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I’m in an argument about whether entropy is a part of the Fall with a couple of Christians.
I believe entropy is part of the nature of matter, but I haven’t been able to argue that convincingly. I’ve tried, and been told it was deep, which I take to mean I was totally and depressingly not comprehended. The people I’m talking with don’t seem to have a background in science.
Any good explanations of entropy for people who aren’t into science?
Any sources for Catholic theology and/vs. science?
What value do you see in that discussion?
Or I guess another way I might approach it is, why not go to the source material first? Seems like the Christians you’re arguing with should be making a defense based on a linguistic analysis of the relevant parts of the Bible. (I’m assuming by “the Fall” you mean when Eve ate from the tree of knowledge?)
I want people to have an accurate understanding of entropy.
You’re right about what’s being meant by the Fall.
If your goal is to impart an accurate understanding of entropy, decouple it from the other thing they are strongly attached to. If this is a discussion you’re having with strangers on the internet, you probably can’t do this, since the conflation of the two topics is probably the sole reason you are interacting.
You’re in a tough position that might be worth giving up on.
The relevant physical laws and properties are largely symmetric with respect to time. So, speaking very roughly, if one could take a system with increasing entropy and reverse “everything” (point the material particles and photons in the opposite directions) it would evolve as if you had reversed time, and therefore to have decreasing entropy.
Quantum uncertainty complicates this picture, but not necessarily in a way that is useful. Black holes also complicate anything having to do with physical laws, including the potential for “reversing”, and have a complex theoretical relationship with entropy.
So in theory, even a non-interventionist God could set up initial conditions such that entropy would decrease, and at least in that narrow sense entropy is not “part of the nature of matter.” Arguing beyond this basic picture (which is certainly done) gets one into the weeds pretty quickly.
Back before their priest set them straight, physicists liked the Steady State theory wherein matter was being continuously created, mostly because this allowed us to escape entropy and the universe to be infinitely old.
I’m not sure entirely what you mean by entropy being “part pf the nature of matter,” but that feels like a middle ground.
Oh that’s a good question! Completely off the top of my head, I think the standard traditional (as in “way back during the SCIENTIST-BURNING DARK AGE MILLENNIUM”) view was that since death was the result of sin, then the accompanying corruption, aging, etc. was also introduced as part of the Fall, and that an unfallen world would not be the same (see Tolkien’s Valinor, though he also complicates things by having Death be not a curse or punishment, but the Gift of Iluvatar).
I would have to go chase up some Augustine and Aquinas to check the standard view, but “is entropy a natural part of the universe as created, or only came in with the Fall?” is a really good question (also, don’t forget: the first Fall was the Fall of the Rebel Angels, so going the Tolkien route again, the corruption of matter started with Melkor/Lucifer). As against that, there is the teaching that the world/universe will have a definite end (entire Book of Revelation, various Old Testament prophecies).
Mostly I think the theological consideration has been of the spiritual effect of the Fall of our First Parents and not so much the effect on the physical universe:
*From the Epistle of St Paul to the Romans:
It’s one you could have a fun time arguing without needing to end in stalemate yelling at each other “Well, the Bible is just fairytales!/Science is just wrong!” 🙂
For anyone in the South Bay, we’re having another meetup this coming Saturday.
Why are all historical dramas lately full of cheap sex scenes? Is it the Game of Thrones influence? I have nothing against sex scenes in particular, but they should only be in the show if they somehow propagate the story or tell you something about the characters. But that is rarely the case, instead you have a lot of “random boobage” and of course the “obligatory” lesbian sex scenes between almost every two good looking female characters. Such scenes often make no sense from the perspective of the story and all they achieve is making the characters less believable and the story less immersive.
I don’t know if the 15year old boy demographics is that important for the producers (I don’t see any other reason they would do this), but unfortunately it seems like it has now become an HBO standard.
Are there any examples of high production value recent TV shows that do not fit this pattern?
It sells and they can get away with it. I, for one, would welcome the recriminalization of pornography.
Well I would not. I have nothing against pornography. I just don’t like pornography being mixed together with a story if it does not develop the story or the characters in any way (and often actually makes them less believable). Particularly when it is done in every goddamn episode of a TV show.
But I find it hard to believe that people other than teenage boys really enjoy this drama/porn combination.
“I’m a simple man, I see tits, I click ‘like’.”
You’re not the target demographic. Joe Q. Public is, and Joe likes tits and lesbian sex, because it maximizes the amount of women involved.
Actual porn maximizes the number of naked and usually fairly to very attractive women and it is readily available online for free. Why mix that with drama?
It’s just hard for me to believe that anyone other than teenage boys requires plot-irrelevant tits in TV dramas. Or do adult men actually imagine themselves to be the swashbuckling heroes who kill the dragon (or the pirates or whatever…although pirates are currently the good guys on TV) and then go fuck three wenches at the same time and then they go watch the main heroine have sex with another woman who she never interacts with otherwise and who is irrelevant to the story?
I’d also be interested in how women (other radical feminists who are offended by naked women on TV no matter the context, especially if those women are attractive) react to this. After all, about a half of the viewership is presumably female. A lot of these scenes have to be even more eye-rolling to women.
Same reason why one drinks tea with sugar, rather than shovel sugar directly into the orifice. A plot makes the porn more interesting, especially to a jaded viewer. (Television is also free-ish. Since plebs, at least over here, seldom pay the TV tax.)
Also, a movie with porn elements is, to the pleb mind, better than a movie without porn elements. And you can pretend it’s not really porn, and watch it openly with the rest of the family. I don’t think social mores have degenerated enough for openly watching porn while your housemates are in evidence to be acceptable.
@Anonymous: Why would you want to watch porn with other people around? It is fairly boring to, umm, just passively watch it.
Also, you can get porn with something like a story (other than “Hello, I’m Hans, the plumber” “Hello Hans, I just took a steamy shower”).
Anyway, I guess they would not be doing it if there were no demand for it. On the other hand, 10 years ago this was far less common and I don’t think the mores have changed so much in that short time, it would have been as acceptable back then as it is now. So perhaps it is a fad that will go away again once people get tired of it.
No, it’s because porn is what you look at in the bathroom with the blower on when your wife’s gone to bed, but historical dramas are something you can watch in plain view of everyone. Convenience!
I’d say it’s because the shows you’re talking about are on channels referred to (in the US) as “premium cable”, which cost the user a monthly fee, and the nudity reminds the viewer that they’re getting something they could never get on “basic cable”, the category below that.
Don P.: Why can’t you get nudity on basic cable?
@Tibor: probably because he lives in the US, which is a little more prudish than Europe. (I’ve got no problem with this arrangement BTW.) In basic cable they will not show nudity, except maybe part of someone’s butt crack very briefly.
Interestingly, I’ve seen some stations make an exception for late-night viewings of movies considered “very important” (e.g. Schindler’s List) though they always stuck big warnings at the end of each commercial break.
@Well: I haven’t watched TV (I watch all series or films on my computer and I don’t even own a TV set) for a couple of years but on the Czech TV stations a show that contained excessive graphic violence would come with a warning (something like that it might not be suitable for children and the youth) and same when it had explicit sex scenes. They would also usually only show them after 10pm. At least via satellite or the regular antenna broadcast, we’ve never had cable. I am not sure if this is still the case.
I remember that when I was a kid (90s) the cinemas would list some films as inappropriate for the youth so that if you were under 15, you had to come with your parents to see them. But this disappeared in the early 00s, roughly around the time I actually got 15 🙂
@Tibor
And it is hard for me to believe that anyone can enjoy Fifty Shades of Grey, especially since it depicts rape. Yet it had record sales.
Rationally…no.
Emotionally…hmmm…probably.
Just like I don’t expect women to want or enjoy actual rape, but surveys show that very many women have rape fantasies.
Humans have primitive needs which are often neglected in civilized society. It’s not surprising that they feed this part of their humanity through fantasy. It seems much more healthy than becoming a hooligan or terrorist.
Insofar as people who are bothered by something seem to disproportionally be the ones to talk about it, I feel the need to try to reduce the inevitable bias by mentioning that this sort of thing almost never bothers me (it’s possible for it to be sufficiently egregious and incompetent to get to me, but if so that’s because of the egregiousness and incompetence, not because I have any problem with this otherwise). Indeed, I think for me it sometimes succeeds in what is perhaps the intended goal of distracting me from some of the other flaws in a TV show.
Probably the most ridiculous scene of this kind was the GoT scene in one of the latest episodes where the Iron Islands people are on a ship with the Dorn women (who are completely ridiculous characters on their own) and just out of the blue the sister of the guy who got castrated (I am quite bad with names) starts kissing one of them (there is no backstory to this or anything and the two women have more or less just met). Thankfully an enemy fleet launches a surprise attack and cuts the eye-rolling spectacle short.
I don’t watch GoT – although I’m familiar with it – but that seems like a good method to convey a surprise. You’re expecting a scene for titilation but – BANG – everyone’s dead.
The problem is that scenes like this actually make me wish that everyone is killed. One of the two women was captured and then tortured to death by the queen (since she had poisoned her daughter a season two before), so at least something good came out of it 😛 That character was an archetype of a badly done fantasy warrioress with “sexy armour” with zero protective value, weird exotic weapons (used badly but there are no characters that use their weapons well on GoT anyway) and “let’s fuck everyone I see” attitude, so I was happy that they got rid of her.
I’m fairly certain that was deliberate, and it wouldn’t have been at all the same if she had just been an inept but enthusiastic wannabe warrior princess. Making you happy meant making her reprehensible, and “narcissistic slut who gets good people killed with her games” was a fine way to go about doing that. But,
At least one professional disagrees with you on that one, and I’m with him. Some characters, including Tyene and her sisters, are conspicuous in their martial ineptitude, while others are just quietly competent.
@John: Tyene is one of those Dorn women? Anyway, I don’t remember any really competent fighters. Extreme telegraphing and spins are common in Hollywood/HBO but GoT does it even worse. I would not say that the characters in vikings are fighting well either. It is hard to find any fighting scenes on TV where characters do although sometimes it is fairly ok. I guess some of the choices from the article are indeed on the OK side, but GoT in general is indeed below even the low TV fight scene average.
The pitched battles in GoT are complete rubbish, but that is again the case of pretty much all TV. I don’t remember any film/series where the armies fight in formations, except for the opening scene in Rome (the HBO series) which was actually quite nice and even the gear was realistic (I’m not completely sure about whistles being used but why not, that would be nitpicking).
I don’t think we are really fit to judge the realism of pre-gunpowder fighting. We are generations removed from people actually training and fighting for their lives with sword and spear and shield, and the records we have of those days are pretty crappy. The descendants of the armed martial techniques those warriors trained in and used are sports and art-forms, and we should expect that change in focus to have lowered the actual effectiveness of the techniques taught. We could be very wrong about what actually effective swordsmanship looks like.
There are surviving texts from times when those really were military weapons. One of my SCA friends has been looking into German pole arm texts for years and claims that they have very useful information on how to use the weapons.
It may be relevant that, prior to that, he was already competing at high levels in SCA combat using a halberd, which is very uncommon.
Technically true, but “generations” here means one or two generations, not centuries’ worth. There were melee engagements between classically trained martial artists as late as WWII — ammunition was scarce and logistics spotty in the more far-flung theaters of the Sino-Japanese War and later the Pacific War, and swords don’t run out of ammo. I’ve actually talked to people who participated in them, though mine’s probably the last generation to have that opportunity (and honestly I can’t say I got much out of it — the people I talked to were all in their nineties, and their stories tended to be a little garbled).
@Nornagest: That’s fascinating. Elaborate?
Also, let’s not forget that we have manuals on the use of swords, shields and polearms from circa 1620, contemporary with the first newspapers.
@ Tibor
It’s been a while since I’ve seen Sin City, but at least the women fought in an organized fashion, unlike the men who I think only did one-on-one.
From one angle, the men were characterized, from another angle, the women had better sense.
Yes, I’m aware of the existence of manuals like that. But we also have books written about contemporary forms like judo, which I have had an opportunity to compare with live instruction in that art. And the books are a very poor copies indeed of the knowledge transmitted by actual instruction. I’l stick with my claim that our knowledge of pre-gunpowder weapons use is “pretty crappy”.
Also, we can get some hint of how far our sport forms of armed martial arts might differ from the original lethal use of the corresponding weapons by looking at how far our sport forms of unarmed combat differ from something like the real thing. Think, for example how far western sport wrestling is from UFC fighting. Now, to be sure, what the UFC athletes are doing isn’t quite actual fighting. There are still rules, and some actions are prohibited. But they have a lot more freedom than wrestlers, so they are closer to what actual unarmed combat looks like. And the difference between sport wrestling and UFC fighting is dramatic, which suggests that the difference between sport fencing and actual sword fighting would be correspondingly dramatic.
@johan_larson: Judo is really a sport rather than a martial art designed for real-world application (that’s why it’s ju-do and not a (ju)ju-tsu). But martial arts, with or without weapons, which are designed for use in actual fighting tend to be fairly similar. Humans today are more or less the same as humans in the middle ages and humans all over the world have the same biomechanics as well. If you take a halberd or a sword or a bow there are only so many things that you can do with it which make sense. If you have a manual on top of that (and Victorian manuals are really explicit, they describe the use step by step, unlike the medieval treatises which are a bit more vague) you can reconstruct the martial art with quite a high degree of confidence.
More importantly, some principles apply always. Spinning, i.e. showing your back to the opponent while he is pointing a sharp piece of metal at you is an incredibly stupid idea. Making huge swings that your opponent can see 2 seconds before you make them is also not very efficient (but used in films so that the actors can easily respond to the moves of the other actor in their choreography). Not to mention that all Hollywood swords seem to be made of lead, since they swing them as if they had 5-10 kilos, particularly if those are medieval swords.
So yes, people like those from the SCA or HEMA might get some things wrong in their reconstructions but overall it is likely more or less correct and most of the Hollywood fighting is simply wrong, since fighting like that would get you killed 100% of the time against anyone who’s actually practiced with the weapon (or who at least has enough common sense not to spin around).
The spins probably come from the popularity of eastern unarmed martial arts where you sometimes spin to deliver a stronger kick. You can do that in an unarmed fight but weapons change the situation completely. Telegraphing comes from the need to train actors quickly to do the choreography. And “dual-wielding” probably comes from DnD (unless those are two short weapons or a short weapon like a dagger paired with a longer weapon like a sword…two long weapons get in the way of each other).
I concede that a good 1620s combat manual would differ as much from the real thing as a good freestyle wrestling manual from UFC. However, I think fencing is a red herring. Fencing is obviously a sport, the foil being a gentleman’s dress sword rather than a battlefield weapon. Western martial arts manuals address no-rules self-defense with the battlefield weapons (besides matchlocks) of the time, with tripping, haft chokes, wrestling holds with a dagger, etc.
@Tibor: Ah, D&D. I think the reason for “dual-wielding” there is that the Armor Class system that made the war game more elegant led to a shield making you only 5% less likely to take a full-damage hit. When that’s all a shield does, players are going to put another weapon in that hand and argue with the DM that if one weapon = one attack/turn, two logically = two.
@Tibor
A lot of this is simply because the “wrong” way is visually impressive to people who don’t know any better, and the correct way is only interesting to people who are deeply familiar with actual swordfighting.
It’s not a flaw limited to swordfighting, either. X-Men 3 came out right after I had finished officer training. One of the first scenes has a bunch of soldiers advancing on a hilltop to capture some mutants, and they have a squad on all three sides to completely surround them. Which is totally wrong. You use an L-shaped cordon in that situation, with the heaviest weapons on the outside corners–totally surrounding an enemy in close quarters means that if you miss when shooting at the enemy your shots stand a good chance of fratricide. This was obvious to me as somebody who was still new to the Army, but if they had done it the “real” way, people who don’t know this will wonder why they left two sides open. In that situation, it’s bad writing to leave 95% of your audience confused to satisfy the 5% who are familiar with the real-world situation.
Another example, nearer and dearer to my structural engineer heart, is the complete lack of understanding of the structural mechanics of a building. My stock example of this is in Cloverfield, where they show a pair of skyscrapers with one pushed over so that it leans on one across the street. The most recent example in a movie I saw was in the new Justice League, where Superman is carrying an entire apartment building out of danger.
Both of these are obviously totally impossible with even the slightest knowledge of how buildings carry loads. The skyscraper in Cloverfield cannot be pushed that far over without the P-Δ effect causing the entire building to collapse straight down when it’s not too much more than maybe 15′ (~5m) out of vertical.
As for the apartment building in Justice League, if you have a footing settle a few inches (cm) differently than the others, you will start seeing severe architectural distress (diagonal cracks from doors and windows, and sticking doors), and more than that can result in actual structural distress. Buildings with anything over a fairly small footprint simply cannot carry the large vertical loads imposed on them too far horizontally with the way they’re normally constructed. So if you tried to pick up a building from the middle, Superman-style, you’ll just bend the whole building upward until it breaks in half, and it’ll never even leave the ground.
I think there’s an argument to be made that these depictions can cause real harm by feeding 9/11 conspiracy theories (because peoples’ visual of a building collapse is informed by fiction rather than real life). But in each of these situations they did it anyway–if they even knew it was wrong–because it was a cool visual. They’re not making movies to appeal to structural engineers, because you’d go broke doing that. So they show it “wrong” to make it accessible to a wide audience.
I study a sword style that descends from Nakamura Taizaburo, who worked as a sword instructor for the IJA in Northern China during the Sino-Japanese War. (It’s not Nakamura-ryū, though — my teacher’s teacher was Toshishiro Obata, who left to start his own school before Nakamura-ryū was formally incorporated.) Nakamura died a couple years before I started training, but I’ve spoken to some of his students. Most didn’t have much to say on the subject — very few people of that generation are left now, and most of those that are, aren’t willing to talk about their experiences. But I have heard a bit from the horse’s mouth, and considerably more secondhand from people of my teacher’s generation.
On the other side of that war, I also ran into a fellow in the Philippines a few years ago who’d fought as a guerilla against the Japanese when he was about fourteen, and grew up to become a prominent eskrima instructor. He was kind enough to tell me some of his stories, too.
It’s worse than that — the foil was always a training weapon, designed as a light, nonlethal way to practice technique. Hence the elaborate right-of-way rules. The gentlemen’s smallsword of the 18th century evolved into the Olympic epee, which is heavier and slightly longer with a larger bell guard. I don’t know where the Olympic saber comes from; I’m told it evolved from Hungarian weapons, but it must have come very far if so. It resembles the actual fighting sabers I’ve seen far less than an epee resembles a smallsword.
The smallsword is a lethal weapon, incidentallly, but it’s optimized for infrequent, unarmored one-on-one duels, rather than for battlefield use against multiple people who might be wearing armor.
Judo is primarily a sport, but it’s easy to read too much into the judo/jujitsu distinction. -do means “way”, roughly, and -jutsu means “technique”. The former carries linguistic connotations of being more… I don’t know if I can use the word “holistic” here without it sounding like hippie bullshit, but that might be the best way of putting it. More well-rounded, more concerned with developing character. Kano sensei was very much into that angle, and that’s one reason he used the word. You can’t necessarily draw the same conclusions if you see the suffixes used for other styles, though.
Also, after the war, many Japanese arts rebranded as -do styles for political reasons without substantially changing their curricula.
@CatCube: I like to use this as an example of an amazing looking fight which uses realistic techniques. Obviously, there still is a bit of artistic license, but much less than in Hollywood and it looks so much better. You actually get the feeling they are trying to kill each other, plus some of the techniques (with that slow motion to highlight them) actually look brilliant and would be something entirely new to the average viewer (kind of like Bruce Lee revolutionized kung-fu movies).
Of course, your average actor won’t be able to pull this off or only after way too much training. But with some good editing (or by having the characters wear helmets during the fight…although I sort of understand that the filmmakers don’t like the main characters to wear helmets because those actors are expensive and they want to show their faces as much as possible) you could use proficient doubles.
Can confirm that’s way better swordplay than anything I’ve seen out of Hollywood.
@Tibor
I’ll take your word for it that it’s better, but to be honest if I didn’t compare it with, say Game of Thrones one after the other, I don’t know that I’d notice the difference.
I can talk somebody’s ear off about poor small-unit tactics or room-clearing in movies, but I don’t know enough swordplay for the badness to jump out at me. It’s just not one of my bugbears. I can understand how it could be somebody elses–like my previous comment shows, I’ve got my own–but I’ve just never invested the time in sword combat for it to become so.
I’ve invested quite a lot of time in it and also know a little about the historical sources, although not a lot. I haven’t seen Game of Thrones, although I did look at a few webbed fight scenes from it, supposedly some of the better ones. Judging by those I agree with Tibor.
Part of it is speed. Part of it is a sword fight turning into grappling, which period ones apparently did (SCA doesn’t). I thought the “fall down but don’t lose” action was overdone, but still not entirely unbelievable.
@CatCube: I don’t have all that much experience with historical fencing apart from reading about it and watching videos. I became interested in the topic while doing my PhD in Germany and the closest HEMA (historical european martial arts) club was 80 km away, not worth going there and back every week. Now, I’m back home and there is a HEMA club in my home town but I will have to wait till February for the beginners course to start again from the beginning. But even if you don’t have even that, the fight scene from Adorea (the video I linked to) looks a lot more lively. You feel like they really want to kill each other and they are fast. Most Hollywood fights are really slow and mostly consist of them swinging into the air in between the two combatants (aiming at the opponent’s sword, not at the opponent…there are very few fights in the movies where they use weapons other than the sword…which, if it is in a battle is kind of like using mostly pistols in a WW2 movie, but ok, swords are cool). The worst thing are the spins. And you’re right, most people are probably not bothered. But people watched kung-fu movies before Bruce Lee and weren’t bothered by it. Lee and then Jackie Chan raised the standard a lot. On the other hand, western cinema is still pretty bad in this respect, most fighting is done with camera tricks so that you don’t see that none of the actors can actually fight (they use extremely many cuts and never actually show the fists landing). But while my only practical experience with martial arts is a year or so of judo when I was 9 and then about 2 years of freestyle wrestling (like Greco-Roman but you can also attack legs) when I was about 14-16, I find East Asian unarmed fight scenes much more enjoyable than their western counterparts (Jackie Chan in particular). Of course, they are often far from realistic but you can see that the people actually have some training and the director does not have to resort to cheap tricks to disguise the fact that they know nothing about fighting.
@David: What are the SCA rules? Are there any restrictions on what part of the body you are allowed to hit? What I like about HEMA is that there are none (of course that means you need safety gear if you’re sparring with actual, albeit blunt, weapons). Grappling is also fine there. My understanding is such that grappling was particularly common in armoured fighting. Unless you have a war hammer or even better a polearm, you just cannot do anything against a 14-15th century plate armour. What you can do is bring your opponent down and then stab him where there are openings in the armour (the visor, which you can lift when you’r holding him on his back, the armpits, the groin). The openings have to be there since otherwise you would not be able to move in the armour (specialized jousting armour is an exception but that is essentially sport equipment which would be completely unusable in a battle due to its weight and severe restriction of mobility and vision).
You have the opportunity to bring to our time one historical person who is now dead. It can be anyone at all, from any stated time in his or her life. Don’t worry about breaking history; this person lived and died as in our timeline; you’re getting as perfect a copy as physics allows.
So, who do you want?
(Let me suggest we skip the bus to Shitstorm, OK, by not naming really major religious figures. So Jesus and Mohammed are out, but feel free to name Paul or Abu Bakr.)
Personally, I find this a difficult question, because I don’t think having a historical person available for direct consultation is going to make much of a difference. We already know rather a lot about the major figures of history, because their words and deeds have been amply recorded.
I’d bring back Prince or Chris Cornell, since seeing Prince and Soundgarden in concert were both things I intended to do but did not get the chance. (Or if I can only pick one of them but then also get a one-off where I can manipulate living people, bring back Prince and have one of the Winan sisters–or similarly equipped black female gospel singer–take over lead vocal duties for Soundgarden. Or maybe Cornell’s older brother who also sings marvelously. Or Doug Pinnick from King’s X.)
But to answer more in the spirit of the question, I’d love to bring back my dear Robert E. Lee.
Plato is a somewhat boring answer for a philosopher to give, but I have some inclination to give it anyway. He was so insightful, and he seemed to be partly inspired by the geometric innovations of his time; I wonder how he would react to modern logic and mathematics, what that would inspire in him.
I guess the original Protagoras would have been an even more obvious choice for me, but he’s really just one of the vast horde of people we don’t actually know much about because our records on ancient times are so spotty. If I could get access to lots of people, my list would include a lot of those (including Protagoras, certainly), but if I only get one person, I’m not going to take a chance on someone who I don’t know enough about to know if they actually would be worth the effort. So the author of Protagoras before Protagoras.
I looked for a time limit, and didn’t find one so I’d pick Jane Austen. Greatest author of all time. Her novels are the greatest social insight of all time. I know that I could use those insights for the current wicked world.
Part of me wants to pick von Neumann, but that’s rather a big cop-out on ‘historical’. I just think he’s really smart, and he’s proven the ability to put those smarts to use in the modern hyper-specified, hyper-empircal etc. world.
Non-culture war:
John von Neumann. Someone considered a genius by other geniuses has to be good to have around.
Culture war:
Adolf Hitler, just to give people a sense of perspective. Mike Godwin can take him on the lecture circuit to demonstrate.
Er ist Wieder da! 😉
Since you can’t have the actual Hitler, I recommend Look Who’s Back, in which Hitler appears in contemporary Germany, and is immediately picked up by the media as a brilliant comic Hitler impersonator.
I’ve read the book, but I haven’t seen the movie.
It’s told from Hitler’s point of view, and it’s fascinating to watch him try to achieve his goals while figuring out the modern world. It’s funny and disquieting.
I saw the film. It’s brilliant.
(Nevermind minor mischaracterizations of Hitler – like portraying him to be a little on the “slob” side, while IRL he was a gigantic neat freak.)
Nebuchadnezzar I’s sage, one Šaggil-kīnam-ubbib. I would ask what the flip happened in the region between 1200 BC and 1150 BC.
I think there are two ways you might want to use it. One is to find someone from a historical period you want to learn more about. Someone who could help you with these would be great.
Another one is to bring someone really smart who can come up with more really smart things. Someone mentioned John von Neumann. Niels Abel would also probably be a good choice, given how much he managed to do in maths before the age of 26 when he died. Their usefulness depends a lot on what age they will be when you bring them back. And do they keep all knowledge of the entirety of their historical life or just whatever happened before they reached the age when you copy them in the present? A 60year old Newton would probably not be very helpful today, he’d have so much catching up to do he probably would not come with any significant new discoveries.
Well, depending on your tastes I guess a third possibility is to bring back Marilyn Monroe to … ok I’ll stop here 🙂
All in all, the best thing would be to bring someone like Marilyn Monroe from the ancient Mesopotamia.
Your Abels example inspires me to mention Frank Ramsey as another obvious candidate.
Bach. I’d like to know about actual performance practice from his time, and I’d especially like to see what he’d do with a music synthesizer.
On the other hand, there’s Jeremy Bentham. I just read this, by Rikk Hill. Quoted at length because I realize not everyone is willing to have a facebook account.
Bentham Transcription Project, to improve the odds of seeing the other half of what Bentham wrote.
Another good one: I’d bring back Christopher Evan Welch so his character Peter Gregory could come back to Silicon Valley. Suzanne Cryer does an amazing job playing essentially a female version of Peter Gregory, so I’d like to see their characters interact.
On the subject of bringing back geniuses, while I can see a good case for Von Neumann, Galton is another strong candidate. He didn’t just play a major role in inventing statistics and popularizing evolution. He also wondered whether Darwin was right in speculating that inheritance worked via blood and figured out how, with 19th century technology, to test the conjecture. He asked whether talent was inherited equally through the male and female line, figured out how to test the question empirically, got the wrong answer due to a bias in his data, realized there was a bias in his data, redid his calculations, and got the right answer.
I can’t believe no one asked for Leonardo da Vinci. He was obviously greatly held back by the limited manufacturing techniques of the time and it would be great to have him as a ‘maker’ today.
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2017/11/27/success-effort/
Discussion of biases which cause people to give worse advice than they otherwise might– for example, not wanting to be blamed for failure resulting from the advice, and therefore recommending too little risk. This might apply more to advice in person than to advice given to the public– a lot of public advice seems to be recommending too much risk, but then someone who just says follow your bliss is less likely to be blamed than someone who recommends to you personally that you start a business which turns out to fail.
There are biases which can cause people to either under represent or over represent the amount of effort involved in a project.
Anyway, I’ve noticed that I recommend a lot of efficient movement systems, I tend to not mention how much I’ve spent on classes and therapy sessions.
Here’s a link to a personal-experience article by a guy who was a hippie in San Francisco back in the 60’s.
http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-2546-true-story-i-was-hippie-in-san-francisco-in-sixties.html
TL/DR: The stereotypes aren’t wrong, exactly, but there is more to the story than they convey.
Do you think programmers ought to know how transistors work?
Which programmers? Verilog programmers/ASIC designers should. Java programmers don’t need to.
I mean, all programmers should probably be shown a full-adder and understand how it works at some early point just to drive home the point that this isn’t some magical machine that thinks, it’s just a bunch of electronic components wired up in such a way that useful results come out the other end.
My question was provoked by EY’s comment on FB:
I would not want to work with a developer who did not know how transistors work.
Transistors work via quantum mechanics, so that’s kind of a tall order.
I’d say they ought to have seen it modelled as a three-terminal device and applied to building logic and memory; knowing the semiconductor stuff about the BJT or the FET seems like getting into diminishing returns.
There are really two questions here: First, is having an understanding of how transistors work helpful to a programmer; second, is the kind of person who knows how a transistor works likely to be a better programmer than one who doesn’t.
So are your answers “no” and “yes”? (in the second question you’d probably want to condition on the person already being a programmer)
I’m an electrical engineer who specialized in computer architecture but mostly just codes for work these days.
I think my ability to grok computers and programming raised a level when I took the first digital logic and microprocessor applications classes in college. But transistors? I don’t really think so. I think it would be enough to do as toastengineer says. A programmer would be wise to understand how to use digital logic gates (AND/NAND, OR/NOR, XOR/NXOR, NOT) to make a full adder, a latch/buffer, and maybe a simple microprogrammed state machine for control. Then they would understand the basics of what the processor they’re programming is doing, and drive home the fact that there’s no magic going on, it’s just a whole bunch of simple switches.
Then as an aside you could show them how to make the simple gates out of MOSFETs to get the gist of how one makes the little switches and gates out of physical components. It’s probably enough to just read the Wikipedia page on CMOS logic.
Here’s the article I mentioned above about controversial claims that the Ancestral Puebloan/Anasazi culture practiced human sacrifice and ate the victims.
Basically, the Navajo claim to know as much about Chaco Canyon and related archaeological sites as Puebloan speakers, while the scientific consensus is that Athabascan-speaking proto-Navajo and Apache didn’t reach the area until Chaco had been abandoned for centuries. Puebloan-speakers use scientific consensus to support their claim to be the only ones present from the time Chaco was built until after it was abandoned, and don’t like Navajo and pro-Navajo white archaeologists poking around and suggesting the kivas were used for anything unethical.
Darn, we really need to get to the bottom of this because…. hmm.
Any history pro around here that can clear a thing out for me ?
I saw an argument on a imageboard recently regarding Transylvania between a Hungarian and a Romanian.
Whatever the Romanian said I could verify with wikipedia but whatever the Hungarian said I could not.
His whole argument is that there were no Romaians in Transylvania pre Hungarian occupation and they migrated there after during the years of Maria Theresa filling the gaps made bu turks in Hungarian population eventually achiving majority in that region ? I could not get any concrete information out of him and I can’t find any source for what he is saying.
Can someone point me in te right direction ?
Hungarians have a reputation for being …tribalistic? (in the SSC sense) over Transylvania. (For example, when I was in Budapest this June, the Transylvanian flag was flying prominently on the front of the parliament building, while the EU flag was hidden off to side.) That combined with his caginess would lead me to dismiss his argument. Though to be fair I don’t know the reputations of Romanians on this subject.
But if you want to be more charitable and less lazy than me, the subreddit r/AskHistorians might be a good place to ask for details and resources of migration patterns/historical demographics in Transylvania and how this plays into the modern debate. They don’t allow discussion of recent (>20 years old) events, but almost all of this debate is much older than that.
I believe the information is false, and it’s just historical revisionism. Some Hungarians are still sad about the territories lost in 1920, and “all population there was Hungarian” is a meme that provides greater justification for still wanting those territories back, one hundred years later.
The official story (supported by Wikipedia) is that those territories were lost where the majority of the population there was not ethnically Hungarian; so after WW1 they were given to existing or new national states according to the majority population. I can easily imagine that the evaluation was not completely fair (Hungary just lost the war, and was judged by its enemies). On the other hand, if we speak about historical populations, it seems fair to also mention forced hungarization during the previous decades (if 100 years ago is relevant, why not 200 years?); i.e. we are talking about territories where after decades of assimilation, the majority of population still remained non-Hungarian.
(To get an idea about the effectiveness of assimilation, notice how minorities other than Roma are almost non-existent in current Hungary. EDIT: Actually, now I see how this could work as an argument for either side. It is exactly the same result you would see if all not-completely-Hungarian territories were lost.)
What probably confuses people a lot is a “mathematical paradox” that by losing territories where Hungarian ethnicity was in the minority, Hungary lost a majority of their ethnic population. Good luck explaining this to a person with average math skills!
Disclosure of conflict of interest: comment author is Slovak, i.e. one of the bad guys
Sweet! Duolingo has a Mandarin course in beta!
Mine Warfare part 2 is reposted at Naval Gazing. I’ve done a bit more research into magnetic mine mechanisms since I wrote it, so the explanation of the different types should be better.
Can someone steelman or genuinely defend the following statement, please:
“Internet access should be treated as a basic human right”
I’m not sure that we should call it a right yet, and the answer probably depends a lot on how you define “right,” but I can definitely see a case for “internet access is an important thing that the government should guarantee to its citizens.”
A number of systems we use in our daily life, governmental and otherwise, assume that you have internet access and you will access them over the internet. You need the internet to do business, to apply for jobs… in some places you can even vote online. It seems likely that this trend is going to continue – online services will expand, and in-person or phone access will shrink or disappear to save money. Therefore, our society has a duty to ensure even its poorest citizens can get online.
Basically, even if it’s not required for survival, like food and water, it’s increasingly required to participate in a first-world economy. I can imagine the internet becoming as important as the electric grid in the near future.
Additionally, if you believe education is a universal human right, then guaranteeing a person’s ability to connect to the largest source of information on the planet is an extremely good way to implement that right.
“Internet access is table stakes for modern society; we should ensure people do not fall below that social floor.”
Wait, are people on the table, or the floor? Or in the basement since they could “fall below that social floor.”
So I’m kinda on the fence on this, but I’m definitely sympathetic to that statement. Here’s my thinking:
I desire a world in which the luck of birth has zero influence on someone’s life outcomes. On this issue, the matter of luck of the wealth of the family and the community to which one is born is in play, because your access to the internet depends heavily on how rich your parents are and on where you are raised.
I believe that the internet offers incredible advantages to people when it comes to improving life outcomes, such as finding jobs, finding friends/mates/acquaintances, access to a wide variety of shopping choices, dumb entertainment, or education.
As such, people having different levels of internet access due to their luck of birth seems likely to lead to people having different life outcomes due to their luck of birth. So to get a little closer to a world in which luck of birth doesn’t affect life outcomes, guaranteeing internet access as a human right to everyone would be a decent step.
Now, this argument proves too much, because the same argument could be applied to anything that offers different life outcomes, though I’d say that it proves exactly what needs to be proved.
A more common argument I’ve seen, which I’m also sympathetic to, is that the internet has become so dominant as a form of communication that without it, one can’t reasonably be said to have a right to free speech – free speech isn’t completely worthless without a means by which to transmit it, but it does lose much of what makes it meaningful. If we lived in a world where speaking was the dominant form of communication and some sizable portion of the population had, by luck of birth, loudspeakers at all times that could increase the range of their voices 10-fold, I think it’d be reasonable to argue that the other portion of the population that lacks loudspeakers don’t have the right to free speech to the same level that the one with the loudspeakers have. Especially if they’re living in a society where the majority have loudspeakers and are using them at full volume every time they speak. In such a society, I think it’d make sense to guarantee loudspeakers to everyone as a basic human right.
I think this conflicts with intuitions I think many people have that basic human rights shouldn’t also compel others to do things – I’ve seen that kind of argument on the issue of socialized health care, for instance. I think it’s incredibly important that people who have this intuition are listened to, but I don’t share that intuition and feel comfortable declaring things basic human rights based on what I believe should happen in an idealized world. If the “basic human right” part is a sticking point, perhaps a steelman of that statement ought to be “we should strive to create a world in which every human has internet access.” But perhaps that’d be de-fanging the statement too much, and the “basic human right” part is the core that you’re actually concerned with.
One argument against the “basic human right” version is that a polity which accepts the idea of positive rights, that people are entitled to certain outcomes hence entitled to make other people provide them, is likely to work less well than a polity which enforces only negative rights, hence will end up further from the set of outcomes you want.
@IVIIN. (By the way, how the heck do you spell your name — which of those letters are capital I’s and which are small l’s?)
Wow, this is a great post. I pretty much totally disagree with your position (or I did before I read your post), but I may need to change my mind a bit. Well the idea of the Internet being a “right” is definitely nonsense IMO, but whether society should give everyone access to the Internet as a welfare thing perhaps makes some sense. Although I do have a couple of arguments against it.
1) Yes, people do have unequal starts in life, with some growing up in poor, uneducated families, and some in rich ones with many connections. On the other hand, people also have great disparities in natural talents — intelligence, social skills, general health. I suspect the latter issues are more important than the former. This comes under the rule that life isn’t fair. Yes, it is a good thing for society to try to mitigate these disparities (and for those against too much government oversight, it is a good thing for individuals to try to mitigate this through charity). But is the Internet really that big a factor in these disparities? Maybe.
2) In my city, public libraries have free Internet, so the poor definitely have access to the Internet. Also, is the Internet really that expensive that the poor can’t afford it? Can’t you get Internet for like $20 per month? OF course you need a computer too, but can’t you get a decent one for at least going on the Internet for $1000? I think this is not too much? And in fact, it seems to me that the poor all seem to have smart phones. I do think that welfare assistance should be based on actual expenses of life, and probably getting the Internet should be part of that.
It’s all lowercase. Those are Ls. You can find out by copying the nickname and pasting into something that uses fixed width fonts.
Maybe you just added an extra 0 on accident, but just in case I’ll give some examples. Wal-Mart sells windows laptops for ~$200 This gets you pretty much everything you’d need for your own internet access, typing up documents, etc. besides the actual internet connection. If you’re not attached to having a keyboard, you can get a smartphone there for a little under 50 bucks, although unless you’re just going to bum off wifi, I don’t think you can get a plan with data for less than ~$45 a month though. But that also nets you phone service which you probably need.
If you can get access to newegg, you can get refurbished chromebooks for under 100 if WalMart laptops cost too much. But that requires more knowledge to be aware of.
I don’t think poor people in U.S. cities are lacking internet options that almost all of them can afford. Rural areas may be a different kettle of fish though. You may get stuck with no cheap choice but a really bad cellphone data network or dial-up. This wouldn’t be as terrible if it wasn’t for the horrifying amount of page bloat that make a lot of websites impossible to use.
My parents are in the “dial-up, cell data, or satellite” bucket. And the cell data one is so sketchy that you can’t always reliably check e-mail. You get one bar at best, and often no signal*. They just got Hughes, I think, and I’ll see how that works out when I get home in a few weeks.
(* This also leads me to a cell phone rant: if somebody tells you that they’re going somewhere without cell service, don’t call their fucking cellphone over and over to try to contact them. Call the Goddamn landline they gave you. Our little electronic leashes don’t work everywhere, and you shouldn’t expect them to. This is one place where I think @Well… has the right of it with overreliance on cell and smart phones.
Why, yes, I did have somebody trying to get a hold of me for a couple of days while I was on vacation for a time-critical work item without reading my Out of Office message giving them the number to reach me. Why do you ask?)
Anonymous is correct in that my name is all lowercase.
Yeah, this is where the argument “proves too much.” Even in the left, there’s a general sort of grumbling concession that people should be rewarded for making use of their hard work and talents.
That’s never sat right with me. It seems to me that I didn’t have any choice in what I’m talented in or my inclination to work hard. I can afford to have fast internet anywhere primarily because of my income from my job. I landed on my job for a variety of reasons including luck of social connections, but also including the luck of my intelligence and the luck of my inclination to study hard. It seems unjust to me that someone who can’t get a similarly paying job should have less internet access than I do, just because they were unlucky enough to be less intelligent or less inclined to work hard (or just didn’t have lucky social connections like I did).
That said, it seems to me that empirical evidence pretty convincingly shows that following a “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” principle to organize society is 100% of the time a path to the creation of a hell on Earth with massive amounts of senseless death and even more suffering. Which is why I’m glad people like David Friedman are around to tell me that I might be closer to that path than I might realize.
So to your question “Is the Internet really that big a factor in these disparities?” I have to answer, I think so, but I’m certainly open to the argument that it’s a small enough factor such that the downsides from “correcting” (as I see it) that factor outweighs the gains. Especially if there are downsides that I’m not sufficiently weighing and paying attention to.
This is why I’m not fully on-board with the idea of internet access being a basic human right the same way that I consider, say, freedom of conscious to be.
Well, I do think public libraries and other public infrastructure (e.g. public transportation to allow poor people to get to those public libraries) is a means by which to help to correct this injustice. I do think, though, that internet access of the kind that I have – dozens of Mbps unlimited at home and similar speed but less consistent and limited anywhere via my smartphone – is meaningfully different from internet access from going to a public library. I get to enjoy using the internet from the privacy of my own home using my own equipment that I control or almost anywhere I go on my smartphone, and I get to do it at any time I want. Use cases open up with such freedom and flexibility.
I guess ideally, when it comes to internet access, I’d like a world in which everyone has gigabit at home with the necessary equipment to take advantage of that, as well as a smartphone with LTE. I also think it’d be very easy to accidentally create mountains and mountains of skulls while trying (and utterly failing) to create that ideal world.
This line of argument often leads people to conclude that everyone should get equal outcomes. It seems to me more reasonable, if you accept it, to conclude that nobody deserves anything. You aren’t responsible for being smart, or hard working, or honest. The worst person in the world isn’t responsible for all of his faults. He doesn’t deserve to be punished, you don’t deserve to be rewarded. He also doesn’t deserve to not be punished. You don’t deserve to get more than he does, you don’t deserve to get the same amount as he does either.
The alternative conclusion, which I find more persuasive, is that desert is predicated on the actual person as he is, not the imaginary disembodied soul waiting to become that person.
I don’t think that’s more reasonable, though. I think it’s more reasonable to conclude that everybody deserves everything. Because all else being equal, nobody getting anything seems to be worse than everybody getting everything (that’s is one gigantic mammoth-sized “all else being equal,” though).
I do think that there’s a strong case to be made that in order to create a prosperous society, that’s the basic idea to follow. Heck, even before looking at any empirical evidence, intuitively, it makes sense that a society which rewards people who are intelligent and hardworking is likely to be one where more intelligent people work harder compared to a society which doesn’t, and it makes sense that a society with more intelligent people working harder would be more prosperous than one with fewer.
But this definitely conflicts with my sense of fairness, justice, and empathy. When I see a beggar starving in the streets or a murderer on death row, I can’t help but feel that it’s horribly unfair that they’re there while I’m here, even though there’s absolutely nothing I did other than be lucky which allowed me to avoid such a fate. Even while recognizing that the systems in place that caused those people to suffer the way they did is probably alleviating far more suffering elsewhere.
That’s why I’m a proponent both for flattening life outcomes and for listening with as receptive a mind as possible to people who say that societal changes one believes would be beneficial is actually likely to cause unintended negative outcomes. I don’t think I always do this well, but I like to think I try.
Inclination, perhaps. But my inclination is to NOT work hard. If I do so anyway, why should the fruits of that be taken away to provide for others who are similarly inclined but followed their inclinations?
I’m not talking about what is better or worse, I’m talking about what people deserve. Once you separate the person from all characteristics that might be relevant to desert, what is the basis for saying that he deserves anything, let alone everything?
What does a dog deserve? It’s not due to any virtue of yours that you aren’t a dog..
I mean, that’s my inclination as well. However, the fact that I did work hard – or at least hard enough to do the things that landed me in this job – indicates that I had other features that were able to override my default inclination not to work hard. Low time preference or low sensitivity to the boredom or pain from doing the work required to get me the training and qualifications to get my job, for instance. The same applies to anyone else like me who is naturally lazy but managed to work hard anyway – the very fact that they worked hard anyway is evidence that they were lucky enough to have characteristics that could override their natural inclination to be lazy. Other lazy people might not be so lucky and thus just not work hard, which could condemn them to a life of suffering. All because they were unlucky.
The basis is that they’re conscious beings, and I consider conscious beings suffering to be bad (in fact, I’d say the concept of something being “bad” is intrinsically tied to whatever extent it causes suffering in conscious beings). I think a conscious being suffers when it doesn’t get what it wants. My concept of desert follows from that.
I think a dog deserves everything it wants, to whatever extent that it is conscious.
I think you are misusing the word “deserve.”
Suppose I am a thoroughly wicked but very talented person, and there is a way of forcing me to use my talents in a fashion that does a great deal of good for other people. It is good that I be kept alive, even at considerable cost to others. But I don’t deserve to be kept alive.
Do you disagree?
It seems to me that once you take seriously the determinist line of argument you are following, “desert” no longer makes any sense since nobody is responsible for anything he does, hence nobody can deserve to be either punished or rewarded for anything he does.
I disagree. You deserve to be kept alive. And whether or not you deserve to be kept alive is not contingent upon any of the other details you provided, such as the fact that you are a thoroughly wicked person or that you are talented or that there is a method of forcing you to use your talents to help people. It’s only contingent upon the fact that you are conscious and are currently alive (and I’m assuming you desire to continue to be alive – if you desire to die, I think you don’t deserve the punishment of being kept alive).
Yes, this seems correct, and this is what I’m struggling with. Because as far as I can see, there’s no principled way to object to racism, homophobia, and other similar bigotries without invoking the idea that people don’t deserve differential outcomes based on their luck of birth. Yet that idea, along with everything we know about physics, necessarily leads to the conclusion that “desert” is a meaningless term.
Which leads me towards thinking that perhaps society would be better if the concept of desert were removed completely. We punish murderers not because a murderer “deserves” to be punished, but rather because having a system that punishes murderers promotes general well-being and sense of safety among the population. Likewise, we reward intelligent and hardworking people with money and status not because being intelligent and hardworking makes one deserving of money and status, but because having a system that rewards intelligent and hardworking people leads to good work being done that makes the lives of people better.
Which perhaps might provide a guide for redefining “desert” to make it make sense. At the same time, I see the concept of “desert” as being very pernicious and causing a lot of suffering in this world. I’d prefer it that when we punish murderers, we do it with compassion such that their level of suffering is as little as is required while still creating enough of an incentive to change people’s behaviors within society such that the occurrence of murder is minimized. But I observe people desiring to cause lots of suffering to murderers on the basis that they “deserve” it, with little thought to the effect it has on the incentive structures of society and the ultimate effects to the murder rates. I can see this easily causing murderers to undergo unnecessary suffering, and a murderer is generally no less conscious than anyone else, and his unnecessary suffering is no less worth preventing than that of anyone else.
And I also see this kind of thing playing out in smaller scales all over the place, such as antipathy for lazy people who “deserve” to be poor or fat/awkward people who “deserve” to be alone. Perhaps they “deserve” those things in the sense that the systems in place which cause them to suffer in those ways is overall beneficial to society, but the mindset that they “deserve” those things seem to lead to others causing more suffering to those people than is actually necessary for promoting societal well-being.
It’s not internet access per se that’s a basic human right, but the ability to meaningfully take part in society. In the modern west, a whole host of things, from job applications to filling in government forms to socialising, are largely or wholly done online, and anybody who doesn’t have access to the internet will therefore be severely hampered in doing these things. Hence, internet access is necessary to meaningfully participate in modern society, and should be considered as a human right in a kind of derivative sense.
The last two jobs I worked I walked in and asked if they were hiring, was interviewed in person and offered the job in person. I even did the work in person. I didn’t realize I wasn’t meaningfully interacting with society.
The internet makes my life better, but this vein of “you have to do this to be a part of society” is bullshit, you could have said the same thing about having cable years ago. “everyone talks about TV event X, how can you not have cable? You won’t be able to talk about X without it!”, you probably had people arguing for microwave ovens 60 years ago, “supermarkets have so much frozen food in them, you can’t really afford to eat if you don’t get one!”.
That is unusual for many modern workplaces. If you walked into my workplace and asked if we were hiring, the security desk would shrug and tell you to check our website, and they wouldn’t let you in the door.
I don’t work at some prestigious firm or anything, either.
I have gotten jobs without the internet – but not since 2004.
Guy at my workplace is looking for a full-time job, was asking if anyone knew anyone in [major local employer] and who he should address his CV to, since he was going to bung one in.
My brother works there, so I said I’d ask him (I reckoned he’d at least know the name of a guy in the HR Department which would be better than simply addressing the CV to ‘Whoever opens this envelope’).
My brother said that (a) actually they’re not hiring right now (even for the Christmas rush) and (b) don’t bother sending in a paper CV, that will just be ignored. Apply via the website as that’s where jobs are advertised and that’s where HR will respond. Plus you’ll also have a better chance of getting a job working there by applying to [major outsourcing firm] instead since [major local employer] outsources so much to them, from catering to maintenance to you name it, and he gave me a couple names to pass on for application purposes.
So walking in the door and asking “any chance of the start?” is not going to get you hired there, at least.
Public libraries (at least in most US cities) have free internet-connected computers you can use.
I’d need a steelman of the concept of rights, first.
Is literacy a basic human right? If so, when and where did that happen?
I think internet access is as basic to humans in early 21st century developed nations as literacy was in the early 20th; “right” is fuzzy when it comes to positive rights that require specific effort on someone else’s behalf, but whatever measures you’d have endorsed to make sure that young adults ca 1917 could at least read, roughly analogous measures are now appropriate to ensure that young adults have at least some internet access.
I’m a moderate kind of guy, but after watching BBC question time* last night, I feel a desperate need to secede, emigrate, seastead – anything!
“Trump did a bad tweet” – BOOOOO! – “Ban him from the country” – *CLAP CLAP CLAP* – “I really hate Trump” *CLAP CLAP CLAP*
Some British politicians are calling for Trump to be arrested for hate speech.
I feel like I’m living in a joke country, a sort of vulgar, unfunny, boring joke country, and I want off. I want to live in a sensible land, where people have sensible discussion, where public figures aren’t howled down the moment they go off the carefully planned (and completely nonsensical) virtue signally script.
A country without Alan Kurdi policy making. Where Peter Hitchens is Prime Minister.
Any ideas? Do you think there are enough people who feel similarly that maybe, some day, we could take over the Isle of Wight or something? Any other suggestions?
*Panel show where politicians and other worthies take questions from a studio audience.
The traditional solution for Brits unhappy with their government has been to move to America.
You’ve been living in a joke country for the longest time, mate. It’s why your comedians are so good.
That will just confirm what a big racist you are.
Yeah, we can see through the undead supremacist agenda that’s being pushed here!
The Wight Nationalist Worker’s Party would like to make a statement clarifying that it is not “undead supremacist” but rather “undead separationist”. It believes in the right of all magically animated beings to maintain the unique fabric of their society. We have nothing against golems, but golems don’t belong here. They shouldn’t be allowed to just enter undead territory and undercut undead laborers making an honest undeath terrorizing small villages for the local wizard. Golems who come here are stealing the human flesh from hard working undead mouths!
I don’t think it makes too much sense to get outraged about political theater. I’d just tune it out, same way I tune out the 24 hour news cycle.
Remember that guy who lasted like 10 days? What was his name? Scarmucci?
The last time I heard something sensible said of Trump by a UK politician was Question Time a few years ago early during the US Primary when Chuka Umunna said something along the lines of “Trump? Why are we still talking about this man? If we all just stopped paying attention to him he’d go away!”
I think the current political problems in the UK stem back to the Con/Dem alliance of 2010, which finally broke the collective hallucination of “we want our politicians to compromise and cooperate to get things done.” When the LibDems provided an example of how to broker power sharing deals and compromise to pass legislation (and I feel like the Government’s record since 2015 shows the LibDems were a significant moderating force) people realized that when they said they want compromise, what they meant was that the Other Side to compromise on all of their values so Our Side can legislate what we want.
Thus the mess we currently have, where the only remaining sure-fire way to score political support is by bashing Donald Trump.
(Of course 2010 coincides with the time when I was beginning to properly follow politics, so I’m probably very biased on this date!)
I don’t think Trump was joking. I think he really hates Muslims. It’s possible that it would be a better British response to claim what he did was so ridiculous it must be a joke.
It’s pretty clear that you and I would be happier in different micronations.
Clarification, it’s possible to hate Islam without hating Muslims. It’s okay to hate ideas, especially really bad ones like Islam.
That said, Britain is in a state of dhimmitude.
I think I’m the opposite – Islam seems ok – I’m a little worried about the Muslims.
Any religion is okay when people ignore the parts that tell them to hurt other people, and focus on the parts that tell them to become more virtuous.
I’m certainly no expert, but it seems to me that Islam is a really practical religion that addresses issues of violence and domination without hypocrisy.
I don’t want to go to war. Peace is fine by me.
But I think if I was going to go to war, I’d want to ensure the submission of those I was fighting against.
And maybe, when I say “I want peace” I’m being hypocritical, in that I want peace on my own terms, without any paying any price for it. In practical terms, Christians, where they have had a state, have had to be (essentially) Muslim.
As I say, I’m no expert. I’m probably more interested in philosophy than religion.
But, I think I object less to principle of violent passages within the Koran, and more to the simple fact that those passages are aimed against me and mine.
In pretty much the sense that the Us is in a a state of Dummytude.
Meanwhile, the government is seriously considering plans to give returning ISIS fighters council houses in order to “re-integrate them into society”. So apparently, in the eyes of the political class, “tweeting nasty things about Muslims” = “evil, ban him”, “going abroad to murder non-Muslims” = “well, maybe they were just naïve, let’s see what we can do to help them”.
Of course they are.
Well, I hope whatever they do works.
I honestly think the best way to appeal to the kind of people who want to live in the Islamic State would be to start public executions of traitors. They’d probably love that.
By traitors, do you mean ISIS fighters or the political class?
ISIS fighters.
I think I’d be more comfortable with them being allowed back in the country as long as I knew they’d be killed if they were found to be plotting mass murder.
Have them swear an oath, repent, if they break that, death penalty.
Well, the political class there is evil. The challenge for good people is how to humanely get rid of the forces of evil.
The most humane idea I’ve ever heard proposed in political philosophy is periodic elections whereby evil people who get into power could be non-violently stripped of all power and replaced by another person of the majority’s choice.
Problem is, if you hold some extreme fringe position like not particularly wanting to live next door to a Jihadi who is determined to kill your children (and you don’t have much money) you are out of luck.
That’s pretty much what Britain First, the EDF, Tommy Robinson are – a protest of the ignored, insulted, and victimised working class. Of course, they are considered completely outside of acceptability, and demonised by the political classes.
So, I’m not really too sure what can be done.
Perhaps part of the problem is an attachment to party politics – people don’t vote for individuals, but for parties with an executive plan. Politicians aren’t elected on their individual merits, but by their association with a party brand name – which allows for tighter control of legislators, who can be driven in strange directions.
I think maybe a more powerful non-party political upper house with a real power to prevent crazy shit going down might help.
Other than that, it’s secession.
On the other hand, maybe everything is working as it should and the deplorables should just shut the hell up and get with the program.
Yes, as Pope Francis would tell us, legislators shouldn’t pay any attention to the safety of pre-existing citizens when drafting immigration policy. If a few of you plebs get beheaded by your diverse new neighbours, that’s a sacrifice your betters are willing (for you) to make (on their behalf).
That’s pretty much what Britain First, the EDF, Tommy Robinson are – a protest of the ignored, insulted, and victimised working class.
I have to agree that this is not adequately addressed, since a lot of the enthusiasm about immigration is from the London-based types whose experience is “Saudi princelings buying expensive property as investment, my firm sells this to them and I make cracking commission off those sales, so I’m all for free movement and open borders” and “I’ve hired this wonderful Polish builder/plumber/electrician to do my loft conversion”, while the disgruntled are “I can’t afford to live anywhere in London as all the property prices are jacked up by foreign investors buying property they never even live in” and “They’re hiring cheap Polish labour and I can’t get the job instead”.
Saying that opposition from the second group is purely and solely based on racism is not tackling the question and leaves them open to “well okay, if you’re calling me a racist, and the only people taking my concerns seriously are this party you call racists as well, then sign me up to vote for the racists!”
The US government sometimes needs to train diplomatic personnel to speak a language from scratch. How long this takes varies quite a bit, depending on the language:
http://www.openculture.com/2017/11/a-map-showing-how-much-time-it-takes-to-learn-foreign-languages-from-easiest-to-hardest.html
Basically, English is a Germanic language with a lot of Romance influence, so we have an easy time learning the languages of western Europe, where those two language groups are found. Spanish is Romance, so it’s easy. Dutch is Germanic, so it’s easy too. The farther away you get from those language groups, the more foreign the languages, and the longer it takes.
But there are some complications. For some reason we English speakers struggle with Icelandic and German, two Germanic languages that you’d think would be easy for us.
Either there are no countries/regions where it takes ~36 weeks (but not ~30 or ~44) to learn their language, or it takes ~36 weeks to learn some kind of micro language spoken only on the borders between Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.
[Edit] Like most humans, I don’t read signage. It says right there in the legend/”blurb” there are no Category III languages in Europe.
Those are the two living Germanic languages with the most complicated morphology. I imagine that makes things a bit harder for speakers of a language with a whole of four inflectional suffixes.
With Bitcoin hovering near or above $10,000 the past few days, and with this being picked up and commented on by major news sources, I’m curious if any of you folks who own Bitcoins sold them this week, or if you’re planning to soon. Has the recent spike caused any of you to lose faith in Bitcoin? If not, any inkling where you think it might peak?
(This is just idle curiosity on my part; I’m not looking for investing advice. Looking at Bitcoin’s meteoric rise over the past year (and particularly over the past several weeks), it sure looks to me like it’s going to have one hell of a bust.)
I know nothing about the inner mechanisms of bitcoin but it has been called a bubble literally every year since 2011.
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
Known antivirus magnate and psychopath John McAfee is calling for it to hit $1 million by 2020 (and promising to eat his own dick if it doesn’t)
If he though it was going from 10k to 1 million in 3 years, why would he tell anyone?
Isn’t this just an attempt to make an I told you so prediction?
If he bought in for $100 (and isn’t planning on buying any more), why wouldn’t he try to convince everyone it’s on a rocket-ship to the moon and they need to buy buy buy now?
Yes, exactly; if he owns bitcoins, he wants everybody to believe bitcoins will go up, so that it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
When Bitcoin hit $5,000 I sold to get out my original investment. Whatever is does from here on out is pure gains for me, it’s my only speculative investment with the vast majority of my investments in diversified index funds, there’s still a lot of upside potential, and I’m financially okay with Bitcoin going to 0 if things don’t work out. I don’t plan on selling anymore Bitcoin for dollars, though I do plan on using Bitcoin to purchase things directly as time goes on. There’s a Matrix Bitcoin meme:
Neo: What are you trying to tell me, that I can trade my Bitcoin for millions someday?
Morpheus: No Neo, I’m trying to tell you that when you’re ready…you won’t have to.
As to where Bitcoin might go…it could go to zero if a competing cryptocurrency performs all its functions better or a new attack vector is found that compromises its security. Or, if it becomes a better store of value than gold, with widespread adoption by institutions and the masses, and takes over gold’s market cap of ~$7 trillion, then one BTC would be worth ~$350,000. If it becomes a replacement in part or whole for any fiat currencies too, it’s value would be higher than that.
I’m watching all this as an interested outsider (it’s fascinating to see a gold rush take off right under my nose, as it were) and there seem to be two ways to invest in Bitcoin:
(1) The prudent way
(2) The ‘you are going to ruin yourself’ way
And a lot of the new investors seem to be taking the second way. I have no doubt professional investors, large institutions like banks, and people who are not brokers as a living but understand how markets work and have already invested successfully in stocks and bonds and the like will make a profit off Bitcoin. I’m equally sure the new, small investors who are sinking their life savings and borrowing as much money as they can to invest are going to lose their shirts, because they won’t be able to identify when the crest is, when the recovery from a crash is, and when the real crash comes.
It all reminds me of a 1909 detective story, where one man ruins another by encouraging him to buy shares in a gold mining company. The value of the shares rises like a rocket (complete with first rise, then crash, then recovery to rise and keep rising again), the second guy wonders if he should perhaps sell now just before any possible crash, the first guy tells him that maybe he should as it would be safer (but in such a way that the second guy thinks ‘aha, he knows they’re going to rise even higher and he hopes to buy my stock’) and then they crash and he’s ruined (turns out the first guy was the representative of a deep-pocketed investment firm and they rigged the whole rise of the stock by secretly buying up the stock and disseminating rumours, sold when it was at its highest just before the crash, and made a comfortable profit).
What a simple thing money-making was after all. Quite, and that’s the bait that has ruined many a person 🙂 To make it even better, guy one tells guy two from the very start that it’s all rigged, and because guy two now believes he has the real inside information, he never notices when he’s being conned:
Let’s say you have two people who have a strong opinion on some political issue and are on opposite sides(they don’t know each other). They both have a strong ideological reason for their beliefs. Eventually, they realize their bias and try to be more open minded. Eventually, they start moving away from their biases but end up closer to the other side of the spectrum. If we have a strong reason to believe they care more about the truth than proving their ideology, why wouldn’t they converge to one position?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann%27s_agreement_theorem
I´m not assuming common knowledge. They don´t know each other. But I am assuming that they have access to the same information and they didn´t choose their position based on their general bias or else they wouldn´t have chosen a position that´s on the opposite side.
Perhaps even though they care more about the truth than proving their ideology, they’re not very good at truthseeking and often think that they’re seeking truth when in fact they’re trying to prove their ideology?
If they are just trying to prove their ideology, then why would they believe the opposite side of the spectrum of this issue? To put it in more concrete terms, imagine two people studying the issue of financial regulation. One of them is more libertarian and the other is more social democrat. At first, they have pretty straightforward opinions that follow clearly from their bias. But they do research and the libertarian ends up supporting more regulation and the social democrat less. They haven’t converged so much as flipped positions. Maybe they aren’t honest truth seekers but you can’t explain this in terms of supporting their ideology. So why wouldn’t they converge?
Most disputes are over values, not facts. What knowledge would change a view from “I want a world in which everyone is equal” to “I want a diverse world”?
Are you thinking about specific instances where this has happened? I don’t know why they wouldn’t tend to converge.
Has anyone here read Jaron Lanier’s book Who Owns the Future? I found the first 30-ish pages a bit rambling and lazy, and so I flipped ahead to get a sense of whether it was worth continuing. There’s a section in Chapter 10 headlined ‘Experimentalism and Popular Perception’, in which Lanier discusses the Laffer Curve. I feel like I’m going crazy, because as far as I can tell he doesn’t just completely misunderstand the point of the Laffer Curve, but even draws it upside down. I know that well-respected authors make mistakes, but this would be getting into ‘surely I’m missing something’ territory even if I wasn’t clueless about economics (which I am). So if anyone wants to either tell me what I’m missing, or confirm that Lanier was just making it up as he went along, I’d appreciate it. The relevant section is available through Amazon’s ‘look inside’ feature: https://www.amazon.com/Who-Owns-Future-Jaron-Lanier/dp/1451654979
You’re right, Lanier gets it completely wrong.
Thanks.
Man, I keep thinking I’m sufficiently cynical, then being forced to reevaluate. I know the world of publishing is probably as messed up as every other industry, but still, how on earth did that get past Lanier, the editors, the gushing blurb-writers, and (as far as I can make out) all of the reviewers? And that’s just a section I randomly flipped to, and happened to have enough background knowledge to notice that it wasn’t just confusing/confused, but flat-out wrong. Who knows what else is hiding in the other 300 pages.
Anyone have a theory about why sharks shut down if you turn them upside down?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_death#Tonic_immobility
My thinking is that this is a glitch, sort of like those goats that faint if you scare them. It doesn’t serve any function, but it persists because the trigger (being turned over) is so rare for a free-swimming apex predator that there isn’t any real selection pressure against it.
Until the killer whales discovered it, and started using it to hunt shark …
Do we have any reason to think killer whales only started doing this recently, and not e.g. 10 million years ago?
Nah, killer whales read about it on Wikipedia or Quora like everyone else.
I believe the behavior was discovered only recently, which suggests that killer whales only discovered this hunting method recently, or that it isn’t actually very effective compared to other killer whale hunting activities, or that it is difficult to transmit for some reason.
Does it effect egg-laying sharks as well?
@DavidFriedman: On the subject of fitting paperback books in pockets
Sorry to revive a pretty inane point from OT89.75, but I finally went and measured some of my own books. A couple were 4″x7″ but most were 5″x8″ or 6″x8″. The smaller ones were also older scifi that were printed over a decade ago (Connie Willis’ Bellweather and William Gibson’s Idoru), so possibly standard paperback sizes have increased recently? The other possibility is that my more recent paperbacks were mostly given to me as gifts, so people bought larger/nicer editions.
And this fall I’ve mostly been reading on my Kindle (5″x6.75″) or hardcovers from the library (big). So maybe that influenced my internal estimate of book size.
But I don’t think even the 4″x7″ fit comfortably in my pants pockets, so unfortunately I’m back to my original conclusions that its men’s vs. women’s pockets. Oh well, at least this is the culture ware thread. WHY FASHION, WHY?! 🙁
On a more positive note, this experiment led to the discover that my Kindle fits (just barely!) in the pocket of my favorite jacket! So that’s nice.
Because Fashion has a burning hatred for women and thus will not put any practical features on women’s clothing. There are rumors that this is because when Fashion was a young boy, a little girl at the playground called him a “stupidface”. At that point he took a vow of vengeance and swore to quietly sabotage women however he could.
If you’re a woman (okay, if you are typically wearing clothes marketed towards women) then I don’t expect you could, no. I think they assume you have a purse. I can fit paperbacks into most short pants pockets easily, and jeans with some difficulty. I don’t wear slacks much, but that’s usually easier.
>I think they assume you have a purse.
Yeah, that’s probably it. Indeed, since becoming a Working Professional this summer I have acquired a Reasonably Nice Purse, which also fits my kindle (and has room for other things). And even before that I was a college student so just brought my backpack everywhere, even if the occasion called for something classier. So smaller pockets isn’t really that big a deal, but it would be nice to be able to store more things on your person.
This same discussion came about when it was suggested that smart phones replace many other things one might have to carry. Unfortunately, phones have been getting bigger and are probably well out of lady like pocket capacity.
Yep, but they have been too big for a while. One nice thing is that as they continue increasing they might be too large for guy pockets, triggering a society-wide re-examination of phones and/or pockets.
(… well, a girl can dream!)
This is why women need smart watches.
They’re broadly useless for men (or, well, “people who carry their phones in their pockets”), but they’re quite good for “people who carry their phones in purses/bags/some other place where they can’t see or hear them.”
I’ve seen the “why no pockets in women’s pants/dresses?” question
pop up every so often over the years. It usually involves women decrying the lack of pockets or functional pockets. From my biased view it looks like women are crazy enthusiastic about pockets, but for some reason they’re stymied by big fashion. Maybe big fashion wants women to continue buying purses and handbags. I don’t know.
Regardless, there are options for women who want functional pockets, mentioned in the Atlantic article I linked. Patagonia, holsters, and even bras!
I haven’t read any of your linked articles, but this is topic is a perennial favorite complaint among my friends and I. The complaint in the OP was mostly rhetorical and lighthearted (I mean yeah, I’d be in favor of more and bigger pockets, but I’m getting by just fine with the status quo. Actually first can we get rid of the norm of nice pants having sewn-up pockets? This really annoys and confuses me.)
I think articles and complaints like mine make it seem like there’s a lot more enthusiasm than there is. You notice the times when women are excited about it and complain about it or write articles, but you don’t notice the vast majority of the time that we don’t care. I’m probably more enthusiastic about pockets than most women, and I hardly ever think about it, unless something prompts me like DavidFriedman’s original mention of keeping a book in his pocket. So even among women who want bigger pockets (well generalizing from myself) there isn’t a sustained will to do much about it. And I’m not convinced all that many women want bigger pockets ever — it would impact styles and appearance, which lot’s of people DO care about, and I’ve talked to women who don’t think bigger pockets would be better than carrying a bag everywhere.
And yes, there are niche brands that emphasize their pockets — and outdoorsy brands like Patagonia do tend to do much better on providing useful pockets! But I don’t think there’s the social pressure to change the norm for women’s clothes in general.
I tend to specifically look for pockets when I shop for new pants, in hopes that enough of us doing that may help encourage the market.
Also, real pockets that are sewn shut I’m pretty sure are a compromise between us pocket-users and the purported-to-exist women who favor the appearance of pockets but don’t want any actual stuff in there messing up their silhouette. Whenever I buy pants like this, the stitches holding the pockets shut are always a separate line so you can remove them without damaging anything else.
Now, a FAKE pocket, or a might-as-well-be-fake pocket that’s like one centimeter deep, that sort of thing I hate with the fury of a thousand suns.
Men’s clothing sometimes comes with sewn shut pockets as well, sewn in a way that is easy to open. I don’t know what the reason is.
https://brokensecrets.com/2010/09/13/why-suit-jacket-pockets-are-sewn-shut/
@Loquat
>I tend to specifically look for pockets when I shop for new pants, in hopes that enough of us doing that may help encourage the market.
Good for you! I sometimes try to do this as well, but I already find clothes shopping hard and stressful enough that I don’t prioritize it.
>Whenever I buy pants like this, the stitches holding the pockets shut are always a separate line so you can remove them without damaging anything else.
I suspected this but I know so little about sewing/clothes-making that I’ve left the stitches in — I would feel so dumb if I ruined a $60 pair of pants immediately by cutting them open! However, I’ve also definitely pulled the stiches out by accident/fidgeting and I don’t think those pants have fallen apart, so cutting them with scissors should be even less likely to cause damage (note to self: todo tonight 😛 ).
>Now, a FAKE pocket, or a might-as-well-be-fake pocket that’s like one centimeter deep, that sort of thing I hate with the fury of a thousand suns.
ENTIRELY AGREED.
@Aapje
Thanks for the link, that was interesting! Looks like there is (at least a little) debate over pockets in menswear too. I wonder how the no-pockets crowd holds their stuff — if they think things full pockets mess up the lines of a suit, I would think a backpack/satchel would mess it up even more.
I have seen a claim that the pocketlessness of women’s clothing is part of a deliberate patriarchal conspiracy started during the French Revolution to stop women concealing weapons…
A left-wing patriarchal conspiracy against Charlotte Cordays?
(Fun fact: at her trial, Corday used utilitarianism to justify killing Marat. It didn’t work.)
I feel like I’ve seen this somewhere too…
I do remember an r/AskHistorians answer that discussed the history of pockets in womens clothing, and there was definitely a change in the nature of pockets in the late 18th century, but I don’t remember the details. I’ll post it if I can find it later.
(Also worth mentioning:the pocket used to be a separate article of clothing/accessory, more like the holster Odovacer mentions above. I don’t remember when this changed.)
Not a historian, so take this with a grain of salt, but: a pocket used to be a separate pouch, worn on a belt or cord. Women in the early modern era would wear them between layers of clothes, for concealment or protection, and in this case there might be slits in the outer clothes that you could reach them through. (A “wallet”, incidentally, was a similar article.)
I believe pockets in this sense got less common in the late 18th century as women’s fashion started moving away from multi-layered petticoats, and pockets in the modern sense started appearing sometime in the 19th.
5×8 or 6×8 is trade paperback size. 4×7 is mass-market paperback size. Trades are more durable and usually more expensive. For a long time, mass-market paperbacks were standard for genre publishing, but in the last ten years or so there’s been a tendency for more “literary” authors in SF and especially fantasy to be sold in the trade format. A lot of Neil Gaiman’s recent books have been sold that way, for example.
Doorstopper fantasy is still usually sold in mass-market format once it reaches paperback, though.
Thank you for the explanation of “mass-market” vs. “trade”! I’ve seen the terms a lot but never understood what they were referring to.
Originally, trade paperbacks essentially were just hardcover books with different covers. They used the same page-proofs. They were called trade paperbacks because they were intended to be sold through the trades, i.e., dedicated booksellers and other specialty shops.
Mass-market books had a smaller format with cheaper paper, so couldn’t use the same paginations as trades. (In fact, most mass-market books were never published as hardcovers at all.) They were called mass-market because they were intended to be sold at supermarkets, drug stores, and the like rather than specialized shops.
They also differed in how unsold units were handled. Unsold trades could eventually be sent back to the publisher by the bookseller for refunds. Unsold mass-market books were generally “stripped”: only the covers were returned after being torn off. The rest of the volumes, without covers, were simply “pulped”.
The publishing industry, of course, has now changed from this.
My jeans are approximately a half inch thick, 2 pounds, and made of a mixture of blue dye and 200-grit sandpaper. They have a lot of room for my legs. My wife’s jeans are more like 2mm thick, weigh 2 ounces, and are made of a blend of gossamer and Spandex, again mixed with blue dye. They are form-fitting. Of course mine have a lot more room for books!
(Warning: some slight overstatement may have been employed above)
Just wear cargo shorts, which are acceptable for any sex and any demographic
It would be more accurate to say “equally ugly for any sex and demographic”.
Yes, this.
That’s, like, your opinion, man.
haters gonna hate
scottevest has women’s clothing with lots of pockets (i tried posting a link to the site, but not sure it worked)
Hey, I need some help finding a novella. Pretty sure it was mentioned in a link dump, or as a candidate for the book club, or in a comment thread (possibly about accelerando, which it reminds me a bit of).
It was about two dueling artificial intelligences–one a hive-like mind called the demiurge, one a more individualistic and branching community, both trying to defend their areas of the galaxy against the other. Also, in the background, is another “intelligence”–a great, terrifying mass of ever-encroaching grey goo logic, which can only be temporarily contained at best.
The plot involved some branch of one of the two intelligences being simulated inside the other and finding a “lemma”, some snippet of logic that could be brought out of the simulation and used against the grey good, which I believe was called brobdingnag.
I don’t think you’re describing Scott’s short story (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/21/repost-the-demiurges-older-brother/) but it’s pretty similar and perhaps the novella you’re thinking of was mentioned in the comments there?
“True Names”
Cory Doctorow and Benjamin Rosenbaum
I haven’t read it but it sounds interesting.
Thanks! I was curious about it as well.
Appears to be available legally (CC) for free:
https://archive.org/details/TrueNames
I’ve probably been beaten to the punch on this, but what if The Comet King was a firefighter? Massive spoilers for UNSONG, in case it’s not obvious.
Do we still think that Trump is not a racist ? Is it still crying wolf ?
Islam is a race now? But I thought Islam is the cure to racism! Though I guess you have a point, if Trump opposes Islam, and Islam is the real cure to racism, then that makes Trump at the very least an opponent to anti-racism.
Right, Trump makes the difference between “muslims” and “brown people” crystal clear. As demonstrated in the link I provided.
Your link is to a reddit post, which links to a BBC article, which includes a screenshot of the tweets Trump retweeted. Where is the distinction made? Or are you being sarcastic?
Sure as sunrise, any accusation of racism against X will be followed by a comment of “But is X really a race?” As if racism was the only way something could be evil, so if it’s not racist, it must be okay.
Yes, we’re all sticklers for correct terminology here, but “religionist” hasn’t really caught on as a term so I’m not going to flip out over it.
Well, to the extent that it is used at all, I am more likely to see it used as an approximate antonym of ‘atheist’, i.e. someone who follows a religion, without specify what religion.
Would ‘(anti-)religious prejudice’ work better?
It seems to me that there’s a *much* stronger case for the claim
Trump is an anti-Muslim bigot
than the claim
Trump is a racist.
And I think it’s actually pretty important to be clear about exactly what we mean when we toss around these words, since they’re commonly used in extremely fuzzy ways.
I don’t see support for either claim. Trump is a demagogue who believes he can get attention and political support by saying hostile things about Muslims.
DavidFriedman:
Fair enough. His rhetoric is often explicitly hostile to Muslims and hispanics, whereas I don’t think that’s true in general for blacks or gays. What he feels in his innermost heart about Muslims is unknowable.
Trump calling for the execution of the Central Park five even after there was good reason to think they weren’t guilty suggests some degree of anti-black racism. Likewise, his birtherism might be racism, or it might be political opportunism and epistomological irresponsibility. (Is this a culture wars thread or what?)
His major animus is against Muslims and hispanics, though.
Speaking of birtherism, I talked with a man who seemed to know a lot about birther arguments. I asked him what he thought would happen if Obama were removed from office because he didn’t met the natural born citizen requirement, and the birther had no idea.
Presumably, the outcome would be that Biden would become president.
This suggests to me that the birther community wasn’t thinking about their goals at all. Whether it was racism or political animus or something else, this seems very weird to me.
Have you not considered ‘Respect for the Constition’? “Who? Whom?” and similar maxims are the domain of the left, and not something that would really feature in the conscious calculations of Birtherists.
Obama’s publisher said he was Kenyan-born. As soon as this was bought to Obama’s attention he should have said sorry and then gave the complete evidence of his being born in the US* rather than having his supporters scream ‘Racists!’.
The issue of whether he could legitimately run is hugely important and should of had cross-party consensus that Obama should have taken all the (very easy) steps to end the doubt that Obama and his publisher of choice created.
* Which he obviously didn’t do, as it took the current President to force Obama to finally give the full evidence.
No it doesn’t. It suggests he believed they were guilty. It’s quite a leap to go from that to “He believed they were guilty solely because they were black.”
The intense desire to punish the only suspect available when the alternative is punishing no one at all, is an error orthogonal to racism. I’ve seen it happen far too often, and with suspects of all races including white guys, e.g. Richard Jewell. Or, more locally, the current mayor of my city still insists that this guy is guilty of a crime he pretty clearly didn’t commit because something something the victim deserves justice something tough on crime blah blah.
Donald Trump is pretty clearly an anti-muslim bigot and he may be a weakly anti-black racist, but he’s also very clearly a Tough On Crime idiot.
@johansenindustries
What, right-wingers are incapable of making decisions based on who benefits and who loses out?
@dndnrsn
The fact that I wrote ‘don’t’ and you read ‘can’t’ kind of proves my point about the left-wing mindset.
If you want an example, then the most obvious one is ‘Iam glad slavery is abolished since slavery is an evil’ vs ‘I am glad slavery is abolished since slaveowners are evil’
This:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_conspiracy_theories#/media/File:BarackObamaCertificationOfLiveBirthHawaii.jpg
released to the public on June 12, 2008 was more than sufficient for anyone that wasn’t insane or racist or both.
@Brad
It doesn’t matter if a quarter of Americans are racist, insane or insanely racist.
On something that affects his eligibility to be President, he should not have his publisher claim that he was born in Kenya and then use the controversy to rile his base instead of providing the proof that he so easily could.
Since you’ve repeated the claim twice now, do you have some audio or video clip of Obama’s publisher saying he was born in Kenya? Or even better some proof that Obama “had his publisher claim” that?
> instead of providing the proof that he so easily could.
He did. I just linked it above.
@johansenindustries
You stated that it’s the domain of the left. What’s your evidence the right doesn’t do it? Or, some people on the left, some people on the right, etc. You’re just flatly stating something and telling me what I believe.
@Brad
That proof was not good enough. Perhaps you think that it should have been. Perhaps you think it is evidence of great evil amongst Americans that it wasn’t. But the fact is it wasn’t. A quarter of Americans wrre still unconvinced by the short form. It took the long-form certificate for it to go to lizardmen levels and Obama refused to release the longform certificate until he had milked the controversy dry.
You are correct that I should not have written* ‘said’. Well done. However, I did not make the ‘said’ claim twice since I the second was a ‘claim’ claim which is perfectly legitimate to use in reference to written materials.
Obama, to some extent, picks his publisher. He chooses what image to present to his publisher. He chooses what books to send to his publisher. When he is running for President, I think he has to take more responsibility. The obvious example is when it is said that people have their accountant (as opposed to their publisher) prepare documents that way when it is likely that they just acquiested with what the accountant said. Or perhaps ‘Why did Trump fake a Times cover” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/06/27/why-did-trump-fake-a-time-cover-look-for-a-clue-in-the-real-ones/?utm_term=.697952981e39)
* I almost did it again there.
(https://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/birthers/booklet.asp)
Where someone was born isn’t a matter of opinion so I’m not sure why you are citing opinion polls. (Except not actually citing.)
@dndsrn
Isn’t is the done-thing in rationalist circles that you can’t prove a negative?
I can only point out that identity politics is associated with the left. Hate laws are promoted by the left (particularly in America, in the UK it is more that opposing hate laws makes you right-wing). Protected categories are prefered by the left. Class war rhetoric (possibly the original identity politics, so I might be double-counting) used to be the left’s raison d’etra.
The phrase ‘they’re voting against their economic interests’ is an oft-heard phrase amongst left-wing circles. And despite mostly hanging around right-wing circles I can’t think of a right-wing equivilant. The right mainly think of hurting society or everyone. The left thinks we’re all doomed, but particularly pooorer islands and that’s terrible.
One example is Obamacare. This site: has the criticisms of Obamacare summarised as being
The bit about small busness is definitely the more left-wing thinking and indeed I might say it exist to appeal to left-wing thinking, but the vast majority of those things are about everyone. Compare that to the left’s view about reforming Obamacare* which are just a list of as many sympathetic special interests as they can think of.
(* I can’t find a similar summary on that issue. Tell me if you disagree with mine.
However, certainly there will be people with the attitude I associate with the left in the right camp. For this open thread the obvious example would be Nazis. Who like the right’s value of toleration at the moment. Another example: Right wingers think sucker punching people is wrong. There could definitely be groups on the left that are the same way. There’s no such thing as an absolute.
@Brad
You were the one to link to Wikipedia.
We are not discussing where Obama was born. We are discussing whether he provided sufficient proof of where he was born, and the nature of sufficient proof has to depend on his audience. And on issues of legitimacy, when he’s running for President, that audience has to be every American.
He ought to have made a good faith effort to remove all doubts. He didn’t. He took a half measure. We know he took a half measure because once the gains from keeping the controversy alive were gone* he finally did release the long-form birth certificate.
*Mostly birthers getting used o their representatives not being.
Do we have to re-litigate boring political arguments from ten years ago every couple of weeks on here?
@johansenindustries
OK, prove the positive. “Who-Whom” was just Lenin’s pithy way, as far as I can tell, of saying “the important question is whether they win or we do.” It’s been adopted more recently by Sailer followers, again as far as I can tell, to express their belief that people on the left categorize an action as being good or bad based on who does it.
But one can find the right doing both things. For an example of the former sense, the current tax bill will dick over a lot of grad students, but that makes who-whom sense if you consider that grad students rarely vote Republican. For an example of the latter, I can predict with eerie accuracy whether the left-wing majority or right-wing minority on my Facebook feed will talk about a given murderous attack, based on who did the attack and whom they did it against – about 2/3 of a week after that guy plowed into counterprotesters in Charlottesville, there was an Islamist terror attack involving vehicular homicide, and the people talking about Charlottesville and the evils of vehicular homicide didn’t mention it, and the people who had been quiet about Charlottesville were suddenly up in arms about the evils of plowing a car or truck into groups of people. That is exactly “who-whom” in the sense it’s used by Sailer, etc, and I see everyone doing it, because it’s basic tribalism.
The left, right now, is more into identity politics, or, at least, is more into openly expressing the concept. But plenty of stuff one sees in the mainstream Republican party rightwards can be seen as “identity politics for white people” (or, for certain sorts of white people). I don’t think you can call “class warfare” identity politics – it’s a material thing, isn’t it? You can’t identify as proletarian if you own a factory, and if you give a member of the proletariat a big stock portfolio, they’re not still a member of the proletariat, are they?
Easy equivalent. The right-wing version of “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” style “they vote against their economic interests because Republican elites snooker them with promises of culture-war stuff they won’t ever actually get” is that some democratic voter blocs are kept voting democrat by social welfare, etc, programs that are long-term harmful. I’m pretty sure Thomas Sowell talks about this, so you don’t have to go too far right! (The farther-right version is a lot more crude).
I will acknowledge that “these underprivileged groups have worse health care than the average and we need to help them” is a thing on the left, but I don’t know how it plays into either an original or a contemporary (Sailerite, really) understanding of “who-whom.”
Is “don’t sucker-punch people” an element of right-wing thought? Or is it simply that right now the biggest political proponents of sucker-punching (after all, most sucker punching is entirely politics-neutral; tapping a guy on the shoulder then plowing him in the jaw probably happens more due to alcohol and petty beefs than politics) are on the far left?
And, most left-wingers think sucker-punching people is wrong. The “punching Nazis is great” crowd complain constantly that the far larger numbers of ordinary liberals, social democrats, etc don’t appreciate them enough, are too weak to embrace punching, etc etc.
‘Can be seen’ is not the same thing as actually is. When all you have is one lense then everything will be split between things that ‘make sense it that lense’ and incomprehensible hate and evil. Its the same thing as thinking that attempts to simplify the tax-code must be borne from animosity to universities who had benefited from the loopholes and special dispensitions being put in.
The right absolutely opposed the Charlottesvill ramming and thought it was bad. Not focusing on it is more abut marketing than principles. Even if it were otherwise you’re reasoning would still be circular. The left being outraged by one right-winger killing one person while being more offended by hypothetical backlash than the frequest Islamist attacks is only symmetrical with the right if you assume that they are symetrical.
Is not the fact that there’s a pithy phrase for the left-wing eqivilany pretty good evidence that the former is the more common.
But yes when it happens, that is both sides assuming that the other intends to vote in their own interests but are failing. However, the left’s position is “How can these people be so stupid?”, the right’s position is that “Actually in the long-run the effects of welfare are harmful to thoe communities”.
The answer to the right are that these people are not profesional economists or that in the long-run we’re all dead. The answer to the left is that they’re not actually just concerned with their own narrow self-interest.
The left’s position is that working-class right-wingers must be stupid. They come to this conclusion by not realising the possibility that they do not intend to vote in their own self-interest. They do not realise the possibility because abstract principles are not something they possess. The fact that the right are outraging the left with actions that the left cannot comprehend is proof that the right do.
Nobody ever engages in wide-eye confusion for why A-Americans vote Dem.
Its when you say things like that then it proves my point. There really are people who hold principles rather than principals. Some people do find ‘ And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?’ resonating with them. As just as its reasonable to conflate Republicans with right-wing, it is reasonable to conflate them with right-wing too.
Perhaps, The Guardian and the like don’t count as real left-wing. But is there an equivilant fake right-wing paper saying that its OK to engage in anti-civilisation behaviour if it makes a Nazi (or comminie or whatevr) uncomfortable?
If a left-wing proposal to simplify the tax code included a bunch of stuff removing loopholes etc that benefit, say, fossil-fuel manufacturers – would it be fair to speculate that an urge to harm fossil fuel manufacturers is at play?
First, it’s false to say everyone on the right condemned what happened in Charlottesville. It’s not especially hard to find people on/around the fringe right saying that car guy was acting in self defence, or whatever. Second, Second, it seems to me that you’re attributing a given action by someone on the right to “marketing” but on the left to “principles.”
So, because Lenin coined a pithy phrase, that proves this is a left-wing thing? Come on, that’s not pretty good evidence of anything.
You keep talking about what “the left” thinks. I was unaware that these were positions that I, someone on the left, holds. I was also unaware that I do not hold abstract principles.
Have you read What’s the Matter with Kansas? The thesis is not that right-wingers voting against their economic interests are idiot rubes. Frank, the author of that book, which was quite the big thing in left-liberal circles ten or fifteen years ago, did not assume that stupidity was the reason. He recognized that they valued some things more than others. He did not think they were stupid, or snookered into thinking abortion more important than their own economic interests – his description of their snookering lay in the fact that Republican politicians had a habit of promising prayer in schools or an end to abortion and then delivering free market or crony-capitalist legislation.
OK, but their explanations for why differ.
Is there a reason to believe that people who hold “principles rather than principals” are disproportionately found on the right? Is there evidence that they do? And the “you saying this proves my point” framing is really kind of condescending.
The major reason that the sucker-punching proponents are left-wingers, mostly fairly far left, is that the whole “punch a Nazi” thing comes out of the 80s/early 90s punk scene, where modern North American antifa mostly descend from, where there was a problem with Nazi punks, so anti-Nazi punks basically made it a policy to punch them whenever they showed up. By and large, it worked. So, you’ve got an element on the left that has had previous success with relatively more frequent low-intensity violence: it’s usually not incredibly dangerous, it’s emotionally satisfying, and for some applications, it works (you don’t see many Nazi punks around). There’s no equivalent on the right, but that doesn’t prove some difference in the essence between right and left; the difference is due to historical change. If there had been commies infesting the country music scene, and guys in cowboy hats and bandannas had started punching them to go away…
It’s not about “real left-wing”, it’s about “left-wing” including everyone from slightly-left-of-centre-centrists to tankies. You keep talking about “the left” as though it is this monolithic entity. That is pure outgroup homogeneity bias.
Possibly an implication of:
“Something must be done.
This is something.
So we must do it.”
Precisely. And since the incentive of the police is to stop looking for suspects once they have arrested someone they think is guilty, for everyone else “this” isn’t merely “something”, it’s the only thing available to be done.
One would not have to speculate. They would be loudly boasting about punishing the evil fossic fuel companies.
If they’re not boasting about punishing the fossil fuel companies and it just happens to hurt them, then no I do not think that it would be fair to think that they are lying about what reason they do give and are in fact motivated by hate for fossil fuel companies.
Having to kill somebndy to defend your own life is bad. Self-defence and bad aren’t opposites. ‘but on the left to “principles.”’, I’m certainly not. What somebody (left or right) is making a particular effort to publicise is obviously and innately marketing. It is when we get to beleifs that we can start talking about principals. If both sides agree that something is bad but its worse optics for one side then the fact that is is the other side publicises does not tell us about their principles.
I was refering to ‘What’s the trouble with Kansas’. But its definitely good evidence – if there was a culture and all you knew about it was that it had fourty words for snow would you think they were as likely from the Sahara desert and Alaska?
Yes they didn’t need a book – “quite the big thing in left-liberal circles ten or fifteen years ago” – to begin understanding why others voted against them [Yes I know, you didn’t need a book to tell you anything]. Ussain Bolt wouldn’t have had a hit racing career if many other people could run as fast as him. Thomas Frank wouldn’t have had a hit book if many other people on the left could simply look at Kansas and go ‘They probably have principles’.
I would call Thomas Frank the exception that proves the rule. But a brief look at his Wikipedia page says that he’s a former college Republican who has also wrote a book critical of the Democrats, so he doesn’t actually appear to be of the left.
There are many reasons. You have been reading them. Do you accept the existance of a great number of persons with principles? Do you accept that if those people were often found on the left then one would not be able to write a hit book exploring the rise of anti-elistist conservatism in the USA? Do you accept that such a book was a hit?
But guys in comboy hats didn’t punch commies to go away. You need to explain why they don’t exist. You say that difference today is because of the differences yesterday.
But how do you explain the differences yesterday when commies were infecting higher education or sports (or wherever) and there was still this lack of vigilante violence on the right?
I also refer to the right as a monotholic entity. Is that pure ingroup homogenity bias? Or is it just thinking that the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ do – in some areas, such as this one – cut reality at the joints?
@johansenindustries
No, the audience doesn’t have to be every American. He met all the legal requirements to be listed on the ballot in every state. That’s all he needed to do. Every birther lawsuit failed.
You and your compatriots weren’t satisfied. I acknowledge that. You claim that lack of satisfaction is sufficient reason in and of itself to give rise to an obligation on his part to do whatever it took to satisfy you. I disagree. No such obligation existed. And given that no such obligation existed, and that none of you were going to vote for him regardless, he had zero reason to cater to your inane demands.
@ Brad
Democratic instititutions are important and fragile things. I think it every person who is fortunate enough to live in a nation with them has an obligation to not deliberately damage those institutions in order to get your opponents to poorly react to rile up your base, just because it’s convenient.
FWIW, why is the location of his birth even an issue? He has citizenship via jus sanguinis anyway.
@Anonymous
Because the Constitution demands that president be a natural born citizen, and that has generally been held to mean having been born in the United States.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/donald-trump-says-central-park-five-are-guilty-despite-dna-n661941
@ John Schilling @ David Friedman
Trump kept calling for their conviction *after* someone else was convicted due to DNA evidence and they got a forty-one million settlement for false conviction.
I’m surprised this isn’t common knowledge here, and I suspect people aren’t hanging out in places where Trump is sufficiently hated.
On the other hand, it may be that I’m unusually interested in justice system atrocities.
@johansenindustries
Is there a rule that says this, or is it just an unwritten custom?
The constitution demands that the President be a natural born citizen. It does not define the term.
Which is one reason Trump is unfit for office. Raising spurious objections, which had already been disproven, to the constitutional eligibility for office of a duly elected President was an attack on our democracy.
But apparently a bunch of y’all didn’t care.
@Brad
Trump did not ‘raise’ those objections. He forced Obama to settle them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_conspiracy_theories#/media/File:BarackObamaCertificationOfLiveBirthHawaii.jpg
It was long since settled. All the organs of government so held. Trump insistence in the face of hard evidence that it wasn’t was an attack on our democracy. But it seems you only pretend to care about that.
@Brad
Proof is in the eye of the beholder. I always thought that McCain was less likely to be natural born. That certificate on the other hand may have proved it to you. It still didn’t prove it to a quarter of the country – honestly, Brad, I think you may have been the only one convinced – and since better proof would have been so easily to present he should have presented it.
Frankly, the idea that Obama wouldn’t show his full birth certificate because it would prove his being born elsewhere is in fact the more charitable explanation than the truth of his deliberately keeping the controversy alive for political gain.
Yes, I am aware of this. I am also aware that Rex Parris kept calling on the courts to uphold the conviction of Raymond Lee Jennings in spite of his being exonerated by DNA evidence and ultimately released with a hefty settlement, with both Parris and Jennings being white. Please don’t make me go dig up other examples.
“[X] was once arrested for a brutal rape and/or murder, therefore [X] is Guilty, Guilty, Guilty! and must be punished most severely, don’t bother me with your ‘DNA’ and proof of innocence and other suspects who may also be guilty, we’ve got a Guilty! person here who must be punished!”, is a stupid wrong thing that people have been doing for as long as we have records, and it is a stupid wrong thing that white people have been doing to other white people for as long as we have records.
It is a stupid wrong thing that is NOT EVIDENCE OF RACISM, even if in a particular stupid wrong case it happens to be a stupid wrong white person doing it to innocent black people. And yes, I know that Donald Trump was particularly stupid and wrong about the Central Park Five. But you are still crying wolf.
Hawaii doesn’t issue short form birth certificates with false information. Nor does any other state. So it would have been impossible to have had a different place birth on the other birth certificate form than on that birth certificate form hr provided. I’m not sure how an impossible explanation can possibly be charitable.
As for the 1/4 of the population, for which you still haven’t actually provided any evidence, again I don’t see any relevance. If anything it just goes to show how damaging Trump and people like him were in their attacks on American democracy.
Well, not any more, right? Unless you’re arguing today that he was not born in Hawaii.
@skef
No, it is still more charitable to think that he really wanted to President and had no choice. Than to think he did it deliberately as a cheap tactic.
Even with him having released the long-form and nothing incriminating coming from it, the charitable explanation is still that he didn’t know what was on it and was paranoid about it.
We should not extend to Obama the charitable explanation. The charitable explanation has never been credible to me. That still doesn’t change what the charitable explanation is.
(Most on the left, of course, would never look for for an explanation being happy to simply drink Tea Party tears. It is not unreasonable for the right to do otherwise.)
@Brad
As I said before when said that, you were the one to link to the Wkipedia article. If you disagree with the article that you linked to and the CNN and Harris Polls that the article you posted cited, then say so directly.
It is absurd to blame Trump for the state of things before he intervened. Trump stepped in and resolved the issue before the 2012 election like a good statesman should. To blame Trump for the state of things before he got involved run counter to causality and is simply lunacy and demagoguery.
You don’t seem to be using “charitable” with the epistemic sense that it most often has here.
There’s nothing epistemically uncharitable in ascribing a self-interested motivation. And the circumstances required to account for doubt on Obama’s part seem absurdly unlikely. I presume his parents would have needed to forge the short form, on this theory? And given that his mother was unquestionably a U.S. citizen, they would have done this in the 1960s so that he could be a natural born citizen, in anticipation of his running for president?
The issue was definitively resolved in June 2008. Obama is not responsible for your faulty reasoning abilities. Maybe blame your schoolteachers. Or parents.
@skef
I may be using the term differently from how it is usually used here. Is there a term used here for what ‘charitable’ means elsewhere(merciful or kind in judging others)?Whatever that term is I mean that. Trying to ascribe to Obama the least wicked and least demonstrative of malice possible motive.
@ Brad
Things are resolved when they are resolved. Not when Brad or anyone else thinks they ought to be resolved. Can’t get an is from an ought.
It has been said that Trump wading in in 2010 was instrumental in his gaining the platform that let him win in 2016. If those people aren’t just talking out of their backside, then the situation could not have already been resolved in 2008.
@johansenindustries
Why not? A perfectly reasonable explanation for that sequence of events is that Trump first gained the admiration of what would become his base by pandering to their racism.
I don’t see any reason to give the benefit of the doubt to those that refused themselves to acknowledge reality even when there was no reasonable doubt left.
“Sympathetic” isn’t far off.
I don’t think it’s hard to do a bit better. After many accusations that he was born in Kenya, Obama released a document with the legal status of a birth certificate. (That is, a document that is accepted as a birth certificate in legal situations that require one.) Then many people said they wanted to see a different document. At that point he might have quire reasonably concluded that the people in question would never be satisfied.
“Everything would have been settled if he had released the long form at the time” is a politicized claim with dubious support.
@Brad
Just saying ‘racism’ doesn’t constitute an argument. Can you give another example of a person managing to get political cout by entering a political dispute that was resolved two years earlier?
@Skef
That the issue was resolved when Obama released his long-form certificate is something you don’t deny, do you?
So you think the most sympathetic explanation is ‘Obama thinks we*’re all disingenious liars, so just can’t be bothered to try to satisfy as we’re unsatisfiable’?
When we’re talking about the scale that we are talling about, that doesn’t strike me as being much more sympathic than Obama is worried that he was secretly born in Kenya (regardless of the probability of the possibilities, which is unrelated to sympathy)
*’we’ of course refering to the people anking for and wondering why Obama wouldn’t release his long-form.
If a left-wing proposal to simplify the tax code included a bunch of stuff removing loopholes etc that benefit, say, fossil-fuel manufacturers – would it be fair to speculate that an urge to harm fossil fuel manufacturers is at play?
So, the only way to know if people are motivated by who-whom motivations is to pay attention to what they’re saying – it’s never fair to speculate about somebody’s unspoken motivations if they give you a different explanation?
You’re deriving an awful lot from Lenin saying something one time; this isn’t remotely in the same ballpark as “forty words for snow.” If you were talking about communists, hey, maybe, but I fail to see how Lenin saying something pithy one time is somehow characteristic of The Left.
OK, but you’re using “left-wing people in general are bad at understanding the Republican voter base” as a standin for “left-wing people in general don’t have principles”. Those statements aren’t the same thing at all. I will admit that there is a very strong tendency on the mainstream left and the far left to be bad at understanding the Republican voter base. But that’s not the same question as to where you can find more people with principles.
He criticizes the Democrats from the left, as I understand it; Thomas Frank can safely say to be of the left.
Again, how does having principles yourself make you good at understanding the principles of others? Every left-winger in the US could be principled; they could still fail to understand the right. And vice versa. In my experience people with strongly-held principles are the worst at understanding the other side.
Easy answers: because academia involves fewer fistfights than punk concerts in general, and, wait, what commies are we talking about? When did commies infect sports?
Your characterization of everyone on the left as being more into who-whom than everyone on the right because Lenin coined a phrase. What in the world is Lenin supposed to have to do with me? If Lenin had said “he who smelt it dealt it” what would that say about the left? This isn’t carving reality at the joints. The joint between Lenin and a left-liberal is narrower than the joint between a left-liberal and a mainstream conservative. At the very least, the latter two are less likely to kill each other than Lenin is to kill either.
‘Never’ goes too far. As I said before there is no such thing as an absolute. But yes on the who you should assume that they are motivated by what they say they are motivated by.
When I said ‘Is not the fact that there’s a pithy phrase for the left-wing’ this was immediately after quoting you using the phrase ‘What’s the matter with Kansas’. When you mistook it as referring to Who? Whom? I stated “I was refering to ‘What’s the trouble with Kansas’.” You then quoted that.
If I point out Lenin. Don’t see how he’s representitive of the Left. The Guardian. don’t see how that’s representative of the left. Punks/Antifa. Don’t see how that’s representative of the left. The popularity of a book whose shock thesis is ‘Republicans have values’. “What’s Lenin got to do with me”. You don’t like Lenin? Fine then deal with my tens of other examples. Although, frankly, if you are on the left then you almost certainly like someone who admires someone who aspired to be like Lenin.
Yeah, I read more. He was a Bernie voter.
It is not about not understanding the principles of one’s opponents, but assuming that those principles don’t exist and that the person must be stupid. If the left were accusing the right of haviing principles, were simply getting it wrong then that would suggest the left have principles. But they don’t. If you think the right has principles but you don’t know what they are then you can try reading David Brooks. It is the insight that they’re not stupid but have principles that let’s you get a hit book.
There’s a habit of people thinking their opponents are their opposites. That one’s opponents accepts one’s framing but just takes the opposite side. We see this when the right scream “You hate freedom!”, “You hate tradition” and the left show “You hate black people” “You hate gay people”. Which are principles. Which are principals? Is there a counter-example I’m missing?
A person motivated by principles will naturally assume that his opponents are motivated by principles. An identitarian will assume his opponent is motivated by identitariasm. Can you name a left-wing news source that if speculating on the right’s motive are clearly dominated by assumptions of principles (perhaps equality, to give an example) rather than motivated by malice to a group or being in cahoots with another?
It’s easy to mistake someone who has principles very different from yours for not having principles at all.
Are you implying that this cherry-picked rhetoric is evidence that the Left is lacking in principles? Flipping it is easy. When the Right says “you hate America” or “you hate Christianity”, and the Left says “you hate equal rights” and “you are greedy”, who is arguing from principles here?
Also, the dichotomy of “principles vs. identity politics” isn’t all that clear cut, or informative. Politicians often try to appeal to certain segments of the population because those segments share the same principles as them.
Its like if a politician said “we are the party of Christians” instead of “we are the party of Christianity”. Is saying the former proof that they are actually insincere about their Christian beliefs, and are instead just playing “identity politics”?
There are reasons, ethical principles, why the Left supports what on the surface appear to be an unrelated coalition of people like homosexuals, Black Americans, and immigrants. These principles are things like support equal rights, the elimination of social hierarchy, and economic utilitarianism in general.
Before he released the short form, people demanding that he release his birth certificate as evidence he was born in the United States. He did so. Then they weren’t satisfied. So an unhealthy mix of “disingenuous liars” and “delusional” seems about right.
It’s not unsympathetic to him just because it’s unsympathetic to other people. And it’s not unreasonable to be unsympathetic to the people in question given that they didn’t accept that a birth certificate was a birth certificate.
@Skef:
If I correctly understand this argument–I don’t actually remember the details of the controversy–Obama first released the short form document that supported his place of birth and then, some years later, the long form. The first release did not persuade all the skeptics, the second did–or at least most of them.
If that is correct, what is your explanation for the several year delay? johansenindustries’ explanation, as I understand it, is that Obama thought he benefited politically by the fact that some people were unreasonably skeptical on the issue, presumably because they were not going to vote for him anyway and their unjustified skepticism made his opponents look bad.
Do you agree with that explanation, and if so do you agree that it was a base motive? If not, what is your explanation? Saying that everyone should have been convinced by the short form may be true, but it isn’t an explanation.
I disagree with a number of aspects of his characterization, most of which have to do with an unrealistic application of hindsight to the whole ordeal.
First, the demands for the long form were of a different nature than the previous demands for a birth certificate. There is a constitutional rule that presidents must be natural born citizens. The demand for proof of that status was unusual, but given that his father was foreign and he had spent time when he was young in a foreign country, doubt about his origin was comprehensible. So he released his birth certificate. Demands for the long form implied fraud on his part or, at best, his parents’, in forging a short form. Meeting a demand to produce a document on the part of people accusing you of having forged a document makes for a losing battle. It was entirely reasonable for him to ignore those people at the time.
It may have been a political miscalculation on his part, in that he may have assumed that a higher percentage of people would have seen that this implicit accusation of fraud crossed a line. But people at the time did largely understand that the people demanding the long form were not reasonable, and at least bordering on conspiracy theorists. And he did get elected.
Second, the timing of the release of the long form is clearly tied to the strategy for the campaign for his second term. At that point, no one thought there was a live legal issue about his eligibility, and basically everyone was going to vote for or against him based on a) their assessment of his first term and b) other political commitments. One reason to take that step would be “let’s put this whole thing to bed.” Another would be to remind voters that a subset of his critics were at least borderline conspiracy theorists. There may also have been a “fuck you” element to it, directed to those who had implicitly accused him or his parents of fraud.
The claim on the part of birthers that “we would have been satisfied by his producing the long form” is, as I said earlier, dubious. The claim that Obama “waited years to settle the issue” rests on it, because it assumes that he could have settled it at the time. I consider it an attempt on the part of a group that had wound up looking foolish in the eyes of most to look somewhat less foolish. That doesn’t imply a lie — there is no implication of a forgery, for example — they might just see themselves now as more reasonable and less motivated by politics (and the other thing) than they are.
@Guy in TN
I think there would be a huge difference between Christianity and Christians. If there isn’t, then why don’t we see people using both rather than just using Christianity.
@johansenindustries
I think this is the core of the dispute. I disagree with this; I certainly don’t think it’s sure enough that you can make it a key part of your argument. In my experience, people with strong principles usually thinks their principles are the right principles, and so someone who disagrees with them clearly has something wrong with them. Even if they attribute principles to their opponents, they usually get the principles wrong, and identify their opponent as having principles, but evil ones.
The statement “people with principles generally identify their opponent as having principles” (with the addendum that, further, they are good at identifying those principles properly) is one that needs some backing up.
Oh, but the difference should be made, because it’s nowhere near clear to me that religionism is as bad as racism.
Indeed, objection to Thugee or the old religion of the Mexica is completely understandable.
Nybbler, I’ve long thought that the framers of the US Bill of Rights owed an enormous debt to the conquistadors for converting the Mexica to Christianity. Without them, the Free Exercise clause would have been suicidal.
@Le Maistre Chat —
I’m confused. Why would non-Christian Mexica (who are thousands of miles away in the Valley of Mexico) be more of a problem for the U.S. than the other non-Christian Native Americans who were actually in U.S. claimed (or intending-to-be-claimed) territory?
Edit: oh, are you saying that if human sacrifice was still practiced in Mexico in the 18th century it would have caused a problem for the Founding Fathers? It seems pretty easy to route around by adding “except no human sacrifice” or something. And also, still, the non-Christian religions of the Native Americans they actually had contact with didn’t seem to cause a problem with respect to the free exercise clause specifically.
@quealegit: you raise a good point. I’d say the Free exercise of human sacrifice problem didn’t come up with tribe’s north of Mexico, but I have this nagging memory that there were indeed homicidal rituals in some tribes on US-claimed soil well into g the 19th century.
I don’t have the link handy, but when I can I’ll post an interesting article about a Navajo archaeologist controversial for claiming that the Ancestral Pueblo culture (Anasazi to him) killed and ate people and post-Columbian rituals of the region are designed to keep the dark god of that era away.
I can’t think of any off the top of my head, but I’d be surprised if at least one of the dozens of native North American religions didn’t do human sacrifice. Native Hawaiian religion definitely did. Not on the scale of the Mexica, but it’s well documented. The practice died out with colonization, but I don’t know how or if the legal system got involved.
I do know that the Sun Dance of the Plains cultures was banned for a long time. No human sacrifice in that one, but it’s reputedly pretty nasty to Anglo eyes.
Overusing the “racism” card, especially in situations where it doesn’t apply, does make it sound as if “racism” is the only possible evil. Indeed, that racism is evil, and evil is racism. No need for nuance of any sort, or to correctly label bad things, so long as the alleged perpetrator is branded with something, right?
“Islamophobe” is the correct accusation here. “Bigot” and “xenophobe” are more generic but may apply. “Racist” is not.
Even children pick up on this abuse of language. Hence why they mockingly accuse each other of being “racist against fat people.”
@beleester
The defining characteristic of racism is that it is hatred of something that the other person cannot change and that does not define their behavior. Criticisms of culture* are fundamentally different because one can change their culture and culture often makes people behave in certain ways.
If criticizing culture is racism, then criticizing ISIS culture is racism and being anti-terrorist is racism.
Ergo, it is useful to be far more nuanced about objecting to those who criticize cultures than those who criticize races.
* Like religion
Aapje:
That’s a defining feature of many kinds of prejudice or bigotry outside racism. There are surely people who aren’t racist by any reasonable definition, but who despise gays. It wouldn’t make any sense to call them racist.
“Racist” in particular is thrown around so often and so sloppily in US politics that it’s really important to nail down what you mean. Personally, I think the word should be tabooed, and the speaker should replace it with a more precise statement of what they mean in most discussions.
Criticism of culture is the opposite of racism. It means taking the opposing position at the “nature or nurture” scale when explaining behavior. (I am not saying that reverse stupidity is intelligence; only that reverse is reverse.)
If Islam does not explain the behavior of ISIS, then what does? It could either be some inherent inferiority of the brown people — and I guess no politically correct person wants to go explicitly there (although a few make large enough hints in that direction; I mean the whole idea that your color of skin completely determines your identity is already halfway there, you just have to be socially savvy never to bring it to the obvious conclusion) — or we have to pretend that nothing happened, or that everything is completely random and unpredictable. (And there is always the option to disregard all context and simply proclaim: “patriarchy did it”.)
Also, it is very harmful to blame minority members for “internalized racism” if they criticize the culture they grew up in. Ayaan Hirsi Ali can’t say that she regrets being genitally mutilated, or we put her on a list of hate speakers. The message is: if you are a member of a minority, and you see any mistake made by your community, and would like to improve it… just shut up! You are allowed to blame cishet white non-Muslim males, and that’s where your freedom of speech effectively ends. And this is supposed to somehow help the minorities. Apparently, only the whites are mature enough to be able to receive criticism and use it to improve themselves. And that opinion is somehow not racist.
If you don’t want the conversation to be derailed, start out with accurate terminology.
The original claim in the “crying wolf” post was that Trump was no more racist – measured specifically by his friendliness to white supremacists – than other Republican Presidents or candidates.
Given that every living Republican President before Trump and nearly every living Republican presidential candidate put out statements after Charlottesville specifically to clarify that they do not agree with Trump’s views on white supremacists, I can’t see how that claim is still defensible.
You can still argue that Trump is not himself a white supremacist and is simply more willing than past Republicans to ingratiate himself to them – but that still marks a substantive difference from past Republican candidates and presidents.
What are Trump’s views on white supremacists?
As I remember it, although he objected to violent self-proclaimed anti-fascists also, he did not have a single nice word to say about white supremacists in the aftermath of Charlottesville. Therefore, if they all disagreed, then surely Trump is the least racist Republican president if that is the metric being used.
Trump’s just a normie.
The main point of contention was over whether there were “fine people” on both sides, with all other Republican candidates/presidents clarifying that they do not believe there were fine people on the KKK side of the rally.
On the broader level, many people pointed out the oddness of Trump’s response to that issue being essentially the only time he has ever looked for nuance and tried to see both sides of an issue. When a Muslim kills someone, we must ban all Muslims; when a white supremacist kills someone, we must remember that many of the people waving Nazi flags did not actually kill anyone, and also some liberals were punching people!
I mean, shit, I know a lot of people find it difficult to see anything weird about Trump’s response to Charlottesville- but think of it this way: it is basically unprecedented to have all the past presidents & candidates (not to mention Congressmen) from your own party issue statements specifically disagreeing with you on something, on any topic. That never happens.
The leaders of the Republican Party think Trump is more racist than they’re comfortable with.
@MrApophenia
I had a really long post that was eaten. Presumably I used a banned word – can’t think what it was.
Bullet points:
I don’t believe that Trump ever has changed his position based on ‘a Muslim kills someone’. It is possible that a Muslim killing someone gives him the opportunity to speak of his immigration policy, but that’s just like Charlottesville gave him the opportunity to condemn white supremacists and the violent left.
One of trump’s earliest scandals was saying about a terrible group ‘and some I assume are good people’ condemning a group while suggesting that some of its members might be good people is perfectly Trumplike.
Being decent and seeing the decency is what let Trump win crucial states over Clinton.
‘all the past presidents & candidates’ is false. That not correct. A subset did. If we look at the subset: McCain, Romney, and the Bushes are losers who suck. They didn’t vote for him. They are opposed to MAGA, there is no reason to think their criticism is anyway related to ‘Trump is more racist than they’re comfortable with’
@johansenindustries
In this situation, you might try to “go back” in your browser, then open up the reply box again. Depending on how your browser does form data, your post might still be in there.
If two Presidents, a long time Senator, and a successful businessman and Governor are losers in your mind, you must have quite the impressive resume. Let’s see it.
@Brad
Its not in my mind. There were big elections. Huge things. I’m surprised you missed them all. Three of them loss directly. All of them lost when their favoured candidate got toasted by Trump.
From an article about the “fine people” comment:
Emphasis mine. He was not calling the neo-nazis and the white nationalists “fine people,” he specifically condemned them. He was talking about the people who were there merely opposed to the removal of the statue, but were either not aware of or not part of the nazi/WN groups.
There were fine people on both sides, who were probably naive or stupid. For instance, here’s the picture of the aftermath of the car attack. See the black flags, the red flags, the red and black flags? These are socialists, anarchists, communists. These are not nice people. Not fine people. But if you zoom in there’s some schlep there in a Gary Johnson t-shirt looking quite overwhelmed. That’s probably a fine person who thought he was going out to confront “hate” and did not necessarily understand that he was also marching with the sorts of people who want to use state power to enslave his libertarian ass.
So, back to crying wolf. Trump specifically condemns the hate group people, states that when he’s speaking positively of anyone there he’s specifically not talking about the hate group people, and only the people who were there in support of not tearing down historical landmarks, and you and the media are running with “Trump thinks nazis and kkk are ‘fine people.'” Still crying wolf.
Yep. When the most nuanced analysis of an event is coming from Donald Trump, that’s when you know you’re crying wolf.
To clarify, Trump’s statement was: There were very bad people here. There were Nazis. I condemn them. There were also very bad people on the left. I condemn them as well. But there were also some fine people there, marching on both sides of this event.
The boiler plate Congressional statement was: THIS EVENT WAS FULL OF NAZIS! NAZIS ARE BAD! NOBODY IS ALLOWED TO CLARIFY THIS IN ANY OTHER WAY OR THEY ARE SUPPORTING NAZIS!!
And these quotes are one reason why it’s hard to take a lot of prestige media outrage coverage of Trump at face value. Because the excerpted quotes and the public discussion were 180 degrees out of phase with this.
This would be bad if he were merely an average president doing some dumb things because he got dealt a bad hand and played it poorly, as with W. But it’s a lot worse with Trump, who IMO is really unsuited to be president, and whose hobby seems to be taking a fire ax to the nearest bit of Chesterton’s fence he can find. We need *accurate and honest* reporting of the stuff he does. We get *inaccurate and overblown and dishonest* reporting of the stuff he does, which has the effect of masking a lot of the worst of his actions behind a smokescreen of his enemies’ lies about him.
The notion that there was some contingent of people there who innocently showed up to protest the statue removal and were shocked to discover Nazis is wrong on its face. This was a protest arranged by white nationalists and neo-Nazis with an explicit, openly stated mission statement of trying to get the mainstream right to accept that they are all serving the same cause. That’s why it wasn’t named something about Robert E. Lee and was instead called “Unite the Right.” This wasn’t some innocent protest crashed by a bunch of racists, it was a Klan rally from the get-go.
As opposed to the counter-protestors, who were the usual batch of types who show up to counter-protest Klan rallies, from communists to antifa to people who just feel strongly opposed to Nazis having a rally in their local park.
The best case argument for Trump is that he honestly didn’t know that. And Trump is pretty stupid, so sure, that’s plausible. But I want you to really consider an equivalent scenario:
An explicitly pro-ISIS group holds a rally in support of imposing sharia law in the US. A bunch of people show up waving ISIS and Al Quieda flags, the crowd chants about killing infidels, and one of them kills a counter-protestor.
A Democratic President gets up on stage and says that, sure, ISIS and Al Quieda are bad, but there were lots of nice moderate Muslims at that rally, and they shouldn’t be judged too harshly.
Reasonable response?
@MrApophenia
Not a good analogy. In your hypothetical, what innocuous cause does the Democratic version of Trump think the moderate Muslims were rallying in favor of? If he thinks that they were rallying in support of imposing sharia law in the US, he absolutely shouldn’t exonerate them. Sharia law is incompatible with US law, and so it should be obvious that the entire rally is worthy of condemnation.
In the real-life situation, the protesters were ostensibly protesting the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, which is a perfectly legitimate cause. It is not unreasonable to assume that some of those protesting the removal of the Lee statue were non-violent, non-Nazi, non-white-supremacist protestors.
I find your in-depth knowledge of the composition and ideology of the entire crowd there quite impressive. And the way you switch from “Alt-Right” to “Neo-Nazi” to “A Klan Rally” really makes the case that you’re being precise and factual in your analysis and not simply slinging terms with maximal emotional load across as wide a range of people as you can.
As for what the exact ratio of white supremacists to neo-nazis to KKK members to Non-Racist Southern Pride types to various other flavors, I don’t know. Based on the footage I’ve seen, it seems pretty clear that the goats outnumbered the sheep by a wide margin. It’s equally clear from the footage and the reporting that it was not an all-goat event, especially during the earlier phase before the protest was moved out of its original planned location.
I don’t think your example is reasonable. You need something that’s object-level popular. The vast majority of Americans (including black Americans) are not in favor of tearing down historical monuments. If you want a source I can dig around, but the last poll I saw (shortly after Charlottesville) was something like only 25% of people in favor of tearing down monuments, with ~64% opposed and ~11% don’t know. And the survey comp was biased towards Democrats, who are more likely to be in favor of removal anyway. Lots of people are against taking down monuments but are not at all in favor of WN/NPI, White Supremacists, KKK or Nazis.
So, consider instead a “Freedom of Religion” rally, sponsored by an Islamic group that hadn’t killed anyone yet (NPI is not ISIS or Al Qaeda tier), and then one of them goes full snackbar and blows people up. Yes, I can believe there are plenty of non-Muslim Islamapologists who would show up to such an event, in favor of religious freedom, and then be shocked, totally shocked when limbs start flying. I would fully expect a Democratic politician to then say #NotAllMuslims and talk about the fine people who were there to support religious freedom when the event tragically turned violent by one extremist who was probably only doing it because of right-wing Islamophobic rhetoric anyway so really we need to blame the Republicans.
ETA: Also I agree with Trofim. There is what I call the left’s “One Drop Rule of Nazis:” if there’s one Nazi in any group of people then it’s all Nazis. I’ve only seen this one guy with a Nazi flag, and given that it looks like he just took the flag out of the wrapper that morning, I don’t know how serious he is about his Nazism. You’d think any self-respecting Nazi would bother to iron his flag.
The fact that you knew Nazis were going to be there and you still showed up does not make you a Nazi.
The fact that you happen to agree with Nazis on Issue X, with Issue X being virtually anything other than “kill Jews” does not make you a Nazi.
The fact that you march alongside Nazis in support of Issue X does not make you a Nazi.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If Nazis are the only ones willing to march for causes I believe in, then I will march with Nazis. I won’t march with them when they support causes I don’t believe in. If you want to call me a Nazi because of that then so be it, but I’m not playing this game anymore.
But again, that’s precisely my point. They weren’t holding a “Respect our history” rally, they were holding a “Unite the Right” rally which really was organized by neo-Nazis, the Klan, and other white nationalists. The only thing General Lee had to do with it was what park they picked.
And again, the original question wasnt whether Trump should be nuanced about white supremacists. The question was whether he was different from normal Republicans. There clearly is, because even you guys are attacking normal Republicans for their un-nuanced condemnation of Nazis.
The question wasn’t whether you think Trump is right, it was whether there was a difference between Trump and other Republicans on the subject.
But Trump “totally condemned” the nazis and white supremacists.
What exactly is the problem?
I’m not trying to convince you of anything. You were anti-Trump before this and anti-Trump after this.
I:
1) Support Trump.
2) Do not support Nazis, KKK, Richard Spencer, or white nationalism or supremacy.
3) Do not support removing confederate statues.
You’re the one trying to convince me to not support Trump, by telling me he supports Nazis, KKK, Spencer, WN/WS. But when I look at Trump’s words, he “totally condemns” nazis and white supremacists. I’m in agreement with Trump here, find your argument unpersuasive, and think you must either have reading comprehension problems, or are intellectually dishonest. I cannot find any reading of Trump’s statements that bear out the assertion that he thinks nazis/kkk/WN/WS are “fine people,” unless “totally condemns” means the exact opposite of what I think it means.
Matt M
You’ll get fired from your cushy job for doing so and I won’t be outraged over that. Just so you are on notice and can’t pull a Damore whining about how could you have possibly known.
@johansenindustries
And you’ve what, never lost anything in your life? If that’s your definition of loser than everyone in the world is a loser. What a worthless point.
Of course there’s a difference. “Other republicans” are whining sniveling do-nothings whose strategy consists of constantly apologizing to the left, and who constantly lose elections by doing so.
Trump is different from that.
@Trofim_Lysenko
“It’s equally clear from the footage and the reporting that it was not an all-goat event, especially during the earlier phase before the protest was moved out of its original planned location.”
Gavin McInnes didn’t go because he thought it was “too explicitly neo-Nazi”. What is the source of your in-depth knowledge of the composition and ideology of the entire crowd there that you disagree with him on the basis of?
@RLMS
The claim Apophenia made was: “The notion that there was some contingent of people there who innocently showed up to protest the statue removal and were shocked to discover Nazis is wrong on its face.”
If there was even ONE person there who was not an avowed white supremacist and/or neo-nazi, that claim is false. Much the same way the statement “Muslims are terrorists” is categorically false if we can show the example of even a single Muslim who is not a terrorist. I am not the one making claims of extraordinary knowledge here, RLMS.
I am claiming that based on the video of the event I’ve watched, adn the reports I’ve read, I think there is room to conclude that there was at least one and most likely more than one person there who was not an avowed white supremacist and/or neo-nazi. Is that sufficiently clear?
@Brad
If I lost something and then spent the rest of my days criticising the winner. Then people might think I was a bit sour and biased. We actually have a phrase for that.
@Trofim_Lysenko
To be pedantic, “some contingent of people” implies more than one person, and furthermore suggests an organised group. But getting to the crux of the issue: do you think it would be fair to describe the Unite The Right rally as overwhelmingly white nationalist? If so, I’m pretty sure that you agree with MrAphohenia and me about the facts, and hence should also conclude that Trump’s claim that “you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists” is incorrect (either because he has a different definition of white nationalist to us, or — more likely in my opinion — he assumed that it was a generic anti-statue-removal rally). If not, please link your examples of non-white-nationalist rally goers.
@rlms
‘Overwhelmingly’ doesn’t actually destroy mathematics. There were either fine people there or not. The number of non-fine people doesn’t change the actual statement.
Sure, for values of “overwhelmingly”. I think that once you discount the avowed white supremacist, neo-nazi, and/or KKK types there, as Trump did, you’re not left with his “many” but rather with a distinct minority of the participants.
I think that attributing that “many” to him looking at the guys waving swastika signs and going “Yep, looks like a bunch of fine americans!” in his head is bullshit, and ignores that Trump is a walking embodiment of Hanlon’s Razor. It sounds like you and I are on the same page of that part at least.
Apparently not, since MrApophenia claims that it is patently obvious that there exactly zero non-White Supremacists at the rally. My position is that it is not obvious that that is the case.
Romney and McCain spend all their time criticizing Obama? Bush I, Clinton? Who did Bush II lose to again? Your ‘point’is totally incoherent.
You’re like the fat guy at a bar that can’t walk a flight of steps without wheezing yelling at the TV that a professional athlete is a loser because he missed a catch.
The people you are deriding as losers are far more accomplished than you are. If you claim we should discount their opinions because they
are losers how much more so should we discount yours?
@johansenindustries
If you read my post carefully, you will see that Trump claimed there were “many” non-white-nationalists at the rally, which contradicts my statement that it was overwhelmingly white nationalist. It’s true that his statement about “fine people” was not qualified in such a way, but the obvious interpretation is that the two groups are the same (otherwise he’s saying there were many non-white-nationalists, but only some of them were fine). However, that’s beside the point. I’d be deeply worried if Trump claimed that there were fine people in ISIS, even though that’s certainly true. Wouldn’t you?
@rlms
I disagree with you that there are fine people as part of ISIS. I think if you’re taking sufficient steps to be part of ISIS, then you’re not fine.
I also disagree with what you’re implying that anyone who is not a white nationalist is fine. It is perfectly sensible to refer to only a subset of non-white nationalists as being fine.
There can still be many non-white nationalists at a rally and it being “overwhelmingly”* white nationalist. For example, it is true that Texas voted overwhelmingly for Trump, but there are still many Hillary voters in Texas, no?
However, imagine if a young muslim goes to a Musim United march organised by a hardline pro-sharia group. Do I want the President to condem that young man? No. I want him to condemn the group and offer the hand of deradicalisation to the young man.
* This might seem as if it is just being pedantic, but I think it really gets to the thinking: What did they overwhelm?
You’re agonizing over the question of how many “good people” would show up at a rally that has been advertised as white nationalist.
I could counter by asking how many “good people” show up to a counter-protest that has been explicitly advertised as “stop these white nationalists from exercising their lawful, constitutionally protected right to assemble because we disagree with them”
If you are part of the group that caused the police to unconstitutionally break up a lawfully permitted rally due to fears of escalating violence, I’m not sure how much moral high ground you get to claim here.
As an analogy to actual, swastika-wearing Nazis? That fails on account of actual Nazis have killed lots of people. Millions of them, in a horrific manner and with no justification.
Not so much American Nazis specifically, but the only reason anyone ever becomes any kind of post-1945 Nazi in any country at all is because they think that Hitler fellow had some fine ideas and that we could use some of that kind of thinking around here. Seriously, I don’t think ideology or group anywhere has undergone the sort of evaporative cooling than has Nazism. Aside from Hitler and the Holocaust, there is nothing the Nazis have to offer that other groups can’t provide at less social cost, and is there any group anywhere whose social membership costs are as high as the Literal Nazis?
People wearing actual swastikas and other Nazi iconography are signalling allegiance to Adolf Hitler and everything he stand for. People standing next to people wearing actual swastikas, are the moral equivalent of Benito Mussolini or pre-1941 Josef Stalin, signalling that they believe their ends are so righteous as to justify any means. The best that can be said about any of them is that they are a puny evil, but they are still evil. This applies only to literal swastika-wearing and/or sieg-heiling Nazis, not to everyone against whom “Nazi!” has been screamed, but it does apply to the actual Nazis and any analogies need to match that.
@John Schilling
‘The only reason anyone ever becomes any kind of post-1945 Muslim in any country at all is because they think that Mohammed fellow had some fine ideas and that we could use some of that kind of thinking around here.’ is a statement of fact and Mohammed went to war to kill a great deal of people. He’s not Hitler, but the fact that he’s not the icon of evil just limits the reasons to be a Muslim.
There are however numerous reasons why one might go out cosplaying as a Nazi at a protest: 1. To be edgy 2. As a laugh 3. To offend people 4. To try to push the Overton window 5. To demonstrate American freedoms; probably more that I can’t think of.
For example, Prince Harry went out in a Nazi uniform – not at a political event, but he’s a Prince everything is essentially political – would you call him an evil racist who wants to murder all the jews?
@johansenindustries
“I disagree with you that there are fine people as part of ISIS. I think if you’re taking sufficient steps to be part of ISIS, then you’re not fine.”
I disagree with you that there are fine people at a rally that invites David Duke to speak. If you’re taking sufficient steps to listen to David Duke, then you’re not fine.
“I also disagree with what you’re implying that anyone who is not a white nationalist is fine. It is perfectly sensible to refer to only a subset of non-white nationalists as being fine.”
Who were the non-fine non-white-nationalists Trump was referring to in that speech?
“For example, it is true that Texas voted overwhelmingly for Trump”
Um, no? I’d hardly call 52% (to Clinton’s 43%) an overwhelming victory.
Going to a rally where Duke speaks is not the same thing as going to a rally to hear David Duke speak. When Celeste and Daphne performed at Glastonbury had all the Glastonbury goers gone to hear Celeste and Daphne?
(If you’re suggesting that there’s some moale equivalancy between listening to David Duke speak and mass-murder, warmaking and sex slaves then I would disagree with you heavily there as well. Though I suppose you think listening to Duke is worse since you think that ISIS and not the rallygoers are full of very fine people. I was mainly referring to the effort and willingness to enter a warzone, though.)
The non-fine non-white nationalists would be the non-white nationalists who aren’t fine. I’m unsure what it is that you find difficult about that concept. Perhaps they were just looking for a fight? Or they cheat on their wives. Who knows?
Is is true that there are counties that voted overwhelmingly for Trump? Would you say that in all the counties that voted overwhelmingly for Trump that there aren’t many Clinton voters in it.
I listened to David Duke speak.
Or, I should say, I spent a lot of the day looking for livestreams of Charlottesville, and most of them went down at various times. One of the last remaining ones was with someone watching David Duke. By the time he spoke, the rally had already been forcibly dispersed by the police throughout the city. His “speech” was delivered on no stage, with a small crowd of people (maybe 20 or so) huddled around him, in what appeared to be the parking lot of some small park or something. I came in midway so I cannot speak to the content of the whole speech, but I saw about 10 minutes or so, and it was pretty boring standard right-wing stuff. No different from what you’d hear on Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or whatever. Nothing about a race war or a new holocaust. Then he told everyone he heard Antifa was coming, and urged them to get in their cars and leave the city, at which point the 20 or so people seemed to disperse and go their separate ways.
Would you have the same reaction to someone who marched in a demonstration along with Communists?
I disagree with you about the meaning of words. If there are a thousand people in a group, a hundred of whom are X’s, the statement “there are many X’s in the group is true. So is the statement “the group was overwhelmingly non-X’s.”
“Many” does not mean “a majority.”
Would you dis agree with the statement “there are many American transsexuals”? “Many women are victims of rape”?
Was it? The slogan someone else quoted was “Unite the right.” The word “nationalist” does not appear in that. Quite a large fraction of the population identifies as right, just as quite a large fraction identifies as left.
Where was it advertised as white nationalist, such that only white nationalists would want to come?
@DavidFriedman
““Many” does not mean “a majority.””
Not necessarily, but look at the context. Trump said there were “some very bad people in that group” but “many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists”. That suggests a minority of bad apples (it is not contradictory to describe a minority as “many” and a majority as “some”, but it would be odd). This interpretation is supported firstly by the fact that he was trying to imply an equivalence between the two sides, and secondly by the fact that it would’ve been an accurate description for most anti-statue-removal rallies (but not this one).
“Where was it advertised as white nationalist, such that only white nationalists would want to come?”
Look at the rally’s twitter. The most recent retweet is from “Identity Evropa”, a bit further down is a tweet pointing out that the Mayor of Charlottesville is Jewish. The founder of the Proud Boys declined to speak at it, because he didn’t want to be associated with “explicit neo-Nazis”. The rally organiser wrote a few articles for VDare, such as this one, which is pretty clearly white nationalist.
There were some non-white-nationalist right-wing groups physically present at the rally: various militias came to protect the first amendment rights of the protestors. But they all seemed to take pains to distance themselves from the rally (for instance by referring to the organiser as a “piece of excrement”).
“We” discussed this in OT82, but many of those links are down. The language on the Unite the Right’s Facebook event page was:
The page is now down, but that language is documented here.
I take it that whether a non-white-nationalist would want to come to an event described this way (and with the associated media that rlms links to) would depend on the non-white-nationalist in question. Gavin McInnes pulled out of the event beforehand because of the ethno-nationalist focus.
I asked:
And got the response:
Unless I’m missing something, the first tweet at that link is from the day after the event, so notrelevant to how the event was advertised before it happened.
skef cites a facebook page for the event, which includes:
I agree with that–don’t you? It wouldn’t be a reason to come to the demonstration–but neither is it a reason to avoid it, if one agrees with other things it is for.
Epistemic charity is an aid to understanding, not a suicide pact. Abandoning knowledge of connotation and social implications just makes one obtuse.
@skef:
We are discussing the claim that it was “a rally that has been advertised as white nationalist.”
Nothing so far offered supports that claim. What you now seem to be claiming is that it was a rally which someone who was paying attention could have deduced was being organized by white nationalists, which is a much weaker claim.
And even that isn’t true–Neo-confederates are not the same thing as white nationalists.
You’re missing something. This, for example.
Only if people are generally as dumb as you seem to think they are.
The irony of this discussion is that there is zero probability that Trump actually went through any of the thought process we’re going through, trying to untangle whether or not any non-white-Supremacists were at the Charlottesville rally.
What David Friedman is saying only requires a few dumb people or people not paying attention out of many people. Although a lot of people would have run across media reports about the Neo-Nazis and Neo-Confederates, the main thing preventing hapless saps from showing up to Nazi protests on accident is probably the fact that most people have no interest in going to protests of any variety.
Let’s also keep in mind that the whole reason McInnes and the Proud Boys made a big public show of “officially disavowing” the rally is because it was ambiguously marketed such that a lot of well-meaning right-wing people might show up, being unaware that there were white nationalists present, and end up with their photos posted on the Internet and being fired from their jobs for being a Nazi.
So I guess you can say “Well since McInnes disavowed everyone should have known better” but that doesn’t work unless you follow Proud Boy Twitter accounts. But the fact that they felt the need to go through that exercise at all shows that there was ambiguity and that they themselves believed a lot of people wouldn’t understand the “true nature of the rally” or whatever.
@John Schilling
No, I was pointing out that Spencer’s NPI group was not actual swastika wearing Nazis. I was surprised they allowed someone with a swastika flag, or KKK garb at the rally. My impression of NPI had been that they were trying to disassociate pro-white advocacy from anti-other advocacy, and create something like every other ethnic group has (NAACP, AIPAC, National La Raza Council, CAIR, etc).
That was my impression before Charlottesville, though. Now I can’t extend them that charity.
Skef writes:
1. I don’t think that was at the link which RLMS offered as supporting his claim.
2. Are you assuming the axe things in that image are supposed to be fasces? Are you further assuming that most people reading the tweet will recognize them as such?
I wouldn’t be surprised if the first assumption was correct. Or if people who self-identified as fascists recognized them. But I would be very surprised if the average American did, or even knew what the fasces was and what its connection to fascism was.
What we are arguing about is not whether the event would attract fascists but whether it would attract only fascists (and white nationalists and KKK people).
@johansenindustries:
That is a false statement. Many people become Muslims because they want the benefits of theistic religion generally. There are many similar theistic religions to chose from, and in most places no great social penalty for choosing Islam over one of the others. By comparison, there are many hard-right and/or white-nationalist groups that don’t call themselves Nazis,but there is a hefty extra dose of stigma for taking up the swastika.
For that matter, many people become Muslims because their parents, teachers, etc, expect them to, and it’s easier to go along than make a fuss. There are many communities where almost everyone is a Muslim and social penalties would apply for not being a Muslim. Are there any majority-literal-Nazi communities in the US, or anywhere else in the world?
This at least is true, but it isn’t uniquely true. Lots of people waged wars in the name of lots of religions, and Mohammed did lots of notable things other than waging war in the name of his religion.
Hitler, is famous for trying to exterminate the Jews and conquer a bunch of lebensraum for the Aryan Übermenschen. Those are pretty much uniquely Hitlerian evils, and they are pretty much the only things Hitler is famous for. Anyone signing up for Team Hitler specifically, is signing up to support those things.
You’re missing the importance of evaporative cooling here. Islam, and for that matter communism and social justice and even Trumpism, offers many different things to many different people. Support for any of these movements, is not support for any specific thing. And that was true of Nazism in, say, 1931. Then stuff happened.
As a result of that stuff, Nazism is considered uniquely despicable for its insistence on uniquely despicable things, which may have been unfair in 1946 and maybe even in 1956 but by now has imposed sufficient costs as to drive to alternative right-wing movements anyone who doesn’t specifically insist on the uniquely despicable things that only the Nazis have to offer.
That is absolutely not the case for Islam in general, and it would be a bit of a stretch even for ISIS.
Right. They were the sort of people I was referring to when I said, “People standing next to people wearing actual swastikas, are the moral equivalent of Benito Mussolini or pre-1941 Josef Stalin, signaling that they believe their ends are so righteous as to justify any means.”
And even if you don’t see any moral problems with it, how can you not understand that it is an absolute losing strategy to have people wearing swastikas at your political rallies without evidence of your disapproval being at least as obvious to the camera as are the swastikas?
@DavidFriedman
Why are you charitably assuming that Unite The Right twitter significantly changed its political position right immediately after the rally, but not that I intended multiple tweets from it to be evidence*? Regardless, there’s a tweet from August 12th that describes the rally-goers as the “alt-right” (which does not imply that it was white nationalist, but does show it wasn’t intended to unite e.g. neoconservatives and right-libertarians). That tweet also uses triple parentheses to indicate a belief in the Jewishness of American intelligence agencies.
You don’t seem to object to my statement that the rally’s organiser (Jason Kessler) is a white nationalist. Given that, and the fact that both sympathetic neutral parties who were present (the militias) and a sympathetic person who was invited to speak (Gavin McInnes) deemed it accurate to describe the rally as “white supremacist” and “explicitly neo-Nazi” without qualification, I think the onus is very much on you to give evidence of
*although question of what evidence I intended to provide is irrelevant if you care about the truth rather than point scoring
@ John Schilling
Would you agree that Christopher Waltz probably does not want to kill all the Jews? And that he went out in public in Nazi uniform.
Now, obviously I am not saying that these protesters went to the rally with Nazi memorabilia so as to make a film. But would you agree that the statement: ‘people wear Nazi uniforms for a variety of reasons, possibly including to express their support for the Holocaust and conquering Europe for Deutschland’?
And if you are open for multiple reasons, is it not more reasonable that they went out in the uniform of ultimate evil in order to offend or even intimidate, rather than to demonstrate their support for the Holocaust or invading Europe?
You made a claim about how the event was advertised. In support of that claim you provided a link to a page that contained no information on that subject, since the first tweet it showed was from after the event.
The question isn’t whether it was possible for some people to figure out that the event was being organized by white nationalists, it’s whether it was impossible for anyone interested in the event not to realize that.
Really? Your defense is going to be that I didn’t explicitly exclude movie actors, historical recreationists, etc, from the class of “actual swastika-wearing Nazis”? Because most people don’t have any trouble recognizing that Waltz et al aren’t Nazis of any kind, but the sort of people who show up at political rallies wearing swastikas really are.
Twitter user pages have unbounded scrolling. As you scroll down, earlier tweets are displayed. If you thought that only the messages prior to the event were relevant, it’s not rlms’s fault that you didn’t scroll down to look at them.
There are numerous reasons to wear a Nai uniform. There are numerous reasons to wear a Nazi uniform at a political rally. Once you’ve accepted that there are numerous reason to wear a Nazi ‘uniform’ at a political event then ‘they have Nazi iconography they must support the invasion of Poland’ because simply an error of logic.
When the left went to protests carrying Nazi symbols – swatsikas and the like – to protest TRump – did you consider that evidence that they were firm supporters of the holocaust. Or did it seem obvious to you that they (being your in-group) had other reasons for the Swatsikas rather than support for the 3rd Reich?
Perhaps, including the offending of their outgroup?
A citation to a haystack is not a valid reference to the needle contained therein.
Mission accomplished. Just turns out their outgroup was bigger than they thought.
David Friedman
I wasn’t outraged when the middle finger to the President lady got fired, so someone marching next to people with hammer and sickle getting fired certainly wouldn’t outrage me.
But to get to what I gather is the underlying question, I don’t have the same visceral reaction to communist symbolism as I do to Nazi symbolism even if the handbook of 20th century democides says I ought to.
Why do you suppose this is?
@Matt M
I’m can’t answer for Brad, but I think there are very good reasons to have different reactions to Communists and Nazis.
For one thing Communism covered a much greater spectrum than Nazism. While we should think of Pol Pot, and Stalin in the same terms as Hitler; we should most certainly not put Ho Chi Minh, Castro, Vo Nguyen Giap, Tito, Che Guevara, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev into the same category of world historical evil. And that’s without getting into the various democratically minded Communist parties of Europe, or India who seem to have done little beyond peaceably contest elections, and occasionally engage in hypocritical apologetics for Soviet crimes.
The French Communist party helped to form much of the the backbone of the resistance, while the French hard right was collaborating with a regime that was shipping French citizens to gas chambers. There really were some very decent people in the French, and Italian Communist, in fact more then decent, brave, even heroic. Of course one can probably say the same thing about the wehrmacht, and even if it’s true it doesn’t change the fact that Marxism-Leninism is a terrible system of government, and that it’s advocates deluded themselves about the nature of the Soviet regime for decades.
If you wanted to equate Fascism writ large with Communism, that would be a different thing; but I get the impressions that some on the hard right have a great deal of admiration for people like Franco, and Pinochet, and would recoil at comparing them to a bunch of godless reds.
The other thing is that I agree with (what were, at least theoretically) the terminal goals of Communism, Indeed I would think most people do. And I don’t just mean people on the left. In principle the goal of Communist parties was to create a classes, stateless, post scarcity society, free of all forms of coercion and alienation, and based on principles of voluntary mutual cooperation.
Notice the similarity of this vision to David Friedman’s ideas about a stateless utopia. Notice also the number of ex communists who were prominent in the American conservative movement. Either Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Irving Kristol, and et al. fundamentally changed their basic moral values when they repudiated the radical left, or more likely there view of the facts changed; and they came to think that sadly Marx’s vision was impossible, and that any attempt to put it into practice was doomed to end in catastrophe.
It actually seems to me, that the spirit of (pre-alt right) American conservatism was closer to Marx, than to say Julius Eovla, or Richard Spencer. How many ex Nazis ever served on the board of the National Review?
The dictatorship of the protectorate was just supposed to be a phase that would end with the withering away of the state. No honest person ever joined a Communist party thinking they were going to create a permanent tyranny. The thing is that no political movement ever failed more totally at achieving it’s stated aims than Marxism, and no system of government was ever more different from how it’s propagandists represented it than Communism.
The Nazis on the other hand did exactly what they said they were going to do. To quote Hitler’s own words from mien Kampf blaming the Jews for Germany’s defeat in world war one:
Communism failed, Nazism on the other hand worked exactly as designed, right up until it’s enemies destroyed it. Accordingly we view Communist sympathizers as fools, and would be accolades of Hitler as monsters.
If I believed the things that Communists said, I would become a communist. On the other hand if I believed every word the Nazis said about the Jews, I might become a very enthusiastic Zionist, in the hope that my Hebrew neighbors might be relocated somewhere away from me, but I would not become a child murderer. The difference between me and a Nazi is not just one of factual opinion, but of the deepest moral principles.
Perhaps some people are flying the hammer and sickle because they really like gulags, but that is not the impression I get at all from talking to western Marxists, who seem very intent on convincing me that what Stalin did was not “true” Communism.
Plenty of prominent Marxists, including Marx himself, were quite open about the fact that their classless society would require the “liquidation” of “counter-revolutionary” elements, so murderous Marxist regimes were doing exactly what they said they were going to do, too. Nor does the fact that they planned to stop at some vague point in the future make much difference: after all, I’m sure even the Nazis would have stopped committing genocide, once they’d exterminated all the “inferior races”.
@Hyper
What methods do communists use to create a post-scarcity society in revolutions? Sure, everybody wants a post-scarcity society but surely you can only count it amongst communist’s goals if they are trying to make strides towards it.
Leaving that aside, as somebody who strongly disagrees with the idea of a classless society then we can descrive Nazisms as ‘In principle the goal of National Socialist parties was to create a Jewless, free of all forms of coercion and alienation, and based on principles of voluntary mutual cooperation and shared values’
To my mind the defining principle of both ideologies is that once you get rid of the wreckers, then everyone else can live in harmony.
I don’t see any real difference between murderous envy of perceived power and wealth belonging to the well-bred and murderous envy of perceived power and wealth belonging to Jewish people. Surely the difference can’t be that Hitler wrote it down first, whereas Communists just implement it?
Of course, only the ‘twelve or fifteen thousand’ figure you quote Hitler as saying is the equivilant of Lenin’s borgeousie purge. The Holocaust is a couple of magnitudes higher than that.
@Matt M
A personal connection to the victims of the one but not the other.
Yeah, the demotic/egalitarian nature of Nazism that parallels Communism is often ignored. The Nazis wanted to create a society where everybody was equal as well — all pure and Germanic and working toward the Furher. If the Nazis succeeded in killing everybody else, what (in theory) would be left would be an egalitarian mass of totally equal (i.e. homogenous) people. The only difference is that the Communists tried to implement their equality by killing or removing anybody above the common folk, whereas the Nazis tried to kill anybody below or outside the common folk. Would you rather Procrustesus stretch your limbs or chop them off?
Also, I think the difference (for Americans at least) is simply geographical distance — Communism’s horror were further away. C.F. Nazi imagery in Thailand.
@hyperboloid
If the Nazis hadn’t been annihilated by the end of WWII, we probably would have seen “moderate” and less murderous Nazi parties in other parts of the world too. The only places communists didn’t fuck up were because they lacked the power or faced off against stronger opposition. We don’t worry about French communists now for the same reason Richard Spencer doesn’t really matter. Lack of a plausible route to power, not because their ideas or ideals are vaguely morally acceptable.
And saying communism failed but Nazism succeeded is bizarre. The Nazis failed by ’45. Communism still isn’t dead, and you are still apologizing for their monstrous ideas and horrifying bodycount by selectively leaving out all the evidence that they fully intended to liquidate kulaks/enemies of the state/bourgeoisie. That wasn’t some sort of accidental side effect of high minded ideals, it was the point.
The main difference between Nazis and Communists is that Communists had more time and space, and that the Communists were not defeated dramatically. As a consequence of that:
– Communists had multiple leaders, so now we can say: “These ones were quite evil, but compared with them, those other guys who didn’t literally murder millions of people seem like saints.”
– When we talk about Nazis, we debate descriptions from outside; what actually happened. Concentration camps, etc. When we talk about Communists, almost always someone introduces their “inside view” and insists that we instead talk about how some of their ideals were noble.
No, let me put it more plainly… When we debate Nazism, Nazis are not invited; they are merely described. But when we debate Communism, some Communist or a sympathizer usually invites themselves, and puts themselves into a position of an expert who knows “what Communism was truly about”, unlike the other guys who are just repeating American propaganda. Being a Nazi sympathizer gets you disqualified and called a horrible person; not being, at least slightly, a Communism sympathizer achieves a similar effect.
– Communists had the opportunity to raise whole generations of people, isolated from non-Communist opinions and news. Just because the regime officially ended, it’s not like these people are going to update about everything overnight. For people in the Nazi regime, I guess it was “this is what it is like during the war”, but for many people in Communist regime, it was all they have ever experienced, and even allowed to hear about.
I think Nazism was, in a sense, actually a worse idea than Communism.
Nazism glorified one smallish sub-group of the human race, and had compulsive military expansionism built into it. This meant it burned out relatively quickly.
National socialism’s economy, and subsequently war economy, was based on using conquest to pay for more conquest. (I’m thinking of doing an effortpost series on this) – but that isn’t necessarily why it burned itself out; its problem was just as much that German industry couldn’t compete with the industrial capacity of the USSR and the US put together. However, if it wasn’t destined to burn itself out, it was destined to do horrible things – the German plan for the east revolved around a predicted ~30 million Soviet civilian deaths due to starvation, for example.
It wasn’t just that Nazi Germany had a pyramid scheme of using the next conquest to pay for the current conquest, the narrow racism presumably made it harder for them to get and keep allies.
They didn’t have a great deal of trouble in finding allies, did they? They had several Eastern European countries on their side, and the Italians. Not great allies (the Italians being in the war might have caused more problems for the Germans than it solved, for example), but still. Their problem in keeping allies had to do with losing the war – something that happened at least twice was “German ally sees the writing on the wall, tries to quit the war, German forces seize power to keep them in the war, then deport all that country’s Jews.”
@hyperboloid:
Than you for your detailed answer to the question.
One minor quibble. Pinochet was a military dictator. I don’t think he was a fascist–at least, his economic policies were not. Franco is a better example.
@DavidFriedman
Franco wasn’t Fascist. He was a Catholic Monarchist Reactionary. If you want a real Fascist, look at the Man Himself – Mussolini.
Communism took for granted that ethnic Russians are superior humans. But it didn’t plan for exterminating other ethnic groups. They were supposed to live forever in harmony under the superior Russian leadership.
The emphasis on being “international” simply meant that you (a non-Russian) are supposed to forget about your own nation/country, and only think about what is good for the Soviet Union. Not that Russians are expected to do the same for you!
Fascism and Naziism could be approximated as “let’s do something similar to Communism, but putting our nation/country at the first place”.
> What are Trump’s views on white supremacists?
Although I don’t use that idiotic platform it’s my understanding that retweeting implies endorsement.
It doesn’t. Not unless you’re very desperate to target someone with guilt by association. Twitter is chaotic. People frequently retweet accounts they’re unfamiliar with. To say Trump has now endorses white supremacists is like insisting someone endorses the political platform of the National Socialist Party because they overheard a member tell an offensive joke at a party and laughed at it.
Tweeting is voluntary, overhearing something at a party is not. Although the most likely explanation in this case is that the videos confirmed Trump’s prejudices, and he too impulsive to spend time looking into who exactly made the original tweet.
Why does “who made the tweet” matter.
Shouldn’t the objection be more related to “does the tweet accurately represent what it implies”?
It strikes me as interesting that there’s so much obsession over who he re-tweets, rather than what he re-tweets.
As if re-tweeting the KKK saying “Good morning, world!” is somehow a greater moral affront than re-tweeting Beyonce saying “Let’s round up all the Muslims” or something…
I was thinking of the laugh being roughly analogous to the tweet, not the overhearing. I agree he’s too impulsive to have likely looked in to the account, which is why this hasn’t changed my opinion of the man. The only thing it shows clearly is that he believes Muslims pose a threat, and you don’t need to be detective to have figured that out already.
There are many reasons one retweets things. Sometimes it’s an endorsement of the statement, but not necessarily. To think it’s an endorsement of the original tweeter is silly, given that you only need to tap a few times and it’s done and at no point does this involve the bio of the original tweeter showing up on your screen. You don’t even have to be as impulsive as Trump to retweet something from an asshole.
Nearly always retweeting is done because you want the thing to have more exposure. Sometimes this is done because you think the thing is dumb and wants mocking, but from context we can tell this is not what Trump was doing.
That may explain the outrage. The SJW way of solving bad actors is to de-platform them. If you give exposure without explicit condemnation, you are working against de-platforming, which makes you part of the problem, and hence guilty of the same sort of sin.
I don’t know twitter enough to know if it has idiosyncratic norms. I would personally have a broader variety of reasons of retweeting than endorsement of everything the originator has said or done, down to “this particular tweet is interesting in some way, even if I’m not convinced by it.” Like when I post articles to Facebook even if I don’t agree with the conclusions but there’s some interesting annecdotes or whale puns in there somewhere.
In reality I don’t link things much, because I don’t care for the drama potential, and I use social media to be social, not to change the world.
Setting aside questions of whether retweets should be considered endorsement in the general case: the original source of the videos seems pretty confident that Trump’s retweet in particular was an endorsement. If she were wrong, it would be very easy for Trump to clarify. Instead, he tweeted back at Theresa May about how she should ignore him and “focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom”. (The connection between a video of a Dutch kid and Radical Islamic Terrorism in the UK is left as an exercise for the viewer. If you don’t see it, well, I guess that lack of vision is why Trump is president and you’re not.)
Can we just take a step back and realize how insane this all is? The President of the United States of America impulsively retweeted a set of videos designed to make people afraid of Muslims. His defenders are reduced to claiming that, well, he probably didn’t know that the original source is an anti-Muslim loonie who has been arrested for harassing women wearing hijabs while out shopping. If he were your senile great-uncle, that would be a reasonable excuse. Don’t you expect better from the leader of your country?
It must be so exhausting to feel compelled to defend this twit.
No.
People wanted representative democracy. They got it. Good and hard.
Ideally, yes. In the actual world as is, no. Seeing as it’s already acceptable and respectable to engage in all sorts of warfare directly causing the death of hundreds of thousands to millions and lie in order to get to the point where you can do that for reasons I find highly questionable at best and arguably evil at worst (Polk, Wilson, Johnson, Bush II), I don’t feel like anything is meaningfully more broken when a President is rude, uncouth, crazy, and religionist/racist/whatever. And really, lots of Presidents have been the last thing; some were just more polite or circumspect about it. Especially when current President is one of the most disliked Presidents in the last couple decades. I would prefer a different President, but the bar for him accidentally doing better than I consider several past Presidents to have done is so low it’s embarrassing.
Not really, because I don’t have to apologize for Trump. I agree with him.
On the other hand, his opponents who feel compelled to devote gallons of ink and days of broadcast time every time he takes 10 seconds to retweet something while sitting on the john, that’s got to be exhausting.
Oh, and constantly having to apologize for the atrocities of Muslims, who adhere to a supremacist religion that wants everyone who isn’t them either dead, forcibly converted, or subjugated. That’s got to be pretty exhausting too.
This is exactly backwards. The defenders shouldn’t have to be demonstrating Trump didn’t know about the original source. Trump’s detractors should have to demonstrate that he did. Then and only then would it become an issue even worth discussing.
@xXxanonxXx
You miss my point. Even granting Trump the complete benefit of the doubt regarding the source, he still impulsively retweeted a handful of poorly sourced videos designed to portray Muslims in a negative light, without spending any time at all to research their veracity.
You might accept that from an elderly relative. It would generally be met with skepticism in the comment section of this blog. It is crazy that people are willing to defend this as reasonable behaviour from the President of the United States.
@Conrad Honcho:
Have you, uh — have you ever actually met any Muslims? Because I have to say that if Islam requires all non-Muslims to be enslaved, subjugated, or killed, the Muslims I know are doing a piss-poor job of it. Should I complain to the local imam?
@Iain
Did you know that there are nazis walking around who aren’t gassing Jews right now?
@Iain: actually, yes. It’s kind of his job to make nominal Muslims better Muslims. Every religion has scads of members who don’t practice the hard teachings.
(Of course the doctrine of armed jihad becomes less hard if you’re a man who can’t get a mate and the mujahideen leader is following the doctrine about slave girls.)
@Conrad Honcho:
The Daily Stormer is, as I understand it, fairly prominent among American Nazis. According to its founder, “the official policy of his site was: ‘Jews should be exterminated.'”
CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, is a prominent representative of American Muslims. Here are their core principles: you will notice a surprising lack of subjugation. Instead, there’s a bunch of hippy nonsense about dialogue between faith communities. Terrifying!
If you think that Islam demands the subjugation of non-Muslims, and the vast majority of American Muslims disagree with you, consider the possibility that maybe they know more than you.
@Le Maistre Chat:
You are being the anti-Muslim version of this guy. Don’t be the anti-Muslim version of that guy.
@Iain
You seemed to have two points. One, that Trump supporters were desperately trying to argue that maybe Trump didn’t know the source of the tweet. This is exactly backwards. It should be seen as an act of desperation by Trump detractors to bring the connection up at all. Two, you’re saying Trump did not investigate the videos for veracity, and spread them for the express purpose of sending the message Muslims are a danger to our society. I agree. I just don’t see how this is news. Trump has been spreading dubious stories since before the election. He’s said that Muslims needed to be subject to extreme vetting before they could come to America. It’s not like you need to go rummaging around in the man’s trash for incriminating documents to discover what his real positions are. He’s not subtle.
For what it’s worth, I agree with him that Islam is a problem. I just wish someone else could address it. And, yeah, the Commander in Chief behaving like a pundit on twitter does make me cringe.
@Iain
Two (obvious) possibilities:
1. The organization is aligned with an interpretation of Islam where that makes sense. Islam doesn’t have as much formal splitting as Christianity does, so you’ll have several mutually contradictory sects saying they’re plain old Sunni, whereas Christians tend to mark their sect as special and distinct somehow (like “Adjective” Catholics).
2. The Islamic holy text supports lying to infidels in matters of religious import. Since American Muslims are in no place to throw their weight around in the bailey, for want of sufficient numbers, they wisely resort to motte-only public relations. You’ll probably find that in Muslim-majority countries, Islam is less “hippy” and more “mujahideen”.
I suppose you might not view Jizya as subjugation.
But, unlike the guy you link (who commits a logical error in the second paragraph), LMC isn’t wrong. Islam has been practically harvesting the efforts and hopes of unmarried young men for conquest since it existed. Legal polygyny and exhortation to violence against infidels is just going to do that.
@Anonymous:
In this case, you should not be asserting that “Muslims”, unqualified, are in favor of subjugating infidels.
This is an impossible argument. Regardless of anything Muslims do, you can assert that it’s merely a deception tactic until they’re in a position to start subjugating the infidels again. If this is your premise, there is no way for you to be convinced that Muslims are not planning to subjugate you.
(Jews used to get a similar smear, along the lines of “They can’t be trusted, because they have a religious holiday where they declare all their oaths and promises null and void.” Take any assertions of the form “This is what [outgroup]’s holy book says, so you know that they cannot be trusted regardless of how nice they act” with an entire mountain of salt.)
I agree that taking a passage out of a holy book is probably not a good way to understand how a large religion is practiced.
So look at the actual practice: in how many countries where Muslims have the political power are the non-Muslims treated well?
But isn’t that exactly what people say about “peaceful” white nationalists..? (obviously substituting “minorities” for “infidels”)
The very amorphousness of Islam, particularly Sunni Islam (Shia is nowadays pretty much a one-country affair), is why I’m resorting to blanket statements. If Mr Westernized Moderate Muslim and Mr Orthodox Fundamentalist Muslim and Mr Self-Appointed Jihad Preacher are all claiming to be part of the very same body of believers, and not even have the decency to formally schism and rebrand, I’m not going to do it for them.
Maybe they should have thought about that before subscribing to said holy book.
In addition, whether they want to subjugate infidels or not is a simple question of looking at what they do when they can do it. History looks a lot like “Muslims subjugate infidels when they can, and lie about it when they can’t”.
—
My general argument is this: A good Muslim should want to subjugate infidels. A Muslim who doesn’t want to subjugate infidels in the name of Allah is not a good Muslim.
Quoting from your link, which looks to me like a pretty good account of the subject:
You could probably make a clearer case out of differences in legal status–who can be a witness against whom, what the diya is for killing someone.
This, I think, is a turning point. Before I agreed with Scott that on balance the media’s coverage of Trump was doing more harm than anything Trump was actually saying. While I still don’t think the question “Is he racist?” is the right one, retweeting false videos where the original intent was to incite hatred is completely unacceptable.
Unfortunately I also think that a considerable swath of the media has constantly been making so much out of his actions that turned out to be inconsequential that they have no power left to call him out on genuinely harmful ones. Those that already hate him will continue to hate him, and Trump’s tacit supporters having seen all the smoke before but never fire will continue to ignore what the media says about him.
He has used falsehoods to incite hatred against Muslims before and it’s been basically forgotten.
Sorting through reddit comments is painful, but if I’m reading it right, he retweeted 3 videos purporting to be of Muslims behaving badly. One of them was not in fact of a “Muslim migrant”. (I assume since BBC is denying the “migrant” part only, he’s actually the child of Muslim migrants, but let’s cross the entire video out to be safe.)
If he had just retweeted the other two factually correct videos, would that have been acceptable?
(Do correct my facts if I’m off somewhere. There’s a lot of fog of war here, and if all 3 videos were fake my hypothetical is kind of beside the point.)
I think this is the conversation we need to have.
It strikes me as non-obvious that simply posting, without commentary, a video of Muslims committing crimes is somehow “Islamophobic.” And even less obvious that someone re-tweeting (which is, by definition, posting without commentary) said video is therefore also Islamophobic.
Furthermore, I find it somewhat revealing to see the American media (who are oh so concerned with Trump’s egregious assaults on the first amendment), enthusiastically parrot the talking points and support of tyrannical British laws which do not respect free speech. Headlines typically go something like: “Trump re-tweeted postings from Britain First, a racist right-wing hate group who have been arrested for inciting racial hatred.” So basically, we know these people are bad because the British government has arrested them for hate speech.
Nevermind that the US rejects hate speech as a thing worth being arrested for, and that such charges would be instantly laughed out of court in any country that even pretended to protect a right to free speech.
I have to wonder how they might react if Trump retweeted, say, the Dalai Llama. “Trump re-tweets racist propaganda from an individual that is currently an outlaw from justice in China, where he is wanted for disturbing societal peace and inciting religious hatred.”
@Jaskologist:
First, the claim is more than “here are some Muslims behaving badly”. There is an implicit claim of causality.
Second, from this ABC article we can see that the videos lack a commitment to truthfulness.
We don’t actually know the religion of the boy arrested in The Netherlands, as it was not released by the police.
you can see that the most incendiary video is badly in need of context, as it is from the Egyptian unrest in 2013. The motivation for that unrest wasn’t religious, but rather different Egyptian factions struggling for political control of the government.
This is just plain old shit-stirring. It’s easily identifiable. I understand things like confirmation bias and backlash effect are extremely strong. But really.
Which factions were those?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2013_Egyptian_protests
Nope, no religious motivations here.
What part of that article suggests that the videos lack a commitment to truthiness. The fact that the duth boy was born there is now well know – although this time yesterday, it was all ‘not a muslim’ everywhere; that’s changed.
But what’s untrue about the others?
Do you not feel bad when you say ‘The motivation for that unrest wasn’t religious, but rather different Egyptian factions struggling for political control of the government.’ when one of those factions – arguably the most major – and the faction that murdered the boywas a self-proclaimed Brotherhood. A brotherhood of what, do you recall?
When the military and their backers, who were Muslim, attacked people, who were also Muslim (and this was not sectarian fighting either) what was the true relevance of their religion?
This is standard power play bullshit. Highly likely to happen during and in the wake of the downfall of any authoritarian government.
I get what you mean, but the implication of this is that it’s silly to imagine Muslims fighting over doctrinal matters.
@Randy M:
European history involves quite a lot of fighting between Protestants and Catholics — some of it, such as the Troubles in Ireland, quite recent. How much information would you say that this fighting gives us about the character of Catholics and Protestants?
I feel like it’s probably possible to tweet a video of a Catholic committing a crime without everyone immediately jumping down your ass about what a Catholophobe you are.
Up Next: Trump retweets a bunch of Thomas Nast cartoons.
@Ian, HBC: Pointing out that both sides share the same religion does not provide much evidence as to whether religion was a motivating factor. I wasn’t saying HBC was wrong, just that his evidence was insufficient.
But–him saying that it wasn’t sectarian (which I missed, despite quoting, whoops–darn relevant paratheticals) does specifically admit the possibility, so it seems my post added little.
Yup, a lot of which seems to have been fought for tribal reasons, and led for political reasons.
Which seems like a good argument for not condemning Muslisms as specifically evil, and also for not allowing immigration by more disparate cultures than we already have for historical reasons.
@Matt M:
Sure. But if you tweeted multiple videos of Catholics committing crimes in foreign countries (except one of those videos wasn’t actually a Catholic after all), and you had a history of doing things like this, and you had been elected as the president of the United States on a platform of keeping Catholics out of the country, then maybe the Catholics would start getting a little antsy.
You know. Hypothetically.
I think the muslims beating people and destroying things of value to people of other faiths is both more hateful and likely to incite hatred than sharing videos of them doing it.
This is the values disconnect we have. I care about the things in the video, not the sharing of the video.
Upthread I shared a picture of the aftermath of the Charlottesville car attack. Are you mad at me for doing so because that might incite hatred against neo-nazis?
I see your point, but this is one of the places where I think Trump does a lot of harm.
When you’re a powerful and influential person, you ought to be especially careful not to incite violence or hatred. Partly, that’s because lots of people look to you for guidance about how they should act. But also, that’s because lots of people actually are taking orders from you or your government–perhaps at several removes, but still, you’re the guy at the top. “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest” is a lot more dangerous thing to say when you’re the big boss than when you’re some random property developer in NYC.
(This is also sort of replying to Jackologist/Matt M above)
Perhaps I’m being particularly sensitive to these videos because until recently I lived in Britain, and it’s that he retweeted Britain First, who have a history of sharing inflammatory content (even if it was probably Ann Coulter he was retweeting, not them directly, according to the BBC). It’s also that at least one of these videos is misleading – I’d similarly be upset if you were sharing pictures claiming they were antifa rioting if in fact they had nothing to do with antifa, even (especially?) if there were genuine incidents where antifa did just that.
With this instance it’s also context – I can’t see any reason why Trump would share even legitimate videos. It’s not in response to a specific event or even policy proposal. It seems to be just to antagonize his opponents and excite his supporters, and while I didn’t mind when he did that with the CNN wrestling video (well, OK, I don’t think a President should ever do that, but it’s normal for Trump, ultimately inconsequential, and the way the media tried to link a bad, obvious joke to threats to free press was just ridiculous), in this context I think it has real potential to encourage hatred or harm of a specific people group in a way that none of his actions or tweets before have.
This is how 99% of Twitter users use Twitter.
The problem here is that people keep expecting Trump to behave like an intellectual statesman, rather than like a regular Twitter user. The media is shocked and appalled that he uses Twitter in the exact same way as everyone else does. He looks at it on his phone when he’s bored, occasionally RTs things he sees that he likes, composes hastily written screeds to bash his political opponents, etc.
I feel like this rounds to “you may not criticize Islam.”
People expect Trump to behave like he’s President. Is that unreasonable?
Just because it’s how other people use Twitter, does that make it OK?
I’ve long accepted that this will be a Presidency of 3am tweets, belittling political opponents, rants about whose is bigger, and even calling out foreign allies. It’s not what I’d want in a President, but it is what we have.
But I’m responding to the original post’s question: are people still crying wolf? Up until now I would’ve defended Trump and the assertion that the frequent portrayal of Trump as an (in this case) anti-Muslim bigot, the constant parroting of the idea that he’s encouraging hate, and the scrutinizing of every tweeted character for whistles or what-have-yous is doing more to encourage hate than anything Trump himself has done.
Trump may or may not be more racist than your average 70 year old white man, and I don’t care, but this time I think he’s crossed a line to where he’s actually encouraging hate. This is where I think the media have a legitimate reason to call him out, though as I mentioned above, they’ve cried wolf too much and lost their credibility in the matter.
@Jaskologist
He’s *allowed* to do whatever he wants — he’s the president! But if he retweets random videos of cardiologists falsifying test results (and furthermore some of those videos turn out to not actually depict cardiologists), that’s strong evidence that he has an irrational fear and hatred of cardiologists.
Is fear of Islam (or Muslims) more or less rational than fear of Nazism (or Nazis)?
Vastly less rational. How many Nazis would you say there are in the US? Give an estimate, then calculate deaths/person for each group from here.
I dunno, are we talking actual honest to god Nazis because I’ve traveled back in time to 1940? Because obviously actual Nazis are scarier.
However, modern neo-Nazis are mostly wannabe punks with no real power or the occasional murderous thug/criminal who the FBI (or police) comes down on like a ton of bricks (although they are useful bogeymen and make for good press headlines). The second type may be dangerous if you run into them in a dark alley but vastly outnumbered by other types of murderous thugs/criminals of a less ideological bent.
There’s no real point in being afraid of modern neo-Nazis in America or in being afraid of crazy Islamic terrorists. It is hypothetically possible that one may end up in a dark alley with a Neo-Nazi or be an unfortunate soul going about their business when some ISIS inspired nut goes on a rampage, but both options are super unlikely and not easily preventable. Better to be afraid of crashing your car.
If it wasn’t for the media’s constant obsession with these sort of extremely low probability dramatic events, I’d don’t think either issue would be on people’s radar much at this point.
I’m not interested in deaths/person but in political power.
The vast majority of Nazis are peaceful. Never gassed a Jew. They just support a political system that allows for the gassing of Jews once they obtain state power.
The vast majority of Muslims are peaceful. Never slaughtered an infidel. They just support a religious and political system that allows for the slaughtering of infidels once they obtain power.
I don’t know. Shouldn’t you compare 1940s Nazis to ISIS, or other Islamic governments?
I still say 1940’s Nazis are considerably more dangerous than ISIS. Competence counts so to speak. Even though ISIS isn’t a pack of idiots, I don’t think it’s measuring up to the Nazis of the time who cultivated allies and were able to steamroll a well developed continent for a little while.
If there are sufficienty few Nazis that the ratio is in favour of Muslims* then there are sufficiently few Nazis that to be scared of Nazis is silly. It’d be like being of the zombie of Charles Manson – obviously if its right there then that’s a horse of a different colour but meh.
* Worth mentioning that there’s quite an oppressive branch – the TSA – founded to pretty to try to prevent Islamic terrorists as well as having to ‘fight them over there’ and Islamic terrorism is still the far larger number just this decade.
If we’re going to use historic Nazis, why not use the Ottomans at the gates of Constantinople for the Muslims? Or Muhammad’s followers riding towards Mecca?
Hmmmm… that’s tough. It’s not clear how to adjust for population and the massive gaps in time. But I definitely wouldn’t want to be anywhere in the vicinity of either of these groups if I wasn’t their ally, and they both had competence in spades and were very successful (much more successful in the long run than the Nazis). I’m willing to call them “roughly as terrifying or maybe even more terrifying than Nazis” to their outgroups.
Matt M:
That seems about right to me. You or I can spout off on the internet about something without thinking it through much or knowing what we’re talking about, and little is the worse for it. The president is in a fundamentally different situation–his words have weight and impact that very few other people can match.
Conrad:
So, how many countries ruled by Muslims are currently about the job of slaughtering infidels? If you count ISIS as a country, that’s one. The rest of them don’t seem to be too keen on human rights (including but not limited to religious freedom), and some of them are pretty nasty places for anyone who’s not the right brand of Muslim (Saudi Arabia), but perhaps I’ve missed the news stories about the mass executions of infidels going on in Muslim countries.
quanta:
Yeah, Nazis in 1940 were in control of the most powerful country in Europe with a really badass military, lots of industry, and science/technology at the forefront of human achievement. It’s been several centuries since anything like that was the case for any Muslim country.
Okay.
But Trump never agreed to do that, never promised to do that, and never gave the slightest indication that he was even the least bit inclined to do that. And people voted for him – not in spite of that sort of behavior – but because of it.
You can disagree with it if you want. You can even denounce it. But seeing the media continually reach for their fainting couch because they are just shocked and appalled that Trump’s Twitter etiquette isn’t becoming of a very serious politician has grown pretty damn tiresome.
So, how many countries ruled by Muslims are currently about the job of slaughtering infidels?
It’s not just a matter of deaths, but quality of life. It’s also hard to compare, because we’ve got one example of Naziism, and the numbers for what it was like to be a regular German during that time period are skewed by the war. For that reason, I’m not going to try to use ISIS’s Caliphate, Syria, or the Sudan or Ethiopia for examples of Islamic governance.
Serious question: is the government of Iran or Pakistan today more or less oppressive than Mussolini’s Italy pre-World War II or Franco’s Spain post Spanish Civil War? Given that the big lefty protest umbrella is called AntiFA, I think they’re comparable states to use.
@Conrad honcho
I find it interesting that islamaphobes always seem to agree with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi that the only Muslims who really count are the subjects of his pathetic caliphate.
Tell that to the soldiers of the Iraqi golden division. Because these brave, and ruthless men, have been fighting shoulder to shoulder with Christians, and Yazidiz, against an army of ruthless genocidal terrorists. What exactly have you done to save anyone form the horrors of the so called Islamic sate?
It is true that there are many in the Muslim world who no doubt have sympathy for the hateful, and fanatical doctrine of the Jihadis, but they are overwhelmingly outnumbered. I am not telling platitudes about peaceable Muslims, because the people of Egypt did not respond to the abomination that left more than three hundred worshipers dead in a mosque in the north Sinai on Sunday by taking the path of peace, instead they have gone to war. As the Kurds, and the Iraqi’s, and the Afghans, have gone to war, to save their civilization form those who would destroy it.
Every time Trump insults Islam, he insults them, and undermines there struggle. It is a disgrace to hear the commander in chief of the US armed forces talk about our allies like that.
I am on the side of those who are, as we speak, risking their lives to fight men who would come here and kill us in our sleep if they could. Who’s side are you on?
@Civilis
Much less, in both cases. Pakistan, though it has is has it’s problems is a multi party parliamentary democracy. Iran while deeply repressive in many ways, is no absolute dictatorship, and has mixed system of government akin to European constitutional monarchies of the nineteenth century.
Also, Ethiopia? They’re brown (or black as may be the case) so they must be Muslim? In case you don’t know, that country is, and always has been overwhelmingly Christian.
Also, Ethiopia? They’re brown (or black as may be the case) so they must be Muslim? In case you don’t know, that country is, and always has been overwhelmingly Christian.
Mea culpa. I meant Somalia. Shows what I get for typing while frustrated. I will note that this is the second time that someone on the left has fallen back on talking about the right’s supposed hatred of ‘brown people’. Isn’t that canard a little outdated?
Much less, in both cases. Pakistan, though it has is has it’s problems is a multi party parliamentary democracy. Iran while deeply repressive in many ways, is no absolute dictatorship, and has mixed system of government akin to European constitutional monarchies of the nineteenth century.
It’s not the state of the top level of government that solely defines repression. Pakistan just had a senior government minister forced out because the oath of office was changed slightly in how it referenced the prophet. Significant parts of the country are in the hands of tribal authorities. Murders of those accused of blasphemy seem to go unsolved. Likewise, the Republican Guard’s calling a lot of the shots in Iran, and I wouldn’t want to be in one of their prisons either.
It’s hard to compare two societies of different technological eras. Certainly, Franco and Mussolini didn’t have the Internet to deal with in keeping their control of government, and it was a lot easier to make inconvenient dissidents disappear. Still, that countries are willing to torture and disappear the inconvenient in the modern age with all the modern problems that entails tells you something about them.
If the death penalty for apostasy counts, quite a few.
In the case of Trump, or someone else in his position, it’s weak evidence of that. The obvious alternative explanation is that he thinks a lot of voters have such a fear and appealing to it will help him get or keep their support.
Ethiopia is majority Christian.
@hyperboloid:
You seem to assume that the idea of spreading Islam by force is something special to ISIL. It isn’t. It’s been orthodox Islamic doctrine for well over a thousand years, with the practice varying with circumstance.
Do you think the conversion of al Islam from one city in Arabia to all of what had been the Persian empire and about half of what had been the Byzantine empire over a period of a century or so was done mostly by missionaries?
Conventional doctrine views the world as divided between the lands of peace, ruled by Muslims, and the lands of war, not ruled by Muslims, with an intermediate status for non-Muslim lands with which Muslims currently have treaty agreements. Muslim rule doesn’t imply forced conversion, but it does imply a different, and in most respects somewhat inferior, legal status for the tolerated non-Muslims, details varying by school of law.
It’s an ancient Christian civilization, but “overwhelmingly” is an overstatement–about a third of the population is Muslim.
The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Also consider a nasty little joke dating back to Iran/Contra: “The Ayatollah Khomeni would like to thank President Reagan on behalf of the Iranian moderates.”
I’m on the side against Islam. I think it’s the mother lode of all bad ideas, and is basically “Nazism but because Allah instead of volk.” Islam divides people into believers and infidels, and infidels are subhuman and you can do whatever you want to them just like Nazis divides people into Aryans and subhumans. Rape, enslave, murder, no problem. I am opposed to that sort of thing both on general principle and because history has shown us it leads to boundless human misery.
Yes, I’m aware #NotAllMuslims, but only because individuals behave differently when they’re a minority group instead of a majority group, and an individual’s adherence to any given ideology tends to wax and wane through life and is dependent upon circumstance.
@Conrad Honcho:
Seriously — you need to go out and meet some actual flesh-and-blood Muslims. You are talking like a crazy person.
Here is the Pew survey on Muslim attitudes around the world. Key excerpt:
And this is largely looking at Muslims outside of developed countries — the numbers in the US are even less damning. (They don’t ask all the same questions, but here’s Pew’s survey of Muslims in America.)
That is not and has never been orthodox Muslim doctrine. A Muslim killing or raping a non-Muslim has committed a crime under Islamic law. Whether the penalty is the same as for the same crime against a Muslim depends on the particular school of law.
Not a crime in the context of warfare, but we don’t consider soldiers who kill enemy soldiers to be murderers either.
In traditional Islamic societies both non-Muslims and Muslims could be slaves. Part of the penalty for killing someone was the obligation to free a believing slave (or fast for two months).
What’s your view of Judaism? Rabbinic law, as described by Maimonides, permits the rape of captive non-Jewish women in the context of warfare. He reads a variety of restrictions into the text, but concedes (unhappily) the basic point.
Those 31/38 Muslim countries sure do sound lovely and accepting. So I guess it would be perfectly safe to go to them and start preaching the Gospel, maybe hand out some Bibles?
Conrad:
You said
The vast majority of Muslims are peaceful. Never slaughtered an infidel. They just support a religious and political system that allows for the slaughtering of infidels once they obtain power.
This is a factual claim, and it doesn’t seem to be consistent with history, in which a number of Islamic regimes have had substantial long-term populations of Christians and Jews, who broadly did reasonably okay. (They were second-class citizens, but they weren’t being slaughtered.) It also doesn’t seem to be consistent with modern practice, where there are a lot of countries in which Muslims are the majority and are in power in the government, but which do not actually go around slaughtering non-Muslims.
There are substantial Christian populations in many Muslim countries, including Pakistan, Syria, Indonesia, Egypt, and many other Muslim countries. There are Islamic terrorist groups who target Christians, but governments that have been run by Muslims for centuries have long-term Christian populations that have survived, un-slaughtered, for all that time.
@albatross11 @Conrad Honcho
Yeah, “slaughtered” is far too strong. Islam’s conquests and rule before modern day isn’t the age of nationalism yet, but tribalism has been substantially phased out as well. Conquered populations are loot and cash cows, not strictly enemies to be put down ASAP.
According to dr Clark in The Son Also Rises, the dhimmi populations of the Middle East became highly elite as a consequence of jizya-avoidance by the lower income dhimmis. The rich could afford to pay the tax and carry on, but the poor often couldn’t, so they rationally became Muslim.
So, is your point that Islam today is not worse than Judaism millenia ago? I could easily agree with that, but exactly what relevance it has to things happening today?
More precisely, my point was that Islamic law of war is not much worse than Jewish law of war. Maimonides was only about one millennium ago, and is still regarded as an authority on the subject–I don’t know if later scholars rejected that particular conclusion, have no reason to think they did.
The main difference is that a larger fraction of Muslims than of Jews take their religious law seriously, perhaps in part because Islam is a younger religion. Also, of course, that Judaism was never an expansionary religion in the sense in which Islam was.
My other point was that what Conrad wrote and I quoted was false.
Fine, I correct “slaughter” to “slaughter or subjugate.” Islam is still very bad, and I don’t want it anywhere near me.
And I still think Muslim states today are like what would probably have happened if Nazi Germany had either won or avoided WWII. After the initial slaughtering and purging, they would have “benevolently” kept some subjugated populations around, secure that they would have no political power and fewer legal rights.
When a politician who currently lives in New York refers to large parts of the American populace as “a basket of deplorables” whose goals are incompatible with a good society, is that politician reacting to (A) the skin color of those voters, (B) the culture of those voters, or (C) the religion of those voters?
When a different politician who used to live in New York uses that kind of video to make a point about foreigners who goals are incompatible with a good society, is that politician reacting to (A) the skin color, (B) the culture, or (C) the religion of those people?
And once again, if you read the whole statement, it sounds a hell of a lot less outrageous.
Why, it’s almost as though the people reporting and discussing these things are more interested in getting you mad than in informing you.
If I read that statement, it looks even worse. Or rather, it looks as much worse than the out-of-context interpretation as it did the last few times I read it. It reads as her literally saying that if you support Trump – for any reason at all, including not supporting her – you’re 50% likely to be “deplorable”. And if you’re not, then you’re just misguided and frustrated. Huddled in your basement, clinging to your guns and religion, perhaps. There’s zero chance you might actually be smart, informed, or have a legitimate gripe; you just need the guiding hand of Hillary. The idea that you might possess your own agency is laughable – your friends who are voting for Clinton need to help you out of your obvious delusion. Friends don’t let friends vote for Trump!
Let’s be clear: stereotyping is wrong. Unless it’s Hillary stereotyping half of all Trump supporters.
Why, it’s almost as though the people reporting and discussing these things are more interested in getting you mad than in informing you.
Judging from your tone here, I think you’re doing exactly what you’re accusing your opponents of doing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_jogger_case#Accusations_by_Donald_Trump
Although the “Is Trump a racist question” is fairly unimportant; rather, he’s a poor, emotional, credulous thinker whose need to protect his ego seems to dominate all other considerations. From his actions, however, it seems hard to deny that he’s at least somewhat bigoted.
I have no idea if he is credulous. You surely don’t assume that in order to say something he has to believe it?
Trump is a demagogue, and a reasonably competent one. Some of what he does may be explainable by intellectual defects of one sort or another, but the first guess should usually be that he is doing it because he thinks it will achieve his political purposes.
Why should that be the first guess? Reports of his personality paint him as impulsive, rather than calculated. His constant live tweeting of Fox & Friends also suggests impulsiveness (and credulousness) rather than foresight and consideration.
That’s exactly what I’d expect someone who wanted to loudly pander to fans of Fox & Friends would do
It’s all a game of Neopythagorean Bocce!
Oh please, it doesn’t have to be some sort of expanding brain meme. All it requires is for Trump to stay in campaign mode (the one thing he’s demonstrably good* at) once he’s got the job instead of settling in to actually govern.
@Gobbobobble
He wouldn’t be wrong to keep doing what he does, either. He’s got a campaign in 3 years to win! Then it’s smooth sailing and he can just relax.
Urstoff asks:
Because the alternative assumption led almost everyone, myself included, to predict first that Trump would lose the competition for the nomination and then that he would lose the election.
Because the alternative assumption led almost everyone, myself included, to predict first that Trump would lose the competition for the nomination and then that he would lose the election.
The inference is the problem here, not the assumption.
Because Trump understands the media very well and has had a consistent pattern for decades of using them to his advantage by doing precisely the sort of outrageous things that you believe he does out of impulsiveness.
He isn’t making a secret out of what he’s doing either:
“The media are always hungry for a good story, and the more sensational the better. It’s in the nature of the job, and I understand that. The point is that if you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you. I’ve always done things a little differently, I don’t mind controversy, and my deals tend to be somewhat ambitious. Also, I achieved a lot when I was very young, and I chose to live in a certain style. The result is that the press has always wanted to write about me. I’m not saying that they necessarily like me. Sometimes they write positively, and sometimes they write negatively. But from a pure business point of view, the benefits of being written about have far outweighed the drawbacks. It’s really quite simple. If I take a full-page ad in the New York Times to publicize a project, it might cost $40,000, and in any case, people tend to be skeptical about advertising. But if the New York Times writes even a moderately positive one-column story about one of my deals, it doesn’t cost me anything, and it’s worth a lot more than $40,000. The funny thing is that even a critical story, which may be hurtful personally, can be very valuable to your business.” (From “Art of the Deal”.)
Now that Trump is in politics, just replace “valuable to your business” with “valuable for his political goals.”
Trump isn’t impulsive. He doesn’t gamble, doesn’t drink alcohol. He’s calculating and relatively risk-averse.
I think this is an issue in which Moloch has eaten the press. The only way to beat Trump is to ignore Trump, but because of the clickbait/outrage porn state of the media, they cannot. Anyone who doesn’t write “DID YOU SEE WHAT TRUMP JUST DID??!?!” loses eyeballs to the outlets that do.
As a Trump supporter who hates the press, I can’t say I’m too upset about this. When your enemy has a crippling coordination problem, this is not a bad thing.
This.
As I have said before, it doesn’t matter whether Trump himself is a racist; Amon Goethe was not an anti-Semite, he was just an opportunistic predator given unlimited license for his impulses by the prerogatives of the final solution. It is wrong to say that trump is a racist; not because he does not hold most blacks, Hispanics, and foreigners in contempt, but but because by saying so one presumes that he cares about white people. The one consistent thread in everything Trump says, and does is that he divides the world into two groups, the winners and the losers; he admires power and privilege, and disdains weakness.
This is Trump in 1990 speaking on the Tiananmen square massacre:
Gorbachev is bad because in his weakness he did not slaughter protesting Soviet citizens, and Deng Xiaoping is good because he pilled Chinese bodies in the streets. And his affection for the Chinese regime did not end there. After spending a lot of time on the campaign trail accusing China of “raping” the United States on trade, Trump pivoted to effusive praise of Xi Jinping once inf office.
Nothing more needs to be said of his perverse affection for Vladimir Putin, but what’s remarkable is that he even had good things to say about Kim Jong Un:
Compare his admiration for dictators with his disdain for his own supporters.
Trump regards his own voters they way he regarded the would be students
of Trump university, as helpless rubes who diverse to be taken advantage of.
Race has never been the deciding factor for Trump, in his mind there are two kinds of people predators, and prey. If you want to see the real policy implications of this, look no further than the Tax bill now before congress. After running on a economically populist platform of preserving entitlements, he is instead supporting a tax cut that republican congressman themselves say is designed to force cuts to Medicaid, and social security.
The white working class needs to get it through their heads, Trump is just not that into them.
A comparison of Russia in the nineties with China in the nineties suggests that Trump’s instincts were actually remarkably prescient.
A comparison between China, and every other post Communist state in Europe would seem to say otherwise.
Gorbachev was overthrown in a coup by KGB hardliners, so we don’t know what would have happened long term if his plans were allowed to play out. Nevertheless looking at the Baltic states, or the Czech republic, or even Serbia, it would seem to me that he had the right basic idea.
He may be racist, but this is no evidence for that truth claim.
What horrible thing is he accused of doing? Retweeting videos of three Muslims committing crimes previously tweeted by evil British political activist Jayda Fransen. The media is spinning it as “videos PURPORTEDLY show Muslims committing crimes”, as if they were faked. What’s the evidence for fakery? That the Muslim who attacked a man on crutches in the Netherlands was born there, and so not a Muslim migrant. Cute, but most of us who oppose Islam are more sophisticated than that. It’s well known that the second-generation Muslims can be much more dangerous than the parents, many of whom are very moderate and immigrated for higher paying jobs.
Furthermore, a lot of the evil the evil Jayda Fransen is accused of doesn’t actually seem evil. Britain First conducts “Christian patrols” of neighborhoods taken over by Muslims? Oh, the horror! She’s been arrested multiple times for breaking hate speech laws? Unjust laws were made to be broken.
The one very problematic thing Googling her turned up is threatening political opponents with execution by hanging if Britain First takes over. That’s indistinguishable from Nazi or Communist Party talk.
Not a migrant, not a muslim.
I have to admit that my first impulse was to wonder how “not a migrant” might be language abuse.
But, yeah, fair enough.
What he said.
There are so many assaults by Muslims in the Netherlands that I’m surprised she tweeted a fraud.
Then again, according to Britain First’s Wikipedia article, they’re a BNP splinter, so she may actually be a Neo-Nazi in the non-slur-by-Orwellian-government sense.
A Britain First supporter assassinated an MP a couple of years ago.
OK, I found that story in their Wikipedia entry. Britain First denied knowing him, with Jayda Fransen’s predecessor as leader saying “Anyone who assassinates an MP should be strung up from the nearest lamp post. That’s our sense of justice.”
So it’s ambiguous whether they incited that specific violence, but their sense of justice is the same toxic stew shared by literally Hitler and the antifas who lynched Mussolini at a gas station.
What Trump is doing is playing the political game to win, and the responses in this thread (and the things that are conspicuous by their absence) show exactly why he’s succeeding as well as he is.
Trump shows pictures of Muslims doing bad things, and people aren’t asking themselves ‘why?’. It’s not to stir up ‘hate’, because the people to whom this message is addressed already have a bad image of Muslims. They know groups like ISIS are doing worse in the name of Islam. Trump’s message is an acknowledgement that these people exist and their concerns are recognized. If you’re worried about Islamic terrorism, Trump is the one person you know is willing to call it out.
It’s a lesson for another reason. We have in this thread people that can’t or won’t distinguish between actual Nazis, neo-Nazis, white supremicists, white nationalists, neo-confederates, Christian identity types, the Alt Right, and the red tribe in general. There may be some overlap, but there’s a difference. The people calling out Trump are just as vulnerable to group identification as Trump is. If the left is going to play identity politics, then Trump’s going to use the environment it creates it to his advantage.
And that brings us to what’s conspicuous by its absence. Trump’s retweeting a couple of thinly sourced anecdotes where Muslims did something bad is “stirring up hate”. Meanwhile, we get stories like this: “Air Force Academy hoax doesn’t change overall picture on hate crimes” (http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/09/opinions/hoax-hate-crime-and-racism-opinion-ghitis/index.html). This isn’t an assault. If it had been real, it would be nothing more than a single asshole. The media repeated it and similar stories like the “it’s ok to be white” poster ‘atrocity’ over and over without any discussion about how the hoaxers or the people repeating the stories are racist or bigoted for “stirring up hate”. The Texas State University can publish an article telling me my DNA is an abomination (my DNA, not my culture, so something I can’t change) and it doesn’t get any handwringing about racism from the people calling Trump out.
I’ve read enough here that my rational thought process can comprehend what’s going on as a matter of the difference between outgroups and fargroups, but that’s increasingly meaningless as the red and blue tribes pull further apart. I don’t like that increasing division, but it’s something beyond my meager paygrade to fix. As it becomes increasingly obvious that the blue tribe is hostile to me, the more I get pushed into the red tribe, and I’m sure I’m not alone. And I (and millions of other people) are likely to vote for a poor leader that at least acknowledges my existence than a terrible leader that is willing to throw us to the sharks.
“We have in this thread people that can’t or won’t distinguish between actual Nazis, neo-Nazis, white supremicists, white nationalists, neo-confederates, Christian identity types, the Alt Right, and the red tribe in general.”
Most of them seem to be red tribers, judging by the number of people who think Trump was right to say that the Unite The Right rally (organised by a man who was rejected by the Proud Boys for being too racist, and who described the victim of the terrorist attack that occurred at the rally as “a fat, disgusting Communist”) contained “very fine people”.
Ugh, what a bunch of outgroupies.
Thank you for illustrating my point.
I’m not willing to blindly smear everyone that attended, say, the Women’s March on Washington, based on the people that organized the march and the prominent speakers that were there, though by your logic I should do so.
Can someone explain the difference between what results from publishing the following and who is responsible for those results:
1) Piss Christ (a crucifix submerged in urine)
2) a Qur’an that’s been accidentally urinated on
3) video of Muslims throwing someone off a building
4) video of American troops abusing Muslim prisoners.
“You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people on both sides,” Trump said Tuesday.
For that matter, I’m not willing to give Trump any grief for thinking that groups like the Workers World Party or the Revolutionary Communist Party or Antifa might have some very fine people, as unlikely as it may be.
I don’t think anyone who spoke at the women’s march was as objectionable as David Duke, but that’s besides the point. The issue is not that there were some bad people, it’s that (as you could easily predict from reading about the organiser) there were essentially no good people. This is not an inherent fact about anti-statue-removal rallies! I’m sure that the majority of people mentioned here are perfectly fine. But the Unite The Right rally was white nationalist from the beginning. I’m not slurring the fine generic red tribers who protested in Helena and elsewhere by saying this, it’s people who are defending the protestors in Charlottesville by ignoring the difference between the two rallies who are doing that.
I think the fine people on the other side he was referring to were probably the hundreds of clergymen rather than antifa, but I could be wrong.
On the other hand, I’m much more sympathetic to taking down a Confederate monument in frigging Montana. As north as north gets and was a non-state with like 7 citizens and a chicken during the war and its leadup. Somehow I doubt the war affected them too much.
rlms:
How would we figure out if there were any substantial number of good people at that rally? It’s not at all clear to me.
I don’t think anyone who spoke at the women’s march was as objectionable as David Duke, but that’s besides the point.
David Duke is an asshole, but he never kidnapped and tortured a gay man to death.
Ultimately, I don’t think many people involved with these rallies know who’s sponsoring it on their side. People want to protest, and some want to get in fights with the other side. In most cases, I think the people organizing the protests want to keep themselves anonymous. It was a game on the right to spot just how many anti-war rallies were organized by the Workers World Party (under the guise of ANSWER, aka Act Now to Stop War and End Racism). The WWP distinguished itself by splitting off from the other far left groups because it supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary. I didn’t go blaming the people in those rallies for not knowing who’s sponsoring them.
Speaking of “who’s who in a group” – did anybody think that the videos of this rally, compared to say the videos of street scuffling in Berkeley (not the first time with people cracking Milo fans on the head, but the second one, with alt-right umbrella groups showing up seeking , featured a more black and red from the right, and less black and red from the left? I may be misremembering things, but I remember a lot more Pepe at Berkeley, and a “costume” over “uniform” feel. Whereas, in those videos, the left is far more likely to be in red, black, and masks – to have a more standard attire. So, right now it’s the anarcho-communists who are best at dressing up together. What we’re discussing seemed a lot more “neo-Nazi and white nationalist guys who showed up intending to colour-coordinate” on the right and a lot more “ordinary people who hate Nazis, as one does, including random middle aged people you don’t see among more extreme folk usually” on the left.
I think part of the reason is that in the latter case, a lot of alt-light personalities who like to show up at “goad the leftists into a fight” event. They, presumably, know that if they hang out with enough undeniable Nazis, their brand becomes Nazi, and their brand depends on a lot of supporters be able to plausibly deny being a racist or whatever. Which people hanging out in the middle of a group of undeniable Nazis are less able to do.
A lot more of the left-wingers meanwhile were church people and ordinary liberal folks, compared to Berkeley. They’re clearly able to recognize Nazis too.
Additionally, we’re arguing over whether one non-Nazi in a group of people openly wearing swastikas is not Nazified, rather than the previous question of whether one Nazi Nazifies everyone else. In Berkeley, how many actual swastikas were there, vs. more obscure and thus plausibly deniable hipster Nazi symbols (dark sun or whatever? Are there hipster Nazis using the wolfsangel?) was also less. So, clearly, there was a higher % of Nazis at Charlottesville than at previous “show up and rumble with some commies” events.
Additionally, would it be fair to say that most of the groups rallying were either neo-Nazi (who, rather than argue about their ideology, will just point out that people who wear swastikas in that fashion want to be thought of as Nazis) or white nationalists (“they haven’t managed to commit vast atrocities yet due to a lack of power” isn’t a huge defence to be honest)?
It’s not a defence of the moral precepts of Neo-Nazis. However, it is excellent reason to not worry about them. It’s kind of like the same reason I’m not deeply worried about homicidal crack dealers from X city. I think people that bring either topic up very much outside of very specific contexts are unlikely to be doing much besides playing games.
A more extreme example of this principle is how I didn’t care about Charles Manson after he had been in prison for decades. Neo-nazis aren’t as totally shut-out mind you, but at this point I’m convinced that if the Neo-nazis get anywhere it’s going to be partly the fault of the idiot media who constantly brings attention to them.
And I distinguish Neo-nazis from 1950s style segregationists, because the second group gaining power is somewhat more likely (but I still think very unlikely) but not nearly as bad as Nazis (after all, a lot of the people who fought the Nazis were pro-segregation). And for all their moral failures, segregationists still have a way lower body count. They’re like problematic Hindu caste system levels of evil instead of Genghis Khan levels of evil.
quanta:
Yeah, that’s how it looks to me, too. There was a time when the Nazis were a genuinely scary power in the world. Thank God, that time has passed, and these days, the people who call themselves Nazis are a bunch of losers who will never get anywhere near any power.
Something similar applies to Communism as an ideology, even though there are still some countries which are officially Communist. (Most importantly, China.) There was a time when it looked plausible that the world would end up under Communist domination; these days, that’s hard to see happening, albeit not so implausible as the world ending up under Nazi domination.
@quanta413
I’m not speaking on the question of “how high to we rank this threat” but on the moral question. Someone who would do evil but lacks the power isn’t good, or even neutral; they’re evil, but powerless.
@dndnsrn
Sure. Morally their ideas are evil, but lots of ideas are. Morally evil ideas are a dime a dozen. Morally evil actions (that are actually committed or sufficiently likely to be committed) are what should be of interest in almost all cases.
“That time” being 1923?
“These days” could just as well be 1927.
I’m fairly confident that people who call themselves Nazis will never again get anywhere near any real power. But that’s because of the intense opposition that will be incited by their appearance in any political context, and so not a justification for slacking off when it comes time to oppose Nazis.
I don’t think so. Spencer/NPI seem to be their own thing. I know you want to group them in with the red tribe or conservatives, but we don’t share an ideology with these people. We would never even know who Spencer is if it weren’t for left-wing media shoving cameras in his face. You never see “friend of the show Richard Spencer” as a guest on Hannity, and Ann Coulter never cites “the scholarly research of Dr. David Duke.”
Why would they? What political ideas does Spencer have that conservatives and Republicans share? He’s against the RAISE act (merit-based immigration) and would prefer whites rule over a class of non-white immigrant slaves, he’s for universal healthcare, and is pro-homosexual, calling homosexuality part of “white identity.” If I were to engage Spencer and convert him from a pro-white racist to an anti-white racist, he would still be a rainbow flag waving, pro immigration, free healthcare cheerleader. That is, a Democrat.
These people are not my ingroup. I would call them an outgroup because I disagree with all their ideas, but since they’re powerless and politically irrelevant I see them as a fargroup.
I meant most of the people in this thread who can’t distinguish between those groups are red tribe. I agree that the modern part of the alt-right are not red tribe either in the sense of Republican or in the original cultural sense.
Richard Spencer is pro immigration? Even if you qualified that with the provision that the immigrants would be slaves, I don’t think that’s true. Hasn’t he repeatedly said that he is a separatist who wants to create a white ethnostate?
The main thing he holds in common with mainstream republicans is his fanatical support for Donald Trump. I don’t know about you, but if Nazis got it in there heads that I was one of them, I would make it very clear that I was not.
The fact that Trump won’t just have his sister soldier moment, and say that the alt right are scum, and that his brand of nationalism has nothing to do with them is very strange.
He either thinks he needs their support, or he agrees with some of the things they are saying.
So, just to be clear, we have a widely diverse political coalition held together loosely solely by the commonality of supporting Donald Trump…
and you’re mystified as to why Trump won’t denounce this group? Really? You can’t understand why Trump won’t denounce a group of people whose main defining characteristic is “People who like Trump?”
@hyperboloid
Trump said “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.”
That is far greater criticism than Clinton gave about Souljah, and its still not good enough for you. Criminals and thugs are pretty equal to ‘scum’ (if he called them criminal scum would you complain about not calling thugs?) And that’s still not good enough for you.
Would anything be genuinely good enough for you? Or is the thing he ought to do to prove that he’s not a secret white supremacist always going to be something that he hasn’t specifically done?
I want to point something out about Hyperboloid’s comment. His first paragraph refers to “a seperatist that wants to create a white ethnostate”. His second paragraph refers directly to Nazis. And his third paragraph refers to the Alt-Right as a whole. In fact, we have a quote above where Trump explicitly condemned the white nationalists and the Nazis. Just as not every far leftist is a communist or terrorist, not everyone on the right fringe known as the Alt-Right is close to being a Nazi.
He either thinks he needs their support, or he agrees with some of the things they are saying.
Would you say that this is just as applicable to why the left won’t condemn groups like black nationalists (Louis Farrakhan), Palestinian nationalists (Linda Sarsour), Puerto Rican nationalists, or former leftist terrorists (Bill Ayres)?
@Civilis
I think it is a likely true thing to say that a higher % of people calling themselves “alt-right” are serious Nazis or WNs than before Charlottesville. Those events basically led to them being able to claim the brand name, so to speak. It’s not even a “not only are they racists, they use the internet too” thing – people who existed as Nazis or WNs before imageboards were a thing are calling themselves and getting called “alt right” primarily now.
I think it is a likely true thing to say that a higher % of people calling themselves “alt-right” are serious Nazis or WNs than before Charlottesville. Those events basically led to them being able to claim the brand name, so to speak. It’s not even a “not only are they racists, they use the internet too” thing – people who existed as Nazis or WNs before imageboards were a thing are calling themselves and getting called “alt right” primarily now.
I agree that there are more WNs and Nazis, but there are two reasons we have this problem: first, that people keep using Alt-Right and White Nationalist interchangably (as well as using White Nationalist and Nazi interchangably). Second, that the left can’t reign in either black nationalism or explicit anti-white racism/cultural bigotry. The Unite the Right protest was a symptom, not the cause.
If you don’t like the Alt-Right, it makes sense to smear them with the White Nationalist label, and it makes sense to smear the White Nationalists as Nazis, because some people will believe you. This tactic is weakening the more it’s over used, and instead you’re ending up with more people falling into actual White Nationalism. (I still don’t think there’s enough actual Nazis or even self-identified neo-Nazis to fit in a high-school cafeteria. My recollection of the photos of the Unite the Right rally is that there was one idiot with an actual Nazi flag.)
I hate the White Nationalists, because they are idiots and what they believe is destructively stupid. If it comes down to choosing a group, I’m taking the one Thomas Sowell (or Clarence Thomas, or Ben Carson, or Nikki Haley, or Condolezza Rice, or Ben Shapiro) is in over the one Richard Spencer is in any day. But I can at least understand where the Richard Spencers of the world are coming from, because the same people are using the same tactics against both groups, and at this point our options are hang together or hang separately, because the exact same social rules being used against both groups. If the left had only no-platformed the actual neo-Nazis, they would have won, but they’ve no platformed just about everyone on the right. We’re smart enough to see the disconnect between ‘the Nazis are explicitly evil, so we should prevent them from speaking’ and ‘everyone on the right is a Nazi’.
I like reading SSC, and I don’t like getting in internet arguments, but that ‘something is wrong on the internet’ compulsion kicks in because in order for things to get better the left needs to see feedback from the right, and people here are rational enough that some of them might listen. I want that gap to narrow because sometimes the blue tribe has a point, but the means you use to try to persuade us has the opposite effect.
We’re not going to believe you sincerely care about who leads right-wing protests when from our perspective we see no signs that you’ve done the same diligence policing who leads left wing protests.
We’re not going to accept that it’s a good thing to police the speech of even self-identified Nazis because they were mass murdering assholes when you have sizable numbers openly flying the colors and symbols of groups on the left that mass murdered their political opponents on the right (which would include a large number of us).
Unfortunately, most on the right are not going to accept that group identity politics is bad for groups on the right when we see it encouraged and celebrated for groups on the left, and there’s a case to be made that defect-defect is the right response to the group identity game.
Unfortunately, most on the right are not going to accept that it’s politically stupid to smear an entire group for the actions of a few when we see the left doing it to the Alt-Right, gun owners, Whites, and males.
In each case, by complaining about something that the right considers you to be doing as well, all you’ve managed to persuade them is that you are insincere. They think you complain because it gives you a political advantage. That’s why people on the right turn to political figures that are either vocal in brushing aside the complaints or are willing to use the same tactics.
Personally, I’m willing to believe that most on the left are sincere in their complaints, but the fact that you can’t see what you’re doing from the right’s perspective is just as bad a problem.
And the train doesn’t stop there. This type of logic goes all the way down. Republicans are basically Trump supporters and Trump supporters are basically alt-right and alt-right are basically white nationalists and white nationalists are basically Nazis.
Therefore, Republicans are Nazis.
Different people stop the train in different places, but there are plenty who take it all the way through.
1. Come on, white nationalists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, whatever, these are not new things. For some alt-right groups, the more internet-based ones, I can see “this is a reaction to some university activist excess of whatever” as plausible, but for groups that are inheritors of a racist tradition going back to when Jim Crow was brought in? Unless you’re going to count Reconstruction as some kind of awful provocation, that’s not a reaction, and it’s certainly not a reaction to anything recent.
2. What prominent black nationalists are there right now? What territory do they claim for a future black ethno-state?
3. This isn’t just “the media called them alt-right and now everyone thinks alt-right is synonymous with neo-Nazi/WN/whatever.” The groups doing the UTR thing worked hard to call themselves alt-right. They were claiming a newish label with less stigma attached, and they have successfully claimed it, but they did so by attaching a whole bunch of stigma to it.
As noted above, the neo-Nazis, etc, worked to call themselves alt-right too. As for the number of neo-Nazis, there were plenty of swastikas and linked symbols on display in Charlottesville. Maybe there was only one actual WWII era Nazi flag, but I feel confident in calling someone with a red-white-and-blue colour palette flag with a swastika or an odal rune or whatever on it someone with a Nazi flag.
I would estimate that there are tens of thousands (most likely estimate) or low hundreds of thousands (high estimate) of people you could call neo-Nazis, WNs, or white supremacists (I do not use the sociology-type “Justin Trudeau is perpetuating white supremacy” definition of the last one, as it’s a ludicrous definition and a transparent attempt to play with language) in the US today. So, maybe you went to a school with a really big cafeteria.
So, I think that the tactics of some people on the left have been counterproductive for starters, as “no platform” just doesn’t work well in the age of the internet. But it’s simply false to create an equivalence here. The racist far right has been responsible for more violent deaths in America than the far left, at least in the last 10 or 20 years. When the far left gets violent, some dude gets cracked in the head with a bike lock; when the racist far right gets violent, someone walks into a black church with a gun. Additionally, the “no platforming” is hardly uniform. Random Edgy Republicanoid – Milo, for example, who is an asshole provocateur, but holds few (open, at least) views outside the Republican pale – will get no platformed at Berkeley, but somehow the Republican party has not been forced underground or into foreign exile.
Who’s this “you”? I suppose I should have filled in my Hillary/Soros 2020 Antifa Inc. membership form this year, so I could vote on who is allowed to attend protests? I should have set a reminder on my phone, but the deadline is past.
What’s this “left”? Are you aware that the standard-issue leftist – the anarcho-communist types who wave hammer-and-sickle flags because they are either unaware that commies betray anarchists every single time or are suffering from some sort of equivalent to battered spouse syndrome hate liberals? I’m a liberal. They view us as weak, incapable of fighting the fascists (instead of the Soviets, who fought fascism by splitting Poland with them, and only entered the war when attacked, instead of those weak liberals in Britain and France etc), tantamount to fascists ourselves (see old-timey communist denunciations of social democracy as “social fascism”). “Liberals get the bullet too.” The women’s march, for example, was derided because it did not feature burning cop cars.
Do I think it’s shitty that communist regimes that were responsible for some really nasty shit are treated like, at worst, quaint (“aww, look at those college commies, they’ll snap out of it when they get a job”). Yeah. I think that’s shitty. It’s a big blind spot on the part of many people.
I’m here. This is not some leftist space. Already most of the people here are considered vaguely tainted by far left-wingers. “How do you know so much about the books of the heretics? Looks like you hang out with heretics, too. Sounds like what a heretic would do.” Coming here and outgroup-homogeneity-bias’ing all over the place isn’t going to accomplish much.
@dndsrn
I’m at a loss for why hhite supremacists wanting to co-opt the term alt-right means that the legacy media ought to have rushed to help.
‘The racist far right has been responsible for more violent deaths in America than the far left, at least in the last 10 or 20 years.’ that seems to be based on calling Paddock just regular left – or that the lifelong Democrat coincidentally attacked a group who every other lifelong Democrats could not contain their glee and wait till the bodies were cold which obviously isn’t credible.
However, the person you were responding to did not refer to the ‘far-left’, thus the fact that Paddock and exploiting Paddock’s behaviour are just run of the millleftism and not far-left is sophistry.
Also, ‘referring to the Dylan Roof attack and acting as if the left don’t do things like that is disgusting – there is the famous ‘revenge’ attack by the Somalian. Yes, nobody died in that attack, but the fact that the left can’t aim seems besides the point. The left still made the attempt.
@johansenindustries
The media fucked up. They want to sell papers (or clicks or whatever). “LOOK AT THESE NAZIS HOLY SHIT” gets eyeballs. Then they fuck it up on account of journalists being lazy and rarely expert in the subject matter they are dealing with. They’re also weakened terribly by the fact that they want to bring Richard Spencer on the talk show so they can say “LOOK AT THIS NAZI HOLY SHIT TUNE IN AT 9” but decades of no-platforming working (like I said, doesn’t work so well these days) means they’re completely unequipped to deal with him when he shows up (and, it should be pretty easy to deal with him, so even more of a fuckup on their part).
I had thought Paddock was being categorized as “mass shooter, NOS” – I don’t think most mass shooters of the “guy got himself an AR-15” variety are doing what they do out of political or religious motivation. If someone who happens to be a registered Democrat or Republican doesn’t leave a manifesto about how they’re going full massacre for the cause of the centre-right or centre-left or centre, I’m going to assume they have another motive. When Roof clearly identifies why he shot some black people, different story.
And, what “revenge” attack by a Somali are you talking about?
The only reason there are “prominent WN leaders” is because the left-and-left-leaning media promote them for criticism. There are no glowing profiles of Richard Spencer and his “bold, fresh ideas!” in National Review, or on Fox News, or from Ann Coulter or Pat Buchanan or the Federalist or Front Page Mag or Breitbart. No one is listening to them or promoting them in a positive manner. I saw a clip of Spencer’s speech at the University of Florida and there were a whopping two rows of people there supporting him, and they looked like they came with him. The only reason these people are “prominent” is because CNN and the Atlantic and Vox and all the rest of these people interview them and give them a platform for the purpose of smearing their actual political opponents with them.
Should Fox News could find some tankie at a leftist conference and run story after story about how all the Democrats are really in league with this prominent Stalinist and demand every Democrat denounce him 15 times a day or else prove what all know, that Democrats are all just itching to march us all off to the gulags?
Dallas sniper, Republican baseball practice, Rand Paul’s broken ribs…
And, what “revenge” attack by a Somali are you talking about?
Sorry my error. He’s from Sudan and there was a death, but this is the one I was referring to https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tennessee-church-suspect-may-have-sought-revenge-for-dylann-roof-case/
I had thought Paddock was being categorized as “mass shooter, NOS”
The media wouldn’t have categorised him as that if he were a life-long Republican targeting a soul concert.
I’m going to assume they have another motive.
What motive do you think he had for targeting a country music concert?
@Conrad Honcho
First, yeah, the media is fucking up. I’ve said that before. But there’s not some kind of stream of black nationalism that people are reacting to. The “hairdye NKVD” campus activist left types people here worry so much about (and, I will admit, they are obnoxious; but their danger is mostly in the reaction to them) aren’t really leftists (their challenges to the capitalist system are limited to vague muttering about how capitalism somehow created racism, because reasons, and the occasional “man I had to work to pay rent, capitalism sucks, eh”, and they seem more interested in distributing inequality equally than eliminating it) and I don’t think there’s really much black nationalism among them – their demands tend to be of the “more black CEOs, more black lawyers, ten mil for the black student’s centre” than the “we want 13% of the US land area for an ethnostate NOW” variety.
Second,
-maybe this is a copout (ha) but some attacks that would get coded as right don’t, due to blind spots in the US media. A white man who shot black cops over immediate grievances (not a previous racist far-right worldview) would get coded as right. (EDIT: this bit is worthy of further discussion – is racism right or left or neutral? Etc) Did the Dallas shooter have any far-left manifestos or anything lying around?
-OK, granted. Still, the right has better marksmanship, it would appear. The right still has a higher body count (both body counts are fairly small, by standards of body counts).
-was Paul’s neighbour beating him up something political? I thought they had some kind of neighbour beef.
EDIT:
@johansenindustries
See my comment above re the Dallas shooter for the Sudanese guy.
Maybe it’s shitty that a Republican shooting up a soul concert would get coded as right, but a Democrat shooting up a country concert wouldn’t get coded as left, but that’s the media’s problem, not reality’s, nor mine – I’m not the media. I figured he chose the country concert for being a good target.
EDIT AGAIN: I thought of an example. If the prosecution version of the Zimmermann trial was correct – if Zimmermann did, in fact, profile a black kid and initiate a conflict in which he shot the kid – that would be a racist murder, but I would not categorize Zimmermann as a right-wing killer.
I used to listen to Glenn Beck pretty regularly like 3-5 years ago and this was like 1/3 of his show. Finding some really incriminating clip from some Black Panther meeting, playing it 50 times, and demanding all Democrats apologize for it.
This kind of crap happens on both sides. Both sides have more than their share of radical racists who would not hesitate to kill people if given power, and both sides have their own dishonest media who shines a spotlight on these people way out of proportion with their power and tries to draw a straight line between them and mainstream politicians they don’t like.
This isn’t just “the media called them alt-right and now everyone thinks alt-right is synonymous with neo-Nazi/WN/whatever.” The groups doing the UTR thing worked hard to call themselves alt-right. They were claiming a newish label with less stigma attached, and they have successfully claimed it, but they did so by attaching a whole bunch of stigma to it.
They’ve always been a part of the right fringe; they worked to take leadership of it by being the most visible part of it, which they accomplished by hitting the jackpot of being one of the few groups willing to stand up to the violence of the far left, and being given a prominent spotlight by the left that wanted to make them the visible face of the right. The violet antifa leftist protesters have been around for quite a while. If they didn’t exist, there would be no way for the violent rightwing protesters to make a name for themselves by fighting back (at least as far as America goes; I know the European dynamic is different). Since the end of Jim Crow, the Klan and the other right groups have done nothing more than march around like idiots, accomplishing nothing but getting laughed at by everyone.
As noted above, the neo-Nazis, etc, worked to call themselves alt-right too. As for the number of neo-Nazis, there were plenty of swastikas and linked symbols on display in Charlottesville. Maybe there was only one actual WWII era Nazi flag, but I feel confident in calling someone with a red-white-and-blue colour palette flag with a swastika or an odal rune or whatever on it someone with a Nazi flag.
Sincere question: Where are you getting your images of the rally from? Looking over most of the pictures from openly leftist media outlets like Buzzfeed or even the Google images archive, and it looks like the neo-Confederates were far and away the biggest part of the rally. If you’d called this a neo-Confederate or even a Klan rally (though, again, there’s an important difference), I don’t think I’d be arguing with you.
I would estimate that there are tens of thousands (most likely estimate) or low hundreds of thousands (high estimate) of people you could call neo-Nazis, WNs, or white supremacists (I do not use the sociology-type “Justin Trudeau is perpetuating white supremacy” definition of the last one, as it’s a ludicrous definition and a transparent attempt to play with language) in the US today. So, maybe you went to a school with a really big cafeteria.
Again, “Nazis are bad and need to be deplatformed because they have a history of advocating genocide” doesn’t mix with equating Nazis and the broad group “people you could call neo-Nazis, WNs, or white supremacists”. There’s a reason Godwin’s law exists, because Nazi is the ultimate emotional trump card, and for very good reason.
But it’s simply false to create an equivalence here. The racist far right has been responsible for more violent deaths in America than the far left, at least in the last 10 or 20 years. When the far left gets violent, some dude gets cracked in the head with a bike lock; when the racist far right gets violent, someone walks into a black church with a gun.
We’ve tried rehashing the statistics over and over again, and I won’t go into how accurate the direct numbers are. However, remember this discussion thread started because Trump retweeted a picture purportedly of Muslims throwing someone off a building. Rightly or wrongly, the right’s placing the responsibility for the deaths of people like Kate Steinle and the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting on the left, because that’s what the left seems to be fighting for. And that’s because it’s what Trump built the appeal of his campaign around, opposition to illegal immigration and reduction in Moslem refugees.
Random Edgy Republicanoid – Milo, for example, who is an asshole provocateur, but holds few (open, at least) views outside the Republican pale – will get no platformed at Berkeley, but somehow the Republican party has not been forced underground or into foreign exile.
The thing is, we see middle of the road Republicans and centrists being de-platformed. Anyone outside the establishment is fair game. Charles Murray is a Democrat, for crying out loud, and he still got violently deplatformed. Trump gets votes because he seems to stand up for the people the Republican establishment wont (much less anyone prominent on the left). For that matter, every Republican candidate since Bush has been called a Nazi by mainstream leftists; is anyone surprised when we complain about the word no longer having any meaning? Admittedly, this is the place where we on the right should have been policing ourselves. While I don’t think anyone sincerely thinks third-wave feminists are equivalent to Nazis, the ‘femenazi’ epithet, though catchy, set a bad precedent.
What’s this “left”? Are you aware that the standard-issue leftist – the anarcho-communist types who wave hammer-and-sickle flags because they are either unaware that commies betray anarchists every single time or are suffering from some sort of equivalent to battered spouse syndrome hate liberals? I’m a liberal. They view us as weak, incapable of fighting the fascists (instead of the Soviets, who fought fascism by splitting Poland with them, and only entered the war when attacked, instead of those weak liberals in Britain and France etc), tantamount to fascists ourselves (see old-timey communist denunciations of social democracy as “social fascism”). “Liberals get the bullet too.” The women’s march, for example, was derided because it did not feature burning cop cars.
If you feel justified conflating the various groups on the right, the various groups on the right are entitled to feel justified conflating the Tankies, the Socialists, the Social Democrats, the Progressives and the rest of the left. The fact that the supposedly-mainstream Women’s March on Washington had a convicted murderer, a vocal antisemite, and an advocate for blowing up the White House as speakers does not speak well for the left.
I apologize for being frustrated, but people keep illustrating my problem, and it’s pushing more emotion into my replies. I don’t mean every person on the left has every problem I’m associating with the broad “the left” and “you”, but it would really help if people would not demonstrate exactly what I’m complaining about at the same time they’re seeming to deny it exists.
@Civilis
But the crew at Charlottesville wasn’t the alt-right-ish street brawlers who showed up at Berkeley. Heimbach is not Based Stickman or that Patriot Prayer guy.
I was watching videos, checking pictures, at the time. I wasn’t keeping count, but I saw a lot of flags and imagery that was either Nazi or closer to Nazi than normal for the “not a Nazi, check out this cool geometrical symbol, wink wink” crowd. A lot less green.
There were three primary groups: Neo-Nazis (who are either National Socialists or people who looked at the popular imagination view of the Nazis and decided they liked it), white nationalists (who want a white ethnostate that has been created through ethnic cleansing), and white supremacists (who want a system that is multiracial but where everyone who isn’t white is kept down via official and nonofficial means). Neo-Confederates and the KKK are in the third group. These groups generally get along pretty well. Are these fair definitions, for our purposes?
I would argue that white nationalists are very bad, because you could not create a feasible white ethno-state in the US (or Canada) without major ethnic cleansing that would probably result in a significant (seven or eight figures) death count. I would argue that white supremacists are very bad, because their entire thing is violently subjugating people. All three of these groups are bad. If no-platforming 1. still worked like it used to and 2. could be limited to those groups, I would support it against those groups.
The left has an unfortunate habit of not wanting to let the right score points, which leads to things like downplaying the degree to which radical Sunni militant violence is an issue (which is awful for Muslims, because most victims of said violence worldwide are Muslim). But that doesn’t excuse people on the right getting too cozy with people who historically are worse than radical Sunni militants, or would be if they got the chance.
Everybody calls everybody else a Nazi. I thought it was bad when Murray was deplatformed and the professor who was supposed to debate against him got put in the hospital. A lot of liberals agreed with me – the NYT had multiple articles defending Murray and condemning those who attack him. If you read liberal sources, and pay attention to what antifa types are saying, you see a pattern: when antifa, or just student left activists in general, beat up or whatever people who are within a few SDs of a Nazi, the liberal press lauds that. When it happens to someone who isn’t within a few SDs, like with Murray, they condemn it. The antifa types respond to the former by saying “yes, we are great”, and respond to the latter by being indignantly puzzled as to why these fucking dumb liberals don’t get it.
But, I’m not conflating different groups on the right. Republican uncomfortable with Trump isn’t big-time Trump supporter isn’t alt-right of the “loves Pepes; should have read Mother Night” variety isn’t alt right of the neo-Nazi/WN/white supremacist variety. It’s shitty that people do that. I find it obnoxious when they do that, but I won’t make/keep any friends from pointing out that the word “Nazi” actually means something when people post dumb shit on Facebook.
Similarly, the Women’s March was very liberal. There were some dicey people involved, for certain. And some people who say dumb things (“blow up the white house” is almost certainly in the same frame as “your mother’s going to kill you when she gets home”). I would argue that mainstream, liberal left-wingers have a somewhat worse problem (like, 10 or 20% worse) of not wanting to punch left than mainstream, sorta-conservative right-wingers have of not wanting to punch right. I would also argue that the two groups, when they don’t punch to their respective sides, do so for different reasons: a liberal who doesn’t condemn someone dicey does so because they don’t want to give points to Fox News; a conservative who doesn’t does so because the deplorables like Trump, and while Trump is a major liability, he also gave the Republicans a victory they weren’t expecting.
But, the UTR march in Charlottesville included very few people I would categorize as “good people.” That’s my point – that anyone whose brand depended on being able to plausibly deny being a bad person, like McInnes or Cernovich or whoever – stayed away, because they could spot the Nazi and Nazi-adjacent people.
dndnrsn, I want to apologize, because based on your most recent post, some of our disagreement is based on different definitions.
I am using ‘nationalist’ (as in white nationalist and black nationalist) in what is likely on reflection to be a non-standard manner; I’m using it to refer to groups based on advancing the political interests of an ethnic group (a “nation”). The Nation of Islam is, for this definition, an example of a black nationalist group (and one of the reasons I use ‘nation’ as the descriptive term). Black Lives Matter and La Raza would be nationalist groups under this definition. I think most of the neo-Confederates are Southern white nationalists. I reserve the Supremacist label for those thinking that their group deserves to be the ones in power, either as a separate state or by legally dominating an existing one. Thinking blacks are stupider than whites is the hallmark of a white nationalist idiot, thinking blacks are too stupid to be allowed to vote is a white supremacist idiot. Though one doesn’t have to be racist to notice that if the law discriminates against the group you are in, it makes sense to band together with the people of your group that oppose that discrimination, even if some are racists (and this equally applies to all racial, cultural and religious groups; the same logic that drives blacks towards the nation of Islam drives whites towards the white nationalists).
I think the number of supremacists or separatists of any stripe is a lot lower than the number you think, but I don’t know how you would test that, given the stong impetus from all sides to fudge the number and the lizardman factor. Yes, I agree if the separatists had their way, it would turn into a bloodbath regardless of their intentions, but based on that logic, I think the workers seizing the means of production would also necessarily result in a bloodbath. What’s important is that both sides need to believe that the rules are evenly applied. If the rule is ‘no openly advocating genocide’, we can kick the Nazis out and they can’t complain. If the rule is ‘no advocating fringe politico-economic systems that require a bloodbath to work’, then if the left gets to kick the White Separatists out of the acceptable discourse window, they can’t complain when the right kicks the Anarchocommunists out of the window. On the other hand, if the left can run around with Soviet flags and not get called on it while the right can’t run around with Confederate flags, then many on the right, even those that think both the Soviets and the Confederates were assholes, are going to get irritated enough to change the rules.
Most of the stressors here from the right are that the right perceives the rules to be biased in the left’s favor. Trump shows Muslims doing bad things and the left says its wrong to stir up hate against Muslims, while the left repeats the ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ fallacy over and over, riots ensue. There may be perfectly valid reasoning behind this sort of thing. But Muslims are a Democratic and leftist constituency group, and police (or at least the law and order values) tend to be Republican interests, and when it happens over and over again the disparate treatment gets noticed… and the people that notice follow the political leaders that acknowledge that they notice as well.
Dammit, I had a response that must have included a banned word. Crap. I know what it was, I think. I’ll just give a condensed version.
1. I don’t think you can call just any pressure/advocacy group nationalist. The Canadian branch of the international Sikh-diaspora organization, which advocates on behalf of Sikhs worldwide, is not made up of Sikh nationalists in a Canadian context (for all I know, there may be members who want a Sikh nation in Southeast Asia, but none of them are asking for part of Canada). Sikhs who want a state to be carved out in Southeast Asia would be nationalists. There’s gray areas – the Quebecois nationalists have mostly given up on separatism, but they still seek to maintain Quebec as a distinct society, with Quebecois control over Quebec.
I don’t know if La Raza are nationalists; I can’t recall their platform or whatever. Nation of Islam includes separatist, nationalist elements. I don’t think BLM could be called nationalist, and I think it’s tricky to talk about BLM as one thing – there are groups calling themselves BLM who range from eminently reasonable anti-police-violence campaigners, to groups making really wild demands, to groups consisting of student-activist types who appear mostly to focus on getting more turf in intra-activist left infighting. There are probably some black nationalists in there.
Meanwhile, I don’t think that someone holding the more racist variety of Horrible Banned Discourse views makes someone a white nationalist. I think that term should be saved for people who want a white ethno-state, by and large. There’s gray areas, again.
2. Sure, there’s double standards. It’s bogus that a lot of people in my bubble came to the conclusion that the Pulse nightclub shooting was the fault of Republicans somehow. I don’t like that the reaction to literal Stalinists (low-estimate death count: 10 million) get a “haha university kids amirite” reaction. Etc. But the solution on the right to this should not be “stop punching right” because that’s a terrible solution. The centre-right responding to the left by cozying up to the far right is a horrible response; it’s happened before and the results weren’t pretty.
It seems to me that inability to even agree on a definition of what people go into the bin of bad guys (white nationalists, white supremacists, etc.) suggests that it’s probably impossible to agree on how many of them there are.
Several points on a long comment thread:
1. The claim that there were a lot of Nazi symbols on display at Charlottesville. I googled for pictures of the event, and found a page with lots of them. Going through the first many pictures, I found only one such item, a flag with a Swastika on it. I saw lots and lots of Confederate flags.
2. johansenindustries writes:
As best I can tell from a little googling, there is no evidence that Paddock was a Democrat, lifelong or otherwise. Do you have any?
The obvious motive is that it was a very large crowd somewhere he could shoot at from a convenient vantage point.
3. On the nonexistence of black nationalism. Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam (as distinct from the faction led by Elijah Mohammed’s son) explicitly supports separatism, although Farrakhan has downplayed that part of their position of recent years. The Wiki article estimates a membership of 20,000-50,000. My guess is that that is well above the total number of self-identified neo-Nazis in the U.S., although not necessarily above the number of white nationalists broadly defined.
About half of the Confederate flags I can see in those images are being waved by obvious KKK members.
@David
Are Country concerts know for their unusually large crowds?
It was early speculation. Looking at it again – which is of course more dificult han it should since the MSM wouldn’t have reported it if it weren’t – it seem to bare out.
I don’t know.
There has been a case recently in the North of England where a woman had her head bashed in against a stone wall by three Pakistanis who shouted “Gori [slur meaning white] Slag” “White Slag” as they beat her.
The police did nothing for about a month, fobbed her off, told her that it couldn’t possibly be a racist incident, and only got their bums in gear when she posted her injuries on facebook and started trending.
Compare to punishment and reaction when someone makes a rude tweet about Islam.
So, here’s the thing. The danger, the real danger, is (1) that the police and authorities will do anything to downplay and ignore heinous racially motivated crimes committed by minorities against white people (2) that the police won’t enforce the law unless you can get your case trending on fucking twitter.
So, I can’t feel too upset about videos of Muslim crime getting twitter coverage. That’s the only thing the authorities seem to pay attention to these days.
On the other hand, he’s retweeting misleading videos from a group who had a supporter assassinate an MP a short time ago… so… that’s bad.
Also, I think it’s less a problem with Islam, as a problem with a lack of law enforcement. They need to start executing jihadi plotters and enforcing hate speech laws against Muslim preachers. And locking up criminal scum of every race and creed.
As every peice of UK media has written after wheeling out Brendan Cox: Cox’s killer had no links with the group Britain First. He just shouted the pretty low-hanging fruit phrase.
My view is that Trump is no more racist than the baseline white American man – who is pretty damn racist.
Less inhibited, though. He’s just saying what we’re all thinking.
There is good reason to believe the typical American is not particularly racist. This link has some stats:
http://ijr.com/2014/04/133024-10-charts-show-racist-america-really/
He didn’t say the typical American, he said the typical white man. Who are uniquely evil, as we all know.
I’d bet the typical black man is probably more racist, if you measure it based on the common definition. The typical Asian man MUCH more racist, but smart enough to lie about it.
However, in modern academic language, if you don’t say “a lot” to the question “How Much Discrimination Is There Against African-Americans”, you’re guilty of some degree of “symbolic racism”. This is the sort of racism which backs the studies about “racism” explaining the Trump vote better than anything else.
So would I, but it doesn’t matter. Polite society overwhelmingly believes the opposite, and are not willing to listen to any alternative opinions on this manner. A lot of them even explicitly define racism in such a way as to preclude anyone other than whites from possibly engaging in it.
Hmmm? I thought I was a member of polite society, and in my experience asians are certainly more racist on average than whites. I don’t think most people I know would regard that as controversial.
I think they would. I think some 20-40% of polite society believes it is literally impossible for non-white races to be racist.
Polite society overwhelmingly believes the opposite, and are not willing to listen to any alternative opinions on this manner.
That is because polite society has re-defined racism as structural racism, where only those in a position of power can be racist, so if you are white in a majority white society you have benefited and are continuing to benefit from the social racism in your country, therefore you are racist even if you’ve never said a mean word about POC. On the other hand, a POC can say “kill all YT” and that’s not racist, because they are not in a position of power because they are a minority in a majority white society. You see?
Of course, the ordinary definition of racism is “a guy who says lynch all black people” and that still gets used as well, except only if it’s a white person saying this about non-white people. So racism in the commonly understood sense also exists but only as applied to white people. Non-white people saying it about white people is still not racism.
That’s the motte and bailey I dislike in this entire discourse; they claim that what is meant by racism is “Structural racism only; we are not claiming you hate non-white people or want to kill them when we say you are a racist living in a racist society, Geoffrey”, but they still are quite happy to let the emotional affect of “racist means horrible evil person who hates non-white people and wants to kill them” be the first meaning that leaps to mind for other people who know nothing about Geoffrey when they say “Geoffrey is a racist”.
Pretty damn racist as compared to who and what? The platonic ideal? Sure. As compared to people of other races? I’m not really seeing it. Talking to some people from other countries, it was really eye opening what sort of things they would say openly that I’d estimate a minority (but sizeable minority) of people from my hometown would probably even think and much fewer would say (and by left wing standards my hometown would be a stereotypically more-racist-than-normal place).
This highlights the basic problem with tossing around the word racist–the definition could be anything from original-sin type racism which everyone (or at least every white person) has by definition because of living in a racist society, all the way up to actual Nazis longing to murder all the nonwhites and Jews they can get their hands on.
White people are the least racist people in history. No one else invites other races into their nations and gives them political equality with them. They’re the only people who even recoil at being called racist by their own race because they see it as a bad thing they don’t want to be guilty of. When a Chinese guy goes off on a rant about how inferior Japanese people or Africans are to Chinese people, no other Chinese person says “hey man, that’s racist, you shouldn’t say that.” No one bothers, because they agree. Massive racism is just baseline, and it’s that way all over the world.
Monkeys came down out of trees, and the group from the one tree started hating and murdering the groups from the other trees, and it’s been like that for 200,000 years, and it’s pretty much only modern white people who’ve decided “hey, this is a bad thing, we shouldn’t do that!” No one else has.
This.
I don’t know if your definition of white people includes Arab Muslims, but Islam gave the same legal/political rights to all Muslims, independent of race. There was certainly prejudice against various groups–but that’s true in America at present. The legal distinctions were by religion (and gender), not race.
Arabs often did count as white. The racist trope “black tribe worships a white woman” was made by H. Rider Haggard in “She”, where the white goddess is an immortal Arab.
Also, Anglos had no idea that Christian Palestinian and Lebanese immigrants were “of color” until Edward Said and Casey Kasem started complaining about depictions of Arab Muslims.
You should read more if you think modern Western conceptions of race were historically universal.
Well, this has gone about how I expected.
“And all I did was accuse a racial group of collectively bearing the worst possible sin!”
I’m always amazed at how much racism/privilege is like Original Sin with a new coat of paint.
Nevertheless, he persisted.
@BBA
Can you give a coherent reply to anyone’s response? Seriously, if you’re going take a short and vacuous swipe at people, what sort of response do you think you should get? You got some decent responses despite your rudeness and lack of elaboration or evidence. Any response to those?
Time to update your beliefs. Baseline *primates* are pretty damn racist.
One problem is that the media systematically chooses not to report anti-narrative incidents (e.g., in this case, crimes committed by Muslims in Europe, but it could be other things too). If you want to share an article about this sort of thing, you aren’t going to find it on the Times; it’s going to be on some random right-wing newsblog, or at best a tabloid. And if you do cite that kind of source, people are going to call it fake at best, or call you a dirty right-winger at worst. But it’s not fake, most of the time: if you look into it you’ll find primary sources, but they’re in German or in Danish, or you’ll find a police blotter, or maybe a mention in some respectable newspaper which confirms the basic facts, but written in a way that makes it completely unsuitable for sharing.
So we either grant the media the power to decide which facts can be talked about and which cannot, or we hold our noses and accept that for some topics people are going to have to cite unpleasant sources.
Actual crimes are usually reported in mainstream news, though sometimes details are withheld. (For example, in the US, many media sources will not report the race of the suspect in a crime story, because the suspect is black too often and they worry that they’re perpetuating stereotypes.)
When we get events reported only on websites we’ve never heard of, associated with some ideologically motivated group, it’s hard to know whether to believe them. Ideologues are often willing to lie or exaggerate to get attention for their cause, and a website I’ve never heard of has little to lose in terms of reputation.
By contrast, one check on prestige media outlets’ desire to shade the truth in some of its stories is that they care about their reputation. Being embarrassed in public when it turns out your story was made-up (Rolling Stone and their UVa gangrape story) or when it turns out you were played by your sources (NYT and Iraq’s alleged WMDs) is embarrassing and loses you some of your influence.
Just an observation – it’s funny that the defences here of Trump tend either to “he’s just trying to get racists to support him, not a racist himself, just incredibly sleazy” or “he’s not a racist, just dumb with no attention span.”
Actually the most pertinent defense is that the tweets were of Muslims and so had nothing to do with racism. The other discussions were that yes Trump has many defects, but he has certainly not demonstrated racism. Can we all agree that calling Trump a racist IS a continuation of crying wolf?
Someone can start a new thread about Trump being an Islamophobe or Trump is a sleazeball, or Trump has no self control. I suspect those posts would engender mostly agreement. An important part of crying wolf is the tendency of political activists to accuse the opposition of some terrible things, and when it is denied to claim, “but they are guilty of this other thing, so it comes to the same thing.” Accuracy in accusations is important. Calling Trump a racist is simply an epithet having nothing to do with reality.
Apropos of a recent exchange, what are ways in which university education could be produced at a much lower cost? What keeps it from happening?
The internets.
Bankruptcy for education loans.
Aggregate inertia and influence of the banking sector.
I think that lectures waste a ton of man-hours. Lectures are probably a pretty good way of learning some subjects, like maybe history, but they are a pretty mediocre way of learning others, like my field, physics. Even so, I do think lectures are a useful component of a university education in almost any subject, but it doesn’t make sense to have so many people give such similar lectures many different times to different groups of students. And many professors are really good at certain aspects of teaching, and very poor at giving lectures, or visa versa.
So my proposal is that we produce (film) the ultimate lecture for each subject once, update it every few years, and spread that one lecture everywhere. Assemble a team of the best academics from the specific subject the lecture is on. Hook them up with a team of people who understand how to package information to make it easy to learn, actors / public speakers to actually present the information, and graphic artists to create diagrams and other visual media. Go ahead and spend a couple million dollars to produce a single hour long lecture. Distribute it on the internet for anybody who wants to watch it. Students enrolled in a physical class can be assigned to watch this lecture on their own time, possibly more than once to be sure they absorb the information, and can then meet in small groups (either physically or via telecom) with other students and a TA / group discussion leader to ask questions and solve problems together, or whatever other activities go well with the specific subject. You still need to pay the TA, but from my experience (four years as a grad student TA) that kind of work is much easier than preparing and delivering a lecture.
In a nutshell, the advantage of this approach is that you are trading a large one-time cost for a huge amount of distributed future value. A single lecture for a subject, produced only one time, could satisfy a major component of the educational needs of every single student in the entire world fluent in the language the lecture was produced in. And for the smaller incremental cost of translating the lecture, satisfy the needs of almost every student in the world.
Minor Drawbacks:
– Some subjects are contentious – not everybody would agree on what things are appropriate to teach / how to frame things. But there are lots of subjects that are not (math, physics, computer science) so we could start on those subjects first.
– Some parts of the lectures would become out of date as new discoveries are made and as fields shift. But I think that the majority of what is taught in many subjects, especially at an undergraduate level, doesn’t change all that frequently. I would say that 90% of what I learned in getting a MA in physics had been known for fifty years.
– How do you choose which organization gets to produce the ultimate lecture, and how can we trust they
do a good job. I suppose that the libertarian answer to this one is to encourage the major educational institutions to compete to create the best ultimate lecture, though this will drive up total cost of setting up the system, since multiple organizations are producing redundant products.
Major drawback:
– It’s difficult to imagine how to recuperate the cost of producing these ultimate lectures. I can’t really think of a good business model that doesn’t either restrict access to only the wealthy or suffer from free riding.
But I would say that the biggest reason why the system I am describing won’t work: it may not be able to satisfy the signalling aspect of a university education. A good education can empower a person to be able to make valuable contributions to society, but a good education by itself isn’t quite enough – you also need to be able to convince others that you have the potential to make a positive contribution in the first place to get them to work with you. The most obvious example of this is getting a job – you need to get hired before you can use your education to make the world a better place. Ultimate lectures by themselves can’t certify that students actually learn anything and actually gain useful skills.
Though I will comment that something needs to arise to fulfill the signaling aspect of university education, because it has been my experience that the universities are starting to completely fail to accomplish this goal, yet our society and economy are rather based around the ability of a university education as a certification that a person is not a looser. A generation or two ago, a university education was a very difficult thing to acquire, and if you as a person were able to actually acquire a degree, that by itself was a sufficient indication that you are not a looser and can be a good candidate to hire for a job. But because a university education was essentially a guaranteed ticket to a prosperous middle class life society moved in the direction to overproduce degrees. Now days, universities produce so many more degrees than there are jobs that need that degree, and degrees are so easy to get (since we demand they be accessible to everybody) that their value has massively gone down. A university degree is now seen as a necessary but not sufficient certification that a person is not a looser – a massive downgrade from the days when they were seen as a sufficient certification. I believe that the falling value of university education is going to become a major political / societal issue in the coming years as so many students these days have taken on massive amounts of debt to acquire a degree that will fail to deliver them any value.
Can you tell that I am bitter about being having been unemployed for the past two years? 😛 I received an absolutely fantastic education and have excellent analytic thinking and problem solving skills, but I can’t actually convince anybody else that I have these things. As a teenager I was obsessed with phoniness and actively shunned the kinds of personal-brand-building activities that you put on your resume because I bought into the belief that my academic success alone could prove my personal worth. But now that I am in the real world and see how necessary it is to be able to market yourself to employers, I feel extremely frustrated at my earlier self’s idealization of university education.
Sorry if this feels off topic, but actually I do think that this is a really important aspect of education to consider – one that my younger self did not consider and is now paying for.
I had a course in college that used Udacity lectures for a large chunk of its instruction, so the idea has merit.
I don’t know if Udacity is profitable yet, though.
So my proposal is that we produce (film) the ultimate lecture for each subject once, update it every few years, and spread that one lecture everywhere.
Um – The Open University? Much late night viewing on the BBC was “OU lectures filmed in the 70s and boy you can tell by the fashion”
Even Khan Academy is basically this.
One sideline, though, is that different approaches to explaining/understanding an idea work for different people. I think it’s really valuable to be able to find some completely different source of instruction (lectures, slides, notes, textbook, whatever), when the one you’re paying for isn’t working for you. That’s one really nice feature of iTunes I/OCW/Khan Academy–if your linear algebra teacher isn’t explaining things well, maybe the MIT linear algebra lectures or the Khan Academy linear algebra lectures would do a better job.
True. Unfortunately, the existing school system offers no improvement in this dimension; each students only gets one version of the lesson.
It would be nice to have multiple lessons on the same topic online. Perhaps cross-linked “if you feel you didn’t understand the lesson, try this version”. (Possibly with some social network aspect, where you could see the videos recommended by people like you.)
Why doesn’t anyone use the Feynman lectures on physics? Has introduction to mechanics and introduction to E&M changed that much since then?
Why isn’t the best book superior to the best lecture? You are not limited to books written by people now alive for you to record and the student can read the book at his own pace and times of his convenience.
One possible answer is that there is something about the live interaction, student in the same room as lecturer, that works for many students better than reading a book. But you are not giving that, since your lecture is recorded, not live.
I contend that for some people in some circumstances books can be superior to lectures. Even without any training in “speed reading” skills, students generally can read faster than lecturer can talk; one can return to previous paragraphs or stop reading to think about a difficult point (asking the lecturer to go about the previous point 5 times or stop talking would be a social faux pas).
This is pure speculation, but the same reasons might explain why sometimes a very good lecture works very well for some people on some particular topic: the lecturer is forced to present the material at read-at-aloud speed or slower (because writing equations or sketching figures at the chalkboard slows everything down). This gives the student time to think about what they hear.
However, personally I believe tutorials (maybe order of 15 persons of quite similar level of background knowledge) with an atmosphere that encourages to you interact with the teacher and other students (and you can plausibly interact with them) is the ideal form for organized learning. This does not scale very well, so it isn’t what people think about when they hear the word “lecture” (I close my eyes and see lecture hall with ~150 students for freshman calculus) and that’s why people would think that recorded lectures would be a comparable experience (“any questions or comments?” it would be awfully inconvenient if all 150 students started sharing their questions or comments, so it’s quite rare to have any true discussion.)
Colleges seem to be moving toward less and less of the 150 person lecture halls and more and more small classes, so if criticisms of lectures are based on the former, they are trying to fix a problem that is already being successfully fixed.
@Protagoras
Are you speaking of liberal arts colleges or big universities or both?
I’ve only been a student at large R1s, and neither of them has been moving away from the enormous lecture format. If anything, they’re doubling down on it. For example, when I started university, iClickers were not very prevalent and thus attending large lectures was effectively optional. This was very useful to me as I once took two classes that had the same slot. It also meant that if the lecturer was god awful, I could avoid wasting time and just read the book then take the tests. You might ask why I’d take the class then, but these were required classes and couldn’t be avoided.
Now, iClickers seem to be required for a lot more of the classes I know about, and answering the questions is sometimes a significant fraction of the grade. Or they’re used to take attendance, and if you don’t activate your iClicker for too many lectures you’re automatically failed (Seen this policy on a syllabus, but never actually seen it enforced, not sure if it’s more than a threat).
Granted, iClickers have good uses in theory, but my experience with them has been pretty meh. Often, professors give credit just for clicking to respond at all, so there’s not even much incentive to both getting answers right.
WTF? The whole point of boring lectures is to skip them. That’s why it’s college and not high school.
Surely there’s some way to cheat the iClicker. If there isn’t, I’m very disappointed in the students’ lack of initiative.
At my university attendance was very often required (or a significant portion of your grade, say 20% was attendance and participation, or there were even quizzes once to twice a week). We had small classes, though, so it was pretty easy for a professor to tell when a student was or was not there, and to my knowledge we never used iClickers or anything like them, just regular old roll call or something.
I have mixed feelings about it. I didn’t really mind attending class, even if the lecture was kind of boring, and I think I still derived value from it. In my experience, most students got value from it, even if they thought they didn’t or that their time could have been better spent. But for the top students, it’s sometimes the opposite, where they’d be better served by skipping but can’t. And all that aside, these various measures to encourage attendance—roll call, participation grades, having a bunch of short quizzes—may just waste class time and the professor’s own time in addition to the students’ time. I think I’d prefer to see a much stronger presumption toward attending class, but with few or no penalties should someone not; improving the quality of lectures is, of course, one way to encourage that.
@Nancy Lebovitz
The only simple way to cheat an iClicker is give it to someone else to click for you. This is generally heavily penalized if you get caught (because it’s cheating even if you have them enter answers randomly), and also requires you have a friend who does go to lecture.
Seems like a business opportunity for nerds.
The iClicker equivalent used at my college accepted input via a web interface, so if you monitored it during the lecture, you could input random answers (the questions were not displayed), and hope the professor wasn’t asking questions like “Are you physically present in the room: A – no, B – no, C – no, D – yes.”
Personally, I find that I benefit from having two or three more-or-less independent ways of seeing something explained. If I don’t seem to be getting much out of the lecture, maybe the book will help. Or an alternative set of lectures online. Or a website someone put up explaining the idea. Or….
I’ve seen a recommendation to read math textbooks from different decades. Types of explanation go in and out of fashion.
What keeps it from happening? Ultimately, because judging the value of a university education is hard or impossible, so we rely on secondary measures of quality, including exclusivity, reputation, and prestige. These tend to be the characteristics of luxury goods, where people tend not to negotiate down. People brag about being able to afford a Patek Philippe or a Porsche, not about the screaming good deal they got on one. And producers of luxury goods tend not to offer such deals, because doing so tarnishes the brand.
Trying to judge the value of the actual education delivered would probably require separating the actual work of educating from the judging of results. This would mean some authority would set standards for what someone who has passed the 101 level of political science should know and administered tests to verify that they do. And that someone really shouldn’t be whoever is delivering the education.
I would expect existing institutions to fight a proposal to do this tooth and nail. Suddenly Fancy Pants College would have to justify charging $5000 for a course that prepares you for an exam that you can also prepare for with a $500 course at Home Town Community College or even a $150 self-guided course you ordered from Amazon. And a 95 would be a 95, no matter which way you got it.
Incidentally, I took a stab at estimating what it actually costs to deliver a college education by traditional means, and the figure I came up with was $30,000, not including books and room and board and whatnot.
Not in the Midwest, they don’t. I can’t think of the last time I heard anyone boast about how expensive his new (vehicle, house, anything) is, except in the context of bragging about the massive discount he was able to get on it. Even the multimillionaires I know do this. To do otherwise would be gauche.
On the other hand, people do brag when their kids are accepted to or receive a major scholarship from a prestigious university. That’s considered acceptable.
When I was in the military, I was trying to earn my bachelors degree with as little out of pocket expense as possible. Tuition assistance covered something like 15 credits a year, with a maximum allowance of cost per credit hour that would eliminate any elite schools. I took online courses to hit the 15 credits a year, but at that rate, it would take about 8 years to earn a degree.
I supplemented the rest with CLEP tests, basically subject-level tests you can take, provided by the college board, to prove mastery in a certain subject. The test fee is something like $90. Colleges aren’t required to accept these tests for credits, but most of the lower prestige ones will (snooty schools of course will not). My preparation for these tests usually consisted of watching Youtube videos of lectures of say, Psychology 101 for the Psychology test. Occasionally I would go on Amazon and buy a previous version of a commonly used textbook for that subject. Out of date versions (and by out of date, I mean 2-3 years old) can usually be had for $10 or so. I passed every test I took, usually by a wide margin.
“Teaching + evaluating” creates a horrible conflict of interests.
In my experience, already at high school — students constantly tried to make me teach less, because then they would have an excuse at the exams that I didn’t teach that, so they would be required to learn less. Also, some parents come (and sometimes bring their lawyers) to threaten the school if they kids get less than perfect grades. And it’s kinda depressing to teach people who visibly try to make you teach as little as possible.
In instead, the role of the “teacher” would be to teach; and the role of some “examiner” (preferably working outside the school, i.e. not a subordinate of the same director) would be to make exams, I think the situation would change. Suddenly the teacher would become an ally… against the “bad” examiner. At least the students would not object against being told more about the subject.
Also, it would make possible to evaluate teachers. (Of course you would still have to control for the quality of students.) In current system, teachers who teach little and give everyone free A’s are the most popular. If you expect more, and give worse grades, everyone is angry at you. However, saying openly “well, my colleagues simply don’t teach all the required stuff, and then give free A’s to anyone” is not going to make you friends at the workplace. (And the colleagues could say: “well, that’s just your opinion, man; you obviously need some excuse for your crappy teaching, reflected by the bad grades of your students”.) Instead, if both me and my colleagues would have students examined by the same independent examiner, there would be some feedback at least for the most obvious cases. (Yes, many things could go wrong, Goodhart’s law, etc. Still think it’s better than the random system we have now.)
Hmm, I feel like the same problem emerges though. So what happens if the teacher, for whatever reason, doesn’t end up covering all the material the examiner plans to examine (splitting these roles into two fully independent people with no accountability to each other seems to drastically increase the likelihood this will happen).
The students then complain, I didn’t deserve this bad grade. My teacher never covered this! And they have a point. The examiner, by the nature of his job, I assume, has to say “Not my problem, take it up with your teacher.” The teacher will have his various excuses from “I didn’t have time, I didn’t have resource, the examiner sucks and asked bad questions, etc.” How does the conflict get mediated exactly?
If I remember correctly, this is exactly what happens with AP Tests. Just because your teacher did a poor job doesn’t mean you deserve to get the same grade as someone who actually knows the material. It’s not your fault, but utterly accurate to anyone using the grade as a measure of knowledge. It’s also not your fault if you only grow to 5’2″ but it doesn’t fly to tell the NBA you’d have been 6’5″ if your genes had “covered” height properly.
In current situation, if the teacher does not teach something that is required, it is easy to cover up (just don’t ask it at the exam). In the proposed situation, it would be easy to find out. I think that not hiding errors is an improvement.
This part is easy. The questions and answers should be recorded. So afterwards people can look at the records and say whether the question did or did not belong to the defined scope.
Overruling of Griggs v. Duke Power and other laws and rulings which make it difficult for employers to test potential employees rather than rely on a credential.
This isn’t really a “way” but a change in incentives. Probably the best you can do from the outside; organizations are good at distributing waste/fat and making it all look essential so there’s no one place you can target.
Technically Griggs vs Duke Power was basically repealed in the ’80’s. But then Congress codified Griggs with the Civil Rights Act of 1991. So it is this law you really want to be repealed.
I agree that this law has had some very bad results and should be repealed. But it is only a partial response to the original posting. For one thing, it is has been pointed out many times on SSC that using a college degree as a proxy for a good hire is common in Europe as well as in the US. The European usage is obviously not a result of the Civil Rights Act. Repealing that law is only part of the solution.
There a several on line programs that offer reasonable bachelors, and masters degrees at a low cost. Excluding those in the very controversial for profit sector, the two that come to mind are Southern New Hampshire University, a traditional brick and mortar college in new england that branched out into on line education in a big way, and Western Governors University, which was founded in 1997 by the governors of five western states to offer professional education to students in low population areas who might not otherwise be able attend a traditional college.
Both are focused heavily on non traditional students, working adults who need to complete a degree to open opportunities in the workplace. WGU uses a competency based education model that relies heavily on testing rather then course time to earn credits. Whereas SNHU’s programs are more like the on line education that is available from most state universities.
In a world in which increasingly a bachelors degree takes on the role once filled by a high school diploma, I think what WGU is doing has a lot of advantages. It would be a great thing if state universities could offer a catalog of low overhead on line degrees, with a strong focus on testing competency in specific skills that are important to employers. This is of course not a comprehensive liberal education, but that’s not what a lot of people need.
“Apropos of a recent exchange, what are ways in which university education could be produced at a much lower cost? What keeps it from happening?”
Most people want 3 things from university – actual knowledge and skills, a prestigious credential, and the experience of spending 4 years on a nice campus with other people their age. If your alternative only has the first, you might not get many takers.
It does if you can convince employers to hire you after getting one for a tiny fraction of the cost.
That’s what I meant by “prestigious credential.” Will employers think your degree is as good as one from a famous university?
Most people don’t go to Harvard though. If it can replace your state university, that will do a lot on its own.
Your state university, in most cases, is already not outrageously expensive though.
The problem isn’t Harvard OR state universities. The problem is all of the private liberal arts schools who charge almost as much as Harvard while delivering a degree that’s almost indistinguishable from that of a state university.
In-state tuition(not including room and board) sets you back thousands of dollar per year. With room and board that’s probably over ten thousand.
That’s lowballing it. I just looked up in-state tuition for the University of California, one of the larger state systems; it’s $12,630 annually. (Out-of-state students pay more than three times that.) Room and board varies by school and by the type of housing you get, but at UC San Diego, for example, it seems to be somewhere in the neighborhood of another $10,000 for three quarters.
California is expensive, but e.g. Illinois State looks to be comparable.
TL,DR: we probably can’t produce university education at much lower cost without politically unpalatable austerity programs, but we can maybe take the price down a few notches by hacking away at some of the bureaucracy, building new universities, and/or sending fewer students to university in the first place.
OK, skipping over the bit where everyone is a technophilic autodidact and so MOOCs can do everything but the signaling, boo signaling, what is it that makes up the real educational value of a university education that isn’t a readily MOOCable lecture?
1. Ability to interact personally with teachers at every level from TA to Esteemed Professor, who can provide more nuanced feedback than a multiple-choice test and offer specific help when needed.
2. Ability to interact personally with many other like-minded students, for collaborative study, networking, and
funmotivation.3. Availability of laboratory facilities and the like, for fields of study where these are relevant
4. University-organized internships, exchange programs, and the like
5. A period of several years when the student has a socially and economically accepted excuse for doing no productive work and can hang out alone in the library and/or in the coffee shop with their friends without being told to get a job.
How to make these cheaper:
#1 should be right up your alley, and I assume the “cut professors’ salaries by 50%” solution is not the one you were looking for. What does it take to get lots of professorial-level talent to hang out in one place on the cheap? I’m thinking this is something traditional universities are already pretty good at.
#2 gets us into circular logic territory, because anything that makes university education cheaper, makes it cheaper to have lots of good students hanging around supporting everyone else’s education. If we address the other points, this one comes along for the ride. But, anything that gives the best students the “opportunity” to avoid going to university, makes it harder / more expensive for universities to provide a good education to everyone else. So MOOCs may be part of the problem as well as part of the solution
#3 calls for us to think hard about whether universities really need some of the fancy and expensive laboratory facilities they insist on. But I don’t think there are big gains to be had here, because A: those laboratory facilities are also part of the compensation package for the professors, most of whom are unwilling to wholly abandon research in the name of education, and B: most of them are paid for from a separate revenue stream than tuition
#4 is probably not a big cost driver except insofar as the university’s prestige makes it easier to set up these deals and prestige can be expensive.
#5 gets cheaper if we can convince the students to accept a lower standard of living. A traditional university gets most of the achievable economies of scale by housing the students in dorms and feeding them in cafeterias. Modern universities are often criticized for providing what look like frivolous luxuries, and to some extent that is true and represents a potential savings. But see #2, we want to convince the really good students who don’t have to go to university, to do so anyway for the benefit of all the rest. Plus we are now educating the grandchildren of the baby boomers: grandparents like to see their grandchildren indulged, and they vote.
So nothing obvious comes to mind in terms of greatly reducing the direct cost of university education. Which leaves three alternate approaches that may be promising:
#6, reduce administrative overhead. This is I believe substantial at most universities. Some of it is due to legitimate regulatory or lawsuit-avoidance requirements, which could be addressed by government action. Or more precisely by a credible promise of government inaction. The rest is just the Iron Law applied to university bureaucracy, and that’s tough but not perhaps hopeless.
#7, increase supply. No matter how low the direct costs of university education, if the number of slots is smaller than the number of dedicated applicants, the price is going to skyrocket. And yet it is relatively uncommon for new universities to be created, at least in developed nations. Unfortunately “new university nobody has heard of” is now firmly linked with “crappy for-profit university that rubber-stamps credentials without really teaching anything”, so we’re going to need a way to boostrap “this is so a Real University!” prestige. Maybe convince famous rich people, particularly the ones who are famous for being smart (e.g. Gates, Bezos) to go the Thomas Jefferson / Leland Stanford route and endow universities? Would mean cutting into their bednet-distribution charitable efforts, though. Added bonus, new universities created ex nihilo will come with less entrenched bureacracy.
#8, reduce demand. Provide alternatives – with real economic opportunities at the end – for people who aren’t well-matched for university education, stop insisting that university education is the One True Path to the American Dream, stop accepting students who aren’t going to graduate in four years, and stop subsidizing education except in narrowly-targeted cases.
Make 3-year undergrad degrees standard, like they have in England. Government accreditation bodies would currently stop a college from switching from a 4 to a 3 year BA degree.
Also revive appreticeships like in England.
Richard Posner has suggested making the third year of law school optional. There again, the accreditation process blocks the change.
Some interesting research, relates to some of the topics Scott has discussed in the past. Apparently there is a significant amount of genetic overlap between intelligence and longevity; a lot of the same genes seem to improve both.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171128123356.htm
There seems to be a very strong link between intelligence and healthy lifestyles, so I don’t see how one can conclude that genes that improve cognitive ability also give separate genetic boost to longevity.
This study disentangles the effects and finds the link is mostly genetic: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4795559/
If I parse this right, it menas that
– genes -> intelligence
– genes -> lifespan
rather than
– intelligence -> lifespan
right? Honest question, not sure how to parse the results.
As i have long suspected, there is little evidence that the media has a significant effect on body dissatisfaction and eating disorders.
http://www.christopherjferguson.com/Who%20Is%20the%20Fairest.pdf
“From the literature reviewed to this point we conclude several points:
1. Genetic effects on both eating disorders and body dissatisfaction are clearly the strongest effects, accounting for approximately 40% to 80% of the variance (Bulik, Sullivan, & Kendler, 1998; Keski-Rahkonen et al., 2005; Klump et al., 2001; Spanos, Burt, & Klump, 2010; Wade, Wilkinson, & Ben-Tovim, 2003) in such outcomes.
2. Among social factors, peer influences, both active and passive, exert the most powerful influence on body dissatisfaction.
3. Media effects on body dissatisfaction remain generally small and inconsistent, particularly when other factors, such as peer influence, are controlled.”
People on Twitter were suggesting that the media influences peer opinion, but i contend that it’s peer opinion that influences the media. Think about it, the media operates in a free market, whatever they publish must appeal to their consumers. If publications aimed at women use very thin models, it must be because that’s what sells. Indeed efforts to move towards using more average and plus sized models have largely stalled, because their appeal turned out to be more limited. This shows that it is not the media that dictates public tastes, but rather public tastes that constrain the media.
> Indeed efforts to move towards using more average and plus sized models have largely stalled,
Is this the case? I feel like I’ve started seeing (and continue to see) a lot more plus size models in ads in recent years.
That’s why i said that they stalled, not that they reversed themselves. The efforts succeeded in the sense of having plus size models at all, but the stated goal was actually to have the entire industry revise its standards to be more realistic. In that sense it failed, as thin models continue to dominate the market and plus size models don’t appear to be making further gains.
That said, they’re still fighting it out. Last year Fashion Week got thinner, but this year a bunch of big brands announced they would not use unhealthily thin models. This is something of a cop-out, given that heroin-chic was a short-lived fad, and healthy thin is still in, but in in the long term there may yet be more progress. As things stand now though, i expect plus size modelling will continue to be a niche market.
TLDR: Bring back the Marlboro Cowboy … the man who taught the world “what sells” (to borrow a phrase from the OP).
THE POINT: Like tobacco-smoking, starvation-dieting induces compulsive behavioral disorders in susceptible individuals … most prevalently in adolescent females.
Hmmm … tobacco/cancer denial … pesticide toxicity denial … climate-change denial … vaccine-safety denial … and now anorexia denial (?) … whence this denial-clustering? And how should scientists/rationalists respond?
At the risk of being excessively confrontational (even by “Open Thread” norms), ideology-driven science-shutdowns are a bad idea … because in the long run, science-shutdowns make rational discussion of tough social issues entirely infeasible.
I was going to give you the benefit of the doubt for the Quakers comment (even on reflection it’s quite readable, good work!), but you’re still banned, John.
Yeah, I wasn’t sure it was Sidles until the last sentence of the Quaker comment (that style of condescending quasi-humor is unmistakable), but this is much more obvious. It even has the topic-comment structure he originally got banned for.
Scott has banned him, so he’s persona non grata here. Okay.
But apart from that, what’s so bad about John Sidles? I don’t remember much of him, and I certainly had no idea that the indicated posts were his.
@Larry
I’m not sure exactly what it is but judging by the few posts he’s made post ban…
…I think it’s that his writing style is a sort of unique form of incoherent and terrible. Personally, I’m not hugely bothered by it and usually just skip over it. And occasionally he contributes something. But my vague memory is his posts tended to be worse pre-ban (like longer and more obnoxious).
His posts really are incoherent and terrible, and condescending, and full of obnoxious stylistic tics, and you’d need a bulldozer to make room for his ego, but that’s not what really pissed me off about him.
At the end of the day there is only one prerequisite for intelligent discussion, and that is being willing and able to understand and engage with other people’s points. All our other norms — don’t shitpost, don’t insult people, try to use a legible style — are nice to have, but you can have a conversation without them. It probably won’t be a pleasant conversation, but it can be a productive one.
Sidles doesn’t do that. If you’re dumb enough to substantively respond to one of his posts, he’ll pick apart your response until he finds something that he can use as a prompt to repeat one of his twenty or so talking points, and then he’ll do that. If you’re arguing for something he doesn’t like, he’ll take a few swipes at you in the process; if you’re arguing for something he does, he’ll agree with you in a way that makes you wish he didn’t.
Similar criticisms are commonly extended to the broader (Post)Modern Enlightenment — there being no shortage of commentators who do so.
It follows that persons who admire the (Post)Modern Enlightenment, have reason to assess such critiques as sincere compliments.
On behalf of the SSC’s pomo-enlightened readers, thank you for this insight.
Once again, please go away.
Right, if you don’t give him such an opening he’ll just dig through your post history for excuses to dismiss you as too stupid and/or emotionally repressed to comprehend his clearly superior and enlightened prose.
That sort of thing in conjunction with the issues raised by Nornagest above are what got him banned in the first place.
Peer opinion about X can influence the media in a way that influences peer opinion about Y.
The clearest way this has happened in the last 50 years or so has to do with standards of male attractiveness. As women’s discretionary income increased, so did the efforts to find effective ways of marketing to women. Sex sells, so those efforts included better nailing down and following through on what women (intrinsically or contingently) find attractive. A side result is that general portrayals of men in advertising and fiction conform much more to those standards than they did in the 60s and 70s. And a side result of that is that men today have a much more acute sense of where they fall in the attractiveness spectrum than they used to, with the understanding mediated in part by their male peers.
I haven’t noticed any of this (last paragraph). Could you explain what you mean that portrayals of men are conform more to what women find sexy? What characteristics are you talking about? I don’t feel I know any better than I did 50 years ago where I so fall.
I do think that women in general are more likely than previously to be interested in men based more on their general appearance than before. Although women are still much more likely than men to be more attracted based on power instead of appearance. And I don’t think this has anything to do with the media. It is the general culture that has changed.
@Lillian
There is also little evidence that sexual preferences of men drive body dissatisfaction, as studies find that men prefer more voluptuous partners than what women see as the ideal.
I feel like there is a motte and bailey by the activists on this matter based around non-specific words like thin and curvy.
That just means that men sexually prefer women who see the ideal body type as less voluptuous than men see it.
How does that work??? Do you think that men prefer women with eating disorders and/or body dissatisfaction?
I was assuming it was a joke, but you never know around here.
Unfortunately for you, women select for men who make kidding-not-kidding jokes.
(It’s not their fault, though. They only do that because men sexually prefer women who sexually prefer men who make kidding-not-kidding jokes.)
Yes the article discusses that. It seems body dissatisfaction is mainly driven by intra-female competition, so the pressure is to conform to female rather than male ideals of feminine beauty. It’s interesting that these ideals don’t quite match up though, sice you’d think it would be advantageous for both men and women to be aware of their opposite’s preferences, that they might better attract them. Likely the difference is that they’re optimizing for different problems. The male ideal female is meant to push men into seeking out healthy fertile mates, but the female ideal female is meant to push women into appearing healthy and fertile. It could be that in the latter case aiming at a point just past the target leads to more hits.
Or it could be a classic virtue spiral, where direction pushing is seen as virtuous, rather than target hitting, so people don’t stop when the target is hit.
Competition for the favors of the best specimens in a group also doesn’t necessarily result in optimal outcomes for those whose favor is being fought over.
Let’s say that having some qualities, like wealth or higher class or higher education, makes it far easier to be thin. Furthermore, let’s assume that it’s far easier to (dress up to) fake being wealthy, higher class or better educated, than it is to fake being thin*. Then wealthy and/or higher class and/or better educated women have a strong incentive to make being thin strongly correlated with these other qualities, so men will use that to decide which women to approach/favor, rather than use more easily fooled indicators.
This mechanism works especially well because men prefer thinner than average women, although it starts working less well when women get substantially more thin than what men prefer. But you’d still expect women who compete like this to err on the side of wanting to be too thin, which is exactly what we see.
Of course, you can make a similar argument about male competition. Do men favor showing off wealth more ostentatiously than women prefer? That is what one would expect if the same mechanism happens for male competition over women.
* Note that this is far easier in online-dating, where old or ‘strategic‘ pictures can obscure body weight.
Treating men or women as groups of monolithic traits causes all kinds of problems.
Say men had a range of preferences, and women somehow were all very similar in appearance and behavior. Each woman would get roughly the same amount of attention, although some would be unlucky and be stuck with a cluster of men who didn’t like the average. The first woman to display a different trait would likely grab more attention than the average woman as she is going to be outnumbered by the number of guys who would prefer her new trait to the average (even if it isn’t their ideal). This extra attention will lead to copying by other previously unsuccessful women.
This is (to a limited extent) what you see in US schools in general. Up until the early stages of puberty there is relatively little in the way of distinctive physical traits when compared to what is about to come. Then they enter high school, freshman year for a lot of girls means they are now (fairly suddenly) being compared physically to their peers who are developing earlier, and also to the sophomores through seniors at the school who are way more advanced on average. They quickly associate physical appearances, and physical changes, with increased attention. Since they can’t will themselves to larger breasts and shapelier butts particularly well, many are stuck feeling as if their only option is dieting. This change, even if preferred by only a few, is likely to increase the attention they get, or course if multiple girls follow this strategy some will get less attention than others, and might well feel pressured to try even more extreme forms of dieting to out compete.
These effects can be compounded very easily. Say boys develop sexually a little later than girls, then girls entering high school will often be competing for a smaller effective pool. This basic split can be used to explain a lot of issues that arise. The boys that mature quickly end up with out sized attention from the girls, girls end up in competition with each other, and then the boys that mature later are functionally playing the game with both boys and girls who are more experienced and thus have explored and developed further into the social rules that need to be obeyed. At some point, rather than learning and catching up, they just get shut out of the game entirely for long stretches.*
I think this also addresses the peer effects for girls that are being found, but would need to read more to be able to be confident in that at all.
* I like this explanation for why poorly socialized guys often end up with poor hygiene. They end up so far removed that the basic actions of clean(ish, this is high school after all) clothes, showers and teeth brushing do nothing to improve their standing, and gain little or no positive reinforcement for effort they do put in.
It rather feels like the three of us are poking at the edges of the same truth rather than really disagreeing here. All our statements appear to be compatible as part of a larger thesis about a complex system. This seems like a good sign.
Very interesting life story I found by browsing Wikipedia’s list of child prodigies. Synopsis:
“Hildegart Rodríguez Carballeira was an activist for socialism and sexual revolution, born and raised by her mother as a model for the woman of the future. She was conceived in Ferrol by Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira and an undisclosed biological father chosen by her mother with eugenic intentions. She spoke 6 languages when eight years old, finished law school as a teenager, and was a leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party and afterward of the Federal Party.
Hildegart was one of the most active people in the Spanish movement for sex reformation. She was connected to the European vanguard, corresponding with Havelock Ellis, whom she translated, and Margaret Sanger. She had correspondence with many other European personalities, accompanying Herbert George Wells in his visit to Madrid, but rejecting his offer to go to London as his secretary.
At the age of 17, her mother shot and killed her, giving the explanation “the sculptor, after discovering a minimal imperfection in his work, destroys it.”.”
Good god, the woman succeeded in making a bona fide child prodigy who studied law, taught philosophy, and became widely known and highly regarded activist, all while still a teenager. Yet that still wasn’t enough. If such a daughter could not satisfy Aurora Rodríguez, then no thing and no one could have any hope of ever doing so. No wonder they locked her up in the loony bin.
Apropos of the story about the Hungarian chess prodigy girls from a couple of months back: I feel like people underestimate the population of people in the early 20th Century who were trying educational experiments on their children.
Or the 16th century:
I guess the lesson from the Polgár family is to use redundancy. You don’t have to kill your child for losing a chess tournament, if you have two more.
This evokes a dark memory from around ten years ago.
I was invited to speak at an academic honors convocation. Several undergraduate students received awards for doing outstanding work. One of the awardees sat at our table, and I was quite impressed with her.
The very next night, she was shot and killed by her own mother.
The mother had lost her job, suffered a mental breakdown, and feared that she and her daughter would soon become homeless. So she killed her daughter to prevent that from happening.
Geeze man, I was not prepared for that rather abrupt dark ending!
Interrupting People
What are your algorithms/heuristics/whatevers for when and when not to interrupt someone? Also how do you do it?
Aside from the obvious, e.g. speaker at an event or in a classroom, I had a lot of difficulties with this. When I was a lot younger I would often interrupt people; I was eager to share something related to what they were saying. It was rude of me, and turned a lot of people off. After enough chastisement and self-reflection I went to the opposite end. I tried to let people speak until there was a natural pause in the conversation. That worked with some people, but with others, well, they wouldn’t shut up. If I didn’t stop them they would go on for many minutes, and change the topic. If I wanted to add something to a certain topic, by the time they stopped talking they would be 2-3 topics past what I wanted to address.
Now, I do my best to let others speak their thoughts, but I do interrupt them if they’ve been speaking for a sufficient amount of time (that really depends on the circumstances), and if I have a clarifying/supporting question or statement.
It’s actually rather complicated, if mostly grokable. I find all of the following relevant:
Is the interjection on topic, or a change of topic?
Is the interjection urgent?
How long has the current speaker been speaking?
How many interruptions have there been recently?
Is the occasion formal (that is, like a lecture) or informal?
How long have you been a participant?
Relative status between speaker and interrupter.
Generally “Don’t interrupt” is a good heuristic if the speaker is also following social norms and nothing urgent has come up. Norms will also vary by culture, though.
It’s very context-dependent. One heuristic I use is that if I can predict what the other person is going to say (i.e. they’re about to tell me something I already know); I have a more interesting direction to turn the conversation; and there aren’t many third parties involved who might want to hear what the speaker has to say, I interrupt.
Among Friends (Quakers) the social rules regarding interruptions derive from a primary directive: “Never speak twice before all have spoken once.” Three social consequences are:
(1) When Friends do speak, their words are well-considered (the overall social effect is overwhelmingly good).
(2) Friends never interrupt (the overall social effect is generally good).
(3) Friends rarely tell jokes (the social effect is arguably bad).
Specifically in regard to (2), I was witness to a Friend who was testifying to personal troubles … it became apparent (slowly), to everyone present, that the distraught Friend could not stop their stream-of-sorrow.
Rather than interrupt, a weighty Friend physically took their hand … and held it until (after many minutes) the sorrowful stream dried up of itself.
Specifically in regard to (3), only one Friendly joke is known (to me). Brace thyself:
Among Friends, this joke is regarded as a finger-wriggler! 🙂
That’s quite interesting. How closely do Friends tend to follow that rule? I’m having a hard time envisioning how this would work without forcing many conversations to start off in a fairly artificial way, especially in groups of five or more. Also, is it socially permissible for a Friend to give up his right to speak? I know that there are some contexts in which I am happiest sitting back listening to others talk. This is especially true if the topic is one I don’t know much about (better to remain silent and be thought a fool, etc.). Do Friends make allowances for this sort of situation?
In regard to the (good) questions that you ask, far more can be learned from physically attending a Quaker service, or from reading a Friendly essay like Richard Allen’s “Silence and Speech: An Open Letter to a Newcomer,” than from any comment I could post. According to Allen’s essay:
If among Friends there are any “absolute cast-iron rules”, then I am not aware of them — it’s a community in which respect for tradition is exceedingly strong, and respect for individual choices is even stronger, and yet respect for authority per se is nearly nonexistent.
PS: the above “finger-wriggling” link is no manner of joke, but rather among Friends is a prevalent practice for expressing silent approval in public.
Go away, John.
Really? If that’s a Sidles post, he’s modified his commenting style so as to be entirely unobjectionable.
He regressed in the comment below, but this was a particularly lucid comment for him.
Indeed. I didn’t catch on until the quote-link-emoticon ending of the first comment.
This was quality enough to allow him, if it didn’t make a mockery of Scott’s ability to ban commenters.
Caveat: I’m probably no better at this than you are.
For the most part I try to default to not interrupting unless it’s important and urgent (kind of along Randy M’s criteria). Most of what I think to say isn’t very important, so it’s not a huge loss that it gets missed. If there is something I really want to follow up on, I will just awkwardly transition back to it, e.g. “To back up a few topics…” or “In response to you made earlier…”. This is not actually awkward with a bit of practice (and if people find it awkward or annoying they are welcome to change their conversation style to let me respond to points as they come up).
However, if I feel like someone is never giving me a chance to participate and/or get annoyed, I switch to ‘assertive, rude, New Yorker’ (apologies to NYC dwellers for the stereotype, but I actually do find it helpful to think of it in terms of tapping into the stereotype). In which I will exploit any pause or breath if I have something I want to say, though I try to keep my tone respectful and put a polite spin on it. AFAIK this hasn’t pissed anyone off, but I don’t use it very often (I can only think of one person I do this around regularly).
Also worth noting that this is my conscious heuristic for when I’m explictly paying attention to the interruption problem. I don’t know what I usually do when I’m not thinking about it, because I’m never consciously aware of it unless it screws up (and I get called out for rudely interrupting — which again doesn’t happen very often).
No offense taken. The strangest part is if someone with NY pattern speaks to someone with the MW pattern both come away thinking the other was rude. Not interrupting, for example with statements of agreement, makes us think you aren’t really paying attention or don’t care about what we are saying.
> Not interrupting, for example with statements of agreement, makes us think you aren’t really paying attention or don’t care about what we are saying.
“I’m listening” signals is another conversation tactic I’ve been (occasionally) trying to work for the last few years. I think if done right it isn’t interrupting — but maybe I’m interpreting what counts as “interruption” pretty narrowly?
I’m not talking about an “uh huh” or “yeah” but a full-on taking over the conversation with an anecdote that reinforces what the other person said before turning it back over. My sense is that would be considered rude in the midwest but it isn’t in NYC.
I have spent years–20 or so–trying, with limited success, to learn not to interrupt people. I still have to actively think about not interrupting to not interrupt.
My family don’t talk one at a time: we never have. My father’s family doesn’t either. So I am perfectly comfortable participating in a “conversation” where three different topics are being discussed, and each of them has a couple people talking at the same time, and most participants are involved in more than one of the three. Most people think that’s not an appropriate conversational norm: my wife is incredibly hostile to multiple-people-talking-at-once conversations.
https://qz.com/951424/how-to-stop-interrupting-people-or-learn-to-love-it-instead/
Article has some discussion from Deborah Tannen about high-consideration and high-involvement conversational styles.
In general, people from the high-involvement side are told to be more like the high-consideration side, but if people who don’t interrupt wanted to learn the high-involvement style, what might help?
Some years back, a speech therapist studied the speech of science fiction fans (the generally geeky folks who regularly attend sf conventions) conversing with each other.
The linked article only mentions it briefly, but from more detailed accounts I read at the time, she found that interruption was unusually frequent in that context, and not seen as rude.
If I am in a conversation that involves someone presenting an argument of the form A therefore B therefore C . . ., I will interrupt if I don’t buy one of the therefores or if I think one of the sets of factual premises is clearly wrong. Sometimes I think this rule should be suspended. This is often the case when I am talking with someone who is approaching things from a standpoint very different from mine. Better, then, to get the big picture before responding.
It’s very interesting to see how different people react to this kind of interruption. The more rational a person is (as a rule of thumb) the more likely they are to understand this sort of interruption and roll with it. Having grown up in a big family may also play a role here.
Oh, good one! Someone recently got mad at me for doing this and I was completely taken aback, because I think it’s a very useful practice.
I hate it when people interrupt me.
I’ve noticed there are certain activities where interrupting me is standard practice — for example, in games of Werewolf / Mafia / Avalon / etc, it’s good practice to speak as much as you can and not let anyone else get a word in, because then you’ll be more persuasive. I don’t participate in those activities.
I do interrupt other people sometimes. Other times, I wait for the opportunity to speak, then give up and leave the conversation. I don’t think I can put into words what determines which one I do.
I put up a book request a couple open threads back but had no replies, so am posting on a fresh thread in the hopes that it will get better results.
I really liked reading Parasite Rex by Carl Zimmer and was hoping the commenters on SSC might be able to point out a similiar book, dealing with parasites and their life cycles for me.
Thanks in advance.
Recommended: Adam Johnson’s darkly eschatological SF novel Parasites Like Us (2004, GoodReads review here). This was Adam Johnson’s first book; it provides a good introduction to the themes of Johnson’s later works.
Replete with bio-, anthro-, and paleo- meditations; Johnson’s brand of integrative SF-narrative may be too pomo for some SSC folks. Possibly too, the OP-er “liquidpotato” might prefer that Parasites Like Us dealt more with parasite-biology sensu stricto, less with (e.g.) the ecological impacts of Clovis point civilization.
Have you read I Contain Multitudes? Not strictly about parasitology but would still scratch the same itch I’d wager.
There is an excellent set of microbiology podcasts put out by Vincent Racaniello and various colleagues. One of them is called “This Week in Parasitism,” and involves in-depth discussions of parasites. I’ve listened to some of the episodes, which were quite good, though parasitology has never grabbed me the way virology (TWIV) and microbiology (TWIM) have.
On my blog, I’ve created a kind of word problem meant to test a hypothesis. I can’t say more for bias-reduction reasons. Curious to get y’all’s reactions.
What value did you choose for X?
How does that correspond to the, uh, other thing?
Do you think the word problem works for what it is?
I chose 0, or a close enough approximation as makes little difference.
I thought it was a reasonably fair correspondence, at least for me.
Same.
I basically choose 0 for X, (My actual thought was that there might be some non-zero number, but it would be very very small) and it corresponded very well to the other thing. Not sure that the penalty for not pressing the button is sufficiently grim. Also I should mention that I’m very religious, so my belief in an afterlife may have minimized how much weight I gave to the negative consequences (in this life).
I said 0 and it corresponded very well to complete the trio.
I think the test is if anyone did have a decently high X. And i doubt they will.
I was tempted by zero, but I’ll say my actual answer was “I guess 1 in a billion.”
I’m against the object level issue. (Is there a term for what an analogy refers to? Referent maybe?)
And I didn’t guess what you were going for–I thought it was going to end up some kind of wire-head thing, maybe. Somehow I was going to end up being the other person. (But I didn’t base my low answer on that).
Actually, I think my 1-in-a-billion answer is pretty good, but a bit high. Imagine the scenario where everyone has a choice. There’s 7 billion people on the planet. Assume they all make the same choice. If we don’t push the button, there’s considerable increased suffering. Not to mention second order effects–people won’t be performing as well in critical jobs with less sleep, etc. So there is some number where it’s pretty reasonable to have everyone push it. But at 1 in a billion, that means about 7 people will die. I’ll pick dust specs over torture, so let’s push it out to 1 in ten billion and play the odds that no one will die.
Imagine a new anti-depressant that that works great with no side effects, but will kill people if they overdose after it is expired at some low odds. We’d probably control that but still allow it to be prescribed, right?
So your X is dependent on the total human population? If population were to rise to 70 billion, you’d have to adjust?
In an attempt to universalize the ethic, yes.
Applying it to abortion to turns it into Pascal’s Mugging, where there’s a small probability of a large consequence, and the main contributor to the probability is epistemic uncertainty. I don’t accept that the correct thing to do in Pascal’s Mugging is to calculate probabilities.
SSC answer to question one: Insufficient data because you want a numerical value for X and aren’t even trying to quantify the harm that will otherwise befall me. The ratio of X:harm is going to be low but finite.
Anywhere else, the answer to question one is “X=0, you monster”.
Question #2: The analogy is flawed in that the assertion that a mother who declines to abort her baby will love that baby with all her heart is another thing that probably ought to be quantified for the SSC audience. Outside of SSC, you’ll be dismissed as a monster by Team Life for asserting that probability is anything less than 100% (how could a mother not love her baby?) and dismissed as a monster by Team Choice for asserting that probability is anything greater than 0% (you expect a mother to love her rapist’s baby?)
Yeah, I tried to play along but I couldn’t get past this. My thoughts were that I want things I love because they make my life better, so if they end up making my life worse I don’t know that I’d want them. Maybe the question should ask for an acceptable ratio of difficulty to death likelihood (or something)?
Crap. That’s what I meant to say.
Anywhere else, the answer to question one is “X=0, you monster”.
But is it, though? Ignoring the second half of the problem, yes we all would say that under no circumstances would we press a button that might kill an innocent person, so X = 0.
But if we think about it for ourselves, without having to give a number, but in the privacy of our hearts – would we really be willing to undergo the inconvenience and maybe even suffering not pressing the button would cause? Especially if X was only really low like maybe 1 or 2 or 5 or even 10% chance?
I know the right answer is “X=0” and I agree that is right. But I think I might privately decide “X = 50% because that’s still a 50:50 chance for them as against a 100% chance for me of a bad outcome”. Or maybe even higher!
0, but it doesn’t work for me; there are differences. The first line is phrased as an absolute, but it’s actually subject to uncertainty in the other thing.
Do you think the word problem works for what it is?
In the particular instance you are using, not really, because in that case pressing the button isn’t an X% chance of killing, it’s 100% (and if it doesn’t turn out to be 100%, people will be very angry and may even sue you). It’s a good problem to get people wondering “Realistically, how high would I be willing to go for X?” but for the problem you want to use it, it doesn’t work: for a medical procedure, the expected success rate is if you press the button, there is only 2 in 100 chances it won’t result in the death of the person and for surgical procedures, that goes down to 2 in 1,000 chances it won’t result in death.
So basically if you press the button, you are putting X very, very low for a refusal to press it (i.e., you want to cause the death of the person and if there’s only 1% chance this will happen then you won’t press the button; if X = 100% then you will press the button).
As for the mother love question, there are those who encourage button pressing as they claim the mother will suffer even more if they don’t press it because then they will meet and possibly fall in love with the person and if they have to give them up they will always be thinking of them and missing them, so button pressing is more humane all round.
Unfortunately, I figured out what you were going for too quickly which made me think maybe X is close to 1. Disturbingly, this made me realize that even if I applied the idea to a different situation than you were going for, where everyone agreed and I knew it was morally wrong, I might accept a pretty high number for X (.1? .5? 1?) even if it wasn’t the situation you were making an analogy for.
I’m really, really glad I’ll probably never be tested either in the situation you were making a metaphor for or something similar.
Like quanta413, I realized what you going for and found it very hard consider your word problem by itself without jumping straight to the object level. So on that basis I don’t think it’s super useful for testing your hypothesis.
On the other hand, since it seems from comments that more pro-life-ish people found it easier to think about what different values of ‘x’ would mean, perhaps it is a good word problem for highlighting/discussing some the different moral intuitions of people on different sides of the debate.
(In fact, judging from Randy’s comment, I’d guess something about “this lines up better with some pro-life-ish moral intuitions so works better as a hypothetical question when viewed from the pro-life-ish side”, but with n=2 that’s a weak guess.)
=====================
Anyways, my response to the hypothetical:
Agree with others about the problems with assuming P(‘I will love this person’) = 1 and having P(‘Button will kill this person’) be the main variable. I think John Schilling made good points about quantifying X, quantifying the harm to yourself, etc.
Another big thing: from the phrasing, I assumed that the person in danger from the button is already out there living their life, and that aside from pressing the button I won’t have any affect on them until some far-in-the-future meeting. This does not map to my understanding of the object level issue.
To me, that’s the biggest difference. Essentially I’m treating “% chance that the thing I kill ends up being a human when otherwise it’s just a clump of cells” and “% chance that I end up killing a human when otherwise I wouldn’t have killed anything” as the same thing even though they’re not. But to get to the moral issue, I figure they’re close enough.
BTW, and hopefully above commenters will read this too, I created this hypothetical during an argument with my pro-choice brother, as a way to get him to understand how a purely rational person from the anti-abortion side might see the issue (or how I see it anyway). And in that instance, I didn’t ask him what X was, I just told him it was 50% and then asked if he’d push the button. He never answered me.
I can’t help it: what sort of bizarre essentialism is this? I feel like saying “Go read Eliezer’s ‘A Human’s Guide to Words'”.
I think what you want to say is: “% chance that the thing I kill is actually morally relevant”. That just presupposes moral realism, which I think is equally bizarre, but at least most people don’t agree with me about that.
% chance that the thing I kill ends up being a human when otherwise it’s just a clump of cells
Psst – humans are just clumps of cells! The ugly bags of mostly water are just giant masses of cells all clumped up together, how horribly unpleasant and in no way comparable to the clean, elegant, aesthetic lines and metallic purity of a paperclip!
> I created this hypothetical during an argument with my pro-choice brother, as a way to get him to understand how a purely rational person from the anti-abortion side might see the issue
Ok, for this purpose it seems like a pretty good hypothetical to me.
From another side (or, at least my other side): in the hypothetical, not only will you yourself go through months of inconvenience and years of economic consequences, but then you have years of affecting the other person, and you might do a bad job and cause them a lifetime of misery. That’s what I’m more concerned about trying to put a probability on.
In your answer to skef, you stated “I acknowledge this is not a perfect metaphor, but I do think it’s a useful way to get people who have no epistemic uncertainty about abortion (especially pro-choicers) to consider that maybe they should have some.”
As a somewhat pro-choice person who does have epistemic uncertainty about abortion, I think its important to think about the uncertainty that this person will have a good life and you will love each other.
ETA: and I feel like I’m probably repeating myself and I really don’t want to get into a debate on this object level issue, so I’m not planning to respond to this thread anymore, but I just wanted to say that I did find your hypothetical worth thinking about and discussing, so thank you for sharing.
We can use rates of attempted suicide to see revealed preferences here. Most people do not seem to regret their existence enough to do something about it.
Suicide reveals a preference for death. That’s a very different thing from regretting one’s existence in the sense of regretting having been born.
In which direction? I think number of people who wish they’d never been born would be less than those that want to die right now.
Certainly either is possible without the other. You can not (sic! as opposed to cannot) regret being born, but say that it’s enough now and you want to die. You can also regret being born, but not want to die (for example because of the consequences your death would have, which not having been born would not have had, or because of the unpleasantness of getting yourself killed).
I don’t know how prevalent regretting one’s birth without wanting to die really is, and that sort of retroactive preference isn’t revealable. You can’t ask about it because the truth will be buried under layers of social desirability bias. We’ll probably never know.
I understand the logical compatibility and non-equivalence of the statements, but I expect that practically they overlap significantly and one can assume by all the striving to live that most living people are glad they do, short of evidence otherwise.
Seconded. I figured the trick out before thinking through my answer, but to the extent that I might have considered giving a low number, it would have depended on my assumption that there was an actual pre-existing person being harmed. This thought experiment fails as an intuition pump because it only works if you are already on the pro-life side of the fence. The real division between pro-life and pro-choice is where you draw the line of personhood. “Isn’t it bad to risk killing a person you love” has no weight if you are already confident that you aren’t killing a person.
My preferred intuition pump is the old classic: the hospital is burning down, and you can either rescue one crying baby or a rack full of hundreds of fertilized embryos — which do you choose? I’m not in a position to evaluate how convincing it is, but at least it addresses the real point of contention.
Not really, because it’s only really a valid analogy for a situation wherein abortion is necessary to save the mother’s life.
Uh, no? The point of the thought experiment is not to analogize the pregnant woman to the baby.
The point is this: if you believe that embryos are fully human people, of equal moral stature, then the answer should be easy: you leave the baby behind, grab the embryos, and save hundreds of human lives. If that seems morally questionable, then maybe there is a moral distinction between embryos and babies that you are not permitting yourself to notice.
@Iain
There are three buttons. There are three types of nanobomb. Each button deactivates its respective type of bomb. Each type of bomb will go off in 1,2,3 minutes respectively.
A hundred people have bombs of type 1 and 3 internally in their blood. One man has bomb 2. This is the one opportinity to deactivate a type of bomb.
Which button do you press?
EDIT:
If I were to try to make your metaphor better, then I would say a baby in one room. A thousand pregnant ladies in the other. A machine that destroys the brain of any baby yet to hit his first birthday. You have to fire it in one room. What room do you fire it in?
OF course, everyone would sacrifice the one baby if forced. So doesn’t quite work for your point.
@ Iain:
The issue isn’t actually the moral status of the embryo vs. a born human per se, it’s the embryo’s life vs. a born human’s (the mother’s) convenience, financial situation, job prospects, etc. As a society, we already accept the principle that human convenience can be outweighed by the existence of other things, even if these things aren’t as important as humans; that’s why we have laws against, for example, destroying the habitats of rare animals, or pulling down historic buildings.
I kind of like that intuition pump, but it’s obviously emotionally rigged to the pro-choice side. Let’s make it better by using something closer to the tradeoff we are dealing with. Then let’s make it cruel and heartless by quantifying it. That should be a better intuition pump.
The hospital is burning down and you can either rescue X mother and baby pairs, or Y pregnant mothers. How much greater does Y have to be than X for you to decide to save the pregnant mothers? What if the pregnant mothers are all pregnant with twins? What if the pregnant mothers are all third trimester and the babies are all less than a month old?
Obviously, if you’re extremely pro-choice, Y = 2X is the break even point. If you are extremely pro-life and put value only on human lives but not on suffering pain, then maybe Y=X is the break even point.
I think that just muddies the point, because it brings in the question of how you weigh adults vs infants.
I disagree, the point is not muddled at all; that question is morally the same as the question we are dealing with. There is no meaningfully different moral criteria to be used comparing different ages of people to comparing babies to balls of cells that will count as babies in 1 day, 2 days, 30 days, etc. If you believe your answer will depend on the ages of the infants (or let them be children or toddlers or whatever), then you can add that detail and specify how it affects things. Perhaps you are Peter Singer and that’s a perfectly valid answer. After all, for him Y=X is the cutoff if the infants are too young, but Y=2X (or something like it) if the infants are instead children. And he’s got a smooth progression between the two cases as you go from infant to child.
I may save my friend more easily than two strangers. I may save a (presumed innocent) stranger above two convicted criminals. I may save an able-bodied adolescent more quickly than a thousand people who are likely to remain trapped in permanent or semipermanent isolation/solitary confinement after being saved.
None of this means that it’s okay to kill any of the above in order to spare myself some inconvenience.
Sure. But that places a limit on your ability to credibly claim that [strangers / criminals / those trapped in solitary confinement] are of equal moral weight to [friends / innocents / able-bodied adolescents].
That’s a bit of goalpost shifting isn’t it?
It’s an intuition pump, not a rigorous proof that abortion is great. If it does not pump your intuitions, that’s that.
Edit to add: Note that there is a significant pro-choicewards step from “abortion is baby murder” to “fetuses have lesser moral value than babies but that doesn’t mean you can kill them”. The goal of the intuition pump is to convince people to make that step.
Mostly what it does for me is force me to confront the fact that modern medicine has enabled a shift towards r-selection, with all the horror that implies.
It doesn’t really pump my intuitions about abortion specifically, no.
Edit to address your edit:
I don’t see the step, any more than I see a step between “Killing a stranger is murder” and “I preferentially save friends over strangers”.
The whole “lesser moral value” thing isn’t getting to me at all – I freely accept that the two strangers have identical moral weight to my friend, but may choose to save the one friend anyway, and the same can remain true at larger numbers based on other biases than “moral value”.
The phrasing could use some work when it comes to the counter-factuals. The first paragraph asserts that an event will happen. The second asserts that doing something could prevent that event from happening.
And like other commenters I don’t get what the percentage idea is doing in the example. Abortion isn’t Russian Roulette or something. If the idea is that the fetus might be a person, then the example is resting on a kind of rhetorical trick, in which conceptual uncertainty is portrayed as metaphysical uncertainty.
Yes, you’re basically right. Like I said to quaelegit, I’m quantifying the epistemic uncertainty over whether a human embryo has the same moral worth a post-natal human does, using a metaphor that maps it to a kind of Russian roulette over whether performing some action will result in a morally bad thing happening.
I acknowledge this is not a perfect metaphor, but I do think it’s a useful way to get people who have no epistemic uncertainty about abortion (especially pro-choicers) to consider that maybe they should have some.
As a pro-choice type, submitting anecdata that it doesn’t work as intended in my case, and quite a bit of suprise that you imagine it might in any case.
[edited to somewhat disguise possible spoilers, but don’t read below the dashes if you plan on answering well…’s q yourself]
X = 0%, or functionally so, but with a lurking awareness that this is the kind of territory where it’s much easier to *say* 0% than to live that truth.
Issue level: w/r/t/ the issue, I am on the side that thinks the government should not try to prevent people from making their own decisions.
—–
Full answer:
I pictured someone I already love, very much, and who I think about every day, and miss when they’re not around. I then supposed another copy of them, only better. (Now with operatic singing and advanced maths!) I supposed I might get to meet this person, and would come to love them more than anyone else in my life.
Only then did I start to imagine the “button.” The question of whether to risk a chance of killing the romantic love-of-my-life for some significant amount of everything not starting to suck… well, I didn’t see how that could be a very smart question. I went with “0” for X, or anyway near enough that there’s no point quibbling. Love’s pretty great, and even if everything started to suck, I’d rather have love.
I’m pro-choice, although I support significant restrictions on late-term abortions.
I have some thoughts about this… Let’s see. I think I wasn’t supposed to think “romantic love” exactly, but just “love the way you love your kids” or even “love like you have for everyone because you were raised in a good church” kind of way. So maybe I broke the experiment. I don’t think romantic attachment is actually a from-before-you-were-born kind of thing, and maybe you didn’t mean to invoke *that* strong a love.
Some examples of things I think that are incompatible with the strong only-one-true-love idea are: 1. We can make society work with an odd number of people. 2. Chickens can be trained to recognize attractive faces.
From what I understand, the majority of abortions are sought by women who already have children, who they already love, and they’re not easy or happy-go-lucky events. I could easily be wrong about much of this. Anyway, I’m going to stop writing because I’m really curious to see what everyone else wrote.
FWIW, I also initially thought that the scenario was referring to romantic love.
My answer was also zero (or something quite close to it), but not because of the romantic love angle. My answer would have been the same if the scenario had stated that some stranger on the other side of the world would have been the one to die.
My moral answer was that X is around ~10%. I approached it with a veil of ignorance. “Would you risk an X/2 chance of death to avoid a 50% chance of lifetime disability?”
But I also missed the intro paragraph on my first reading. With that 0%. Selfishness or love would put the problem outside of morality.
—-
The argument proves too much.
Blastocysts aren’t conscious. So, if there’s any moral ambiguity, it’s around the idea that maybe we should treat “people who’d otherwise exist” as morally equivalent to fully-developed adults. But this moral stance has huge implications well beyond abortion.
To reason about “people who’d otherwise exist”, we need a vantage point that lets us see them. Suppose we’re sitting at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. We can watch an initial timeline. And we can see what happens if we intervene in various ways.
In our initial timeline: George McFly and Loraine Baines go to the Enchantment Under The Sea dance. One thing leads to another. A condom fails. Loraine get pregnant. They debate an abortion, but get married instead. The kid grows up to be Marty McFly, beloved child and eventual husband of Jennifer Parker.
We could intervene and talk Loraine into an abortion. Would that be murder? Not legally. But it sure feels like it. From our table, we can see Marty McFly’s life. Encouraging an abortion looks pretty similar to outright killing him.
So, we go a step back. The condom failed. We could swap it out with a good one. Would that be murder? This seems like more of a stretch. Abortion is a more direct intervention. But, in the end, the outcome is still the ‘death’ of Marty McFly’s.
So, we go a step back. The Enchantment Under The Sea dance was a bit delayed because the musicians had car trouble. What if we delay them a bit more? The outcome is that the dance is canceled. George and Loraine never hook up. Marty McFly ‘dies’.
This starts getting morally tricky. The brute fact is that anything that prevents George McFly and Loraine Baines from hooking up will end Marty McFly. But, that’s true for every child that was conceived, and every child that could have been conceived.
What if we fixed the musician’s car? Then, they show up on time. Dance ends a heartbeat earlier. Fluids shift imperceptibly. And, Marty McFly ‘dies’. A sibling, Mary McFly is born in his place.
So, if you really want to say that “preventing a who’d otherwise exist” is the same as killing, you can. But then any time you don’t facilitate someone getting laid, you’re committing murder.
And, almost any time you interact with anyone, you’re causing a change of events that will snuff out the timelines of people who’d otherwise be born, and replace them with potential siblings.
Unless you want to appeal to transubstantiation or souls, there’s not a great way to stop the “potential person” style argument from carrying on well before the point of conception.
You’re glossing over an important distinction, though: a blastocyst may not be conscious, but it is definitely alive and will grow into a conscious entity given time. In fact, depending on how you define consciousness, babies might not even really be conscious until 5 months or so after birth, and almost nobody thinks killing a newborn baby should be morally acceptable.
Also, humans can’t actually see alternate timelines, and have no way of knowing that this act will result in the existence of Marty, while that act will result in the existence of Mary instead, so it doesn’t make any sense for our morality to address that sort of thing. But we do know that a pregnancy will result in a baby, unless something goes wrong, so terminating it is unquestionably ending the existence of a person who would have otherwise been born.
Ugh. While I suppose there are people in the United States who haven’t thought through their position on this, at this point I think that consists entirely of people who are determined not to do so. That goes doubly for SSC. Do you really think that around here there’s the slightest prospect of anybody on any side in this discussion making a point anyone on the other side hasn’t heard (much less of them taking it seriously, even if by some miracle a new point were raised)?
That seems to be an argument against debating anything at all on here.
This debate in particular is one on which pretty much every American at least seems to have opinions hardened to granite. On other topics, there is sometimes room for changes on the margin, but this one, not so much.
I’ve been generally anti-abortion since about age 19 (though not before), but my specific ideas about abortion (especially what to do about it) have changed a few times from age 19 to now and I wouldn’t say I’m currently 100% sure. In other words I probably couldn’t be turned pro-choice, but I could be convinced that I’m wrong about how anti-abortion laws should be designed and carried out, or how steep they should be.
Loquat:
Terminating it is unquestionably preventing the existence of a person who would otherwise have been born. If it wasn’t questionable whether it counts as ending the existence of a person, it wouldn’t be such a culture war issue in the first place.
[Edit in reply to Anonymous below: okay, let me rephrase that. It is unquestionably preventing the existence of something that would unquestionably be a person. It is only ending the existence of something that is questionably a person. Will that do? Either way, do you agree that Loquat’s ‘unquestionably ending…’ wording is still an overstatement?]
To my understanding, the culture war is exactly about whether it is the prevention or the ending. Those two are mutually contradictory, so you can’t say that prevention itself is unquestionable… unless you think abortion is retroactive contraception or something similar.
No it is being questioned if a ‘foetus’ is a person, because it is a culture war issue.
The Atlantic slave trade did not go on because Africans were seen as less than human. it went on because there was money being made, and acting as if they were less than human helped justify that.
Death camps don’t happen because people suddenly find the victims less than human. They happen because there’s a will and a way to kill those people, and declaring them as being less than human helps to reduce the wages of the prison guards.
Abortion goes on because it is convenient to those in power. Acting as if the baby is less than human helps them justify it.
Pro-choice Americans believe that if something goes wrong with the dose in a late-term abortion and the baby exits the woman still living, that it is the doctor’s responsibility to kill it there. Going ‘Terminating it is unquestionably preventing the existence of a person who would otherwise have been born.’ is sophistry that doesn’t actually reflect the actual views of pro-choices based on the legislation they actually pass.
Is that the majority position? I mean, if ‘pro-life’ can be rounded off to ‘no abortions under any circumstances (or at least, any circumstances where a live baby is reasonably likely to result if the pregnancy is carried to term)’, then ‘pro-choice’ encompasses the full remaining range, from ‘elective abortions within a narrow time window in early pregnancy, or only if the foetus is diagnosed with some particularly horrible medical condition’ all the way up to ‘abortion on demand, for any reason, right up to the time of natural birth’. I am not sure that that latter position is in fact the majority view among people who do not take a strict ‘pro-life’ position, and indeed, some sort of intermediate position is the kind of thing you actually see in the real world. Indeed, I would have expected that a lot of the reason for people being squeamish about late-term abortion is precisely because they think that what is being terminated is by that point something that is capable of suffering.
Well, okay, but literally everything else that isn’t illegal also goes on because it is convenient to those in power (or at least not inconvenient enough to be worth the bother trying to ban). Unless you’re trying to argue that in this one case, every politician who support the availability of some sort of elective abortion under some circumstances actually believes that it is an evil akin to slavery or the Holocaust but is villainously promoting it anyway for some sort of personal gain, which is … conceivable, I guess, but unlikely, and an extremely uncharitable take.
Look, I didn’t come here wanting to get bogged down arguing for any particular position on the pro-choice scale; I was just objecting to Loquat’s unsubstantiated claim that abortion is unquestionably the ending of the existence of a [thing worthy of moral concern], rather than the prevention of the existence of such a [thing that would be of moral concern once it came into existence]. My point was that if it weren’t questionable, something on which reasonable people can and do disagree, then it wouldn’t be a culture war issue in the first place. And your comment seems to be likewise asserting that a [blastocyst/embryo/foetus] is morally equivalent to a fully sentient child or adult. Which, okay, you can hold that position. You can argue for that position. But you cannot claim that that position is uncontrovertially correct and expect to be taken seriously … unless I’ve misunderstood what you’re trying to argue for.
No, Winter Shaker, I disagree.
Preventing the existence of someone who would otherwise have been born is what you do with contraception (or sterilisation, if you’re sure you don’t want any/any more kids). Sex gets you pregnant, you want sex but not the pregnancy, you use method(s) of preventing the pregnancy by preventing conception. You are preventing the sperm and ovum from meeting up successfully.
When the contraception fails or was never used and the women becomes pregnant, then barring a miscarriage we’re into ending (“terminating”) the pregnancy and the existence of someone who would otherwise have been born. The sperm and ovum have done their job, the zygote has been formed, and if you don’t stop the process at some point then you’re going to end up with a miniature human person. That’s why all the emphasis I see over and over again on the “clump of cells” rhetoric when it comes to pro-choice people mocking pro-life people; “they are worried over a clump of cells” (because that makes it sound like a wart or a tumour, not a human life, and so ridicule is the weapon being wielded here).
@Winter
What we see in the UK is indeed abortion limits that are just later than when the baby can survive out of the womb. And a pro-choice person is one who considers that too low. And I have never heard a pro-choice person condemn the legal post-birth abortions, and if your notions were correct you would expect them to rather.
The people supporting slavery and the holocaust didn’t think they were committing an atrocity to the scale of the holocaust or slavery.
You said ‘If it wasn’t questionable whether it counts as ending the existence of a person, it wouldn’t be such a culture war issue in the first place.’ my point is that this is completely backwards. People suddenly became enamoured with Latin and complex philosophy about the nature of consciousness because it is a culture war issue. Its not a bunch of Latin-speaking philosophers rushing to enlighten us about our outdated view of human life.
I suspect one problem with thinking clearly about abortion is that we’d like to draw a clear line between okay and not-okay actions, but the lines that are natural to draw (conception/implanting and birth) aren’t all that convenient for our moral reasoning.
Maybe we might also draw a line at viability outside the mother, but that’s kind-of fuzzy–a six-month fetus *may* survive if delivered early; an eight-month fetus probably will survive. Also, that line changes based on technology. The other lines are pretty arbitrary ones (putting the boundaries at the trimesters is a pretty classic Schelling point thing), or are very subject to technology changing (when can you hear the heartbeat vs when can you see the heart beating on ultrasound).
In particular, if the criterion we want to use for moral reasoning is sentience, I’m pretty skeptical that a newborn baby qualifies as sentient any more than, say, a 7-month fetus which can be aborted in some cases in the US. But where you can probably get 30-40% of the population on board with allowing abortion of that 7-month fetus, you will get approximately 0% on board with “aborting” the newborn.
Huh, that wasn’t even the part I was expecting argument on. Really, all I meant was:
1. This [thing of controversial moral status] is definitely alive.
2. Abortion kills it.
3. If not killed (either by abortion, or by illness/accident/etc), it will develop into [thing everyone can agree is worthy of moral concern]
…which is I think to most people’s intuition is very different, morally, from preventing a couple from hooking up in the first place, because as normal humans with no ability to view alternate timelines we have no idea whether said hookup would have even resulted in pregnancy, and that was the whole thing Drew was going on about, that if you’re a timelord preventing hookups is morally the same as abortion.
And, of course, like albatross11 said above, there’s no obvious point mid-pregnancy to draw a line and declare *this* is the point where the [tocms] becomes a [tecaiwomc].
True, almost nobody. But Peter Singer thinks it should be morally acceptable and he’s a prominent ethicist. There is something to be said for the moral consistency of his position.
Neither are sleeping people. I’ll make sure not to nod off if I’m ever in your presence.
I also assumed romantic love.
That being said, we make decisions all the time which potentially endanger the lives of people unknown to us. And we tend to follow the routine default choice that everyone around us is making.
You’re driving to an important appointment and don’t want to be late. Driving just at the speed limit involves some risk; each increment of speed above the limit increases the chance that some innocent person will die as a result of your decision.
Of course the person most at risk in this situation is yourself, but you are not the only one; if someone else is killed, you were the one breaking the law. Alive or dead, you will be seen as culpable.
Yet nearly everyone routinely exceeds the speed limit.
I chose 0.3%. Is that high? It felt low at the time… I chose that not because I care about the person I will eventually love, but because killing seems wrong. There will always be more people to love. If I’d known it was about abortion, I would have picked a higher number. Abortion is normally done within nine months of conception. Therefore, if you want to have another baby, you only need wait 9 months to have it.
The analogy would be just as valid if the baby hadn’t been conceived yet, and you were wondering whether or not to use a condom, or whether or not to go on a date with someone, rather than whether or not to have an abortion. Something happens, between choosing to date someone, and the baby becoming an adult, that turns them from a figment of your imagination to a person. People differ on when they draw that line, although most people have inadvertently agreed on it being somewhere in a 9 month time period. Nevertheless, that line is needed – we can’t say that you must go about your life with the only goal of increasing the number of babies you produce, as to do otherwise is murder. Even the catholics don’t go that far.
The holy war over this issue, as far as I can tell, isn’t because some people are more caring than others. Rather, people have a certain existing view of where the line should be drawn. Their argument in favour is stupid, and will inevitably look stupid to outsiders. However, they perceive any effort to regress their internal view as being a useless affront on their freedom, and any effort to progress their definition as being a slippery slope from which any definition could be adopted.
I suppose I see the question of whether killing unborn human life as being non-controversial: even pro-choicers will agree this is murder. The essential disagreement between them and the anti-abortion crowd, then, is over when human life begins. Most pro-choicers seem to think that a fetus doesn’t become a human life until somewhere into the 2nd or 3rd trimester of gestation, whereas most anti-abortion people say it begins from the moment of fertilization or conception. (Extremely few would say a sperm or unfertilized ovum counts as a human life.)
So, in my hypothetical you might say X (very) roughly represents the likelihood that human life begins at conception or very close to that.
I have actually read past the …’s before considering the value of X, because I felt there was a catch, then I saw that there were quite a few. For me, it would matter that:
1) The person doesn’t exist yet (in my opinion), and I am not morally obliged to create it.
2) The problem puts it as a “you will love the person, there is an X% chance person will be killed”, while the real formulation, I think, would be “the person will not exist, otherwise there is a X% chance you will love the person”
3) Does not take into the account possibilities “Y% chance you will hate the person”, “Z% chance you will abuse the person”, “A% chance you will end up neglecting the person”, “B% chance the person will have to suffer greatly or live a not-really-worthwhile life”, “C% chance the person will become a threat or a burden to the other people in the society” and so on.
Also very relevant, in context:
– the chance that the existence of this person means that you will not have an opportunity later to create a different person — one who you would love just as much or more, but who would have a better life.
– the chance that there are already many people in your life whom you love, and the addition of a new one would spread you too thin and leave you unable to fulfill your duties to your loved ones.
In the real world, 67% of women give “unready”, “can’t afford baby now”, or “has all the children she wanted or all children are grown” as the most important reason for their abortions.
I noticed the intended analogy before reading the explanation, so it was at least close enough to be recognisable, but your way of thinking about the issue seems very different from mine. From my perspective the answer to your last question is definitely ‘no’.
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[spoilers for the word problem follow]
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I guess I have two (related but somewhat distinct) main issues with it. First, the analogy is not very close, and the differences are important. Killing a person doesn’t just rob that person of their future life, it (usually) causes immense suffering to other people. Also, although I personally care about conscious experiences rather than preference-satisfaction as such, some people think that an important part of the badness of killing is the fact that it leaves a person’s goals and plans forever unfulfilled (whereas presumably foetuses do not yet have goals or plans).
Second, I think the question ‘does this count as the taking of innocent human life’ is a red herring, reminiscent of what Scott talks about in his essay on the noncentral fallacy. It’s more a question about concepts and semantics than a question about facts and values, which are presumably what really matter here.
well since he’s spoiled it i’ll give my take
“someone I will love for all my days” is very hard to replace
your replacement is not
40%
not so much
I don’t want to spoil it, but no
I already kill people all the time by not donating to the AMF, and the idea that they’re my soulmate or such nonsense doesn’t really outweigh costs that high to myself, so I set X to 100 but really I’d still press the button then.
…huh. Does this map to “infanticide is okay too, birth is just a schelling point”?
Are you joking? I can’t tell.
I refused to choose a number, because the word problem was insufficiently specific.
“It will be harder to do the things you want, to achieve the things you try to achieve. You will be hampered down. You will lose sleep. You will lose money. You will experience moments of intense pain.” — How much money? How much sleep? How many moments of intense pain? How much “hampering down”?
For a bad answer to that question, like “I would lose my job, lose all my money, get evicted, and die homeless in the street suffering intense pain”, you could get me to choose a pretty high value of X, like definitely 20% and probably at least 50%, and I would argue from consequentialism that my life is probably worth at least X fraction of this other person’s life.
For a better answer to that question, like “I’d be 10% more tired every day for the rest of my life and my taxes would go up 10%”, X would be very very low.
I’m in favor of the — er, the thing.
Highly variable based on the specifics; could range from 0.01% to 1, depending on the situation.
Spoilers ahead for the other thing (click the link if you haven’t yet and intend to):
Giving specifics relevant to the actual scenario it’s trying to parallel, where the person’s death causes no harm to anyone else and by failing to press the button I’m likely given the future choice to cause another person to come into being at a lower cost to my quality of life who will have better expected life outcomes, probably something like 0.9. Currently trying to sort out how I think about murder ethically, so this judgment is tentative and could change a bit in the next few months (though I anticipate not below 70%).
I think it’s possible to add a fair bit more relevant info without giving away the situation; the lack of effect on people close to this person is important (since my decision would change significantly if pressing the button orphaned children or left friends and family in despair for years to come).
Following up some of the Net Neutrality discussion – does the way we pay for home internet make sense?
Most payment schemes for stuff can I think be roughly broken into 3 categories:
1) Pay-per-unit. Examples are gasoline and home electricity – a gallon of gas costs X, a kilowatt hour costs Y. You pay for every unit, and only for the units you buy.
2) All-you-can-eat / pay-for-access. E.g. buffets, Netflix, cable TV. You pay one price to get in the door, regardless of how much you use.
3) Pay-per-capacity. E.g. garbage service (pay for a small bin, pay for a dumpster, either gets taken once a week). Most internet service works this way, your pricing is based on your peak download speed. Mobile plans are sort of this – you pay for a maximum chunk of data, but you don’t usually get credit for unused data.
It seems to me that charging by “pipe size” for home internet doesn’t make a lot of sense anymore. It would be like if the power company charged everyone the same price for 50 Amp service, regardless of if they ran their lights and AC all day or only lived in the house for the weekend.
The user has no incentive to be frugal with data use. The ISP has no real incentive to increase capacity, since they get the same cash from their subscribers regardless of how much data they use. Download speed doesn’t seem like a great price discriminator – most home users want enough speed to stream HD video, and don’t need any more than that. Like the electric company, the same peak capacity works for most, but if everyone used their peak capacity at the same time, it would overwhelm the system.
Technical issues for metering aside, pay-per-byte seems like a more sensible approach. It encourages users (and websites) to be frugal, easing capacity concerns. At the same time, ISPs are encouraged to add capacity since they can sell more data. It makes people pay their “fair share” – data hogs will need to pay for the privilege.
So why don’t we do it this way? Purely technical? Legacy of the evolution of the system (download speed used to be a much bigger discriminator, I think)?
Probably because the marginal cost of bandwidth is lower than the marginal cost of an extra gallon of gas. The cost comes from connecting the pipe to everyone else, not sending information down the wire once it’s there.
But that’s equally true for electricity, and that’s metered by the kilowatt-hour.
I don’t think it is. there are big fixed costs, no doubt, but someone has to actually generate each kilowatt. With data, once you’ve built a pipe of a given size, the costs of sending one bit and a billion are basically the same.
Think that through further, I think the power company is a good comparison because the delivery model is the same – it’s just that with the internet a different company owns the power plants. It’d be like the situation if the power company actually just built and maintained electrical wires, and all the actual power plants were independently operated.
You’re already paying a power plant to get access to their power, but now the company that owns the wire says they want a bigger cut.
At least in my state, this is almost the case. Residents pay the power company that runs the wires to your home but once a year or so the neighborhood will have someone canvassing to switch your actual energy provider (cheaper, greener, or whatever). For the resident, the result is adjustments to your power company bill.
If there were two companies, I’d expect the wire company to charge you a fixed connection fee and the generating company to charge you by the kw/hr. For an ISP, maintaining a connection that can carry 100mbps costs them the same amount whether you’re using it constantly or not at all.
Advertising.
Way back before dear old Rowland Hill, postage was paid by the recipient, not by the sender. Can you *imagine* how much junk mail you’d be getting now if that still happened?
But the ISP doesn’t make any money off of ads – why would they care?
If the recipient was required to pay for each email received, the problem of spam would be completely different, and the public would have demanded some sort of solution long before now. Now apply that logic to online advertising. (Another way to think of it is if your cable company billed you per minute of viewing on non-premium channels, you’d turn off the TV any time a commercial came on.)
The issue is that the cost in terms of bandwidth for viewing a web page is completely invisible to an end user, especially including the cost of the advertising on a page. I can’t count how many simple news pages want to play some elaborate video ad. And it’s not just the ad itself, it’s the mechanisms to make sure that I view the ad and the site gets credit for the view.
Consumers have comparatively less insight into bandwidth than to appliances or lights or what have you. In the rare case where something goes very wrong with an electric bill (modally someone stealing electricity from you) the electric company works with you. For ISPs they’d have to do that much more frequently. On the one hand, sure it’s great to be able to bill a customer $500 because he has a virus, but on the other you probably are not going to end up collecting the full amount very often and you’ll have to use a lot of resources dealing with unhappier customers.
1. Back in the days when Netflix was still mostly about mailing DVDs, most home internet customers wanted broadband capability somewhere in the 1E6 bps range so that e.g. Youtube videos wouldn’t take more than a few seconds to load, but used that capability with a duty cycle of less than 5%. At that level of usage, almost all of the ISP’s cost comes from installing and maintaining the cable, router, etc sized for peak capacity, and almost none of it depends on the trickle of bits actually delivered.
2. Most people absolutely hate doing even simple algebra, hate not knowing in advance what their utility bill is going to look like, and really hate having their utilities disconnected or degraded because they didn’t sign up for enough [whatever]. So if it costs the company an amortized $15/month to support an idle 1 mbps DSL line and $20 for each trillion bits delivered (comes to $52 per mbps-month), then Alice who uses 2% of her capacity costs the ISP $16/month and Bob who uses 6% costs $18, and Grandma who uses the DSL line twice a year to read her grandchildren’s emails still costs $15/month. The solution that maximizes the profit : angry calls to customer service ratio is to charge everyone a flat $25/month.
3. When Charlie the Early Adopter gets the first Netflix account on the block and runs it a solid six hours a day, that costs the company $28/month, but there’s only one Charlie on the block so they’re probably going to keep the flat rate of $25/month. But another thing people really, really hate is having to pay for something that they are accustomed to getting for free, and zero-marginal-price add-ons to a flat-rate service count as “free” for this purpose. So when half the block is Charlies and half is Bobs, the ISP gets grumbling if they increase the price to $30/month for everyone but the fiery hate of a thousand suns if they hit the Charlies with a special surcharge for Being Like Charlie.
4. Yes, this is going to break in the long run.
The cost of the copper or fiber in the ground is huge. Those lines represent a huge amount of human labor to install and maintain. In contrast, upgrading the router in the local hub is a comparatively trivial cost (which telcos will still whine about, naturally). And as computer technology marches on, routers become cheaper and cheaper, but copper or fiber in the ground still remains expensive. Or possibly even gets more expensive, as low-skilled labor gets more expensive.
Plus, if you actually try to use a lot of data on your “unlimited” data plan, they will usually start throttling you down, or sometimes even outright disconnect you. There are some hilarious lawsuits where telcos try to argue that “unlimited” doesn’t mean that there are no limits. You can read up on them if you want that nice glow of culture war-adjacent indignation. 🙂
Peak internet usage is synchronized in the evening, just like prime time tv, so the cost really is the pipe size. If you bittorrent in the middle of the night, those extra bytes cost the ISP something, but not much. Pricing electricity by pipe size for residential customers wouldn’t be as reasonable as for internet, but it’s not totally crazy for residential customers. Changing the mix of energy to solar makes it more reasonable in the near future. (It’s also a lot easier to abuse than the internet, via batteries and bitcoin, but those are recent developments.)
In fact, water, gas, and electricity are not just pay per unit, but have a monthly rate, ie, connection charge (not quite the pipe size) and this is often half of my bill.
I read a paper by Andrew Odlyzko, maybe this about the history of communication technologies and how people always hate paying per unit, even though it’s a lot cheaper, and other recurring patterns.
Water is effectively unlimited household water, with a per gallon charge for gardeners. Most landlords of apartment buildings bundle it with the rent, so it is unlimited. Similarly, gas is basically unlimited cooking and hot water with a rate for heating. But the monthly charge is a smaller part of the bill and fewer landlords bundle it, but still many.
The fixed part of the electric bill is usually a smaller portion than the other bills. I’m not sure why, since my impression is that it really undercharges for the value of the connection and overcharges for the value of the electricity, which is going to be a problem as solar ramps up, particularly with net metering, but even without. Maybe it’s a form of price discrimination, if the rich use much more electricity than the poor, but not so much more water and gas.
Not sure if anyone else has mentioned this yet, but the “Pay-per-unit” model for utilities, especially electricity is often a bit different. With the increasing prevalence of solar and batteries, charging per kWh is no longer a representative way of pricing. If you go “off the grid” but still require a utility connection for when your battery is low and there’s no sun, you’re incurring a significant cost on the system to have the infrastructure in place. So instead of paying per unit, you pay a fixed “infrastructure cost” and then pay per kWh used over that. This is something like the old pay per line, then pay for calls model of traditional telcos.
Additionally, for heavy users of electricity (or water/sewerage), particularly commercial users, you will pay to have a MW capacity piped directly to your premises. Then, you can work with them to demand shape etc. to manage total bandwidth required across the network by doing things like paying a variable energy price depending on the market price at the time.
Basically, you have a simple pricing structure for consumers, because they don’t want to think about the complexities, but if you have a user who imposes a significant load on the network, you require them to respond to dynamic incentives. After all, it should be worth their while to actively monitor usage.
I know some of this happens with the use of e.g. dark fiber currently, but one of the complexities is that the heavy users aren’t necessarily commercial users. So this isn’t a solution, so much as another way to think about the problem.
I was asked to copy this message from late in the last OT to this one, to facilitate further discussion:
Just noticed this. I already posted something similar above, but I just finished reading the sequences, and whatever else maybe said about them they are WAY too long. I don’t know that I have much to add about other places to find the same information, it’s something I’m curious about myself. But I will say that having read both, I think Taleb’s books (Fooled by Randomness, Black Swan, Antifragile) present a better system for making decisions under uncertainty.
You remembered! Thanks. I want to give an in-depth response to this, but it’ll be in a few hours. I’m broadly interested, though, in what others have to say about: 1) whether the core lessons of the Sequences are already (or better) taught by a traditional liberal arts education, and 2) whether the core lessons of the Sequences could be better taught by a liberal arts education with minimal or substantial curricular changes.
I don’t know that there’s much of anything in EY that isn’t offered somewhere in the traditional liberal arts curriculum, but of course the important question is whether anyone learns it. For that, I don’t think either of these questions can be given a purely theoretical answer. Educating people seems to be hard, and it also seems to be the case that different people respond to different methods differently. There is some research that suggests that a liberal arts education does a fairly unimpressive job of teaching good thinking skills, but it still seems to be better than nothing, and the current results come with a giant “compared to what?” Whatever the alternative is (reading the sequences or whatever else anyone comes up with), we should want evidence in its favor to be supported by actual, thorough studies measuring the results, not anecdotes from people who are quite likely to be outliers and/or overestimating how much benefit they got. We certainly don’t want theories about why approach X, Y, or Z “should” work; educational theories based on that have a long history of failure.
Covering those topics in school doesn’t mean they teach them well or correctly.
“What do you mean you need to go to a Madrassa to learn about religion, we teach that in Catholic school!”
I’ve always found Eliezer’s disdain for academia understandable, but ultimately off-putting. I think he was failed too many times, too early in his life, and if he’d had Terry Tao’s parents, he would have climbed the academic ladder easily, and met plenty of other people just like himself along the way.
The core of Eliezer’s ideas–of making beliefs pay rent, and really, truly *listening* to that small part of your monkey brain that can sit back and, for lack of a better word, *rationally* evaluate a situation definitely is part of a solid liberal arts education, but it’s also something of a you-already-have-it-or-you-don’t-think-about-things-that-way-at-all mentality. It’s something that requires cultivation–something that some people are inherently good at, and others never really truly grok (much like programming).
Those ideas crop up in your standard four-year degree program, and are probably even cultivated by the rare lecturer, but–and I think Eliezer would agree–his ideas certainly aren’t being optimized for in such degree programs. I honestly found Grad School to be the closest thing to an experience that, while chock full of plenty of perverse incentives, actually came close to cultivating a correct-way-of-approaching-problem-solving view of the world.
Interesting. I thought that might be true before I went to grad school (I think my undergrad was really good at cultivating a good approach to problem solving), but at this point I have not found it to be true. I haven’t found exactly the opposite either, but certainly I think of scientists on average as much less trustworthy than I did before grad school, and I see borderline unethical to definitely unethical behavior enough that I’m surprised that things don’t go worse on aggregate.
Yeah, which I think is the problem in a nutshell–academic programs don’t explicitly optimize for rationalist!bayesian thinking. Publish-or-perish certainly doesn’t incentivize the best sorts of thoughtful practices when solving problems. But it’s nonetheless one of the few places in the world where you’re explicitly working on making a better map of some territory. Actually doing that particular part well requires something that looks a whole lot like the bundle of ideas that Eliezer talks about.
I dunno. I feel like domain knowledge and ability to grind out a ton of work end up being far stronger factors of making a better map than having the bundle of ideas and skills that Eliezer talks about. If you’re good at (1) and (2) I think (3) is the next thing to work on but not as necessary as it would first seem.
And like you said the system and incentives sometimes work against good epistemic behavior. On the other hand, that’s the short to medium term incentives. In the long term (like 50 years or more), I think the system and incentives in science probably are better than most fields.
Does loyalty require optimism? That is to say, can pessimism about a cause’s chances of success be equated to disloyalty toward that cause?
I would say “Definitely not.” The men who flew the Ploeisti raid knew they were likely to die. The Scots who followed Bonnie Prince Charlie weren’t entirely stupid: there had to be plenty of them who knew they’d likely lose.
Was dying necessarily a failure in those cases? The Ploesti raid was certainly dangerous, but plenty of crews made it through. You always assume it will be the other guy that eats it. Even if you don’t, the mission can (and did) still succeed – maybe you consider that a worthwhile trade.
Some people just want to die for a cause. Or really do believe that noble failure is better than disgraceful survival.
When enough people get really pessimistic in battle though, they rout (which ironically might make them more likely to die).
If you’re internally pessimistic, no. If you act in such a way as to increase the odds that your cause will succeed, you should think of yourself (and be treated) as loyal.
If you’re externally pessimistic, maybe. People react in a bunch of different ways to pessimism, and some of your potential allies may react to your expressions of pessimism in ways that damage the cause. (Sometimes the opposite, of course – convincing people to dig in for a long, uncertain battle can be helpful for example).
Compare:
“Game over man, game over!”
“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills…”
As with everything, act judiciously.
More specifically, I’m thinking of folks at certain other places on the net (one commenter in particular stands out) who accuse anyone (not just me) who expresses insufficient certainty that 4d-Chessmaster Trump will lead the Red Tribe to glorious victory over the “pajama boy” Left of being (((paid infiltrators))) there to spread demoralization.
It’s possible (even likely) that you and he are loyal to different causes.
So, how should you best respond when your therapist starts pushing new-ager pseudo-religious nonsense about “asking the universe for what you want”, that you need to put “positive energies” into “your personal universe” because “people find what they look for” — and therefore, by implication, everything bad that’s happened to you is your own fault because you were ‘looking for it’ with your ‘negative attitude”?
How about when she says you should ignore statistics entirely because they don’t really matter, because “outliers exist” and because “probabilities are meaningless”?
If you like her and just want some affirmations you can believe in, try rephrasing it in a more down to earth way.
“In other words, I should set concrete goals for myself?”
“So you mean if I act confident people will treat me with more respect?”
“Are you saying that I need to appreciate the small positive things in my life I might be overlooking?”
“Hmm, perhaps in my situation I need to consider low odds but high pay-off strategies?”
If you don’t like her then you can probably take it as a chance to look elsewhere, since she sounds like someone who says meaningless platitudes and that’s not what you are looking for.
Honestly, if possible, I’d consider getting a new therapist. That style would not work for me. I’m not sure what I’d do if that option was out.
Granted assuming this is about you and your therapist, I don’t think everything you give an example of your therapist saying is wrong, so maybe just try to filter out the signal from the very loud noises. Your perspective on the larger world seems more negative than is strictly justified (it may be totally justifiable on a personal level; I do not know what your life is like). But I think I personally benefit from your perpective, since your perspective is interesting and coherent and I often enjoy reading it.
Can’t really go to someone else, because it’s the Neighborhood Health Center; you get who they give you. It’s them or the generally worse Community Mental Health Service for someone on Medicaid like me. And she’s otherwise generally been better than many of the other providers I’ve previously had.
To be fair, three points
1. Richard Wiseman holds that there is no such thing as lucky or unlucky and that instead they differ by being open and aware of opportunities. (And had done studies – no idea of replication – to look into this)
2. You miss every shot you don’t take.
3. Statistics can be misleading and are affected by people’s beleifs in statistics. There was a discussion on this website about mistaking ‘a greater porportion of men have experienced being physically attacked at night’ with ‘men are more at risk of being attacked at night’
I’ve actually seen people use exactly that argument to justify spending $100/mo on lottery tickets, and argue that everyone else should too. And I’m fairly confident most everyone here should understand why this is a bad idea, and that the lottery is “a tax on innumeracy.”
True, but it depends on how you structure your problem statement.
If your goal in life is to win the lottery, then buying a lot of lottery tickets is the best way to achieve that goal.
If your goal in life is to maximize the amount of money available to you, buying a lot of lottery tickets is an obvious mathematical loser.
It’s quite possible that the potential net gain in utility of winning $average_lottery_jackpot is significantly higher than the net loss of $average_monthly_lottery_expected_loss such that said choice actually does make a certain amount of sense.
This actually isn’t even true, unless you are totally emotionless. It is reasonably plausible that buying lottery tickets can substitute for some other unhealthy behavior (like drinking/smoking) with fewer negative effects. I suspect this is the case for some of the ‘benefits’ to things like drinking a glass of red wine or eating chocolate daily, and that the effect of adding in a glass every day would be minimal for many people without dropping some other poor habit.
I thought that they’ve shown that it’s mostly the act of talking that helps people, and that the content doesn’t matter that much. Which I suppose argues for both staying with her (because what she says doesn’t matter) or switching (because any therapist which doesn’t annoy you will be as good as any other.)
get a new therapist?
I’ve actually been thinking about this “ask the universe for what you want and it will give it to you” thing lately. I think what it really is, is making confirmation bias work for us instead of against us.
A few months ago I started doing a few new things and I’m pre-occupied with the new challenges of getting some mastery. The funny thing that happened is that quite a few things started popping up on my radar that gives me opportunities to push my mastery to a different level.
Clearly the universe giving me these opportunities just when I need them is complete nonsense. It’s much more probable that because I’m thinking about the topics so much that I’m sensitive to any topics, discussions or events, no matter how tenous the link is, to see it from the perspective of the new things I’m trying out, where normally, I would have dismissed them from my mind or not notice them at all.
My two cents and run on sentences.
>Clearly the universe giving me these opportunities just when I need them is complete nonsense.
Unless these opportunities are coming via the internet, in which case I suspect Google 😛
google alert is awesome 😀
but no, just stuff that cropped up in life
Assuming your in-person demeanor is anything like your demeanor here, anyone who treats you is likely to start saying things like this to you. You tend to respond to a suggestion with an explanation of why it won’t work. You do it consistently enough that most therapists are going to identify the tendency as part of your problem.
So given that you’re not in a position to easily switch therapists, and she seems not-bad in other ways (and also that you’re asking for the best response, and not alternative ideas), my suggestion would be to 1) go up to the meta-level, 2) “stick to your guns” but 3) don’t insist on invalidating her own viewpoint. So, basically, acknowledge your pattern of “negativity” but be clear that from your perspective you are weighing each suggestion objectively and her just stipulating that some are likely to succeed isn’t going to work for you therapeutically. Explain that while you see the possibility of being systematically wrong, the “just be optimistic” approach isn’t right for you, and she needs to take a different strategy.
I would be strongly tempted to ask her what she wants and whether the universe had given it to her.
Actually, when I expressed my usual (lifelong) skepticism of this sort of hippy-dippy claptrap, her response was basically “then why has it worked so well for me?”
To which I answered “confirmation bias” and “confusing correlation with causation”, that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”, and her personal experiences lack scientific rigor.
You should take the expert’s advice. Follow it for 6 months. Then re-evaluate based on outcomes.
Debating the therapist is like me arguing with a tennis coach who’s criticized my follow through. Follow through can’t matter! The trajectory is set when the ball leaves the racket!
Both objections are technically correct. My ball doesn’t know where I end up pointing my racket. Your life isn’t determined by spiritual energies resonating with the universe.
But, I’m not paying for a physics lecture. You’re not paying for a sociology seminar. The point is to get actionable advice that a domain-expert thinks will improve our outcomes.
Maybe my tennis coach is bad at physics. Or maybe “follow through” is a polite way of saying that I’m making a whole ton of minor mistakes, many of which will get auto-corrected if I focus on my form.
Maybe your therapist is bad at math. Or maybe “positive energy” is a polite way of saying that you have a bunch of off-putting personal tics, many of which will get auto-corrected if you focus on a positive vibe.
Follow-through is a psychological hack designed to get your body aligned at the correct angle at the point of contact. People have a strong tendency to change their angle of attack slightly if they start thinking past the swing too early, and that’s fatal in a sport like golf; the tendency can only be burnt out by, first, deliberately extending your swing past the point of contact, and second, lots of practice. It’s like how beginning boxers are taught to punch not the surface of the bag, but a point a foot or so behind it.
Similarly, a lot of the talk about manipulating “internal energy” in martial arts is a hack designed to help you engage particular muscle groups in counterintuitive ways, or to ensure that you keep breathing through a technique (harder for a lot of people than it sounds). There is no such thing as internal energy, it doesn’t exist, but acting on the idea of it is still genuinely helpful for a lot of people.
I’m going to give an answer out of left field.
We don’t understand how the brain works at all well.
We really don’t understand the universe works well at all: for one thing, it includes billions of brains.
Logic works well for things we understand, but we need something different than logic to manage interacting with things we don’t understand.
Think, for an analogy, of the old wired phone system–and assume that your knowledge was that there was such a thing as a telephone and you had to pay to talk to people. Someone tells you “if you pick of this handset, whistle this tune, push this random set of numbers, and whistle the tune again, you can talk to anyone in the world for free” it would make no sense: there would be no logic that made that plausible. In reality it works, because of the way that the switching system works–but it doesn’t work explainably.
A lot of counseling is really a form of magic–changing consciousness in willed ways. You can’t explain why it works, but it demonstrably does work a lot of the time.
So my advice would be do it, and don’t do it because it makes sense: do it because it quite often works and we have a very poor idea as to why.
Another way to think about it is that brains are dumb, so dumb things might have positive effects on the brain even though they shouldn’t.
I recently finished Rationality: AI to Zombies. I do not consider myself a Bayesian. I’m one of those religious people. (Mormon) And I also feel that Talebian Antifragility is a better model for how to behave under uncertainty than Bayesianism, which is to say I had some issues with the book (not the least of which was the length.) I thought this might be a good place to invite people to tell me why I’m wrong or what I missed. My initial review is here.
TL;DR
-Yudkowsky focuses too much on winning, but he doesn’t spend much time on the “when” of winning (though I mention his contributions to existential risk)
-It maybe necessary to lose in the short term in order to win in the long-term.
-Both of these things may contribute to fragility, which from Taleb’s perspective is short-term limited wins which lead to large unbounded losses.
-There does not appear any allowance in Bayesianism for dealing with asymmetrical outcomes. Where being wrong is catastrophic (despite an assessment of a very low probability) vs. where being wrong is inconsequential (but with the same low probability.)
-I mention Scott missing Brexit and the election of Trump as an example of what this looks like.
I’m looking for people to tell me what I missed.
Can you give a thumbnail sketch of what “Bayesianism” is? I’ve studied statistics, and Bayes’ Rule certainly came up, but the notion of Bayesian statistics as opposed to some other kind was never touched on.
Bayesianism is Yudkowsky’s/LessWrong’s term/ideology. Here’s their link on it:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1to/what_is_bayesianism/
As a thumbnail it’s making very broad use of Bayes Law as a way of making choices when you’re uncertain.
I don’t know about if LessWrong etc. use it differently, but Bayesian statistics* is a mainstream thing. Andrew Gelman has a blog about it, and it is about taking a prior anf getting a posterior.
*Opposed to frequentist.
They don’t use it differently, but as I mentioned they use if very broadly.
It’s a heck of a jump to go from the very specific notion of Bayes’ Law, which is about the relationship between the conditional probabilities of two events to the far more general notion that what you should believe to be true is a function not merely of what you have just observed, but of your views just before you observed them. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but there are at least a lot of steps missing in the argument.
I’m familiar with something similar in a much more specific case, namely rating chess players. In competitive chess, you have a rating, which is a number like 1800. After playing a set of tournament games, there is a formula for adjusting your ranking based on your results and the ratings of the other players. Sensible enough. What the Bayesians want you to do is something similar, but more generalized.
Take a look at the first few chapters of Probability Theory: The Logic of Science by E.T. Jaynes (the first Google hit is a pdf of the first three chapters). Sure, sometimes he does sounds like he’s fighting a strawman, but I can assure you that frequentism used to be the mainstream interpretation of probability until recently and is still pretty widespread.
To be honest, I was never very impressed by Taleb. Maybe there was something I didn’t “get” about his writing, but he just seemed to be making the point over and over that “black swans do happen, and sometimes they can be really bad.” To which I can only say: well, duh! Anyway, doesn’t Yudkowsky also cover black swans in his book, when discussing short-term versus long-term thinking? He makes the point that people are better at thinking about frequent risks than about things which happen infrequently. Which seems to be Taleb’s whole point, just expressed without made-up vocabulary.
Doesn’t Bayesianism handle that trivially, just by having a large negative weight attached to the bad thing? A large negative weight makes the possible bad outcome influence your decision greatly, even if it is not likely to happen.
The bigger problem with Bayesianism is Pascal’s mugging. And, on a more practical note, the difficulty of actually calculating the probability of… anything, really. I’m not sure how Yudkowsky deals with that… I haven’t read the whole book.
I also think Yudkowsky focuses too much on winning. And more specifically on function optimization. But this is a disorder of the whole machine learning field at the moment. There is almost no discussion of concepts like “creativity” or “willpower” that GOFAI (good old-fashioned AI) spent a long time thinking about. Instead, people are focused on improving benchmark X by Y%, because it’s measurable and publishable.
From wikipedia:
I don’t understand why this is true. Shouldn’t the probability of a payback diminish with the increase of the mugger’s offer? It looks like Pascal, in this telling, hints that is the case, but then just drops it.
A link from that wikipedia page goes to a GiveWell page that seems to be making a similar point.
The bigger picture here (to me at least) is that you need to consider variance as well as expected value. A lottery ticket that pays out one in a 10^100 times, but gives you 10^105 dollars each time, might have an expected value of $100,000, but the variance is so high that I would not pay that much for it.
I second Incurian’s point. The flaw in the argument is that the 1 in 1000 is assumed constant for any payout amount. I think the probability of payout decreases faster than the increasing payout amount. so at $10, I believe the mugger will pay back with probability p, for a $10p expectation. At $1000 the probability could be less than (1/1000)p (since why would such a wealthy person be mugging me, unless he is running a social experiment). So, as the payout increases, the expectation could actually *decrease*.
Imagine the 2 scenarios
1: give me your wallet and tomorrow I will return with twice the amount.
2: give me your wallet, I will remove the cash, and return the rest to you.
which one do you think has higher expectation?
I think speculating about the robber’s motives or likely behavior is not really the point of the thought experiment.
Imagine if, rather than a robber, it was someone completely trustworthy, who offered a deal that had an extremely small — infinitesimal! — chance of paying out a gigantic, life-changing award. The expected value could be extremely large. And the odds would would be in your favor, if you could play over and over. But you can only play once. And since there is basically 0% chance that you will ever see the reward, the expected value doesn’t (or shouldn’t) matter to you.
You can also imagine a scenario where it’s a threat rather than a reward. Give all your money to the Church of Paperclip Maximization, or else you have an extremely tiny chance of being tortured for all eternity in the worst possible ways. Would you take that deal? If you just are looking at expected value, and not at variance, I can make the potential torture worse and worse until you have to take the deal.
I still don’t entirely see it. I think the argument lies on our inability to intuitively think about large utilities. Like, what’s the difference between positive a billion utility and positive a trillion utility? Mathematically the utilities increase, but emotionally they just become some undifferentiated maximum value.
In scenario 1, as the probability of success goes to 0, the payout utility has to become enormous. I don’t really know how to think about utilities that large, but at some point I assume the only way to increase my utility is to obtain god like powers. When put that way (as opposed to some vague ‘enormous utility’), suddenly even a low chance of winning seems like an ok game.
The same goes for the second example. Think of what the worst torture possible. Now, is something 1000x worse than that really something you want to risk, even if it is an extremely small probability of happening? i.e. I don’t think it is wrong to take the deal if you keep making the torture worse and worse.
OK, fine. I’m making you the deal now then. I’ll send you a bitcoin address, you send all your money there. In exchange, I promise not to use my godlike powers to torture you eternally. (There is a very, very, very low chance I actually have these powers, but it’s not zero.)
Note for the humor-impaired: this is a joke. But if it weren’t, still, would you take that deal?
sure, it is low but not zero. Can you give me an estimate of what the probability is? And describe in specifics the torture so I can assign a utility value to it.
Joke answer: everything from the broadcast.
Slightly more serious answer: Well, if I have godlike powers, then the torture can be infinitely bad, right? So no matter what, the negative utility will not be finite.
sure, but the probability you have those powers is infinitesimally small. so the expectation is….? Also, if you had these powers I suspect that instead of making the punishment worse and worse, you would instead do something like bend a spoon to increase my probability estimation that you actually have the powers. My probability estimation becomes lower and lower when all you do is increase the amount of torture.
The general problem with problems like these is that when stated as a word problem, there are many hidden assumptions that we aren’t noticing (or are noticing but are not really in the forefront of the problem). I think if stated just in the simple math, it will become only a problem of infinite utility being possible, and no longer seem like an absurd proposition.
i.e. the (positive) version of the problem,
You have epsilon chance of winning X dollars. How large does X have to be to pay $1000 for the game? Now we can talk about expectation maximization, risk tolerance, variance, etc. I think for this, expectation and variance both matter, the only real question is infinite utility.
Finally, I’ll note the mugger problem is similiar to walking into a convenience store and the clerk saying ‘do you want to buy a lotto ticket?’ i.e. give me your money, and i’ll give you a small chance at a large payoff.
Did you read Antifragile? That book brings more nuance to things. IMHO
Perhaps it does, but if so I have no recollection of Yudkowsky mentioning it in 2300 pages. Also the standard form of Bayes law allows you to update probabilities, it has no term for weighting the consequences of different probabilities. Also Yudkowsky spends a large amount of space on stuff with very little weight (p-zombies, and many worlds vs. Copenhagen, for example.)
And I could be totally missing something which is one of the reasons I posted.
I thought his first book made a couple of decent points: in some domains results are radically skewed, and optimizing for the median (or even mean) case in those domains is asking for trouble. He sure took his time saying it, though. I wish the 100-page monograph would come back in style.
Also, he didn’t enhance his credibility by displaying a weird affection for the life of the playboy (“flaneur”).
Sure, black swans are underappreciated in some domains. But they’re overappreciated in others. For example, Scott has a bunch of blog posts about how we probably should be less conservative in approving drugs for really bad diseases, because we’re killing more people than we’re saving. (I’m too lazy to find the blog posts now.)
I’m not even convinced that Taleb’s meta-point is valid. There’s a tiny chance of a lot of bad things happening: supervolcanoes, nuclear war, spontaneous human combustion (yes really) Should I change my behavior based on these things? Probably not. In the first place, I don’t have a good idea of how likely they are, or what I could do to mitigate them. In the second place, it just might not be worth it. If I move to Montana and stock up on canned food, maybe I’ll be more likely to survive a nuclear war. But only at the cost of ruining my life.
In reality, there’s no shortcut to deciding what to do. You don’t get a gold star for saying “well, black swans exist and they are bad, so avoid them.” You have to look at each specific scenario and see what we could do to avoid it, and whether it’s actually practical and worth it. For example, we probably could have done more to prevent over-leveraging in the finanacial system in 2007. But you can’t generalize that to say that every black swan is a burning issue that we need to get right on top of (we need to do something about that spontaneous human combustion problem, now!)
I think the larger point is that the right way to deal with black swans is not to try to predict them; that’s impossible. It is rather to be aware that they exist and therefore adopt a position of flexibility that lets you change up when the unexpected occurs. If you’re heavily committed to the usual state of things, you’re going to get killed when the unexpected occurs.
It’s quite possible that any given low-probability event isn’t worth preparing for, but that there are ways to prepare for a large set of such events, such that the sum of their probabilities is high enough to be worth preparing for.
For example, having a few days’ food and water and fuel for heating a room in your house is a good way to be prepared for a largish set of bad things that might happen, any one of which is pretty unlikely, but at least one of which will happen in the next ten years with a not-all-that-small probability.
A super volcano is not a black swan, you have missed two different major points in Taleb’s work.
First on the subject of the title “The Black Swan”, the original black swan was the surprising discovery of a species of swan that had black feathers, before that only white swans were known. This is not a story about a rare event, it is a story about the limits of knowledge. “All swans are white” was not disproved by a freak mutation (a rare event) in the chick of a white swan, it was always false as there were (essentially) always black swans. You could not have formed a (useful or correct) Bayesian estimate of the reality of black swans by searching all of Europe. You would have, after exhaustively counting every last swan you could find, perhaps concluded that not 1 in a billion swans was black. Perhaps a very clever Bayesian would have couched his 1 in a billion estimate with the knowledge that mutations exist and that just because he could find no swans now that did not mean that one could not be hatched in the future. That very clever Bayesian also would have been wrong by many orders of magnitude.
Secondly for the actual discussion of human black swans this is only an analogy. The housing crash isn’t considered a black swan because it is a rare event, it is considered a black swan because it is an emergent property. It isn’t random, but an expected event that has never occurred before. This sounds like a contradiction, but isn’t.
Your not the only one to make this claim.
However Taleb’s point is very different (although I will concede that he hammers on the one same principle over and over).
An attempt at a summary: The black swan in nature is just a random chance, you see only white swans, posit that all white swans exist. This does not alter the chances of a black swan occurring (or currently existing outside our knowledge). Taleb’s broad point is that in complex systems with purposeful actors that noting that all swans are white can cause the black swan to appear. If you note that housing prices in the US have never declined by more than X, and then build a financial derivative to profit from this, you might actually be creating a new environment that will cause housing prices to fall by more than X. The basic difference being that somethings that look unlikely become more likely just by the noticing.
Does the regular expected value formula not cover this sufficiently? Or is expected value not compatible with Bayes?
If there’s some way of feeding Bayes into the expected value formula, I do not remember seeing it. A search of the text on my kindle turns up three instances of “expected value” none of which relate to applying it to Bayesian statistics/reasoning.
And one of which says “And never mind the expected value of posterity.” Which is exactly my criticism. 😉
Not sure what he meant by that, that sounds weird.
I don’t quite understand what you mean by that. If all your probabilities are derived from Bayesian statistics, and you use those numbers in your expected value calculation, I think you’ve done it. Maybe your complaint is that he doesn’t explicitly cover expected value, not that it’s incompatible with Bayes?
This GiveWell blog post I linked upthread has some discussion about this.
I was also Mormon when I started R:AI to Z. I was preparing a thorough explanation of the path to defensible religious knowledge about the church (heavily guided by The Lectures on Faith), but managed to poke my own holes in it by the time I finished the book.
I read your piece, and, if I’m understanding, your main criticism, perhaps most clearly displayed with Alexander’s predictions, is that being 90% right isn’t necessarily better than being, say 80% right, depending on which things you’re getting wrong. It’s better to be right 80% of the time if that 80% covers the most important things than to be 90% right if the mistakes that happen 10% of the time are about very important things.
Hence the idea of “antifragility,” to sacrifice optimal progress for the sake of having a higher probability of avoiding awful things. You didn’t go too much into it, but does antifragility literally say not to “shut up and multiply”? That is, does it say to take actions that you think will produce less utility than others in order to avoid the occasional terrible result?
If not, and if all it’s saying is that we need to prepare against unforeseen disasters, then I think the whole system comes out of Bayesianism. Make the best model you can, and then adjust your utilities (positive and negative) by the probability they will occur to make choices. That leads to preparing for disasters, and the exact amount of preparation also comes out of that calculation.
If it does (say not to shut up and multiply), then it just sounds like antifragility is saying to exaggerate negative utilities. Something like “every utiliton below this threshold is worth 2 utilitons above this threshold; we’re willing to sacrifice twice as many utilitons from (for example) worlds with a utility score of -10 or higher in order to prevent the loss of half as many utilitons from worlds with a utility score of lower than -10.”
If that’s the idea, then I think Bayesianism also accounts for that; the adjustment in order to avoid exceptionally bad results is just about how you weight your values, which is orthogonal to how to achieve them.
I would rather be right about the most important 80% things than about the least important 90% of things. But we can actually make this choice in real life? I mean, if you know that you are wrong about X, then on some level you already know the truth about X. And if you know the truth about X, and the truth about Y, then you don’t have to decide which one of these truths is more useful to you; you can take both of them.
The nearest situation in real life I can imagine, is when (1) X feels true, (2) Y feels true, and (3) X and Y are contradictory. Now I am forced to make a choice between X and Y, but I do not know which of them is true.
It is possible to say in such situation that one should e.g. favor the option that is supported by more experience (has more parallel streams of evidence) over one that is a result of a long conjunction of arguments. (Although, even this reasoning could make us favor “Sun turns around Earth” over “Earth rotates”.)
Karl Marx was predicting in the mid-1800s that the development of capitalism would inevitably lead to the elimination of small businesses and decline in real wages for wage-earners.
70 years later, his “scientific socialism” began being tested and falsified on a massive scale.
Yet haven’t the last 35 years bore particular prediction out? Real wages have stagnated at best, while big business buys laws that raise barriers to entry.
The funny thing is that regulating business to the point that a mom-and-pop operation can’t operate without lawyers and an HR department is considered progressive.
I think Smith also thought that left unchecked capitalism would devolve into oligarchy.
“When the regulation, therefore, is in support of the workman, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters.”
Where’s that from?
https://books.google.com/books?id=pl1KAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA224
I couldn’t search with your link, but searching http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3300/pg3300.txt here doesn’t find your quote.
1. sorry, ‘support’ should be ‘favour’. it should be in your link then.
2. it should on the page i have linked to (224), there is no need to search.
3. just searching in google also turns up good results if you are unable to find it doing a book search. also, searching for sub phrases is often useful in debugging why a search didn’t work (could be a mis-quote, alternate punctuation, spacing, etc.). For instance, searching “sometimes otherwise” in the gutenberg link turns up results.
That link just goes to the contents (other editions, cover etc.) for me. I actually was searching for a substring. It just happened to be ‘is in support of the workman’. Should have tried more.
Searching it just gave me links to blogs that didn’t give citations either.
oh.. the quote is on page 224, the ‘pg=PA224’ in the url is supposed to take you to the page, but maybe doesn’t work for all browser configurations? I don’t know how the internet works i guess.
If you’re interested, I got the mis-quote by copying from David Brin’s blog https://davidbrin.wordpress.com/2013/11/11/liberals-you-must-reclaim-adam-smith/
not sure why the quote was changed.
David Brin is not a reliable source for Smith’s views. I had an exchange with him some time back on the subject–he never provided support for his claim.
Is Brin’s claim that even though Smith doesn’t explicitly mention wealth inequality, in every situation in history such inequality leads to monopolies and government control by the wealthy, which Smith does warn against?
I’ve heard Brin say that the Lord of the Rings had such inferior old values (I think he described it as medieval, but I won’t swear to his word choice) that no one took prisoners. I’m dubious about whether he’s careful to get things right, but let me know if I’m mistaken.
I’ve heard Brin say that the Lord of the Rings had such inferior old values (I think he described it as medieval, but I won’t swear to his word choice) that no one took prisoners. I’m dubious about whether he’s careful to get things right, but let me know if I’m mistaken.
My sense of Brin is that there are times when he will make an argument mostly out of contrarianism, and LotR had one example of this – there’s an argument he made that it was Sauron, not the Fellowship, that we should be siding with. Sauron’s realm was more inclusive than Gondor and Rohan, since the former admitted orcs and trolls in addition to humans, elves, hobbits and dwarves. The Ring was an allegory for modern technology and globalism. I think it was clear from the tone that he knew this was an extreme view, and made it anyway for the sake of making it.
That quote seems to be saying that government regulation of capitalism will tend to favor the employers, not that capitalism will devolve into oligarchy.
a free market drives competition, selects winners. the winners are motivated by desire to accumulate capital. they will thus tend to become large and monopolistic, killing the free market. to keep this in check, regulation is needed.
the book is very long, i couldn’t quote the entire thing. it shows how some of Smith’s ideas about capitalism seem almost socialist. He seems practical and intelligent, not a raving ideologue.
the father of capitalism also says this in his book:
“Our merchants and master manufacturers
complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and
thereby lessening the sale of their goods, both at home and abroad. They
say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits; they are silent
with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains; they complain
only of those of other people.”
and also
“The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.”
Taken at face value, that’s an argument for a flat tax, which is not generally considered the most socialist of ideas.
‘In proportion to their abilities’ is an interesting statement. If you can contribute more, you do contribute more. Let’s not apply our current political climate and evolved morality to something written in the 1700s. (I’ve forgotten the particular numbers, but I think it was the Obama/McCain election where Obama was being labeled a socialist for wanting a 38% top rate, and McCain was a free-market capitalist for wating a 33% top rate!)
Yes, by all means let’s not project our own biases on the guy. In particular, let’s not pattern-match it to a Marxist slogan: Smith was writing before Marx by a hundred years or so, so he can’t possibly have been aware of what something that sounds a lot like “from each according to his ability…” would imply to us.
Fortunately, he clarifies that in the same sentence, so it’s quite obvious what he actually meant. “In proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy…” is pretty unambiguous as a policy recommendation, and it’s less progressive (in the technical sense) than what we currently do.
It’s not even clear that his statement excludes as a progressive tax, as it is still proportional, just in varying proportions. He is also saying revenue is enjoyed under the protection of the state. And really if ours is currently more or less progressive depends on how Smith defined capital gains, and what his corporate rate would have been. But sure, he’s not a communist. How would you classify that statement about taxes?
Anywho, not the most important part of the discussion, so I can remove it. (edit: no I can’t.. looks like my edit window has passed?)
I’ve read it. There are some bits that can be quoted out of context along the lines you suggest. But it only seems socialist if you identify support for capitalism with support for capitalists.
Smith didn’t.
If you are going to talk about Smith, it’s worth actually reading him, not just trying to tease out the meaning of a sentence taken without its context. In this case that means reading his long discussion of alternative taxes. It’s more sophisticated than most current discussions, since he realizes that who actually bears the burden of a tax is not simply determined by who hands over the money.
He isn’t arguing for a flat tax–indeed, he isn’t arguing for an income tax at all. He is arguing that the burden of the tax system should be proportional to income. He considers a variety of different taxes from that standpoint.
This is basically every political debate in my lifetime.
A concept Tom Woods refers to as “The 3×5 card of allowable opinion”
David, I haven’t read your blog response to Brin, but it look sinteresting and will try to get to it sometime this week.
But yes, capitalism is not socialism, capitalism is… capitalism, but it seems that Smith’s free-market capitalism is a bit different from what many pundits suggest.
Does Smith not think that government intervention is necessary to free markets?
Anywho, going back to the OP, the statement was the largest Marx experiment seems to have been a giant failure, yet Marx’s predictions seem to be coming true in the last 35 years.
But, it seems that Smith was also concerned about these failure modes of capitalism, this wasn’t original to Marx.
Is this also a selective mis-reading of Smith?
A preliminary perusal of the material shows that the taxation quotation from Smith is found to be particularly mis-represented. So we can discuss the taxation views on tangent, but in response to the OP question, it still seems like the things ‘Marx predicted’ were things that Smith was also concerned with.
Smith was not an anarchist. He assumed that government was necessary for the standard minimal functions–basically a legal system and national defense. He thought there were arguments both for and against a government subsidy for education. He held a few policy positions that modern libertarians would disagree with–I am pretty sure he wanted a maximum legal interest rate and a restriction on banks that issued their own currency doing it in very small denominations.
But the bit from The Wealth of Nations that people quote as evidence that he supported some sort of antitrust laws is actually rejecting such laws while arguing that government should not do things that promote monopolistic arrangements.
I don’t think so. Large firms are very visible, so it’s easy for people to believe that firms are getting larger–and they have been claiming that long before the last 35 years. I haven’t seen any evidence of a net increase in size of firms, just the usual pattern of a few areas where one firm or a small number are dominant, many more where they are not.
For examples of trends towards less concentration, you might consider the way in which the news industry has gotten much less concentrated as the result of the rise of online sources of information or the way in which the publishing industry has gotten less concentrated as self publishing has become a viable alternative to getting a publisher to take your book. And it’s my impression that industry of making and selling computers is less concentrated than it was 35 years ago, although I don’t have actual data.
Which failure modes of capitalism? Smith was worried about government intervention in favor of the “merchants and manufacturers,” but that’s a failure mode of government intervention, not of capitalism.
I think so, but you would have to offer examples for me to be sure.
If the government intervenes to disable capitalism, that is a failure mode of capitalism. Government intervention isn’t failing, it is thriving.
You can claim, ‘but when government intervenes it is no longer capitalism!’. Maybe, but if capitalism tends to this, then it is still a failure mode. The same with communism. Communists can claim the Soviet Union wasn’t really communist, but if communism just inherently tends to stabilize at an authoritarian oligarchy, than it is still an accurate communist experiment.
It seems you are also saying that the OPs original premise is just incorrect, which may be. But did Smith think large accumulations of capital were dangerous to free markets?
@DavidFriedman
I have my doubts. There was a huge amount of diversity back then in the number of manufacturers and computer designs. Perhaps nowadays the absolute amount of diversity is even bigger, but the market has surely grown much more and a somewhat sensible definition of concentration is diversity/market size, no?
In 1985, each of these systems had substantial sales: Commodore 64, Amstrad, Apple II, Mac, Atari, BBC Micro, IBM PC (variants), ZX Spectrum. Then there were many more minor systems being sold as well.
Nowadays, the ‘desktop/laptop’ market is mainly split in two, between PCs and Macs. The gaming market is mainly split between XBox, Playstation and Nintendo. The smartphone/tablet market is mainly split between Android and Apple. Of course, you can split some of these even further, since multiple companies make some of these systems (although the same is true for some of the systems from my previous paragraph). However, I think that the (inflation-adjusted) average revenue of current companies is substantially higher than the average revenue of 1985 companies.
This doesn’t say too much about about who is building the hardware, or what brand the completed product is sold under.
How many companies are manufacturing personal computers that will run Windows or some flavor of Unix? How many are manufacturing tablets (which are really just computers with a different user interface) that run some flavor of Android?
There are a few big dominant computer companies now (Apple, Google, MS, Amazon), and there were a few dominant computer companies in the past (IBM, Wang, DEC).
You are treating the computer market in 1985 as one lump, and then dividing it into 3 or 4 lumps in 2017 to get this result. If a person wants a computer now they can choose a laptop or desktop with competing systems, or they can choose a tablet, or they can choose a smart phone. Splitting them up this way would be like saying “well 110 years ago there were dozens of small car manufacturers, but now there are just a few. If you want a car, that market is dominated by Honda and Toyota, if you want a pickup truck its dominated by Ford and Chevy, if you want an SUV its dominated by Dodge and Nissan, if you want a motorcycle its Kawasaki and BMW, and if you want a sport utility wagon then you are basically stuck with a Subaru!”
My sense of the computer hardware market is complicated, mainly because the area of focus has moved. It used to be on hardware design, which was why you’d have Altair, Atari, Macintosh, Osborne, IBM, Commodore, TI, and Tandy. Architectures were emerging at the same time, mostly correlated to the hardware at first, and with a few cross concerns emerging, such as RISC, 68000, and 8086. And then the OS was a factor on top of that, again, often correlating to the stuff underneath, but with a few standards such as Unix that anyone could lay claim to.
But the OS barely congealed around a set of fewer than ten major players before the windowing interface on top became the great differentiator. And then that coalesced, only to have the mode of use become important – desktop vs. laptop, and then mobile, and off we go again. Now we have relatively few major choices within the mobile or desktop or laptop domains, but a lot of focus is also now on “solutions” – whether you want your business problems to be solved via cloud tech or dedicated chip design or some clever algorithm or if you’re on the other end and you’re just shopping for a consumer appliance, or you’re looking for something completely different and you don’t even necessarily know there’s computer hardware involved (e.g. cars).
If we judge computer hardware diversity in terms of, say, the desktop market, it went from at least dozens of competitors in the 1980s to about six – HP, Lenovo, Dell, Asus, Apple, and Acer – offering essentially three user experiences (Windows, Mac, Linux).
But if we judge by the classes of problems that desktops were being used to solve in the 1980s, it’s exploded, since this includes calculators, big iron databases hulking in server rooms (same problems, more data), laptops, tablets, routers, gateways, Raspberries, BlackBerries, Siris, Alexas, scads of specialized chips embedded in other products, and even thousands of websites.
TLDR: lamenting the collapse of diversity in the computer hardware industry feels a lot to me like lamenting the collapse of diversity in the horse-drawn carriage industry.
Not as far as I can remember. I think he was more concerned with conspiracies in restraint of trade, which were in some ways facilitated by government policies that he criticized.
Wages have flatlined, compensation has not. Incomes have just shifted away from cash and towards more tax favored types of compensation.
The U.S. Small Business Administration lends credence to these claims, citing internal reports that show, for example, that small companies accounted for 64% of new jobs created in the U.S. between 1993 and 2011.
Isn’t this effect primarily seen in the US (source: <5 min of google image search)? If so, one couldn't really call it a general result about capitalism, but rather one which is specific to our political and economic system.
At this point I think the decline of small business is more of a Rorschach blot than good evidence for or against anything on an ideological scale. There’ve been so many changes since the ’70s that it’s stupidly easy to point to one or another of them: if you’re a libertarian it’s obviously the fault of overregulation, if you’re a progressive it’s Walmart or some other capitalist boogeyman, if you’re an old-school conservative it’s atomized society. You could probably construct a nativist angle too, but I’m not confident of my ability to pass the ideological Turing test there.
Likely more than one of these are true, but I have no idea in what proportions.
There’s been some arguments in the econ blogosphere about market power concentration. Most of the commentators seem to agree that big firms have more market power. But they also pay out higher wages. There’s also been a bias among the higher classes to shift towards paid W-2 income as opposed to entrepreneurial income.
Plus, firms with a lot of market power seem to be pushing the technological frontier out MORE. They aren’t the Ma Bells stifling innovation.
My favored hypothesis (which may change) is that frontier firms are becoming more productive much more rapidly, and it’s extremely difficult for small firms to realize a lot of the same productivity gains, since a lot of it is return-to-scale. Like, in the past 10 years, A/R systems have become a lot more advanced: computers and business logic handles at least 70% of cash application for me, the system automatically tracks invoices, I can use some rudimentary statistical analysis to spot missed invoices and billings, all stuff that would have been intensive manual work just 10-20 years ago.
But smaller firms cannot implement systems quite as advanced as mine, and they can’t hire employees quite as good.
The end result is that big companies can implement good A/R systems, and because each individual employee is a huge value-add, can offer high wages. So me? Good deal to be a desk jockey. Really good. 20-30 years go, not as much. Small firms? Not so much, and they fall further behind.
Same thing with the entire economy, writ large.
Here’s a MR link about it:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/10/the-future-is-here-just-not-evenly-distributed.html
It’s probably not just economies of scale. Diseconomies of scale also play a factor. Big companies can’t change as rapidly. So you have a dying Sears, with a rising Amazon.
As much as I get tired of breathless “hyperledger solves everything” hype, even as I am working to stand up a couple of different Sawtooth instances, I do kind of wonder what a hyperledger inter-corporate AR/AP system might do to your field in a decade or so.
You aren’t the only one….I don’t understand the blockchain technology very well, unfortunately. It looks like most of the applications being studied are for payment transfers between companies. That would hopefully make my job easier and more accurate, but that wouldn’t replace the internal general ledgers.
To a great extent, you still need human decision-making and analysis. Is this new computer mainframe a capital expense? If so, what is the depreciation schedule? What’s the budget for computer replacements next year? Why did we exceed computer replacement by 30%? Okay, we exceeded computer replacement because labor was twice as expensive but the actual parts were 10% less expensive. Why did that happen? Okay, we used overtime labor, why didn’t we contract out to a different company at a lower cost, and how do we budget for this next year? Are you planning to hire additional workers, because then we need to change the budget for our health-care expenses, and if not we need to increase our overtime budget.
And then no one wants to provide an answer, so you have to call, email, stalk, beat people with sticks to get answers.
So unless blockchain comes with the ability to people with a stick, it won’t replace the human element entirely….and actually accounting might look very similar to the way it is now, because we spend most of our time doing stuff like that, not making journal entries.
Blockchain ledger for promises of violence.
Sounds like a great SF idea, or possible how things are done on Jackson’s Whole and on New Hong Kong…
Jim Bell came up with that idea a while ago. Might not want to discuss it too much, it got him imprisoned.
At first, a person could start their business just by selling some of their product.
Then, they had to get a loan from a bank to open up a store and hopefully earned enough revenue to pay it back.
Now, they get a venture capitalist to spend money for something that won’t get any revenue for years with the hope that it will someday be profitable.
I think you’re right, but I don’t agree about the diseconomies of scale. Amazon isn’t growing at such a massive rate because they are at the right size. They are growing because they decided to reinvest their revenue for years with little profit. Sears either doesn’t have the will or the capability to do something like that.
On the one hand, this is good. We want the most productive firms to win out over the sluggish. It’s good for consumers and the economy. But it is concerning that so few companies might be in control of a larger percentage of the economy. Especially when these companies don’t need that many workers.
Note that Sears was more or less the Amazon of its day.
Yeah, Sears may not be the best example, and some larger firms are innovating well. Wal-Mart has hit the e-commerce space in a big way.
I guess we’ll see. Normally diseconomies of scale are a real thing, though, which is why GE developed the rule to spin off any business where they are not #1 or #2, and why start-ups have any room to grow at all.
Economy of scale will only go so far. You can make a factory that turns out a million units a year more efficiently than 100 factories each turning out 10k each. But if the market demand permits 10 million units a year, it may be that a one-million-unit factory is the best one you can build – there’s only so much floor space for machinery and raw material storage and only so much throughput on that machinery – and now your best bet is ten such factories, and you likely won’t be able to run even two of them as efficiently as a competitor could run just one more.
Which makes me wonder where that cap is for a company like Amazon. The Amazon way of running merchandise is applicable to anything from books to yard tools. They don’t have to make the stuff; just display and deliver it. But Amazon does other things. Some of them are loss leaders fed by their retail business. Some are fed by the tech they use on their retail business, so they’re easy for Amazon to establish a presence. Some might be easy enough for competitors to imitate, though, and even do better than Amazon. I just don’t know exactly where.
We’ve talked about this on SSC open threads before. In short, there is plenty of ambiguity as to whether Marx predicted an absolute or merely relative immiseration of workers. (By relative, I mean relative to the wealth that they could be enjoying if capitalism did not routinely place certain fetters on the production and distribution of useful wealth).
As for the elimination of small businesses, it is still happening. Plus, consider: the small businessman in Marx’s day was someone who used his own capital and thus reaped the entire rate of profit, including interest and the net profit of enterprise. Now, most small businesses are really working for those who finance them, the collective class of capitalists associated in the big financial institutions and on the stock exchanges. If our small businessmen are not outright just managers who are being paid a salary, then at most they merely take home the net profit of enterprise after interest is deducted, and these small business owners are given the fairly grueling managerial job of identifying disproportionately profitable areas for the collective capitalist class to move into, and using their skills to make that happen…while reaping but a portion of the proceeds of the capital that they employ.
Not that this is a bad thing! It is inevitable that, as the division of worldwide labor becomes more complex, it will also become more coordinated, regulated, and centralized. The big financial institutions are the seeds of the future planning commissions, and should not be broken up, but rather democratized. This is one thing that distinguishes scientific socialists from reactionary populists who merely yearn for an unattainable “paradise lost” of simple commodity production where every producer owns his own business and produces for his own account, and where coordination of society’s division of labor into various lines of production happens only chaotically due to Smith’s “Invisible Hand” rather than consciously.
(Although, the Invisible Hand really is a wondrous mechanism, for what it’s worth. Marx was in awe of what it had accomplished. But he also knew when it was time to put an old dog to sleep.)
As for business buying legislation, why of course! Political power cannot be walled off from economic power! That is historical materialism 101.
I now have a new theory as to why the Democratic Party in the US, and why the socialish greenish progressiveish consensus parties in the EU have cozied up into circles of mutual analingus with Big Finance.
I quote from the Communist Manifesto:
That is pretty explicit. I do not see how you can read that either as consistent with what actually happened thereafter or as consistent with the claim that Marx was not predicting an absolute immiseration of the workers, along with increasingly unpleasant conditions of work.
I’ve tended to interpret Marx as a follower of Ricardo who, like most other people, did not have Ricardo’s extraordinary mathematical intuition and so misunderstood the logic of the Ricardian system. But I’m not sure that’s correct.
Ricardo, from whom Marx presumably got his iron law of wages, made it explicit both that he was describing a long term equilibrium, which wages might exceed for an unlimited length of time, and that that equilibrium wage depended on the tastes of the workers.
Can you quote Marx, somewhere else, saying that what he was predicting was not a falling real wage for the workers but only a real wage that did not rise as rapidly as per capita output? That seems to be what you are claiming he was ambiguous about.
I promised a CW link about things going wrong at a sperm bank.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/04/white-woman-sues-sperm-bankagainafter-getting-black-mans-sperm/
This is two suits on different grounds about one child, not lawsuits about two different children.
The elements of negligence are: 1) Duty, 2) Breach, 3) Cause, and 4) Harm.
Elements 1-3 are slam dunks. The only question here is if there is a legally cognizable harm. Then if so how much in dollars is required to make her whole?
Similarly breach of contract is probably straightforward to prove, but the normal measure of damages is expectancy. Namely: what is the difference in value between the baby should would have had, had they not breached and the baby she has. That’s an awfully tough question to answer.
They could ask instead for costs that she claims she will incur — counseling or similar, but that’s a rather unsatisfactory answer.
Not just counselling, having to relocate.
If true that will be substantial, but I have to wonder about Uniontown, Ohio being “intolerant” of mixed-race children but fine with gay parents.
If Cramblett had a white male husband rather than a lesbian domestic partner and co-parent, I think this would be a clear win on the grounds that visible pregnancy + mixed-race child would cause suspicion of infidelity and thus reputational harm. As is, selling “harm” to judge and jury without looking like a racist is going to be tricky.
“As is, selling “harm” to judge and jury without looking like a racist is going to be tricky.”
On the other hand, selling “no harm” without looking like you are denying that racism exists is also tricky.
A better question is whether a company can/should be held responsible for harm caused by the discriminatory behavior of 3rd parties they have no control over.
No, no, see, she’s not racist, just everyone else.
The question is also whether one is allowed to have preferences about offspring. If a service existed to tailor traits to parental wishes (which likely will shortly), would that establish a value in having a specific baby?
This very sperm bank is implicitly offering that, is it not?
It would be one thing if they made no promises about the donor one way or the other, but if they’re willing to say “you get a white baby” then surely the person is entitled to a white baby, no?
Seems like they are. Given that, how will people’s sympathies line up? Mother is racist for wanting a white baby? I.e., not (morally) allowed to have preferences. Or, legitimate, if non-quantifiable harm was done to her?
We usually talk about eugenics in terms of IQ, but many people have more idiosyncratic preferences.
If a trait does not affect life time earnings, is is allowed (socially, morally) to be preferred? Or is this a manifestation of an “-ism”?
Does is change when it is a matter of certainty vs probability?
Reminds me of the “Noble Winner Sperm Bank”.
I think if I had to argue for “harm” in this case, I would ask whether anyone, anywhere is selling insemination services where the sperm you get is either completely unknown to you, or luck of the draw. A survey of local fertility clinics should show that no one is doing so. Based on that argue that anything that isn’t sold at all is effectively worthless. They charged my client good money for insemination services, and delivered something that a) isn’t what she asked for, and b) is worthless. And the difference between what she paid and the effective value of what was delivered is a measure of harm to my client.
Not sure whether that would fly, but at least it doesn’t require me to say one word about race.
Well they did refund her for the sperm.
The difficulty here is that she basically has to argue that giving birth to a black child has negative value for her. That it imposes costs above and beyond the sperm. That she is worse off now than if she had never interacted with them in the first place.
Sure, but she is suing for negligence, not just harm done. And can’t compensation for negligence go (well) beyond the strict economic loss? In effect the financial measure of harm just establishes that there has been negligence at all. Multipliers can then be applied based on the degree of carelessness and whatnot in settling damages.
@gbdub
In general, the test in negligence law is whether the harm is foreseeable. An unforeseeable intervening cause breaks the chain of causality but a foreseeable doesn’t.
Matt M
No, she doesn’t. At least not on the breach of contract claim. All she has to show is a lessor value from what she bargained for, not that interaction left her worse off.
@ johan_larson
Punitive damages generally require gross, rather than ordinary, negligence. But they certainly can be awarded.
If the judge is unsophisticated, one can claim that the damages are the difference between the average or median incomes of white and black Americans, multiplied by life expectancy.
A more sophisticated and more correct claim is to demand damages after correcting for factors that correlate with race, but that would not differ for children from the same parent. The best way to do so would be to look at a study comparing the incomes of children of different races raised by the same parent. For example, Madonna has both a white child and black children, so one could compare their incomes (and do the same for other families where the children have different races). I’m not aware of such a study having been done, though.
So one may instead look at studies like this, which try to correct for individual and occupational characteristics, but such studies can both overcorrect and undercorrect very easily (and probably do both).
I’m not a legal expert by any means, but I feel like the defendant here isn’t disputing that the contract was breached – hence the refund. A refund is an appropriate compensation for a breach of contract that does not do any additional harm above and beyond “I didn’t get what I paid for.”
To seek additional damages beyond the cost of the refund, she has to prove that she was, well, damaged, above and beyond the mere “not getting what she paid for” part of it. Which would therefore imply she is actually worse off than if she had done nothing (because the refund essentially restores her to “nothing” status)
Can we take the “replacement costs” angle? The contract was for impregnation with sperm of a specific type. Because of the breach of contract, the cost she now incurs for satisfying that desire is not just that of another treatment (i.e. a refund); the more substantial cost is that she now has two babies to raise. Thus the damages are the entire cost of raising a second baby.
I recall reading a blog post about a study which claimed that black and white babies had the same IQ, if raised by white parents
Didn’t look into it because I’m lazy like that, but I bet that suffices as proof if anyone’s interested.
No that’s not how contract law works. Expectancy damages aren’t meant to restore you to the position you would have been in had the contract never happened. Rather they are intended to put you in the position you would have been in had they fulfilled their end of the bargain.
For example, if I contract with you to buy a new Tesla model S for $5000 and you don’t deliver the car you can’t just refund my $5000 and walk away. You owe me the difference between $5000 and what it would cost me to get a new Tesla S from somewhere else.
Reliance damages, on the other hand, are.
Children are not fungible – no one could argue that a wrongful death of a child could be fully restored by adopting you a kid of matching age/race/gender.
So could she ignore the racial aspect entirely, and simply argue, “I wanted a child with one donor, which would have value X. You gave me something I didn’t want (a child with a different donor). That child has value certainly, but children aren’t fungible so that’s irrelevant. In fact this child I didn’t ask for has caused me large expense Y”?
At that point, restoring her to where she would be if the contract had been fulfilled would require compensation for value X. Restoring her to where she’d be if the contract never happened at all would require compensation for expense Y.
I’m assuming negligence requires all four of those? Like, if you catch your doctor saying he didn’t bother washing his hands before surgery, but you don’t actually get an infection, there’s no harm done so you can’t really sue for anything?
Are there any long term studies of interracial adoption? I don’t think it has been occurring with much frequency until the last few decades, so perhaps not. In any case, saying (hypothetically) “Because of this error, I have a 15% lower chance of frequent contact with my child in twenty years and a 5% lower rate of communal support” doesn’t seem to be presenting real harms with any certainty.
Would it be fair to call this a case of female cuckoldry?
Right. In law if some test has elements they all need to be met but if one has factors then only some do.
I’d think that would have to be the substitution of another woman’s egg. It could happen in the context of IVF but not artificial insemination.
Interracial adoption is really common where I live, with white parents who can’t have children on their own commonly adopting Asian children.
They probably can’t say this in court, but interracial (Asian adoption) and interracial (conceived and the child came out half black) are very very different things from a cultural perspective…
For whatever it’s worth, my wife and I adopted two kids from India, who are both now in their 20’s. In my experience, the difficulty of raising a child of another race is greatly over-stated. Kids are kids. Matt is correct that it is a bit different when the two races are White and Black, but I don’t believe it is greatly different.
I suspect the courts will pull out the magic “contrary to public policy” wand and say no harm can be recognized.
I think everyone in this thread is focused too much on the racist element. I think the fact of the matter is, this woman can claim she is stuck raising a child that she didn’t want/choose. In my mind that’s harm enough, and the damages should be the entire cost of raising the child including her time/effort. Easily should be millions.
She doesn’t even have to say it’s because the race. She looked over her choices of sperm and decided on the donor that she wanted. They gave her something else, and now she has to deal with the consequences. Even if the baby was white, she isn’t getting the traits from the donor that she choose. And any derivation from what she choose can cause her to feel like she doesn’t want the child.
Of course, the part of this that we all know is, had they give her any other white guy, she never would have known the difference.
If I poison someone’s wife and he thinks she died of natural causes, that person was still harmed by me. Another person who does the same, but in a way where the poisoning is obvious, can’t claim that he should not be convicted or have to pay damages because other people get away with poisonings too.
So she could argue that the difference in race merely made the mistake evident, not the race of the baby is part of or the entirety of the damages.
Then the solution is for the sperm bank to offer to find her a couple to adopt the child, and pay for the adoption. Once she refuses that she can no longer claim that raising the child is a hardship, and that all costs need to be covered.
That doesn’t quite do it, because she has already had the costs of bearing the child, and would have to repeat those costs to get back to having the child she wants.
True, but those costs are fairly small compared to the costs of raising a child for 18 years. They could cover those and even offer to cover the costs of another pregnancy and come out way ahead. The offer itself proves that the woman doesn’t feel that keeping the child for 18 years isn’t a burden.
As I understand that isn’t the claim, but the claim that they have to move because the town is racist doesn’t seem to hold water. The company shouldn’t be liable for a 3rd parties actions imo.
There is still an emotional connection with her child. It is still hers. Adoption is not a clean solution in this regards. She is harmed if she keeps it since it is not what she wanted, but also harmed if she gives it up for adoption, since she would have to abandon her child.
Lets say there was medical negligence during a delivery causing a baby to be permanently disabled. Do you think the solution is for the hospital to find someone to adopt the baby? Of course not! The mother still wants to keep her baby, but the hospital still deserves to pay damages.
And by the way, raising any child is a big hardship… yet most people aren’t putting their kids up for adoption… can they still claim raising a child is a hardship?
Personal situations are often considered in assigning damages, this is not unusual. For example if I break arm due to your negligence, I will be owed damages, but these will be much larger if I am a professional athlete, since it has a larger impact on my expected earnings.
They can’t claim it as an unwanted hardship that someone else should be liable for.
This isn’t a 3rd party action, its a direct inability of you to earn.
If their child has a disability, that would be an unwanted hardship, yet they still would not offer it for adoption.
If their child had a disability caused by malpractice, that would be an unwanted hardship that someone else should be liable for. They still would not put it up for adoption.
Clearly unwillingness to offer your child up for adoption is not reflective of a lack of hardship, counter to the cliam
Even for the malpractice during delivery case? Should the hospital be allowed to just offer to put the child up for adoption, instead of having to pay damages?
In these cases the harm is directly to the child, and the majority of the case will rest on restitution to make the child whole (as possible). The money goes to the parents as caregivers. In this case the couple is (as my very limited understanding has it) not claiming that being black is itself a handicap, only that it will cost more to raise the child properly because some other people in their community are shitty towards black people.
Also to get back the original proposition that I was responding to was that the sperm bank could be liable for all the costs of child rearing,
who cares about the legal equivalences? not wanting to give your child up for adoption means nothing other than you are a human. It’s fine if you find her statements or reasons objectionable, but offering to take the baby off her hands is not some king solomon gotcha. And maybe the sperm bank shouldn’t be liable for the entire cost of raising the child. That still doesn’t make refusal to adopt an admission of anything.
If it helps, imagine a scenario where a couple tries in vitro, but they accidentally use another mans sperm, only discovering this after the birth. So now that the racism meter is turned off, would it be fair not to compensate the couple if they don’t give up the baby?
I realize you said IMO, but as I posted elsewhere the usual standard in negligence for whether a 3rd party breaks the chain of causation is whether or not those actions were foreseeable on the part of the tortfeaser.
I don’t think she has said that she doesn’t want the child. The question, which is hard to answer, is how much worse off she is with this child than she would be with the child she would have produced if she had gotten the right sperm.
Damn, that case brings out the uncharitable in me. I’m struggling to be fair to the woman, and it is difficult if she has a mixed-race baby she was never expecting, but propping up her case for compensation with “the town I live in is so racist”? Yeah, that’s gonna make her popular with the neighbours! The obvious response there is “Then move somewhere else, woman!”
It’s hard because although she is correct about the transracial wotsits making parenting difficult, the fact is that she’s sufficiently well-off to be able to afford to go to a sperm bank in the first place and to bring a court case and to have all the sociology rolling off her tongue. I mean, there are a lot of white women having transracial babies living in majority white towns who are not having any particular parenting classes or support from sociologists and social workers in bringing up a mixed race child, and they’re not suing anybody over this (possibly because they got pregnant the old-fashioned way: went clubbing, got drunk, pulled, nine months later a happy event!)
I mean, I’m glad she’s taking the problems of mixed-race children seriously but come on lady, according to this article, 10% of births in the USA in 2015 were from one white and one black parent, so you are not some special snowflake who needs a load of cash to learn how to comb your kid’s hair. I agree the sperm bank screwed up, but as long as the child is healthy and there’s nothing about the sperm donor being physically/mentally ill, she could have had a worse outcome.
It is veering very close to sounding like “I want to complain that this isn’t the product I ordered and I demand compensation but I also don’t want to sound racist (although I’m happy to throw my townsfolk under the bus on this one) so I am going for the ‘I need the money to properly study up how to raise my mixed race child when I’m white and living in a
white supremacist hell-hole of raciststhe small town I’m living in’ angle”.Do you have issue with people even being able to select for race at a sperm bank? Clearly this is allowed, and nobody seems to mind. The bank then screwed up. Consumers should be protected for something that will force them to raise a baby for 18 years. Make most other consumer complaints seem pretty trivial.
I agree that the sperm bank screwed up and the woman was justifiably shocked when she delivered an unexpected mixed-race baby.
On the other hand, the child seems to be normal and healthy, so it’s not like suing a maternity hospital for screwing up the delivery and giving the kid brain damage. And she appears to be solvent enough that the cost of raising a child was not a discouraging element (she chose to get pregnant) so she can’t claim that this is a harm either. So it does remain “I am white and living in a white town and it’s just too inconvenient and awkward for me to be saddled with a black kid” and however you fancy that up in lawyer language, it is still going to be uncomfortably close to “I’m not a racist but”.
But is it more racist than being able to select the race in the first place?
I think she’s planning on it?
My reading of the article was that “the town is racist” was meant to imply “Because of this company’s negligence, I have extra expenses relating to moving that must be considered as part of the damages.” It looks like her and her legal team have already put some thought into “How exactly can we quantify the harm that was done here,” even though it’s very difficult.
This strikes me as similar to the issue that got some publicity about 15-20 years ago (or maybe that’s just when I heard about it in law school) – botched contraceptive procedures resulting in a healthy child. Some parents sued, attempting to recover the cost of child-rearing. The problem arose with damage offsets: yes, it will cost thousands to raise the child, but you also have the offsetting benefits of a child. Society (or at least juries) usually don’t like hearing the value of a healthy child as “zero or negative, I hate those little monsters.” In fact, the much more common (and lucrative) claim is for medical negligence which results in losing a baby – typically the life of a baby is held to have a positive financial value. Therefore, if I recall correctly, most states limit the potential recovery to medical costs and physical/emotional distress related to the pregnancy, but nothing for child-rearing.
This one is even more highly charged, with the race angle, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the end point was rather similar. She is, in some sense, suing for negligence resulting in a pregnancy of a character she did not expect. I would expect her to be able to recover something, but probably limited to particular issues related to the pregnancy. Even though they would be the same costs as with a non-mixed-race baby, I would think there would be some “bodily autonomy” arguments about negligence resulting in a bodily effect different from what was disclosed and/or bargained for.
I guess this is part of why sperm banks are considered an immoral intervention into reproduction.
Maybe it would make sense to check on whether the town actually is all that racist instead of guessing. I’m not saying we have to, but the lawyers in the case should.
Also, I’ve seen a fair number of black people say they’re happier if they don’t spend all their time around white people, so that might be a sufficient reason to move to a more integrated place.
Iowa Part 7 is up at Naval Gazing. This covers the Turret II accident and Iowa’s last retirement.
We hope.
Why I’m pretty sure it will be the last one is something I have part of a post already written on. Not scheduled yet, but it’s coming.
Hey Bean, I was at the Utah memorial the other day and remembered you were having a tough time finding photos. Maybe it’s not relevant since you seem to be done with Iowa and Pearl Harbor, but if you need any specific pictures from Pearl Harbor, the Missouri, or the Pacific Aviation Museum, I live in the area and would love an excuse to go on a naval history photographic scavenger hunt.
Utah was a bit tricky to get photos of. I finally found an aerial view that I used in Part 2. But I really appreciate the offer, and I may take you up on it if I return to relevant topics.
Actually, I’ve been meaning to ask you if you’d be interested in guest posting. You were a submariner, which is not a field I have that much knowledge of.
I want to take you up on that but I’m not sure what I could contribute. I was only a radioman, and so I think anything I’d write regarding actual submarine warfare would get BTFO by a submarine-qualified officer (one of whom I believe posts here). Between that and classified information I’m left with day-to-day submarine life, which involves a whole lot of scrubbing the engine room. Maybe after some research I could put something together.
I’m happy to answer any submarine questions though, here or you can email me, tselleck at cocaine.ninja
Speaking of photos: do you have any 4k+ resolution photos you particularly like of good warships available online, for wallpaper purposes?
Not really. I’m not a warship picture collector by nature, and most of my sources don’t go that high in resolution. But all of my wallpapers are of Iowa.
Close enough?
Disappointed. I was assuming it would be a micrograph of a weld failure or something.
The Paper Wall is my goto desktop image site. Not sure how many of the results are relevant.