for Germany, but hey, that's what Poland is for.
Wow, I’m slow on the draw on this open thread.
So, there are a couple of groups who have made BASE slingshots, and to the best of my knowledge they’ve been working as intended. I’ve seen a couple way sketchier and lower budget versions than the one in thevideo that Gdub found (like, for example, this other rig also from youtube). The Quebecois rig that that I first saw doing this included a lot more duct tape and foam on their launch basket, so it looks like the tech is improving steadily.
I know that the main reason they’re not used more is that it takes a long time to get the passenger packaged just right so that their neck doesn’t snap during the acceleration (As well as being an insurance nightmare). Lots of padding and braces get the job done, but I can’t imagine it’s very comfortable. BASE openings can be a lot of shock at the best of times (depending on deployment delay.)
So for a trebuchet specifically, while I’ve never seen it done, it’s probably possible unless a trebuchet is that much weaker than a giant slingshot.
Well, I’ve already been wrong once here, but …
I imagine some of the problem with any trebuchet that is powerful enough to reach the required velocity at launch is going to be the fact that the acceleration is neither constantly linear in vector nor as consistent in terms of raw numbers as a slingshot. That should mean that the maximum acceleration undergone in the trebuchet is likely to be much higher, and therefore more dangerous.
Accounts Receivable Background Part 4
So far, I have discussed Accounts Receivable from a largely process viewpoint. For a typical A/R Accountant or A/R clerk, the process dictates daily workflow. By this I mean that every A/R accountant is largely concerned with simply going through their work in a “If A, then B” manner. There’s some space for independent judgement, but not a whole lot, and rarely do staff members look at the “10,000 foot” view.
In this section, I’ll describe some of the ways management look at A/R, with two major focuses: Reserve metrics and Fraud.
I’ll begin with Reserves, because any discussion of Fraud will require knowledge of Reserves. Unfortunately, there are some rules that I do not fully understand, and this is a bit above my paygrade at the highest levels. It also does not help that general accounting rules and the IRS do NOT agree on the correct treatment of reserves. Also, international standards do not agree with US standards.
That aside…
A/R does not expect to collect on all the money we are owed. Despite our best efforts, some businesses simply do not pay their debts, whether due to inability or unwillingness. After a certain period of time, A/R will write off these past due amounts. These past due amounts are referred to as Bad Debt.*
However, Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) requires companies to forecast credit losses at the moment of sale**, and expense at the moment of sale. In Accounting, this follows from the “matching principle,” which means that all expenses need to be categorized in the same period as the revenues they earned. Basically, if Rearden Steel sells $100,000 in steel in August, it would have to record ALL expenses associated with that $100,000, to the greatest extent possible: this includes any Bad Debt Expense incurred during this period.
Therefore, A/R will create a “general reserve,” based on prior experiences with companies and overall collection rates. If, historically, Rearden Steel writes off 1% of all revenue, it will create a Bad Debt Expense of 1% of all revenue whenever it makes a sale.
In accounting terms, the General Reserve looks like this:
Bad Debt Expense $1,000 Allowance for Bad Debt $1,000
The Bad Debt Expense will be closed out at the end of the month, meaning it will be taken as a loss against income. The Allowance for Bad Debt, while a credit account, will be reported on the asset side of the balance sheet, as a contra-asset. So the balance sheet will read:
Accounts Receivable $100,000
Allowance for Bad Debt $(1,000)
Note: Financial statements will use the term “allowance,” even though internally we use the term “reserve.” “Allowance” is most accurate. We are not setting aside specific dollars for these losses, so we aren’t actually “reserving” anything.
Setting the General Reserve rate is not generally done by A/R accountants, and I have no familiarity with the process. I would think that this is typically set at Director or VP level, in conjunction with Internal Audit, and possibly even C-Suite level since it can affect income.
Note: While GAAP allows setting a reserve based on prior experience, recent international standards have prohibited this practice. International standards now require an “impairment review” to be performed, customer by customer. US accountants are trying to harmonize GAAP with international standards, so this may change in the US in the future.
This is the part where I get fuzzy, as its generally above my viewpoint:
Specific reserves are set for accounts when they become “doubtful.” It is my guess that most companies actually set specific reserves and do not fully reserve at the moment of sale. I base this off reading several 10-Ks of major companies, that all describe Allowance for Bad Debt set up as a percentage sales past due a certain amount. My prior company’s 10-K specifically states that they used specifically identified receivables, which we would only be able to identify after the balances are already substantially past due.
There is nothing stopping a company from a using blended rate of specific reserves and general reserves to arrive at a single unified allowance rate.
Anyways, “Doubtful” is a specific accounting term meaning A/R no longer has 100% confident the debt will be paid. Once a charge become doubtful, A/R is required to set a specific reserve it, usually on a percentage basis. So, if Rearden Steel sold $300,000 of metal to Union Pacific last year, and only expects to collect $150,000, Rearden Steel will set a $150,000 reserve.
The accounting transaction would then be the same as the above:
Bad Debt Expense $150,000 Allowance for Bad Debt $150,000
The allowance would then be reported as a contra-asset on the balance sheet, reducing the company receivable.
Specific reserves are set by A/R accountants in conjunction with A/R managers. These are usually reviewed at the Director and VP level on a monthly or quarterly basis for approval.
Reserves are always a judgement call. It’s tough to know exactly what a company will receive for payment, and always tough to judge a reserve amount. We are supposed to set reserves conservatively, but management will often revise reserves to reflect a less aggressive target.
Bad Debt Expense, being an expense account, is then closed at the end of the month, and taken directly against income. Note that this means that we are taking the loss before actually writing anything off.
Write-Offs typically occur when A/R no longer believes an account is collectible. This does not eliminate the customer’s legal requirement to pay, so further collections efforts may be attempted, but from an accounting perspective the receivable is lost. The accounting transaction is typically handled as follows:
Allowance for Bad Debt $150,000 Accounts Receivable $150,000
Again, you can see that this would not actually hit our income statement. When A/R writes something off, it will be taken against the previously established Reserve, which has already been expensed. To our investors, the asset position of the income position of the company should be unchanged, as long as we are properly reserved.
The tax treatment, however, is entirely different. IRS does NOT recognize bad debt expense based off reserve rates. So, if Rearden Steel set a $150,000 reserve last quarter, the IRS would not recognize this as a valid expense. Income would be taxed at the full receivable rate.
The IRS only allows deductions for bad debt based on specific charges. So, from an IRS perspective, the actual relevant loss occurs not when A/R sets a reserve, but when A/R writes off the charge. From a Wall Street perspective, the relevant loss occurs when A/R sets a reserve, not when A/R writes off the charge.
Fun contradiction, huh?
A/R management will be judged off the following metrics:
-Receivable
-Reserve
-Write Off
Obviously, increases in all these are bad, and decreases in all these are good. And of these, the write off number is obviously the most important, as it represents the actual final expense to the company: those are the charges on which we have simply given up. We can always reduce the reserve if we think we are over-reserved and reclaim those dollars, but a written off amount is a permanent loss.
Reserves are typically judged as a % of outstanding receivable, on a comparison to prior reserves. For instance, if reserves are not increasing, but receivable has doubled, upper management will hound A/R until they get a reason why A/R is not reserving for the increased receivable. Similarly, if receivables have declined, but reserves have not, upper management may override prior reserve decisions and lower the reserve.
Receivables will be judged as a % of sales. At my current position, an unhealthy account is anything that has receivable over 1.5% of sales and will receive extra attention. Upper management may hound A/R to collect the account.
That’s all for now. If anyone sees anything that think is incorrect, you can let me know. I am not really an expert at this level.
*Accounts Receivable is debt because it is trade credit extended to another company. The revenue is already booked, and the sale made.
**This is referred to as a “Day One Provision.”
I have nothing intelligent to contribute, but I did enjoy the view into some of the complexity of accounting.
Thank you for sharing!
What happens when a company with a long-standing account which has accrued an allowance for bad debt pays off all its debts in full? (In a way that’s obvious it won’t be making any further purchases – it’s going out of business, or had a one-time need that’s been fulfilled)
Not that I have any inclination to start a conversation on this topic, but I’m surprised how little the past Open Threads talked about the Trump-Russia thing, even during the “highlights”. Is there just not much to say, pending Mueller’s findings? Is the Open Thread community on the same page in one direction?
There was a good deal of talk about it back in February as I recall but at this point yes, it’s pretty much “pending Mueller’s findings”.
Recall how long the Nixon investigation took.
I’ve been seeing claims that Houston’s lack of zoning contributed to flooding. I’m wondering whether other cities in Texas which have zoning are doing a better job of flood mitigation.
People like to compare to the Netherlands, but in fairness I don’t think the Netherlands have to deal with storms of the kind Texas/Louisiana do.
I haven’t seen talk about the Netherlands, what I’ve seen is claims that there were a lot of surface put in which was impervious to water, and it would have been better to put in bricks with gaps between them instead of asphalt and concrete.
There’s a premise that if there’s regulation, it will be sensible regulation, and I’d like to check on that.
Concrete + storm drainage systems is standard in Houston as well as cities with much stricter zoning laws. And for 99.999% of scenarios, such a system is what’s best in urban environments. I don’t think any alternate system would have fared any better under Harvey; concrete or no, the ground is surely completely waterlogged by now.
All other cities in Texas are either much smaller or much further from the coast. I’m not sure this question is going to get you good answers.
Galveston has zoning, and it floods every time a hurricane hits it. New Orleans isn’t in Texas but it has zoning and it flooded real good when Katrina hit it. All the Jersey Shore towns flooded by Sandy have zoning, as did the East Coast cities flooded by Floyd and Irene (both mostly rain events, like Harvey but unlike Sandy or Katrina).
The claim that lack of zoning was a significant contributor to flooding is rather extraordinary. Harvey set a record for rainfall; every OTHER city (with zoning) hit by similar rainfall has flooded badly.
Never mind that the two articles I’ve looked at mix zoning with other things and contradict each other. The Post article mixes building codes (how you build) with zoning (where you build). The Spokesman-Review complains about “pave over natural areas that provide resilience to floods”, where as the Post points out that Houston’s soil is quite impermeable in the first place.
The best claim is that if you had zoning which didn’t allow people to build in flood-prone areas, you wouldn’t have these problems. True… but no real city subject to significant flooding has such rules, because they’d prevent building in huge parts of the city. And that’s not the traditional use of zoning anyway; it’s to separate areas of industrial, commercial, and various densities of residential use from one another.
You don’t need zoning to get people not to build in flood-prone areas, you just need to let the natural incentives work on builders, buyers, lenders, and so on. When we hide those natural incentives we get overbuilding in flood prone areas. Which not only makes things more expensive but means more people living in those areas and so greater tragedy when something like this happens.
Edit: does this discussion violate the 3 day rule? Not sure when the clock started.
Not sure what argument you’re making, here. I suspect that if you let people do whatever they want with only the limits of libertarian ‘natural incentives’ to constrain them, you end up with flood prone areas settled by people with high time preference, living in relatively shoddy buildings (as banks will not lend to them). Which may be a great use of the land in some economic sense but certainly doesn’t lead to great outcomes when the flood does come. This touches on the broader question of whether the state should act to constrain people with high time preference and provide incentives for them to practice more of the bourgeois virtues, or whether we should just accept the outcomes of high time preference as part of the human condition.
I don’t think you get much density in these areas that have land that effectively can’t be borrowed against. So the outcomes when the flood does come may well be significantly better as compared to the status quo. Maybe worse for the people caught up in it, but far fewer people impacted.
Third-world shanty towns would argue otherwise, and places near major labor markets but “off limits” to legal and/or high-value development are likely to be seen as ideal sites for shanty town construction.
And subsequent destruction, by fire and flood and other disaster, is a common end state for shanty towns. This may not constitute a market failure, depending on the values and circumstances of the residents, but it ought to be accounted for in your analysis.
To amplify John Schilling’s point, Kowloon Walled City.
50,000 residents on 6.4 acres.
Third world shanty towns are generally built without respecting any sort of property rights regime. I’m not suggesting abolishing all government and enacting anarcho-capitalism, I’m suggesting eliminating NFIP and committing not to pay for rebuilding after floods.
And I would expect major labor markets to migrate away from flood zones too, as businesses also wouldn’t be able to rely on the federal government picking up the tab.
I don’t think this is politically feasible, and likely would be generally viewed as a violation of the compact between government and citizenry.
You have to mitigate these problems before the disaster. Not “blame” people for doing the permitted thing after.
It’s one thing to depend on the market to solve things that happen all the time and everywhere. It’s another to expect that problems in Houston will cause the kind of mass re-migration in coastal areas that is required to prevent the next Houston “somewhere”.
I don’t believe flood insurance was available before NFIP? And yet we still had large scale losses due to flooding. NFIP was intended as a carrot to push local governments to adopt some sort of management of their floodplains.
I don’t understand why there is a compact between the government and its citizens to rebuild your house if a hurricane destroys it but there’s no such compact to rebuild your house if a fire burns it down.
A hurricane on the gulf coast of Texas isn’t some black swan that no one could have foreseen. In the next hundred years there will be bad hurricanes that hit the gulf coast, various parts of Florida, the outer banks, NYC, and so on. These are well known risks that can and should be insured against using the private insurance system. There’s no market failure here. The only “problem” is people would rather have someone else pay their costs for them.
Generally I agree that people should not expect to be recompensated for obvious risks, but in terms of that comparison consider that floods may be predictable, but they are not easily started by oneself for fraudulent purposes.
@Brad:
The difference is not between flooding and burning, but scale.
When one house burns down or gets flooded, what you say applies.
When tens of thousands do, it’s a completely different story.
We could try and explore exactly why these are different, but I hope you would accept as a “fact on the ground” that it is simply true of human nature and virtually impossible to deny.
@HeelBearCub
I wonder if that was true before television. I think the “fact on the ground” you are talking about might well be the visual images causing all logic and reason to go out the window.
Anyway, if we can’t precommit to not treating uninsured people as if they were insured because of pictures of homeless kids on tv, then the obvious solution is to mandate insurance before hand. And not NFIB insurance policies we have now, but real underwritten policies.
The ACA had a similar underlying logic of mandating health insurance in part due to the practical impossibility of turning people away from emergency rooms.
@Brad:
Yes, it was this way before television as well. But I think you may be on to something.
A few books come to mind. The first is “The Johnstown Flood” by David McCullough. Mostly this treats the precursors to, and the actual flood itself, but it also recounts some of the national outpouring of aid, including federal governmental aid, in the aftermath. I believe you will see this is a pattern when examine most disasters, whether it is the terrible western wildfires during Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency, the San Francisco fire, the Halifax Explosion, the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, etc.
The second book that instantly came to mind was “Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded” by Simon Winchester. This explosion was, IIRC, the first major world event after the undersea trans-pacific telegraph cable was laid. Thus it was the first far-away tragedy which could be reported in near real time, and it became an overnight obsession in London as a result.
I would say that the closer in time that unaffected people can hear about a great tragedy, the more likely they are to help. Fast communication in general, and telecommunications especially, make societal response to tragedy more likely.
I think this may be related to why you don’t get insurance for large asteroid impacts. If that actually happened the insurance company couldn’t pay all the claims off. If you are a local insurance company in Houston you are going bankrupt on flood claims tomorrow, otherwise you would have to have enough money to pay off all claims at once. The total value of the house for every house you have insured.
100,000 houses don’t burn down on the same night, but they might get flooded in a natural disaster.
That might be it, then again maybe not.
@tscharf:
As I mentioned upthread, I don’t believe flood insurance was available from any insurers at all until NFIP was instituted, and I think it is for precisely the reason you outlined.
The risk of an insurer being wiped out by a large regional disaster is a known thing; this is what reinsurance addresses.
(An asteroid impact would probably wipe them out anyway. Literally.)
You are also suggesting that this will result in the flood plains being left empty as they are unprofitable to develop without NFIP, etc. If the land cannot be profitably developed, then any property rights to that land are of negligible value. So go ahead and postulate the strongest possible property rights regime; the sort of people who build shanty towns in places with no property rights, will instead offer $50/acre or whatever to the current owners and build a shanty town with property rights. And the current owners will sell for pennies on the dollar, because you are postulating there is nothing else they can profitably do with the land.
Houston isn’t a major labor market because somebody said, “hey, wouldn’t it be neat to build a whole lot of expensive industry on an easily-flooded swamp?” Houston is a major labor market because it is a major sea and river port convenient to, initially, a bunch of prime agrictultural land and, lately, even more oil. That geography isn’t going anywhere. The infrastructure that has been built up over the past century and a half to exploit that geography, isn’t going anywhere. Houston’s industrial base and associated labor market, isn’t going anywhere.
It will be protected from flooding by whatever means its owners and their associated government deem necessary, and if that means private dikes and expensive insurance, so be it. If, in addition to this expensively protected industrial base, there is adjacent land that is defined as cheap and useless because we are resolved to point and laugh when anyone who builds there suffers and dies (see HBC regarding the political implausibility of that), then a whole lot of desperate poor people hoping to improve their lot by working in Houston’s industries are going to take their chances and build there, hoping to better their circumstances and move up and out before they lose everything to the next flood.
So, the Greater Houston Shanty Town. Or some more profitable and durable sort of industrial, commercial, or residential development. Take your pick, but leaving the land idle isn’t on the table unless you’ve got men with guns tasked with shooting anyone who sets up a shanty there.
There’s a reason insurers have insurers. And probably them as well.
The difference between using commercial reinsurance and a federal flood insurance program might be semantics. I suppose with reinsurance the people who aren’t prone to floods won’t be paying for it.
@tscharf (@2:17 pm this is going fast)
As Paul Brinkley says, concentrated risk is a well known problem that the contemporary insurance industry is capable of dealing with. And the size of the Harvey claims, while certainly large, are also within the capacity of the system.
Again, these hurricanes are not extremely low probability, extremely high cost events that the insurance model somehow doesn’t work for — like an asteroid strike or the Yellowstone super volcano going off. Something like that wouldn’t just be too large for the insurance industry it’d also be too large for the USG.
The private insurance industry could handle these hurricanes. The “issue” is that some of the premiums would be very high, and the people that would be responsible for paying those very high premiums would rather not pay them. That’s it. That’s all that’s going on here.
Right, it’s pretty hard to argue against that people should pay for the risks they take and people who live in flood plains should assume that risk. It’s OK to share that risk with other flood plains but sharing it with people who don’t live in a flood plain is a bit bizarre.
And you can build a house that is flood proof by just jacking it up in most places in Houston. Building codes. Their local property taxes can account for the increased risk to publicly funded infrastructure.
They should be allowed to live there though, if they want to take on the risk and understand the risk.
I don’t think that was a significant part of the reason from the standpoint of the people who designed it–emergency rooms are a very small fraction of medical costs–although it might have been part of the rhetoric.
The ACA created adverse selection, since insurance companies were forbidden from basing prices on information about purchasers, aside from a limited ability to base it on age. If customers are free to decide whether to buy, the ones who are being charged much more than the actuarial value of their policies–young and healthy–drop out. That drives up the cost, which drives up the price, which pushes out more of the good risks. You end up with system at which you can only buy insurance at a bad risk price–the classic “Market for Lemons” problem.
The ACA attempted to solve that problem by forbidding the buyers as well as the sellers from basing their decision on information about how much the customer was likely to collect–requiring everyone to buy. I gather it didn’t do a very good job of it, because the penalties were not high enough. Also, I don’t think it prevented adverse selection on what sort of policy you bought. But that was the motivation, from the standpoint of the economists designing the system, all of whom would have been familiar with adverse selection.
The big issue being federal flood insurance. Though an event as big as this one messes even that up; most of the flooded areas weren’t considered flood prone.
Not just federal flood insurance but the well nigh inevitable disaster relief whereby it acts as if flooded properties were insured despite no premiums ever being paid. It’s something like the equivalent of the Greenspan put for real estate.
Because if there’s one paper we can trust to know about flood control, it’s a medium-sized paper from a city with 16.5″ of precipitation (a large fraction snow) a year, very different geography/geology and really bad flood control. Seriously, I’ve seen what what I would classify as a medium thunderstorm turn every road in Spokane into a river 4-6″ deep for half an hour or so. Of course, I’ve only seen the one, so it’s not not the end of the world that this happens, but I’ll still take my advice on flood control from elsewhere.
There’s a twitter thread going around (Storified here for convenience) that has some things to say about this. The most interesting part:
Thank God we can find a way to put a partisan spin on this issue. For a second, I was worried that we might be united in concern for the people stuck in a flood zone.
I think it’s a mistake to say “lack of zoning” is responsible or contributory.
If you posit both the existence of zoning, a particular set of zones, and a particular set of construction requirement, you can design a Houston that would have been more resilient to Harvey. But merely saying “zoning” is not a magic bullet, as I can also posit a particular set of zone regulations that increase the devastation of Harvey.
I think people saying “zoning” are really pointing at the idea that either: we incentivize, in various ways, proactive and preventive action to mitigate future disasters (everywhere) at some cost, or we will pay for the (unmitigated) disasters when they eventually and inevitably occur.
Still, some of these are in the mode of type-1 vs. type-2 mistakes. The raising of disaster preparedness has other costs. For instance, we could encourage or require more density on higher ground. Many people who want aggressive zoning rules want those rules to prevent dense development, as it changes the character of existing neighborhoods.
Houston has land use regulation akin to zoning ordinances – there are maximum density requirements, parking minimums, etc. But it doesn’t have zones. Development is either allowed or disallowed, anywhere in the city. You can’t plop the Equitable Building in the middle of a residential subdivision (or anywhere else for that matter), but a Dairy Queen is just fine. This gets rounded off to “Houston has no zoning” in the popular discourse, which doesn’t really explain the situation. (At least, this is just how an ignorant Yankee who’s never been there understands things. Any Houstonians here, correct me if I’m wrong.)
In any event I don’t think zoning policy has that much to do with the flood.
Is there any major city that doesn’t have density regulations (beside NY, I guess)?
Pretty sure even NY has density regulations. See: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/04/regulatory-arbitrage-deal-of-the-year.html
Basically, a building straddled two zones, and one zone was technically overbuilt. So…there’s definitely a FAR limit in New York.
You can generally purchased additional FAR, IIRC. That’s how it works in Chicago. The money is then used to
buy votersinvest in underdeveloped communities.I think the best you can do anywhere in NYC as of right with bonuses (e.g. for including a public plaza) but without transferred air rights is a FAR of 18.
In terms of built FAR, the Equitable Building mentioned above, built before the zoning law was put in place, has a FAR of 30. That may be the highest in the city. It’s more than the Empire State Building (25) and and One World Trade (26).
This comes from over on the sub-reddit and all I can say is “Holy Put A Bit Of Butter On The Spuds, Batman!”
Because this study is contradicting all the dieting advice, including that by medical professionals, that I have ever received:
That part about saturated fats has knocked me down with a feather. Lashing the full-fat butter on the spuds? Full-fat cheese? Creamy desserts? Not alone will it not carry you off with a stroke, it has a negative association!
Now granted, by reducing carbohydrates they do mean “less sugar and starchy foods” like bread, pastries, potatoes (sigh). And granted, this does not mean go out and stuff yourself like a turkey being fattened for Christmas on all the fat-laden goodies. And yes, we should be upping our intake of vegetables way more than we consume as our normal diets.
But by jings, this is not the “cut out dairy, cut out everything full-fat, use olive oil sparingly” advice I’ve been hearing.
So the next time you’re pouring double cream on your fruit salad, you can say with a clear conscience “I am doing this for the sake of my health” 🙂
They also published a paper from that study regarding the vegetables. (I don’t have the Lancet link, but this article summarized it.)
(bold is mine)
Well, by damn. We should all go back to our grandparents’ diets so, because I have seen the recommendations that hey, we have now decided you should be eating seven or more portions of veggies a day. (Look, if I’m eating that many vegetables, I may as well just call myself a cow and turn out to graze in the field).
Back to the days of “everything in moderation”, “a little of what you fancy does you good”, and real butter on your bread 🙂
Yes! Fuzzy Pink Niven’s Law- ‘Never waste calories’; never eat soggy potato chips or crappy ice cream, but if the pleasure is worth it, it’s worth it. Take what you want and pay for it, says God.
Well, keeping in mind that we should never use one study as definitive proof or even strong indication of anything, I don’t think it’s all that surprising relative to what we already know. The saturated fat bit is probably the most surprising part.
Evidence has been developing for a while that calorie-for-calorie, carbohydrates seem to lead to negative health outcomes, so that part isn’t at all surprising. As for fat, I believe evidence has been building that calorie-for-calorie, fat isn’t particularly unhealthy compared to the other macronutrients – it’s just that the calorie-per-gram density of fat is more than double that of carbohydrates or protein, so eating a lot of fat implies eating a lot of calories, all else being equal, and eating a lot of calories without also exercising a lot means increase in body fat. I think recent nutritional science supports the notion that having a high proportion of fat in your diet isn’t particularly unhealthy as long as your caloric intake is just as low as if you weren’t eating a lot of fat.
In general, I really hate the idea of labeling certain foods healthy or unhealthy – with few exceptions, the dose makes the poison. Like, you could be quite healthy with a diet could be primarily made up of butter, cheese, and creamy desserts, as long as you limited your daily caloric intake to something matching your size/age/gender/activity level. It may be difficult to do so because the high calorie density of fatty foods means you have to lower the total mass of the food you eat, but if you could do it, the results wouldn’t be all that bad.
My guess is this is part of why nutrition advice is always flip-flopping: it seems that experts assume people are either going to ignore or only halfheartedly follow any advice, so the advice gets exaggerated. “SALT WILL KILL YOU” gets a few people to eat less salt, whereas “watch your salt consumption” gets nothing. Then later on somebody notices, “wait, salt’s really not that bad.”
My cardiologist says I should walk for at least thirty minutes a day. Checking online material, the usual advice is 150 minutes a week. I suspect the same pattern.
He gave me a copy of a journal article of which he had been one of the (many) coauthors. It found that people who started out healthy were less likely to have heart attacks, as were people who self-reported as getting more exercise.
I will restrain myself from telling him that it reads like something written by people who wanted an article on their vita, not people who wanted to generate useful information.
It will be surprising for people not paying close attention, as we have been told that fat is not only bad for losing weight, but also bad for your heart, for some time, with quiet walkbacks such that people still buy egg-white omelettes as the “heart healthy” option.
IDK about that particular study’s quality or conclusions, but the idea that low carb high fat diets can be healthy is not new or novel, just not widely accepted or practiced.
I had been struggling to lose (or even stop gaining) weight for several years, and am doing much better on a very low carb ketogenic diet. The more I read about macronutrient metabolism, the more sense it makes to me, but bodies are complicated and I am ignorant enough that it could all be just-so stories. Nevertheless, my blood work was good before and is still good now.
A random question to those who are better than me in optics and/or ophtalmology, that has been bothering me ever since the last eclipse: so, we all know that staring at the sun will hurt your retina unless you use protective devices. But, let’s say, I am standing my apartment’s balcony and staring at something that goes on in the house next to mine, while the sun is in my general field of vision (so it stays in the same spot in my eyesight for a while), not in the center, but somewhere on the side. Am I burning out pieces of my retina that are less noticeable, because they are not in the center of my field of vision, or is that sort of exposure ok?
I don’t know for sure, but my general belief is that “if the sun is doing your eyes any noticeable harm, it will be uncomfortable.” Like, if it seems bright-but-not-uncomfortable, you’re fine. If you feel a strong desire to shade out the sun with your hands or look away, but you override it those desires and instead keep looking, you might be doing yourself harm.
I also don’t know for sure, but I would highlight two things that may be relevant.
1) Focal plane. If I’m looking at something nearby, my eye is not specifically trying to focus the sun’s rays onto the retina, so the effective dose of sunlight is much lower. Like how a 1W laser is a lot more dangerous than a 1W LED.
2) The further from the center of my field of vision the sun is, the less of its light actually makes it into my eye per unit area of eye surface even though its angular size in the focused image is the same. Think in a ray optics diagram of having incoming parallel rays striking a surface oriented at different angles.
It’s possible the effect is still damaging to the eye anyway, even at the lower intensity, though.
I’m not so sure about point 1. Beyond a certain distance (I couldn’t find much about what distance this is, except it apparently varies depending on both ambient lighting and pupil size) you might as well be focused on the sun (or some other point in the sky behind the subject) anyway.
Does anyone else visualize a good post-singularity outcome as sort of like a video game, where we know there are better and better levels of existence, and we need to solve fun challenges the AI designs to “level up”?
That description makes me think of the video game The Witness (haven’t beat it, but it involves lots of puzzles and vaguely transhumanist philosophy). It also reminds me of that passage in Paradise Lost where Adam and Raphael discuss God’s prelapsarian plan for mankind to gradually rise in wisdom and grandeur (I could be misremembering that). Or the basic scheme of reincarnation — gradually level up from an animal to a Brahmin and beyond? In other words, I think what you’re describing may be what a lot of people already think is the nature of life.
What, does “leveling up” mean in this case? If it’s something an AI can help with, I imagine an increase in knowledge and power? Are these levels of existence differences in physical nature or in perception? If it means something more like attaining Nirvana or another spiritual insight, I’m not sure how an AI could help.
Leveling up would mean gaining more knowledge and insight, and the ability to have deeper subjective experiences than were possible in the previous level.
Psychology question: As we know, some people have mental imagery, some don’t and we can measure how much mental imagery each person has by asking them questions. Have equivalent studies ever been done for the other senses? Do some people have much better mental olfaction or gustation (gustitation?) or hearing (audition?) than others?
Personally, I’m very bad at imagining tastes and smells, much more so than images, with sounds and tactile sensations somewhere in the middle (actually, very different for different kinds of tactile sensations).
Obligatory nod to Trump discussion up-thread: I’ve decided for now to pretend though Trump is faithfully carrying out his oath of office. He swore to execute the office of the president, and is striving to ensure it is very, very dead. He’s not too good with his vocabulary words.
I suspect that the ability to imagine what a dish will taste like with more or less of some spice is part of what makes someone a good cook.
My wife has that. I don’t. I’m better at the science of cooking and some of the technical skills, and I do come up with good dish ideas, but I rely on her to get the flavors and proportions right. At our wedding my brother-in-law called us “the seasoning” and “the reasoning,” respectively. And yes, that’s part of why I asked the question 🙂
I’m passing along a request from the subreddit
The Slavic languages also seems like good candidates. The way my granddad used Злорадствo (gloat) seems to have shades of this, something akin to “I told you so”.