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I’ve been thinking about the Jedi, and this idea that they have to be celibate. Where did Lucas get this idea? The Jedi are sort of sci-fi knights, but the traditional European idea of the virtuous knight does not include celibacy. Knights could have children. In fact, as lowest level of land-holders in a feudal system, they were supposed to do so, in order to have someone to inherit that land when they passed away.
Lucas definitely drew some inspiration from Asian sources, particularly Japanese films. But the Japanese notions of the warrior, codified in Bushido, don’t mention celibacy either.
The groups that are supposed to be celibate are priests and monks. Are the Jedi supposed to be monks? They seem rather too martial for that. The only Jedi we see who fits a monk-like role is Yoda, and even he can pull out a light saber and go to town when the occasion calls for it. But he is rather the exception. Most Jedi are more warlike than he is.
I think the Jedi owe at least as much to the Shaolin Monks of Wuxia as they do to the Knights Errant of chivalric romance or the Ronin and Samurai of Jidaigeki.
Which is not to say they aren’t -heavily- inspired by the Ronin and Samurai of JIDAIgeki…
Night’s Watch and Kingsguard are also fictional warrior classes that require celibacy.
Interesting. What’s the first time Jedi celibacy is introduced? Phantom Menace? That was in 1999, which was later than the novel “A Game of Thrones”, which came out in 1996.
In the earlier EU, based on the original trilogy, Luke did marry. His wife was Mara Jade.
Where was it said in Phantom Menace? The earliest I remember is from the promotional posters for Attack of the Clones (this, or whatever that’s a recreation of).
The Jedi are a pseudo-religious sect, so I think the precedent is not with ordinary knights but knights crusader. I guess having them eschew earthly delights makes them seem more mystical and profound. And I think they do perform some, if not monk-ly deeds, at least deeds reminiscent of what monks do. They often enter a meditative trance when performing feats through the Force, often folding their legs and closing their eyes while doing so, in the vein of a Buddhist monk. And all of their advice and stuff is from Zen Buddhism. So there seem to be ample similarities between them and religious orders, especially the militant ones, for Lucas to perceive his idea.
The Jedi of the original theory certainly are supposed to be more like monks than “martial” class. I mean, look at how Obi-Wan dresses. He is an ascetic living in hut. I don’t think Yoda ever wielded light saber until the modern CGI allowed that. Of course they are like monks, and the idea of celibacy was quite natural plot point when it was introduced.
What we see in the prequel trilogy is extrapolated from the precedent introduced in the OT.
Also, now that you mentioned, we have been talking about celibacy, but Lucas never said Jedi were supposed to celibate. They were not supposed to form attachments. This was a plot point in many/some EU stories.
“Lucas never said Jedi were supposed to celibate. They were not supposed to form attachments.”
“A PUA you can be, Luke.”
A PUA with literal mind-control powers?
[handwave] “You want to have sex with me.”
“I want to have sex with you.”
Such behavior would swiftly bring the Jedi Order into disrepute. I can’t believe that’s what Lucas had in mind for his upstanding guardians of the republic.
In the KOTOR video games, using the “jedi mind trick” on people for selfish ends (i.e. getting a bigger reward for doing them a favor) earned you dark-side points, and was considered to be an immoral act.
That’s not a pickup artist, that’s a pickup technician.
Jedi can have sex, just no attachments or posession
So no sex slaves, then 😛
No personal ones, but a Jedi temple could totally own some for common use by all members.
Obi-Wan in ANH is the ruins of a once-proud order. He is an old man in hiding living on the fringes of society. Using him at that time to understand the Jedi Order is like trying to understand the SS based on the old men in hiding in South America in the 70s.
I’m wondering whether the Janissaries would be a better model than monks are. They, like the Jedi, were taken from their homes at an early age and turned into formidable fighters.
Everyone on Tattooine dresses like a 16th-century Japanese peasant, though.
(Which, now that I think about it, is kinda odd given that Tattooine is a desert planet and Japan is a humid temperate climate, but this is probably one of those things I shouldn’t be thinking too hard about.)
Templars?
Right, because monks have always been peaceful in popular culture.
The warrior monk is an archetype as old as anything else Lucas mined for the story and worldbuilding of Star Wars, and celibacy/chastity have usually been part of the package. Mumble something purity strength purpose mumble mumble. Also, the coach says no sex before the Big Game.
One of the many things that bugged me about the prequels was the laziness of dressing all the jedi the way that Obi-wan dressed on tatooine. the star wars universe would be much more interesting place if we saw more rich and politically powerful jedi like Dooku and had them interact with the rest of the universe in ways more complicated and nuanced than “was a good monk” and “led robot rebellion.”
Obi-Wan, Yoda, and Ghost Anakin all wore the same robes, so it was already strongly implied that this was the Jedi uniform. They’re space monks, so they wear space monk robes. That said, it would have been cool to see Dooku play the Grey Eminence. (The real Grey Eminence, btw, got that title because of his monk robes.)
http://www.ncregister.com/blog/jimmy-akin/what-are-celibacy-chastity-and-continence-9-things-to-know-and-share
This is a very civilized handling of the fact that the meanings of celibacy and chastity different in common usage and common usage.
In Catholic terms, celibacy means not being married. There doesn’t seem to be a specific word for the obligations of those living a consecrated life (those who take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience) to not be married.
Chastity is obeying the rules about sex.
Continence is not having sex.
And “decimate” means to kill exactly 10% of. Or else language evolves.
Since there no longer are any rules about sex other than “don’t be a rapist”, and since “continence” now means not wetting yourself, the obvious linguistic evolution is for chastity to take over the former role of continence.
It is amusing that, applying the old words to the new rules, we can literally say that anyone who isn’t chaste is a rapist.
For a university thing, I have to present results from a study.
In the study, two people made an experiment with a 13-year-old girl; applying a method to teach her multiplication skills. To test progress, they had her do 10 simple multiplication tasks and looked how much she got right. They did four before the training began, then six throughout, and an additional four afterward. The numbers she got right are
5 – 4 – 4 – 5 – 5 – 8 – 8 – 7 – 9 – 10 – 9 – 9 – 7 – 10
Those were all with tasks involving multiplication with 7. Paralelly, they did the same with 8 and 9 and got these success numbers
4 – 3 – 5 – 4 – 5 – 8 – 8 – 7 – 9 – 10 – 9 – 9 – 7 – 10 (in this case training began after the fifth, not the fourth, still lasted until the 10th)
4 – 3 – 3 – 3 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 8 – 8 – 10 – 10 – 10 – 9 – 10
Here’s what I want to ask about. The study says there is a 95,3% chance that the effects are real and not by chance, based on some dubious statistical tools. This strikes me as way way too low. There is supposed to be a 5% chance that this is a coincidence – really?
I take that deciding whether a sequence is random is actually very hard, so most don’t know what they’re doing and are using methods that aren’t very good. But what would be a reasonable way to obtain a probability? Or is the 95,3% number accurate after all?
It also strikes me as an ill-defined question in the first place. The study presents it as the probability that there has not been literally zero real progress.
I haven’t actually run these numbers, so take this with a grain of salt. You are applying your expectations to the statistics. You expect that somone who cannot perform multiplication problems will be able to be taught to multiplication (and fairly easily).
This seems to be a very low power study, with only one individual, with only a total of 30 tests. 30 observations is quite small.
If that one individual was actually a dolphin, your reaction would be to question the how anyone could calculate that it was 95% probable that you could teach the dolphin multiplication.
Basically, you are letting your Bayesian prior sneak into your evaluation of the problem.
So let me make sure I get this right: you believe that, had I just asked what is the chance that these three sequnces of numbers-
5 – 4 – 4 – 5 – 5 – 8 – 8 – 7 – 9 – 10 – 9 – 9 – 7 – 10
4 – 3 – 5 – 4 – 5 – 8 – 8 – 7 – 9 – 10 – 9 – 9 – 7 – 10
4 – 3 – 3 – 3 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 8 – 8 – 10 – 10 – 10 – 9 – 10
-are randomly generated, you’d have said something around 5%? Because I’m pretty sure that if I had seen them, without knowing about the study, I’d have said it’s lower than 0,1%. Probably lower than 0,01%.
Reddit: “If someone was born in 1900 and died in 2000, what is the maximum number of countries they could live in without ever moving?”
A commenter counted ten countries for a spot in northern Serbia outside of Vojvodina (with a bonus two more between 2000 and the present); can any of us get more? How about for other hundred-year periods?
Does anyone know of a thing by GK Chesterton (possibly in The Everlasting Man about the foolishness of worshiping success?
He was talking about the proto-Nazis of his time, and saying that Christianity is better because it has a God that understands failure and is at the side of those who are suffering.
Nazis think they’re natural-born winners, so they can only lose if the other side is using unfair methods. Yes, I think there’s an error there.
This is *not* “The Fallacy of Success”, which was about extremely low quality advice books. If Chesterton was giving a fair description of those books, we’ve actually seen some progress in the field.
I’ve had a quick look through a book or two and I don’t think I’ve quite got what you mean, but there is this excerpt from one of the essays in Heretics, “Pagans and Mr Lowes Dickinson”, on the topic of humility:
Thanks for looking.
I’ll see if I can come up with a better explanation.
Since these OTs are occasionally a vehicle for advice–
I’d suggest at least once in your life, and possibly every few years, doing your own taxes using just the forms and their instructions. There’s a lot of rhetoric out there about how complicated the tax code is, and if you are a multinational drug company or own the Trump real estate empire it certainly is. But for most people, even most of those doing quite well for themselves, it isn’t that complicated. Doing them by hand will give you insight both as a voter and as a taxpayer (e.g. what to look out for in terms of possible deductions next year).
Even you don’t feel comfortable submitting your version and ultimately decide to use turbotax or an accountant, you still will have learned something and you can compare what you did to what they did.
I endorse this as well. I was sort of forced into doing it when I was young and in the military because the VITA rep screwed something up and my return was rejected. I figured “What the hell, I’m smart, I can figure this out.” And it turned out that I could. Was a really useful learning experience.
I especially endorse doing this when you are very likely to get a refund (e.g. you are young, don’t make much money, have children and get EIC etc.). Then it’s like doing a logic puzzle where you get paid $1000 at the end.
Personally, I prefer a more negative framing of doing taxes to get a rebate
Now if the rebate was obtained by doing a sudoku or something, that might be more palatable.
One of my points is that this is an exaggeration. Unless you are terrified of numbers or have a rare tax situation, it is not an especially difficult or time consuming exercise.
It’s hyperbole obviously. But how unpleasant it is isn’t just a matter of numbers but also of how much you hate tedious tasks and some other factors. Personally if I had the option, I’d rather exercise so strenuously I vomited rather than waste even one evening doing taxes. And I’m not terribly athletic but I’m good at math. I can only imagine how much my preferences would change if my understanding of basic arithmetic was bottom 20% of the population.
And how time consuming it is or isn’t depends vastly on how much of a stickler you are. Last time I tried to do it by hand to the letter, despite the fact I was a graduate student with one of the simplest possible returns to figure out, I couldn’t even figure out how the two states I had to pay taxes in legally defined residency. After one night (a few hours) spent trying, I gave up since nothing I could find in any public laws by googling contradicted my layman’s understanding of residency and since I made so little money that even if I had fucked up, neither state’s tax administration was likely to wreck me.
If you’re getting 10% of your income back as a tax refund, you have your withholdings set up wrong.
Or you’re a noncitizen. More required withholding for them.
I suggest the reverse as well, that if you always do your own taxes have a profession do them at least once to see if this profession can save you lots of money.
I agree, and would add that if you aren’t in a complicated tax situation and are moderately decent at reading legalese, it’s just as easy (though not as user-friendly) as doing Turbotax. The first time I did it, I felt stupid for having paid fifty bucks a year for tax software that was obviously was just a brightly colored wrapper around the IRS e-file form.
I have changed my mind a bit about how easy tax returns are to do. I am a professional tax accountant (although corporate, not individual), and I feel that I understand them pretty well. My kids are in their twenties, and I insisted on them doing their own returns so they would understand them, even though I found them pretty easy to do. But once I started going over the instructions with them, I realized they were a lot harder than I thought. It seems like every line of the instructions have a lot of comments telling taxpayers that if they all these various kinds of income they need to do these various other things. See the easiest form instructions 1040EZ. I know what these things are, but I understand why my kids don’t. I guess if you just assume you don’t have those kinds of income, then the instructions are pretty easy. I guess that’s how returns should be done, but it does mean if you do have one of these oddball types of income or situations, you will probably do the return wrong. The “simple” tax returns look a lot harder to do than when I first started to fill out mine (this was before I had any training myself).
Having said that, I do endorse Brad’s comment that everyone should at least try to do their own.
A few OTs back, I asked what the US is best at. This time, let’s consider the other side of the coin, what the US is worst at.
I think it’s fair to say the US struggles in some areas. Other prosperous countries would probably not trade their K-12 education systems for that of the US. The medical system is known for high overall costs, mediocre overall results, and some nasty gaps in coverage. The electoral system is known for high incumbency, low voter participation, and a funding model that makes politicians highly dependent on their campaign contributors.
But where are the problems worst? I suspect the worst of the worst is the justice system. The cops kill a lot of people, the system jails a lot of people, the prisons themselves are pretty darn nasty, cops and prosecutors have a lot of leeway to seize your property, and prosecutors have so much discretion in filing charges that most defendants plead to lesser charges rather than face high-stakes trials.
Yeah, having the #1 incarceration rate in the entire world, including despotic hellholes, is pretty damn embarrassing. Especially for a country whose propaganda constantly emphasizes freedom and liberty.
I have to question the implicit assumption that said despotic hellholes are reporting accurate incarceration rates.
Speaking as a Canadian – so, about as close to an American as you can get (although not as close as commonly thought) – there are so many horrible features of your systems in general for choosing governments, officials, etc. This probably leads to the other problems. The most visceral example is the gerrymandering. But stuff like elected police officials, judges, etc, that seems really bad too. In general a lot of stuff in the US seems run on systems that were cutting-edge in the late 18th century but are kinda struggling now (be more like us: our system only dates to the late 19th century, with periodic half-assed attempts to update it).
That got me curious about the Canadian system. As I understand it, your senate consists of individuals appointed by the Governor General on the advice of the Prime Minister for what used to be life terms, now are up to age 75 terms. There are supposed to be an equal number from each of various regions, not based on population.
That sounds an awful lot like the British House of Lords, although without hereditary membership and with geographical dispersion. Is your point that the power to appoint life peers is a 19th century innovation? It actually seems to go back quite a lot farther than that–farther than the 18th century.
The senate doesn’t really do anything, though. In practice, it’s mostly an honourary thing, with a certain amount of “this guy was useful to the party” type stuff, that sort of thing.
My comment was more a shot at Canada’s kinda-antiquated-too system. A better comparison would be US vs Germany – the latter has a system that was brand shiny new far more recently, and was kind of put in place from scratch (well, West Germany up to reunification).
…so, like the British House of Lords?
The US is worst at advancing the technology necessary to create an unfriendly artificial general intelligence that will eat our light cone.
Trains. Maybe roads. Not being fat (not literally the worst, but pretty bad.).
Eh.
(Though I suppose you could also make versions of this point about trains/roads/obesity.).
even if pisa rank is okay, the cost is terrible.
Trains in the US are uniformly ridiculously expensive to build AFAICT. Most of them are also really bad (Boston and maybe Seattle subways are okay, but they’re the US at its best and are sub-par for rich countries).
Our train system is great, it just isn’t optimized for being a passenger train system.
Our roads do kinda suck compared to the other first-world countries I’ve been to (though they’re nowhere near the worst in the world), but I think this is more a symptom of one of the things we might actually be the worst in the world at, which is infrastructure cost control.
Geographically (and culturally) we aren’t well optimized for a passenger train system at all.
Depends where in the States you’re talking about. The Northeast megalopolis is well situated for passenger rail, and California could do better than it’s doing (though the current high-speed rail plan is stupid). Might be a few other places where it’s worth it, too — Vancouver/Seattle/Portland, maybe, or Milwaukee/Chicago/Detroit/Toronto. But that all hinges on someone figuring out how to cure the cost disease, because otherwise the return on investment would probably be better if you went to Vegas and bet it all on black.
If I switched the email that I’m using for this account, would someone still be able to figure out what my old email address was?
AFAIK, your gravatar is based on an MD5 hash of your email. It’s not trivial to reverse the hash, but a determined adversary can probably uncover it (MD5 is meant for speed, not cryptography). So it depends if you’re worried about casual observers, or if you think the Mossad is out to get you.
One researcher says they were able to uncover 45% of gravatars on a forum in about a day, using hash-cracking software and a dictionary attack.
As for your previous email, it shouldn’t be hard to find two posts by “Wrong Species” with two different gravatars, and get the emails from both.
So I’m pretty much screwed either way if someone is determined enough, no matter what I do now?
Use a throwaway email address for your gravatar and you break the linkage. Though there’s still a lot of stuff it’s hard to do–I’m not sure if SSC works if you come to it through TOR, but the performance will surely be horrible, and some parts won’t work if you use the TOR browser since they’re also useful for tracking. (Also, basically every website that lives on ads does everything it can to track you, because that lets them sell the ads for more money.) For a really serious attacker, maybe I try to match your text style to other known copies of your writing, or just note what times you usually comment and infer an approximate location, or….
I’m confused. Beelester said that even after changing email addresses, someone could still find out my old email address. You say the opposite. Are you saying that Beelester is wrong or is there some new nuance that I’m not getting?
I think Beelester is wrong, at least for posts made after the transition to user accounts. Posts made before that transition may not be linked to your account and therefore may be immutable.
EDIT: Yep, it gets changed on your old posts.
There may be archive sites, screenshots, or caches that have the old icon. But this website will display your new icon on your old posts once you change your linked email address.
From hashcat’s performance numbers for a stock PC with 8 GPUs, we get something like 200 billion MD5 hashes per second. So it would take about 200 seconds to try every 8-letter and less Gmail address. One estimate I saw was that there were about six billion active email addresses in use right now, so if I had a list of them, I could use that system to find your email address in under a second. (Or if I just had a list of emails of people I thought would be interesting to track, I could check those *really quickly*.) Assuming there’s no salting being done, I could precompute the gravatars for each email address, scrape sites to find gravatars, and then look for matches.
I don’t believe so. I’ve changed my email here before, and doing so changed the gravatars on my old posts.
I don’t know if this is 100% reliable, though.
My wife and I had an argument last night. Am I out of line?
I do not like tattoos. I have never liked tattoos. My wife has heard me describe them as “degenerate,” “low-class,” “trashy” and “ugly.” Now I completely understand that other people do not share this opinion. This is my own personal taste. I completely understand that other people get tattoos because they find them meaningful, they make important statements about themselves, they commemorate events or people in their lives, or they simply find them beautiful. That is their opinion and they are entitled to it. I would never try to argue with someone who likes tattoos that they shouldn’t, because there is no accounting for taste.
So I made some comment about the ugly tattoo on some musician on TV and my wife bristled. She has for awhile been pondering getting a tattoo on her forearm of a few words that are very meaningful to her; a sort of personal mantra. She said that should she do this, I would be unsupportive, or judgmental and would look at it as ugly, even though she should be able to do whatever she wants with her body.
I said yes, she is allowed to do whatever she wants with her body, I’m certainly not going to “forbid” her from getting a tattoo, but I’m not required to like it. How can I like something I think is ugly? I can do whatever I want with my body. Dye my hair orange, shave half of it off, and tattoo dicks all over my face to show how empowered I am or whatever, but she’s not required to find that attractive.
Am I wrong?
I think tattoos are interesting.
Is it subconscious or conscious personality signalling? There’s plenty of psychological data on differences for those who get tattoos and those that don’t….and “on average” stereotypes hold.
That’s part of it, but I also simply find them aesthetically displeasing. I like the human form as it is. I value things like “purity,” “cleanliness,” “symmetry.” I have never seen a tattoo on a person (especially a woman) and said to myself “that makes that person look more attractive.” Only the opposite. I completely understand this is a matter of subjective taste, and there are others who think tattoos are sexy. Great for them! But I do not share this opinion.
“Ugly” and perhaps “trashy” plausibly qualify as descriptors of “personal taste”. “Degenerate” and “low-class”, not so much.
As for the rest of it, don’t standard marriage norms call for lying in such situations?
Not when you’re talking about permanent changes to appearance. “Does this dress make me look fat” gets a white lie because the dress isn’t permanently attached to the body.
Ok, but in that case this needs to read in the stronger way:
What you say after this about “it” implies you mean how the tattoo affects her appearance. But you also mean that she is “allowed” to get the tattoo but you’re not required to like that she gets the tattoo. You don’t forbid her doing so but you’re not OK with her doing so. (Or at least I don’t see how a white lie wouldn’t also be appropriate in this case otherwise.)
That doesn’t make you out of line, but it does clarify the substance of the disagreement as not just aesthetic.
No, I meant I’m not required to like the tattoo. It really is about the thing itself, and not about me not liking her doing something I don’t like.
If she did this, I would completely understand why she did it (self-empowerment), and I certainly don’t object to her doing self-empowering things. But I would find the tattoo unattractive, and thereby find her less attractive than I currently do.
But then again: why not the white lie?
Because white lies are about little things that aren’t important, and tattoos are necessarily important, because they’re permanent.
Your wife declares she’s going to get dicks tattooed all over her face. For some reason, you think this will make her less attractive to you. Do you lie and say “oh, that’ll be beautiful, honey?”
I don’t really know how to interpret this thought experiment alternative because tattooing dicks all over one’s face really would have dramatic social implications in the way a smallish arm tattoo would not now. You’ve already said that tattoos have class implications for you, but you’re picking an example that would have class implications for virtually everyone while (I think) wanting us to consider the aesthetic implications in isolation.
What we’re looking for in an example is a change that’s permanent, ugly to at least some people, but still broadly acceptable. So maybe one of those 90s ski-ramp nose jobs.
Hmm. Now that I think about it, though, anything like this is probably going to be a lost battle. Especially for a woman in our culture, any change of this kind is going to be a proxy for aging. Grumpiness about the tattoo, whether she gets it or not, is going to be projected onto future grumpiness about looks lost to age.
Yeah, I think you’re fucked here.
But you said that you think tattoos are not just aestetically ugly, but also “trashy”, “low-class” and “degenerate”. This implies that if your wife got a tattoo, it would lower your opinion of her, since the tattoo would be evidence that she is the kind of person who gets a tattoo.
Which is a perfectly fine opinion to have.
I think it’s a bad idea to let your spouse (or kids) do something you hate so much, because it will contaminate your opinion of them. And you’re stuck with them, so it’s not like you can cease association.
Regarding tattoos themselves, I agree with you. Might as well tattoo “I come from a long line of poor decision makers” if you get tats at all.
Suggested tat: 高度的时间偏好
FWIW, my wife and I have discussed the same issue. She has considered getting a small tattoo on her ankle; I find tattoos pretty unattractive in general. We haven’t had a fight about this, exactly, but in an alternative universe where I didn’t sometimes express dislike of tattoos, I think it’s at least 50/50 that by now she’d have a tattoo.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to tell your wife you’d find a tattoo unappealing or unpleasant. I’d expect her to be willing to do the same with you, if you proposed getting a tattoo and she thought they looked trashy or low-class or whatever. Indeed, I’d expect that to be the more common case–husband says “I think that tattoo looks cool and want to get it” and wife says “over my dead body!”
You can’t forbid her from getting a tattoo any more than she can forbid you getting one, but both of you can certainly express your opinions. You have to decide how forcefully to do so–my own experience in 20+ years of marriage is that there are places where I disagree with my wife that are really important to her and not to me, and there, I generally just swallow my objections and don’t make a big deal of it–it’s not a hill worth dying on. There are other issues that go the other way. (We’d probably have a couple guns in the house if my wife didn’t find the whole idea so upsetting, for example. It matters a lot more to her than to me.)
Maybe it would also be worthwhile to be clear that even if she gets the tattoo, that’s not going to make you leave her or stop loving her or lose your attraction to her or something, it’s just something you’d rather she didn’t do. (Even though that should be clear, it’s good to say out loud for her to hear.) Among other things, that lowers the perceived stakes on the conflict, which is almost always a good idea.
All IMO.
Absolutely. My dad always told me “don’t sweat the small stuff…and it’s all small stuff” and the magic words for a successful marriage are “yes, dear.” She tells me what color she wants the room painted and I paint the room that color. It makes her happy and I simply do not care.
I did make that explicitly clear, that I would still love her and would never leave her, but it would definitely impact the attractiveness. My wife is very girl-next-door cute, with blonde hair, blue eyes, great rack. A tattoo kind of wrecks that whole sweet-and-innocent image. If she got one I doubt I would be successful at hiding my disgust.
You should probably trying being more open about something aesthetic like that simply because your wife is interested in it.
How does one change their aesthetic tastes? If you hate the color green, how do you start liking green?
Exposure, trying to appreciate different elements of the object, discussion with why other people like them. Surely you’ve had the experience of your aesthetic tastes changing before.
I can’t really think of anything that I used to dislike, that I now like. It usually goes the opposite way, where something I used to enjoy like certain TV shows or styles of pop music or something I now find juvenile and stupid.
And it’s not like I haven’t had decades to develop my aesthetic tastes in what I find attractive in women. I dated a lot, including girls with tattoos, but that was always a signal to me that this was going to be a short-term thing.
It’s your wife, so maybe try anyway? I’m also a bit astounded that you’ve never had the experience of going from dislike to at least indifference. Maybe see a therapist for that.
What something that you disliked after reaching adulthood (I’m not talking about kids thinking brussels sprouts are icky here) that you now like?
Plenty of different kinds of music, literature, etc. SSC may not be the place to ascertain this, but I feel like aesthetic development is the norm, not the exception. Maybe it’s not, and people really do get further stuck in their tastes as they get older. If so, that’s a somewhat disappointing.
Brussels sprouts, in fact, were something I only learned to like recently. I had a disgust reaction to them, but my wife cooks them well, and now I can even handle poorly cooked Brussels sprouts (and TIL that Brussles should always be capitalized).
The biggest hurdle I often face when I make an effort to like something that I don’t is that the old not-liking was something I saw as a key piece of my identity. Is this an issue? Ask yourself for a few days how you would feel if you suddenly liked tattoos. Would it feel like any kind of betrayal of your prior self? If so, that might be an issue for you as it is for me.
Ask her to share her thought processes in the meaning behind the tattoo, and what it is she likes about the potential artwork, etc. Encourage her to go into depth, and while she’s doing so try to not think about it as a body modification.
It might not change your mind, but it will at the very least show a willingness to consider things you don’t like from her perspective, which may help.
There appears to be a good deal of unconscious social signalling involved in individual patterns of dress.
Not simply meta-commenting on tattoos, but whatever comes may be a rationalization, or otherwise obfuscated for various reasons.
Thus,the information gained may be in the category of “This is how the brain makes rational a partially unconscious pull”
… That’s still a valid inter-personal method of communication, though.
You’re not wrong.
But it probably doesn’t matter. I’d start practicing the phrase, “Wow, that actually looks much better than I thought! Maybe I was wrong about tattoos!”
I am strongly against divorce, so before I go on, let me ask–can you afford two residences?
Point of order: “it’s my body” is not a true statement of any married person.
Propose a compromise. She can get the tattoo if she gets breast enhancement also.
She already has a great rack. My wife is very beautiful. I think she’s perfect as is.
Why not just tell her that?
She’s not contemplating it for aesthetic purposes. It’s a “personal statement” kind of thing. She sees such a tattoo as aesthetically neutral and I do not.
Has she considered getting a blog?
I’m torn.
I think each of the following is true :
1. Healthy marriage does not require that you subvert or alter your own personality, including your aesthetic tastes.
2. A person is the sole possessor of their own body. No other person has the right to determine what happens to it (with certain limitations that would not apply here).
3. One essential marital role is to help your spouse achieve their greatest aspiration / fulfillment / degree of personal expression.
I don’t think that resolves the issue, though.
People naturally have some trepidation when it comes to permanently altering their bodies. Maybe part of what she is feeling / expressing is a heightened sense thereof, as she could also be permanently altering her marriage. And you can’t reassure her that she wouldn’t be.
No, I don’t think you are out-of-line. But then again, I’m an old-school type.
That said, I suggest that in lieu of the tattoo you offer to get her a pricey piece of jewelry with her mantra engraved on it.
This is the compromise I’d want if it were rational given your finances.
You are a genius. And Valentine’s Day is coming up. fortaleza84 you just saved my marriage, bless you!
Oh you are soooo fucked if you think this is the solution.
How do you figure?
@Conrad Honcho
@HeelBearCub
Hey, it might work! Do tell us how it turns out, Conrad!
@Conrad Honcho:
You’ve already offended her by implying she was morally degenerate.
She wants to make a permanent addition to her body. That is an extremely personal decision, a statement of self determination and autonomy. A statement of personal values. She is so committed to an idea that she wants to place it on her body permanently.
For instance, I’ve contemplated getting a tattoo on my arm that incorporated the names of my wife and children somewhat abstractly into a design.
You are offering to replace that with a “pricey piece of jewelry”. The optics on that are all kinds of wrong (and the thinking behind it is probably wrong as well).
If you think me offering me an expensive watch with my wife and kids names on it as a substitute for a tattoo is going to show how much you understand me, you are sorely mistaken.
EDIT:
Oh God, it’s even worse. You’ve already picked it out for her and are just going to present it to her. Holy fuck.
So what’s your solution, besides “change my moral foundations?”
@Conrad Honcho
Because you’re doing it for _you_, to dissuade her from getting that tattoo, and she’s going to know it.
My solution would have been “don’t sign a piece of paper shackling yourself to someone who doesn’t share your moral foundations” but you done fucked that up
I don’t have any kind of problem with NaD’s position here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/10/open-thread-92-75/#comment-587883
which I take is similar to what you are saying about moral foundations, but if it is really that important to you, shouldn’t you have talked about it before marriage?
I don’t like tattoos either, though I don’t dislike them quite to the extent you seem to, but if there’s something that’s fairly common in our society and _really_ a dealbreaker I’m surprised you never talked about it before.
That said, I can’t some I’m quite as horrified about the proposed solution as HBC, just as you married her, she married you. She too should have had some idea of what she was getting into.
@The Nybbler
And? That is exactly the point. Or rather, it’s a compromise: she still gets her mantra on her arm where she can look at it, in a beautiful and lasting way, but it’s not permanently affixed to her body.
@Brad
I’ve been making such statements about how much I dislike tattoos to her since well before we married. She generally agreed with me, but mostly along the lines of “I don’t hate them, but there’s nothing I’d ever want to permanently put on my body.” Her considering getting a tattoo is a new development on her part.
You’re going to give her a gift, that’s actually for you, or a compromise. Obviously I could be wrong here; I don’t claim to have an accurate mental model of your wife (or even mine). But I’d be very surprised if it was taken positively.
If getting this tattoo is as important to her as her not having it is to you, you’re at an impasse and one of you is going to have to yield. If it’s actually much less important to her, better that you impress upon her how important it is to you, and lead her to suggest an alternative like the bracelet, rather than giving it as an unsolicited gift.
First, I would suggest you talk to her, rather than presuming you can dictate to her. You already know she is angry, and you should take on board the idea that she is pissed for good reason.
Second, make sure you differentiate between what you like and what is moral. Make sure that you are clear with yourself that this is about what you find unattractive, not about what is actually moral. She isn’t proposing forcibly giving you (or anyone else) a tattoo.
Just because you have a disgust reaction to something does not make that thing immoral.
Do you think that all traditional Maori are actually immoral?
I really doubt you are being asked to give up your moral foundations, here.
No, I don’t think tattoos are immoral, I think my aesthetic preferences are derived from my moral foundations. You know I’m a conservative. I have a low disgust threshold and put a high value on purity. That’s out of Haidt’s moral foundations theory. I’m doing some armchair self-psychoanalysis here and figuring that’s why I dislike tattoos on women and find them so aesthetically displeasing: they violate my moral leanings towards purity/sanctity.
@Nybbler,
Okay, yes, I like the idea better of leading her to the bracelet idea instead of presenting it as a gift.
How long have you been married?
I considered making the jewelry suggestion and decided against it before I saw that others had made it and some argued against. It works as a compromise if she suggests it, might work if you suggest it, is very unlikely to work if you just do it–because they you are making the choice for her.
This is a bad sign.
I ran this whole thing past my wife. We discussed it for a while, because it’s interesting, and she came down to a few takeaways”:
1. Her advice to Conrad, if he asked my wife, is to just live with it, because it’s important to her.
2. But her advice to Conrad’s wife, if she asked my wife, was that she should realize Conrad doesn’t like it and stop, because it’s important to him.
3. When I mentioned the jewelry compromise someone had suggested, my wife said “oh, that could be a good solution.”
Or you’re creating a utility monster. Next year it’ll be all “this is some nice skin, it would be a terrible shame if something were to be permanently written on it, hint hint hint.”
Once you pay the damegeld…
Well played.
I like it.
Keep in mind that for most men, marriage is all about damegeld. The trick is to always give her a little bit more cash and prizes than she would get in a divorce proceeding.
I’ll reiterate the viewpoint that this may be a good compromise if you suggest it and she agrees, but I think it will likely backfire badly if you get it for her as a surprise.
I ran an abbreviated version of your scenario past several people whose opinions I think are reasonable. Everyone had the same reaction I did: jewelry might work if you suggest it and she agrees, but it would seem manipulative if given as a surprise.
Obviously the actual outcome depends on the dynamics of your relationship and is impossible to say with confidence from afar, but I doubt this will go well if you gave this as a Valentine’s Day “gift” (especially in that context, since then it feels particularly like you’re giving her something that really advances your preferences in a manipulative way).
(FWIW, I think your decision to express your concerns is perfectly reasonable and I would do the same if my spouse were seriously considering getting a tattoo. I don’t envy you having to navigate these issues, since there may not be a good way to reconcile it and make you both happy. Good luck.)
I’m not an expert on women or your marriage. Nonetheless, I have an opinion about the bracelet.
It might work, but if your wife accepts the bracelet instead of the tattoo she wants, she is doing you a favor.
I strongly recommend *asking* her if she’d like a bracelet instead rather than surprising her with it.
On my blog (and maybe here too?) I’ve argued against tattoos, not on an aesthetic basis (although I dislike them) but on a physiological (?) one. Basically I think you have to have some kind of body dysmorphic disorder to look at your body and see it as a blank canvas. Would your wife find that idea offensive or interesting?
Relevant blog entries here and here.
To be honest this just reads to me as ‘I personally dislike tattoos and don’t do well at empathy’. And this from someone who doesn’t personally like tattoos!
You’re pretty much begging the question with things like ” they can only leave the skin in a worse condition aesthetically”
Basically I think it all comes down to this: “Similarly I never could imagine looking down at a fresh tattoo on my own skin and thinking “Good, that part of my skin looks better now than it did before.” That’s the main reason I don’t have any tattoos.” Some people can and do look down at tattoos and think that. This is the main reason they have tattoos. People are different.
Your posts could be repeated with ‘why eating spicy food is objectively wrong’, ‘why do people read novels when films are better?’ and any number of other projections of personal taste.
If I was just justifying my lack of empathy, I would merely say “I can’t understand why anyone would want a tattoo” and then retreat immediately to aesthetic reasons. It is because I have empathized, by understanding that to get a tattoo I’d have to look at my skin and decide it would be better with a tattoo there, that I decided there might be a body dismorphic disorder thing going on. I know I said “I never could imagine” but really I have imagined it, I just also had to imagine a sort of mental disorder to make it make sense.
I know! That’s what’s begging the question though.
Maybe we’re starting from different assumptions. I assume that the lack of markings humans are born with is “nature’s intended way” so to speak, that we cannot be further perfected by adding permanent markings. We can only be downgraded by such a modification.
Tattoos/piercings/etc. is like lowering your car’s suspension until the tires scrape against the wheel wells, all just to get a particular “look,” when the suspension as set at the factory is optimized for the way 99.99% of people drive the car. (I can’t remember, but I think I made an exception about tattoos when it comes to gang members and people in primitive tribes. For those groups I am more approving of tattoos.)
How do you feel about people deliberately getting a tan? Lipstick? Shaving?
All of those are departures from “nature’s intended way,” assuming you aren’t living somewhere where the tan comes naturally.
In terms of perfecting-the-already-optimal, I don’t have a big problem with any of them:
Tanning is the skin’s natural response to sunlight, and a tan doesn’t last longer than a few weeks or months at most anyway. Someone who lies on a tanning bed is replicating sunlight they for whatever reason can’t or won’t get by going outside. I don’t think it’s unattractive if a woman is tanned because she’s been outside a lot, but I am a little put off if it looks like she goes to tanning salons, but more because it signals a bunch of other stuff I find unattractive.
Lipstick is very impermanent, normally not worn for more than a few hours. Most often it’s worn in a shade meant to exaggerate the natural blush of an aroused person’s lips, but in less natural shades it is actually even more functional in that it simply draws attention immediately to the lips, and does so quite successfully. So I can appreciate it in that respect, and it often looks nice. I would be put off by a woman who wore lipstick all day every day though.
Hair grows back. I have been thoroughly acculturated to be disgusted by armpit hair and to a lesser degree leg hair on women, and I’m even a bit grossed out by long or bushy armpit hair on men, but despite awareness of this acculturation I am not too stressed about the custom of shaving.* I’m not sure how I’d feel if it was a custom for all women, at the onset of puberty, to get permanent laser hair removal on their legs and armpits, though. I’d have to think about that.
*I like that a more rugged look is back in fashion for men of all socioeconomic strata (for the first time since, what, the Civil War?). Men look like men again. Though it is sometimes perplexing/amusing to see men who look like lumberjacks from the neck up and dandies from the neck down. (“Lumbersexuals”)
I can see you’re trying but I think you’re failing badly. Labelling ‘someone having an incredibly common different preference’ as ‘body dysmorphia’ isn’t really understanding.
As far as I can tell, the point is that
1. Some people value the ‘don’t interrupt the natural’ more, some less. You are clearly on one extreme
2. Some people feel this sort of permanent inking is a powerful way to state/express something, whether trivial or fundamental. Others don’t at all
I’m definitely someone incredibly unlikely to have tattoos (except perhaps as part of a group thing e.g. ‘everyone in this regiment gets this tattoo’ or all the actors in the fellowship of the ring getting the same LOTR tattoo). But this is because it doesn’t do anything for me, because I frankly fear permanent decisions, and because I’m uncomfortable with simple ‘this is who I am’ statements of that kind (similarly I don’t wear clothes with slogans/words on to express my identity/personality)
@DavidS:
We agree more than you realize.
I’m not all that extreme. I think it’s fine for members of gangs, tight military regiments, and primitive tribes to get tattoos. But I’ll grant you I am pretty entrenched where I am.
No argument there. Of course it’s a powerful way to express something! I just don’t think expressing something in that way is ever worth the cost (except for the previously mentioned exceptions).
Me too! The only clothes I own with writing or graphics of any kind on them are promotional items I got for free, and I only wear them as pajamas, while doing yardwork, etc.
I totally get how it looks that way. But can’t you at least concede it’s plausible? Suppose I said “it seems like >95% of people suffer from cognitive bias X.” It sounds like an incredible statement and your impulse might be to respond “No, you’re probably the one with the problem,” but humans DO suffer from cognitive biases all the time! Basically all of us! I don’t think it’s that farfetched to say most humans suffer from a kind of body dysmorphia that makes them see their bodies as incomplete works requiring finishing touches in the form of piercings, tattoos, etc. After all, it took a major religion and its world-conquering offshoot to reverse that pattern, and after a mere few thousand years (a blip in human history) it’s already losing its influence to prevent people from tattooing themselves.
Are you arguing some common definition of body dysmorphia applies to the desire for tattoos, piercing, etc, or are you redefining “body dysmorphia” to include tattoos, piercings, etc ? What information do you think you’re adding by pathologizing their preferences? We already know some people like getting tattoos and think they look good.
For comparison, here is the mayo clinic’s short description of body dysmorphic disorder, as diagnosed today:
(emphasis mine)
I was suggesting that the desire for tattoos might be related to some kind of unexamined/undiscovered body dysmorphic disorder. I don’t think it needs to be so extreme that it causes you to have trouble functioning (though how would we know, since tattoos are readily available? I’ve seen otherwise well-behaved teenage girls sneak off behind their mothers’ backs to get tattoos!), so walk back the “disorder” part if you want and just make it “dysmorphia.” When you take the dysfunctional part out, I think the Mayo definition fits pretty well:
Check. Presumably spending a few hundred bucks on a tattoo is a way to alleviate that issue, until it creeps up again and you have to go get another tattoo.
I doubt anyone’s done a study to determine whether/how much people obsess over areas of their bodies they then get tattooed, but that would be interesting to know.
Check.
Another interesting research question: do people treated for body dysmorphia get fewer tattoos after their therapy than people who are otherwise similar but do not undergo therapy?
If you’re taking the “disorder” out of it, then all that’s left is someone who wants to look different than they currently do. The “disorder” is the disordered, irrational, and/or harmful part of the behavior. It’s the obsessive behaviors and negative thoughts, the unrealistic body image. Again, if you’re defining “body dysmorphia” to mean “desires any permanent change to their body for non-functional reasons,” then yes, tattooed people fall under your definition, but it doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know – that some people like tattoos.
I think your reading of the description is inaccurate, or else we disagree considerably on what a typical tattoo-desiring person is like. One of the key components of body dysmorphia is that they are correcting or hiding a (perceived) flaw, not adding something cool. This is a flaw that bothers them, that they obsess over. Do you think people who want tattoos are spending time worried about whatever untattooed skin they have left? This is not the same thing as the “canvas” metaphor you used – the canvas metaphor is someone realizing they have room to improve, to customize, to express themselves, and getting excited about it. Body dysmorphia is finding stains on your canvas and having to add some paint or plaster to cover them up – only you can’t, because the stains are in your head, or because you pore over every inch of the canvas looking for tiny stains no one else would notice. It’s panic, anxiety, shame. It’s the difference between exercising because you think everyone’s laughing at your slightly-untoned left calf and exercising because you think it’s cool to look ripped at the beach.
It would not greatly surprise me if some people with many tattoos used it as a coping mechanism for body dysmorphia, but I would contend that the typical tattooed person does not fit that description.
Surely there’s something in between “normal healthy functioning” and “disorder that keeps you from any semblance of healthy functioning.” Just like there’s something between “I just go to the gym to stay in shape” and “OMG everyone notices my slightly less than award-winning calf muscles, I’d better go do a thousand reps of ankle raises at maximum weight, right after I inject these steroids.”
I’ve met women who always seem to think they’re 5-10 lbs over weight when they look healthy-slim to everyone else. It doesn’t mean they’re throwing up after every meal or even going on and on about it all the time, but it is a dismorphia that’s pretty obvious after hanging around them for a week, and maybe they devote more time to trying to lose weight than they really need to.
Spending a couple hundred bucks on a tattoo isn’t exactly elective amputation, but it is a sizable investment in a permanent and fairly invasive cosmetic alteration, which in turn suggests that “my skin requires improvement over its natural state” is held as a notion by the would-be tattooee. In fact it goes beyond just “my skin has room to improve,” because it adds “and I am willing to pay lots of money, and other non-monetary costs, to improve it, without the possibility of going back if I don’t like the outcome.”
(emphasis mine)
No, I don’t think that follows. You’re listing factors that increase the cost of a tattoo, but someone can think those costs are worth paying without having an inaccurate image of their body that “requires” a tattoo. People spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on frivolous things all the time, even things that will make other subcultures look at them askance.
I ask you again, what is the difference (if any) between your model of a tattoo-desiring person as having body dysmorphia, and the common model of someone who thinks tattoos look neat and decides to get one permanently etched on their skin?
What is the “disorder” or inaccuracy you see in their thoughts besides “they think tattoos look good and I think tattoos look bad”?
To see the skin as a blank canvas must indicate some kind of body dysmorphic disorder because the skin simply isn’t a blank canvas.
What specifically do you mean by that? I’m not trying to be difficult, but it really doesn’t seem different from “they think tattoos look good.”
That is, I’m inferring you mean something like “they think skin can look better with certain tattoos on it,” rather than “they think skin is literally canvas,” or “they are incapable of perceiving visual features present on the skin.”
I’ve responded in the new OT.
Couldn’t a nudist make a similar argument about people wearing clothes?
We wear clothes because our skin is insufficient in some provable way (i.e. fails to protect us sufficiently from cold weather found even not that far outside equatorial latitudes, from the sun, from rough surfaces and pointy objects, etc.).
I’d take this hypothetical nudist more seriously if he was also arguing that humans should only live in a narrow band of latitudes near the equator, in shady forested areas where there are no thorny plants, rough-barked trees, or sharp rocks.
How big of a tattoo is it? It’s one thing if it covers the entire forearm. But if it’s something that is relatively small then I don’t see why it should bother you so much.
I suppose it’s related to my personality type? In a Johnathan Haidt moral foundations sense I’d lean heavily, heavily towards sacredness (purity) over degradation. My wife is very girl-next-door cute, blonde, blue eyes, bubbly. She’s the exact type of innocent, wholesome beauty that I find most attractive. A tattoo ruins that package, regardless of size.
If you take a decoration in your house, love it or hate it, it eventually fades in to the background for most people. As long as it’s not too outlandish, I think you’ll get used to it sooner than you think.
Is there a way of saying this to your wife that would work (maybe you have)? Some version of “You are just so perfect the way you are, the exact type of innocent, wholesome beauty that I find most attractive, and a tattoo messes with that.”
Yes, I should have gone with this argument last night. But it was late, and I was kind of blindsided by the whole thing.
It may help evaluate the situation if you told us what words she was considering.
It wouldn’t. They’re entirely unoffensive and just a personal aspirational motto.
Can she get it as a temporary tatoo first?
Please tell me it’s some sort of “Live. Laugh. Love.” nonsense
No, it’s not insipid. It’s perfectly reasonable, but for some reason I don’t feel like sharing it. Feels personal I guess? But I like fortaleza84’s solution: I’m getting it engraved on a gold bracelet for her.
Eeks.
I have a “choose your battles carefully” philosophy for these things.
I can’t give any specific advise though.
Conrad Honcho,
I respect that you’re not sharing your wife’s phrase.
Aside from issues about privacy, if you quoted it here, there’d be discussion of whether it’s a good phrase of not, and that would be tiresome and distracting.
I was assuming we all thought it was this
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DJOCxzCXUAAWCH0.jpg
My guess is:
Ash nazg thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.
And no, that is not ROT13.
Was the tattoo specified to be on her finger?
That’s actually kind of a cool idea, but it’s impossible to get script that small that won’t fade to unreadability in a year or two.
I think that you’re wrong but in the direction of being too lenient not too harsh.
(I’m not married, and obviously I’m not married to your wife, so take this with a giant block of salt.)
A tattoo isn’t like a bad haircut. It’s permanent unless you get an expensive and painful procedure to remove it.
Do you want your daughter or daughters to look at her and think that it’s okay to get tattoos? Do you want your son or sons to look at her and think that it’s okay to marry a woman with tattoos? Because those are the stakes.
Personally I wouldn’t allow my girlfriend to get a tattoo: if she did, she would cease to be my girlfriend. Divorce is probably going too far in your case but there would need to be serious consequences of some kind.
That is a very good point.
Are you guys serious?
I think ‘Honey, I personally just have a problem with tattoos and I’d much rather you didn’t get one’ is something many people would respect. But this is a really bizarre thing to get super-judgemental about. I mean, of course it’s OK to get tattoos. Of course it’s OK to marry people with tattoos. We’ve suddenly moved from ‘this is personal taste’ to ‘everyone who disagrees with my personal taste is scum’ (actually, it’s not sudden, we started with ‘trashy, low-class, degenerate’)
That’s just, like, your opinion, man.
Well from this
I completely understand this is a matter of subjective taste, and there are others who think tattoos are sexy. Great for them! But I do not share this opinion.
I’d have thought it was OP’s opinion too. I personally don’t like peanut butter: if my son does or marries someone who does, I’ll live with it. I even let my wife eat it!!!!!
Either Anonymous is a psychic or I’m extremely unoriginal. I was going to employ the same Big Lebowski quote myself.
Stated less pithily, this is a question of different values.
I strongly value health and bodily integrity. I also believe that you are your body in every meaningful way: there is no external disembodied self.
Body modification is a complete rejection of that philosophy. It says, “I will mutilate and destroy my body, my self, in order to send a message about my identity.” I categorically reject tattooing, male and female circumcision, scarification, gauges, and most piercings. The fact that our culture is so in favor of it disgusts and alarms me.
Well, I also think tattoos signal “I make poor life choices.” This does not mean everyone with tattoos makes poor life choices. My wife has not made poor life choices, and she wouldn’t start making poor life choices if she got a tattoo. It’s a good heuristic though, but as we all know those only work until they don’t.
Also keep in mind I’m the same weirdo on this blog who doesn’t want his kids to see gay pride parades or TV/movies that portray homosexuality as normal because I think they increase the chance your kids grow up to engage in the homosexual lifestyle, which is suboptimal in terms of positive life outcomes. “I don’t want my daughter getting a tattoo nor do I want my son marrying a girl with a tattoo, and their mother having a tattoo normalizes this for them” is right in line with my parenting strategy.
Why not all piercings? And how do you feel about someone with a fake hip or screws in their knees? What about someone who loses an adult tooth and gets it replaced with a fake?
Don’t you think there’s a huge difference between “body repair” and “body modification” or “body mutilation?”
Because if I made “no earrings” a requirement then I might as well join a monastery. There are still a fair number of women without tattoos but essentially zero without pierced ears.
As for people with protheses of any kind I don’t have anything against them. They didn’t choose to lose their teeth or have joints give out, they’re making the best of a bad situation. It’s just not something that I would inflict on a healthy person.
No. Especially not in the case of a missing tooth. No one needs all their teeth. If you’re only missing one you get it replaced for purely cosmetic reasons.
So if everyone on the planet got tattoos tomorrow your mind would be instantly changed?
That would at least have the advantage of tattoos ceasing to be a marker of Bad Stuff You Do Not Want In Your Spouse. Though I doubt it would change his mind on what’s attractive.
If the only thing you have against tattoos is that they raise your estimation of an individual’s likelihood to do Bad Stuff, then what’s the problem with a wife or child who presumably has already been vetted and doesn’t do any of that other Bad Stuff getting one?
Young people in love are stupid and rationalize away all sorts of bad behavior/attributes. The point of following the heuristic is to avoid falling in love with high-risk individuals. Ever tried to talk a friend out of a relationship? It does not work well.
@Fahundo
Many people don’t really know their spouses, or children, especially by the time they’re teenagers. An out of character action can lead to suspicion of there being a can of worms that just has started leaking.
Sounds like a bigger problem that wouldn’t be solved by forbidding them from getting tattoos.
@Anon
He says he’s known her over a decade. I would hope that he knows her by now.
@Fahundo,
Are you familiar with the idea of circles of control and circles of concern? The terminology is from 7 habits of highly effective people but the idea is pretty ancient.
Basically, I try not to stress out over things which I can’t control. Doing otherwise is a perfect recipe for neuroses.
I can try to order my own life and my small corner of the world. But I can’t bring order to society or the whole world.
I like to take this a step further. I prefer not to stress about things I can control, but have no good reason to.
This is a bit less than the level as if my wife suddenly decided she needed to take up smoking to look cool. I wouldn’t divorce her or anything, but I’d be pissed.
I have a revulsion reaction to tattoos like Conrad does. You might see it as an aesthetic choice like changing your clothes, or earrings, or hair color, but those of who don’t like tattoos, really don’t like tattoos. It is a visceral disgust.
You have just told me that neither my wife nor my daughter exists.
@DavidFriedman,
No, I didn’t. I specifically hedged by saying that there were essentially none.
This is also a really annoying argumentative style by the way. Your family is exceptional in a lot of ways and that’s a good thing. But the flip side of that is that they’re often the exception to the societal trends we’re talking about.
@Nabil
I think you are mis-interpreting it as an argument, rather than a way to express uniqueness (like a tattoo?)
@Nabil:
I see you have met David Friedman.
@Nabil:
I was trying to suggest that the world is less uniform than you assume.
Honcho: have you considered the hypothesis that she wants to start making bad life choices – as in “choices that will be bad for *your* life”? Also, do you have children?
We all like to jump in when we are the exception to the norm. A survey on percent of ears pierced would have shown how uniform it is. One personal data point does not.
In the absence of statistical data, personal data is what we have–so far as I know, it was what the original claim I was challenging was based on.
The comment by DavidS suggests that there is more than one datum contrary to the view that practically all women have pierced ears.
On a brief search for statistical data, I find:
It’s not clear how reliable that figure is, but would you agree that 10 to 20 percent of women isn’t “essentially zero”?
Sure. Will you agree that you really didn’t care about arguing about Nabil’s mate pool?
@meh:
Of course. My point was that I thought he was expressing an incorrect factual belief.
@A Definite Beta Guy: aesthetic can be strong! My point is more that a bit of humility is helpful, as this is ‘can you do me this favour as I have a non-rational aversion’.
In general I think the quest to turn ‘my preference’ into ‘the objectively right thing’ is a problem in a lot of relationships.
PS: on the tattoos/earrings: I’m a 30-ish middle class white Brit living round London. Thinking of my female friends I’m not sure more have pierced ears than tattoos (and of course I wouldn’t necessarily know about the latter). Neither are ubiquitous, neither at all uncommon.
Re: tattoos/earrings – I have unpierced ears and as far as I can tell, it is rare but within the Overton Window among my friends/community, ie nobody has tried to pressure me out of it/told me I was being childish or needed to see a psychologist/etc. about it (which is what I would expect to happen if it were outside the Overton Window). Mostly I’ve gotten “Huh, okay,” or “Yeah, okay, that makes sense,” or “that’s odd, but okay.” As was pointed out above, I am not normal, but my friends may be more so.
Less than half of my friends have tattoos. Disapproving of them would probably get hostility – how is that any of my business? – but not wanting one is still treated as perfectly reasonable, not even particularly odd, and the majority of people don’t have them.
My sister had her ears pierced at some point, but let them close up again. Some time late in college (long ago now) she went to a field school in Costa Rica to do some primatology observation/research with a bunch of other students, and apparently a large majority of the other girls (mostly rather well-off Ivy-League types) had piercings of one kind or another–all of which proceeded to get infected as they hung around in a tropical rainforest 12 hours a day, waded through swamps, etc.
I think this really depends on the person. Some people like the ‘I want to shield you from all the roughness and complexity of the world’ schtick. Some find it patronising.
I really think the best approach here is not trying to win or prove you’re ‘right’ about whether she should have a tattoo – as OP says, it’s personal taste. So much less combatitive to just say you’d prefer it.
I got the impression that he had made his feelings clear about tattoos before she considered getting one, so in that situation it would be difficult to walk back prior comments.
Yes, this is the case. And we’re talking, oh, over a decade of her hearing this sort of thing from me. The only things she had ever said before were along the lines of “if I were to get a tattoo, this is what I’d get…” This is the first time she ever said she was actually thinking of doing it. Kind of a “if I still want it in five years maybe I’ll do it” thing. And she brought that up after hearing me make negative comments about the tattoos on someone on TV. It was not a case of her bringing up a tattoo and then me jumping on her.
FWIW, I share your distaste for tattoos. It wouldn’t be a dealbreaker for me, but I’d prefer no tattoo.
Have you pointed out that in the history of humanity, no sight–no distant vista, setting sun, or tended garden–has captivated men’s attention more than that of female flesh? Nothing has so inspired sonnets or deeds of great heroism, and she thinks she can improve that with some words of ink?
(Which may, in fact, be the second most captivating sight, mind, but generally only in paragraphs at a time. Maybe as a compromise she could get a few pages from your favorite book as well?)
Joking aside, can we assume that your wife cares about you being attracted to her? Early in my marriage I heard the most jaw dropping statement from my wife, that she felt she shouldn’t or shouldn’t bother to take as good care of herself (I think in the context of losing weight) now in order not to be so attractive to other men. I had to enlighten her that not only did I still appreciate attractiveness in a spouse, but some part of my esteem among other men was in having an attractive wife.
Have you asked you wife to consider what priority she should place on pleasing her husband aesthetically vs advertising that particular value or saying to passers-by? Especially when she can achieve it by abstaining from something simple.
Still, you’re swimming against the currents. For example, most of the female relations I have are people of coloring-upon.
How old are you? I’m in my 40s. Tattoos on women are usually unattractive. Not always, but usually. (Forearm tattoos especially, ugh.) But I keep it to myself. Lots of women I like have them, especially younger ones. It’s too bad that they became just the coolest thing, but they did.
Of course it’s different when it’s your wife. (My wife had an ankle tattoo when we got married, which never really bothered me, but if she wanted a forearm tattoo boy I’d try to talk her out of it.)
I’d look for a compromise. A bracelet sounds great, I wouldn’t have thought of that. If a tattoo was inevitable, I’d be a lot less put off by a shoulder tattoo than one on the forearm, but that might just be me.
Calling things degenerate is degenerate (not joking).
That’s a bridge too far.
A murderer is degenerate. Really, this statement isn’t strong enough.
It is not degenerate to say that murderer is degenerate.
Or if I wasn’t serious, I’d say “this matrix is degenerate” is not a degenerate statement, but obviously that’s not the same thing.
You’re degenerate.
Flagged, reported, called the cops.
Help, help, I’m being oppressed!
Not being able to call degenerate things degenerate explains a good deal of degeneracy.
You can point out degeneracy without being degenerate! It’s the word specifically that’s degenerate. Calling things immoral, unnatural and sinful has a long conservative tradition behind it; referring to degeneracy was made popular by spiritualist atheists, rootless Zionist agnostics, and these guys.
You could have been clear the first time. Besides, while I think “immoral” should be accepted in some contexts it currently isn’t [and feel free to use “sinful”], “unnatural” is BS, and none of those applies to anything that just suggests people becoming weaker (say, of mind). “Degenerate” is fine.
This is the worst argument against using a word I have ever heard that didn’t fall into complete incoherency on the level of “fargle the pancake green wingwozzles”. This is like saying I should stop using the word “oppression” because it’s used in stupid and terrible ways by marxist nutjobs. Or like saying I shouldn’t use any terms from Nietzsche because the Nazis were kind of in to him.
EDIT: Just checked that your third link is literally Nazis. I seriously can’t tell if you’re serious or just joking by intentionally using the literal worst argument in the world and Godwinning in the first post you’ve bothered to make an argument in.
I never said degeneracy was bad! (If I thought it was, I wouldn’t have called you degenerate)
I think you’re misunderstanding my intentions here.
@ rlms
Still can’t tell if joking. Leaning towards it now. But you’re clearly not making a joke about eigenvalues or something. And all the other possible denotations of “degenerate” that I am familiar with are obvious insults. And none of them apply to using words that Nazis happened to use. And googling doesn’t show me any that aren’t insults either.
Some people use “degenerate” to describe a cluster of properties that they consider negative. I agree that some of those properties are bad, but not all: there is nothing wrong with atheism, homosexuality etc. I brought up the Nazis not because they’re bad, but because they’re degenerate (the two are orthogonal).
How do you, rlms, define “degeneracy?”
I love reading the word “degenerate”.
It reminds me of the possibility of beauty and excellence.
But, yes, you’re probably right.
Probably a shit test.
Probably the not-really-reversible result of failing many.
Possibly, a bunch of those (almost certainly not all) were hearing, multiple times, after expressing a preference against it, “if I were to get a tattoo” and doing nothing.
I’m alarmed by some of these responses.
Modifying preference to conform to social norms, where those social norms are justified entirely with reference to personal preference is chaotic and mad.
That’s how we end up as slugs, or writhing dick monsters, or something similar. Behave yourselves.
Anyway, the issue.
The answer is compromise. Sometimes you have to get used to the annoying things people do – but if you want to maintain a happy relationship, without domination, there has to be at least the appearance of a compromise.
So, the compromise shouldn’t be “I do it and you get used to it”. It should be something like, “I will make this extra effort in your preferred direction even though I can’t get all the way there. I’m trying.”
The compromise in this case is that she should write this important message on her arm each morning with a biro. Get a stencil or something.
In fact, writing it each morning shows a greater dedication to the message – it can become a ritual.
I wouldn’t call this a bad idea, but I’m doubtful on whether she still cares about any idea he has (except possibly to go against it).
There may not be anything to be done about your seeing tattoos as ugly, but I think your associating tattoos with being low class is out of date.
Tattoos are probably not upper class, but especially for people below a certain age, they’re sort of middle class. I expect to see more opinions here about tattoos, class, and cohort.
These days, I think tattoos are as much about conspicuous consumption as they are about personal expression, or at least a lot of tattoos look vaguely similar to each other.
I agree with this. I know a whole lot of upper-middle class people that have one fairly small and tasteful tattoo. Increasingly popular among the under-40 crowd.
So everyone is focusing a lot on the “shithole” part because of the vulgarity, but I found the next exchange more informative:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-referred-haiti-african-countries-shithole-nations-n836946
Is there any reasonable read of that exchange where “it would be obvious why” doesn’t mean “it would be obvious you only want to expel the non-white immigrants”? Especially combined with the Norway bit?
I think your reading is more likely. However, I think we can fill the rest of the statement in fairly accurately and see that there is ambiguity in meaning.
“It would be obvious why [you want these Haitians in]”
There are lots of potential reasons why you would want the Haitians in the bill. They are good people. They contribute to the economy. Bad things happen if you send them back. Etc.
The whole world will spend time talking about the shithole comment, and everyone will be distracted from any substance. If Trump could also do substance, he would be *terrifyingly* effective in our current media/political environment.
Trump spews chaff, to be sure.
But he constantly spews nothing but chaff. This isn’t a considered strategy to distract from something. Not in the way you are contending.
I’m not saying he’s employing it as a strategy, I’m saying if he were capable of doing so (by being good at substance), he’d be very effective, because his constant twitter public-outrage-fest smokescreen would let him get away with just about anything with only people who actually pay attention to the news noticing.
What’s your take on Trump’s level of effectiveness or accomplishments (non-legislative of course) during his first year? I’m not asking if you like what he’s done, but is your impression that he has done much, or that he has done little?
the strategy is in who he chooses to spew chaff at. See, for example, his continual criticism of Kim Jong Un, and not of Assad.
Do these attributes not apply to Norwegians as well?
I guess the “bad things happen if you send them back” doesn’t, but keep in mind, Trump sees immigration from the point of view of “We should only allow it if it benefits the US,” not as some sort of humanitarian charity program to better the lives of non-citizens.
Assuming the existence of some sort of hard limit on number of people allowed to immigrate, is it not reasonable to discuss how we should go about prioritizing who is allowed in and who is not?
It seems like this is one of two core pieces of the immigration debate.
What should our immigration policy be trying to do? (Broadly improve the world, broadly improve things for current US citizens and their offspring, broadly improve things for the future US with the prospective immigrants, offer a home to those who need one enough regardless of the impact on current US citizens or the world or the future of the country, etc.)
Assuming we can agree on one of these, we get down to factual questions like “does the current US/future US/world benefit from relatively free immigration of low-wage, low-skill labor from Latin America?” Or the H1B visa program? Or family-based rather than merit-based visas? Or….) One of the stronger arguments to bring up here is that we’ve had a lot of large-scale immigration in the past, and it’s overwhelmingly paid off for us. On the other hand, you can make convincing arguments that some things have changed (jobs for people with few skills are hard to come by and may become even harder to come by in the next couple decades).
A huge amount of public rhetoric, even from pretty smart and otherwise-reasonable people, is pretty fuzzy on (a), in favor of emotional appeals about the well-being of refugees from Syria or Somalia, or nostalgia about Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, or some similar thing.
Right. I agree that (a) is a very important question that we need to answer. It’s a discussion that virtually every mainstream politician and media outlet has gone out of their way to avoid having for decades. And I think, in his own overly belligerent and ham-fisted way, Trump is trying to spur and motivate that discussion.
And instead of having the discussion and engaging him on that question, the media response is “SHUT UP YOU RACIST!”
Trump asked a simple question – why do we want more Hatians as opposed to more Norwegians? And as far as I can tell, all of the outrage media coverage in response has been dedicated to calling him names, and none of it has been dedicated to actually answering his question.
I don’t mind running immigration as a charity program, but I would love it if we acknowledged it as that. It would make us realize there are costs and that it is optional, two things that often are pretended aren’t true.
We have some immigration programs whose purposes are pretty explicitly charitable — most notably the refugee program. Other parts, which collectively make up the overwhelming majority of annual admissions, are clearly not charity nor intended to be. Family reunification, for example, is not about the benefit to the alien, it’s about the benefit to the US relative.
I sort of read it more like this:
Not that I agree with the sentiment, but there is a strong sentiment out there that low-skill immigrants do all sorts of jobs that Americans won’t do, and the country will suffer/grind to a halt without these jobs getting done.
This seems more likely to me when you compare to arguments about seasonal Mexican laborers picking veggies and fruit, where the argument is that we are all gonna go without veggies and fruit if they don’t pick it.
I’m pretty confused how you go to that implied rest of the sentence. I read the exchange as almost precisely the opposite of that.
“Why do we need more Haitians, take them out.”
“Because if you do [take them out of the bill], it will be obvious why [you took them out].”
I’m genuinely confused how you get to your reading, if you could elaborate I would be interested in the thinking that got you there.
It’s obvious that we need Haitian immigrants to reside in the US; if we take them out of the US then every hotel in Florida will have to close for the lack of cleaning ladies, and there will be a massive humanitarian catastrophe in Haiti that we’ll be blamed for and feel bad about.
It’s obvious that we need Haitian immigrants to be included in the bill; if we take them out of the bill, the talking heads on television will accuse our President of being a horrible racist. Er, more than they already do.
Both of these are plausible readings of the statement, both are politically useful but strained on the facts. Trump is immune to accusations of racism, and Florida’s hotels can get their cleaning ladies from Puerto Rico.
@MrApophenia:
Again, I think your reading is most likely correct.
John Schilling’s examples above show how it’s quite possible to read the statement in the way I outlined. You asked if there was “any reasonable way” to read it other than you did, and I was trying to steelman that for you.
Yeah. This exchange changed my view on Trump and racism – prior to this I agreed with Scott that Trump isn’t racist, just signalling red tribe, but it’s hard to see this exchange as anything but “Trump is blatantly racist, but knows better than to say so explicitly”.
Can you elaborate on this? I’m not sure why someone would think Trump is racist because of this, but not when he, say, disparaged Judge Curiel.
Lots of democrats would say something like “after Trump spent all that time insulting mexicans, now he’s up against a judge of mexican heritage. Ha, take that!” This doesn’t seem necessarily racist, just aware of ingroup/outgroup dynamics.
Saying we don’t want any immigrants from lousy african countries sounds like he’s assuming everyone from an african country sucks. I can’t see a reasonable alternate explanation of it.
I think the alternate explanation is that he thinks that it’s even less politically feasible to get a finer-grained filter in place. I can’t see someone with Trump’s general experience believing everyone from sub-saharan Africa is terrible. But if we can’t just take the non-terrible ones and if the terrible/non-terrible ratio is high enough, then yes, banning them all makes sense.
(Just to clarify, I don’t support this logic. I’ve had friends from quite a few countries that would probably be on the ‘terrible/poor’ list, and frankly, the fact that the US didn’t snatch them up is a damning indictment of our immigration system.)
Digressing a bit from the main topic, but that wasn’t the big deal about Judge Curiel. The big deal was that Trump said in an interview, in fairly clear language, that he didn’t think Curiel was able to fairly judge his case because he was of Mexican descent.
Of course, this all occurred simultaneously with the media insisting that people of Mexican descent would refuse to vote for Trump because he favored building a wall.
Yeah, and I doubt Curiel was a Trump voter, too. Not sure what that has to do with his ability to judge whether Trump University was a scam.
Why are we even bothering to go through this exercise of sifting the Trumpian tea leaves for racism? It seems like the same basic idea comes up every couple weeks and I just don’t know what we’re getting out of it.
There seems to be this baseline assumption that if Trump ever says anything unambiguously racist then all right-thinking people will immediately denounce him as Double Hitler and the nightmare will be over, and that seems unrealistic to me.
@Matt: The Trumpian implication people are concerned about is not “(almost) all Mexicans are opposed to the wall” but “Curiel will be unable to separate his feelings about my wall with his factual judgments about my scam university”. No one is saying that Mexicans shouldn’t let their feelings about the wall dictate whether or not they support Trump; I would hardly fault you for not wanting to vote for Trump if your brother pickpocketed someone and Trump’s response was to airlift your entire family to Canada.
Lots of people who voted for Trump disagree with at least one of his policies.
The implication of “supporting the wall automatically means Mexicans won’t vote for you” doesn’t seem that far off from “supporting the wall automatically means that Mexicans will not carefully weigh the pros and cons of your general argument and select the best overall option”
Yes, there’s an argument to be made that Curiel is a professional, and that he is held to a higher standard than the average citizen and we expect him to overcome this sort of bias in his professional capacity as a judge. But overall, I still see the narrative going something like this.
Media: Mexicans hate Trump!
Trump: This guy is a Mexican, how can he judge me fairly if he hates me?
Media: OMG Trump is such a racist for suggesting a Mexican guy might judge him unfairly!!!
There is an argument to be made that thinking someone is prejudiced against your race is a good reason not to vote for them for president, and a bad reason to decide if their university is a scam.
Yes, in theory Mexicans are equally capable as everyone else of deciding that Trump, on the net, is a great president despite his plausible prejudice against Mexicans. But “precommit not to endorse / vote for people who are prejudiced against me” is hardly an unreasonably life strategy.
He said that he doesn’t want the special, non-merit-based, immigration from lousy countries, he said nothing about the regular, merit-based immigration.
This is consistent with him thinking that lousy countries have people who suck on average, but not that everybody in these countries sucks. And he didn’t say all African countries, or talked about black people, so how is his view racist?
Do you think it is racist to believe that in some countries there are people who, on average, suck?
He denies saying it, so I don’t know if it’s true or not.
But that said, I don’t see how saying Haiti is a shithole is racist. I mean, would you want to live in Haiti?
If it wasn’t racist, why would the place being a “shithole” be a reason for not prioritizing immigration, rather than prioritizing it? All things being equal, isn’t it better to provide a route out of shitholes first?
Besides which, you can be more selective about getting the most talented people out of shitholes than out of countries that are already rich.
Depends on whether you believe places are shitholes because the ordinary people living there make them so, or because some aspect of the place (including a small and shitty elite in charge) makes them so. Neither proposition is per se racist; I’m sure conservatives say the same thing about Berkeley…
Haiti isn’t a “shithole” because of the climate.
Unless you think the ground of haiti is literally cursed (after all, they did once make a deal with the devil) then there are reasons that haiti is a shithole that have something to do with the qualities of the people that live there. Some of those qualities are racial (95% of the population is of primarily african ancestry) other are not (their culture is descended from people who literally made a deal with the devil!).
You can think Haiti’s problems are inherent in its people, perhaps genetically burned in, and that’s conceivable[1]. But you can also think it’s inherent in the culture or widespread beliefs of its people, or its institutions, or just some set of self-sustaining destructive social patterns that keep it poor and nasty and awful.
We have a bunch of worked examples where impoverished superstitious warlord-ridden shitholes pulled themselves out of poverty and became, say, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, China, etc. So it’s clearly possible for a country to be a mess for a long time in ways that can change rapidly for the better. This is, in fact, one of the strongest arguments against a kind of h.bd determinism w.r.t. nations–lots of countries that looked almost as screwed up as Haiti turned things around and ended up as pretty decent places to live.
[1] Though I kinda doubt Haiti is so genetically different from the rest of the Caribbean that this is a good description of reality.
Why is the purpose of US immigration policy to provide routes out of shitholes? “The People” in “government of, by, and for The People” is me, not foreigners in shitholes.
People from shitholes tend to have a lot of problems, like poor education, poor health, etc. I don’t see how moving them in next door to me makes my life better, and is not something I’d like the government that’s supposed to be acting in my interests to do.
If your objective is to use America as a charity to make lives better for non-Americans, then yeah, sure.
If your objective is to maximize American greatness (again), then no, that’s clearly a terrible idea.
It’s not declaring Haiti as a shithole which provides evidence for Trump being a racist; Haiti is undoubtedly a shithole. It’s declaring, as he has been reported, African nations (along with Haiti) as shitholes, and contrasting them with Norway. This is not proof but the first really good evidence I’ve seen that Trump is racist against blacks.
That’s more of a problem with the way the news presents Africa. There are some nicer sections of Africa, but all you hear about it is death and destruction. Which isn’t unfair, because Africa has more than its fair share of human misery.
Africa has more than it’s share of misery, but also it’s far away and news reporting from faraway places is almost always about disorder and misery.
Nicer compared to what? Are there any major cities in Africa that are nicer than the nicest cities of Norway?
Note that this is a legitimate question – I readily admit that I am largely ignorant of Africa in general.
@HeelBearCub
And?
@Matt M
I’d be skeptical of there being any African city that was nicer than the worst city of Norway. (If you compared sub-city entities, such as neighbourhoods, I might be willing to believe it. Places like Grønland, Furuset and Stovner are well-colonized by foreigners, and there might be superior places to live in South Africa somewhere.)
@The Nybbler:
I thought you generally put more consideration in your posts than that.
First off shanty and hut aren’t the same thing. Plenty of shanty towns in the US.
But also, shanties or huts merely existing has no relevance to whether the average Nigerian entering the US lived in such a dwelling.
@Anonymous: I think you’re underestimating the weight many people put on climate. I know many people who claim they can’t deal with Boston, for gods sake.
I can’t judge Africa, as the only African city I’ve ever been to was Cairo, which was moderately shitty. Definitely dirty. They were still on (or were just coming off of?) leaded gasoline at the time. Every building was covered in soot or dirt. You’d get back to the hotel room and blow your nose and it was black.
But I’ve been to the Dominican Republic, and that was a shithole, and if that’s the nice half of Hispaniola, then I can say with high confidence that Haiti qualifies as a shithole.
@skef
It doesn’t help, but there are places with climate similar to Haiti that aren’t shitholes. Hong Kong and Singapore have similar climates and aren’t shitholes. Climate is not something that can’t be overcome.
@Anonymous, I was just responding to this:
Absent immigration limitations, plenty of people are going to be happy to give Nairobi a try after a couple Oslo winters. “Nicer (in the abstract)” is a pretty meaningless measure.
(re)edit: Looking into it a bit more, by what standard would Trondheim, for example, be more than a backwater in comparison to Nairobi?
@skef
Oslo isn’t even particularly cold. It’s the same climate as northern Germany or Poland.
@HeelBearCub
I do not think the difference between a shanty, a shack, and a hut is relevant. I’ve seen Mexican huts which are nicer than those shanties anyway. I don’t know which Nigerians Trump was talking about, but if he meant refugees, I’d expect them to be going back to substandard housing.
Probably by the standard that Norway’s entire population is only somewhat larger than just the population of Nairobi.
Worse than Boston, but I take your point. At the same time, there are a number of cities much farther north.
(@Anonymous: I reedited to get my point the right way around.)
@skef
Homicide rate and crime in general, for instance. Kenyan homicide rate is an order of magnitude higher than Norway’s (merely 3x higher if you think Breivik should be counted).
By that standard Trondheim beats out New York City. I’m sure plenty of people would prefer living in Trondheim to living in New York City, but would anyone really judge it a better (or nicer) city?
(Or compare with Chicago or Houston, if you prefer.)
@skef
I haven’t actually lived in Trondheim, and probably couldn’t understand trondese, but even so I’d definitely favour it over New York for a bunch of reasons, of which crime rates are certainly one.
@Anonymous: As would anyone else who doesn’t like cities and prefers something akin to a suburb.
This just demonstrates that “shithole” and “backwater” have different meanings. Backwaters are boring and no one remembers they even exist, whereas shitholes lack basic amenities (any or all of stable food supply, plumbing, electricity, competent law enforcement, public hygiene, etc – the more missing, the more of a shithole it is). A place can even be a backwater shithole.
So Trondheim is certainly more of a backwater than NYC, while by some measures (crime, dirtiness) NYC is more of a shithole.
@Brad
What causes a man to become an ankle-biter? Lust for gold? Power? Or are they just born with a heart full of insecurity?
@The Nybbler:
But the sentence “They will never go back to their huts in Africa once they have seen America” can’t be reasonably read as referring to urban shanty towns. It’s a “How you going to keep ’em down on the farm, once they’ve seen gay Paris” line. It’s a statement of contempt for “backwards” rural areas. It does not contemplate the idea of the impoverished living within sight of opulence.
Otherwise, merely seeing the US wouldn’t be the thing that kept them here.
I don’t really see how you can be ok with calling Haiti a “shithole” but then balk at Africa being called the same. Even if you don’t take the entire continent as a whole, the richest African nations are still very poor with high crime and AIDs rates.
Equatorial Guinea has the highest per capita GDP in Africa, and it’s like half of Mississippi’s, and I’ve definitely seen Mississippi called a shithole.
@ Conrad:
I’ve been to South Africa, and I certainly wouldn’t want to live there for any long period of time. Everything was covered in barbed wire to keep burglars out, so after a while it started feeling like I was living in a warzone. Once in Durban I saw a guy getting lynched in the street, and this was in one of the nicer parts of the city.
I bet Saint-Denis, Réunion and Victoria, Seychelles are nicer than the worst city in Norway.
@rlms
No objection here. I accept that Réunion and Seychelles are probably not shitholes. But they’re also not quite what “Africa” means in common parlance, even if possibly technically correct, at least as far as continental classification is concerned. Réunion is also France, and as long as we’re talking countries, and France is not a shithole.
Saying Haiti is a shithole isn’t racist. Saying we should stop letting immigrants from black countries in, in favor of immigrants from white countries, sure looks a lot closer to fitting the criteria, though.
So much so that someone in the room apparently said as much in response.
Is seeing any aggregate difference between races racist?
We’re not talking about “seeing aggregate differences,” we’re talking about saying in fairly plain language that we should favor white immigrants over black ones, then proceeding to set policy accordingly.
And yes, that is obviously racist. It would be hard to think of a clearer example of racism.
I would consider judging individuals according to those aggregate differences racist. Not everyone agrees.
But the standard is “not from shithole country” and not “isn’t black.” I don’t think that’s racist.
Right, and “shithole country” just happens to be defined as Haiti plus Africa.
@MrApophenia
And I’m trying to figure out why a reasonable person might adopt such a policy. What’s the difference between white immigrants and black immigrants, such that the distinction is useful for deciding which group of immigrants to favour?
I see.
I get that you’re trying to wink-wink nudge nudge your way into a banned topic, I just don’t feel like humoring you. Deciding legal policy based on race is racist (and illegal), even if you think you have a cool, edgy acronym theory that says it makes perfect sense.
@MrApophenia
We’ve been in the supposedly banned topic for this entire thread.
What I’m trying to do is to understand your viewpoint. Which I find hard, given your earlier statement that noticing things that may or may not be true is morally wrong.
The topic isn’t banned, the phrase is, to make it harder to find this blog by Googling it.
But bringing the topic up might still be stupid, because it tends to shed more heat than light.
I would put money on Trump considering all sorts of other countries to be shitholes. Maybe Latin America, maybe SEA, maybe Eastern Europe, almost certainly Middle East…
I’d suggest that if you think the best explanation of Trump’s statements is the Banned Acronym, we actually pretty much agree entirely on what is driving Trump here. You’re just cool with it, and I’m not.
Is your argument that Haiti isn’t shitty compared to Norway?
It’s not Trump’s fault that European countries are highly developed and African ones aren’t.
Fair enough. I have a somewhat lower opinion on Trump’s being familiar with the statistical sciences in that regard, but don’t see much against the notion that he’s got roughly the same idea in a pedestrian way. After all, he’s really old. This stuff used to be mainstream in the distant past of the previous century.
To be fair, it’s not like he was saying we needed more Albanians coming in. He picked one of the richest, safest countries in the world to use as an example of desirable immigrants.
If anything, I would consider his comments classist, not racist.
Right. There are a lot of ways Norway differs from Haiti. Typical skin tone of citizens is one of those, but it sure as hell isn’t the only one…
So far as a genetic racial argument is concerned, there are a lot of West Indian immigrants and they seem to do pretty well–I think Sowell, in Ethnic America, says they reach the median US family income in one generation. I don’t think we know whether Trump would be opposed to letting them in or not.
I don’t think it is racist to argue that we are better off with immigrants from more successful societies–better education, health care, lower crime rates, and the like. I’m not sure it’s true—a lot of the mass immigration a century+ ago was from very poor places—but it isn’t racist. At the moment Haiti and most of Africa qualify as particularly unsuccessful societies.
You can call a place a shithole, or you can call it other words, such as ‘suffering’, ‘hit hard’, ‘hurting’, etc. You call people you like from ‘hurting’ places, and people you don’t from ‘shitholes’. I don’t think it’s inherently racist, it just shows preferences. When those seem to align with race it then gets called racist.
You can even restrict to US areas. Listen to how one might refer to poor rust belt, mining, or rural areas vs. poor urban areas.
I guess I don’t see much reason for change.
In private conversation among my circle of acquaintance, it wouldn’t be shocking to hear someone describe Haiti, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Venezuela, etc., as hell-holes or shit-holes. That’s not the kind of talk you want from a leader, in general, but the sentiment isn’t crazy. A lot of countries are really awful places where there’s a lot of poverty and corruption and dysfunction and war, and colloquially calling them shitholes isn’t all that shocking.
And the underlying question of what countries we’d do better accepting immigrants from is worth asking. We’re probably going to do better overall with Norwegian immigrants than Haitian ones, in terms of how the immigrants will do economically and academically and such. (Though I think Haitian immigrants actually do pretty well here in the US, so maybe not.) People making our immigration policy shouldn’t call poor countries shitholes in public, but they definitely should be asking about whether some countries are a lot better places to get immigrants from than other countries.
A more accurate version of this than thinking in terms of selecting which immigrants we want from each country, based on their skills, qualifications, history, health, etc. We probably benefit more from the French-educated Haitian engineer coming here than from the perpetually-unemployed Norwegian welfare recipient.
But again, all this requires thinking through what our goals are w.r.t. immigration policy.
To clarify, what made me change my mind isn’t his referring to countries as shitholes, it’s his conclusion that we don’t want immigrants from poor countries. By far the most likely reasoning behind this is that he assumes citizens of these countries are pretty much all the same, and their quality determines their country’s success (he didn’t make any room for the people who come to America being above the baseline, which is what happens in practice). Hard to read that as non-racism.
,
That or he’s aware of the concept of “averages”.
Would anyone dispute this assertion?
If the people that come to the US are above average, then it’s still be better to get people from countries where the average is higher.
Also, regression to the mean is a thing.
What that he has ever said or done gives you the idea that he has? A steelman is supposed to be a tool for coming up with the best version of your ideological opponent’s arguments, not for deluding yourself about the intellectual abilities of your allies.
@Brad
I don’t like trump, and I certainly don’t consider him an ally, but I grow tired of the incessant baseless and hyperbolic complaining about him that attempts to pass for serious analysis. If you think that trump is incapable of the thought “shitty countries are shitty because the people that live there are, on average, more shitty than people in non shitty countries” then it’s not me that’s deluding myself about anyone’s intellectual abilities.
You could have fooled me.
@Brad
Then you might want to reconsider some of your priors and assumptions.
Actually, I have pretty much the opposite reaction. Your entire quote said nothing about the race of the citizens in these poor countries, until the last word. The way you put it I find it very hard to read as racism. Maybe you are right that Trump shouldn’t consider people from a shit hole country to be shit hole people, but you are doing the same thing as previous people who said he was racist. “He is doing this thing that is bad or unethical, and racism is bad or unethical, so he must be racist.”
Yes, his examples of shit hole countries correlate with Black countries. But the problem is that hellhole countries do correlate with Black countries. If one were to honestly come up with the poorest countries in the world, and not consider race, Haiti and most of Africa would be a likely result. It was not at all politically correct or astute to use those examples, but this is Trump we are talking about. He is very stupid in some ways, but still I have seen little evidence of racism.
Scott on the Haitians:
“It has proven hard for me to appreciate exactly how confused the Haitians are about some things. Gail, our program director, explained that she has a lot of trouble with her Haitian office staff because they don’t understand the concept of sorting numerically. Not just “they don’t want to do it” or “it never occurred to them”, but after months and months of attempted explanation they don’t understand that sorting alphabetically or numerically is even a thing. Not only has this messed up her office work, but it makes dealing with the Haitian bureaucracy – harrowing at the best of times – positively unbearable.
Gail told the story of the time she asked a city office for some paperwork regarding Doctors Without Borders. The local official took out a drawer full of paperwork and looked through every single paper individually to see if it was the one she wanted. Then he started looking for the next drawer. After five hours, the official finally said that the paper wasn’t in his office.”
Whether you think that this sort of “cognitive peculiarity” is caused by the Banned Topic, or childhood malnutrition, or a curse by the Devil, or anything else, do you think it has anything causal effect on Haiti being a shithole?
Can you imagine these people running a developed society, with functional government agencies and private companies larger than mom and pop shops? And if they were imported in the US, without any filter, what kind of jobs would they able to hold?
Are these observations racist?
I don’t think so. If I’ve correctly understood the context he was talking about the visa lottery, which assigns visas at random to applicants from any country that has less than some number of immigrants. A low average quality of the population is a good argument against assigning visas at random although not a good argument against assigning them selectively–to members of that population who are not of low quality in whatever respects are relevant.
As it happens Haitians are not eligible because we already have more than the required number of immigrants from Haiti.
Retail. They work retail. That is, similarly intellectually endowed people exist already in the US, and you’ll find them at your local hamburger establishment, unable to make change for $12.53 on a $10.53 tab without the cash register.
Stefan Molyneux just did a Youtube video comparing this discussion to the history of germ theory. That back in the day, a lot of people believed in the “miasma theory” of illness. That people got sick because of “bad air” or what have you. A particular location was making someone sick, so if you took that person out of that location and brought them to a place with “good air” they’d get better.
Of course, what germ theory teaches us is that no, it’s the person who is sick, not the place. Taking a sick person and placing them in a new environment full of healthy people won’t really make the sick person better, but it will make all of the healthy people sick.
A whole lot of people seem to be treating noticeable differences in human development in various countries as if the miasma theory is still in play. Countries are bad for no particular reason. If we take the people in bad countries and put them in good countries, surely their lives will get better.
Of course, if the countries aren’t inherently bad… if they are bad because the people are bad… then all you’ll really achieve is making the healthy countries sick.
@Matt M
Wait, what, the most empathetic no. I know nobody who has paid any attention at all to the public discussion around these issues who treats the differences in country outcomes that way.
Usually the current differences are attributed to the social, economic and cultural history of the country; the commonly-given reasons why they persist vary a lot, but common ones include various aspects of culture, bad political institutions, bad educational institutions, and path dependency effects of bad political decisions. Everybody likes to recall how the past one child policy of China created a male-female demographic imbalance and then proceed to speculate what kind of present day consequences it has on Chinese society; or how polygamy creates social instability in various parts of Africa; what kind of effects different religions’ stances on various issues have societies; and so on.
The short answer that most people would answer why some countries are persistently not doing very well because stuff is complicated. I’d assume that even high school graduate not particularly well-versed in social science is bright enough to say that.
To me it sounds like Molyneux is misrepresenting his outgroup’s position to the extent that the word “bullshit” is warranted. Nobody of interest is acting like there’s magical miasma around around Haiti. Only people who I can imagine doing that are people whose knee-jerk reaction would be to attribute it to the race and don’t want to say it aloud but are lazy enough not to research or think about the question at all.
I’d also add that the standard pro-immigration argument is that when individuals from bad countries move emigrate to good countries and integrate in their superior society and learn their ways, then their lives will get better. If they don’t, their lives won’t get better, and that’s a problem to be dealt with. (One basic right-wing argument how that can happen is that they won’t integrate if the society rewards them with social security handouts that alone enable a better standard living than what they had in the bad countries).
I also hate hate hate that I must write out this kind of very very basic position? It isn’t like culture and economy and history and their effects on society are not subjects that we have discussed to death in Moloch-knows-how-many open threads, no, we are back to the fricking square one.
and now I’m at it, let’s add the standard argument of “death spiral of political corruption and terribly structured post-colonialist economy, where corruption enables the continuation of the exploitative economic structure and high profits enjoyed by the landowners / natural resource extractors continue to fuel the local political corruption, which continues to breed overall misery” to the mix, even though it counts as such path-dependency effect.
One can discuss whether such explanations are reflective of the reality, but I simply can’t let a notion pass that such explanations wouldn’t exist and the mainstream political thought is running on magical miasma thinking and only Molyneux dares to ask questions “why some countries are like this”.
@The Nybbler
But Amazon is killing off retail for non-perishable goods, and McDonald’s restaurants are starting to install touchscreens where you can order on your own, avoiding the issue of the idiot cashier messing up your order or your change.
The job prospects of the “diversely smart” aren’t going to be good.
@nimim.k.m.
I don’t know if the inability to grasp the concept of alphanumeric sorting even after the white devils spend months trying to explain it to you can be an aspect of your culture, but even if it is, it’s not like you immediately lose your culture the moment you set foot in another country. It would take a generation or two before your descendents are fully Flynned, in the meantime the country that hosts you has to deal with you.
Well yeah. If you ask someone why Haiti is so much poorer than the Dominican Republic, they won’t claim that the ground in Haiti is cursed by a malevolent God and that the DR is not. They’ll go on a long rant about evil white colonialism or whatever.
But that has little relevance to present-day policy. The fact is, they don’t care why Haiti is worse than the DR. It’s not relevant to them. In their view, a randomly selected immigrant from Haiti has just as much of a chance of being a great and successful American as a randomly selected immigrant from the DR, India, or Norway. To think otherwise is blasphemous.
They wouldn’t say “the ground in Haiti has been cursed by God” but they would say “the political entity of Haiti was made irrevocably poorer by the policies of western colonial powers 200 years ago.” Which, in a very practical sense, is basically the same thing. Appeals to some vaguely-defined third-party power in the past of which nothing can be done to rectify the situation other than “move them to somewhere not cursed/destroyed by colonialism”
Yes. And the point here is that focusing on what happens to the immigrant is only half of the equation. When you take someone suffering from the plague out of a bleak, cramped, dreary quarantine zone and move them to a fancy resort in the alps, surely they’ll feel a bit better and be a bit happier – even if their plague is uncured.
But what will also happen is that all of the formerly healthy people staying at that resort will also catch the plague. The biggest problem with miasma theory wasn’t that it didn’t make the sick people better, it’s that it made more people sick.
I don’t know enough about Hatian history to say, definitively, to what extent the place being a shithole is attributable to God, colonialism, luck, government, or what. But one component of any particular country being a shithole is the people in that country. To whatever extent Haiti is a shithole because of something having to do with the Hatian people, bringing more Hatian people into other countries increases the likelihood of those places becoming shitholes too. I know that this is crimethink, but I’m about past the point of caring…
@Matt M
And nevermind that if you skim the best people from a shithole, it becomes increasingly shittier.
There’s a very reasonable possibility that the reason some countries are shitholes is because of institutional inertia rather than the people in them. After all, the people of North Korea aren’t different than South Korea.
Amazon was responsible for about 4% of all retail sales in 2017.
Hong Kong, Taiwan, China before Mao’s death and China since provide a similar contrast.
Only the germ theory (as presented) is incomplete, ignoring genetic diseases even. What is closer to accurate is that germs cause disease under specific circumstances*, which is a blending of the two theories. How well you fight of disease depends in part on general health and stress levels along with how many times you have fought off similar infections before. Some germs have a symbiotic relationship with us in one portion of our body and a murderous relationship in another. For some things his statement is approximately correct, but for others it would actually be incorrect, that taking the person out of an unhealthy environment would allow them to be cured and not only that but would improve the general health of the population they are introduced to by helping them build up antibodies to related diseases.
*Yes, this is a gross oversimplification and doesn’t apply to all disease.
@Matt M
Haiti may be a special case, in that there is a strong rumor that it was dedicated to Satan in the course of their revolution (turns out it may have been some Voodoo god instead, but eh, tomato, tomahto). I know at least some Haitians believe it to be true, since that’s where I first learned this factoid.
@Matt M
I’m done with this discussion. Frankly, I think I’m done with OTs.
For some time now I’ve been pondering about having an OT holiday and I think I’m going to act on these plans now.
A century or so ago, the U.S. was bringing in about a million people a year, a lot of them from places such as Poland and southern Italy that I suspect you would have viewed at the time as shitholes. Yet the U.S. did not become a shithole. To predict whether whatever characteristics of Haitians were responsible for the poor condition of Haiti would also make Haitians bad citizens of the U.S. you would have to know more than either of us knows about what those characteristics are.
More relevant evidence would be how Haitian immigrants have done in the U.S. The answer is that family income of Haitian Americans averages $47,541, which is below the national average but well above the average for African Americans ($40,931) or Mexican Americans ($38,000).
How do you think they vote, compared to the national average?
How does the income for Hatian immigrants compare to that of Indian immigrants? Or Swedish immigrants?
Personally, I’d be in favor of a race/nationality blind merit-based system, which I believe Trump previously spoke in favor of and was shouted down with cries of RACISM! then too…
But if you come in and say, as a given, that we’re going to have a system where we pick people based on their country of origin, it seems entirely reasonable to me to suggest “maybe let’s pick the good countries instead of the bad ones?”
Edit: I also think a merit-based immigration system should only admit those who are projected to do better than the US national average (total average, not average among your race or whatever). I see no particular reason to admit anyone who would move the average down.
Not much more shitholey than NYC, Detroit or whatever other typical immigration target. Poland and Italy (including southern Italy) were still considered first-world countries a century ago, and even more so, historically.
By contrast, who is the Haitian Copernicus, or the sub-Saharan African Archimedes?
Were these immigrants mostly selected by merit?
EDIT:
Since a picture is worth a thousand words:
Warsaw circa 1914
Naples circa 1910
Port-au-Prince circa 2015
1) Much less welfare back then
2) Much more pressure to assimilate; if immigrants and natives clashed then, the assumption was generally that the problem was with the immigrants. Today, it’s that it’s with the natives.
3) Sicily, for example, was a shithole, but not to the level of Haiti.
4) This immigration wasn’t without its problems; along with the people leaving Sicily’s problems behind, we also got some of the people causing Sicily’s problems, like the mafia.
@vV_Vv
Who is the Alabamian Copernicus? You can throw in Missouri if you want to get to equal populations with Haiti, which gives you George Washington Carver, but I don’t think that helps you much.
Well, Alabama does include Huntsville, with all the people who proved the planets circle the sun by going out to visit them…
A few accomplished Alabamans:
Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black
Astronomer Micheal E. Brown (head of the team which discovered dwarf planet Eris)
Robert Carmichael, mathemetician
Tim Cook, businessman.
Waldo Semon, inventor of vinyl
J. Curry Street, physicist, co-discoverer of muons
I can resist anything but temptation.
( From H.L.Mencken, The Sahara of the Bozart)
Woah, hey now, as a Missourian I’m compelled to defend my state (although I’ve been sitting out thus far). Off the top of my head:
– Mark Twain
– John J. Pershing
– Walt Disney
– Maya Angelou
– Reinhold Neibuhr
– T. S. Eliot
– Laura Ingalls Wilder
– Langston Hughes
– Robert Heinlein
– Omar Bradley
– I’m going to claim U.S. Grant, too
– Charles Lindbergh
– the founders of Anheiser-Busch, J. C. Penney, and H&R Block
– Sam Walton
– Edwin Hubble
– Joseph Pulitzer
Now, maybe we didn’t have anyone who lent his name to a systemic revolution in the history of science, but we’re not a bunch of uncultured yokels out here, neither. To borrow from Civilization, we’ve got our fair share of great writers, artists, merchants, generals, and scientists.
@Chevalier, I’m not disputing most of your list, nor Missouri’s claim to some fine citizens, but you can’t possibly claim both Hubble (born in MO, moved before or just after his first birthday) and US Grant (born outside MO, but posted in St Louis ~ages 21-24) unless you’re going by a standard of “once breathed Missouri air.”
I mean, claiming famous Americans for particular states is always kind of weird because they can move so freely, but still.
You’re undercounting Grant’s time here a little, as he lived at White Haven between ’54 and ’59, too, but your point is fair. I’m just possessive of Grant since I live within walking distance of the historic home and volunteer there often, but I’ll concede I can’t justly count him and Hubble.
Nevertheless, I feel that my state’s honor has been satisfied.
That’s exactly the problem with Trump’s statement, aside from just being unpresidential.
The program that he was arguing against (DV lottery) is premised on the idea that we should take or not take people based on the country they are from. He made exactly the opposite of the argument he should have been in order to attack the program. The argument should have been “why do we want people that have no other qualification except that they won a lottery”, not “why do we want people from poor countries”?
Norwegians are eligible for the DV lottery. Haitians aren’t.
Expecting intellectual depth and care from Trump is like expecting good behavior from a drunken motorcycle gang.
Trump’s statement was made in a private meeting with his staff. It’s not unpresidential to speak frankly in such circumstances. It’s insane to expect that anyone would so police themselves.
@cassander:
If we are talking about the “shithole” comment, that isn’t true. It was a meeting with members of Congress, including Leslie Graham and Dick Durbin.
@HeelBearCub
Apologies, it was a private meeting with members of congress, not members of his staff. How does that change things? It still wasn’t public.
@cassander:
Members of Congress literally are the representatives of the public. Dick Durbin is a member of the opposition party who Trump is engaged with in negotiation. Leslie Graham, of all people, was apparently pissed enough to call out Trump while still in the meeting.
Trump doesn’t have the kind of political capital where he gets to spew venomous bullshit at members of the opposition party and expect people to cover for him. LBJ he ain’t.
@HeelBearCub
I thought we were discussing the morality of what he said, not its wisdom. And trump wasn’t spewing “venomous bullshit” at these people, he was asking a question that millions of people have asked themselves.
@cassander:
You appear to not be keeping track of your own arguments.
@HeelBearCub
I don’t see where you think i’ve been inconsistent.
@casander:
First you claim:
I pointed multiple reasons why a generic President, especially one with Trump’s lack of political capital, should, in fact, police his language.
Then you made the claim:
Your statement about sanity is explicitly one about wisdom, not morality.
This kind of thing is frequent with you. It is annoying.
No you didn’t. You attempted to cast his decidedly non-public statement as if it were public in order to prove your own point, with an irrelevant example about how LBJ liked to cow people through insults. That wasn’t what trump was trying to do, and even if he had, and it worked, I sincerely doubt you, or anyone else castigating him now, would have approved.
No it isn’t. almost everyone agrees that presidents ought to be circumspect in what they say in public, and that trump is not as circumspect as he should be. I am objecting to people extending the same moral standard to his private conversations and judging them as if they were prepared public statements. That’s an insane moral standard.
You inventing straw men about my arguments is not my fault.
Practically everyone in these discussions assumes that we are better off if immigrants are high education, high income types. It isn’t at all clear that it’s true.
The implication of the principle of comparative advantage is that exchange produces a larger benefit when it is between people with very different relative abilities. If I can cook a meal in an hour or cut a lawn in an hour and your time for each is two hours, there is no gain from one of us cutting the other’s lawn in exchange for cooking. If the ratio of costs is different for the two people, on the other hand, there is a gain from trade, even if one of them is able to do both jobs in less time than the other.
That suggests that the present occupants of a country are likely to gain more by bringing in people who are different from them–for instance people who are about as good as the current occupants at mowing lawns but much worse at programming computers or curing diseases. The U.S. is a relatively high income, high education society. So we may benefit more by bringing in poor and uneducated people, as well as benefiting the immigrants more, than by bringing in people more like the ones already here.
That argument assumes, of course, interaction by voluntary exchange. If you imagine a society where everything everyone produces goes into a single pool and is then allocated on a per capita basis you would get the opposite result. I think that is at least part of the intuition that lies behind the widespread support for “merit based” immigration.
@DavidFriedman
One reason why ‘we’ have a high income society, is because we automated and outsourced many of the poor paying jobs, hence high unemployment for people with less education attainment.
Setting up a society so that people with less education attainment do worse and then having mainly those people immigrate, seems sub-optimal.
@DavidFriedman
Taxes, minimum wage laws, liability, and licensing screw all that up. Even the upper middle class doesn’t have much in the way of servants because the cost of hiring such is just too high.
Did he even say it in public?
I thought this was a private meeting, and someone leaked? Does that even matter?
I think if the controversy was just Trump said a bad word, the privacy of the meeting would matter. Presidents swear in private, nothing new there. Bush had his hot mic moment getting caught calling a reporter a major league asshole, and people snickered about it on the news but it wasn’t a huge deal.
If the controversy is that the President is espousing racist views, it doesn’t really matter as much whether it was public or private.
@MrApophenia
The public controversy mostly is about the bad word. If Trump had said “third world” there’d be no controversy.
I don’t fully agree. If it leaked that Trump has said we don’t want any more Haitians in the US, and we were setting immigration policy accordingly, I think that would still be getting attention.
Probably less without the cussing, though.
This seems like basically every other thing Trump does, ever, in his presidency. There are some important issues to be resolved, some of them rather subtle and requiring some careful thought. Trump and his people start trying to work out how to address them. And then Trump spouts off something offensive and eye-catching, and like 99% of the news coverage goes off and chases the offensive comment, and there’s nobody left paying any attention to the important issue, including Trump and his people.
At this point, this pattern is reenforced because everyone expects Trump to say something offensive and awful, so even if it’s a meaningless slip of the tongue or something, the whole news media and public are primed for it.
@albatross11
that’s definitely the pattern but, at least in some cases, trump clearly does it deliberately and he (or at least his people) do keep paying attention. Hence how we just got a tax bill, and building pressure on north korea.
This description has me thinking, “Yes, Minister did it.“
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/07/open-thread-92-5/#comment-586549
Thanks to everyone for helping. I should tell more about myself. Expanding on my comment from last time:
What goals I do have are very uncertain because I do not know what I want. @Brad asked if there was something I had a burning desire to do, and it doesn’t feel like there is. Or, put a better way, it feels like my passion is split in many different directions. I had this problem in college where I joined too many clubs and never put my full effort into any single one. I would end the week exhausted but not feel like I contributed to anything.
I was raised on a farm with a strong red tribe culture. I love my family, but was bored stiff in public school growing up where there wasn’t much opportunity for gifted kids. Home internet was dial-up until high school. Libraries were my connection to the outside world. Reading extensively and taught me many things. I wasn’t bullied and had several friends, but most people thought I was kind of strange. I always thought I would get out of there and do Great Things, but I am not sure I am that ambitious any longer. What I always told people growing up was that I would be an inventor and run my own company. Entrepreneurship runs in my family, and I went through periods of fascination with Thomas Edison and Bill Gates.
For relationships, I don’t have many close friends. My high school friends all went to different colleges. My college friends all moved to different places across the country. I do not feel enough social draw to stay close to people. I am single and actively looking for a relationship, but am hampered because I am an introvert averse to “night life”, work in a male dominated space with few young people, and have few friends to introduce me to dating prospects. My hobbies have the same problem as my work, too skewed towards men. Online dating is difficult because, while I get plenty of good leads, no one commits to meeting in person. I am impulsively, but not certainly, monogamous and think I would like 3-4 kids. This may not be possible due to the testicular cancer I had at 20. I have one testicle, possibly infertile due to the chemotherapy, and one surgery caused nerve damage that prevents me from ejaculating.
What advice do you have?
Shoutout to @quaelegit: If you didn’t read my other reply, I am in the Dallas area and would love to meet up. Email me at cwl at protonmail dot com.
I wouldn’t rule out having kids, even if you are infertile, because I think that many women who want children favor having a good father much, much more than having the children be ‘his.’ Sperm banks were invented for exactly this problem.
Your characteristics probably result in your dating prospects becoming much better in 5-10 years time, with women who explicitly seek a partner to have children with. If you are not particularly lonely right now, you may want to focus first on becoming a better prospect in 5-10 years time.
I think that your main issue is your lack of focus. One approach is to fix that. I don’t feel qualified to give advice on how to do this. Another approach is to find a job that is ‘chaotic’.
Ultimately, you do have to commit to something and accept that you will never have a perfect job, perfect hobbies, etc. You always have to accept some drudgery and unpleasantry. The trick is to have enough good to outweigh that.
You are right, but missing the point that having kids that are mine could be important to me. There is value in I think I would be emotionally closer to kids I fathered myself, that heritable traits would allow me to better predict and relate to the troubles and feelings any future kids may have and be a more effective parent, that there would never be any delicate conversations over the “real” father.
Again, true. I’m just worried that time will sneak up on me and I won’t know what to do when I get there and make an awful mistake about the right person for me. The prevailing advice of those I’ve asked and society at large seems to be to let love happen. This is at odds with my personal inclination to have a plan and what seems likely to produce a successful long-term match.
That’s interesting. Most people that know me have told me I’m very focused. Only I don’t know what to focus on now that I am out of school. Could you please elaborate on what you mean about that and a ‘chaotic’ job?
Nothing wrong with having a plan. Think about your optimal search strategy for finding a mate.
A very long time ago, after the end of my first marriage, I did a little calculating. I was living in Blackburg, VA, teaching at VPI. I estimated how many women there were in Blacksburg who I would have to date once to eliminate as prospects. I then estimated how many women I could reasonably expect to date a year. The second number was considerably smaller than the first, so I concluded that being in Blacksburg did not directly impede my search.
A further calculation (you like plans) might look at the presence or absence of subpopulation that were particularly rich sources of prospects. One advantage of NY over Blacksburg would be the existence of SIGs, special interest groups associated with Mensa or some other organization. It’s worth thinking about whether there are such institutions which would prefilter the population, select for women more likely to be what you were looking for.
Another conclusion I reached was that I should not limit my social efforts to looking for another wife. I should also try to expand my network of friends, because friends have friends, some of whom might be potential mates for me. Think of it as a net trolling the ocean.
The wife of a friend suggested folk dancing as a good place to meet nice girls. She was correct.
@tayfie
I think that a typical job for extremely chaotic, easily bored people is concert planner or such. That involves a lot of small, diverse tasks, I think.
However, given your self-description, you seem quite capable of focusing on medium term tasks, but don’t want to spend years doing the exact same thing. So that’s less about chaos, but more about having diversity.
A good option for you might then be consulting. I’ve done a software quality assessment where the client was unhappy with their supplier and wanted an independent assessment of the issues with the software. Another job was an analysis of how the performance issues of the software could be solved.
These kinds of gigs generally last weeks to months. You have to quickly get to grips with the software, the problem, the customer culture and such. Then you measure the things that need measuring and/or analyze the things that need analyzing. You end with writing a report and generally present it, sometimes directly to (middle) management.
Of course, a job like this involves a lot of travel and possibly having to stay in hotels during an assignment. Although that also depends where you do it. If you do such a job in an area with many IT companies (like Silicon Valley), you may find plenty of work locally.
It is a senior level job if you do it alone, although mediors can do it when part of a team. You may prefer doing it as a member of a team for the social contacts, anyway. I would expect that there is a fairly big opportunity for security consultants especially, so that can be a great niche to go into.
You can make a plan to work towards getting the right qualifications & skills if you are interested.
When I was 23 and had finished my bachelor degree, because of bureaucratic reasons I could not start my Master degree right away, so for half a year I was sitting in my room with nothing to do. I also got a hand injury, so I could not play the guitar, which meant i could not do my favorite hobby. This was the psychologically most unhealthy time of my life. So I definitely recommend you, if you quit your job, you need something to do everyday so your daily routine stays in order.
Apart from that, I can tell you that I am in a similar situation as you. I will soon be finishing university, and my main job perspective is becoming a programmer as well. But becoming a programmer does not feel that interesting to me, for years I have the feeling that i want to do something with culture. I am toying with the idea of studying a humanities subject for fun (universities are very cheap in Germany) while working on the side as a programmer, but I’m unsure if I would have the courage for that. My dating life is also similar yours, I don’t get to know that many women in university, but my diverse but focusedinterests and introvertedness makes it hard to form a connection with people.
I’m sorry that I do not have a solution what you should do, but I hope it helps you to know that you are not the only person with those problems.
That’s fine. Most people don’t.
If you don’t have a burning desire to travel, get a Phd, or run for public office then the best advice is to keep on keeping on. That doesn’t mean just letting the years go by. You should be working on your career (make sure you are getting a new year’s worth of experience every year instead of the same one over and over), trying to build those friendships you have and make new ones (it will only get harder in your 30s), and go put yourself out there on the dating market. Even if nothing comes of it you will develop the skills you will want to have later on.
Regarding that last part (and partly the second to last), given your background and where you live, I’d think about joining a church unless that’s a totally repugnant idea to you.
Emailed you 🙂
I just discovered this book about WW2 naval logistics which may be relevant to the interests of some of our commenters (David Friedman mentioned loving some books about ancient war logistics.) I haven’t read it yet, but the first line definitely catches my attention: “THIS IS NOT A STUDY in logistics. It is more a story of logistics.”
Oh, yes. That. Haven’t read the whole thing, but what I have read has been good.
For next links post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/7pqdoo/hey_its_sci_fi_author_ada_palmer_here_to_talk/
Subthreads of particular interest to SSC crowd:
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/7pqdoo/hey_its_sci_fi_author_ada_palmer_here_to_talk/dsj7wge/
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/7pqdoo/hey_its_sci_fi_author_ada_palmer_here_to_talk/dsj9dsb/
Every once in a while someone writes an article claiming there are not any “no-go zones” in Europe. (“No-go zones” being shorthand for Muslim enclaves where basically Shariah law has fully replaced the law of the local government, where non-Muslims are afraid to go, where police don’t bother going, etc.)
I don’t live in Europe and haven’t been there in a decade, but some SSC readers live/visit there and I trust y’all’s testimony way more than that of journalists.
So tell me: are there no-go zones or aren’t there?
I’d just like to say that I think this is a question that has no factual answer.
Because the claim is not that there exists somewhere in city hall an official document that says “This neighborhood is ruled by the local imam and law enforcement are to avoid it.” Because that obviously wouldn’t fly. The claim is that this is a well known unspoken rule that is implemented in practice. It is essentially impossible to prove or disprove.
Wouldn’t a bunch of reasonable people saying “Yeah, no cops or white people ever go to that [Muslim] part of London/Stockholm/Paris/etc.” be enough to at least produce a credible claim worthy of testing? Couldn’t some organization (maybe one that owns helicopters and has special access to police headquarters…like, oh, say, news organizations) find a way to monitor the flow of police cruisers (or something similar) and verify the claim?
I get that measuring an unspoken rule is hard, but surely it’s not impossible.
The claim doesn’t fly, and has been made anyway. I’ve seen it made about places where I’ve lived.
My point is that it wouldn’t fly as official written policy. And the claim that it’s happening is not actually about official written policy.
If I claim the freemasons have some weird and creepy induction ritual, they will likely respond saying “No we don’t!” And they might even say “Here’s a copy of the official freemason manual and it includes no secret induction ritual, HAHA DEBUNKED FIVE PINOCCHIOS!” But that probably won’t do much to satisfy anyone now will it?
Whether or not they make the official written policy claim, people regularly claim that areas are no-go which aren’t. E.g. this
https://sputniknews.com/art_living/201603261037026861-europe-dangerous-immigrant-districts/
I lived in Brixton for years. I am white, posh enough to draw some people’s ire, not particularly streetwise, and neither am nor look good at fighting. I felt far safer walking down the street there than where I previously lived, a white-dominated town.
I went back there with my small child to meet family (none of whom live in Brixton: just the food’s good). We felt really on the edge especially as if you want a coffee you have to go to rough, scary places like this
http://www.fmondayscoffee.com/
Essentially the problem is that people take ‘lots of ethnic minorities/immigrants’, ‘high crime rates’ or both and then make things up about ‘a white person can’t walk down the street’.
You’re right that if anyone says ‘there are no go areas but they’re secret and I won’t tell you where’, this is technically unproveable, like Russell’s teapot.
It may be a matter of degree. One chance in ten of getting mugged might make the area effectively no go, but most times you went there you would be fine.
I’m thinking of a real experience in Cleveland a while back. My daughter had been mugged–not injured, but several things, including her iPhone, taken. The phone continued to report its location, so we told the police and went looking ourselves.
The location was in a black area–how low income I’m not sure. A black cop advised us against wandering around there. We did anyway, found the phone and some but not all of what else had been taken discarded in a dumpster.
Our interactions with the locals were entirely friendly. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some risk of encountering locals with whom the interactions would not have been.
If there’s a cop in the area to advise you against wandering around, then the area definitely isn’t no-go for cops and the state is still attempting to enforce the law. This disqualifies it as a “no-go zone” in the politicized sense being discussed here.
Eh, yes and no. It proves it’s not a literal “no-go for the cops” but if they’re advising you to go away, rather than assisting you in recovering your stolen property, it seems odd to claim that they’re “still trying to enforce the law” in that area.
If their only purpose is to chase the law-abiding white people away (for their own safety) that seems closer to the spirit of no-go zones than not…
There were two cops, in a cop car, there because we had told them where the iPhone was claiming to be. I think only one of them was black. I don’t remember their doing much searching, but that might just be that it looked as though it would take more time than the chance of finding something was worth.
Not no go in the strong sense of police never going there, but an area where the police advised that it was imprudent to go.
I think if “no-go zone” is being redefined to mean places where the police usually won’t bother searching for stolen property worth less than $1000(*), then there’s just one big no-go zone called “Earth”. There may be small terrestrial enclaves one could safely visit.
Mostly, though, “no-go zone” is looking increasingly like a pair of goalposts on hoverboards steered by hyperkinetic ferrets, and I’d rather play a nice sensible game of Quidditch.
* Or whatever the local equivalent is.
It’s not that the police didn’t bother looking for their property, it’s that a policeman advised them against going into the area themselves. I don’t think using the term “no-go zone” to refer to “a place where people are advised not to go because of the risk of being attacked” is particularly unreasonable.
It’s particularly unreasonable when we started with a definition that included quasi-sovereigns because the state’s laws effectively don’t run there and locals have to turn to other power centers for dispute resolutions. Complete with references to Sharia, natch.
Now it turns out to just mean neighborhood with a bad reputation for crime. Are those goalposts lighter than they look?
A place where law enforcement specifically tells you to avoid because they cannot protect you from violence sounds a lot like “the state’s laws effectively don’t run there” to me.
But even bad neighborhoods do not seem to operate in a perpetual state of violent anarchy. There ARE quasi-sovereigns. They might be local religious figures or gang leaders or whatever. But there’s surely someone setting the rules. And it doesn’t seem to be the state, because the state’s official agents have nothing to offer you but “You have every legal right to go there, but if you do, you’ll likely be attacked, and we won’t do anything about it.”
And we have firsthand reports of people going there and being attacked, and no reports of the police refusing to “do anything” about people who are actually attacked, and yet a simple warning suffices for us to assume things like “likely attacked” and “police won’t do anything” and local gangs/warlords/theocracies openly ruling the streets.
Find evidence for the claims you want to actually make, or go away. Define, in a readily falsifiable manner, what a “no go” zone actually is, and mark its boundaries on a map so we can investigate, or go away. And do try to make the claims you are putting forth for rational inquiry here consistent with the hype being spun for Fox News, or else find a different term to keep the distinction clear.
The Fox News version often does include the explicit claim that the police won’t go to those places, and that is trivially falsifiable. You don’t want to associate yourself with that if you can’t back it up.
Matt M
The original quote in question was:
That’s not “law enforcement specifically tells you to avoid because they cannot protect you from violence”. Garbage in, garbage out as they say.
Besides weren’t you just telling us that these claims aren’t inherently unfalsifiable? Why would you think your assertions of admittedly faith based claims would be at all convincing to anyone else here?
What plausible reason might a cop have had for telling David Friedman not to enter an area, if not the risk of him becoming the victim of some sort of violent crime?
How does “no-go zone” differ from “rough neighborhood” or “ghetto?”
Mr X:
In world #1, the police tell you “That’s a dangerous place to go. If you go there and anything happens, we can’t or won’t do anything about it.” Like the DMZ between North and South Korea.
In world #2, the police tell you “That’s a dangerous place to go. If you go there and anything happens, call us and we’ll try to get there in time to help you out, but know we can’t be everywhere and you’re taking a risk.” Like East St Louis or Anacostia.
David’s story seems to reside entirely in world #2.
What makes it dangerous if not the fact that the police have a minimal presence and are unwilling to spend the resources necessary to make it fully in compliance with state authority? The fact that some places are significantly more dangerous than others to the point of prompting a disclaimer at all is evidence that there are specific enclaves where state authority is minimal, if not absent.
And “we can’t be everywhere at once” is something they’d say anywhere. Even fancy upper class neighborhoods routinely have response times from 5-10 minutes.
I think the main issue here is that there is no precise definition of what a “no-go-zone” actually is. I guess we can define two extremes. At one end, we can think of a place where state authorities literally never go and that is fully and wholly independent and autonomous (probably does not actually exist). At the other end, we can define every high-crime neighborhood where someone might advise you to be on your guard as a no-go zone because clearly, state power and influence is not as high as we might prefer it to be.
If you insist upon the first extreme, then yes, you are probably correct that no-go zones are a crazy conspiracy that does not exist. If it’s the other extreme, no-go zones are literally everywhere and always have been. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, such that people who say “There are certain no-go zones in Sweden” are not complete and total liars and conspiracy freaks, but also, when the government of Sweden says “no such place exists,” they technically aren’t wrong either.
Because the people who insist that “no-go zones” exist refuse to provide a definition, except that whenever an argument is raised against them they insist that a “no-go zone” is something different than what is being argued against right there.
There is no reason why a precise definition of “no-go zone” could not be provided, say by yourself, except that it would pin down the alleged zones as either nonexistent or not worthy of mention. Ghettos got crime, news at 11, whee.
Oh, places like that exist. But they’re usually the endpoint of a long period of ethnic conflict, not the starting point, and they frequently have some level of tacit or official state recognition. Abkhazia. Transnistria. Iraqi Kurdistan. The Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.
I don’t think there are any Western European ethnic ghettos that qualify.
So what if I say the definition is “any place that a state representative cautions you go avoid going to”?
Then you’d just tell me I’m using a dumb definition because that applies literally anywhere. And nothing is solved. What you’re demanding is that I provide a definition that would invalidate the argument. Any definition I provide that might allow for the existence of such zones will be dismissed as not the right definition.
No, I’m demanding that you provide a definition that would allow you, at least in principle, to lose the argument. The ability of either side to lose is what makes an argument valid.
“In this defined zone of this specified European city, the police forces of the legitimate government do not patrol”, is a definition that allows for a valid argument. An argument that it turns out you will lose.
“In this defined zone of this specified European city, any woman not wearing a headscarf will be promptly hauled before an informal Qadi, who will have her flogged”, is also a definition that allows for a valid argument, which you will lose.
“In this defined zone of this specified European city, the crime rate is two standard deviations above the mean and the local police will advise tourists not to go there (but still respond if they call and say they are being attacked)”, is a definition that allows for a valid argument. Which leads to the next valid argument, “Is there a reason anyone who isn’t planning to be in that city should care?”, which you will lose.
You’ve chosen to stand on ground where, as far as I can see, all paths lead to defeat. Pick one.
There’s no one right way for you to lose this argument. Pick one. But be specific, and commit to it.
Of course there are reasons why other people should care. For example, if cities with lots of Muslim immigrants find that Muslim-majority areas tend to turn into no-go zones for outsiders, this is relevant to the question of how many Muslim immigrants a country should accept.
I was interpreting “no go zone” as a place where it’s more dangerous to be obviously a police officer than to be someone who probably lives there.
That’s an “obvously” followed by an “if” followed by an as-yet-undefined term.
To validate the “obviously”, you need to define “no-go zone”. Then you need establish that such a zone would be a matter of real concern (e.g. significantly worse than the zones populated by Eastern European immigrants or poor Western European citizens or whomever else is going form the low-skill labor pool). Then you need to establish that “no-go zones” by that definition, exist.
It is unclear that using “no-go zone” as an intermediary is doing you any good in making that argument. It is also unclear that your argument is going to end up as anything more than an observation that the places your low-skill labor pool lives will have higher crime rates than the places everyone else lives, independent of their religion or skin color or nationality.
Maybe you could try reading the piece of text I quoted in order to see which definition of “no-go zone” I was using.
Believers in “no-go zones” have evidently been warned by the police to stay out of the bailey.
Any word with a definition can have the definition substituted in, “proving” by this standard that pretty much any word is useless.
Words with existing and widely accepted definitions, are not useless. Words which do not have existing definitions, for which a unique definition will be provided for use in this argument only, are very nearly useless. Words which do not have existing definitions but which suggest an obvious definition that isn’t the one you are going to use (or suggest different “obvious” definitions to different people), are worse than useless.
In that case there’s nothing to talk about and the people that push it despite this impossibility of falsification should treated similarly to UFO enthusiasts.
UFOs are transient and mobile; the alleged “no-go zones” are not. One can trivially falsify a claim that there is e.g. a UFO permanently hovering over Bob’s Small Appliance Repair over on 5th and Main by going over to 5th and Main and looking up. No-go zones should be similarly falsifiable, and anybody qualified to claim that they exist should be able to give us the information we need.
The difference being that whether or not there is a UFO over Bob’s Repair Store is not closely tied to a major political disagreement about a very controversial topic.
The claim there are no-go zones is falsifiable (you could tease out a reasonably well-agreed-upon definition of “no-go zone”), but it seems like nobody’s undertaken falsifying it. Am I wrong in either regard?
I’ve seen a few informal attempts, mostly ignored or dismissed on the basis of “you didn’t go to the right part of Malmo/Molenbeek/Beziers/whatever, obviously you’re not taking this seriously”. Step 1 has to be getting the people claiming a “no-go zone” exists to mark it unambiguously on a map, which they can never be bothered to do.
@Well…
There was a journalist who raised money to go investigate this claim in Sweden. My understanding from reading his reddit AMA was that he did not find any areas that meet the strong definition of “no go zones” that you and John Schilling are using, but he did think he found systemic police-related issues in some Swedish cities. My impression was that it sounded like the same kinds of stuff people complain about in US cities, but I don’t remember the details and didn’t investigate beyond reading the ama thread. He also got in trouble with one or more Swedish police departments, though I don’t remember details or if this was related to his claims of finding problems.
(There was of course controversy and disagreement in the AMA thread, and I don’t remember any of the details so I’m not super confident in my impressions mentioned above. But I am pretty confident that investigating such “no-go zone/religious law” claims was the journalists’ stated mission.)
I don’t remember his name or what cities he went to, but this might be enough info to find his stories/reddit threads? (If timing helps, I’m pretty sure I saw the AMA last spring — it was definitely after Trump became president.)
Thanks quaelegit, that’s interesting. You summarized it well enough I don’t feel compelled to go searching for it. I was mainly just curious to know if that kind of analysis had been done, and I think I now have a good sense of what the reporter found.
I mean, supposedly there’s completely secular “no-go zones” in the U.S.. I’m sure there’s places the police go “aww fuck, I don’t wanna go there, let’s go investigate this instead” everywhere, regardless of what demographics live there. That’s where the big U.S. street gangs come from, people go to the gangs because the police won’t come.
And the existence of them is measurable, isn’t it?
I am skeptical of this claim. Do the people making it ever specify latitude and longitude, or something similarly unambiguous?
Anacostia (District of Columbia) in the late 1980s. Probably some large swathes of Detroit and Camden NJ now.
They’re maybe not on a map, but if a friend comes to visit from Germany and wants to go do some tourist stuff in DC, I’ll be telling him in approximate terms where it is and isn’t safe to go, because there are parts of DC with a pretty high crime rate. The same is true for many other cities (St Louis, Baltimore, Chicago, New Haven, etc.).
None of those are no-go areas, exactly. But there are parts of town where even the police don’t like to go alone, and where an awful lot of people get murdered, and those are places you would be wise to avoid.
The question is, are there similar parts of big European cities, particularly (in the context of the question we started with) where recent immigrant communities from Muslim countries have created those dangerous neighborhoods.
My understanding is that no-go zones (if they’re real) are a step further than just places where cops don’t like to go alone. It’s where cops have all-out stopped going. Those areas are in some ways functionally sovereign, though without the heroic/positive connotation.
Anacostia is amazing to me. The fact that a complete shithole neighborhood exists about 0.25 miles away from the actual US Capitol building is all kinds of hilarious.
Right. If someone tells me that a place is a “no-go zone” and I hang out there for an afternoon, nobody physically assaults me, and I see two-man police patrol cars pass by every couple of hours, it’s not a “no-go zone”. And if someone tells me that there’s a “no-go zone” in [city] but won’t be more specific than that, I consider the claim falsified if a random low-income neighborhood fails the above test.
DC is gentrifying pretty fast now, but for years going there was surreal. Some of the richest neighborhoods in the States literally a block or two away from some of the poorest.
There are parts of Oakland that I would never go to at night, and it is very difficult to get police help at any time of day. I was once driving through one of those neighborhoods in the daytime when I saw a pedestrian get hit by a car, and it took almost a half hour for any emergency services to show up. I don’t know if it’s because the area is a “no-go”, but it did seem fairly obvious that there weren’t any cops hanging out nearby.
Sure. I live in St Louis city. A few members of my extended family live in St Louis county. Most of my family is convinced that I live in an urban ghetto where sensible (white) people fear to tread. I have been told directly that a cousin (by marriage) who occasionally has to venture into my neighborhood for work always leaves behind his wallet and carries three twenties, enough money that when he is mugged the urban youth won’t kill him. If you asked my extended family, they might well say I live in a no-go zone, or something along those lines.
This has very little correspondence to reality, but surely fills some need. (For locals, for reference, though I didn’t attend, I understand the St. Louis meetup happened at Hartford Coffee Company. That’s my neighborhood.)
OTOH, I might tell you much the same thing if you asked me about, say, East St. Louis, and possibly with as little justification.
I grew up in St. Louis, and would pretty much agree about East St. Louis. I did once end up driving through after getting lost, and I didn’t get shot at, but jokes about the US military sending troops headed to Bagdad there first for training are generally seen as humorous, but with a tiny bit of truth.
Obvious bullshit. If a minority is acting bad, it’ll turn up on the internet with empirical proof, see reddit, worldstar, etc. The “no go” phenomenon has all the hallmarks of insular (American) old men, in only existing in still images and text posts on the 2018 internet where everyone films everything. Why is it trivial to find something as weird and infrequent as, say, a deer killing another animal to eat its meat ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQOQdBLHrLk ) but no “60 minutes of petite blonde waif being harassed and hollered at by judging Muslims through Berlin-Kreuzberg” video?
@Well…
I’m not aware of anything going further than social pressure (primarily towards other Muslims) and street harassment (primarily by youths against non-modest women and gays). Also, in a few places criminal gangs have gained a lot of power over some streets and you have gangs made up of mostly Muslim youth, who act partly in accordance to their culture, but who tend not to be very religious and who also tend to violate Sharia law in many ways (like by stealing). So I don’t think that it’s reasonable to call this an issue with Sharia rule, but rather a problem with street gangs.
It’s certainly a lot different than places like Iran, where you have religious police enforcing certain religious rules in an organized way.
I don’t think that there is any place where the police won’t go, but people in some places are much more prone not to cooperate with the police and more prone to fight the police (but only after a (perceived) provocation, not as a general policy to keep the police out).
Some very similar problems exist with some lower-class, non-Muslim areas; especially those that feel disconnected to general society, while having a very strong subculture. An example is that some trailer encampments in The Netherlands are extremely criminal and anti-police, probably way, way more than any area with many Muslims. I would be way more wary of going there as a non-member of that community than any area with many Muslims. They are also the only places where the Dutch police seems to be wary to go with anything less than a large force.
PS. There was one story in a major Dutch newspaper about a ‘Sharia Triangle’ being a no-go area. The article had many damning quotes, but the journalist turned out to have invented quotes for most of his articles and he was fired.
A few years back, I was in Baltimore for an interview. I came back from a bar with a girl around midnight and Google Maps sent me through what I would later learn was one of the biggest open air drug markets in the city.
I was followed for a few blocks, but I’m a big guy who is regularly mistaken for a cop so nobody hassled me or her. We were both scared witless but that was the extent of it.
As an American, that’s my mental image when I hear about no-go zones in Europe. A no-go zone is a neighborhood which doesn’t belong to your people and everyone knows it. You won’t necessarily get jumped if you go there but if you do it’s absolutely your fault for going there in the first place. We’re used to the concept here but it’s something they haven’t really had to deal with before.
The one place that comes to mind when I hear things like this is the borough of Tower Hamlets in East London.
It’s not a no-go zone in the sense that I have a good friend who lives there, and went to visit him on a number of occasions. I did not feel unsafe any more than I normally would traveling through an unfamiliar part of London.
It does fit that description though in that the council ended up being controlled by one man, who used his religious connections to gain and retain power in the area. Search the BBC for “Tower Hamlets” or “Lutfur Rahman”.
Then in 2015 the UK Electoral commission came in, found evidence of massive voter fraud and overturned the election results, showing that it wasn’t beyond the control and reach of the national government.
On the other hand, a quick google does bring up some concerning articles dated since the change in leadership.
Yes, there are.
Lizardman’s Constant meets Proportional Representation!
Every time this kind of thing seems up, it seems to mostly be confused Americans talking about things. This thread doesn’t appear all that different.
Preface: N = 1, I am not a researcher, what have you. OP said he wanted to hear from people in Europe, he can get what he wants.
From ages 5-23 or so, I’ve lived in the outskirts of the city in the Netherlands with the highest amount of non-western immigrants. When I was in high school, the amount of such people apparently was higher than ‘native’ citizens, and it certainly shows when going about on the street. Since 2009, the mayor has been a certain muslim, of the sorts who very literally said to jihadis to fuck off already. Insofar my country is concerned, there’s not really any place where immigrants are more widespread.
I have never at all been afraid to walk about in any neighborhood. This does not owe to me never going out at night. This does not owe to me taking long routes to avoid bad areas. This isn’t because I’m tanned and wiry-haired; I technically count as someone of non-western descent, given that my father is from eastern Europe, but I’m stark white and very visibly Dutch. None of this changes that I’ve not once been very afraid to walk around anywhere.
Again, this is not because of any avoidance on my part. Low-income areas have their advantages; I’ve always had a thing for foreign foods, since Dutch cuisine is lacking, and I’d often duck into shops run by Poles or Arabs to buy things. On a couple occasions, I had no money at all after a night out and had to walk home through bad areas; nothing at all happened. While writing this response, I asked my brother what he thought about this issue; he seems to agree that being at all afraid of walking around simply doesn’t happen.
Again, N=1. But for as far as I’m aware, no-go zones simply don’t exist here, and it’s also why I’m very skeptical about this being so very different elsewhere.
Glad to see the left-libertarians at Reason hopping aboard the “shut up and move” bandwagon, even if they’re only doing it because they can frame it as anti-Trump!
Is Reason actually left-libertarian now? I quit subscribing a long time ago; when Virginia Postrel left it was a serious drop in quality, but I didn’t think they’d actually gone over to left-libertarianism (*shudder*)
If they have I hadn’t noticed… they seem to support a pretty wide spectrum of libertarian thought. I mean, they’re more lefty than, say, Tom Woods.
Yeah, I would peg them as fairly moderate libertarians. I do feel like they’ve been really pushing the marijuana legalization lately, but I think that’s mostly because it’s been in the news.
Hey, it worked for Cheeseburger Freedom Man.
Tom Woods is the most consistent libertarian that exists. If you find yourself in disagreement with him, you are the one straying from libertarianism.
This may belong in the classifieds thread, but – does anyone have a good therapist they recommend in the Seattle area? I’ve had pretty mediocre experiences with therapists/mental health professionals, but would like to see if I can find someone who is more rationalist oriented. I think that could be really helpful for me!
On several recommendations from recent OT’s, I got Bujold’s The Curse of Chalion via Audible and just finished listening to it. Overall it was a very good listen and well-narrated.
Guvatf V yvxrq
Pnmnevy’f vaare zbabybthrf naq uvf pnershy fcrrpu jrer irel pyrire. V rawblrq yvfgravat gb uvz ernfba guebhtu ceboyrzf. V nyfb rawblrq gung ur jnf culfvpnyyl ubooyrq, va n jnl gung ceriragrq uvz sebz gnxvat gur fbeg bs urebvp npgvba gung zbfg snagnfl fgbevrf erdhver. Ur’f bayl n pbzcrgrag jneevbe, naq zbfgyl ybfrf svtugf, bgure guna gur barf jurer ur pna hfr pyrire gnpgvpf.
Gur qvfphffvba bs gurbybtl jnf irel jryy qbar, vafvtugshy naq zrnavatshy gb gur aneengvir jvgubhg orvat crqnagvp. Vg envfrq n ahzore bs irel tbbq cbvagf. V ernyyl yvxrq gur “qr-zlfgvsvpngvba” bs fnvagubbq.
Gur fho-aneengvir bs n grezvany vyyarff jnf nyfb irel jryy qbar, jvgu ernyvfgvp qrcvpgvbaf bs obgu fvqrf bs gur qbpgbe-cngvrag eryngvbafuvc.
Guvatf V qvfyvxrq
Gurer vf ab zlfgrel be ribyhgvba gb nal bs gur punenpgref. Lbh xabj gurz va shyy qrgnvy nf fbba nf lbh zrrg gurz, naq arire ernyyl yrnea nalguvat zber. V jnvgrq nyy obbx sbe fbzr hagvzryl orgenlny ohg vg arire pnzr.
Gur fgbel vf fb raqyrffyl gvql. V’z fher guvf vf orpnhfr N. vg vf n ybbfr uvfgbevpny nyyrtbel, naq O. vg vf Pnmnevy’f cerqrfgvangvba fgbel. Ohg abguvat gehyl snvyf, naq rirelguvat jbexf cresrpgyl. Rira Pnmnevy’f nggrzcg gb rinqr gur phefr vf urnivyl sberfunqbjrq naq hggreyl erqrrzrq. Guvf tvirf gur obbx gur srryvat bs na vzzrafr rcvybthr gb nabgure zber vagrerfgvat fgbel.
Gur aneengvir vf yvggrerq jvgu hasverq (be pbasvfpngrq) Purxubi thaf. Gurer ner znal qrgnvyf juvpu ner cynprq gb or zber guna zrer sybhevfurf, ohg arire ghea bhg gb yrnq gb nalguvat.
What’s up with lentils? Seriously!
I’m talking about the fact that store-bought bags of lentils contain rocks. My mom told me about this decades ago when I first started cooking, and she likened it to old-timey Middle Eastern societies where merchants would slip rocks into their lentils (or whatever other similar product) so a measured amount would seem heavier/more voluminous than it really was, therefore they could get away with selling less of their inventory for the same money. I shrugged it off, thinking in our advanced, highly regulated society where there’s a whole section of government in charge of weights and measures — emblazoned on every gas pump! — this couldn’t possibly be a problem, but sure enough there are indeed small rocks in bags of lentils you buy from the store, and you can seriously hurt your teeth or your digestive tract on them — or maybe worse could happen if you feed lentils to your infant as my wife and I do.
No matter what brand you buy, each bag’s packaging usually comes with an instruction to “sort” lentils before cooking them (although they usually don’t tell you what you’re sorting for). I’ve found that for 8 ounces of lentils (about half a normal bag you’d find in the “Asian” aisle at Kroger/Meijer/etc.) it usually takes me about 2-3 minutes of sorting to be reasonably sure I’ve discovered all the rocks. There are usually 2-3 tiny lentil-sized rocks per bag in my experience.
If my time is worth $10/hour (normally it’s worth much more than that but I’m being generous) that’s about $0.16/minute I’m losing by sorting lentils, which means I’m essentially donating about $1 of my time per 16oz bag. Where I live each bag usually costs around $2. So I’m essentially paying double for lentils if I factor in my time.
The thing is, I don’t see any way around this unless I quit eating lentils (which I absolutely refuse to do because they’re delicious and an essential part of many of my camel-jockeying, felafel-popping, kafiyah-sporting ancestral recipes). The way lentils are grown, harvested, and processed, I can’t imagine how they could prevent lentil-sized rocks from occasionally making it into the final product.
Should lentil producers discount the price because of the extra work I am compelled to perform (for the safety of myself and my family) every time I cook them? I don’t see how they could do that either.
Quite a conundrum.
Well, there’s sorting lentils and then there’s sorting lentils.
The Nybbler, I was surprised at the comments to your link.
V jnf fhfcvpvbhf ol gur frpbaq fragrapr bs gur frpbaq cnentencu, ohg frireny crbcyr fnvq gurl qvqa’g ernyvmr vg jnf snxr hagvy gur fcrpgebzrgre.
Lrf, gur frpbaq cnentencu vf shyy bs erq syntf, ohg V pna frr fbzrbar guvaxvat vg jnf whfg wbphyne ynathntr nobhg n yrtvgvzngr cebprqher.
I shared the link about sorting lentils on facebook and it went over very well.
Hm, I don’t sort them as carefully as you and I don’t remember having any problems. I don’t cook lentils super frequently though (probably about once a month on average) so maybe I’ve just been lucky so far.
I usually “wash” them — by which I mean pour the whole bag in a big measuring cup (the 2-cup-volume glass type), fill the cup with water, stir it a bit, then pour off the water while trying to keep all the lentil in the cup. I don’t think this would help with rocks, and it might not be the right thing to do…
Are lentil-sized rocks more of a hazard than small fishbones or peppercorns like you might have to watch out for in soups?
Small fishbones can certainly be painful, but many fish come reliably de-boned, and the with ones that don’t, you’re already expecting bones so you eat the fish in a kind of special way.
Peppercorns aren’t a problem, you just bite through them, and I don’t think even a baby would choke on them. They might be uncomfortably intense, spicewise, for some people who end up biting them, but that’s not a huge deal.
Biting down on a lentil-sized rock can crack your teeth. I’m pretty sure I’ve lost a filling that way.
Perhaps they already do…
I mean, almost by definition, they do.
You would be able to by a more expensive bag that did not have (statistical) rocks in it, but the market won’t pay that cost (probably because no one has figured out how to automate it).
Can’t you just weigh the lentils? Presumably, any rock in there is heavier than any lentil.
Perhaps such a machine is rather expensive and slow, because you have to weigh individual things that don’t weigh very much, requiring sensitive equipment. But that doesn’t make it hard, just expensive.
@Aapje:
I’m guessing the per unit weight difference of rocks the size of lentils is not going to be detectable when the quantity that @Well is reporting is 2 or 3 and the number of lentils in the bag is going to be in the thousands.
I think that in order to find out that the rocks existed in that manner, you would need 3 accurate pieces of information. First you would need a very accurate measure of the weight, but this by itself wouldn’t tell you anything, as the bag is filled by weight.
Next, you would need a count of exactly how many units went in the bag. This starts to tell you something, but it still won’t be enough, as lentils themselves aren’t of uniform weight.
So then you will need an accurate measurement of the size of each lentil so you can estimate the weight of each lentil.
And even if you could do all of that, it doesn’t help you at all, as you still need to locate/segregate the individual rocks in the bag. We could already just assume that their are rocks in each bag, as by this report rocks in the bag are a near uniform occurrence. So we really haven’t progressed in finding a solution.
Although, I don’t know that I have ever had this experience, so perhaps it is not so ubiquitous (but I’m not a frequent consumer of lentils).
The machine I proposed wouldn’t weigh an entire bag, but each individual lentil. The idea is to toss out the rocks before you fill the bags, not toss out entire bags for having some rocks in there.
Once you measure individual lentils and have a process for moving each separate lentil from the scale to the bagging area, you can separate the rocks from the lentils. A common way to get rid of bad, light items, seems to be to blow them off the conveyor belt using compressed air.
A common way to measure many items individually in a factory is to use a conveyor belt scale. Some of these seem to be able to measure very light weights, so individual lentils may very well be within the range of a decent commercially available conveyor belt scale (and you don’t actually have to weigh the lentil accurately, just ensure that the weight is less than a rock of a size that you don’t sieve out).
Googling ‘lentil destoner’ gives me this, so apparently the lentils are already destoned based on weight, but not by using a scale, but by using a more efficient method.
So the actual issue seems to be that this regularly fails to remove stones. Perhaps the stones that remain are too light to easily distinguish from lentils?
The rocks I find tend to be almost exactly the size and shape of lentils. Usually when I’m removing them I have to look at them carefully for a few seconds and drop them on my counter and listen to the sound they make to confirm they are rocks.
Occasionally I remove rocks that are much smaller, more like very large grains of sand.
@aapje:
Misunderstood your proposition, my bad.
My assumption is that any readily available way to distinguish lentils from stones at commercial volumes is being employed already.
They are probably the same weight, size and color as lentils. They presumably differ in density and hardness (but perhaps only when cooked), but I assume that the tests available to distinguish these differences readily are destructive to the lentils. Other potential tests, like chemical composition, are presumably either cost prohibitive or unreliable or both.
Obviously, you could hand sort them. But again, I assume that is cost prohibitive.
I got lentils in a Blue Apron package (only 2 servings). I’m thinking that was likely hand-sorted, as the cost allows it.
Edit:
And it looks like Well is confirming my thought.
Couldn’t you just get a gold spiral wheel to sort out the (presumably heavier) rocks? Or run your bags through a sluice?
I’d guess this is you just getting cheap lentils. I’d wager a small amount of money that if you went to Whole Foods and got whatever their most premium lentils were, that there would be no rocks.
Yeah, if we can winnow grain in industrial quantities by bowing air through it to separate grain from (lighter) chaff, presumably we can use the same technique in reverse to separate lentils from (heavier) rocks.
Even if that’s impossible, we know that if Well.. can filter out the rocks by hand, a laborer from some much poorer country can do it too. Someone just has to be willing to pay their wages in the form of more expensive lentils.
Lentils sink. Rocks sink. My guess is the rocks and the lentils are the same density, so winnowing by weight or air resistance won’t work. The obvious solution would be to splice a fluorescence gene into lentils; then anything which didn’t fluoresce could be automatically removed. However, people are unreasonably resistant to splicing random genes from animals into their food supply.
Are we sure that they’re the same density? Because if they aren’t, then we can solve this by picking a fluid that isn’t water to use for float sorting.
“Say, I’ve got a great way to sort lentils from rocks automatically by soaking them in mercury. I expect great health benefits from this scheme!”
“I don’t trust your mercury lentils; they’re glowing!”
“Oh no, that’s intentional. It’s for QA purposes.”
Lentil particle densities according to one paper I found are around 1300 kg/m^3 (1.3 specific gravity). Rock is mostly denser than that, so perhaps float sorting would work, though you’d need a non-toxic fluid that could be removed from the lentils. Or perhaps the pebbles in lentils are unusually cavity-ridden and low density.
@Randy M
They’d glow only under a strong UV source of course, no point in freaking the normies.
You should know full well that mercury is much too dense to make that work, and everything will float. Other than that, I see no problem at all with this scheme.
“Why does the blacklight show splatters all over your couch and floor?”
“I, uh, spilled some lentil soup”
There is absolutely no better place to ask a question than here.
In my experience, they differ in density: the lentils sink more slowly. You could probably tweak the specific gravity of the sorting solution by using water with some quantity TBD of salt.
Salt water doesn’t get above 1.26, and the vaguely common fluids that would float lentils are all toxic and/or corrosive.
According to this chart, lots of common minerals have a specific gravity that exceeds lentils, albeit not by too much. So you could sort them by their bouyancies.
But you don’t have to use a different fluid. Put the lentil/rock mixture in an upwardly-flowing column of salt water. The rocks, being more dense, will sink more readily. Adjust your flow rate so that rocks tend to sink or remain suspended, and your lentils will flow out the top of the column, perfectly seasoned.
Density-exclusion liquid chromatography.
ETA : no, this is better.
I still say air-winnowing would work just fine. Fire the rocks and lentils into air at a fixed speed, and the rocks, being denser, will fly slightly farther. Everything beyond this line here will with probability X be a rock, everything on this side of the line will with probability Y be a lentil. Of course, we may need to test and tune the setup and figure would what the appropriate values of X and Y are. But that can be left to others, mere market researchers and engineers. We first-class minds can return to more important work. I believe we were discussing racism on the internet?
lentil/rock mixture in an upwardly-flowing column of salt water. The rocks, being more dense, will sink more readily. Adjust your flow rate so that rocks tend to sink or remain suspended, and your lentils will flow out the top of the column, perfectly seasoned.
This is a nice idea. You don’t need salt water though; different fluid density just requires different fluid speed to get the same behavior. I think you’d still get small particles at the top (rock weight ~ radius^3, water force ~ radius^1) but I’d imagine a filter could solve that easily.
Why am I now seeing a giant cascade of centrifuges, enriching the mixture of lentils and eventually discarding the rocks after enough passes?
BRB, buying a variable-speed aquarium pump, some polycarb tubing, cheesecloth, a colander, a basin, a drill bit, and a bunch of silicone sealant.
Oh yeah and some cheap lentils.
(OK, I’m not but if I did I bet it would be the Youtube sensation of the year.)
@bean:
That’ll work but it’s illegal to export.
Lentil enrichment is much more efficient if you use a laser to selectively ionize the lentils and electrostatically divert them into the collection basin.
I think we should end this thread before the machine learning algorithms of some security service decide “lentils” is code for something more exciting, and we all end up guests of the government.
They seem to have decided that at least a couple of us are trustworthy already. I’m not worried.
@bean
You say that now, but you might be singing a different tune when you show up at work one day and your manager intercepts you on your way to your desk and says the Security Officer would like to have a talk with you right now. You go in and the Security Officer tells you to close the door, then says. “Now, Mr. Bean’s Real Name, have you ever heard of a site called ‘SlateStarCodex’?”. And then you spend the entire rest of the day trying to explain to a professionally suspicious non-internet-savvy bureaucrat that sometimes a lentil is just a lentil.
No no, officer! By “range-targeted ballistic pulse selection” I only meant I am trying to separate lentils from tiny pebbles by air winnowing!
@The Nybbler
I’ve had some fairly frank online discussions about stuff much more naughty than this under my real name. And I know they know who I am. I’ve probably been on some list for a decade or so, and yet I’ve never had any trouble. I decided long ago that I wasn’t going to avoid public-domain topics out of fear of them pulling up my profile and going “Oh, one of that kind”, then closing it again. There’s some stuff that I can’t talk about, and some stuff where the virtue of silence applies, but this is miles away from either category.
Because my cat.
Is it possible that stones in lentils occur in only some countries or markets? My wife’s experience is that she has never encountered them–and we use lentils fairly often.
I’ve never found a rock in lentils, either, though I don’t use them all that often. I see the warnings on the packages, and I think I’ve seen them on dried beans as well.
Are the rocks the same size as the lentils?
If not, you could build a sieve that would let either the rocks or the lentils pass through.
If so, you could sort by density, by putting the lentils in a tall container and shaking it so the rocks go to the bottom, then skimming the rock-free lentils off the top.
If there is a mixture thereof, you could perform these in sequence.
You could make a similar argument regarding the need to wash root vegetables prior to eating them. You’re “donating” that time, too. It’s a smaller and less tedious donation, but it’s the same in kind.
You might, then, describe the inedible matter attached to your food as an externality imposed by the food producer. In that sense, [2-3 small rocks per 16 oz of lentils] strikes some kind of Coasian bargain.
And if we can describe this lentil-and-stone system as an allocation of effort/revenue/etc. between agents based on incentives, and thereby apply Holmström’s theorem, then the allocation is probably Pareto nonoptimal, but stable.
So it’s probably not fair, but you can at least depend on lentils.
—–
Side note : your nick makes it harder for me to begin statements with “Well, …” because I feel like I am addressing you directly with every paragraph and that feels awkward. I think this improves my writing. So, weirdly, thanks.
Mostly yes. See above comments.
If that worked, then the rocks should already be at the bottom of the bag if I shake it. They aren’t though, because most of them are roughly the same size, shape, and weight as the lentils. I suspect that’s how they got in there in the first place.
I agree but it’s so much less time, and so much less arduous an activity to wash vegetables, that it’s not worth measuring. I don’t start thinking about this kind of thing until the 2nd or 3rd minute I’ve been standing there hunched over my kitchen counter sorting through tiny little legumes.
I doubt Bill Gates pays someone else $10 to dab his own mouth with a napkin when he’s eating spaghetti just because it technically costs him thousands of dollars to take a few seconds out of his day to do it.
Agreed. Thus my deep grumbling.
You’re welcome! Not intended but I’m glad it had that effect. The pseudonym is a reference to that exact speech habit, sort of me making fun of myself for using this account to ramble about stuff on the internet when I could be doing something more productive.
What about sorting them by their bounciness / coefficient of restitution?
Some sort of… inclined hopper? It might at least concentrate the rocks in a smaller volume of lentils.
I thought about this more. Load your lentil/rock mixture into the feeder of a pneumatic gun, whose aperture will allow one particle (mineral or legume) to emerge at a time. Fire a stream of particles against a hard surface, and collect the particles within a certain radius. Lentils should have a lower coefficient of restitution than rocks, IE, the rocks should bounce farther.
How do you collect the lentils efficiently, though? And in any case that machine isn’t going to be very space efficient.
I’m also not sure how robust that aperture system is going to be. Sounds like that’s going to end up getting clogged a lot.
The rate at which you can actually fire lentils/rocks might be a little low too, even if you’re firing them in a constant stream, processing one lentil at a time is going to take an unacceptable amount of time to fill a 3 lb bag…
You could build it into a cabinet, like a ballistic mass spectroscopy unit. And there could be three zones therein : the zone where only lentils land which tilts into a collection bin, the zone where mostly rocks land which tilts into a waste bin, and an ambiguous zone where either can land. This last zone would have to be re-fed by conveyor. It would probably end up at least as efficient as a bag of microwave popcorn.
I envision that you would load the machine with lentils in the opposite phase of the day as you wish to eat them (lentils for dinner means load the machine in the morning, lentils for breakfast means load the machine before you go to bed).
Probably needn’t be any bigger than a chest freezer, and only about three times as noisy.
Eh, I think you’re right, here. The disk-like shape of the lentils could pose a major problem. If there were only lentils in the mixture, they could probably form a tidy rouleaux in the feeder unit, but the irregularly-shaped pebbles would probably cause them to jam up.
If we are permitting re-feeding of ambiguous lentil/rock mixture (as above) then maybe the lentils and rocks could be gravity-fed into a constant stream of air via a larger aperture. It might be less accurate in each iteration, but more iterative power could overcome that.
Discard the lentils. Eat the rocks.
But what about the otherwise perfectly good broken lentil pieces? I don’t want to exclude those either.
Well…,
I would just repair the broken lentils by hand before feeding them into the ballistic spectroscopy unit. Problem averted.
I see, you were thinking of this as a home unit. I was thinking in terms of an industrial-scale process done at the packaging plant.
“I don’t start thinking about this kind of thing until the 2nd or 3rd minute I’ve been standing there hunched over my kitchen counter sorting through tiny little legumes.”
You could make the task a little less annoying by sitting at the kitchen table.
Damn, I thought specific heat might be the ticket, but it’s also kinda close, and varies a lot with moisture: https://s3.wp.wsu.edu/uploads/sites/1254/2016/04/tang11.pdf
Ooo, optical sorting! I approve.
http://www.buhlergroup.com/global/en/process-technologies/optical-sorting/pulses-sorting/lentils-sorting.htm
PS. How about grains of sand in your cilantro? I’ve had that a number of times, even after washing the cilantro. Not as bad as biting down on a rock from a bag of lentils, but still very unpleasant and could potentially damage teeth or dental work. And the worst part is, you don’t discover it until after the cilantro is finely chopped and mixed into your food.
Do you use the whole cilantro plant? In general with plants like that I find that the part where the stems all come together and meet the root is going to be really good at trapping dirt and no amount of washing will get it all, so I just cut off and discard that section.
Normally the cilantro I buy is already loose. It has some length of stem but the stems are not joined at the bottom. I wash the whole thing well, running it under water, shaking it, repeating this many times. Sometimes I’ve even submerged all of it in cold water, shaken it in the water, shaken it out of the water, rinsed it thoroughly, and still found sand later. Cilantro really grabs sand.
Huh, not really a problem I’ve had. Maybe the cilantro growers where I live just use soil instead of sand and it doesn’t get into the plants the same way.
I do recommend the full-submersion method, though, for cilantro and any similar herb. Fill large bowl with water, immerse herbs, swish around for a bit, shake off, change water and repeat if necessary. Also maybe don’t do the whole bunch at once, do it in small batches so all the leaves can really spread out. Definitely stop rinsing bunches of herbs under running water, though, that’s really ineffective in my experience.
Well…
Where do you live? What brands of lentils are you buying?
Midwest.
Meijer brand, Kroger brand, sometimes Goya.
What really? I don’t bother to sort my lentils and I’ve never had a problem with hurting my teeth since I generally chew pretty gently and rocks are less dangerous when they’re surrounded by a goopy lentil cushion, but I hadn’t considered that eating a few tiny smooth rocks could hurt my insides. Is that an actual risk?
Sometimes the rocks aren’t smooth.
And while I don’t think tiny rocks in the digestive tract of my infant will assuredly do damage, it definitely smells risky.
I learned back in school that one teaching of the Protestant Reformation was a belief in “salvation through faith alone” and specifically not through good works. What exactly does this mean? (Wiki article isn’t that clear)
The naive meaning, to a modern American atheist hearing the words, is that as long as you don’t doubt Christianity’s factual claims, you’ll be saved, so you can walk around killing and stealing and as long as you’re certain in your heart that Jesus is the Son of God, you still go to heaven.
I doubt anyone actually believes this. When I heard about this doctrine, I sort of automatically steelmanned it into the idea that “faith” means more than unquestioning belief; that faith would necessarily produce good intentions towards others; and that the killing-stealing-faithful person above is a contradiction in terms. But I recently argued with someone who thought the doctrine meant the “kill who you want as long as you believe” thing, and I realized I had no sources at all to contradict them.
Googling it, I kinda get the impression that something like my steelman is accurate, but nothing conclusive. So SSC, what’s the deal here?
The book of James was written to address that very misconception. Your steelman is basically correct.
It may help you understand better if you replaced the word “Faith” with “trust in God” or “love for God.”
“You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.” – James 2:19
Not that I disagree (seeing as I would have quoted the very same passage), but I think he’s asking for a better steelman.
Nah, that makes sense to me. Just wanted confirmation it was an actual church teaching and not something only an atheist would think up.
Disclaimer: I’m not a heretic, and may therefore be biased. This is, furthermore, a steelman, not an argument that convinces me.
First of all, I think you are trying to analyze it backwards. Start from everyone being damned. Proceed from there to what can change that. Sola fide claims that no action can save you, no good deeds you do have any impact on your going to Hell. What you can do, instead, is become Christian, a believer – which is an internal state, not an action – and therefore pardoned. Consider the bandit crucified with Christ – he lead a life of crime, and made no atonement for his sins (excepting being crucified, I guess), but was saved through his belief that Christ could save him.
Justification is a mess. It’s a complicated subject to begin with, complicated further by the numerous seemingly contradictory passages on it in the Bible and the Church Fathers, and complicated still further by the ambiguous language of folks like Luther. I would love to see a good debate about this, but I’m Catholic, so I reject sola fide anyway. 😀
It seems like one of those debates that matters little in practice: if you believe it’s justification by faith and not by works, you still have to remember that faith takes a lot of work.
Yeah, a lot of authors, going right back to the passage in James, make the point that “faith without works is dead.” My impression is less that that debate doesn’t matter—if Protestants really are saying that strawman/weakman ADifferentAnonymous was quick to question, that would be very concerning!—and more that it’s very difficult to parse what everyone is actually claiming and how much disagreement there is, so the debate is perhaps much smaller and narrower than folks realize. I feel in part vindicated in this by the recent Joint Declaration on Justification by Catholics and Lutherans.
If you believe in salvation by works, then the salvation is an object that you purchase via the coin of action.
If you believe in salvation by faith, and also that faith requires works, then the nature of salvation is instead supplication.
Yeah, but we also believe (de fide dogma no less) in predestination.
I said it was a mess, didn’t I?!
If it’s a mess, why are you a Catholic rationalist?
Definitely not suggesting you stop, but be ready to give a reason for the Hope, etc.
I’m saying it’s a mess—it’s “a situation or state of affairs that is confused or full of difficulties“—I’m not saying it’s wrong, or false, or unintelligible. On the contrary, the Catholic doctrine on justification is true, correct, and with enough patience and dedication, intelligible. And I did after all say I’d love to see a debate on the subject—part of what I mean by that, which I’ll admit wasn’t clear, is that I’d be happy to be defending the doctrine if that’s something people are interested in talking about.
I’d be interested in seeing what you and others have to say. I might weigh in too.
@Nick: go for it. I’m Catholic too, but my instinct in an intellectual mess is “it’s messy because people who come up with false theories prefer adding epicycles to changing their mind”, so it would be good to see. 🙂
Since you sound interested in discussing this more, how does the Catholic account of the crucified thief go? The history-class version of Catholic justification was that it needs both faith and works, but the thief didn’t get to do any good works, so I imagine it’s more complex.
Isn’t “Shut up, idiot, you’re talking to the Son of God! And we put ourselves up here!” quite a work, in and of itself?
He pretty much did a confession-like plea for forgiveness there and had no opportunity to reoffend, too.
My understanding* is that when Christ says “Today you will be with me in Paradise,” this is a recognition of the thief’s salvation, but not a formal bestowal thereof. It’s like the centurion who says “I am not worthy to receive you” and by doing so evidences that he has received Christ already. The thief’s plea for forgiveness follows the achievement of his salvation, via his heart’s conversion and his just works. Thereafter, Christ is just pointing out the obvious. Even if He had not replied to the thief, we would still believe the thief to be in Paradise.
And one could imagine ways in which the thief could have reoffended, which could be lost to the Biblical account, or could be invisible to observers.
* I am Catholic, but I am not sure if this is or isn’t the Catholic account. I hope someone will tell me one way or the other.
From memory: In a radio play about Jesus, Dorothy Sayers has it that the thief starts out just humoring what he thinks is a madman, and then realizes it really is the son of God. The thief is saved because of his initial compassion.
So far as I know, this is not part of Christian tradition, but it is kind of neat.
Sayers comments in the notes to the typescript version that she’s “offended all the commentators” by that, so I don’t think it’s part of Tradition anywhere outside her.
(The Man Born To Be King is a very good play, by the way! If you’re interested in 1940’s radio drama, or plays about Christ, definitely read it!)
Here’s an excerpt from Pilgrim’s Progress that addresses salvation by faith; I can’t speak to the book’s theological credentials, but it should reflect a popular vein of Protestant thought:
I think the upshot is that your steelman is on target.
This is a reasonable articulation of the Reformed position–and Bunyan was a Reformed Baptist. The Westminster Confession articulation is very specific.
I think the Reformed get it wrong (I would–I’m a Catholic who grew up Mennonite), but in practice the argument looks like this one from Wilson.
It’s important to know that there isn’t a uniform opinion on this among Protestants. Luther gave Sola Fide as one of his main reasons for breaking with the Catholic Church. Calvin also believed it but stressed the transformative power of God. So Luther would be closer to your “naive” version than Calvin.
I think the problem with “kill everyone and then pray to God” is that you’re intentionally trying to game the system. If you’re trying to game the system then it means you aren’t really sincere in your efforts to follow God and if you aren’t sincere, then you don’t deserve to go to heaven.
Compare with the way smart technies will often come up with plausible-sounding literal interpretations of law that seem like they’d require the legal system to go along with them. It turns out that judges aren’t all that fond of smartass amateur legal scholars trying to game the system….
Relevant: https://xkcd.com/1494/
I think “kill everyone and pray to God” is different from what I was asking about, but since my original question was surprisingly well resolved, let’s take a crack at this.
The hard version of the thought experiment has it that when you start going to church near the end of your life, you aren’t just going through the motions and relishing your successful gaming; you actually develop a sincere faith and a real regret of your youthful immorality. But as a youth you foresaw that that would happen and counted on it. So either the youth’s strategy goes through as planned, or a sincerely penitent soul gets told “no, sorry, your former self’s machinations cut off the possibility of forgiveness”.
To me getting extended time in Purgatory for your prior sins is a satisfying resolution, although I’m not sure it works exactly like that even in Catholicism.
This seems entirely incompatible with Christianity.
Yeah. As the saying goes, the only unforgivable sin is believing yourself unable to be forgiven.
Yeah, the story of the thief (traditionally St Dismas) who repented on the cross next to Jesus and was saved, seems like a pretty clear attempt to teach the lesson that even after a badly-lived life, you can still repent and be saved.
The point here is the sincere repentance. To take Wrong Species’ example, if there is someone who has a habit of hurting others or being selfish or pulling stunts like making and breaking promises, and then apologising afterwards, and then going on and doing the same thing again, you have to question their sincerity.
If they think “But it’s okay to do this, I’ll just say sorry afterwards and that fixes it all up!”, they’re wrong. Especially if they think “fixing it all up” means they can then go on to break more promises, lie, take advantage, etc. “I’ve said ‘sorry’, you’re supposed to forgive me!” is the penny-in-the-slot approach that, whether it’s sex or salvation, does not work.
You cannot say “I will commit this sin, then be sorry afterwards” because that’s false repentance. Any more than you can say “I will murder my spouse, then be really sorry afterwards” and think that gets you off the hook legally.
By the same token, you are not judged on sins you might have committed/would have committed if you survived and lived after your “atheist in a foxhole” experience. If there is any seed or germ of genuine contrition and repentance, then God works with that. If you say “Wow, I really am sorry, I really do wish I hadn’t done that, I didn’t expect to genuinely feel bad”, that is enough. Otherwise, you’re judged on what you have done, not what you might have done had you lived.
There has to be repentance, restitution (or satisfaction) and a firm purpose of amendment. You can’t say “I’ll do this and then be sorry afterwards (and then keep on doing this)”. The joke attributed to Heine on his deathbed (“Of course God will forgive me, that’s His business”) is a risky way to proceed, since God is not obligated to forgive you just because you said the magic words.
That was a form of rules lawyering that used to be prevalent; people –
including Constantine the Great – putting off baptism until on their deathbed because baptism cleanses all sin (not just original sin) and so the sins of a lifetime would be cleansed by baptism near death, rather than being baptised after the period of being a catechumen and then risking losing your salvation by sinning during your life time:
Right. Also worth noting that on matters spiritual, men are not equipped to judge other men. Only God can judge the sincerity of one’s repentance. We may suspect that someone is “gaming the system” and has not sincerely repented, but we can never know for sure. But God will know with 100% certainty and will deal with that person accordingly.
Doesn’t the very concept of original sin contradict that? Original sin can get you punished by God, but it isn’t anything you’ve done.
That’s an interesting question. Does your present sincerity count if your past self was banking on it to continue their own insincerity? Let’s say you had a “no atheists in foxholes” situation. Someone prays to God to save their soul. They mean it but it comes from a place of fear and they end up dying. God, being omniscient, knows that if they lived they would have continued on sin. Should they go to heaven? How much sincerity and how long, is needed?
Even outside of religion, it’s an interesting thought. If someone wrongs me and then later feels guilt, should I forgive them, even if they made their decision counting on them feeling guilt later?
How much sincerity and how long, is needed?
“Between the saddle and the ground is the mercy of God” – old Irish (and seemingly elsewhere) saying.
A poem from a collection published in 1917 (dealing with the Great War) by an Irish poetess, Katherine Tynan:
Here’s a question that I have always found clarifying : “Does this theology treat God like a vending machine?” Meaning, does it suggest that one could perform a particular action that would compel God to a certain desired result.
If the answer is “Yes,” then the theology (or the interpretation thereof) is simply wrong.
Right. One related idea caught up in the faith and works debate is that we might somehow merit salvation. The Catholic view rejects this: grace received from God is always a gift freely given, and it is only by grace that we are saved. But works are still a common source of grace even if God is not obliged or compelled to impart grace to us.
The saved don’t desire to act like that. A thief could be not in a state of grace his whole life, then in a state of grace when he prays to Jesus during his execution.
The problem then is believing the Gospel truth claims and hoping to get saved near death so you can enjoy a life of vice without going to Hell.
I think a way toward understand this is that God transcends time, so from His perspective some rational agents are predestined to love Him and therefore be saved, while some are not.
To be fair, that’s pretty much what Luther believed (although substitute “don’t doubt Christianity’s factual claims” with “trust that Jesus will save you”). This teaching was toned down pretty much as soon as Luther died, though.
I learned back in school that one teaching of the Protestant Reformation was a belief in “salvation through faith alone” and specifically not through good works. What exactly does this mean?
Part of the problem is that the Reformation was a whole bunch of guys and addressing a whole bunch of questions, and since it’s been five hundred years since the Reformation a lot of those questions have been answered, ignored, re-phrased, or changed completely (I imagine if Luther saw modern German Lutheranism, for instance, he’d have a screaming fit). Before we start, I’d like to curtail any accusations of “This is just Protestant-bashing!” (wait till I start talking about Luther) by admitting up front yep, there were real abuses and disgraces on the Catholic side. I’m going to leave the politics and history out of it and try and stick to theology.
There’s a few points here:
(1) I’m more familiar with the phrase as justification by faith alone, and justification is a complicated matter (there’s actually been a joint declaration on it by the Catholics and Lutherans, which I think about three theologians not on the joint bodies have actually read, and everyone else – especially the laity – is either leery of it, doesn’t know about it and cares less, or is happily ignorant of the entire topic). Luther used forensic, legal imagery for his doctrine on this, famously the “dunghills covered with snow” image to represent his understanding of how we are justified – we are still rotten stinking sinners even if we repent, but the perfect faith and virtues of Christ are imputed to us (the snow covering the dung). Yeah. Well, not quite the Catholic view which is why it took until 1999 to come to a compromise on this one.
(2) Leaving justification aside, Sola Fide is, as some Protestants of the Reformed Tradition like to put it, one of the Solas (which makes me laugh because that’s the same joke as The Lone Gunmen – if there’s more than one, it ain’t sole). They also like to make the distinction that it is Sola Fide, not Sole Fide (Faith Alone On Its Own, Nuthin’ Else). You can’t buy salvation. This was a more pressing concern about the time of the Reformation because of the whole Tetzel ‘selling indulgences’ scandal, but for centuries there had been the practice of making large donations of money/land to the Church in a tacit “tit for tat” bargain: yes I’m a hard-nosed practical man of the world who has done hinky things, but I pay you to pray for me after my death and get me out of Purgatory, worst case scenario get me into Purgatory instead of Hell (see the Scrovegni Chapel as an example of this; Wikipedia calls the guy who commissioned it a banker but most sources are less diplomatic and say “money lender”). We don’t bother so much about this nowadays because one of our besetting sins is Presumption (e.g. “I’m a Good Person, I’m going to Heaven/there’s no such place as Hell, God wouldn’t create that” where ‘Good Person’ means “I didn’t rape or murder anyone, apart from that I didn’t exhibit much evidence of reforming grace in my life”).
Luther, though – he bothered.
(3) I’m talking a lot about Luther even though there were several other influential movers at the same time, but he’s the one got the most publicity then and now, and Lutheranism had a big influence on English what would become Anglicanism and so Protestantism in general in the English-speaking world (which includes America). Luther had issues, to put it mildly (yeah, remember that disclaimer above? Apply it here). At the very least, he suffered from extreme scrupulosity, which meant he was on a constant mental treadmill of “Am I saved? How do I know I’m saved? But really, how do I know? Do I have faith? Do I have real faith, or do I only think I have faith? What if I don’t have real, saving faith but false faith and I only think I’m saved and then I die and find out I’m damned? HOW DO I KNOW FOR SURE FOR POSITIVE FOR 100% CONFIDENCE AND REASSURANCE ON THIS???”
Well, he came up with his own answer (or set of them) which was basically radical confidence in the word of Christ in the Gospels about forgiveness and salvation. Strip everything else away except total faith in this. Naturally, this meant you had the problem of “But how can I be sure the words of the Gospel are true?” and that’s where the “Biblical literalism” got its start – it’s not poetry, metaphor, history or human interpolation, it’s all 100% divine inspired inerrant word to be literally believed. Literally believe the bare word with full faith and you are saved. You can’t buy salvation by good works or piety, you can’t get others to pray your way to heaven, but what you can do is read and believe with full confidence and trust.
I spoke about Presumption above, the polar opposite of Presumption is Despair: “I am such a terrible, horrible sinner and wretch I am hopelessly damned, not even God will or can forgive me, there is no hope”. Luther had an inclination towards this and, to do him credit, he fought against it by clinging tightly to the belief that there is no unforgivable sin and God can and will forgive and save all who truly repent and believe and amend their lives.
Luther was touchy on this (because he was, understandably, protective of the system he’d worked out to calm his mental demons) and so reacted poorly to any opposition or even anything that seemed to contradict him. Even if by an actual apostle. That’s why he was so iffy about the Epistle of St James, to the point of calling it “an epistle of straw” in one writing and (in anecdote at least) ripping it out of a Bible he was reading in a fit of rage, and trying to get the Protestant Bible to drop it altogether as doubtful and dubious.
Luther was fond of preaching that there were no unforgivable sins, that you could be steeped in sin, that you could sin every day – but if once you had saving faith and repented, you were saved:
Now, this did not (and does not) mean that “Believe in Christ, say the magic formula*, and you can then go on doing what you like, even murdering others**”. True repentance and faith mean amendment of life; you don’t live a virtuous and pious life because you’re trying to bribe your way into heaven (“I can commit this sin and then do that act of charity to offset it”) but because now your heart has changed and you want to be a good person and do good. That’s in a way how the Protestant Work Ethic got its start; Calvinism and that strain of the Reformation was big on visible signs of God’s grace, including in worldly affairs, so a reformed sinner would now be sober, hard-working, thrifty and all the rest of it, and having God’s favour would naturally do well, and worldly goods and wealth were a sign of success.
*This is what some variants of American non-denominational Protestantism have fallen into, with the Sinner’s Prayer, but even they in their origins demanded more than just “say the magic words”.
** Assurance of Salvation or Perseverance of the Saints; another problem that cropped up with the Reformation and doubt about “but can I lose my salvation? what if I fall back into sin? what if I do terrible things, am I still saved even then?”. There’s an entire novel – Confessions of A Justified Sinner – about a guy who wrestles with this due to a form of Calvinism and is seduced/tempted/goes nuts and commits ever more dreadful sins to test his confidence in his salvation; the hook on which he is wriggling is that if you doubt you are saved, then poof! this is proof you don’t have saving faith, so you are damned! Then the only way he can prove to himself that no he really does have saving faith is to commit sin in the assurance that it doesn’t matter, he is saved beyond all power of even himself to damn himself.
Perseverance of the Saints drove me crazy. My mother was an Evangelical, and preaching “say the sinner’s prayer and get saved” to the choir was a big thing. I was usually in the position of not wanting to follow the social rules of the church (don’t believe in evolution, don’t do this fun thing), but I said the sinner’s prayer because Jesus could come back Any Day Now and I wanted to be saved from damnation (curse the moral luck of those who died before I was born and so could deathbed comvert!)
As a 14-year-old budding rationalist, I was receptive to the old arguments against the Bible that are easily found online. But Perseverance of the Saints means that if today I say up myself “I am an atheist”, that means I was never saved when I said the sinner’s prayer, right? But it felt real… how would one know the difference? So many questions of epistemology!
It’s interesting how much of the history of ideas is sometimes just a history of self-administered psycho-therapy. John Stuart Mill had something similar going on. He slavishly followed Benthams utilitarianism but it made him miserable. He then came up with his own version which in the end left him satisfied. Ideas are supposed to stand on their own, regardless of the personal quirks of the founder but it does inevitably color our perceptions of them.
I had a feeling you’d have something interesting to say about this 😉
Seriously, fascinating background on Luther.
Thanks, I’m trying to be a lot more charitable towards Our Separated Brethren and particularly Luther, though I still think his main trouble was that he needed to loosen up a lot 🙂
@ADifferentAnonymous
I’m not particularly knowledgeable on this topic and Protestants are quite good at disagreeing/splitting up over doctrinal matters, but it seems to me that “salvation through faith alone” was in itself primarily a rejection of indulgences and/or erasing people’s sins during confession* and/or people being promised salvation if they donated to the church.
So I think you have to keep in mind that the concept was introduced to prohibit certain behavior, not to enable people to behave badly in another way.
I think that some Protestants ‘solved’ the problem that you identify by separating salvation from condemnation. Calvin and Luther seem to believe that the damnation of the damned is caused by their sin, but that the salvation of the saved is solely caused by God.
So people then still get punished for sinning & thus have an incentive not to sin, but they cannot ‘buy’ their way into heaven.
* You can just as easily argue that this allows people to keep committing mortal sins, if they just get their sins removed during confession.
Calvin and Luther seem to believe that the damnation of the damned is caused by their sin, but that the salvation of the saved is solely caused by God.
I think the problem with original Calvinism was the insistence on double predestination while the Lutherans went with a more ‘Catholic’ version of the doctrine; not alone does God choose whom He wishes to save, but that He chooses (or condemns) some to be damned. Neither can effect or affect this; in the one case, grace is irresistible and in the other, faith is dead even if it seems to be a living, saving faith.
That part seems to have dropped out or been discarded or quietly set aside in modern Calvinism/Reformed tradition, though, and there’s a lot more emphasis on the single predestination (God has chosen the Elect, we don’t know who is in the Elect, so preach the Gospel to everyone).
This thread seems to have died, but the subject is super interesting, so here’s some analysis of the salvation question:
Basic Christian truth claim: Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the light; no one comes to God the Father but through Him (all others get a relatively bad afterlife).
The basic modern Anglophone objection to this is that there’s no evidence for this, Christianity is hostile to evidence (creationism!) So if we exist in a world where it’s true, God is an unjust demiurge who takes people to His utopia or sends them to an eternal concentration camp on the basis of a lucky guess.
The problem with their objection is that they’re reacting to the conservative side of English Protestantism. We need a steelman of the basic Christian truth claim.
@Nick apparently understands the Catholic Church’s teaching on justification well enough to defend it. Meanwhile, I’ll put out the definition that occurs over and over in the Church Fathers:
“God became a man so men could become divine.”
Through the Incarnation, God the Logos offered a way for those who return His love (“I love Him because He first loved me.”) To become what He is, in all ways except ontologically, which is logically impossible. The term the New Testament uses for the afterlife of those who reject this free gift is Hades… yeah, the Greek underworld. The Good News to its original hearers was that you don’t have to go there.
People in the Roman Empire weren’t stupid, even the uneducated classes the Church spread fastest in. They wouldn’t have called a message “You’ve never heard of an eternal concentration camp, but that’s where everyone is going unless they beg our incarnate God to let them into his utopia instead.” Good News.
Oh geez! No! Do not put me on the spot here! 🙁
I do read secondary material on this sort of thing, but oh my gosh am I not qualified to make a thorough defense of things. I invited a debate because I’d be happy to mark out the position of the Church in specific ways, not fully. In other words, I’ll do my best to answer specific question and objections, but there’s no way I’m writing up a big apologia.
Oops, mea culpa. And we seem to have run out of specific objections, so mission accomplished? 🙂
You’re all right. But no, I’m afraid SSC will be mission country for the foreseeable future. 😀
As others have said, yes, you’re pretty much right, but since most of the responses so far have been from SCC’s esteemed Catholic cadre, I wanted to weigh in coming from the perspective of a life-long protestant, currently exploring the reformed tradition (Presbyterianism is the big reformed denomination, but many others share some of the heritage).
@Deiseach made some good points which I’d like to flesh out a bit more, in particular the “magic words” of the sinners prayer. It is unfortunately common, especially in modern America, that much of “salvation through faith alone” has been boiled down to a magic formula. Ironically, being saved by faith becomes a work (all you have to do is say this). It is common to hear this view, even among some pastors and in some big churches, and it’s understandable why it’s pushed a lot: either because people want to view themselves as part of the same ingroup as those around them, or out of genuine concern for seeing people’s lives (and afterlives) changed for the better. I’d liken the popularity of this view in protestant/evangelical churches to something like the blog IFL science: well-meaning people have positive associations with the word ‘science’ and share every article with ‘scientists say’ in the title because science=good. These people are often unable to articulate what the scientific method actually is, and don’t really understand the importance of peer review, duplicate studies, statistical hygiene, etc etc. The importance of something complicated (justification by faith / the scientific method) has been boiled down to something easy-to-say (pray this prayer / scientific study => correct), even by people who should know better.
Next, lets take a look at Luther. Again, @Deiseach did a good job highlighting some of his personal hangups and how those influenced his theology, but I want to look more at the historical backdrop of the protestant reformation. The Church at the time was using it’s power and influence to manipulate people: demanding money and other sacrifices under the auspices of their God-given authority and the promise/threat of giving/withholding salvation. Justification by faith was for Luther and the reformers a way of diminishing the Catholic Church’s authority over people in this way. Got Questions has a simple outline of the five solas viewed from this perspective.
A more common phase in the reformed tradition would be something like “justification by grace through faith”. It has the emphasis on grace—that salvation is God’s gift which cannot be bought or earned, and that faith is the human response to this salvation. There is also the expectation that the work of God’s salvation will begin a change in someone’s life, and that change will be evidenced by good works (that is, doing good is a response to being saved, not an attempt to gain salvation).
In terms of sources against someone who would say that it would be ok for someone to be an unrepentant murderer, @Jackologist already mentioned the book of James, Paul (in Romans 6) specifically wrote against the idea that someone saved should want to keep on sinning, and I personally like the Presbyterian Mission website for good medium-length introductory articles with the Presbyterian beliefs of various doctrines (nothing specifically on sola fide, but it is talked about in a number of articles including Atonement, Forgiveness, Grace, Reconciliation and Salvation).
There’s also Revelation 20.12 f. (“…and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works; and the sea gave up the dead which were in it, and Death and Hell delivered up the dead which were in them, and they were judged every man according to their works”), which certainly seems to contradict the “It doesn’t matter what you actually do, so long as you believe” theory.
Just for clarity–I’m Catholic, but I’m a convert: I attended a Reformed (Presbyterian–PCA) church for several years.
The Reformed answer to the “judged according to their works” passages is the doctrine of “substitutionary atonement.” In that understanding, the Christian is judged by Christ’s works, rather than their own.
I think the Catholic understanding–that Christ’s sacrifice saves us but a key part of that change is making it possible for us to change to be like Him–is a much better understanding, but thought it might be worth noting that the Reformed tradition does have an answer (even though it’s one I don’t agree with.)
“God became a man so that men could become God.” If I understand the Fathers aright, there is no bridge between what humans are, even before the Fall, and what God is. The Hypostatic Union in Jesus Christ brought such a bridge into reality: by imitating Him through cooperation with God’s grace, we can become godly in a way impossible even for a hypothetical sinless Adam and Eve.
Greek Orthodox call this theosis. It’s not emphasized in the Roman Catholic Church, but is said even by Latin Fathers. The way salvation was taught led more to the image of souls flitting about in heaven enjoying the presence of God, as we see in Dante’s tour of the solar system.
Can anyone recommend cogent documentaries that advocate for greater free trade in order to promote the welfare of denizens of poorer countries?
My friend and I are “trading” documentaries relating to capitalism (mainly to rebulid our friendship), and I have no clue what documentaries would paint capitalism in a favourable light (they are bringing documentaries painting capitalism in an unfavourable one).
Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose” was turned into a PBS series back in the ’80s, and I think it would fit that description.
Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose series from PBS seems like the most obvious example, though I haven’t seen that in ages. But this friend may already know who Friedman is from stuff like The Shock Doctrine and The Corporation and could already consider him the embodiment of capitalist evil.
Documentaries are a terrible, terrible medium for this sort of thing.
I keep seeing these stories of Trump live-tweeting Fox n Friends almost word for word. And everyone acts so confused and surprised at the contents of the tweets. This has to be a bubble filter Different Worlds thing, right?
He’s a universal leak in the bubble filter. Hence the constant feeling of cognitive dissonance.
I’m not sure if I’m misunderstanding you, but it has been known for a while that Trump live tweets Fox & Friends, e.g. http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/18/media/trump-fox-friends-tweet/index.html
People still object to the fact that the President of the United States endorses these things.
It’s not the content; it’s the context.
People are used to seeing that kind of stuff from Fox News. They are less used to seeing it uncritically retweeted by the president of the United States. Take, for example, this morning’s tweet about 702 renewal, which attacked an act that his administration officially supports — on fictional grounds, no less. The intelligence apparatus of the most powerful nation in the world is dedicated to putting daily briefings on Trump’s desk, and this is where he gets his information?
. “He believes that television producers, especially of highly rated shows, understand what the public is interested in—what it fears, what it wants, what it loves,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in a recent interview. “And so TV programming in some ways is a more accurate reflection of the public mood than polling. That’s his view, he said it to me. And that’s one of the reasons he watches a lot of television.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/144940/trump-tv-post-literate-american-presidency
Donald Trump as Ozymandias….
If that means we can get a Bubastis in the White House to eat some dignitaries on national TV, I’m all for it.
That description pretty much nails him.
I don’t get the connection
phil: It’s a reference to Alan Moore’s character in Watchmen, Adrian Veidt / Ozymandias. He was depicted sitting in front of a wall of screens in his secret lair, watching the world through television.
Huh, I totally missed that but that makes more sense than what I was thinking. I was thinking of the poem.
The empty boastfulness of the poem also resonates pretty well with Trump’s persona.
The boastfulness is a bit less empty for Ozymandias being still one of the most famous people of his age, whose works the mighty are more likely to look upon with wonder than despair.
Dear God let Donald Trump not be the Ozymandias aka Rameses II of our age, one of the few unambiguous historical names stil remembered as an exemplar of civilization just before the Atomic Age Collapse (cause unknown and what are these “tweets” everyone keeps talking about). For that matter, Rameses was the Archetype of Ultimate Evil for almost two thousand years while we were waiting for Hitler to be born; I’d really rather Trump be a forgotten buffoon.
You know that bothered me. You’d think the smartest man in the world would know better thsn to name himself after a symbol of futility, especially since his explanation in Watchmen for why he chose the name didn’t even seem to recognize that it’s a symbol of futility.
It’s like calling your ship the Titanic II and it isn’t ironic or anything, you just haven’t heard of the Titanic.
Maybe he wanted people to underestimate him.
Because the smartest man in the world knows that despite the name’s association with futility, Ramses II was one of the most successful men to have ever lived. Thirty-two centuries after his death and we still know his name, his person, his acts, his visage. Ruined though they may be, some of his works still stand, and people travel from all over the world to come and see them. Adrian Veidt picked it precisely because educated people think it’s a name associated with futility, but he knows better.
That strikes me as entirely plausible.
Hello, I’m looking for some help from the rationalist community establishing some principles of rational debate with my bosses at work. Where would be the best place to ask for this? (Lesser Wrong, comments here, subreddit?)
I would expand upon in the relevant place but brief back ground as follows – My perception at work is that I try to discuss things rationally and objectively, but other people are often really just trying to defend a position. This will almost always be under at least the pretence of rational, objective debate and often the other person probably believes that’s what they’re doing.
Perhaps naively, I think that if we could agree some principles debate and perhaps do a bit on cognitive bias, then the problem would go away to some extent. I’d get on better at work, and as a team we’d do better work.
(Realise I may have delusions of above average objectivoty and rationality relative to my team here)
Are the things being debated directly relevant to your job, or just workplace discussions of things like life, current events, and politics?
The most important thing to establish here is how your interlocutors are treating the debate. If they’re just shooting the breeze about the news or some funny observation, a bit overly adversarial approach to a topic is not uncommon: it’s fun (provided you realize that’s all it is!) and it keeps the conversation going. If it’s something more serious and they are being adversarial, maybe that’s their preferred approach to seeing the best position dominate. With them it’s important to check a while later whether they’ve actually changed their mind or not. Other folks, often ones who maintain more dispassion as to the outcome, are willing to stop a debate halfway, so to speak, when they realize you’ve made a really good point. But that comes down to different approaches to debate.
The things are directly relevant. Things we actually work on, and a general debate about how we work.
I don’t think you should expect to change the metagame of persuasion in your workplace. You’re not the boss, right? You just don’t have that sort of authority. A better approach would be to figure out what sort of arguments and techniques actually work in this setting. You’d get your way a bit more, making the workplace a bit more appealing to you.
Yes, it probably won’t work, but it’s the difference between my job being horrible and it being really rewarding, so it’s worth a try.
One reason that it might is that our job requires us to be both rational and objective and I think there’s quite strong evidence of this. They can argue that actually they are being, but they can’t say they don’t need to be…
Suppose there is a work debate over issue X, and you are advancing a rational position about X while others are “just trying to defend a position.” The latter could be related to ego or cognitive bias, or it could be related to motivates that have little to do with X or override the significance of X. It’s important to distinguish between the two situations.
Suppose the group botches X. Would it matter? For whom would it matter? If X is likely to be botched anyway, who might it hurt if a plausible solution for X were documented in advance?
Generally speaking, try not to be the one who doesn’t know what the debate is really about. Arguing over the text while being oblivious to the subtext is at best a hollow rationalism.
I don’t think I’m that guy, but maybe I am.
One other thing, when defending the allegedly “rational” position is to consider the statement “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.” Your bosses might be defending a position because it’s actually correct. (Of course, your boss might be a known idiot, and this isn’t likely, but it’s always worth keeping in mind. Scott Adams has the Pointy-Haired Boss be the smart one in a situation very occasionally.)
Anyone up for answering the question asked? 🙂
For the sake of discussion let’s assume that the putative issues under debate are the actual issues.
I have been in (software) engineering groups in which debates tend to go as you describe. I’ve also been in one group that was as close to the ideal as I can imagine encountering in practice, and one other that did pretty well.
As you point out:
The last bit might make it look as if all that people need is some “rationalist education”. But the first part counts against that interpretation: many people are just trying to defend a position. Why would they do that? Most likely because it’s the position each respectively came up with. Having one’s position chosen is evidence of being right, and being right means being clever, having value, etc.
What you want is for everyone in the debate to want to arrive at the best answer regardless of who came up with it. This amounts to valuing the team, or even better the goal, over the individual in this particular domain of life. So your task is not to educate people about rationalism but to inculcate a different set of values. The primary value needs to be pride in “the work”, rather than in individual contributions to the work.
Value shifts are hard. Most people don’t like much or all of their work and are doing it to make a living. And if most people don’t shift at the same time it’s of little help. But since you ask, the typical strategy would be along the lines of “Don’t you want to look back on your projects with a sense of pride?” and so forth.
This is one thing that advanced, adversarial academic training can help with. I say “can”, not “will”. But the better groups I have encountered tended to have more people with that background.
This is not going to be effective in certain corporate environments where well-intentioned failure is heavily punished and/or the leadership is incapable of recognizing and/or rewarding actual ability.
In such an environment, management can usually only survive/thrive by subterfuge. This means that they may prefer that their engineers do things that are not optimal for the greater corporate goals, but that are politically optimal.
An example is delivering a non-working software component to another unit inside the company before an unreasonable deadline. Then the manager of the engineers that delivered the non-working component can claim to have done their job, blame the other unit for not using it correctly or for the specifications to have been wrong or such. Then the resulting drama buys time for the software to be fixed, without the manager being be blamed for his unit exceeding the deadline, although they actually did.
The above actually happened to me, BTW (my project was dependent on that component).
Of course, I would advise not working too long in such corporate environments (although it is quite educational, especially on how bad systems/leaders corrupt people).
This sort of thing is part of what I was alluding to in my earlier comment on this thread.
I’m fond of Rogerian argument, and Miller’s law and Double Crux are very new to me but seem interesting and fruitful.
Thanks! 🙂
Listening, making others feel valued, and compromise would probably work better than some sort of official system of debate. A positive work culture [some might even call it a “mindset”] would also help.
yes – a bit of that not happening on both sides here, I guess. One thing I was going to mention is experiments showing biases reduce where people feel good about things/themselves. (I think from thinking fast and slow, but need to check)
Stop. Do not do this. It is a terrible mistake.
You wouldn’t be coming here for advice if you were winning these arguments. The people who are winning the arguments are doing so by non-rational means. You’re asking the winners to throw down their weapons, while you remain armed, so that you can win all the time. You can’t beat Lebron on the court, so you are challenging him to a chess match. What do you think is going to happen?
The sooner you learn how to deal effectively with people who strike you as less-rational-than-thou, the better. World’s full of them.
Also, gently : something is telling you that you might be the naive one here, and that you may have delusions of intellectual grandeur. Listen to it more carefully.
More or less seconded.
Yup, I suppose I am. They probably see themselves as rational and objective, though, and it’s not a total zero sum game scenario, so they might just do it. Maybe Lebron reckon’s he’s a fine chess player…
The main reason I said that I might be naive and that I might have delusions of rationality and objectivity, was to head off replies like, well, all the replies I’ve got! So advice duly noted, but really I’d just like to thoughts on where’s best to discuss what such principles might look like? 🙂
As a compromise you might get Lebron to accept Chess Boxing…
Haha!
Epistemic humility of one kind or another. Your co-workers know something you don’t which is how to be better-optimized for this environment.
If the overall aim is to win… and perfect rationality loses… then it’s not rational to be perfectly rational. Operationally, you may be overvaluing pure, sanitized rationality.
They might also be making decisions based on information you don’t have, or in different ways than you do. You may underestimate their rationality.
Or, you might not be as sanitized-ly rational as you perceive yourself to be. You may overestimate your rationality.
Or some combination thereof.
Or you may be genuinely surrounded by lunatic cretins, in which case you should look for a different job.
…This feels like cleverly worded sarcasm. The perfect parody post of the rationality sphere. It’s only online,so I can’t separate text from context.
Sitting down and talking with your bosses about principles of rationality so they value you more. Errr….Good luck.
Rationality sounds alot like being reasonable,and I’m sure they are used to people sitting down and ‘reasonably’ asking for a promotion.
Ha! Afraid it’s not a parody. Even if it is a silly idea in the context of trying to talk to my bosses about stuff, I thought the rationality folks would have some thoughts on principles for productive rational discussions generally. Check your biases, point at issue…. that kind of thing…
See, if you’re a very productive utilitarian-leaning rationalist, then you convinced your boss…that you no longer are needed, he just outsourced you to india because they need it more and then he donates excess profits there.
Rationality != job success.
So, replies so far all make one or more of the following points – 1) it’s not worth doing/there’s no chance of success 2) learn to persuade people by means that actually work 3) we think you’re an idiot with delusions of rationality.
On point 1), I agree it’s a bit of a long shot, but pay off if it works is large (enjoy current job) and the cost if it doesn’t is low (I’ll quit my job which I’d do anyway).
On point 2) sure, I should try to get better at this (and I do), but it’s not a solution to my current predicament. My job is fun and interesting when it’s about objective analysis and trying to find out what’s true, it’s not when it’s about other stuff – if it can’t be mainly about the former then I’ll do something else instead. I have other viable job options that I’d like to try.
On point 3) The reasoning seems to be only an idiot would try and do this, so I must be an idiot. Obviously if I am such an idiot, I’ll not know it without being directly confronted with my own idiocy. So lets assume I am an idiot with delusions of rationality, and think about some principles of rational debate that might help expose me as the idiot that I truly am.
Where would be best to discuss these principles? What might they be?
You could tell your manager you are struggling with this aspect of your job and ask for their help. Managers are generally sympathetic to and will try to help employees who are trying to solve their own problems. Managers are generally not sympathetic to and will not try to help employees who have identified a systemic issue with the way the managers do their jobs.
I’m kind of in the middle of that – I am asking for their help, and they are nice guys. But I’m also going to be criticising the organisation and them a fair bit. (I know, never get anywhere criticising the boss…)
@Deej
I think that your criticism is too offensive to others to work. You are asking your manager to tell your colleagues something that they will probably be quite offended by (that they can’t reason as well as you due to their biases), creating conflict between the manager and the workers and between you and your coworkers.
Your manager would be a fool to jeopardize his standing with the workers like this and to create a rift between you and your coworkers.
If you personally criticize your co-workers in a way that implies that you are better than them like this, they will probably not take it well.
Generally, the way to address undesired behavior by a large number of employees is to introduce solutions that don’t feel like a personal attack or at least, that feel like a personal attack by some outgroup/fargroup outside the team (like HR or upper management). An example is optional or mandatory ‘harassment training’ or ‘presentation skills training.’ At best, you want people to perceive the training as being aimed at helping them become better than the average person, not making them feel inferior as a person or worker. At worst, you want your coworkers to convince themselves that the training is really meant for their coworkers, while still getting exposed to the information. You definitely don’t want specific people to be singled out for (or in) the training, so they feel that the implied or explicit criticism applies to them more than others.
Another way is to introduce a methodology that forces people to not make the mistakes that they naturally tend to make. An example is Agile development methodologies, which, if you analyze what they intend to do, imply some very negative things about human behavior. However, because the methodologies are presented as a tool that is generically helpful, people usually don’t get offended if you ask them to use such a methodology.
The problem here is that AFAIK there is not really a good anti-fallacy methodology for debating well; nor good training that doesn’t involve a large time commitment (which is probably because you can’t actually learn this easily).
What you could do is prepare or offer to prepare one or more presentations on this topic and get your manager to set aside time for the team and/or interested people from the organization to attend your presentation. Design the presentation to be self-deprecating. Tell people that you have a tendency to fall victim to cognitive bias and that learning some things helped you and that you want to share it with others. Sell it to your manager the same way.
Err heavily on the side of less criticism of others and more self-deprecation. If you can’t come up with examples where you personally fell victim to a fallacy, but you can come up with examples where another person did, then just lie that you were the person making the cognitive error.
Don’t tell people your real issue: that you want them to debate more like yourself. Let them draw their own conclusions (or not).
I doubt that it will create a huge change at your workplace, but I think that this will result in the maximum achievable outcome* given the constraints of human nature and the limitations of the corporate environment.
*probably not that large
I think clarifying your assumptions might be helpful. As I understand it, your view is:
(1) There is a problem: the style of communication in your workplace is frustrating to you on a personal level and also counterproductive for the organization because your managers and coworkers fail to be rational (in at least some sense).
(2) There is a solution: establish team-wide communication norms and guidelines which will constrain your bosses and coworkers into engaging in more rational communication.
(3) But you need advice: figuring out how to establish those new norms / rules / policies.
The consensus of the commenters (with which I agree) is that there is no answer to (3) that has a realistic chance of achieving (2). However, that doesn’t mean you can’t make progress on solving the problem; it just means that you might want to rethink your approach.
I think you should try to identify exactly what bothers you. Is it that sub-optimal choices are being made? Is it that the quality of your ideas isn’t being recognized? That they’re not understood? That you aren’t being listened to? Obviously these are related. If, over the last 6 months every decision was identical, but you felt like the process was better would you be satisfied? What about the inverse (better outcomes, shitty process)?
I ask those somewhat rhetorical questions because I think reflecting on your answers might help you figure out realistic, actionable steps for improving the situation.
If the ONLY acceptable outcome is “all my coworkers are as rational as I am,” you are – to be frank – probably screwed in this job or any other.
If the outcome you want is that your recommended course of action is taken more often, then maybe some of the comments about effective communication / “spin selling” are the most relevant. Learn you understand and tailor YOUR communication to the mental models your colleagues (subconsciously) rely on.
If the outcome you want is for your ideas to be given more weight / consideration, you are overwhelmingly more likely to succeed by framing the issue to your colleagues as YOUR problem, not theirs. Think of a time where you had a good idea that wasn’t given its proper due and ask your boss for feedback. “I think I have good ideas, but I think I could be doing a much better job actually advocating for them. Do you have any tips for how I could be a more effective communicator? I was I might be a lot more effective if [we tried each taking 3 minutes to make our case followed by a 2 minute open Q/A]. Do you think that might be worth trying? Do you have any feedback for me? I’d really like to build my skills here!”
I understand that you don’t think the problem is with you. Without trying to adjudicate that point, though, ACTING as if the problem is with you is much, much more likely to gain your colleagues’ respect and consideration than informing them that they all have a problem but luckily you’ve drawn up a list of rules that will solve their heretofore unrecognized issues.
No matter what, this won’t be easy! Your approach to debate, problem solving, and communication is different than most people. The attendant difficulties are not going to disappear with one simple trick. But try to take the same outside perspective on your own situation you wish your colleagues would do in theirs, think about what you can realistically control, and try to make incremental improvements. Good luck!
@Aapje – thanks a lot, really helpful
@akl – also thanks, v.helpful
I would recommend reading the book Spin Selling.
It lays out a sales method based on asking questions attempting to get deeper into the roots of the why’s behind decision making.
In a professional setting, I would suggest that that’s actually what you should be shooting for.
I would suggest that the tools you’ve learned though rationality would actually be really helpful in that process,
but professionally, if you have ideas, you need to think about having a process to sell them,
other sales books you might find helpful:
– The challenger sale – Snap selling – Little red book of selling
All of these are of the mindset of help your customer first and foremost, the sale is a secondary effect of the helping. And given my nature that has made sales a lot easier since I’m not an extroverted manipulator, I’m an introverted problem solver.
I think you might need to go into more detail. By posing your problem in such general terms, you’re effectively asking for a general solution, which strikes me as impossible, or near enough as to be a waste of time. I wish my fellow commenters were a bit nicer about this, but I think this is part of why you’ve gotten such a dismissive response.
But solving the problem in your specific case might be much easier than solving it in general! Probably not easy in absolute terms, but maybe worth a shot.
Specific examples of interactions would help get us there. (Or made-up ones that you think are representative).
Thanks
We’re a public organisation with a clear objective (defined in law). It’s difficult to measure how well we’re achieving said objective – impact of our work is usuaully quite long term, and counter factual’s difficult to estimate.
I’m quite junior but experienced in a fairly technical area of policy/economics. I spend a lot of time explaining fairly complicated stuff to more senior people including a lot of time explaining why something about their understanding is wrong. I’ve no desire to be promoted or anything, I’d just like us to do a good and efficient job.
I find where I’m involved early and/or there’s no inconvience for people understanding someting there’s very rarely any issues. I explain the thing, they understand it to a greater or lesser degree, I correct bits and pieces later. Where something’s already been agreed or has come from a source they see as an authority (eg consultants) or it’s inconvenient for someone to understand something for whatever reason, there’s often a problem. For my own career prospects I’d be best just to let it go, but I kind of just want to do the right thing – not sure the motivation for this is exactly, and it’s probably not particualrly worthy.
I find that given enough passes, I can usually get points through. But this takes loads of energfy on my part and sometimes leaves bothsides a bit pissed off. Typically I’d see at least three of the following –
– people become reluctant to agree even the most uncontroversial starting assumptions (presummably for fear of where the following logic will take them)
– people move from weighing evidence on balance to burdon of absoulute proof is on you
– appeal to authority (often directly followed by a cry of “appeal to authority” when I point out I might know as much about this as whoever they’re talking about)
– refusal to discuss with the authority they’re appealling to or to mention my points when discussing with more senior people (for example, them: “ah, but person x said this is correct” me: “I think they might not have considered the y, can I check with them” them: “no”)
– describing points of logic or fact as ‘just my opinion’.
Now usually each point can be addressed, and we’ll get to the right place – but this takes a lot of energy on my part and sometimes leaves people pissed off (not least me).
If I could get people to discuss things as they normally do, when not – as I see it – just defending a position, that’d be great for all involved. So I’m trying to think of some principles, ideas, for doing this. My managers are nice guys, they do want to do a good job so it’s not totally impossible that we get somewhere with this. And if it doesn’t work I’ll be quitting anyway so, well, nothing to lose really…
@ Deej
The business world is full of situations where it is more important to make some plausibly-justifiable decision than to make the best possible decision. Once something has, as you say, already been agreed, that means a bunch of people have expended political capital defending or attacking an outcome. That is probably the wrong time for you to jump in as a junior person and say “Hey guys? you know that brutal argument everybody spent months being mad at each other about until they finally came to a mutually tolerable agreement? Let’s re-open that old wound and fight it all over again!”
Your company has a decision process. If that process reaches bad decisions because you weren’t in the room where it happens, the best thing you can do is so useful when dealing with new issues that next time you are in the room where it happens.
Companies often seek the advice of consultants when they need somebody to blame for the result of a risky decision. If the firm is really at a deadlock and can’t decide what to do but needs to decide and act, one side of the argument will hire a consultant to provide cover for doing what they wanted to do anyway. “Look, we’ve paid these guys all this money for their advice based on their track record and expertise – it’d be stupid not to take it, right?”
Think of already-made decisions as like the outcome of an election. Or a court proceeding. Or the course of an ocean liner. You can’t just reverse course on a whim because you think the wrong path was chosen last week. There is momentum; changes are costly. Your bosses would need a specific excuse – a good one – to revisit old decisions at all before they could even consider changing them to suit you. Otherwise the company and its leadership would look weak and indecisive and the people carrying out policy would get really confused. (“I thought we were doing A?” “No, that was last week – now we’re doing B instead”.)
Thanks for explaining all this to me Glen.
Work in management consulting. Can confirm 🙂
Matt M made me post my ‘outside the Overton window’ comments, so can confirm.
I got slightly above 30 on this test that was part of the SSC survey: https://psychology-tools.com/autism-spectrum-quotient/
Does that mean I am autistic? On the spectrum?
No, it means your score on a quiz on the Internet overlaps that typical of autistic people. Pretty much every test like this comes with some boilerplate somewhere saying that it’s not meant to be used for diagnostic purposes, and while you’d be correct if you thought that smells of ass-covering, there is actually a good reason for it too.
But from reading some of Scott’s posts (like the recent one on Adderall), it sounds like these kinds of questionnaires are basically how psychiatrists diagnose people too. What else would a professional look into to determine if I’m on the spectrum? Whether my life has been affected? I’m professionally high-functioning, but my social situation is bad enough to qualify as significantly impaired, whatever the cause.
Professionally high-functioning is already somewhat of a strike against having autism; it makes it significantly less likely and means the severity almost certainly can’t be that high. Socially, if you are really severely impaired, you may want to see a psychiatrist. One thing I’d note is that among adults, I think having literally 0 friends is not rare enough that it would necessarily count as significantly impaired. There are a lot of reasons you could have social difficulty. If you’re a nerd (and you probably are, that’s basically what the AQ test reads as to me), you’ve probably got some of those.
I think sometimes to nerdy people it appears as if more normal people have social superpowers, but the reality is that a lot of perfectly normal people suffer a lot of the same communication problems, difficulty reading context, and nervousness in large groups. And in my experience adults tend to lack friends if you compare them to children or college students, so for some young adults who had fewer friends than average the sudden shift may feel like a social disability becoming clear when it’s more like a normal part of aging and changes in social responsibilities.
Oh, I’m certainly not rock-back-and-forth autistic. I would have said I may have Asperger’s, if the BDSM-V or whatever had not retired that term in favor of “autistic spectrum”. But I have had at least one person ask me if I was autistic, unprompted.
As for the social situation, I have had issues since adolescence, so it can’t be the aging phenomenon you are talking about.
Diagnostics in this area involves a lot more than just answering a few questions. The diagnostic process that lead to me getting an Asperger’s diagnosis took most of a week and involved multiple visits to a neuropsychological unit. Gold-standard diagnostics in this area involves both observing behaviour closely in what is known to be diagnostically relevant contexts, as well as asking questions to people who are not the person of interest (parents, caregivers), and neither of these aspects are covered in an online multiple-choice test.
I’m going to be a little lazy here, and just link my post from the last time I answered this question.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/24/open-thread-91-5/#comment-581790
tl;dr. The test is not perfect and the base rate of autism is low. Therefore you most likely don’t have autism if your score is in the 30s. Also, if you read the DSM-5 criteria, you can see that it actually overlaps less with the AQ test than you might expect. I scored ~36 on the AQ test, but I could only plausibly meet a small subset of the criteria in the DSM-5 at a low severity at worst.
If you read the original paper, you’ll see that mathematics majors score unusually high on the test even when not autistic. Similarly, I’d bet a lot of people here who aren’t autistic have high AQ scores.
Well, literally everyone is on the spectrum, thanks to it’s definition based on the gaussian distribution.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4552377/
And about 2/5 of those diagnosed score above average,with 1/4 scoring below typical make distribution.
That word may mean something different in practice what you think it means.
I see exercise programs and such frequently have a disclaimer that tells people to consult their physician before starting.
This is probably reasonable self-protection for people offering exercise programs, but do people ever consult their physicians? Do physicians have enough knowledge of their patients and of exercise programs to give sensible advice?
This is probably reasonable self-protection for people offering exercise programs, but do people ever consult their physicians?
I’m guessing people who write those disclaimers don’t know. The important thing is that their ass is covered. Offering an exercise program in a thong is a crime.
I think it does happen from time to time. For example, at an annual checkup the patient mentions that he is thinking of starting to go to the gym and discusses it with the doctor. Or the doctor brings up the issue himself.
I’m not a doctor myself, but I would guess that for people who are young or middle-aged and in decent health, the doctor is not going to be able to give advice better than what could be found in 5 or 10 minutes of internet searches.
If you are being treated by your doctor for, say, heart disease, you might not want to just show up at the local Crossfit and start going as hard as your (other) muscles will let you.
People can have medical conditions that limit what kind of excercise they should engage in. People also don’t necessarily actually know their own condition.
Video game general
I’m looking for a new PC game to start – would appreciate your recommendations.
My criteria:
-makes you think (includes some form of puzzle-solving or lateral thinking)
-not a gratuitous amount of cut-scenes, preferably none. I want a game, not a playable movie. For reference, I stopped playing The Last of Us about half an hour in because of the constant banal interruptions to play.
-combat, army building, military strategy themes are a plus but not essential
-RPGs with stat-building, character development and skill/trait customisation a strong plus
Previously played and enjoyed:
Myst series, Obduction, League of Legends, Diablo 3, Resident Evil (most recent one), Dark Souls 3 (though frustrating).
I just started playing Door Kickers again. Most similar to XCOM including limited character development but there are experience levels, 5 classes, and a broad array of realistic equipment.
Does your aversion to cut scenes extend to RPGs that have dialog prompts?
No, I just mean cinematic cut scenes that interrupt gameplay, usually for purposes of disclosing plot.
Divinity Original Sin 2 has plenty of dialog but not a lot of cinematic cut scenes. It’s an RPG where you manage a squad of 4.It has a classless system in which any character can potentially learn any ability, and there’s room to customize builds. The combat is somewhat unique and features lots of powerful status ailments and battlefield control options.
It’s not the most challenging lateral-thinking wise, but probably better than average.
How do you feel about Mass Effect?
I also don’t fully understand your opposition to cutscenes–should all plot be delivered during actual action? That seems somewhat restrictive.
RE: Mass Effect – never played it. I think a satirical youtube montage of all the games bugs put me off.
I’d rather find out what the plot is through gameplay and paying attention to designers’ clues, rather than being force-spoon-fed C-grade cinema dialogue. Same with movies – I’m OK with not knowing what the story arc is until it reveals itself through the sequence of events.
I like games where you are just dropped into a world and have to figure things out for yourself.
Are you talking about ME: Andromeda or the entire series?
ME is glitchy but well… most of what VG critics call the greatest games tend to be weak on the technical aspect. Yanno, do you want the game they spent the whole dev time making sure the computer program part of it worked properly or the one where they spent all their time making the entertaining parts of it perfect?
I’d say pick up ME1 just because it’s old and cheap nowadays, don’t bother with the other two; they both have Electronic Arts’ stink on ’em.
I’d say 2 is the strongest of the series overall.
1 is the most thematically coherent and internally consistent, and partly because of that it’s also the truest to the Seventies/Eighties sci-fi feel that they’re going for, but they hadn’t quite gotten the characters nailed yet and that’s what any Bioware game stands or falls by. Its gameplay’s also pretty clunky, although it has some features I wish the rest of the series had kept.
2 is certainly where some of the problems started that eventually dragged the series down — style-over-substance twists, plot threads that get dropped for no good reason, misplaced edginess, weak conclusions. But it’s got the strongest cast and the strongest script, and gameplay that’s much better than 1 and not much worse than 3. The suicide mission at the end is also very impressive, though marred by a completely nonsensical boss battle. Roll a Vanguard, romance the space babe or hunk of your choice, enjoy shotgunning vorcha in the face and don’t think too hard about the changes it made.
3 has some points where it’s as good as anything in 2, and its nuts-and-bolts gameplay is the best of the series, but its large-scale plot makes no sense, it’s inconsistent even at the level of individual scenes, its villains are terrible and its new heroes aren’t much better, and its ending is one of the weakest I’ve seen in a AAA game, even after the patches. Skip it.
I haven’t played Andromeda.
Undertale (retro psych RPG, set in a fantasy world).
Jagged Alliance 2 (small unit tactics RPG, set in a fictional modern-day Banana Republic).
Crusader Kings 2 (medieval RPG with grand strategy elements).
Long Live The Queen (choose-your-own adventure with RPG elements, set in renaissance fantasyland).
Mount and Blade: Warband (exactly what it says on the tin, heavy on combat and RPG elements).
Cubicle Quest (allegorical lifepath jRPG).
The Longest Journey (classic pixel-hunting adventure game).
Fallout 1 and 2 (post-apocalyptic RPG).
Geneforge (fantasy RPG).
Nethergate: Resurrection (fantasy RPG, set in Roman Britain).
Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (turn-based strategy on a hostile extraterrestrial planet).
Populous: the Beginning (real-time strategy with some RPG elements).
Mount & Blade is a great game.
And I recommend against ever playing it, because it does medieval combat so well (although the controls take some getting used to), it will ruin other games for you.
RPG+Army:
Eador: Masters of the Broken World is a decent game. I couldn’t quite get into the long-term of it, when you get enough magic points to transfer heroes between worlds, but it is solid enough. It is sort of like Civilization (but not really at all), with a turn-based tactical combat.
Battlelords: Warcry is an Age of Empires-style game with a persistent lord/hero. Decent game, although you run into the exploration limits fairly quickly.
Lords of Magic is a fantastic game, albeit older; it is hard to describe, as, while Elemental: Fallen Enchantress is a modern reboot, nothing has ever quite been like it.
Dungeon Keeper is great. Don’t bother with the sequel or the reboots, though.
Warlock: Master of the Arcane is a reboot of Master of Magic, which is a civlization-esque game set in a fantasy universe; the RPG elements are a bit weak, though.
For RPG+Puzzles:
Lufia 2 is the king of this subgenre. Plot is meh, characters are so-so, but it has interesting-ish puzzles (nothing world-spanning, mind, just “Solve this puzzle to open this door”) and fantastic music.
For RPG+Puzzle+Action:
Hexen and Hexen II. That is, uh, pretty much it, as far as I know.
For RPG+Action:
Torchlight (and to a lesser extent Torchlight 2). Diablo-esque game with a more playful attitude. They are the spiritual successors to Fate.
Grim Dawn:
A better version of Path of Exile. Which, if you haven’t played, is another Diablo-esque game. Haven’t played much yet, but a solid game.
You might also enjoy the isomorphic RPGs, which tend to be more puzzle-heavy than standard action RPGs. Avadon is an example of this genre, of which I haven’t played much. I think Baldur’s Gate was considered this genre?
There are also squad ARPGs, which seem the closest thing to what you describe; Pillars of Eternity is supposed to be good, but I could never get into it. Dungeon Siege likewise.
Others have given good recommendations strictly per your criteria, I’m going to make a few sideways suggestions that you still might enjoy:
The X-COM series springs to mind as a good military squad-building puzzle game. Especially look at some of the complete-overhaul mods (The Long War) if you want to increase the class/stat-building aspects of it. It’s brutally difficult, though incredibly rewarding if you play on permadeath mode (though, start a campaign and play a few missions to get the hang of things before going for that). Cut scenes are in-between missions to advance plot, but they very rarely interrupt gameplay – they are for outlining/debriefing.
The Borderlands series is a good 1st person shoot-em-up with RPG elements. It’s not heavy on puzzle solving, but it does help a lot if you plan out your attack and think up a strategy that best uses your skills/weapons before rushing into the next area. There are 4-6 classes in each game, and three separate skill trees per class.
FTL is a rogue-like where you command a crew on a starship. It’s similar to RPGs in how you have to manage your money and customize your ship in different ways, and those decisions do affect the strategy you use when encountering others.
Thinking pretty far outside the box: Braid and Fez are two puzzle-heavy platformers which both have unique mechanics. I’m not usually a fan of platformers, but I loved both of these. I especially recommend Braid, and it has a fairly short playthrough time.
I’ll second FTL, although I will warn that it will probably annoy most people. Like most roguelikes, you can’t necessarily win every playthrough – you may never get that piece of equipment that makes your build viable, for the standard roguelike screw-you. What it does worse is that it has a final boss fight that violates the until-then established rules of the game (don’t bother optimizing a pure boarding party strategy, basically, because it won’t work, at least as of the last time I played, which was some years ago).
It also has unlockables that are entirely chance-driven, which can lead to endless frustration for completionists.
ETA:
Borderlands is a great series, with an important caveat: It is a multiplayer game. If you don’t have someone to play with, it isn’t worth playing. It quickly becomes “Whose numbers are higher” in single player mode.
I’m also a huge fan of FTL, or at least I was for an intense few months after which I quit cold turkey because of how addicted I was. I’d say “Like most roguelikes, you can’t necessarily win every playthrough” is vastly underselling it – you’ll lose almost every playthrough at first, and later, you’ll probably still lose most of playthroughs. My first win came after having played for about 40 hours. Given that each failed playthrough generally takes 0.5-2 hours, I’m guessing that was around my 30th-40th playthrough. My 2nd win came on the very next playthrough, which was pretty shocking to me, but I did manage to win with some regularity after that, even going on streaks occasionally, but probably still losing more than I won. And even so the game was insanely fun – in fact, losing often felt just as fun as winning!
I only played the vanilla version before the updates, but at the time, I had found that a boarding party strategy was the most consistent one for beating the boss. The strategy had to be slightly modified to account for the boss’s quirks, but not by much. Maybe that slight modification is what you mean when you say “pure” boarding party strategy. Certainly a “pure” one was a path to disaster.
Yep. I went pure. I wanted to capture the big bad capital ship, hoping for a different ending.
Advanced Edition introduced an augment that lets you ignore that particular anti-boarding quirk. But even then, using weapons to get past the quirk is within the spirit of a pure boarding challenge imo.
But how “pure” is pure? Are we allowing bombs and MC, or zero-nada-zip offense besides boarding? The former is pretty doable on most boarding ships and runs, the later I’ve pulled off on a god Mantis B run (6 fully trained mantises + perfect defense) and a somewhat weird Phase 1 strat to kill the crew off through their L3 medbay.
FTL is a great game, but getting some of the ships is incredibly frustrating. Probably four or five times now I’ve fulfilled all the prerequisites for the crystal cruiser but one, though I haven’t played for a year or so.
@Nornagest They added a much easier alternate unlock for the crystal ship, now you just need to win on all A and B ships.
Alternatively, get Rock Ship C and rename the crystal crewmember you start with to “Ruwen” and then aim for Rock Homeworlds, where the crystal portal will be marked with the quest marker.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ftlgame/comments/2hjnyg/rock_c_ship_ruwen_quest_marker/
Deck building as a replacement for stats/leveling? I’ve been really enjoying Slay the Spire despite it not being fully released yet. It is a deckbuilding rogue-like focused around small combats.
If you’re looking for Grand Strategy with lots of numbers and management, Europa Universalis 4 (and its WWII cousin Hearts of Iron) where you run a country from early 1400’s to the early 1800’s, balancing conquests, armies, technology, and alliances. Lots of butterfly effects here, making for interesting historical changes depending on randomness and your effects on the world. Lots of creative problem solving depending on your start to wheel-and-deal into getting the right allies to punch up against the great powers like France, the Ottomans, Ming, Spain, or whoever else happens to get really powerful. I’m still working on a run where I started as the Mamluk’s (modern Egypt area) and beat back the Ottoman Turks to form Arabia and unite Islam. I’m thinking my next game I’m going to either play as an aggressive Papal State or try to conquer Europe starting as a small Native American tribe.
Hearts of Iron is very frustrating with the way each iteration from 2-4 (I haven’t played 1) does some things right that the others do badly wrong, and conversely. Like the latest version handles puppet states and peace settlements much better than previous iterations, but the supply and resource systems are much inferior. Still waiting for the HOI that has all the good ideas and throws out all the terrible ones.
Personally, I am not a huge fan of Europa Universalis. Stellaris is a better game overall, IMO.
Europa Universalis suffers from being way, way too long-term. An hour of gameplay doesn’t equate to much in-game progress; you can spend a real-world week setting up favorable conditions to enable you to conquer and integrate a single province, in a world with hundreds.
Plus, you will spend literally hundreds of dollars just to make the game functional, as they have regularly updated the game in ways that break previous functionality in order to enable new functionality that is only available as purchased DLC (for example, tall rather than wide development, which worked better before they added the DLC to explicitly enable the strategy). Basic features, like the ability to give provinces to allies after a successful war they assisted in, requires a purchase.
Stellaris will probably go the same direction with regard to DLC, given it is the same company, but hasn’t yet, at least.
EU4, like probably all Paradox Games, has a fairly steep learning curve. And it doesn’t have many delusions of balance – you can’t just drop into whatever country you like and iterate your way to world domination like in Civ. It requires planning and for true world conquest you need gamey/cheesey/exploitative tricks. I haven’t played Stellaris much since release but iirc it is much more Civvy in the sense that everyone (bar the Ancient Empires) is dropped in at once with comparable starting conditions.
Also the RNG is an asshole and goes against the Sid Principle of giving players choices between good things – Paradox games have a lot of roguelike-ish crotch punches that you have to deal with and it gets discouraging at times.
There being a lot to absorb is one of its greatest strengths and weaknesses. It takes a lot of youtube and trial-and-error to really get a good sense of what you’re doing. CK2 has Ireland for “Noob Island”, in EU4 I’d guess probably England or Portugal – give up the mainland clay or ally Castile, respectively, and after that you can keep to yourself without much hassling. And savescum like hell your first few games – learn the lessons and be able apply it without having restart or figure out how climb out of a hole without a complete toolbox.
Yep, getting in new can suck with all the DLC. It can be mitigated at least. You can roll back to earlier patches with Steam settings, so that it doesn’t punish you for not having the relevant expansion yet (though this can make googling for game advice trickier). The older DLC can generally be gotten cheap, too, sales are fairly frequent. But, yeah, like with the game mechanics, it’s a steep hill to climb.
Quite enjoyable once you get up, though.
Try The Talos Principle. No military or combat, but it’s all interesting puzzles and a unique philosophical/techno-religious theme that the SSC crowd might enjoy.
Basically you’re a robot who wakes up in a garden in a vacant world except the voice of the Creator who says “this world is yours, just don’t go to that tower” and the rest is about the decisions you make and the puzzles you solve to get to the tower.
I wasn’t going to comment because I don’t play video games enough to be confident in my conclusions, but Talos principle is one of a handful of games I’ve (almost) finished in the last decade.
It has very few cinematic cut scenes (I think), but a lot of extra stuff that could be considered to slow down gameplay — mostly long text passages or short audio recordings about philosophy. If you enjoy SSC posts and comments, you’ll probably enjoy these.
The reason I didn’t finish was because a combination of crappy computer and poor video game skills meant that I couldn’t get the timing right to complete some of the late game puzzles, but I really enjoyed it up till then and I intend to buy a better windows computer and finish it at some point 🙂
I enjoyed “The Witness” and thought it was a decent spiritual successor to “Myst”. Note that the puzzles are all variations on the same theme, so if that’s not your thing it could get boring. The story, such as it is, is all revealed by finding recordings throughout the game world. Unfortunately, the story is kind of a twee ball of nonsense as far as I could figure, but I enjoyed the puzzle progression immensely.
I would suggest the Total War series, specifically the recent Warhammer versions.
Leaders and hero-type characters have RPG skill trees, with the special named characters having quests
Every faction plays radically differently from the others, and so you will need to devise and use different tactics and army compositions to fight them. While not puzzle-solving in a traditional sense, your request for military themes suggests that you are open to regarding complex tactical situations as “makes you think”
Quest Battles have a short cutscene before each one where the character gives a speech about why they’re fighting, but they are 100% skippable and don’t tell you vital information.
Total War: Warhammer 2 has a few cutscenes during the campaign if you follow the Vortex victory path. They’re pretty short and there’s like 5 during an entire campaign so I wouldn’t count it as gratuitous. Also 100% skippable.
Let me recommend the Renowned Explorers Society. It’s a strategy game where you assemble a team of pulp heroes to search ruins for treasures, trying to optimize your advancements and somewhat goofy tactical play to get the high score. Not too expensive, either.
Looks like a video game version of Fortune and Glory.
Somehow I’ve never heard of that. The themes are similar.
RES definitely has the press your luck aspect, along with some simple tech trees and variable player powers and tactical combat (same system for social encounters).
Does it have two games modes? In Fortune and Glory you can play by either pitting all the adventurers against each other, or putting them together against the Nazis. I’ve only played against the Nazis, because that’s the shorter campaign and we only had six hours. 😀
RES is not a port of FaG (umm….). There’s no nazis, just intra-organization rivalry with the flashy Frenchman’s team. There are multiple game modes at this point, though.
I might humbly suggest INJECTION, which I made (and is only like 75% finished but it’s polished enough that you might not notice.) It’s a puzzle game where there are “cutscenes” but you can just walk past whoever is talking to you, there’s only one bit in the entire game where you have to wait for someone to finish speaking before moving on. You solve the levels by altering the Python interpreter’s state directly with an REPL.
Similarly I might suggest Else Heart.Break(), which is basically Myst with Ruby programming. It has dialogue scenes but they’re short and they’re in broken english anyway. Really the adventure game aspect pales in comparison to the “world I can fuck around with and break” aspect.
Would also second X-COM, specifically OpenX-COM possibly with mods. OpenXCOM requires the original game’s files but I think they’re official freeware now?
Maybe From The Depths? It’s a RTS game married with a block-based building game; you build warships out of blocks and then send them to fight. The building is very deep and complicated; maybe too complicated.
Oh, and Dwarf Fortress, you might like that too.
My avatar compels me to plug the Disgaea series, a couple of which have been ported to the PC – though I haven’t played the PC ports, and don’t know how well they transferred from the Playstation. They’re turn-based strategy JRPGs, a la Fire Emblem or FF Tactics, but with a lot more room for character customization. Potential downsides are silly anime humor (all cutscenes are skippable though) and some gratuitous level-grinding.
In Disgaea’s case, the gratuitous level-grinding is a downside if you like it, not if you don’t;
you could be doing somewhat monotonous skirmish for incremental numerical changes for… forever.
I’m seconding The Talos Principle: not an RPG, no combat, just pure puzzle solving in first person format. Pure fun. Few cutscenes, as I recall.
Portal and Portal 2: again not an RPG, no combat, just puzzle solving. Puzzles easier than The Talos Principle. Portal 1 is very short, 4-5 hours playthrough, so it is best considered as an introduction to Portal 2 which is longer. Few cutscenes. Main advantages: voice acting 11 stars out of 10, as well as excellent story (absolutely must play Portal 1 before 2, because major spoiler). Bonus points if you are a scientist – the story heavily satirizes scientific research. Might be the best video game ever made, IMO.
This was s triumph.
I’ making a note here:
HUGE SUCCESS.
It’s hard to overstate
my satisfaction.
Starcraft (SC) and SC2. Arguably, the ultimate RTS. Plenty of thinking. Original SC has just been rereleased as Remasterd version with decent graphics. SC2 Campaign is not very hard on two medium difficulty levels (too hard for me on brutal). Online 1v1 (or team games) with other people has nice ranking system, once your MMR is settled by the system, you get equal share victories and defeats. Online play has fewer (alas, nonzero) raging cretins than MOBAs. SC2 campaign contains cutscenes in between all levels, story is told exclusively through cutscenes.
The Fall – puzzle solving, nice story, no cutscenes I think.
Anti-recommendation: Broken Age – point-and-click adventure / puzzle-solving. Boring story, meh puzzles, “cutesy” graphics style not very endearing.
Thanks for the 2nd Talos recommendation – I will have to follow up, sounds exactly my jam.
I loved Portal 1, one of the best games in the genre imo. Unlike you I found Portal 2 to be a big let-down in a lot of ways. What I did like was the visual stylistic touches, additional mechanics like slippery goo and bouncy goo, and the longer gameplay experience. But the INCESSANT attempts at comedic commentary from Steven Merchant…god damn, some of the cringiest writing i’ve heard. In any other game I might have tolerated it or even appreciated it, but PORTAL? Remember the first time you played Portal 1 and you got that anxiety, confusion and despair? That’s what i wanted more of and I got the opposite.
Like every other man on the plant I grew up playing Starcraft. To this day I have never played SCII because the original (+expansion packs ofc) were so important to me.
I’ll look into The Fall.
Thanks
SCII really isn’t that bad from a gameplay perspective, and the single player campaigns have some interesting progression/building options that are implemented fairly well IMO.
The storyline is an unbelievably terrible clusterfuck of bad ideas. So uh, steel yourself for that…
Ah, but isn’t that exactly as intended? Wheatley is an avatar for Dunning-Kruger effect. He is a moron with no conception of the depth of his own stupidity. He is not a likable character. Not supposed to be. Any humor derived from his comedic commentary is supposed to be at best a grim chuckle along the lines of “shut up, moron”, and at worst – make you cringe.
Yes, I do! Good stuff. For me, the atmosphere was partially replicated by Tartarus levels in Portal 2 (I will concede that supporting your opinion, Wheatley is absent in those levels).
RE: SC2. You can not step into same river twice. SC2 is a logical continuation of Brood war, but certainly is not same. Campaign story lines are wrapped up fairly well. (I disagree with Matt M about clusterfuck. SC universe is, after all, a clicheic, Star Wars-esque epic story. Plucky humans clash with hordes of insectoid
bugsbuggerszerg, while having to fend off wise, but grumpy psychic Protoss. Silliness is inevitable. I think Blizzard did well within these constraints.) New units add a ton of variety in multiplayer. Matchmaking works well. Arcade of user-made games is neat (nothing that reached popularity of DotA, though).In general I like what Blizzard did with the game. They seem to care. I don’t know if it is Mike Morhaime’s pet project or what, but compared to a random triple-A shooter that no one remembers a few months after the release, SC2 is vibrant. Blizzard supports e-sports scene and supports wider community (e.g. StarCrafts animated series from Carbot). Apparently at the BlizzCon two years ago, when LotV was released, they had a panel dedicated to the future of SC2. They claim that users asked, unambiguously, for more content. Blizzard obliged with more single-player missions, continuously adding more content to co-op mode, and cosmetic stuff (skin packs, voice packs, blah blah, but if users are willing to pay – and they are, I see all that fluff in-game – that does contribute to the game going strong). Sure, popularity has waned since the heyday of Wings of Liberty, and it will never be LoL or Dota2, but in my book SC2 is a great success.
On the story, maybe it’s just nostalgia/getting older, but I find the first SC to have a much more compelling story. It’s not particularly deep, but the characters are likable and things proceed in a way that more or less makes sense given the fantastic nature of the setting. For SC2, I felt like things make much less sense. I never played the second expansion, so maybe that puts things back together, but the second one starts with finally saving kerrigan from the zerg, only for the story to her becoming zergified again for…reasons? it annoyed me enough that I totally lost interest.
On gameplay, I think brood wars is just about a perfect RTS. You could play a game in 45 minutes that was complicated, deep, with a nice balance between micro and macro. I feel that SC2 is a lot twitchier, it requires a lot more micromanagement and tactical clicking and having a high APM count. My understanding is that they did this in order to make competitive play more interesting, but I was pretty good (I was very briefly in diamond league when that was, IIRC, the top 5% of players) and I always found it obnoxious.
I think we need a drug war just for recreational drugs that users inject. Users litter their used needles, creating a public health hazard of diseases up to HIV for innocent citizens. We can believe that individuals have a right to ruin their own lives with narcotics, but in the case of these drugs that changes nothing.
In Australia there are “safe injecting rooms” and needle deposit boxes in most public bathrooms. I can’t comment on their effectiveness. This seems to be a better strategy in principle if you think the drug war is bad but dirty needles are worse.
One problem with a ‘war on injecting drugs’ is that it’s hard territory to isolate. The ‘war’ will tend to creep into areas you want to handle less aggressively, e.g. pot.
What’s the evidence that heroin addicts confine that activity to a “safe injecting room” given the opportunity?
This is how crazy it’s gotten on the Left coast:
Infected needles as an on-the-job hazard for Starbucks employees
10,000 (or 13,000?) dirty needles collected as litter in San Francisco in March 2017
(Incidentally, how do you San Frans survive there, between this and human feces in public places? Segregation by income?)
Meanwhile in Portland, where the local government eschews cleanup in favor of telling innocent citizens to go buy a Sharps container and put any junkie syringe they find inside and drive it to the one public biohazard box on the Waterfront, children have started getting stabbed in the face with them in public parks:
I dunno if the users are already sociopaths or if heroin or meth use changes one’s personality to stop thinking of others, but yikes.
“It’s hard territory to isolate”… since pot IS an illegal drug in the United States and only gets around it through nullification by WA, OR, CA, CO & c, I’m not currently seeing taking it and other drugs people can abuse without creating a public health hazard (cocaine, LSD) off the list as having a high risk of creeping back.
Usage stats from safe injecting rooms in Sydney over the period 2001 – 2015:
So if we take “effectiveness” to mean “reduction in gross harm to broader society” this room appears to have had a net positive effect on Sydney.
It is unknown (and probably unknowable) whether everyone who injects in such a facility exactly translates to one less person injecting on the street (where harm can be done to others). Maybe these users shoot up anywhere anytime they want, but if they are in the general vicinity of the safe room they go there. Even so, the case for safe injecting rooms looks to have some merit.
Why doesn’t Starbucks give their baristas heavy gloves to use when handling trash?
As far as I can tell, San Francisco doesn’t have a safe injecting site; it’s difficult to see how adding one could make things worse. As far as I understand, the consensus seems to be that safe injection sites do not noticeably worsen the problem of people injecting drugs in the surrounding neighbourhood outside them, but they do significantly reduce the risk of overdose deaths and the spread of blood-borne diseases, so I suspect that a lot of the opposition to them comes from a sort of purity/sanctity objection to people using (injectable) drugs at all, rather than a harm-focussed assessment that they actually increase net health risks.
But I am not sure how big an impact they have – if they take only a tiny fraction of injecting users off the street, at great expense, that would be a strike against them. I would like to see lots of cities run controlled trials.
Generally, though, if you want to get needles off the street, you probably need to address why people are using needles specifically in the first place. I’m not sure how to get a good handle on that, but if it is to do with the price of opiates being so high that people need to get every last penny’s worth (and not waste some to the atmosphere as in smoking), then making affordable, purity-and-dosage-controlled smokable heroin available, at least to registered addicts if you want to have such a system, should decrease the number of needles even if it doesn’t do anything to decrease the number of users.
If it is the case that injection delivers such an intense rush relative to smoking that most users offered the choice between smoking and injecting will choose to inject even when the cost of a fix is a trivial concern, then that’s more of a problem, but in that case, safe injection sites (especially when combined with the availability of pharmaceutical grade opiates, since a ‘safe injection site’ by itself still implies people bringing their own, probably fentanyl-laced or otherwise contaminated drugs to the site) should still get *some* of the needles off the streets. You can then add specific crackdowns on discarding needles – heck, if you’re willing to invest enough forensic resources, used needles should be a pretty good source of DNA evidence as to who has discarded them – then you can probably make it a no-brainer for anyone who wants to inject to do so at a safe site. At what financial cost I don’t know, but if your city is already spending a large amount of money arresting and jailing drug users generally, then it shouldn’t be too much of a wrench to start focussing those resources on the needle-droppers.
I mean, if I need an injectable drug I’m paying $50 for a copay and my insurance is paying who-knows-what for the visit (plus the drug itself). Against this background there’s a proposal to spend tax money on helping recreational drug users shoot heroin? That is beyond the pale, unless you really are a utilitarian. And the drug users in this case look a lot like utility monsters.
How does that make them look like utility monsters?
Preventing the transmission of diseases and exposure of bystanders to dirty needles seems like a worthy public health policy.
Spend money on them, they get huge amounts of positive utility. Don’t, and they cause huge amounts of negative utility, from dying in the streets to spreading disease.
Okay, I can see that. Is that an argument against safe injection sites?
I don’t think users’ utility would be particularly increased by having safe injection sites (especially if we disregard the ones who get help and stop using as a consequence of them). Overall, if combined a crackdown on those who don’t use them, it could even decrease.
Well, we’re already spending a lot of tax money on recreational drug users: trying, with little meaningful success, to stop the drugs getting to them in the first place, arresting, prosecuting and punishing them when they get caught with drugs, some fraction going on attempts at rehabilitation and, depending on where you are, some fraction going on methodone maintenance.
As long as ‘just leave them alone’ isn’t a live option*, it’s not obvious that the current policy is a better investment of tax funds than one which would at least stabilise injecting drug users on a calibrated, uncontaminated dose which is a lot less likely to kill them, while, as Urstoff points out, also reducing some of the negative externalities that Prohibition doesn’t seem to be very good at preventing.
As for utility monsterism … unless I am mistaken, it’s not like there’s an infinite capacity for tolerance. Even if someone ups their dose initially, it’s not like they’ll eventually progress to injecting their own bodyweight and beyond every day, they’ll just top out at an asymptote (though someone more versed in pharmacology please correct me here). Plus, to the extent that prescription heroin reduces the incentive to recruit new users in order to raise funds for one’s own supply, it would be actively reducing the size of the problem in the future. That depends on how you do it – it is presumably wise to limit your free prescriptions to people who already have a drug habit, while encouraging people towards abstinence where that is reasonably achievable, and not just start giving it out to whoever asks, but I don’t think one has to be a utilitarian to think that spending taxes on providing addicts with a stable supply could be better than spending that money harassing them in ways that impose significant collateral harms on the rest of society.
[*edit: just to be clear, I’m not advocating that ‘do nothing’ should necessarily be our response to injecting drug users; to the extent that they create externalities, I’m happy to support government intervention, just deeply unconvinced that interventions based primarily on punishment cause more good than harm]
> Smokable heroin
Bring back opium dens!
I’m not in favor of any of that. And it doesn’t seem like giving them help using drugs is going to reduce any of the spending on any of that either. Instead the proposal is to both keep drugs illegal and subsidize illegal drug use.
Additionally, there’s the problem that subsidizing something tends to produce more of it.
Oh, I see. I was taking ‘keeping the discarding of needles illegal (and doing whatever else seems likely to reduce overall harms)’ as the crux of the discussion here. Well, okay. I am open to persuasion that making it prima-facie illegal to use a drug prevents more harm than it causes, but I am not convinced that that is the case with any of the currently popular prohibited drugs when compared to a legalisation-plus-regulation regime that is actually calibrated at reducing overall harms. LMC’s parent comment did say ‘We can believe that individuals have a right to ruin their own lives with narcotics’, suggesting she is non-committal about the war on drugs in general, as opposed to the ‘war on needles’.
But even so, I don’t think that it is obviously crazy that keeping heroin use generally illegal while subsidizing less dangerous forms of it for those whom prohibition has failed to prevent from becoming addicts would be obviously crazy. Sort of ‘it is a crime to put yourself in a position where you are likely to become an addict, but once you have become one, we will register you institute whatever policy minimises harm’.
We are not, after all, talking about subsidizing the use of contraband street heroin here – we’re talking about subsidizing the use of pharmaceutical grade heroin in accurate doses, to registered addicts that our best efforts have failed to prevent from becoming problematic users in the first place, specifically to reduce the rates of use of contraband street heroin. If we prefer, we can subsidize pharmaceutical grade heroin only for on-site consumption at safe injecting facilities, to reduce the rates of use of any kinds of opiates outside such facilities. Given how much more dangerous the on-street, uncalibrated, likely-to-be-contaminated criminally-supplied heroin is (combined with the knock-on effects of the illegal market on other crimes) than than the pharmacutical, consumed-at-safe-sites heroin, I am fairly sanguine about us being able to ‘get more of what we subsidise’ while still coming out ahead in terms of lives saved / chaos averted. If I had to choose between being drug-free and being alive, I don’t think I’d have much difficulty, after all. But like I say, I am open to persuasion and would like to see controlled trials done, where otherwise demographically comparable cities either do or don’t institute some combination of safe injection sites and/or subsidised pharmaceutical heroin.
I would liken it to ashtrays in airplane bathrooms. You aren’t allowed to smoke in there, but given that someone is going to anyways, an ashtray is preferable to a trash fire.
@Winter Shaker
I don’t see how the proposal isn’t “free heroin with professional assistance in dosing for everyone who who wants it”. This may or may not be better on a “total harm” basis than full-on drug war, but full-on drug war is pants-on-head stupid and is thus a bad comparison. The idea that the rest of us should pay for other people’s drug use because otherwise they’ll suffer and cause huge negative utility is, I think, a problem with utilitarianism.
@Thegnskald
If you actually use the ashtray in an airplane restroom you have a high risk of ending the flight in plastic handcuffs and ending your productive life with a felony charge. The proposal for safe injecting sites has no such disincentive.
Nybbler, that is not a problem with utilitarianism, it’s a problem with the framing of the question. Given that we are going to spend large amounts of money out of the public purse, it is more utilitarian to spend it on safe injection sites and drug subsidies, than in creating a massive police and carceral state in an ultimately futile effort to get people to stop doing drugs. That does not mean that it’s the most utilitarian thing out of all the possible options.
In my opinion as a utilitarian, the greatest utility comes from a world in which you can buy your heroin at the local drug store. We shouldn’t give addicts free drugs any more than we give alcoholics free alcohol. Let the FDA ensure the supply is untainted, treat used needles as any other dangerous waste item, and the free market can take care of the rest. This whole thing were we treat drug users like some special social class, in need of either harsh punishment or mollycoddling, is bullshit and needs to stop.
You don’t need “safe injecting rooms” just to dispose of needles properly. Type 1 diabetics (who surely use more needles per person than junkies) demonstrate this.
At present, needle users are taught never to recap the disposable needles, but instead to drop them into a needle disposal box. This is to minimize the risk of self-injury during recapping. However, recapping is actually easy; you just have to be careful. (And self-injury isn’t even a big deal when you’re self-injecting with the same needle.)
For those who can’t manage that level of care, there are these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_syringe
Probably junkies don’t want those because they want to reuse the syringes. You could perhaps build the syringe into a clasp, possibly self-closing, that would contain it safely, yet allow reuse.
The general problem seems to be that syringe technology is designed around assumptions about the user’s level of personal responsibility that don’t apply to junkies.
Many people don’t consider it easy to always be careful…
Easy things are not as easy and important things are not as important when you are high.
Because drug wars work so well at achieving their intended purposes?
There has been a somewhat existent public scare in Russia about 15 years back or so about the HIV-infected people doing things like purposefully leaving the infected needles behind or even taking pieces of razor blades, purposefully dipping them in their blood and doing things like embedding them in the handrails on staircases or somewhere where people are likely to grab them and cut themselves and getting infected. I think it was pretty well debunked by the doctors pointing out that first, the garbage collectors generally don’t grab the trash with their bare hands unless they’ve got heavy-duty gloves on (as, even if you don’t consider infected needles, garbage can be freaking GROSS and dangerous), and most of the blood-borne disease carriers don’t even survive that long exposed to the air to be a threat. It’s only when a bunch of junkies actually reuse a single needle in a session of circle-injecting where it actually provides any big infection threat.
There was a case in The Netherlands where three HIV-infected men organized orgies, with others who were then drugged with GHB. These people were then anally raped without condoms. In some cases, they were also injected with the blood of one of the HIV-infected men.
Initially there was skepticism after earlier scares of a similar nature, but phone taps showed that the allegations were true and the perpetrators were convicted.
Does anyone have much of an opinion on the Skeptic article about Sandusky? https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/trial-by-therapy-jerry-sandusky-case-revisited/
I’ve been so sure he was guilty that it gave me a bit of a jolt and made me wonder if I’d screwed up bad in judging the guy. And Elizabeth Loftus buys into it, and she seems really good with false memory stuff. And I haven’t read about the case in so long that I’m not sure exactly how credible the witnesses are.
But then I worried that maybe Loftus was pulling a Jonathan Haidt, where you get well-known for noticing a psychological quirk, so then you notice the quirk everywhere. And the article is really badly written (Seriously? The picture of the woman in the bar?). And Crewes downplays weird behavior on Sandusky’s part which makes me wonder how seriously he’s taking this.
Still, is the article just full of crap. or is there something to it?
The original version of McQueary’s testimony seems sufficient to establish that some sort of sexual misconduct, if not actual rape, probably occurred. We shouldn’t be putting people in prison on “probably”, of course. But neither should we be e.g. conjuring nigh-conspiratorial fantasies out of the fact that McQueary’s story wasn’t a perfect recitation of the original through many retellings over subsequent months. We know that’s not how memory works, we know pretty much what McQueary said when his memory was still fresh, and we ought to suspect there isn’t much substance beneath a story that focuses on such trivia.
I’m still going to go with the jury verdict on this one. I could be persuaded otherwise, but this isn’t going to do it.
I’m interested in the fact that McQueary’s testimony seemed to get steadily more incriminating towards Sandusky with each retelling. It’s not as if he sometimes errored on one side or the other, which you might suspect from a completely neutral “faulty memory.” It maps pretty well to “He is suggestible based on what he’s heard about other cases.”
If you ask someone if Person X committed Crime Y, they may say they’re not sure. If you then tell them that multiple other people have independently accused Person X of committing Crime Y on other occasions, I have to believe you’re more likely to then say, “Yes! I saw that, too!” The power of suggestion is very strong. The motivation to tell authority figures “what they want to hear” is very strong. A decade ago, nobody wanted to hear that Sandusky was a pedophile, so the story was weak. Now, that’s exactly what everyone wants to hear, and the story is strong. I guess that could be a total coincidence, but it’s almost a little too convinenent.
That’s not actually what I would expect from an actual faulty memory. Actual memories aren’t neutral, and evolve towards a confident and coherent recapitulation of a preferred narrative. And if a person’s initial memory of a confused reality lead them to e.g. accuse a colleague of a heinous crime, they are going to really prefer the narrative where that colleague is unambiguously guilty of that crime.
If it’s based entirely on “recovered memories”, it should be overturned. That would be like being jailed for Satanic ritual abuse.
But this article could be excessively biased.
I am not overly familiar with the Sandusky case outside of the article you linked.
That said, I would rate the article HOLY S***.
In sum, these are the possible reasons to hypothesize that none of the accusations are accurate:
1. Accusers were perhaps persuaded by the possibility of getting a massive sum of money by participating. Some of them could have additionally been persuaded by fear of missing out — if Sandusky’s going down anyway, why not get in on the payout? And, attorneys with an interest in winning money could have persuaded otherwise reluctant accusers.
2. Accusers were persuaded by “recovered memory” therapy that persuaded them that they had memories they didn’t really have.
3. Accusers were persuaded by confirmation bias and/or social pressure (including pressure from police and prosecutors) causing them to extrapolate or hallucinate accusations from limited information and memories.
The article does a pretty good job of laying out that all the accusers could have been under the influence of at least one of these three effects. Let’s assume the article is generally accurate in its facts and descriptions (a dumb assumption, but my point is argument-checking, not fact checking). The remaining question is, are these effects real? And how powerful are they?
My answer is, THEY ARE VERY REAL AND VERY POWERFUL. The financial motive is probably the least controversial of the three. But I also think the kind of confabulation/hallucination effects possible through “recovered memory” therapy, confirmation bias, and/or social pressure are very powerful and not commonly understood. Most people believe that the human brain is actually pretty good at rationally evaluating reality independent of social influences. I think powerful social influences can overpower reality evaluation pretty handily.
It’s very damning that none of the accusers were just of the ordinary “yup, he abused me/I saw the abuse, yup, I remember it just like any normal memories, yup, I told that to the authorities the first time I was questioned and my story stayed consistent, yup, I was an actual witness/victim and didn’t just extrapolate from limited information.”
As a comparison… a doctor of sports-medicine from another Mid-Western state was recently accused of sexual abuse by former-patients. The former patients were typically young, female gymnists. (A few of those women have risen to international prominence in the sport of gymnastics since the time they were under the care of that doctor.)
How many of those accusations could be characterized (or mis-characterized) in a similar way?
Somewhat like the Sandusky case: once these accusations were released in the news, many more accusations came forth. How many of the follow-up accusations could be characterized (or mis-characterized) as non-victims jumping on the bandwagon to get a payout?
This kind of thing needs careful investigation. But we shouldn’t automatically dismiss all accusations as attention-seeking. And we shouldn’t immediately believe all accusations at first brush, either.
Nota Bene: My first instinct was that Sandusky was guilty.
From Wikipedia, before I read the Skeptic article, I find claims that:
(A) Penn State Board of Trustees commissioned an independent investigation, and requested former FBI director Louis Freeh to head up that investigation. The results of that investigation were that the leadership of the Penn State athletic department had covered up Sandusky’s crimes, and ignored/downplayed the report given by McQueary.
(B) the crime that led to the Pennsylvania Attorney General filing charges was based on a different report. The accuser is un-named in Wiki, but the investigation was triggered by a different report from someone at an area High School. The AG ‘s office claimed to have found evidence that Sandusky had been using the organization known as Second Mile to groom his victims.
From the Skeptic article, I see
(C) A different outside investigation, before any of these accusations became public, was made for the purpose of maintaining/revoking the Security clearance of the then-President of Penn State. This investigation failed to find any evidence of crime or cover-up.
(D) The reputed victim of the McQueary incident denied that it happened as-described.
(E) The McQueary report is remembered in different ways, at different times, by various people. Apparently, even McQueary himself didn’t always quote the same date for the incident.
I’m leaning towards the other evidence discovered in part (B) above as enough to show that Sandusky was guilty of multiple instances of sexual assault. It’s possible for (C) to be true, and still not on-point…if the investigator was not looking into the Athletic Department and its interactions with Sandusky and Second Mile.
Point (E) might be evidence that McQueary had seen multiple instances of questionable activity, but one stuck out in his mind as obviously-sexual-in-nature.
There is lots of different evidence to suggest Sandusky was guilty…but perhaps the numbers became inflated due to monetary incentives.
Doesn’t this *strongly* suggest that monetary rewards should be removed from cases that don’t have direct immediate physical evidence of incompetence, like damage to a house. All that should be paid for in these cases is enough to replace the travel, food, and lost income from ones day job in court.
I’m not the biggest believer in repressed memories. People forget all kinds of memories from when they are young, good and bad. I view it more as psychoanalysts working in the arena of the unprovables.
Now faulty memories due to poor wet-hardware, a brain full of cognitive biases, and “creativity” in what people say they remember I can believe.
In any case of alleged misconduct from more than say a year ago, in which multiple additional accusers join the case only after the initial accusations are publicized, how large must integer N be before there is a >50% chance that at least one of the accusers is making the whole thing up (or at a minimum going off of badly mangled ‘repressed memories’ or similar)?
I’m guessing N is smaller than the number of accusers against Sandusky (or Harvey Weinstein, or Dr. Nasser (sp?)).
But this of course doesn’t mean that they are not guilty in every case, just that there’s a decent chance that someone has hopped onto the publicity with a false or exaggerated account.
My sense is that the likelihood is extremely high that Sandusky is guilty of at least one, and more likely several, of the assaults he was convicted of. It’s going to be hard to poke holes in every one of those cases.
Anyone know of any effective counseling/treatments for Broader Autism Phenotype (BAP)?
This is the first I’ve heard of it, but it sounds like the sort of thing that would’ve been coined to describe subclinical traits, i.e. stuff that doesn’t interfere with daily life by medical standards. Since the medical community is very averse to messing with stuff in that bucket, I bet you the answer is “no”.
Odd trivia on the extent of sovereignty:
According to the Law of the Sea treaty, every nation considered to extend out twelve nautical miles from its coastline. Beyond twelve miles, it’s international waters. The United States has not ratified this treaty, but did ratify a predecessor establishing the twelve-mile limit, so we’re bound by this as well.
Historically, the limit was generally three miles, defined as roughly the distance a cannonball could be fired from shore. This survives in a quirk of US law regarding the territorial sea: most states* with a coastline extend three miles out to sea. Between three and twelve miles, you are within the United States but not within the bounds of any state. This was a mere curiosity until offshore oil and gas extraction became a thing, and both state and federal governments as owners of submerged lands stood to make money off leasing.
*Exceptions include Texas and the Gulf coast of Florida, where treaties regarding the annexation of the respective territories specify that the seaward boundaries of the states extend three leagues, or nine miles. This does not apply to the states in between on the Gulf, or to Florida’s Atlantic coast. Also, the Great Lakes are not international waters, but have a defined US-Canada boundary within them, and the American portions arer entirely within their abutting states.
In the meantime, another issue arises: state laws cover all sorts of topics (crimes, liability issues, licensing, etc.) that federal law is silent on. A few specific laws about territorial waters have been passed, notably establishing a few federal crimes and banning gambling until you reach the 12-mile mark. But for the most part, Congress decided to just incorporate the neighboring state’s law by reference. Thus if you commit what would be a state crime on a ship or oil platform that is between the 3-mile limit and the 12-mile limit, it is a federal crime you would be charged with, but one defined by a state statute. The same also applies to other federal enclaves, such as military bases and national parks, that are within a state but not subject to state sovereignty. And that’s part of why nobody knows how many federal crimes there are – because thousands of them are created by one section of law.
I don’t know how other federal nations handle this. Probably less clumsily than we do, since they had our mistakes to learn from.
Interesting!
This isn’t the first time the federal government incorporated a neighboring state’s law by reference; when organized new territories, the federal government would often do the same thing with some nearby state. All in all, I think it’s a good thing; it gives a well-defined body of law without the gaps that might come from Congress randomly leaving things out.
Even more weirdly, during the days of the Unequal Treaties when the US Court in China had extraterritorial jurisdiction, the treaties specifying that certain people be tried under US law didn’t specify any state… so the court, by its own authority, chose the law of the District of Columbia. As far as I’m aware, this choice was never brought up in appeals.
@BBA
This just strengthens my already existing belief that the US is rather strange in preferring to just hack a bunch of minor fixes onto a shitty system (which together add up to a monstrosity), rather than make some greater changes. Instead of having the federal government convict people for breaking state law, why not just make the state have jurisdiction instead? Even if oil/gas is an issue, doesn’t it make more sense to just toss some money to the federal government or make a special agreement just for offshore extraction in that region?
The Kingdom of the Netherlands is a federation (of which The Netherlands is but one nation), but the other nations are small islands on the other side of the world, so there are no territorial issues. Also, The Netherlands utterly dominates the federation, both in practical ways and legally, so they/we can mostly just force changes if we really care.
Also, in general we just fix issues (for example, we recently traded some land with Belgium because the land could not be effectively policed by the nation it belonged to).
Historically, as I understand it, the Netherlands consisted of a group of independent nations that happened, by a weird and continued coincidence, to all select the same person as chief executive. I gather that is no longer the case.
I’m interested in the Dutch perspective on this, too. To use an anglo-centric analogy, my understanding was that, like the US, a bunch of culturally/linguistically-related-but-administratively/historically-distinct provinces all decided together that
Great Britainthe Hapsburgs can fuck off and we’ll need to team up to make that happen.Or maybe we’re thinking of different things?
@DavidFriedman
Your misconceptions seem to stem from not realizing that the The Kingdom of the Netherlands is distinct from the The Netherlands (which is a constitutional monarchy, but is not officially called a Kingdom). I’ll get back to that later, but I’ll first talk about the history of The Netherlands (not the Kingdom).
Once upon a time the region that is now The Netherlands was a mess of polities that encompassed cities and larger regions. Various empires like the Roman empire and the Roman Empire tried to rule this region, but could not maintain effective control. Holland (the western region near the sea) was also a swampy, mosquito infested hellhole. Then the draining and cultivating of uninhabited swampy land in the western Netherlands greatly increased the economic productivity of Holland, which made it a center of power and which allowed taking advantage of the many waterways for trade and such. This center of power was fought over in the ‘Hook and Cod Wars’ between 1350 and 1490, where the Cods represented the progressive cities and the Hooks the conservative rural noblemen. L’histoire se répète.
Anyway, the conservative noblemen invited the Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy, who was also Count of Flanders, to conquer Holland, which he did. The Burgundian rulers gradually increased the region under their control. Then later the Habsburgs inherited the Burgundian possessions. So eventually there was a state (now) called the Seventeen Provinces, encompassing pretty much the Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg).
Eventually, the Habsburg archduke Philip II, who was also the King of Spain, got to rule the Seventeen Provinces. Protestantism had taken over much of the Northern provinces, but Philip II was a anti-heresy Catholic, so he was oppressing Protestantism, causing a revolt (1568–1648). The revolt eventually succeeded, but only for the Northern provinces. So this is really where The Netherlands and Belgium became separated, which turned out to be permanent, despite a brief attempt to (much) later unite them again.
Anyway, after gaining independence from Spain in 1588 (the final outcome was achieved fairly early, the rest of the revolt/war was mainly a stalemate), the northern provinces formed a confederation, called the Dutch Republic or the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands. So at this point we have our first true federal state. Then the Dutch Golden Age, Dutch colonies, then economic problems, lost wars and such. The populace became discontent.
In early 1795, intervention by French revolutionary forces led to the downfall of the old Dutch Republic. This revolt had a lot of popular support. So at this point The Netherlands became a unitary state (which was permanent), but under French rule. The Dutch populace rapidly became discontent with the French though, because Napoleon Bonaparte wanted to extract much wealth from The Netherlands to fund his wars. Fortunately, Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated at Waterloo (by an allied force including a very large contingent of Dutch and Belgian troops), giving The Netherlands their independence back.
Then The Netherlands was briefly united with Belgium and Luxembourg again. So at that point you had the Kingdom of the Netherlands. I don’t think that was set up as a confederation though. It doesn’t matter much really, because it quickly broke up again. After this, The Netherlands increasingly became a proper democracy, taking power away from the King and enfranchising an increasing percentage of the populace.
After WW II, The Netherlands lost their big remaining colony (Indonesia) and gave semi-independence to 3 smaller colonies. Since then, The Kingdom of the Netherlands is a confederation consisting of:
– The Netherlands
– Aruba
– Curaçao
– Sint Maarten
These nations are all centralized unitary states, with their own representative parliamentary democracy, currency, etc. However, there is an overarching governmental structure that can intervene in each nation. The Netherlands has a majority of the vote, so in practice it just means that The Netherlands can intervene in Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten.
Despite being part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten are not actually part of the EU. Interestingly, Sint Maarten is actually half of an Island, where the other half is Saint-Martin, which is part of France. So half of the Island is in the EU and half of it isn’t. So the EU actually extends into the Carribean.
> Various empires like the Roman empire and the Roman Empire tried to rule this region,
Not sure if typo or a joke about the Holy Roman Empire…
That was an editing error.
TLDR of my comment is that the Kingdom of the Netherlands is a bit like a weak UK and The Netherlands is a bit like England (although there are significant differences, so don’t take this analogy too far).
Also note that my recounting of Dutch history is simplified and I left things out. For example, there are also three Caribbean Islands that are part of The Netherlands as special municipalities since 2010. This is somewhat similar to how Puerto Rico is part of the US, but is not a state or part of a state. Although Puerto Rico has a their own elected government, but this is presumably because Puerto Rico is relatively large.
To get a sense of scale, the before-mentioned three Caribbean Islands have a combined population of 25,000. Puerto Rico has nearly 4 million.
In this particular case, “just fixing it” has HUGE state tax ramifications for oil rigs, so companies would fight tooth-and-nail to stop it from happening.
They could still just make the state’s legal jurisdiction extend to 12 miles and then add a special exception for oil rigs. That seems a lot simpler.
It also has the benefit that new activities in the 12 miles zone will then simply fall under state law, so the mess doesn’t increase as new economic activity happens in the zone.
The traditional US response to such things would be to have fishing trawlers and casino boats add just enough equipment to now qualify as oil rigs.
Garrett says:
>The traditional US response to such things would be to have fishing trawlers and casino boats add just enough equipment to now qualify as oil rigs.
Want. This might a starting point for a satirical technothriller.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to just attach a casino to an oil rig that’s already there?
Are there a lot of oil rigs more than 12 miles out?
Golden Nugget Oil Rig and Casino… no smoking.
I was holding out hopes you had found some profitable or at least amusing loophole at the intersection of these jurisdictions.
But, you have at least justified the existence of maritime lawyers like the redoubtable Mr Cutestory.
I was too.
Actually, what spurred my interest in this was wondering how a cruise ship from, say, New York to Bermuda and back is allowed to open its onboard casino while it’s in international waters, but dedicated casino ships that just go the minimum distance to international waters and back in order to avoid state gambling laws don’t exist. Turns out, there’s a convoluted set of rules on this very topic to effectively allow cruise ship casinos (except in Hawaii, and with special rules around Alaska) while banning dedicated casino ships (except, for some reason, in Indiana).
I went on one of these casino cruises in Florida in 2007 – we did indeed simply sail 12 miles out to see, loiter for 2-3 hours, and then return.
So I think they are legal in other states as well, possibly under clause (1)(B)(ii) of that statute “[…] this section does not prohibit […] the gambling device remains on board that vessel while the vessel is within the boundaries of that State or possession”
dedicated casino ships that just go the minimum distance to international waters and back in order to avoid state gambling laws don’t exist
I’m only going off memories of Chandler and Hammett novels, but didn’t something like this exist during the 30s/40s? Probably laws got passed to shut down that loophole?
Looks like Chandler based his account off a real gambling ship anchored off Santa Monica.
Thank you to whoever linked their board game recommendations a few threads back.
I received Splendor from my wish list, and have really enjoyed it so far.
I bought Spyfall for my brother-in-law, it was well received and a big hit at our New Years celebrations.
Both of those are indeed good. My family is currently in love with Evolution.
As one of the people who recommended Splendor, yay! I’m glad more people are playing and enjoying it 🙂
Does anyone know of any websites or other sources that attempt to rate or recommend media (particularly current, popular media) on both the vectors of popularity as well as critical acclaim.
Basically, I want to re-connect with pop culture (I’m thinking mainly movies, TV, music here), and I want to mainly consume products that are… let’s call it “influential”, for lack of a better word. Stuff that people talk about. At the extreme high end, this is easy enough… I know that Breaking Bad is influential because literally everyone around me talks about it and references it frequently. I know that Marvel movies are popular and generally of decent quality, that people like Beyonce and Taylor Swift, etc. But at the tier below, once the obvious ones are out of the way, I’m not sure how to go about this.
Places like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes are nice in theory, but they focus so heavily in critical acclaim that they suck in entirely too many small/independent stuff that clearly is not influential at all. If I go to the RT “what’s fresh” list, 90% of the movies are things I’ve never heard of. That’s not really what I’m looking for. On the other hand, I can google “Highest grossing movies of the 2000s” and learn that wow, people sure did fork out a lot of money to see Harry Potter, Shrek, and Pirates of the Caribbean sequels. Nickelback sells a lot of records, but I’m not sure they’re influential either.
Does anyone have any suggestions here?
IO9 recently published two articles that may be of interest to you:
https://io9.gizmodo.com/io9s-greatest-movies-of-the-past-10-years-1821878101
https://io9.gizmodo.com/io9s-greatest-tv-shows-of-the-past-10-years-1821927800
Thanks for the link. Unfortunately this isn’t really a sustainable thing. It’s just a bunch of people saying “Here’s what we think at this moment in time.”
It also doesn’t help that their first entry in the first link is, sure enough, a movie I’ve never even heard of!
Let me see if I understand what you want. You want pointers to works that are respected and influential, not necessarily popular or financially successful. Is that righit?
That’s hard, because while there is plenty of commentary of new works, discussions about older stuff tends to be more subcultural. It’s behind the scenes. I think you’ll need to find groups of people who are serious fans of the genres you are interested in, and find out what they are talking about. Anything the fans are still talking about decades after it came out is worthy of attention. For example, SF fans were still getting into fights about “Starship Troopers” in the nineties, which is pretty remarkable for a book published in 1959.
Not really. I want pointers to works that are both respected and popular.
In other words: No art-house oscar bait that every critic loved, but that grossed <5M. And also no "Medea Goes to France" or whatever else is making a lot of money off fart jokes these days.
I think most works that are both popular and critically respected become "influential" sort of by default so that's the word I used, but I'm not necessarily looking for influence itself.
I want Breaking Bad, The Avengers, and Coldplay – but like, the next level below that (because those are obvious and I'm already familiar with them).
What he wants is to invest his scare attention and time into those popular cultural works that will maximize the amount of common knowledge he has with his society, and in particular with his peers.
This is tough because Breaking Bad was closer to an art house flick for most of its run. It only became a cultural phenomenon in its final season, having one 1 episode break 2 million viewers before that, and its first two seasons averaged well under 1.5 million (wikipedia). Even its popular finale with 4.3 million viewers per episode is very weak, Simpsons didn’t fall that low until year 27, and peaked with almost 7X as many viewers (again wikipedia). The Walking Dead’s worst rated season still averaged a million more viewers than BB. Heck the panned “fear the walking dead” spin off pulled in more viewers than your average BB episode.
I’m pretty sure that Breaking Bad owes most of its commercial success to Netflix. When it showed up there and everyone binge watched is when it became a cultural phenomenon. At least, that was my impression at the time.
I’m not so sure that TV ratings numbers are the most reliable metric here. In my bubble at least, almost no one is going to watch the most popular current TV show by tuning in when it airs. They’re either watching on Netflix or finding some other way to stream or download it.
baconbits,
Consider it a range. I don’t want anything less popular than Breaking Bad, and I don’t want anything less critically acclaimed than The Avengers.
Discovery is part of the pop culture journey. But you seem to have your criteria.
Just go down rotten tomatoes, or imdb ratings, and cross reference with audience score and box office. Come up with whatever score works for you.
“It also doesn’t help that their first entry in the first link is, sure enough, a movie I’ve never even heard of!”
That’s a regional thing, it’s a british movie but otherwise fits your criteria
Exposure (~= financial success) matters but it’s clearly not the whole story. Think of Avatar (2009 film; smurfs, not ninjas): far and away the most successful film of 2009, one of the most successful in history, even critically well-reviewed, but when it comes to lasting effects on pop culture it pretty much sank without a ripple. I think more people these days talk about Avatar (animated series; ninjas, not smurfs), which made a tiny fraction of the money.
An interesting point. Any thoughts as to how to track that bit of nuance?
I don’t know. Number of mentions in some corpus (Google Trends, maybe?) might be an interesting metric, although terms might be ambiguous in some cases (like the two I listed).
This method will likely get you lots of movies that have been heavily meme’d on, such as the Bee Movie.
Avatar might have gotten more attention if it had a sequel lined up for everyone to think and talk about. I thought they had immediately lined up a sequel, but googling it looks like it got massively delayed planning for the three after that and now it’s coming out in 2020. Eleven years is an incredibly long time to wait for a sequel.
Don’t think a sequel’s required for pop-culture influence. Fight Club didn’t get a sequel (nor was it a blockbuster, though it was successful) but it’s one of the most influential movies of the last twenty years. Ditto The Big Lebowski. Donnie Darko has a sequel no one’s ever heard of. The Matrix has two sequels that everyone’s heard of but wish they hadn’t.
It’s not required, but surely it helps. Well, with the possible exception of The Matrix, but even there when people think of the sequels they want to go watch the original, as if to wash the bad taste out of their mouth.
I dunno… The more people think and talk about Avatar, the more they realize it was not good (as a movie at least, probably good as a technology exhibition).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THk19WfVHhY
It’s weird. Technically extremely well done, great set design, nothing wrong with the cast, the script is at least competent if not particularly special, but that’s all wrapped around a core of… nothing. Or rather a strange kind of negative wish fulfillment. It’s the only movie I’ve ever gotten the urge to write fanfiction about in order to point out its logical and ideological flaws.
(Never actually did, though.)
Technically extremely well done, great set design, nothing wrong with the cast, the script is at least competent if not particularly special
The only part of Avatar (the space smurfs) movie I’ve seen was about five minutes when I was passing through the living room when someone was watching it on television, and I pretty much immediately started cheering on Evil Human General and his plan of genocide because the space smurfs were so annoying and wet.
I think the problem was that there was no there there; the blue smurfs were good CGI but still CGI which contrasted weirdly with the live-action actors, and the main story was “human guy gets to live out fantasies plus get magic cure oh yeah and environmentalism is cool, kids”.
Precisely. Well, not to the extent of genocide, but I wouldn’t mind seeing them get their asses kicked, and CEO Whatshisface and General Coffee Mug clearly only needed genocide by authorial fiat anyway.
Besides, if we’ve got to watch thinly veiled colonial parables in space, why can’t I have “Flashman Does Eywa”? Most of the plot would still work, and it’d be vastly more entertaining than yet another Dances With Wolves.
Oh please oh please oh please someone do this. That would be amazing.
…okay, I guess I’ve written fanfic now.
This is fun. Maybe I’ll continue.
What the lord am I reading, can someone explain this?
The Flashman novels are a long-running historical fiction series by George MacDonald Fraser, starring an antiheroic British soldier who ends up witnessing most of the military and political disasters of the mid-to-late 19th century.
Since Avatar is basically Dances With Wolves in space, I thought it might be good for a laugh to transpose the lead roles: Harry Flashman’s got basically the same job description as Dances’ lead,
but a very different personality and perceptions. I might have gotten a little bit carried away.
@Nornagest
Very well done indeed. You nailed his voice.
Disney just opened a series of Avatar (space smurfs)-themed rides at their Animal Kingdom park. I think it’s fair to say that Disney is often a pop cultural arbiter, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the (decidedly forgettable) space smurfs Avatar regained some cultural relevance. (A shame, too, since magic ninjas Avatar was much more fun).
Are you talking “currently influential” or “ever”? Because there are of course those AFI lists of 100 greatest [X] films, which tend to have a good mix of stuff that’s popular, influential, and has remained significant over time
Yeah, that’s pretty close to what I’m looking for, only I’m more interested in current stuff than old stuff. So if instead of “ever” it was “between 20 and 5 years ago” that would be pretty great!
Basically what I really want is some sort of mash-up of Rotten Tomatoes and Box Office receipts that uses some sort of weighted average to tell me “these are the movies that are both popular AND good” in whatever timeframe I choose to filer by.
Why not just got to Box Office Mojo and see the highest grossing movies, and then cross reference that list with Rotten tomatoes?
I assume there are similar sites for music as well, though I don’t pay attention to the music scene, so I don’t know.
TV will be harder because not all stations are created equal. A mediocre CBS drama like Blue Bloods will have more viewers than a something like Game of Thrones, but obviously GoT is more culturally important. And that’s not even bringing in Netflix, who doesn’t release viewership numbers.
Movies aren’t really as influential as they used to be so I’m not sure you’re going to find much besides superhero movies(by current, I assume you mean this decade). There are very few must see movies now. Other than superhero movies, there are Star Wars movies, animated Disney/Pixar movies and whatever Christopher Nolan comes out with. That’s pretty much it for very high grossing and has good reviews.
You’re probably going to have to wait longer than 5-20 years for good assessments of what was actually good. You can’t just look at sales, and critics don’t necessarily praise what’s remembered 50 years later. You can’t look at Oscars – people probably remember Apocalypse Now better than Kramer vs Kramer.
It seems like you’re looking for, basically, “stuff that is liked and talked about amongst college-educated but not completely pretentious white people.” If that’s not a total mischaracterization, then your best bet is probably a site like The Ringer or maybe the arts section of things like Vox or The Atlantic.
But if you’re looking to watch this stuff in order to be able to enter “the cultural conversation,” in my experience people on what I’ll call “college-educated middlebrow Twitter” pretty much only talk about current, ongoing shows–even if you never watched The Wire, you’re not “culturally illiterate” on middlebrow Twitter, because people only ever talk about the latest season of the latest show.
Game of Thrones is the only still active show that I can think of off the top of my head that has had years of cultural dominance. In 2017 I’d say the two movies that fit your criteria were Lady Bird and Get Out. Maybe The Florida Project.
Andrew Hunter’s FtL post two OTs ago has me curious, what are some other interesting FtL travel and communications systems in sci-fi books? I liked Enderverse’s model of “instant communication, light speed travel” a lot, before OSC went off his rocker in Xenocide and introduced instant travel.
Physicist and hard-SF author Geoffrey Landis has put together a taxonomy of FTL drives that covers pretty much everything that has ever come up in science fiction, hard or soft. Lots of interesting stuff, and bonus points if you can come up with something that isn’t on the Landis list.
Nothing completely off the charts, but two which don’t quite fit:
The Infinite Improbability Drive: it’s somewhere between a jump drive and modifying the parameters of the universe. Calculate exactly the improbability of something happening, feed it into the drive, and it happens.
Also, another jump drive variant, the “20 decimals of similarity” which allows a Van Vogt hero (or maybe just Gilbert Gosseyn) to go someplace he’d memorized before.
In-universe, IIRC, there was some kind of distinction between this type of finite improbability engine, which can e.g. be used to “break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess’s undergarments jump three feet to the left”, and the infinite improbability drive used for FTL, which is never adequately explained.
I don’t think the logic actually holds up, but it’s an incredibly silly setting anyway.
Douglas Adam’s space travel, time travel, and technological systems are “Whatever is funniest for this scene.”
Nornagest:
It was a funny idea somewhat analogous to having a smart AI bootstrap itself into ever-greater superintelligence.
The idea was that if technology could be used (via various bits of handwavium) to break the laws of probability a little, one could use that precise capability to break them a lot. Instead of a high intelligence engine letting one build smarter intelligence engines, a high improbability engine lets one spontaneously produce higher improbability engines, until you’ve gone as far along that dimension as there is to go.
Both of those look like straight 1.4 jump drives in Landis’s taxonomy, which does not require the author to use the words “jump” or “drive”. Technobabble involving quantum mechanics is explicitly cited, as is the possibility of a human mind doing it without any machinery.
The Gosseyn thing is a 1.4.1 variant, but with neither unrestricted target selection nor restricted in the 1.4.1.1 way. No quantum mechanics involved; I think it owes more to sympathetic magic than quantum mechanics. The Infinite Improbability drive is just weird though it’s main effect is effectively (unrestricted) 1.4.1; the setting obviously isn’t exactly serious.
I don’t see Ludicrous Speed on there.
In no particular order:
– The Star Wars EU (the movies are just speed-of-plot + arbitrary contrivances. I am still angry they made it to Bespin sans hyperdrive.) Yes, really. It’s dead simple (point to point jumps in straight lines, stay away from gravity wells) but works well narratively and after the authors came up with Interdictor cruisers a number of books used them in surprising or interesting ways to produce tactical surprise or flexibility. Especially for mainstream work, I have to admit that Star Wars hyperdrives work well for the stories they want to tell.
– Revelation Space is probably the best-considered high-speed STL setting I know of (plus some interesting corner cases.) A great style and aesthetic, as well. Too bad I just hate the writing, plots, characters, and books, and reading them feels like cleaning heavy underbrush.
– the Eschaton duology by Stross, of course. The only writer I can think of who confronts the acausal implications of FTL travel instead of just invoking Belisario. (For those who haven’t read it: yes, their FTL travel lets you travel back in time arbitrarily. Too bad there’s a strong AI who did it, err, “first”, spread you across the galaxy, and left ten-foot letters of stone telling you “THOU SHALT NOT VIOLATE CAUSALITY IN MY HISTORIC LIGHTCONE, OR ELSE.” The series is about the meaning and consequences of that statement. Too bad Stross considers the setting unworkable, due to some mistakes in book 2. I’d love to see a lot more here.
– The Hyperion Cantos has some fucking weird shit going on, but through four books we see three effective travel regimes, all of which produce dramatically different societies. The religious aspects and deeply soft space opera I can understand some people not liking, but for soft fiction he does a good job actually thinking about the consequences (Pohl’s maxim of traffic jams.)
Sure I can think of more given some time or a pass over my bookshelves…
(With the exception of island hopping. Almost everyone gets island hopping wrong.)
(I guess this is more a list of settings where I enjoyed what they did with FTL, than particularly interesting FTL systems.)
Have any idea what those mistakes are? I’ve heard this before but not in detail, and I’m drawing a blank trying to figure it out myself. There are some things about the ReMastered that don’t quite make sense to me but no obvious setting-killers.
Some discussion here. I think he’s being a bit unreasonable in terms of how broken things are, but it’s his toy, not mine.
I think he also decided it wasn’t realistic enough for a time travel setting, hence Palimpsest. Palimpsest is a good book and I enjoyed it, but it is Primer-level incomprehensible (probably correct for a book about acausal war.)
I think I read that at some point, presumably before I got fed up with the increasing Culture Warriness of Charlie’s blog and noped out of there. It doesn’t really answer the question: it establishes that there are problems but not what the problems are.
My best guess would be that it’s not weird enough. Naively the good-guy side has an I Win button that it’s not using: we know the Eschaton has no qualms about excessive force, by the end of the story we know it knows about the ReMastered’s plan, and right now it’s the only large-scale causality-violating power going, so there’s no good reason for it not to already have melted every Sig rune and totenkopf pin in the universe (and the planets they’re on if it’s feeling thorough) with gray goo or virus bombs or whatever incomprehensible weapons it does this sort of shit with. That is probably something you could work around, I already have some ideas of how you could do it, but they don’t look very much like the clever but still fairly conventional war of expansion in Iron Sunrise.
That’s all pretty speculative, though.
I think the idea Stross was going for was that the Eschaton wasn’t the only acausal entity – the potential rival AI the Remastered were trying to build was also actively interfering in history to bring about its own existence, and the events of the book are what a time travel war between two acausal AIs looks like from the point of view of linear time humans.
Or rather, that was the theory, but he thinks he screwed up how that should actually work. He went back to the problem of how a war between rival time traveling factions should look with the novella Palimpsest, which is a very fun read.
Right, that’s what he said, but just because a war between two globally acausal entities didn’t look like Iron Sunrise doesn’t mean Iron Sunrise doesn’t look like *something*. There are all sorts of plausible explanations for the plot, most around the theme of “the remastered don’t know their god {isn’t a god, is the Eschaton playing silly buggers}.”
Been awhile since I’ve been deep in the Start Wars EU, so I can’t recall, do they ever really explain how communication works? I vaguely recall some mention of “hyperspace comms” but it’s hard to reconcile that with how we see hyperspace portrayed, which is more like moving to a separate dimension or something.
A series of hyperspace communication buoys (hypercomm buoys) are scattered across most of the known galaxy. One of the later NJO books revolves around the desperate defense of one of these buoys, as the Bad Guys try to cripple the Good Guys’ communications.
I think the idea is that the buoys can broadcast through hyperspace for short distances, operating in hyperspace the same way that radio operates in real space, so you can have real-time hologram communications with someone on the other side of the galaxy (though we only see the Jedi Council and the Emperor himself, presumably the top .00000000000001% of the galactic social heirarchy, so who knows how widespread it is?).
EU canon is that they used the backup hyperdrive, which is like an x12. In other words, really slow.
I missed that detail, apparently. Can you recall when that was introduced?
Sorry, no. It’s been way too long. I do know that all of my RPG sourcebooks credit the Falcon with a backup hyperdrive, which is the highest level of canon as far as I’m concerned.
I was always a fan of the way Babylon 5 did hyperspace/drive. The show was never much concerned about the details, but there was some decent thought behind it.
There exists an alternate dimension called hyperspace. Hyperspace roughly maps to realspace, but not in a way that is always predictable, meaning that while travel through hyperspace is faster than light, some ways are faster than others. Hyperspace is full of energy (yes, I know) which makes it dangerous and makes sensors not very useful so well trod hyperspace routes have beacons and navigation aids.
You don’t need a special engine to move in hyperspace, but getting to and from there takes a lot of energy, so most people use hyperspace gates, which are large and expensive ways to get in or out of it. Large military ships with plenty of power are capable of forming their own jump points. FTL communication works by beaming signals through hyperspace, which is effectively real time, though it probably shouldn’t be.
It’s a nice combination that usually felt very plausible and gave you a lot of narrative options.
I don’t like being negative, but Babylon 5 is an example of my least favorite FTL system: the one where they call space as we know it “realspace.” It’s an in-universe admission that FTL is fake.
Or an understanding of how humans adapt language to new circumstances. What do you think people will call what is presently just called “space”, when they need to distinguish it from something else that is called “space” but isn’t the same thing? Hint: They won’t want to waste syllables and they won’t care about pedantic literal correctness.
Here in the real world, for example, you’ll find people using the phrase “real world” to distinguish from e.g. college campuses, without meaning to assert that college campuses are fake.
Well I would think they’d just call 3-dimensions+gravity “space” and the other thing some other word of one or two syllables.
Though now that you mention it, didn’t John Milton coin the term “outer space”? So I guess it could change within the era of Modern English.
The “other thing”, as usually represented, has three dimensions plus time, making it sufficiently space-like that it is going to get a name of the form “[adjective]space”. Which instantly makes the unadorned “space” ambiguous, in that it could refer just to the vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big place that’s got Earth in it, or to that and [adjective]space combined. A neologism will be coined to refer specifically and only to the big place that’s got Earth in it, and that neologism will also be of the form “[adjective]space”. Adjectives of more than two syllables need not apply.
I’ve seen multiple settings use the term “N-space” which fits your short, pithy, and clear criteria, though as you imply most hyperspace implementations also seem to have 3+1 Minkowski dimensions, so it doesn’t exactly pass the fridge test. (Sometimes this is backexplained by N being short for “normal”, but no one believes that.)
I am pretty happy with N-space as a name anyway.
Yeah, also “real world” is used distinguish the internet.
e.g. “Cyber-attack causes real-world harm.”
I am pleased that ‘real life’ has its own Wikipedia entry.
@Le Maistre Chat
Sci-fi may have been borrowing from the real space/reciprocal space distinction in solid-state physics and crystallography. The difference between real space and reciprocal space is simply a Fourier transformation, they’re both physically “real”, but reciprocal space doesn’t correspond to our everyday intuitions. Notably, they’re both three-dimensional space, but long length vectors in realspace are short in reciprocal space.
An interesting thread listing many forms of faster than light communication in fiction is “https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/96389/4918” “Which Sci-fi universe uses the most forms of FTL (Faster Than Light)?” on Science Fiction Stack Exchange.
You might also look through the comment thread of Scott’s sci-fi writeup about faster than light communication “https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/09/the-lizard-people-of-alpha-draconis-1-decided-to-build-an-ansible/” .
(Content warning for scrupulosity, I suppose.)
I sometimes wonder whether there’s a meekness treadmill.
Those of you who have heard of the hedonic treadmill will have an idea what I mean, viz. no permanent gain despite major changes. You may expect more money, fewer irritations, or a nicer job to raise your happiness set point, but soon you adjust and you’re as happy or unhappy as ever.
I’m a very conflict-averse person, largely I think owing to my upbringing.* I was hurt by folks who by not checking their anger said or did things they regretted. I don’t think this is something others should be subjected to; consequently, I don’t want to hurt people. I avoid picking fights, using harsh language, or saying anything impulsively. With six or seven years of practice I’m pretty good at it, too. Ask my friends and they can hardly recall a time I’ve said something intended to hurt someone.**
The permanent gain I wanted here is a decrease in conflict, or the negative consequences of conflict at least. I attempted that by avoiding what I took to be escalating behaviors: name-calling, yelling, etc. But I’ve found it doesn’t work. Some, though not all, have simply grown more sensitive to when I’m angry. I know folks who enter screaming rages and say lots of hurtful things when they’re pissed; this is fine. Yet, should I set my jaw or bite my tongue, the things I want to say are apparently just read into those actions.
A kind of conditioning is occurring, which in retrospect should have been obvious. By being more delicate in how I treat people and in how much emotion I show, I’m only encouraging and reinforcing people to develop thinner skins and to lash out more severely. This doesn’t occur to everyone, just as not everyone develops a thicker skin when confronted with an angry, unfiltered person. But it happens to some for sure. And of course folks don’t develop a thick or thin skin simpliciter—it’s a function of expectations they’ved formed about the behavior of a particular person, which may differ from their expectations about others or folks generally. I wouldn’t bat an eye if a family member were in a screaming fit; I would if my boss were.
Therefore it seems to me sometimes that this has been a waste. That I’ve expended a lot of effort reining in my emotions for nothing. That if I just bit someone’s head off once in a while then everyone, me especially, would be better off. At the time it seemed like a good idea; many folks’ mode of conflict resolution is “screaming match, followed by making up, or not,” and I wanted terribly to avoid that. And this is after all just an application of the Golden Rule. But one can’t avoid being hurtful just by never raising one’s voice, or never calling someone an idiot—it takes more than that, always more than that. With the conditioning I described above, there is a kind of arms race between my capacity for patience and others’ capacities for indignation and harm. That is not a race I can win.
So as I understand it, there are broadly two options here:
1) Be perfect, all the time.
2) Quit while you’re behind.
For the reasons I’ve articulated above, I take it that (1) is off the table. It’s not that being perfect isn’t what we’re called to be—I’m a Christian, after all!—it’s that my approach isn’t cultivating perfection. It’s optimizing for something else; it’s some strange, alien virtue more fit for AI or angels than ordinary humans.
I have a deep aversion to (2)—am I saying it’s okay to be mean?—but maybe that’s my own poor understanding. By accepting (2) can I truly encourage others to treat me with the same level of respect with which I treat them? If so, where are the stable solutions to that? The Golden Rule has always seemed simple and obvious, but the conditioning I’ve described here is unstable, a subtle failure mode no doubt owing to my extreme aversion to conflict. As I understand it, the radical honesty folks, for instance, have a solution, but I don’t think I could live in a world of radical honesty. So what other stable solutions am I missing here?
*I’ll grant that maybe this isn’t so much due to my upbringing as an unusual response to said upbringing, but that’s neither here nor there.
**I asked seven, but only three responded. Two could recall no incidents, but I don’t think they considered the question long. Another could with prodding recall two incidents since I started college five years ago and a few more before then.
Can you be more detailed about what kind of negative reactions are still occurring? Like, are people screaming at you in response to you setting your jaw?
I’m pretty meek myself, and while it’s not enough to head off all hostility, I’m pretty sure it makes a big and positive difference. But Different Worlds and all that…
Sorry, but no; the way I put the jaw-setting thing was misleading, in retrospect, and I’m not going to go into specifics, because I don’t exactly mean for this thread to be personal.
Are you feeling like meekness doesn’t help at all, or just that it doesn’t help as much as it should?
Never raising my voice does not prevent others from raising their voices, but that it does prevent escalation loops where we both end up screaming.
It does not prevent all disagreements and conflict. I do believe that it means they’re conducted less painfully and more rationally.
It does pretty much ensure that I’m treated ‘unfairly’, in that others raise their voice at me, and I never raise mine at them. This frustrates me sometimes, but I mostly just accept it.
(One of the key mental structures making this sustainable is a deep inner arrogance that prevents me from expecting others to treat me as well as I treat them, which you may not be able or willing to replicate.)
I’m not a religious scholar, but the more central Christian claim is to seek and give forgiveness, not to attempt to live perfectly. I have also heard that a better translation of ‘meek’ is ‘the man who holds back’, not the ‘man who is never confrontational’, this makes meek a manner of relativity, not an absolute. Finally I would say that hiding your emotions is a form of deception and is just not healthy.
Maybe the people you are interacting with are being unreasonable, and just looking for trouble. But if I assume that the problem is on your end, here’s what I imagine is going on, based on what you’ve written:
The problem may be that you are still getting quite upset in your head, and although you aren’t yelling, you are still telegraphing your emotions in ways that are more clear than you realize.
The solution would then be the cultivate genuine calmness and charity towards whoever you’re interacting with.
Also, your characterization of yourself as very meek and never wanting to hurt anyone is at odds with your stated desire to occasionally bite someones head off.
This post next to your username must be what a type error feels like.
Lots of people are unreasonable when they’re angry; I don’t necessarily hold that against them, nor do I hold them at fault just for reading me more carefully. And certainly I still get upset in my head, as anyone will get upset if pushed far enough. And yes, I still telegraph my emotions somewhat. And I guess I didn’t make this part clear, but I really and truly have been trying to cultivate genuine calmness and charity for the last several years. That is not enough.
I’m sorry, but this is a baffling thing to say. Have you never felt conflicting feelings in your life? Intellectually and as a matter of longstanding practice I do not want to hurt people. Sometimes when people really, really piss me off I want to hurt them. These two things are not irreconcilable; on the contrary, the latter, should I indulge it, just reinforces the former, and the former, should I indulge it, magnifies the latter.
I second the suggestion made by baconbits9. By your definition of meekness you are on a kind of treadmill. But you are not actually acting in a way that is consistent with this virtue, hence you’re in this predicament.
To be meek is to be powerful and capable of harming others, and yet retain control/restraint over this aspect of your self. Jung would describe this as “having integrated one’s shadow”. We can see this play out in the people around us day to day – we tend not to respect harmless people. Women certainly do not find harmless men attractive; they tear them to pieces over time.
My proposed solution would be to neither seek or avoid conflict, but to have the tools necessary to deal with it. This means learning to confronting people about a problem with the explicit aim of setting your affairs in better order than they were before (even by your own standards). Thus the ‘conflict’ or interpersonal tension becomes simply a process that you both voluntarily go through in order to reach some improved state.
As far as my not actually living out the virtue of meekness, you and baconbits9 are spot on. What I’m looking for here—what I called toward the end a “stable solution” to the problem of treating others as you want to be treated—is, if I understand you, what you call the tools necessary to deal with conflict (mine doesn’t so much deal with conflict as, at best, infinitely put it off). What the heck are those? What does that look like? Here’s where I see your framing go wrong: you say I need to confront people about a problem with the explicit aim of straightening things out. I agree that that would be ideal. But various “naive” approaches to this, like radical honesty, often fail. Sometimes it simply leaves the problem unresolved; sometimes everything blows up in your face. So what is a reliable method for approaching conflict so as to minimize these bad outcomes? Give me a body of tools that work for all sorts of conflicts and all sorts of people and I’ll happily switch.
NB apologies in advance if the latter-half of this sounds like MBA-speak – i don’t have one and i’m not that guy.
Forget “radical honesty”, it is complete garbage. We need not even invoke regular honesty to answer your question. Just a quick side note on this. The RadHon doctrine endorses the enunciation of whatever statement or observation comes to one’s mind at the time. The proposed justification is that truth=what you are thinking=good; lies=what you think they want to hear=bad. The thing is most people most of the time have a filter which is made up of various parameters they tweak depending on the social situation. For instance, talking to their girlfriend they might set their filter to Compassion=8, Kindness=7, Assertiveness=3, Neuroticism=2 or somesuch for the purpose of having an affectionate social experience. Talking to their boss the next day the dials would be completely different, instead optimising for perceived conscientiousness, with some higher assertiveness thrown in to get your point across. In RadHon land however, the responsibility of tweaking these parameters gets shirked in favour of the “say what you are now thinking -> say what you are now thinking -> etc” routine. One damaging effect of this is to promote low-effort communications to the same level as effort-thoughts, so the person you’re trying to communicate with now has to try to parse an unprocessed signal. NOT GOOD FOR YOUR RELATIONSHIPS.
Regarding niceness. If your supply of niceness is infinite (or if your willingness to be nice is unconditional – same thing here) then the marginal value of each nice thing you do is approximately zero. Conversely if you treat niceness as a finite quantity, an exhaustible resource that needs to be allocated wisely, then the recipients of your niceness will be able to value it correctly. “Sam is nice all the time, that’s just his personality. Everything he says is nice. I can’t tell if he actually likes my idea!” Zero information conveyed by a nice statement, given your ~100% track record of nice statements.
Regarding reliable tools for conflict resolution. I’ll tell you what works for me after many years of trial and error.
1. The conflict resolution process can actually start before the conflict heats up, but it requires you to see it coming.
“I have this goal. It involves me interacting/collaborating with these people. These other people have incentives x y z, which will tend to make them behave a certain way. Is this behavioral tendency of theirs at odds with my goal?”
2. Now you have ‘insider’ information about their trajectory, and if you’re good you can spot a collision course.
“I’m appointed quality control engineer on this job. The guys in the thing-producing department are short-staffed and will probably have to rush to meet their deadline in order to get their bonus. They will tend to cut-corners on some important features which it is my job to safeguard.”
3. Pitcure the potential conflict.
“I am at the end of their workflow, and they are going to present a thing to me which I cannot sign off on. This is going to make them mad and accuse me of being a pedantic stick-in-the-mud. They will blame me for the production shortfall and deadline blowout.”
4. Now your forward-thinking is done and we are acting in real time. Request a meeting in the early stages of the project, tell them who you are, what you do, and what your expectations are.
“Hey lads i’m Kurt from Quality, im working on your Thing with you. I can tell you’re a few people short and snowed-under with work. Just wanted to get on the same page about what we want to deliver by the end of the quarter, so we don’t have any surprises. As you know, P Q and R are the essential components that need my sign- off in order to complete. I think we are at risk of falling short on them due to our situation, is that right? OK thought so, well I want to be able to sign off on this so here are our options…
Any conflict that occurs from now on takes place within an existing agreed framework of problem-solving, where they know you want what’s best for the project and are not just being a dick. They know what they have to do in order to prevent X from happening. They know how you will have to act if X happens.
Fully generalised:
-under these conditions we will be successful
-if these things happen, I will have to act in this way
-If i act in this way, you will be adversely affected and I don’t want that
-let’s work together to create those successful conditions
You’ll notice the recurring theme is clarity of each others’ intentions and incentives.
Yes and I put it to you that that happens when the problem isn’t properly defined prior; and when a surprise occurs that is outside the discussed narrative.
Let me know if any of the above hasn’t made sense.
I think the structure you are looking for is broad respect. It would be a long post to get even the basics down, but what it looks like is a person who won’t be pushed around, but also doesn’t push other people around. This is the best (only?) way to be respected by those who push people around AND the people who are sick of being pushed around. It is a very narrow behavior path to get to.
I think I know what you mean. I try to be polite and supportive to everyone I spend time with, because that’s how I like to be and I don’t want anyone to get mad at me. But sometimes I feel like, after years of that, their expectations are so raised that when I do show a hint of temper or say something they don’t like, they react with shock, horror and betrayal. I don’t know what to make of that.
I would suggest that there’s an alternative explanation, though, which is that we select friends who are much like ourselves. I’m thin-skinned and hate drama – therefore my friends tend to be thin-skinned and hate drama – therefore, they have a very low tolerance for people revealing their undisguised emotions to them. It’s not a treadmill, it’s just something that was there right from the start of the relationship but which takes a long time to notice, especially when you’re making an effort to avoid situations where it would come up.
Someone who gets it!! This makes me feel a little better.
This is an interesting alternative, and I need to think about it. How do you suppose we’d test which of our explanations is right? The only way that occurs to me is undisguising my emotions from the start, but I suppose that would just attract different people than normal. I suppose if I truly did attract different people, and not simply the same people as before but operating on different expectations about me, that would falsify my explanation….
Uh, like I said, I need to think about this. 😛
You may have people in your life who chose to associate with you and people like you, but also people who didn’t make such a choice, but still interact with you. If the theory is correct, one would expect the former group to be thin-skinned and hate drama much more than the latter group.
That’s an excellent point. Most of my family is the yell-about-everything-and-say-sorry-later-or-not type.
I don’t have anything very useful to say about your conundrum, but I am going to offer a different, more specific interpretation of what might be going on.
You describe a substantial ongoing effort at controlling your own behavior, and say:
In my experience, people view behavior that they consider to be “out of control” very differently than behavior they consider to be “under control”, and put a lot more emotional weight on the latter.
At the extreme end of the former are people who go into a kind of fugue state in pursuit of whatever they happen to want, wreaking havoc along the way, and then can’t even recall their behavior later, or offer bizarre interpretations of it. Many people like this are still generally well liked, with a “that’s just X being X” rider granted on their social contract.
On the other hand, people tend to be very unhappy when someone does something harmful or critical while in control, and therefore “intentionally”. I occasionally fly off the handle, usually when I’m less socially functional due to some stressor. But I’m generally quite careful about avoiding harm (as distinct from criticism, anyway), and my criticisms (and, yes, meannesses) are generally intentional — I could have done otherwise. And people generally just really hate that shit, and judge me accordingly.
So this may be less of a treadmill than having found yourself on the wrong side of a dichotomy.
This is interesting, and explains well my observation about people who fly off the handle getting off easy. But it’s pretty depressing if true, because this sounds exactly like what I want to avoid. This sounds like a stupid dichotomy that at best only applies to people who “can’t control themselves” when they’re angry—why in the world is it being applied to people like you or me?
It’s analogous to the distinction between murder and manslaughter: The more understanding someone has of the implications and side effects of their actions, the more responsible they are for those actions. To the extent that those side effects are negative (such as hurt feelings), that increase in responsibility reflects negatively on the agent.
It’s applied to everyone, but the more control one has the more one is subject to the increase.
The potential upside is that if this is not a treadmill, but a “static” difference impact, it’s easier to correct for with what amounts to a yet more nuanced understanding of the side effects. I’m not big on “pick your battles” because that just focuses back on “you”, and anyway it’s not like I’m actually resource-constrained in these cases. (In a way, “pick your battles” is a more specific version of “it’s all about you”.) But if and when its appropriate to criticize (or whatever) and it comes from a place of deliberation, muffling the content of the criticism (or whatever) a bit further than is strictly accurate or seemingly called for can be a means of lowering the emotional effect, which in most of us is the mechanism by which it can (with luck) be correcting.
So, my trouble here then is that it would be “easy” for me to just throw morals to the wind and flip out on someone when they piss me off—I’m still tempted to every time, obviously—and from the sounds of it, people would just give me a free pass. Which to me sounds ridiculous. On the other hand, if I really try to exercise self-restraint here, and really try, and really try, and slip up, I am a monster. That’s why I’m saying this dichotomy sounds stupid: unless you
literallyfiguratively see red and can’t exercise any self-control when you’re angry, which I can’t imagine applies to very many people, I don’t see why people should be getting a free pass for exercising less control. And when that self-control runs out, I don’t see how it’s so dissimilar to, why it should be treated so differently from, the seeing-red people whose breaking point is stubbing their toe or whatever.It could be that your “meekness treadmill” is due to typical minding on the part of the people you’re interacting with: they know that they’d be upset in a situation, assume that you will be equally upset, and see any sign of negative reaction in your part as confirmation of this. There’s also the commonly held idea that “blowing off steam” is good for you, so perhaps they assume you’re constantly bottling up rage and assume any negative sign is indicative of a pending major outburst.
Alternatively, perhaps you are good at suppressing negative outbursts, but bad at hiding that you’re actively suppressing your instincts, thus people are reacting to what they think your true feelings are, rather than what you are outwardly showing.
Finally, is it possible that, in becoming very sensitive to your own negative reactions (to reduce them) you’ve become hypersensitive to the negative reactions of others in response to you? If you were the sort to flip out at the slightest provocation, would you even notice the reactions your jaw setting is eliciting?
I can’t find a citation, but I’ve read in discussions of criminology that male aggressive behavior drops off markedly after age 27 or so, so one solution to criminal recidivism is to just lock criminals up until they’re older and more mellow. The solution to your problem may be “get a little older.”
You’re optimizing to the wrong metric, which I think you’ve realized. If the goal is “reduce conflict”, you might reach local minima by not escalating, but your global metric will still be bad as long as you continue to associate with the same people under the same conditions.
But there’s another method. You don’t have to match bad behavior with your own to exert influence. Just set boundaries and leave whenever they start to transgress them. Enforcing boundaries is not contradictory to kindness. You don’t have to escalate and yell, you can still be polite and generous and forgiving. But it’s perfectly acceptable to limit your participation in a relationship if you’re treated badly. “Forgiveness” doesn’t mean “let you mistreat me forever.” It means “I’ve let go of my animus towards you, and I wish you the best (even if I don’t want to spend time together anymore.)”
If someone genuinely wants to spend time with you, they’ll respect the boundaries. If not, you probably should limit their participation in your life anyway. Your life isn’t an Offspring song, extra suffering doesn’t show you “really care”. It just shows unaddressed dysfunction.
People have this romantic notion that if they were perfect they could smile and walk through the abuse and be above it all, and that would be an ideal way to be “nice”. But that’s not helping you, and it’s certainly not helping the others in your relationships be the best people they can be.
4 points of note:
1) You teach people how to treat you. If people realize that you won’t stand up for yourself, they have incentive to keep pushing.
2) Once people know you, they’ll calibrate and infer your actual stance by distance from your baseline. This isn’t going away, because this kind of “sensitivity to other people’s feelings” and the resulting reduction in social friction is something people value, despite treadmills like this being one of the serious downsides.
3) If you are treating people the way you’d like to be treated, and they are treating you the way they’d like to be treated, no one is actually being treated the way they would like to be treated (Unless both parties have identical treatment preferences).
4) Even being perfect won’t save you from being hurtful. If you have or accomplish anything that people value, some people will be hurt solely by the fact that you choose to give it to someone else. Not hurting people is structurally impossible unless you’re, like, an orphan with no connections at all, pledge to stay that way, and don’t count your own pain within this metric. You’d probably be better off becoming comfortable with hurting people sometimes and striving to minimize it in the long term, rather than the immediate.
My rule of thumb for dealing with other people is that as a first approximation, I am the only person able to change myself (and even that is difficult), while everyone else just remains the same, forever. From this perspective, the only way to make other people treat you better is simply to start meeting many new people, and remain in contact only with those who treat you the way you want to be treated.
As I said, this is just a first approximation. I don’t believe this is literally true; I am not that exceptional person. Sometimes I change, sometimes other people do. But from my internal perspective, my changes happen as a result of my strong desires. Other people’s changes do not happen as a result of my desires. Logically, they happen as a result of their desires; but that is something I have no access to. Not even when they tell me, because people live in self-deception all the time. I see barely any relation between what most people report they want, and what they actually do. And I am the same, from outside. The thing is that not all “desires” are created equal. Some of them are mere pleasant dreams, which may often come to my attention, and I may talk about them often, but then something else takes my attention again, and ultimately nothing gets done. But a few of them are like a burning fire which never goes away, only sometimes burns with low intensity, and then something fans the flame again, and then things just explode. And these two types are difficult to distinguish from outside, or even from inside. I believe such fires are burning in other people, too; I just don’t know what they relate to, and which decade of their life will witness the moment of explosion. Therefore, for any specific change and any specific time period, the probability that the other person will change in that specific way at that specific moment is pretty much zero.
You seem to have an internal fire that drives you to what you call “meekness”. (The quotes do not mean disagreement, only that different people might have different interpretations of the same word; and I am referring to “whatever is the thing that you deeply desire”, having no interest in dictionary debates.) I guess, most people do not have exactly this kind of internal fire; instead, they have other priorities and desire other things. (This is not a value judgment; people are different, and there are many things worthy of desire.) So even if they value the same thing, they will treat it more casually. They may not even notice their lack of reciprocity, because they are thinking about something else at the moment. If you have a good connection with them, maybe you could have a talk with them; without blaming them, just say “you know, it is my spiritual desire to interact with people this way, and it would be nice if we could share that”; and they maybe they will start paying attention to this when they are with you. (I wonder how many desires of my friends I trample without noticing, simply because it happens to be a thing I usually do not consciously think about; not because I would have any desire to hurt them.)
Then, there are also people who mistake niceness for weakness; perhaps because they never experienced niceness that didn’t result from weakness in the sensitive period of their lives. We can pity the poor souls, but from the “other people don’t change (at the moment we need them to)” perspective, the proper approach is to be assertive and hold your ground when dealing with them. (This implies that you have to treat different people differently.)
In my model of the world (being an atheist, my standard assumption is that any behavior evolved because it provided selfish advantage in certain context; it’s just a question of recognizing the proper context), the main advantage of niceness is that it is a ticket that allows you to interact with other nice people. If you are a nice person, and you interact with an asshole, you are in a momentary disadvantage, full stop. Your advantage manifests when there are other nice people, who invite you to their party; and the asshole doesn’t get the invitation there. The “karmic punishment” for the asshole is having to interact mostly with other assholes, because everyone else tries to avoid them as much as they can. But this doesn’t always work automatically. Some nice people remain stuck with assholes because of some kind of learned helplessness. (They may believe that everyone is an asshole, so they have no motivation to try meeting other people. They may believe that sticking with the assholes is virtuous; either in general, or because they believe they owe it to some specific asshole for some specific reason.) Some assholes succeed to surround themselves with such helpless nice people; others change their environment often and make good initial impressions so it always takes some nice people longer to update. But in general, using your niceness to get rid of assholes and instead associate with other nice people seems to me like the right way (both the evolutionary purpose and the moral thing to do from libertarian-ish perspective) to “use” niceness.
Hey everyone, thanks for the responses. I won’t be making any more direct responses to this thread, but a lot of it was really helpful and I’ll be thinking it over.
Remember that weirdly dimming star that was hypothesized to be a result of an alien Dyson-sphere-like megastructure? Well there was a Kickstarter that raised $100k for telescope time to investigate it, and the data is finally in: its an irregular dust ring. An unsurprising result about a surprising observation, but a great story about citizen science!
https://astronomynow.com/2018/01/03/new-data-debunks-alien-megastructure-theory-on-mysterious-tabbys-star/
Unsurprising, as you say, except insofar as they were able to get a result using only visible and near-IR observations; I had though this would require far-IR work, with much more expensive telescopes, but the described methodology is clever and plausible.
I do want to read the full paper, because my BOTE calculations suggest that this would require a godawful lot of dust and I wonder what they think the source was.
The only part of this that’s annoying?
The prediction was about this being resolved by 12-31-17; https://www.metaculus.com/questions/467/Will%20the%20KIC%208462852%20mystery%20be%20solved%20this%20year%3F/
Does anyone have experience dealing with a someone close (family member in my case) who has a longstanding (multi-year) paranoid delusion about being followed, recorded, hacked, etc? I’m going through all the medical/psych channels and making progress but the individual still has no idea it’s all in his head. I’m curious if anyone has successfully convinced a paranoid/delusional person to be able to hold to conflicting ideas in their head at the same time (eg “I’m certainly being followed because I see it happening” and “I’m certainly not being followed because I’m mentally ill and my brain can’t not experience being followed”).
Anything helps here. Thanks!
Are you absolutely SURE that their belief is a delusion?
There have been people randomly targeted by channers and by WinRM hobbyists for the lulz.
I’ve had a couple of weirdly random stalkers myself, one of which turned out to have been stealing my mail.
It takes just one person with their own wobbly grip of sanity with an interest and adequate computer skills, to turn your life into a hell right out the delusions of the worst case of paranoia you can conceive, and “interest” could be little more than “he insulted me when we were coworkers that one time”.
Yeah, pretty much entirely agreed.
My usual take on this is “how many actors does this person’s belief require?” Which is of course a refinement on Occam’s Razor but it works really well; I’ve encountered a couple of cases of “paranoid” people actually being harassed and followed, usually by an obsessive stalker.
Meanwhile, there was a recent story shared during the #metoo phenomenon by a woman who insisted that men she passed constantly made obscene comments to her – not “it happened when I passed this group on the street”, but continually at all times while in public; strangers would apparently relentlessly and constantly make obscene and obnoxious remarks. This apparently finally ended when she yelled at one of her supposed interlocutors and he scurried away in shock. That screams, to me, of paranoid delusion; right down to confronting it and temporarily scaring it away.
Now, a lot of the people who push #metoo want to believe that women that are literally constantly surrounded by obscene comments that completely and uniformly disappear when confronted might exist. My take on it? My priors are far higher for a given person being stalked and followed, recorded, hacked than they are for that.
The belief entails a certainty of being followed by dozens of different people and unmarked vehicles across two cities. Beyond the number of actors, the material cost of would be a $1MM+ spy operation…all with the supposed goal to bring a highly illogical, relatively small lawsuit against the person, which, though apparently motivated by financial gain, would net significantly less than of the estimated cost of the recon operation in the first place. All evidence of this multiyear observation rests in language of belief and feeling, often with the “pieces of the puzzle” being assembled after the events have taken place (ie “I didn’t realize it at the time, but now after thinking about it constantly for days, I just know for certain the man in the hat was working for Person X”).
A member of my immediate family has paranoid schizophrenia. This sounds exactly like (some of) the delusional beliefs she had. She’s much better now, but an extended stay in an institution and a lot of serious medication have been involved. I do not think it is possible for people to reason themselves out of such beliefs without chemical assistance, sadly.
Oh, we are now past the age where people can say that they are delusional about possibly being followed, recorded, or hacked.
There are numerous examples of companies spying on customers with data….with it totally suggestible that your microphone and camera is on, and then a product is being sold and recommended with all the trackable data you don’t buy or google, with *that* company data then becoming NSA data…
With perhaps even a hyper-intelligent AI in the background somewhere, doing who knows what.
The sci-fi authors of the 60’s wrote that this was a possibility….and now we are here.
I have bet Scott $1000 to charity at even odds that an upcoming journalist’s book on the rationalist community will be a hit job. I hope I lose.
The journalist seems pretty nice and genuine, although as you say that is often a fiendish facade. More interestingly, Scott seems confident you will lose, but not so confident that he refused the bet (which I feel he would’ve done if e.g. Tom Chivers is actually his brother or something). I’m not sure what to take from that, but I think overall it’s unlikely to be a hit job (20% or so). Possibly relevant datapoint: someone random person on tumblr thinks the journalist is the 50th worst person on Twitter.
I dunno, the guy seems pretty pro-nerd in general and not all that CW-y, and the “50th worst person on Twitter” article seems to suggest that a particular brand of awful people don’t like him, so he’s got that going for him.
Still putting 70% on it being misrepresentative, possibly by accident. Perhaps with a little hand-wringing about actually – *gasp* – talking to the Hated Enemy!
EDIT:
Apparently he actually reads SSC and has for at least a while… I’m downgrading to 50-50 odds. Probably gonna be a fair amount of handwringing for ass-covering purposes though.
I’m not sure how you’d manage to sell such a book without it being a hit piece, so I wouldn’t have taken that bet. On the other hand, 50th worst person on Twitter according to random tumblr is quite the endorsement, so maybe…
It could be like the book “To Be A Machine” which was a somewhat sympathetic people-based book about transhumanists.
Would something like “Despite having beliefs that are crazy, stupid, and evil, Scott Alexander is actually a pretty nice guy!” count as a hit-job or not?
It depends on how much space is given to supporting the first three vs the nice guy part.
That’s a pretty hefty bet, but I’d be inclined to agree with you on this one.
@Andrew
How will you two decide whether it’s a hit job or not? That seems like a fairly subjective statement.
Is it a hit job if he brings up things like Roko’s Basilisk and doesn’t present it in a way that is most generous to rationalists?
Is it a hit job if he lets critics have their say? How many critics and how bad their arguments before you will conclude that it is a hit job?
Is it a hit job if he mistakenly argues that some things are more common than you/Scott believe they are (autism, polyandry, etc)?
Or do you have a trusted arbiter who decides?
I would argue that the quality of your bet depends heavily upon what the standards are.
They discussed this on the subreddit thread. Bakkot and PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIAN are the appointed neutral judges should they be needed.
Also, exact bet wording is that the piece will be “hugely negative towards SSC and the associated community”.
A tiny bit of evidence in favor of “hit job” is that (based on the excerpt article) the writer thinks rationalwiki has something to do with rationalism (and hasn’t investigated enough to determine otherwise).
A relatively positive article about rationalists on a Christian site recently made the same mistake.
It really seems like a fairly common mistake that people make and I don’t think one can read much into it.
That seems like exactly the kind of mistake a well-intentioned outsider who isn’t very familiar with the ground is likely to make. Very different from the more common hit-job techniques of finding one or two extreme outliers in a group and making them the central examples, or putting words in the mouth of your target to smear them, or generating your own ideas about implications of their ideas and then claiming that your targets desire those implications.
I love Tom Chivers. My bet is that it will be a bit critical and jokey about sillier looking bits of the community but not what I would call a hit job. I don’t know who your referee is, though: I know some people in any community/faction/movement will see basically anything written about them from outside as a nefarious attack.
Back when Chivers had a blog on the Telegraph website, my interactions with him were universally positive. We also have friends in common, and my confidence that he is fundamentally a good person who would be averse in general to the idea of writing a hit piece is quite high. He is also, at the very least, clearly a nerdy man, and likely to be sympathetic to at least the underlying psychology. Perhaps he thinks AI risk concern or libertarianism (for example) are foolish, but I would expect a fair hearing and polite and reasonable disagreement, not dismissal and thinly veiled invective.
I find it concerning if he is introducing himself over on the reddit. That place makes this look like Oberlin. He might end up concluding that rationalism, or at least the ssc part of it, is a branch of the far far right.
That place makes this look like Oberlin
I dunno, I keep managing to get banned off it so there must be some effort at least towards protecting the Endangered Left on the sub-reddit (the most recent was for “personal attack” which I have no idea what that’s about, so I’m waiting for the mods to tell me why and where I went wrong. Honestly, some of the commenters on there do make me think “Wowsers, I have encountered a special snowflake in the wild, and here was me thinking they were an imaginary species!”)
I’m outing myself now, but to hell with it.
Re: the sub-reddit, I got banned over the cow thing. I thought that might be it, but I couldn’t believe that would seriously be the reason.
It was seriously the reason.
Names redacted to protect the guilty:
Apparently advocating state violence against a private individual is not problematic, but being sarcastic in return is a personal attack, an insult, and “a useless and inflammatory addition to the conversation”.
I know the mods have a tough job and I really don’t want to pick them out for any kind of censure and I am not trying to play the “poor little me, I am being persecuted” card, and yes I am way more confrontational and aggressive over on the sub-reddit (it does not have the same Protecting Aura of Niceness) but I genuinely do not understand the reasoning here.
EDIT: And I’m not reproducing this here to gin up a hate against the mods, I would like someone to take me by the hand and explain this to me. If “machine gun a herd of cows from helicopters” is “that’s only a joke so we didn’t ban the person”, then why isn’t “I don’t think you know anything about cows” a joke too? If “you don’t know anything about cows” is a deadly serious insult, why isn’t “machine gun a herd of cows” also a bad thing to say?
EDIT EDIT: This is also not demanding the original commenter be banned as well in a tit-for-tat way, I couldn’t care less if they do or don’t get banned for what they did or didn’t say. I would like a coherent explanation because to me this seems unusual criteria for decisions and if I don’t understand my trespass I may repeat it again.
Your style was rather unmistakable. Not to mention your username was similar.
I have a long screed saved against the mods that I haven’t posted, but I’m tempted. At least two of them simply have taken a particular disliking to me, and one of them has a particular liking for “special snowflakes” who go in and break the supposed rules all the time, but are protected by the mods from similarly nasty responses.
Meanwhile they banned me for making a Star Wars reference (“Every word you just said is wrong”) in response to an outrageously silly statement by one of their protected people.
(incidentally milk comes out of neither end of a cow; it comes out of the underside. Nice try)
@Deiseach:
I don’t go to the sub-Reddit and I have no sense of their moderation policy.
But I’ll give you even money I know why you got banned, because you violated the very common rule of many forums, which is that you don’t directly attack other members of the forum. Personal attacks are forbidden.
Most places you have much, much, much more leeway when you say generally inflammatory things about general events and figures in the public eye.
I’ve been a moderator, albeit not on reddit, and this. You can have civil dialogue among people who insult third parties who aren’t present, but not among people who are insulting each other. Severity of the insult (e.g. Cliven Bundy is a thief who deserves to have his cattle destroyed vs. [redacted] commenter is a fool who deserves to be ignored) is secondary at best.
The trick is to not call people idiots, but entice them to revealing their own idiocy in ways everybody will recognize. Then smile silently.
Ah, I’m deflated from my original sense of what the heck? Now I’m mostly “Of all the things to get banned for, The Cow Thing?”
Again, I don’t see why “shoot this guy’s cattle (and by the way, who cares about animal suffering)” is an okay, unremarkable statement, and what was intended to be “I kinda think you’re not someone familiar with a farming background” in a joking manner is a dreadful awful slur.
Now, I think if I had come back with “That’s dreadful, you plainly don’t care about animal suffering to make such a suggestion, you are a heartless butcher” (in the best ‘evangelical vegan to meat-eaters’ style), that would have been an insult or a personal remark. But I didn’t do that.
Now I do understand better, given what John Schilling has said – that I was being interpreted as calling the other person a fool. That is not what I intended, what I intended was “I think you betray a lack of familiarity with this kind of rural mindset and background to the situation which means your comment is lacking”. But if the mods took it that I was saying “You’re a fool”, then now I see why the ban.
But okay, if saying anything at all in response is an insult, I should definitely say nothing and keep on saying it, which I may do in future – just lurk and read, no commenting.
@Deiseach:
I don’t know about Ireland, but in the USA, you called the guy a moron in easily understood euphemistic language that is understood to be intended to cause offense. I imagine that referring to things like “what comes out of the South end of a North bound bull” are common the world over.
Based on previous interactions, I imagine you were probably in high-dudgeon when you did it, and so some part of you probably even intended it that way, but hoped it was colorful enough to afford plausible deniability.
The idea that you need to “say nothing” doesn’t strike me as likely. Rather, you need to show some respect for the other denizen’s of the forum. Framing a comment that disagrees with their position, even vociferously, in a respectful way doesn’t seem like it should be in any way unattainable for someone of your substantial verbal talents. I just don’t think you particularly like to do it, especially when you feel like rural, non-urbane folks are being slighted.
Edit: I also think there is thing in some parts where insulting people in discourse is just sort of expected. I’m thinking of things like the tradition in the U.K. Parliament of being quite disrespectful to your opponents, verbally jeering them while they are speaking, etc. Perhaps that sort of thing is is hanging you up as well.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/not_know_which_end_is_up#English
I find that site to be useful at preventing myself from accidentally using common phrases incorrectly.
I’m also confused by the animal suffering argument. Could you explain?
This is not only common in some places but in some contexts. Familiarity makes it possible, for one: the Richard Carrier thing I said below is totally a joke at Deiseach’s expense, but somehow I don’t think she’s going to bust down my door with a potato harvesting shovel. More importantly, in some contexts (though probably not here) the joke is being respectful: she could, after all, have called a spade a spade. Granted, a third option is always “be even more respectful,” but 1) I’ve just been told by a dozen people that’s not always a good idea, and 2) I’m not sure leaving no room for the more jocular responses is a good thing, since that reduces how familiar we can be with the people we’re talking to. Should we be punishing people for slagging?
I don’t think she’s going to bust down my door with a potato harvesting shovel
You barbarian, it’s called a loy 🙂 And potatoes are dug up with a sprong then picked by hand (generally what you’d do with a few beds of spuds in a small garden patch but even on commercial farms up to relatively recently humans doing the hand picking was the norm; nowadays they’ve gone all modern and have machinery not human pickers any more). Here’s a Youtube link to an organic farm doing it the old-school way!
It sounds like he was advocating destroying the cows, not the people. So unless you consider cows private individuals, I don’t see what violence he was advocating.
So unless you consider cows private individuals, I don’t see what violence he was advocating.
The cows belong to a particular individual and are that person’s property, the whole point of the commenter was that these were not wild cattle. So they were advocating (a) destroy someone’s property (b) taking the cows as animals, to go with the animal rights advocacy side of things, killing them by machine gun from a helicopter is a very cruel and inefficient way of doing it, the animals would suffer physical and other (can you say emotional in the case of a cow?) pain, some would be injured not killed and would suffer and so on. Even those of us who think it is licit and moral to keep cows as food animals would not be partial to “kill them by machine gun”.
So the suggestion seemed to me very over the top which is why I replied in kind, I didn’t mean to call them a fool (had I wanted to say “You’re a damn fool” I would have said “You are a damn fool”), rather that regardless of one’s opinion on the merits of Bundy’s case and actions, it would be very unlikely someone from a farming or rural background would be comfortable with expressing that opinion in the form “if the BLM won’t impound his cows because they’re too chickenshit, they should at least slaughter them in this melodramatic and inhumane way”, which led me to believe the commenter was city rather than country based and bred, had insufficient understanding and knowledge of/sympathy with the particular situation, and therefore their opinion as expressed in those terms was not useful as a contribution to the debate, hence my reply couched as “Do you even a cow?”
Thanks for the advice and enlightenment, though, this is really very helpful in understanding how I unwittingly trod all over corns on several persons’ feet!
I haven’t followed all of the ins and outs of the case, but as I understand it there’s an order forfeiting those cows to the federal government in order to defray some of the millions of dollars in back grazing fees owed. It was an unsuccessful attempt to enforce that forfeiture order that started the whole kerfuffle to begin with.
While destroying the government’s property seems wasteful and your point about animal cruelty is well taken, there does seem to be something quite unsettling about someone that successfully resisted a lawful attempt to execute a federal court judgment via the threat of violence just getting away with it and the judgment going unenforced.
What if some random rich person living in Connecticut decided not to pay his taxes and then when IRS officials came under a court order to seize his Ferrari, let’s say, in order to auction it off and pay the pay taxes he pulled a gun on them. Do you think they would just leave, never come back, and they’d just give up on ever getting that money?
The whole episode makes a mockery of the rule of law. That’s something I thought conservatives (and if you believe the posters elsewhere in this thread, libertarians) were all about.
Again, how do you go from destroying property to violence against an individual?
It sounds like you may have an argument for mods being too sensitive, especially against people with certain views, and histories, but instead of arguing that you are trying to make it sound like your comment was completely defensible, and making an absurd claim like ‘I was merely compassionately pointing out the hole in the commenters knowledge and experience, in the most sympathetic and selfless way possible… and something about animal welfare! I am completely baffled how anyone could find that insulting’
Whether that is true or not, at least that is how it sounds to an outsider.
Violence is still violence regardless of whether it’s directed at people or animals or objects. Granted, the first is more serious than the second, and the second is more serious than the third, but they’re all varieties of violence.
Brad’s point about the forfeiture of the cows to pay the back fees is well taken. I happen to agree about the rule of law point, but I don’t speak for all conservatives here. Of course, there’s the usual exception that an unjust law is no law at all, but that surely doesn’t apply here.
@Nick
I’m not sure I see the point. The statement was not ‘what is violence’ it was
the ‘violence is violence’ tautology does nothing to advance the ‘property is individuals’ claims.
meh,
You’re right, I should have looked back at Deiseach’s original wording. But if I read Deiseach right she’s since walked back her claim. She didn’t reaffirm that it was violence against private individuals and has instead emphasized that it’s violence against cows.
@Nick
I did not read any walking back in that comment. I only see additional points about the poster being evil.
Brad, the cows are not going to be pulling any guns on anyone, why say “If we can’t get them impounded and auctioned off, let’s destroy them”? That’s pure destructiveness. That’s “if my enemy can’t be punished any other way, then scorched earth” calls for vengeance.
Nick, meh is right: I’m not walking back anything. I think that was a bad comment which is why I replied to it with criticism.
meh, Nick is right: I’m not calling anyone evil, just that this is a terrible thing to suggest unless they were joking/very angry, and even if you’re very angry maybe hold off on “send in the government helicopters with machine guns”, all right?
Mark, if that’s an insult, may they never get called anything worse!
The Ferrari isn’t going to pull a gun on anyone either.
Look I’m not endorsing hellfiring the cows, that’s clearly not such a great idea. But certainly something should have been done long since. You can’t go in to try to enforce a court order, be faced with a bunch of people with guns threatening to shoot federal officials if they enforce the law, and then just give up.
We wouldn’t even be a country at this point if George Washington had done that with the people that didn’t want to pay taxes on whiskey.
Right. What you can do is, besiege them until they surrender, then arrest them, then put forth the evidence to convict them, then put them in jail for a very long time for all the trouble they have caused.
If you screw up on the penultimate step of that process, to the point where a federal judge says essentially “game over, you goose-stepping morons“, then machine-gunning their cattle looks an awful lot like spite and very little like rule of law. Rule of law actually does mean that sometimes you have to watch people you know to be criminals, walk away scot-free
First, you can fire the prosecutors / FBI agents that screwed up, which won’t happen.
Second, the fact that you can’t put them in prison for having threatened federal officials trying to do their jobs, because your law enforcement / prosecutors screwed up, is neither nor there. The underlying civil judgement for grazing fees still exists and the rule of law still requires to be executed. Prosecutorial misconduct in a separate criminal case has nothing to do with that.
The sanction against the government was dismissing the indictments with prejudice, not giving a get-out-jail-and-judgments-free card to the defendants usable for anything and everything they’ve ever done or will do.
Not evil, just that he endorses violence against individuals (which I don’t see where he does), and then you throw on stuff about animal suffering because somehow that will resonate with snowflakes…
I think you try to do the least amount necessary to get banned, that way you can claim to being persecuted. You then post here about how in the world your innocent comment could be taken to be an insult, and look how awful the original posters comment is.
I think you have an argument, but that argument is your post is insulting, but did not cross the line to banishment
Speed limits also exist and the rule of law still needs to be executed. It is nonetheless often the right thing for a highway patrolmen to watch a car blow by him at twenty miles over the limit and do absolutely nothing.
Prosecutorial discretion is absolutely a thing, and the very first place it should be used is when someone proposes opening fire with machine guns in a case where this will look very much like gratuitous retaliation for exposing prosecutorial misconduct.
The Bundys probably get to graze their remaining cattle wherever they want for the next few years without paying a cent. This will look, to the average observer (i.e. not you), as slightly less of an injustice than the proposed alternative. There is no course of action that will be broadly accepted as justice. That is the price for having appointed this particular bunch of goose-stepping morons. Maybe try not to do that again.
I must say that if I was the moderator I would have banned you and not the earlier poster too. Your comments were entirely an insult to the other commenter and did not bring forward the argument at all. The other commenter may have been beyond the pale in the arguments they made, but they were still arguing in good faith. You, D, were not.
It doesn’t come out of either end. It comes from the bottom, somewhat back of the middle.
can you not have a bottom end?
Sure, but hoofs are at the bottom of the cow.
An aside: I was browsing the subreddit’s list of bans the other day, and it’s weird—about half of the bans look perfectly just, overdue even, while the other half look like ridiculous overreach. I mean, on the one hand you have folks getting banned saying “Jesus, you sound like almost as gross a piece of shit as he is” and on the other you have The Nybbler getting the same length ban for making a Star Wars reference?*
I’ll grant that I don’t participate in the subreddit, I just read it sometimes, and I definitely have different standards for the discussions I enjoy reading than for the discussions I enjoy participating in, so maybe if Nybbler said that to me or I started praising Richard Carrier in front of Deiseach I’d be clamoring to Scott for bans too. And yes, the subreddit is clearly inundated with far right folks saying inflammatory things, which we don’t see much of here. But even so.
*ETA: Okay, I only just read Deiseach’s full thread above, and Nybbler has commented and says too it was just a Star Wars reference.
Quoting something whose literal meaning is “you’re totally wrong,” and whose tone is dismissive seems like something it should be possible to be banned for. Especially if it’s not obvious it’s a quote (arguable: it’s altered, it doesn’t possess memorable deviations from typical english, but on the other hand it is recent and from a popular film).
I don’t use the subreddit, so I can’t say whether or not that particular ban makes sense according to their policies, but it certainly doesn’t seem absurd that it might be consistent.
One of the moderators threatened someone with a ban for pointing out that a poster had said inconsistent things on that subreddit and on another one.
The moderators are also really bad at banning trolls and people indistinguishable from trolls., if they’re smart enough to troll (or lucky enough that they happen to act like they are trolling) without using rude language. Not all trolling consists of insults.
Eh, “No scouring reddit comment histories” is a reasonable rule imo.
If someone has no opinion, and is only commenting to antagonize people, is banning not reasonable?
Maybe you are only imaging it being used nefariously against people making good faith arguments.
Scouring them for what? There’s a difference between scouring them for doing evil things elsewhere and scouring them for insincerity.
@Jiro
Which kind of instance of insincerity we are exactly talking about, and how it was relevant to the discussion at hand?
Complaining when someone approves of Trump’s statement about shithole countries, when he himself approved of it in another subreddit.
He tried to justify it by saying that there could be readers from those countries on slatestarcodex, but somehow I doubt that there are a lot of Haitians and Somalis on /r/slatestarcodex compared to /r/drama.
I see both highlights as examples of moderators trying to maintain reasonable community norms (enforce respectful, honest discussion in good faith instead of “gratuitous snark”; the particular instance of snark being a Star Wars reference does not make it less snarky). I’m not very active on the subreddit so it’s possible that mods fail at upholding that standard with impartiality (someone gets a pass when others do not). But as single actions on their own, they make sense to me.
This kind of norm, of course, is fully consistent with having difficulty detecting trolls (that Jiro mentioned in the sibling comment). An attempt to have discussion in good faith often translates to “take things people say with face value”. Troll who wants to provoke reactions and does it intelligently can have a field day at such forum.
The user I was replying to actually rarely has respectful and honest discussion in good faith. Another user actually went on a rant about that, but because it was longer-winded (the mods prefer verbosity) that user didn’t get banned. One of the mods is openly fond of one of the users who breaks the stated rules all the time, and has said that this is right and will continue to do so, but naturally she usually gets a pass. Even when they did give her a ban they were apologetic about it.
@Nybbler
She’s more low efforty than personal attacky, which is what I think the mods are most sensitive to.
After seeing a few similar questions in previous threads:
Does anybody have recommendations for books to read that cover major world history anywhere between the beginning of recorded history and the present day? As a young child, I enjoyed the Story of the World books, and I’m looking for something similar.
A Short History of the World by H.G. Wells is a quick and easy read – he starts at the beginning and gets you through WWI.
Another good survey-type book is Charles Van Doren’s A History of Knowledge: Past, Present, Future.
JM Roberts wrote the Penguin History of the World, which gets updated on occasion so it probably comes close to the present day. I wasn’t too crazy about it, but since my main complaint (it’s too general and never got into the interesting details) is exactly what the book is for, it might be what you’re looking for.
I liked the Human Web by McNeill and McNeill. W. McNeill has written a couple other books that are more popular and might also be considered histories of the world, but that’s the one that I’ve read.
Gombrich’s Little History of the World.
I’ve slowly been making my way through Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization.
Another good, recent book is Sapiens by Harari.
Cartoon History of the Universe – Parts I-VII. It’s a lot of fun to read, and is remarkably good on the details!
What do you guys think of this statement:
Libertarianism is not nearly as threatening or offensive to the politically correct mainstream (think Overton window) as social conservatism (which for these purposes includes things like e.g. criticism of gay marriage and feminism, being anti-abortion, etc.). Whereas a social conservative could be fired, blackballed, or otherwise beleaguered for his views, a libertarian–even a quite extreme one–is mostly just seen as a bit kooky but is not in any comparable danger.
I’m especially interested to know whether any libertarians agree.
Social conservatism is the politically correct mainstream in wide swathes of the country while libertarianism isn’t so I’d have to disagree. It’s a big country out there.
OK, I’ll tweak “politically correct mainstream” so it is clearer what I mean.
There’s a reason why those parts are called “flyover country”.
Inherent in the idea of “mainstream” is a kind of authority; of certain viewpoints being “in the drinking water” so to speak. It doesn’t necessarily mean having dominance via sheer numbers.
If you close your eyes and throw a dart at a map of the US you are likely to land on a place where the majority are socially conservative, and are subjected rather than contributors to the politically correct mainstream.
…but if you scale the map by population, that changes.
Even if you rescale by population, social conservatism is still more common than the opposite. A lot of voters for the democratic party are still pretty socially conservative. African-Americans and Latinos (especially ones older than 30) are typically not socially liberal. Neither are Muslims.
Socially liberal people may dominate the upper classes, but they’re still in the minority overall.
@guanta413 define? Support for gay marriage and legalization of marijauna, and regarding gay relationships and extramarital sex as moral, are all now majority positions.
Seems to me that part of the cultural upheaval we’re going through right now is about both social liberals and social conservatives reacting to the relatively rapid reversal in their balance of power on those issues.
@Rob K
Thanks for your point. I wasn’t thinking precisely enough about what exactly counted as socially conservative. More in a relative sense about desired family structure, religiousness, etc. I just went to check Pew surveys on these things again to update my beliefs. I’ll put the links in I used to update in case others want to see.
Latinos are less religious than I thought (see here). A little more than white people, but not hugely so like Africans Americans are much more religious than white people.
I just checked Pew about those specific isssues since you mentioned those all went majority; I’ve updated on where the center sits for those issues. I was a few years behind in my impression of public positions.
I was mostly thinking that African-Americans and Latinos are socially conservative relative to white people. I didn’t realize the change in support had been so strong in the last few years. If you look at Pew, African American support of gay marriage just crossed into the majority in 2017, whereas for whites that happened in 2013. http://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/
Marijuana wasn’t even a thing I was thinking of as being related to social conservatism (except as correlation). It’s too easy to imagine a social conservative thinking it should be treated like alcohol. Say bad but not illegal.
I think it depends very strongly on which articulation of libertarianism. If it’s the Caplan-Levy-Bleeding Heart version that basically is social technocracy (often mis-called social democracy, but look at views on Orban and Le Pen to see the lack of liking for actual democracy) with the serial numbers filed off, yes, the leftist mainstream doesn’t find it threatening. If it’s the more traditional version of libertarianism/classic liberalism, with the emphasis on freedom of association, reducing the power of government bureaucracies in education (the Koch brothers-Bill Buckley version), and so on, it’s much hated, although maybe not as much as social conservatism.
Unsure disliking a particular democratic politician translates to disliking “actual democracy.” Disliking democracy as a concept seems to be the bailiwick of the paleos, not the neolibs.
Agree that disliking a particular politician is not anti-democratic. But thinking that a large number of the most important questions for a nation should be decided by unelected bodies (such as the courts, or an international group like the UN or EU) seems like technocracy rather than democracy.
By that conception, the US has been a technocracy since Marbury v. Madison
I’m somewhat surprised you put Caplan closer to Levy than to the Koch brothers.
Perhaps because he’s for open borders?
Are the Koch brothers against open borders?
The Koch Brothers are closer to Caplan than the average American in regards to boarders. They have been critical of Trump on this topic.
The media never talks about the Kochs’ position on open borders. Wisely, too: the Koch are held as the prototypical Evil Capitalists, and people must not notice the obvious fact that adding cheap labor is a boon for capital.
Bernie Sanders actually described open borders as a Koch proposal. Because it is.
At Google, libertarianism was nearly as offensive as social conservatism. The main issue was how much they conflicted with SJW orthodoxy.
Hasn’t been my experience. Leftists generally seem to think libertarianism = ‘social darwinism.’
I would also guess that if someone has enough political power to get a conservative fired, they also have enough political power to get a libertarian (or an inconvenient liberal) called conservative and then fired.
(If you ask a random person, they probably believe that Damore or GrammarGreat are conservative. From the perspective of consequences, there is no much difference between being a conservative and being falsely accused of being conservative. Reality checks are simply not done anymore. Actually, people are more likely to rewrite Wikipedia to conform to the public opinion; especially if they can find great quotes from “reliable sources”.)
Do you think (genuine question) that most conservatives would identify Damore as a conservative?
I should say though that Damore’s recent law case does seem to claim he’s conservative.
The Koch Brothers are generally counted among the ranks of libertarians, what with David Koch having been the Libertarian Party’s VP nominee in 1980 and Charles Koch having co-founded the Cato institute, and both supporting generally libertarian causes and policies since.
The “politically correct mainstream”(*) nonetheless seems to regard the Koch Brothers as being made of Pure Evil, the greatest threat to democracy and goodness this side of Donald Trump and devoid of any redeeming virtue. See e.g. Jill/Moon.
So I’m guessing that libertarians are regarded as every bit as abhorrent as social conservatives, to the extent that they have any power. Gary Johnson libertarians might get a pass where deplorable Trumpists do not, but only because Gary Johnson got 3% of the vote and isn’t a billionaire. If the political class starts paying attention to the Cato institute’s take on the social or political issue du jour, people will remember that they and libertarians generally are Evil, otherwise the libertarians will get to slide under the radar for a while.
There’s an advantage to being able to slide under the radar, but at some point you have to be able to exercise at least soft power or all is lost.
* I am assuming that by “politically correct mainstream” you mean A: progressives and B: people who shut up if they think their words might offend progressives.
Are they?
I’d bet if you did a family feud style survey of “describe the political beliefs of the Koch brothers”, conservative would beat libertarian at least 2:1. That’s neither fair nor accurate, but I believe that is the perception.
I’d bet if you did a survey, you’d get a plurality if not a majority describing libertarians as a subset of conservatives. Note, e.g., the persistent assertions that the SSC commentariat has a right-wing bias, which is only remotely plausible if we count the libertarians as “right-wing”. And I’ve been explicitly ranked as among the most conservative/right-wing commenters more times than I can count.
I think everyday people mainly think of the Koch brothers as fat cigar-smoking Rich People who drink poor people’s blood, like Monte Burns only in real life. The Kochs are thought of primarily as Pro-Rich & Anti-Poor; conservative or libertarian is an afterthought.
Libertarians are generally thought of as pro-rich, anti-poor by the people that hate the Koch Brothers.
That might or might not be true in a general way, but it has certainly not been my experience.
I personally had no idea the Koch Brothers were associated with libertarianism. My only knowledge of them is based on their treatment in the media in the last couple of years, and the picture I got was that of fat-cat robber-baron capitalists with no ideology other than money.
I think it was Murray Rothbard who first called them the Kochtopus, some 40 years ago.
I think that sums up the way the mainstream treats libertarianism. The Kochs founded or funded much of the infrastructure for inside-the-Beltway libertarianism–Cato, Reason, IHS.
The more-traditional libertarian views are much more fringe, and I’d expect would be very unfavorably treated by the press if they paid attention: think the Mises Institute, Lew Rockwell, and so on. Here’s a good summary of that branch of libertarianism.
I would guess most people associate libertarianism more with Penn & Teller than with the Koch Brothers, who instead are mostly associated with Evil Cigar-Smoking Fat Cat Monte-Burns-in-real-life.
Is there evidence that most people are familiar with Penn Gillette’s political views?
As for the Kochs being fat-cat robber-baron capitalists, yes, that’s the point. Libertarians as fat-cat robber-baron capitalist apologists is a very common view even here; it’s why we get lumped in with “the Right” in spite of being aligned with the political Left on most non-economic issues.
I would guess once you control for people who are familiar with Penn Jillette–as in, they could look at a picture of him and at least say something like “that’s Penn from Penn and Teller”–and not just those who get into him for his political views, the answer is yes. Maybe not a supermajority, but a majority for sure.
I don’t think that’s true for the Koch Bros, about whom I would guess most people who are familiar at least with the name only know “they’re rich and they fund campaigns that are pro-rich and anti-poor.” These are not people who’ve heard of the Cato Institute, and if they have, most of them just assume it is also aligned with a merely pro-rich ideology.
Take those people aside and ask them if that is the same thing as libertarianism, and I hypothesize most would say something like “nah, libertarianism is more what that kooky guy from work believes, about privatizing the social security and legalizing drugs.”
I don’t know if it was Rothbard who coined the term but it was intra-libertarian rhetoric used by libertarians who thought the Kochs had too much influence over the libertarian movement–I think in particular the LP.
Wouldn’t the Kochs have exactly the correct amount of influence, allocated to them by the market?
Or maybe it’s this sort of thing:-
(Nybbler)
I am in agreement with this. The Koch Brothers are treated as the most vile, repugnant people in the world, right after Donald Trump, and are pretty much ardent libertarians.
I do think that “moderate” libertarians tend to get a better reception than social conservatives, but that’s because the moderate libertarians are well-spoken, educated, and tend to concede that we shouldn’t entirely dismantle the welfare and regulatory states immediately. I’m probably putting people like Tyler Cowen in this camp, but there are also people on other, liberally dominated forums, that tend to have a few libertarians hanging around.
Actual libertarianism, though? All issues are social issues. If you want to cut the welfare state, you hate the poor. Scott Walker’s campaign against the public unions in Wisconsin got him a good 15 minutes of hate, which probably would have been permanent had he been elected President.
Also, the “mainstream” progressive ideology seems to require some pretty extreme beliefs about the absolute parity of IQ across all conceivable genetic groups, and a belief that any under-representation by any of these identical-yet-distinct-when-we-say-so groups in certain fields indicates structural oppression which the government must correct. That’s definitely a social issue, and I definitely don’t see libertarians climbing aboard with that one.
All of this “treated as the most vile, repugnant people in the world” thing seems like hyperventilating.
High dollar financiers of political causes are going to be villain figures for those who oppose those political causes. Probably more so than people who wield other kinds of influence, e.g. organizational leadership, since large infusions of money seem “unfair” to the average person in a way that e.g. leading the NRA or the ACLU doesn’t.
George Soros attracts criticism, some of it extreme and vitriolic, from the right. The Kochs attract criticism, some of it extreme and vitriolic, from the left.
I am a libertarian and I think this is absolutely true.
Remember, for a long time, libertarianism was thought of as “socially liberal, economically conservative” and while I’m sure plenty of campus SJWs do in fact favor higher taxes, it’s social issues that seem to drive the real hostility and hatred in society. Consider the reaction Trump gets for “build a wall” as opposed to “reduce the corporate income tax.”
In the professional world, people are inclined to want to get along with their co-workers rather than hate them. And the libertarian probably has at least one viewpoint that is tolerable to virtually everyone. So if you’re working in silicon valley and want to make friends with the liberal crowd, you talk about how you also hate drone bombings and would like to see a less militarized police force and an end to the war on drugs. If you find yourself in rural kansas, you talk about how taxes are too high and how the government needs to stop meddling with people just trying to earn a living, etc.
The fact that libertarians are still seen as somewhat rare (although this is decreasing) also makes you the fargroup rather than the outgroup. You’re not a threat, because your candidate isn’t winning an election anytime soon. The Trump voter, the fan of George W Bush, they are threats, because they sometimes win.
I don’t disagree with you, but, your formulation strikes me as extremely strange. The social domain is the only domain in which hatred and hostility could exist. Saying “People only seem to hate each other over social issues” is like saying “People only seem get hungry for food” or “People only seem to dance to music.”
This may be a useless quibble and useless for you to clarify, but I’m not sure where the “seem” comes in, and it makes me wonder if there isn’t some other difference in the way we are thinking about it.
This is probably a semantics issue. In the most literal sense, corporate tax policy is a “social issue” in that uh… it’s an issue that we decide socially?
But in common usage, “social” tends to describe matters of morality that are (seen as) unconnected with money and economics, and “economic” tends to describe matters of taxation, fiscal, monetary policy, etc.
I think that most people tend to view economic questions (i.e. what should the tax rate be, what should the minimum wage be) as technical questions that can perfectly optimized by doing a lot of math or something (this is obviously incorrect, but hey!). Whereas “social issues” are the ones where math is irrelevant. No financial wizardry can tell you whether abortion is legal or not… whether affirmative action is justified or not, etc. To oppose someone on those issues isn’t just to quibble over mathematical formulas, it is to endorse blatant immorality.
At least in this sort of discussion, “social issues” means gay rights, abortion, drug policy, maybe immigration. As opposed to “economic issues” like taxes, business regulation, trade, etc. Until at least the Oughts, libertarians were aligned more with liberals/Democrats on the former, and conservatives/Republicans on the latter. But now that there’s a populist right and an authoritarian left, all bets are somewhat off.
Obviously people can have strong moral beliefs, and strong disagreements, on things in that “economic” bucket, but traditionally “tax less” didn’t get you labeled a bigot. Increasing polarization is changing that.
Some people on the Left do say angry things about Trump’s economic policy, usually along the lines of “Trump wants to give himself and his rich buddies a tax cut” but those same people usually spend most of their time on social issues.
Completely agree (as another UKer). People might think libertarians are wrong, or selfish/self-interested. But the real ire is on social/’values’ things around sexism, racism, homophobia etc. etc.
In fact on the other side, the right criticises the left for all sorts of ‘your economics are bad’ things but the strongest invective is probably around claims of anti-semitism (and sometime misogyny).
People just feel more strongly, and I think it’s because it feels like ‘morally wrong’ rather than ‘strategically/factually incorrect’. I know plenty of people who e.g. when we had a recent cabinet reshuffle basically did their initial ‘what is this person like’ check by looking up how they voted on iconic things like gay marriage.
Of course, you do have a thing where people claim economic stuff is actually social/values stuff, e.g. that welfare policy isn’t just poorly managed/cheap but based on evil Tories hating the disabled/poor/sick and wanting them to suffer, or that higher taxes isn’t to do with wanting better public services etc. but just hatred/jealousy of people with more money. But I think you have to be quite far down the tribal route in the first place for these to kick in to the same degree as instinctive ‘values’ issues.
I don’t know how far it’s the same on the right, because large chunks of the right (at least in UK) has the same ‘liberal’ values on race, gender etc. E.g. recent Conservative reshuffle was explicitly pitched as a ‘this is getting more women and minorities into Cabinet and making it more representative of the country as a whole’)
My perception is that this was very true in the oughts, still somewhat true but declining due to increasing polarization.
I am not a libertarian, but, here’s a competing hypothesis :
Libertarians are so uncommon that they are present no threat to other ideologies. And so no one takes the effort of taking offense at their views. At worst, libertarians get dismissed as “a bit kooky.”
Agree that this is a huge part of it. People wouldn’t hate Republicans if they held 0 house seats, 0 senate seats, and won 0 electoral votes.
People hate neo-Nazis (or, if you’d prefer, Communists), who hold zero Congressional seats and have never won an electoral vote.
I don’t think a totally serious dyed-in-the-wool communist would have any great difficulty at Google, to be honest.
But keep in mind, the two sides go to great lengths to tar the other with that branch. Blue tribe would tell you that neo-Nazis hold a whole lot of house seats, because every Republican basically is one, or at least is sympathetic to them and is promoting their agenda. Red tribe would say the same about Dems and communists.
And that’s why I said it’s a “huge part” of it, but you’re right, it’s certainly not the whole thing.
People who bother to hate neo-Nazis define them in a manner that at least overlaps a group with two hundred and ninety seats in the House and Senate and a puppet in the White House.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan_members_in_United_States_politics
Nazis conquered half of Europe though. Plus there was that business with the camps.
The Nazi regime was hugely influential to the point of being the kind of historical event that may be remembered — popularly — for thousands of years. Both of my grandfathers fought in a war against them, and this is representative of the population.
Libertarians never had an empire. Libertarians never changed the course of history. None of my ancestors fought in any wars against Libertarians. It’s not analogous.
If Nazism had never taken off in Europe, if Hitler had just remained obscure and politically unsuccessful, while some FDR type regime took control of Germany, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to believe that nobody would care about Nazis today.
Republican/right thoughtpieces describing SJWs/Antifa as fascist movements are also not hard to find.
Maybe in journalism. Not so when they are say, communications to employees from CEOs at large firms, or to students from college presidents. Compare with the ease of finding communications about inclusiveness and diversity. (Reduce “Antifa are fascist” to something milder to make this a better apples-to-apples comparison.)
Gilded Age?
They arguably had a couple back in the 19th century, when “Liberal” still had its classical meaning and we hadn’t had to come up with “Libertarian” to distinguish that from other, later brands of liberalism.
Rand Paul.
I think the real issue is that, as might be expected, there is no truly coherent definition of Libertarian.
Another issue is that (this a point I frequently repeat, sorry) politics is coalitional and at least one reflex/impulse in the broad Libertarian sphere is a tendency to reject things like compromise and organization.
Insert scene about “People’s Front of Judea”.
Nonetheless, the most politically successful Libertarians over the last several decades have mostly had success by aligning themselves in coalition with conservatives. As the Koch brothers found out this last general election cycle, those victories are fairly Pyrrhic. Turns out they had a tiger by the tail.
This is something I think about a lot. I have a question for the libertarians of SSC. Supposing you were willing to compromise on your principles a little bit (and a lot a bit if you’re an anarchist maybe), if you were in charge of the Libertarian Party, which things would you be willing to compromise on to actually get elected and have a seat at the table, assuming you would follow through on your campaign promises? Which things would you never compromise on? Do you think the set of compromises you’d be willing to accept would be viable in a real election? Does anyone want to make an argument strongly in favor or against compromise for libertarians?
The reason libertarians don’t win isn’t because they haven’t compromised enough. It’s because they’ve already compromised too much.
That’s going to depend on whether this is the Zeno’s surrender version of “compromise”, where the other side gets half of what they ask for this election cycle, and then half of what’s left the next, and so on.
If it’s a genuine compromise, then for non-anarchist libertarians I would expect almost everything except black-letter civil liberties issues would be on the table, and then ask what the Republicans and Democrats are willing to compromise on from their end.
And even if I accepted your premise, the actual method by which libertarians “compromise” isn’t by making the LP platform more like the GOP platform.
It’s by keeping their own beliefs but calling themselves a Republican and finding the right districts they can win in (the Pauls, Justin Amash, Gary Johnson as governor, etc.)
The reason Libertarians don’t win is because they can’t compromise enough to win without becoming non-libertarians, because people don’t want it. Liberty has little constituency.
@HeelBearCub
We of the Judean People’s Front are clearly the true and rightful leaders. Besides what has the government ever done for us?
More seriously, I don’t think that Libertarians reject compromise any more than other political groups do (Tyler Cowen’s blog is titled Marginal Revolution after all). Philosophically, yeah, not so great about organization though.
I don’t think the Koch brothers success was pyrrhic though. Once you take into account how things that libertarians don’t like about Trump tend to be defeated or softened (Muslim ban), Trump’s actual policy outcomes are reasonably what libertarians would expect from a Republican and certainly better from a libertarian point of view than what they’d get from a Democratic legislature + Clinton. I actually expected Trump to be worse from a libertarian point of view. Arguably Trump so far is much better than Bush II. If Trump keeps rolling back regulations and doesn’t start a major war before he’s gone, from a strictly policy point of view, the congress and his Presidency will easily have turned out better than Bush II. Bush II got us Medicare part D, No Child Left Behind, The Patriot Act, two major invasions of Middle Eastern countries, and probably a bunch of other shit I’m forgetting.
@Incurian
I don’t think there is any position that a not (D) or (R) party could take that would give them a chance in hell of getting significant electoral power. Nothing to do with compromise or not. Just institutional reasons.
So for libertarians who wish to seriously accumulate power that leaves the choices of (A) infiltrate Democrats, (B) infiltrate Republicans, and (C) attempt to convince whoever is most likely to agree in the current environment. The Koch’s have focused most of their effort on (B) to limited success, but I doubt (A) would have worked in the past.
However, (A) may be becoming a pretty good option as the Democrats are largely shedding their lower class and union roots. The more Democrats are a coalition of wealthy “progressives” (a la Silicon Valley or NYC) and minorities, the better the chances look for a sort of Libertarian philosophy that favors a UBI for redistribution but less regulations. The obvious compromise would be with the SJ people. Basically cutting them some checks and having some jobs be a little bit less than filled by the most qualified candidates in exchange for freedom from most government interference. Think Silicon valley and Google again. I expect that in reality this would degenerate into some form of crony capitalism, but what the hell doesn’t? The Chinese Communist Party did.
(A) is really terrible news if you’re an old school socialist like Freddie DeBoer though.
(this is not sarcastic) This is what I really like about you guys, you don’t get wrapped around the axle answering a dumb question – you fix the question.
@HeelBearCub
We of the Judean People’s Front are clearly the true and rightful leaders. Besides what has the government ever done for us?
More seriously, I don’t think that Libertarians reject compromise any more than other political groups do (Tyler Cowen’s blog is titled Marginal Revolution after all). Philosophically, yeah, not so great about organization though.
I don’t think the Koch brothers success was pyrrhic though. Once you take into account how things that libertarians’ don’t like about Trump tend to be defeated or softened (Muslim ban), Trump’s actual policy outcomes are reasonably what libertarians would expect from a Republican and certainly better from a libertarian point of view than what they’d get from a Democratic legislature + Clinton. I actually expected Trump to be worse from a libertarian point of view. Arguably Trump so far is much better than Bush II. If Trump keeps rolling back regulations and doesn’t start a major war before he’s gone, from a strictly policy point of view, the congress and his Presidency will easily have turned out better than Bush II. Bush II got us Medicare part D, No Child Left Behind, The Patriot Act, two major invasions of Middle Eastern countries, and probably a bunch of other shit I’m forgetting.
@Incurian
I don’t think there is any position that a not (D) or (R) party could take that would give them a chance in hell of getting significant electoral power. Nothing to do with compromise or not. Just institutional reasons.
So for libertarians who wish to seriously accumulate power that leaves the choices of (A) infiltrate Democrats, (B) infiltrate Republicans, and (C) attempt to convince whoever is most likely to agree in the current environment. The Koch’s have focused most of their effort on (B) to limited success, but I doubt (A) would have worked in the past.
However, (A) may be becoming a pretty good option as the Democrats are largely shedding their lower class and union roots. The more Democrats are a coalition of wealthy “progressives” (a la Silicon Valley or NYC) and minorities, the better the chances look for a sort of Libertarian philosophy that favors a UBI for redistribution but less regulations. The obvious compromise would be with the SJ people. Basically cutting them some checks and having some jobs be a little bit less than filled by the most qualified candidates in exchange for freedom from most government interference. Think Silicon valley and Google again. I expect that in reality this would degenerate into some form of crony capitalism, but what the hell doesn’t? The Chinese Communist Party did.
(A) is really terrible news if you’re an old school socialist like Freddie DeBoer though. Actually it sounds kind of shitty to me too, and I’m pretty far from socialism in most of my beliefs.
@quanta413:
And it is at this point that I stop taking seriously any claims about Libertarians wanting principled things and not simply wanting ingroup victory…
Trump’s actual policy outcomes seem to be mostly nonexistent so far, with everything having been gridlocked into oblivion aside from a Scalia-esque supreme court justice and tax bill that mostly just reduces the corporate income tax. How is that inconsistent with the long-standing and sincere Libertarian principle that government should be weak and taxes should be low?
Admittedly, from a PR standpoint we’d probably prefer to get that (lack of) outcome by some means other than electing a guy who promises to do harmful and stupid things but can’t really do much of anything, and then there’s the concern that Trump could figure out how to start doing stuff in the future.
Gorsuch, so far, shares a perfectly coincident voting record with Thomas. Thomas has a very mixed record with civil liberties on the Supreme Court.
There may well be good and sufficient reasons why one might think Thomas is right to have such a mixed record, but from a purely libertarian perspective it is hard to see how a Justice that we might expect to have a mixed record on civil liberties as a big win.
Brad –
I think it is because the Left has a pretty poor track record in terms of supporting rule of law, which is a big deal to libertarians. They seem to prioritize rule of law over strict justice; it is more important to them to have legally correct rulings than ideologically preferable ones.
@Thegnskald
Is it a big deal to libertarians qua libertarians or is tied up in the fuzzy, specifically American mish-mash that includes some libertarianism certainly, but gives coequal pride of place to things like federalism — and more generally includes a reverence for the constitution and framers and so on that is above and beyond what one might expect from a purely functional standpoint (i.e. only inasmuch as they are liberty promoting)?
I don’t see how cherishing the rule of law per se is connected to libertarianism. The libertarian philosophy as much or more than any other recognizes that law can be a force for evil.
I think it’s important to distinguish libertarians (greens, socialists, pacifists, etc.) by whether they have a particular endpoint in mind, or whether they think things should move in a particular direction from where we are now.
Put me in the Gilded age, and my politics would probably look a lot like Freddie DeBoer’s. Today, not so much–then, we needed to move in a direction somewhat more like where we are now (more protection for workers, more regulation to handle public health and externalities, etc.) Now, we have a lot of those things, and the marginal value of more of this is probably negative.
People who are mainly libertarian *by direction* want to move things from where we are now to a better place, say by legalizing marijuana or dialing back our bomb-them-till-they-love-us foreign policy. That implies some openness to compromise.
Wait, what does Libertarianism have against Federalism? I thought that, unless you go ancap, it would be considered a useful structure for devolving power, and that if anything that we could use *more* State:Federal federalist patterns in County:State, Municipality:County, and Community:Municipality relationships.
Brad –
Explanations seem to vary by libertarian.
The general theme is that rule of law is a prerequisite for freedom, either or both by limiting the evil of law (if it applies equally to everyone, that forms a natural limit to its evil), or by ensuring equal protections under the law (specifically, the law can’t be bent to punish you for this one specific thing you did that people decide after the fact should have been illegal).
So when rulings undermine the rule of law, it undermines freedom.
(There is at least a core of truth in this, given the importance of codification of law. How far it actually extends is a matter of interpretation)
@Gobbobobble
I don’t think libertarianism as a philosophy has anything against federalism, but I don’t think it has anything for it either.
The notion that federalism invariably promotes liberty is, I think, part of a sort of Whig history type mechanism for reconciling extreme enthusiasm for the United States and its system of government with a commitment to libertarianism.
In practice a state or local government can be oppressive as a national one can. Indeed the tiniest governments are often observed to be oppressive for no especially good reason at all, even in theory. (Think HOAs.)
@Thegnskald
I see what you are saying and there is some merit to it, but see also my answer to Gobbobobble above. I find it a little suspicious that the very same “strict constructionism” which was a decidedly conservative project (see Bork and Scalia) is transmogrified into a libertarian project, despite its negative consequences for pro-liberty doctrines, by the expedient of pointing to the importance of the rule of law.
Particularly given that it takes place as part of a discussion where in other sub-parts of it there are complaints that it is unfair to situate libertariansim as part of the broader right wing.
That’s two different questions. One is on what issues would you be willing to compromise your beliefs, the other is on what issues would you be willing to provide political support to people who disagreed with you.
In the U.S. the obvious case of the latter is the vote to organize the house or senate, which determines who is the majority leader, who the minority leader. The equivalent in most European systems would be which parties you were willing to go into coalition with.
I think a libertarian politician should be willing to ally with anyone whose position is closer to his than the alternative. That would, for instance, be someone who wanted to legalize Marijuana but not Heroin, someone who wanted to permit freer immigration but well short of open borders. It would permit a libertarian congressman to be a Republican as long as he thought the Republicans were closer to his position than the Democrats.
But if I were a libertarian running for office (quite unlikely), I wouldn’t be willing to say that I believed in those positions. I was unhappy in this election with the fact that Gary Johnson said he was in favor of anti-discrimination laws, which I consider a clearly non-libertarian position. I don’t know him well enough to tell if that really is his position or if he was deliberately watering down his views in order to get more votes.
But then, my unwillingness to lie in order to get votes is one of several reasons why I am unlikely to ever run for office.
@HeelBearCub
Care to back that up? Please explain why libertarians should prefer a hypothetical democratic Congress with Hillary as President from a libertarian policy point of view. Not taking into account Trump’s shooting his mouth off constantly which I explicitly left out for a reason. Policy wise, the only significant thing that has happened the last year has been a corporate tax cut with some loopholes being reduced. Probably a net gain from a libertarian point of view although maybe not for big deficit hawks. And a lot of regulations have been stripped down or delayed. Definitely a gain from a libertarian point of view.
Trump also got to appoint a supreme court justice. Gorsuch is probably better from a libertarian point of view than anyone Clinton would have appointed.
Foreign policy is basically the same as it would have been under any President. Buddy buddy with Saudia Arabia and Israel. Drone Strikes galore. All negatives, but no more negative than U.S. policy on average for the last several decades. And not yet worse than Bush II.
Trade policy is basically the same as it would have been with any President.
Immigration is slightly tighter but it had been slowing for years already. Tighter immigration is negative but there isn’t any wall, and immigration is not the only libertarian issue.
Like John Schilling says, the main thing to worry about is if Trump somehow succeeded at doing some of the shit he says he would. But Trump is full of hot air, and a lot of his worst tendencies (trade and immigration) are checked by the Republican congress not giving a fuck what he thinks.
@Brad
If you count Hayek’s thought as important to libertarian thought, then it is to minarchists and similar types of libertarians. What Hayek meant by “rule of law” was not merely that there were written laws and those were the rules. My fuzzy memory is that it was more about the specific equality among individuals before the law.
@ Brad: it depends on the definition, but there is a reasonable case that a small government cannot be as oppressive as a national one. Scale matters in both the resources that a government can put to use, the scope of its oppression and the cost of getting out from under it. One well armed compound could plausibly hold off/scare a local government, but stands no chance against the US Federal government without access to nukes.
@quanta413
I don’t think that’s true for all values of libertarian. It depends on the saliency of various issues to the libertarian in question.
That seems pretty far afield from saying something like “even though Thomas voted to let the police search cell phones without a warrant, it was really a libertarian vote because the Constitution correctly interpreted required the result and so the opposite result would actually have hurt freedom more via eroding the rule of law.”
It’s reasoning of that sort, I’m calling a stretch.
@Brad
Ah, thanks, that makes sense now. I could make some counter-arguments in favor of federalism but I think my own comfortableness with syncretisms is beside the point 🙂
I strongly suspect that for libertarianism, federalism is a strong step in the right direction at this moment in time – but will agree that it’s not an inherently desired position.
Trump pretty clearly does not have strong opinions on policy details. (See, for example, the recent DACA roundtable, in which Trump agreed to Feinstein’s proposal for a clean passage of the DREAM Act until Kevin McCarthy reminded him that he wanted border security as part of the package.) To a first approximation, the real decisions are being made by Republican leadership outside the White House. Unsurprisingly, then, the concrete outcomes of the Trump administration thus far have been pretty much identical to what you’d expect from Generic Republican President X. (Jerusalem is the only counter-example I can come up with off the top of my head.)
To the extent that libertarians see Generic Republican President X as a good outcome, it does not seem unfair to slot them in on the right. This is obviously not true of all libertarians: Connor Friedersdorf, for example, has been all over Jeff Sessions and drug policy / civil forfeiture / forensic reform. If the shoe fits, though…
Re federalism and libertarianism:
I think libertarianism is consistent with a lot of different ideas about how the limited government you want should be run. Are we better with congress/president or parliament? Should we have first-past-the-post elections or approval voting? Geographical districts or proportional representation? Should we have a lot of important decisions made by referendum? How powerful should the courts be w.r.t. overruling the actions of the other parts of the government?
Some libertarians have thought deeply about this–notably Hayek. But I don’t think there’s any inherent reason why libertarians would naturally have one answer to these questions over another.
@Brad
True, but I think it’s probably true for most libertarians (as the term is understood in the U.S.) given most probable Clinton candidates. It’s sketchy; I don’t think the supreme court is as important to libertarians as to conservatives.
I understand now. Agreed. A process based philosophy is quite orthogonal from a libertarian one.
EDIT:
@Iain
I don’t think I’d say it’s a good outcome from a libertarian point of view. It’s just… not that bad. Especially in comparison to what could have been since there was (and it still could happen) the possibility that Trump would NOT look like generic Republican President X. Tariffs going up would be a really bad outcome. More gridlock might have been preferable, but maybe not.
From a libertarian perspective, Jeff Sessions’s preferences are obviously terrible on drug policy and civil forfeiture. Previous Justice Department drug policy was better before. I don’t understand well enough to evaluate whether his position as AG makes much difference with respect to civil forfeiture. My vague impression is that the law itself needs to change if progress is to be made here. That’s slowly happening state by state with marijuana. I’m not aware of how it’s going with civil forfeiture.
Curious why that’s a counter-example. Is it just that Generic $PARTY$ President X would know better than to shake hornets nests? If I think of which party is more willing to disregard the Palestinians (or the UN) it’s the Republicans.
HeelBearClub:
Can you point out which political movements’ members don’t make calculations like that? Because the whole line about the Trump administration having been better on libertarian issues than the Clinton administration may or may not be true, but it seems like it’s exactly the same logic behind imploring progressives to vote for Hillary despite her warlike foreign policy and close relationships to the big banks, because at least she’ll be better on supreme court appointees and gun control.
Everyone who votes for the lesser evil does this calculation.
One other aside, though, is that you can have ideas about how government agents should behave that are orthogonal to your beliefs about what would be good policies. For example, it’s quite internally consistent to believe:
a. Legally recognized gay marriage is a good policy.
b. The members of the supreme court should not accomplish policy goals by suddenly discovering that the constitution requires something that almost nobody actually thought it required (including the people who wrote it and every judge or legal scholar who ever considered the matter) until about about twenty years ago.
If you prefer the other side of the issue, you might believe that
a. Gay marriage is bad policy.
b. County clerks in states where gay marriage is the policy should issue marriage licenses in compliance with the law.
These aren’t either one libertarian positions, necessarily, but they’re consistent with libertarian positions.
I know I’ve quoted Kennedy’s opinion in Bond v. United States more than once here, but I’d like to add to that. I don’t think it’s particularly Whiggish, because we see veins of this in places like Federalist 45 and throughout the constitutional design. Different groups, optimized for their own domains, hopefully working together, but performing a check on power when necessary. This is the core design. I think the same type of thing when people talk about corporate power. Yes, it’s bad to let corporations have too much power (trust busting was good). But it’s also useful to have some corporate power (Apple can fight tooth and nail to make sure that every digital search close to their reach is done with i’s dotted and t’s crossed according to public law).
The dual to this is that I think your argument proves too much. Sure, there’s no reason to say that small/large gov’t is inherently more/less oppressive (and following the first paragraph, I’d say that I think this is a mischaracterization of the argument, anyway). But there’s also no reason to say that this type of branch or that type of branch is inherently more/less oppressive. Any one, if left unchecked, can clearly devolve into oppression. But that’s why we have other centers of power.
Your HOA is a little tyranny? That’s why we have state/local government. Your state wants to enslave black people? That’s why we have federal government. Your federal government wants your pot? That’s why we have state government. Your President wants to ban Muslims? That’s why we have the judiciary. And so on and so forth. Lots of different power basins allow for lots of opportunities for the people to find a way to get what they want, even if one body of powerful elected officials gets together to oppress you.
Now, there’s a lot of balancing to be done to make this all work together. You can’t just let some get neutered, willy-nilly (I mean, we’ve talked federal/state/local/HOA/corporate/etc.; we might be able to get away without some, but it’s always a “be careful” situation). You probably should try to overlap some of their critical paths. If the states don’t make the federal gov’t work, they won’t be able to defend themselves from hostile invasion; if the federal gov’t works Too Good (with bonus tyrant!), then the states have a way of shutting the whole thing down. Similar with the mechanisms of power across the federal branches.
I really really object to “federalism” being characterized as “big government bad; small government good”. They’re different. They have different purposes, different competencies, and need to work together/against one another in complicated ways in order to best preserve liberty. (Of course, this is all modulo
the MongolsDavid Friedman. Assuming we’re going to have gov’t, how do we do it?)Can you refresh my memory? Riley was unanimous (search incident to arrest), and I’m not remembering which one you’re referring to.
@quanta413:
I think you are ignoring the very real damage being done to equality before the law that is happening on the executive side. In addition, the overall Republican coalition is being pulled farther and farther towards the idea of “If the (Republican) president does it, it’s not illegal”. This is not a principled stand for rule by Presidential fiat, but that is actually more harmful to freedom than the principled stand.
You seem to view this rhetoric as costless and meaningless, but I think that is an extremely naive reading. This kind of thinking is what lead to Trump being able to win first the Republican nomination and then the Preisdency.
It as if, while watching the risen tide eat away invisibly and slowly at a building foundation, you observe the cavity and conclude that a) the building is still standing, so no actual damage has been done, and b) the foundation looks much the same as after the last wave, so it’s probably not the waves undermining the foundation.
@HeelBearCub says:
Given that the last democratic president decided to legalize millions of politically sympathetic illegal immigrants on nothing but his say so under the guise of prosecutorial discretion and the many legal difficulties of last democratic candidate for president, the idea that this is a uniquely republican vice rings a bit hollow
@cassander:
Prosecutorial discretion is literally written into the law.
@HeelBearCub
So if Congress hadn’t quite gotten the votes needed to pass their tax bill, and trump ordered the IRS not to prosecute anyone who didn’t pay taxes over the amounts of the rates he desired, you’d be totally fine with that? Prosecutorial discretion is not license to ignore the law.
@HeelBearCub
Let me put it this way. I might take this claim seriously if partisans either explicitly backing the President because politics is Greens vs Blues, or simply ignoring the shady things their side does wasn’t already the norm. On top of that, the Republican Senate and House ignore the President as much as they can. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan have no love lost for Trump. And Trump’s approval rating is abysmal. Trump probably has less backing for engaging in arbitrary bullshit than most past Presidents.
As far as equality before the law, have there been some laws passed I missed? The travel ban is stupid but not that severe of a problem on the scale of U.S. fuck ups. If Trump doesn’t engage in a major ground invasion of a Muslim country, he’ll have harmed significantly fewer Muslims than Bush II’s actions did.
I don’t view the rhetoric as costless and meaningless. I just happen to believe there are a few orders of magnitude difference in moral significance between tens or hundreds of thousands of dead bodies and saying stupid and morally despicable things on Twitter. And tens or hundreds of thousands of dead bodies is not an atypical outcome of Presidential decisions.
So do you have any better argument than vague metaphor or ad hominem?
Maybe you can explain why from a libertarian point of view, Trump’s rhetoric should be viewed as comparably corrosive to freedom as the massive expansion in government surveillance powers that has taken place for the last two decades. Because I think those are the waves eating at the foundation while you pay attention to the theater in the building above.
@Incurian
I’d compromise on income redistribution in order to minimize personal and business regulation. Having a state that let’s people and businesses pursue their interests as they see fit (barring harm initiation against others) without being subject to paternal micromanagement would be a big gain, and I’d be willing to maintain or slightly expand income redistribution to get there.
Hence the way a lot of moderate libertarians and fellow travelers support an UBI of some kind. It’s a compromise that should meet the “don’t let people starve in the streets” goal of social safety net programs, without imposing a lot of control-by-petty-bureaucrat on millions of people.
@cassander It’s obviously already the case that the IRS investigates some types of potential tax frauds very carefully and basically ignores others. We are regularly reminded during political confirmation hearings that people pay illegal immigrant nannies cash under the table. On the other hand, you’ve got a really high chance of getting an audit if you claim a deduction for a home office.
I recently had cause to look at the rules surrounding home offices. It is a very limited deduction. Hardly anyone should be taking it and those that do should be taking it on very small areas of the house.
It’s an easy to see why something that’s as narrowly drawn as that provides juicy targets for audits. Above all, because the IRS can easily see who is and isn’t taking the deduction, and so who is potentially cheating. It doesn’t have to send agents to sit outside your house and note that there’s an extra person living there.
Whereas with nannies, there’s no way on the face of a return to know if someone is paying a nanny off the books. Or is accepting money off the books for that matter. That kind of fraud is a lot harder to uncover.
@Brad
Seems like you could do decently well by looking at cases where the family has children younger than five years old, and the mother and father both work full-time, the family isn’t claiming a childcare deduction, and the family income is over $250k or so? All that information should be easily accessible to the IRS.
Sure you get false positives when grandparents help out or whatever but I think the hit rate would still be pretty high.
@Chalid says:
I’m aware. That is an example of a good use of prosecutorial discretion, focusing effort in places where the law is easiest to enforce. People claiming home office deductions are not a politically salient group, targeting them is not being done for blatantly political reasons, and the government is not blatantly announcing that people who break tax laws in other ways will be ignored. None of these things is true of DACA.
Couldn’t you drive basically any existing regulation through that loophole? Environmental regulation to prevent the harm of all sorts of externalities including lead poisoning, acid rain, ozone erosion; financial regulation to prevent the harm of various clever fleecings; labor regulation to prevent harmful abuse by employers due to power disparities…
Are there any major categories of regulation that aren’t proposed/defended on the grounds of protecting people from some manner of harm?
@Gobbobobble:
That was my thought, yeah, although I attempted to pull up evidence for it just now and was reminded that Romney talked about moving the embassy during the campaign.
@quanta13:
My understanding is that Jeff Sessions is doing his best to keep civil forfeiture around, including the rollback of some Obama-era restrictions.
Libertarianism is not a magical get-out-of-political-classification-free card. It is meaningful to talk about whether one libertarian is further right or left than another: for example, if some libertarians focus their assessment of the Trump administration on tax cuts — an area where libertarian thought leans right — and others focus their assessment on civil liberties and drug policy — an area where libertarians line up better with the left.
I don’t know about practical consequences, but where I hang out on facebook, raving hatred of libertarians isn’t all that rare. I’m not sure how it compares to hatred of conservatives. To some extent libertarians and conservatives get conflated.
It feels to me, intuitively, that this is driven at least partly by a change in internet culture over the last 5-10 years, in which a lot of formerly pretty moderate and mainstream people have become extremely intolerant of disagreement on some issues. My sense is that that’s a moral stance–to want to restrict immigration from Mexico or to repeal gay marriage isn’t just incorrect policy, it marks you out as an evil person.
Insofar as the “politically correct mainstream” is basically neoliberal with left/progressive views on social justice issues (broadly defined):
Tolerance for libertarians was probably more true in the early oughts when abortion and the war were bigger issues, and when the gay marriage debate was more about “live and let live” and less about “make them bake cake”.
Libertarian views on affirmative action and free speech / free association absolutism were always problematic, and the degree to which they clash with the progressive left seems to be getting worse.
For economic leftists, “techbros” are increasingly the face of the evils of capitalism, and since those guys are overrepresented among the weirdo Libertarian set, that will also hurt tolerance going forward.
Libertarians still have pro-immigration and anti-police-militarization to lean on as common ground I suppose.
Basically, libertarians are tolerated insofar as they align with the tolerator on the live issues of the day.
That’s an interesting take on it.
And pot legalization. And school prayer. How about wishing for an end to the electoral college? I really don’t know how the tribes have aligned around that one.
I’ve been hearing some Blue frustration about the EC over the last year, but it’s hard to evaluate how much long-term staying power it has. It’s a very wonkish issue, and it’s hard to keep wonkish issues in the public consciousness that long.
The Reds I know are silent on it.
There is an interstate compact initiative that has been going for about 10 years.
The problem is that EC is constitutional, so it is maximum difficulty to change, but may not be of maximum benefit.
I have not heard any good arguments for EC
I am against any change to the constitution, whatever the content, because in the current political climate if people start touching the constitution we’re guaranteed to end up with something worse.
The Reds I know are silent on it too, but I’ve definitely heard broadly Republican-aligned folks rush to the defense of the Electoral College. Maybe including on SSC, I can’t recall.
I expect to see Democrat-aligned folks continue to blast the Electoral College every time they lose an election because of it—and because of the way it’s structured, we can expect any popular vote–EC splits to be in favor of Republicans for the foreseeable future.
Do you mean silent as in “don’t have an opinion” or silent as in “aren’t clamoring about it?” The Red opinion on the EC is “it’s fine” and you nobody clamors about things they think are fine.
@Nick
re: stable valence of the electoral college edge, that’s probably inaccurate – the state distribution of the party coalitions has shifted enough that the advantage of the electoral college has swung back and forth quite recently. Based on the distributions of support Obama was more likely than his opponents to win a popular vote tie, or to overcome a popular vote deficit, in both 2008 and 2012.
(Perhaps) interestingly, I was unaware of Libertarian views disproving of the Electoral College.
This is probably a result of the fact the most prominent and well known Libertarian of the last several decades has been Ron Paul, who has been a prominent supporter of the “states rights” Libertarian position.
Also, my impression is that those who are Libertarian inclined are most likely to insist on the idea that we have a Republic not a Democracy (and that Democracies are bad).
“States Rights” is a decent catch-phrase, but I’m pretty sure the Ron Paul position is “smaller governments whenever possible.” To the extent that the EC provides greater power to smaller units of government, I suspect that he would favor it. But he has no particular attachment to states themselves. If you broke the US up into 50 sovereign states, I think he’d be arguing for county-level secession pretty damn quick.
EC just feels like a big complicated clunky top-down centralized thing imposed on the states by the Federal government, regardless whether this picture is accurate.
I don’t think libertarians tend to have any opinion on the electoral college. They aren’t against it for ideological reasons because they don’t, as a rule, see democracy as a moral issue–fifty-one percent voting to violate my rights is no more legitimate than forty-nine percent doing it. But they also are not for it for ideological reasons.
@Well…:
[listing common ground]
> And pot legalization. And school prayer.
School prayer? That one’s not common ground with liberals. For people who care about prayer in public school, the most salient libertarian value is that there shouldn’t be public school. After you get the government out of the schooling business, whether “school prayer” is a thing stops being a political issue and becomes a simple matter of satisfying customer preferences. In a free market instead of cars in “any color you like, so long as it’s black” drivers who really want red cars seek companies willing to sell red cars; similarly parents who want bible-based instruction with a daily opening prayer can, if they so choose, purchase that good without having to inflict it on everybody else at the same time.
I know, but within the confines of a practical issue in which there are public schools, libertarians (in my experience) tend to oppose school prayer.
PS. Might have something to do with atheists being overrepresented among libertarians. (I haven’t verified whether this is true, but I’m pretty sure it is.)
The modern variation of this is how you feel about vouchers for K-12 education being used for religious schools.
Explain how giving parents free rein to indoctrinat their children maximises human liberty.
@TheAncientGeekAKA1Z:
Authority and coercion within the relatively natural context of a nuclear family’s household hierarchy is usually not at issue to libertarians.
(I stopped considering myself a libertarian years ago so someone who’s had more time to philosophize on it can correct me if this is inaccurate.)
Because the alternative is giving the public school free reign to indoctrinate all of the children.
Parents are more likely to care about the welfare of their own children than any other adults are. And diversity in indoctrination is better, ceteris paribus, than uniformity in indoctrination.
It is possible for a country to constitutionally forbid certain kinds of indoctrination in public shcools, so that is not the only alternative. Opponents of libertarianism general want a liberal state, not an authoritarian one.
Which is one reason for thinking most libertarians are on the right.
@TheAncientGeekAKA1Z
There is no such thing as education without indoctrination. Even if you have some method for ensuring that nothing but unvarnished fact is taught, the selection of which facts to teach cannot help but influence people’s attitudes. The choice is not between indoctrination and education, the choice is between one centralized system of indoctrination or multiple independent systems of indoctrination, and it is rare that powerful monopolies work out well for anyone besides the monopolists.
Well:
I think libertarians mostly think about state / law type coercion. Think about that polygamous Mormon splinter group (FLDS?) in the news a few years ago, where there’s a woman who wants to leave an arranged marriage with which she’s unhappy.
I think pretty much all libertarians would demand that she be allowed to leave–no matter what the beliefs of her community or even what agreements she might have made in the marriage contract, she should be able to leave if she decides she no longer wants to be part of the community. Overt coercion by the FLDS members or the mainstream legal system would be something most libertarians would see as very bad.
On the other hand, if she finds it hard to leave, despite being very unhappy with being the 16-year-old fourth wife of some 70-year-old church bigwig, because of the indoctrination of her community, the likelihood of ostracism from her family and friends, or other kinds of social pressure, that’s something I thinkmost libertarians wouldn’t see as a major issue needing some kind of legal or political response.
Now, here’s the thing: there are times where social pressure is *incredibly stifling and nasty and oppressive.* This is probably something of a blind spot in a lot of libertarians’ thinking, at least in the US, because most Americans don’t live under such oppressive/stifling/nasty social pressure in most areas that matter to them. (And social conservatives will correctly point out that some of that oppressive/stifling/nasty social pressure is what makes societies function–a man who knows that beating up his wife will lose him all his friends may be more effectively deterred than a man who knows it will get him a week in jail.)
You can see this same issue w.r.t. blacks’ and womens’ professional societies and mentoring and such–these are an attempt to release some of the social forces that maybe are keeping blacks and women out of engineering or science or software. They may work or not, but they’re addressing a problem that’s probably harder for most libertarians to see than most other people.
When I was younger (and much more of a pure libertarian), I also thought that way–it was easy to discount social forces, because I’m probably in about the first percentile of susceptibility to them.
One thing that has changed my mind is having three children[1]. One of my kids is very much like me–he could frankly give a fuck what social messages are demanding of him, at least absent actual physical danger–if he wants to do it, he does it. (Electronics? Acting? Obsessing over geography?) One of my kids is super-socially-aware, and she seems to infer all kinds of social patterns as rules even when nobody ever makes them explicit. She’s convinced me to make sure she sees that, for example, I have a bunch of smart female coworkers who are scientists and mathematicians, that girls can be good at math and learn to code and such.
[1] Having kids and raising them is a hell of an effective antidote a lot of one-parameter models of human nature and the world.
David Friedman already basically said this, but my answer is “because parents are almost certainly more likely to indoctrinate their children in a pro-liberty manner than the state is”
The assumption is that parents care more about their children than the government will.
There have certainly been parents more devoted to causes and willing to sacrifice their children to them in one way or another.
But there have also been governments so willing.
Parents will chose many different ways to indoctrinate their children, including not at all. This creates a society in which new adults can compare the life they have been indoctrinated to lead with those other people are enjoying and, if this leads them to choose something different, gives them role models and mentors.
If indoctrination is left instead to the Holy Church or Holy State or Holy People’s Will, that creates a monoculture which is much harder on anyone who might chose to be different.
There is such a thing as Fallacy of Grey.
No, there is a choice of more or less indoctrination. If the public system is constrained, and the private systems isn’t, then the public system is going to be less.
This isn’t remotely true.
@Baconbite
Argue your point .
@Matt
The overwhelming evidence is that they will indoctrinate their kids as they were indoctrinated. That’s how religions keep going for millennia.
@JohnSchilling
If they are still able and willing to consider other ways, then the job of indoctrination was half done. Have you ever met a fanatic?
So if they are believers in the fundamentalist church of the flying spaghetti monster, they will want their little darlings brought up in it. There are parents who care by *not* getting their kids vaccinated. Outcomes depend on competence as well as intentions.
@cassander:
Oh that’s not even the half of it! Suppose a teacher can magically select facts that are “neutral” (possible only with magic; in real life there’s no such thing); the teacher himself may still be a tool of indoctrination. For example, if a student admires and looks up to this teacher, and learns that the teacher is gay, or Christian, or whatever else, the student could be more likely to think favorably toward gay people/Christians/etc.
@TheAncientGeekAKA1Z
You’re shaping a child’s worldview, there’s not a lot of grey here. turning them all into open minded secular humanists is just as much indoctrination as turning them all into close minded evangelical christians.
@Matt M
In the context of the present day US, or in general? (And if the former, in the meaning all parents or just homeschooling parents?)
@cassander
To what extent do public schools turn kids into open minded secular humanists? I would bet that the majority of people share their parents’ religious views when they graduate high school.
@general
I think a major point in favour of public education in this debate is that if your kids’ school tells them that there are five lights, you can provide an opposing force (and hopefully the more drastic the indoctrination, the easier it is to argue against), but for homeschooling there is no such symmetry.
In practice, I think homeschooling leads to far more indoctrination than public schooling. Probably the homeschooled are more likely to share the political/religious views of their parents than the publicly educated, but it’s still only a small minority of the latter group that diverge before college. Of course, possibly this is because indoctrination isn’t real and beliefs come from mostly-genetic moral foundations.
@rlms
modern public schools don’t really try to do that, so it’s not suprising that they don’t achieve it. But that there isn’t an explicit, articulated goal of achieving a certain named philosophy in students doesn’t mean that there indoctrination towards the whatever you want to want to call the vague mishmash of the aspects of modern progressivism that are popular among teachers and school administrators.
It is possible to forbid kinds of indoctrination that the people running the system disapprove of. Those are not usually the kinds one wants to worry about.
Schools are supposed to teach people things. We don’t have a divine oracle to determine what things are true. The same teaching that someone who agrees with it regards as education someone who disagrees with it will see as indoctrination.
Steve Landsberg tells the story of two encounters with his daughter’s (in both cases public) school. The first involved the school taking the truth of Christian beliefs for granted. When Steve pointed out that they shouldn’t the teacher was very apologetic–it had not occurred to him (or her–I don’t remember) that not everyone shared those beliefs.
The second time involved the truth of environmentalist beliefs, our moral obligation to take care of Mother Earth. When Steve objected, the teacher’s response was that nobody could disagree with that.
In general, and all parents. State schools indoctrinate their pupils with pro-state views by definition.
Some parents might choose to similarly indoctrinate, but surely some will not.
Matt M:
Sort-of, maybe, kinda. I mean when I grew up (and went to relatively crappy rural public schools) we said the pledge of allegiance every day, and we studied American history for many unproductive years and then had one world history class in high school. And the American history was almost fairy-tale level, with all the rough edges filed off, till high school. On the other hand, I sure don’t think we got a lot of explicit pro-state indoctrination. I don’t think we talked about the ethnic cleansing of the Indians, say, but we did talk a lot about slavery, since that got us to the Civil War.
I’m sure there was plenty of implicit indoctrination–the underlying assumption of almost everyone there was that a state much like ours was necessary for a decent life, that something like American democracy was the highest form of government you could have, etc. But it wasn’t like we were being raised to be Draka or something.
And they might believe you, or they might believe the school. But only if you actually do speak in opposition to the school, which you won’t if you believed the school’s five-lights version yourself, or if your parents did and so nobody told you the truth.
School vs. parents (iff the parents care) leads asymptotically to complete faith in five lights; the truth decays with a half-life of one generation. Even if the truth gives the parents who know and care a persuasive edge, the end result is still inexorably complete faith in five lights, albeit slower.
Homeschooling, or parental choice in schooling, gives you a slow random walk rather than an inexorable Cthulhu-sinestrian swim. Add in even a modest degree of adult persuasion, and it will be a random-ish walk centered the truth.
@TheAncientGeekAKA1Z
I think I had simply assumed everybody here already grokked the standard case for letting the market provide those goods for which quality matters most. If one fully groks the standard case – if one can easily explain how, say, having the market provide groceries gets us better groceries compared to having state-run supermarkets and bakeries then education isn’t a special case – it’s pretty much the exact same thing.
If you think market provision means some people will have trouble buying food/education, that might imply an argument for subsidizing some food/education, but it’s not an argument for having the government directly run all the supermarkets/schools and hire all the checkout clerks/teachers using taxpayer funds. If you think some businesses might cheat their customers, that might imply an argument for laws against fraud, but again, it’s not an argument for nationalizing the whole sector.
And sure, one might imagine a world in which centralizing education under a single bureaucracy made education work better, but…that’s probably not the world we live in.
But setting all that aside, I personally tend to think in terms of wanting to minimize single points of failure. If nearly all the schools are run by the same regional organization, there’s room for some sort of Ministry of Truth to decide what gets taught to everyone, which can only be done by ensuring that less popular views get wiped out or denigrated or watered down into meaninglessness.
And, well…truth matters.
(And also: freedom counts as a “less popular view” in this context)
It’s a lot harder to know if what you’ve learned is true if everybody in your town learned their facts in the same order you did from the same book you did at the same age you did so you never encounter opposition. One failure mode is that the Ministry of Truth introduces popular deliberate falsehoods into the curriculum; another failure mode is that the Ministry ends up dumbing things down to the lowest common denominator, refusing to teach things it knows are true because somebody finds those things too offensive to say outright.
In practice we do tend to get a certain amount of regional variation – school boards in California spend extra effort teaching kids false things about recycling, while school boards in Texas spend extra effort not teaching kids true things about about evolution – but within each region it’s a local monoculture. Teaching only true ideas isn’t an available option, but what might be an available option is a world where different people learned different ideas in different ways and in different orders because they attend many different kinds of schools. A world where one school can try radical experiments and other schools can copy the experiments that work better at producing happy smart well-adjusted well-informed kids while experiments that don’t work as well fall by the wayside. An educational ecosystem, not a monoculture.
Does any of that help?
@Matt M
Sure, if you’re defining pro-liberty as anti-state then I agree.
@John Schilling
That’s true only if school and parents are the only factors that affect beliefs, and if the schools’ positions stay constant. But even granting those assumptions as true enough, it says nothing about the speed of convergence. And empirically, I think it is fairly slow.
If other factors are of significant importance, then “we must have universal public education or there will be nothing to counter the you-know-whos indoctrinating their children with false beliefs!” argument loses most of its force.
I think it’s pretty much a given that state-run schools are going to be constant in their position on “It is good for the State to have more power”, and everything related to it. And I think that is more powerful than you give it credit for.
Who’s using that argument? My stance is that universal public education (in the sense that public education should be available to all, and some form of education should be mandatory in some age range) is beneficial for various reasons, but I don’t think ability to counter indoctrination is one of them.
I think public schooling is on balance better than homeschooling with regard to indoctrination, but I don’t think it’s a major problem for either. Widespread private schooling (replacing public) could be significantly worse than both however. Schools that cater to opinionated minorities could end up indoctrinating children of the apathetic majority.
You certainly seemed to be. This,
seems contrary to your prior statement,
Either five-lights level indoctrination is a problem that we fear parents might impose and for which public education is the remedy, or it isn’t. If it is, then your stance is that counter-indoctrination is a benefit of public education. If it isn’t, then we don’t need to worry about “symmetry” for home-schooling. Possibly I’m missing something here, in which case please clarify.
@John Schilling
Various people upthread say that indoctrination is inevitable, and that choosing between homeschooling and public education is just picking your poison. This grants that parental indoctrination is a problem. I am saying that even if you think both sides want to indoctrinate, the situation isn’t symmetrical. So if indoctrination is the only factor, those people should prefer public schools (or at least, not straightforwardly prefer homeschooling because it gives diversity in indoctrinations).
Personally, I don’t agree that parental indoctrination is a problem. But if argued along those lines, I’d have to also argue that public school indoctrination isn’t a problem either, which would be a harder sell than my argument above (and exactly what counts as problematic indoctrination is pretty subjective anyway).
I agree.
On the contrary. If kids are all indoctrinated with the same ideas there is much less opportunity for them to later reject the indoctrination as a result of interacting with others than if different kids are indoctrinated with different ideas. The society is much more at risk of error if there is a single orthodoxy that might be wrong than if there are lots of different views, hence people willing to find errors in arguments for any of them.
It’s called “diversity.”
@DavidFriedman
Yes, I acknowledged that factor in favour of homeschooling in my parenthetical. Personally I think the balance is still in favour of public schooling, but that’s an empirical question. What do you think the distribution of indoctrinatedness for homeschooled/public schooled students looks like? I think the less indoctrinated half is probably similar for both, but the homeschoolers with the greatest indoctrinatedness are much worse off than the most indoctrinated public schoolers.
John Schilling:
So, that seems plausible, but it wasn’t the sense I came away from my public schooling with at all. There were several teachers who expressed skepticism with state power or explained why there were particular limits on state power in US law in our social studies classes, and I definitely didn’t get any sense of a pervasive “the state should be more powerful” message. Maybe I’m just dense, but I didn’t notice it.
rlms:
It seems like this turns on the uniformity/diversity of homeschoolers and private schools.
On one side, you can imagine a world where all homeschoolers are fundamentalist Christians, and so homeschooling just gives X% of the kids a single indoctrination.
On the other, you can imagine a world where every homeschooler is different, and so homeschooling gives X% of the kids a more-or-less random and very wide range of indoctrination.
The people I know who have homeschooled their kids are extremely diverse intellectually, but I am sure this is not a random sample, and I don’t know off the top of my head how this looks.
In terms of private schools, similarly, you’re looking at who operates schools and what indoctrination parents want. If you replaced every public school in America with a Catholic school, you’d probably get more uniform indoctrination. If you replaced public schools with vouchers for private schools without limit, I think you’d get a wide range of schools–many religious schools of different religions, many nonreligious schools or not-especially-religious schools (the way Boy Scouts or AA have someplace for God/religion in them without being particularly religious organizations) whose focus was on, say, Montessori methods for teaching, or math and science, or ecology, or whatever.
My intuition is that, in the end, you’d end up with schools whose indoctrination roughly matched the diversity of the views of the parents. Maybe different in different regions, among different races and classes and ethnicities, very likely different by religion, but massively different by parental interests and beliefs.
That might be right, since the public school students are also getting influence from their parents, who may disagree with the school. It’s less the case for private schools, since the parents will select a school only partly on the basis of how much it agrees with them.
Part of the issue is whether the home schooled kids get to interact with others–something very easy nowadays over the internet but likely to happen in other contexts. If the others you interact with have all been taught the same view of the world you have, which is more likely to happen with the public school, interacting with them doesn’t make you less indoctrinated. If they have learned a different view, it does.
Public schools indoctrinate you… but not intellectually. The intellectual influence of public schools is weak, maybe even negative. The more substantial form of indoctrination comes from its social influence. It is the other kids who indoctrinate you. Mostly they indoctrinate you into thinking that learning is “gay” and that the ideal way to live is to debauch yourself with sex, drugs, video games, and alcohol. So the choice is whether you want communities and individuals indoctrinating kids in whatever ways they prefer, or whether you want an aimless and ineffectual government-sponsored program to stifle any controlled attempt at indoctrination, out of sheer incompetence, so that everyone degenerates into monkeys.
From what I’ve read, homeschooling parents did make an effort for their children to have a social life, even before the internet.
Some schools allow home-schooled kids to take part in extra-curricular activities.
In our area, there was a home schooling group that got together once a week at a local park. My younger son used it to get players for the D&D game he ran.
I don’t remember either of our home schooled children acquiring any real friends that way, however. Most of their social interaction, some of which did result in long term friendships, was online.
Like the one that put Trump in office.
Nope. Everyone knows what a potato is. Provision of technically/expert services such as law , medicine and education is different, because people can’t make good judgements about them. Ordinary market mechanisms need to be supplemented by professional accreditation, or third party advisors. As I have pointed out, there is evidence that some parents will provide objectively bad medical care for their children, if allowed to.
States have the opportunity to minimise indoctrination by mandating public schooling, and preventing religious(etc) indoctrination in public schools. States also have the opportunity to forbid indoctrination in private schools. (Minimising indoctrination just doesn’t mean minimising diversity).
But right-libertopias have no mechanism to prevent private indoctrination , and therefore upper limit on indoctrination.
Religious parents have the opportunity to minimize religious indoctrination by insisting that their children study other religions, but most of them won’t, since they have no reason to.
States have the opportunity to minimize political indoctrination in the public schools but most of them won’t, both because such indoctrination benefits them and because the people in question view the beliefs in question as true.
You seem to have an implicit philosopher king model of the state, in which it, unlike a parent, is a wise person with only benevolent motives.
On the other hand, a parent does not have the opportunity to maximize the indoctrination of his kids, because those kids, both as children and adults, will be interacting with others reared by other parents and taught other views. The state does have the opportunity, if all kids go to public schools, to make sure they are all indoctrinated with the same beliefs–limited only by whatever other beliefs the parents offer their kids.
And those parents were also once kids indoctrinated in whatever views the public schools teach.
I’m curious, incidentally, as to your definition of “religious indoctrination.” We can probably agree that teaching all the kids that Catholicism is true, or teaching all the kids that Sunni Islam is true, qualifies. But what about teaching all the kids that Catholicism is false or that Sunni Islam is false? Is the only reason not to count that as also religious indoctrination the fact that you don’t happen to believe in either of those systems of belief?
Suppose all kids are taught that we have an obligation to Mother Earth so should not litter or pollute or waste energy, or … . Does that count as religious indoctrination? How about if they are taught that they shouldn’t lie or cheat on tests? That they should obey the law? That they should vote?
No, I am just talking about liberal states.
You think that happens in Iran? If you assume pre-existing diversity, then the libertarian problem with indoctrination doesn’t seem to bad, and , in fact, the libertarian problem with “freedom of association” doesn’t seem that bad either. Libertarian solutions work if you just happen to be starting from exactly the right place, ie magic. Statist solutions work by constitutional constraints, ie by mechanism.
I can’t argue apriori what the objectively correct age of majority is, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem in practice.
Liberal states aren’t against indoctrination, they’re just in favour of liberal indoctrination. In Britain, for example, the schools inspection board marks down schools which don’t teach their children about a sufficiently wide set of sexual practices.
And you think that if Iran had constitutional rules on what children had to be taught, they would include a critique of Twelver Shia doctrine?
If children in Iran were taught by their parents, a majority would get the current religious orthodoxy, some would get other views. If they all go to public schools, they will all be taught the orthodoxy.
Isn’t that obvious? The situation where you argue that parental control doesn’t work–lack of diversity–is the situation in which state control works still worse.
I wrote:
Your response was:
Which doesn’t seem to respond to my point. Do you agree that teaching views of religion that you agree with counts as indoctrination just as teaching views you disagree with does? If so, what do you want your non-indoctrinating schools to teach about religion–pretend it doesn’t exist? How about other issues that people disagree on?
I think your statement is correct in direction but too strong, so far as the academic world is concerned. As a libertarian I agree with the academic orthodoxy on more issues than if I was a conservative–in some cases, such as immigration, holding a stronger version of the position than liberals.
To what extent do you think your agreeing with them* is really part of their calculus about whether to find you offensive or threatening? Are so many of them that rational?
*Here I mean the general “them”, not the ones who are familiar with you or who for whatever reason are very literate in terms of different political ideologies.
I don’t think these are matters of objective calculation. If you agree with someone on some issues that tends to make you think of him as a reasonable person, so when he disagrees with you on another issue you either figure he might be right or, more likely, that he is making an understandable but unfortunate error.
The same thing happens if you know and respect someone due to interactions having nothing to do with politics. One of my SCA friends has been heavily involved in internet regulation issues. The fact that he thinks net neutrality was a good idea makes me less confident that it was a bad idea–because I know he is a reasonable and sensible person.
What I meant was, do you think most of those people first get to know your political ideas and then say “Yes, David Friedman is a libertarian, and although I’m not we seem to agree on several things so he is less threatening to me than a solid right-winger would be,” or do they gather only enough information to be able to say “Wait, David Friedman is a libertarian! That means he must believe [X Y and Z strawmen about libertarianism, some of which I agree with and some of which I don’t]” with additional information they learn about you only serving to galvanize this view through confirmation bias?
I think the only reason that a libertarian would be considered less threatening is that there is some common ground with the PC mainstream, as you mention gay marriage, abortion, immigration, etc.
However, as soon as free speech or freedom of association come into play, then they are more often than not labeled bigots by the people that are strongly offended by conservatives.
I’m a libertarian, and I think this was unambiguously true until several years ago, but now it’s more complicated. With progressive/libertarian victories on same-sex marriage and (to a lesser degree) marijuana legalization, and the decline of political social conservatism as a Republican faction, it’s become increasingly difficult for to see socons as prominent opponents, so the alliance (never that strong to begin with) broke down. Interestingly, now each side often “reads” the other as socially conservative – e.g. progressives sometimes see libertarians’ opposition to SJ as motivated by covert social conservatism, while libertarians see SJ as soconism wrapped in anti-oppression rhetoric. There’s also been somewhat of a trend of progressives easing up on harsh criticism of social conservatives, seeing it as classist.
In theory, Republican-style social conservatism is beyond the pale. In practice, that’s not salient because progressives don’t expect to encounter anyone with those views. When they meet with disagreement (whether online on in real life), it’s more likely to be from a libertarian. So we’ve become more prominent as an enemy.
Really? That’s interesting if it’s true but I’m not aware of it. Curious whether others have noticed this same thing.
A bit. Maybe more among the younger, SJ-inclined crowd. Genuine hillbillies get elegies (they can’t help where they’re from or how they were raised), but “techbros” are treated as irredeemable scum of the Earth.
Hm. The only related experience I recall is a walking-Jezebel-article coworker complaining about her in-laws, who it sounds like are “hillbillies.” She sort of briefly winked at a “they can’t help where they’re from” attitude but got right back to complaining about them, calling them sexist, chauvinist, obsolete/stuck in a bygone era, etc. and threw in something along the lines of “I don’t know how my husband escaped being that way but thank goodness he did.”
Think back to all of those articles before and after the election that were basically “Ivy League educated New York-based journalist travels to West Virginia to ‘understand’ Trump voters.” They treated rural social conservatives as some sort of bizarre and uncontacted tribe. Not civilized, like us, to be sure, but also not worthy of outright contempt.
Nobody is attempting to “understand” the techbros. They’re just dismissed as clearly evil.
I’m not sure what the bitterness is about, you have the explanation right there:
“they can’t help where they’re from or how they were raised”
Do you really think you deserve some kind of social pass for telling people that you think black people are are dumb and that we should cut food stamps — because, what, you think you don’t have any choice but to not only think it but identify as someone that thinks those things?
You had and have every opportunity to hear about and embrace the gospel, yet rejected it. Of course people are going to see that differently than someone from an un-contacted tribe. That’s how human nature works.
@Brad
What the fuck? Did the comment you’re responding to get deleted or something? I’m not sure what any of the above has to do with anyone thinking “black people are dumb” except in the vaguest guilt by association sense. Is techbros now being defined as “Silicon valley KKK members” or something?
Of course it is.
But it results in a somewhat counterintuitive result wherein someone with a thick southern accent who says “Mama told me them dark-skinned folks are all bred to be criminals” is brushed off as “Oh sure he’s ignorant but he can’t help it” while someone who writes a 500-page book with detailed sources citing that studies have shown people of African decent have, on average, lower IQs by 5-10 points is treated as Hitler incarnate.
@Quanta413: Brad’s comment was written in a bit of a confusing way. He’s saying the techbros naturally get less sympathy from SJWs because techbros, being up on the latest thought trends and located in hip places like the Bay Area, are presumably saturated in the PC holy water and therefore have apparently chosen to reject it, unlike the unbaptized Hillbillies who just haven’t yet learned about (e.g.) race and gender being social constructs.
(This is meant neither as an endorsement nor refutation of Brad’s comment, just trying to clarify it.)
I completely agree with the statement. I would even go so far as to say that the politically correct mainstream is pretty libertarian, just in a moderate, wishy-washy way. Present any libertarian view to a liberal and they’re most likely to squirm and say, “weeeeeell, I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s true that…”
The funny thing is of course that apparently “socially conservative, fiscally liberal” is the most common outlook according to surveys. I guess it’s the position that resonates with the lukewarm majority (“let’s keep everything mostly the way it is, but sure, I guess I could stand to give some more money to the needy”), but lukewarm people aren’t the ones getting into heated arguments online or starting petitions to have someone fired for not agreeing with them.
So to the parts of the politically correct mainstream that actually get things done? Yes, libertarianism is about a thousand times more acceptable.
Right. Most people, even if they align broadly with the SJW left, seem amenable to statements that start with “it shouldn’t be the government’s business whether…”
Similarly, I’ve found the best way to get people on the right to reaffirm their [possibly previously non-existent] libertarian bona fides is to suggest anarchism might be a good idea.
I think there’s some things that need to be unpacked in there.
I might agree with the statement *all other things being equal* but there are other things that correlate with those beliefs. If the social conservative is an older guy with a big family that works hard and the only way you know that he is socially conservative is that he that he never ever curses and you think you may have overheard him talking on the phone one time about going to a pro-life rally, that’s going to garner a different reaction than a twenty-something guy that can’t wait to pigeonhole his co-workers and explain to them at great length how taxation is theft and we need to go back to the gold standard.
Separately, we need to account for the rise of the “alt right” or whatever else you want to call it — people that aren’t evangelical Christians but have very strong opinions on “social issues”. I have rarely seen such people labeled “social conservatives” even if that is technically accurate.
Not even just not evangelical, often not Christian at all. Spencer is an atheist, and some white identarians truck with neo-paganism and assert that Christianity itself is a Semitic religion inflicted upon Europe by tricky Jews. They call Jesus a “k*ke on a stick,” which is kind of “frowned upon” in socially conservative circles.
ETA: There’s an interesting article in The Atlantic about the secularization of radical American politics. The alt right isn’t holy rollers, and there aren’t so many Reverends in BLM.
Right, the all-trite are a kind of new thing ideologically. A lot of them are pro-abortion, atheist/anti-Christian or sometimes neopagan, pro-gay marriage (though with a weird snark layer over it?), pro-pot legalization, etc. The only issues that would mark them as socially conservative have to do with race (which for them is tied to immmigration) and maybe gun rights. (Others I’m not thinking of?)
Pretty much. Spencer also supports universal healthcare (for his white ethnostate). There is a lot of outgroup homogeneity bias going on with regards to Republicans/the right and the “alt right.” Left-leaning individuals and the left-leaning portions of the media seem to think the alt-right is either just saying what conservatives really believe but won’t say, or are simply a more extreme version of conservatives.
But there’s a reason why you never see Ann Coulter quoting the “scholarly research of Dr. David Duke” or Sean Hannity interviewing “friend of the show Richard Spencer:” conservatives don’t agree with these people on any issue except maybe immigration (but in a far less racially motivated way). If I were to engage Richard Spencer and cure him of his racism he’d be a big-government, pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, pro-universal healthcare anti-racist atheist. That is, a Democrat.
This doesn’t match my experiences. At best there’s grudging acceptance for gay marriage, for example.
But it is such an amorphous term and I couldn’t find any polling. (Found this for libertarians http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/08/25/in-search-of-libertarians/)
My overarching point was that someone like Damore (which is what this is about, right?) is not the central example that comes to mind when I hear “social conservative”.
I’m not convinced I’m at all plugged into the mainstream of alt-right thinking, but reading Steve Sailer and Greg Cochran plus their comment sections, my impressions are:
a. Strong dissent from both right and left on a lot of factual claims about race and ethnicity and religion and sex/gender. (Black/white IQ gap, whether Mexican immigrants assimilate to white American performance, whether Muslim immigrants are a big risk to import terrorism, etc.)
b. More agreement with cons than libs on specific bits of race-related policy–affirmative action, discrimination cases based on disparate impact, etc.
c. Skepticism about US foreign policy, sometimes on h.bd grounds, but more commonly just on grounds that a lot of liberals and libertarians can agree with.
d. Skepticism about a lot of mainstream economic policy–immigration, but also free trade, extremely deferential regulation of big financial companies, lax enforcement of antitrust law, etc.
e. Some skepticism of police conduct, but mixed with a lot of what looks to me to be tribal identification with police facing down criminals, especially minority criminals.
f. Massive skepticism about the honestly and competence of mainstream US media. Sometimes this extends to right-wing media like Fox, but it seems very pervasive when talking about the Washington Post/NYT/NPR/CNN consensus view of reality. (I think a lot of this is a symptom of the fact that the strongest alt-right ideas/positions tend to be the ones the mainstream media sees as outside the window of acceptable discussion, and so has a really hard time handling well.)
g. Some level of pushback on SJW-style concerns about trans rights, gay rights, etc. Not much overt of hostility toward gays, but a lot of skepticism about the gay rights movement.
h. Much less hostility toward entitlement programs than I think you’d see from either libertarians or Paul Ryan style Republicans.
@ Conrad:
Reminds me of the British National Party, who were (back in the Blair days, before they started splintering and dropped off the radar) widely describes as “far-right”, although on virtually every policy except immigration they were noticeably to the left of the Labour Party (they were big on NHS spending and on nationalising things, for example), and most of their support came from inner-city Labour strongholds.
@Brad:
I don’t think of Damore as socially conservative, and he did not inspire my OP.
(Damore seems to align most closely with Gray Tribe — if I remember right he was expressly supportive of racial/gender diversity in the workplace but questioned the wisdom and ethicality of how it was being accomplished — though I don’t know what he thinks his politics are.)
Richard Spencer is gay, isn’t he?
@Well…
No (at least, he was married to a woman). You might be thinking of Milo, who is (and is married to a black man).
Are you sure? Doesn’t he live with another man? And doesn’t he come off a bit…*that gesture Fred Sanford does by wobbling his hand from side to side*…and then there’s the haircut.
I’m pretty sure Richard Spencer is gay.
@Well is one of our local belles of the third grade playground when it comes to this subject. He hates him some faggots, and he knows ’em when he sees ’em! And he has learned that getting his digs in this way minimizes the blow-back.
@rlms & Well
Being or having* been married to a woman doesn’t preclude a person from being gay (or bi), but neither does a less masculine/more feminine demeanor mean that a person is necessarily gay.
A little googling shows me no actual evidence that he ever had a gay relationship.
I don’t think it is reasonable to conclude that a less masculine demeanor combined with pro-gay statements are sufficient proof that someone is gay. It is merely solid proof that he is not anti-gay.
* Wiki says that the most recent personal statement by Spencer from April 2017 is that he is now together with his wife (again?).
@skef:
Wait, you think I actually hate gay people? I can’t tell if you’re being facetious.
OK for the record: — and I hate clarifying like this because now it’s ruined.. — Suspecting Richard Spencer of being gay is my own little subversive in-joke, which I admit I consistently deliver way too flatly/dryly to be understood properly in a text-based medium. (And looking back on it, I regret having left out the part about “Don’t Spencer and Jack Donovan live together in a McMansion in exurban Bozeman?”)
Of course you hate gay people, although you might not fully realize it. Trust me, I have a sixth sense for this sort of thing.
Why would you expect either Well or anyone else to trust you on that?
Bug report: sarcasm tag not working on SSC.
@albatross11:
I didn’t know there was a tag like that. How would it work normally?
…
OK OK I’m kidding. Sheesh. Now back to Richard Spencer asking Jack Donovan (both men are shirtless in this scene) what he thinks of his haircut…
I’m going to join in the chorus of people who don’t think that libertarians get a pass over (other) conservatives.
Monied libertarians are figures of hatred, e.g. the Kochs.
Armed libertarians are figures of fear, e.g. the Bundys.
Academic libertarians are only tolerated because they’re broke and defenseless.
This is an uncharitable take but I think as a general pattern it holds true: self-defense is the most unforgivable crime in modern liberalism. If you can protect yourself or can afford to pay someone else to protect you then that is proof of evil in the eyes of many if not most people.
Is this the rationalist version of “no offense, but”?
I’ve argued elsewhere that I don’t think the Kochs are widely regarded as libertarians by the Left. (Though this may be a false equivalence; those in a position to affect the Kochs — other rich people? high-profile journalists? — probably do know they are libertarians.)
I don’t think most people really fear the Bundys. Instead I sense they are regarded as goofy whackos, sort of like “sovereign citizens,” or Mike Nichols from Bowling for Columbine, or that Steve Austin character from 30 Rock who was running for congress.
An intriguing idea, although I can envision a possible exception for certain racially-charged situations.
To be fair, sovereign citizen types can be quite dangerous if you’re a police officer (see here).
I’m not saying it’d be irrational to fear that type of libertarian if you made enemies with one, I’m saying most people simply see them as tragic/silly.
Deluded and unfocused, but that doesn’t make them not dangerous. Generally speaking I view sovereign citizens the way I view a loaded gun: expect that a bullet is about to come out of the barrel at anytime.
Intellectually you are right. I’m saying the popular conception of them is as ridiculous and worthy of mockery. The mass action is to point and laugh, not to buy extra door locks.
@Well:
I think that is a function of numbers and proximity, as well as their actual ideas being ridiculous.
People laugh at Scientology as well, but also view it as dangerous.
I think you are trying to set up an either/or dichotomy that doesn’t really exist?
Now you’ve got me thinking. Does one exist? Intuitively it feels like one does: either your ideology is something that e.g. local news stations would basically automatically characterize as evil and backward, or it isn’t.
@Well:
No, I think you have the incorrect intuition.
The first rule of local news is “If it bleeds, it leads.” Local news covers things entirely in terms of current outcome.
I contend that if a sov-cit rants in the public square about fringed flags, it gets covered as absurdity. If he starts shooting at the cop cars that have driven onto his “territory” it gets covered as an evil to be feared.
The event does, but with what attitude is his ideology regarded? Even in the shooting scenario, I can envision the news anchors snickering as they read a brief description of what a sovereign citizen is off the teleprompter.
@Well:
Militia movement? The Bundy Ranch?
Again, I think you are misreading things.
I agree with the folks who say this used to be the case, but increasingly is not.
From where I’m sitting, libertarians are seen as, at best, rapacious anti-social greedheads, and at worst (and more likely) closet white supremacists. I would not openly identify as a libertarian any more than I’d openly identify as a social conservative.
I think labels like “liberal”, “conservative”, and “libertarian” usually obscure more than they illuminate so my take:
People who approach politics in a technocratic way are likely to see disagreement as simply a matter of flawed logic. People who approach politics with a sense of moral imperative will be more likely to see disagreement as an existential conflict. I think this mostly holds, regardless of partisanship.
I feel like “Taxation is theft” is the “moral imperative” version of libertarianism.
It absolutely is that. And intentionally so. Designed specifically to allow libertarianism to compete in an increasingly emotional and less technocratic world.
The trouble with “taxation is theft” is that if you’re talking to someone that doesn’t already have the intuition that taxation is theft, they can just say “no, that’s stupid” and go right back to whatever slogan they were repeating before.
Slogans are great for riling up the base, but if you don’t have a base to speak of, riling it up is a losing proposition.
It’s also “the worst argument in the world.”
Taxation is rather like theft, and maybe you can make an argument that it’s morally the same as me stealing your car, but the catchphrase seems like it’s intended to import all my moral intuitions about grand theft auto to a very different situation.
It is rather more effective than most people here will give it credit for, not necessarily because it imports moral intuitions, but because it causes a moment of confusion in someone who hasn’t encountered the idea before.
Because it isn’t immediately obvious why it isn’t theft.
It appears weaker than it is, as an argumentative tactic, because pretty much everyone here who can comment on it has already encountered it, and has already found counter-arguments.
The “worst argument in the world” counter-argument isn’t strong – because it concedes the point that it is the same as the, but merely treats the moral implications as different. It fundamentally requires a sort of utilitarianism; deontologically, the argument is harder to pose, because it requires creating a special class of people who are allowed to take things from you without your consent.
The strong counter-argument requires a broader philosophical grounding, in treating property as a creation of government, rather than a natural right. This requires rejecting a lot of moral intuitions most people are loathe to do away with, however, because the idea that the natural state of affairs is one in which you can only hold what you can defend is repugnant to most people. Noticing that property as we understand it today is a very modern notion is hard to come to grips with, because from a modern perspective, any other situation appears fundamentally injust.
The preexisting commitments problem also exists for the “taxation is theft” proponent. Forget most people, most self identified libertarians think we need some government (e.g. for defense) and that means taxes.
While the theft concept can perhaps admit some unusual exigent exceptions (think stealing medicine for a sick child type hypos) trying to argue that there’s an foreseeable, indefinite, routine case that is theft but nonetheless okay, but while some other stuff that looks awfully similar is also theft but in that case not okay, is a tough row to hoe.
I can see how it might be effective for anarchists, but for any other sort of libertarian it doesn’t get you much. Arguing that theft is okay for common defense, but not for building highways doesn’t get you any further than arguing that taxes are okay for common defense, but not for building highways.
Property in general cannot be a creation of government because it exists both in stateless societies and, in a primitive form, among territorial animals.
The particular rules of property in a given state are to some degree created by the government of that state.
For more on some of this see my old piece on a positive account of rights.
On the “taxation is theft” argument, it’s worth noting that Mike Huemer devotes a book to a critical examination of the arguments for why it isn’t–for why government is entitled to do things we would consider wrong if done by private individuals.
@Brad
Before going ancap, I was a nightwatch state libertarian that considered taxes to be a ‘necessary evil’ to produce things that I thought could not be produced on a market like security and arbitration. My assumption at that time was that competitive security and court services would lead to battling gangs and societal disarray, so the minimal theft needed to prevent that was justified.
The argument justifying taxes (theft) for security and courts didn’t apply to things like highways, because at the time I was aware of private roads and highways, which made me think this resource could plausibly be produced by the market. Also, even if roads would have difficulty being produced on the market, I didn’t think theft was justified to make roads because the consequences of a poorer road system didn’t pass my theft justification threshold the way it could be justified to use theft to prevent violent clashes in society.
@IrishDude
Maybe I wasn’t clear or maybe you were just riffing.
In case it was the former, what I was trying to say was that if in order to justify the statement “taxation is theft” you need to do major surgery on the definition of theft (i.e. in order to carve out this large area where it is morally justified) then it wasn’t really a true or useful statement in the first place.
Like I said if you are anarchist, then sure it is a statement consistent with your beliefs, and I’ll leave it up to your judgment whether it is an effective proselytizing tool. But for the more usual type of libertarian it seems to create as many problems for the speaker as it does the listener.
One issue here is that, even if there is some way to organize your society without coercion (taxes, eminent domain, mandatory jury duty, occasionally drafting a few people to work in the Imperial Salt Mines, etc.), that doesn’t mean we know how to do it.
We have a lot of experience with trying to set up more-or-less Democratic, modern regimes in places we’d like better governed. Sometimes, they take, but often, they don’t–perhaps the underlying beliefs or institutions or culture or even personalities of the people in those countries doesn’t support what’s needed to keep such a government going. (Just having a country where essentially nobody in the military will go along with a coup is probably a really huge win for democracy remaining stable.)
It’s quite possible that we would have the same problem transitioning to a lower- or zero-coercion sort of society. There is nothing in the world easier than speculating about some utopia when you don’t have to actually implement it with real humans and real enemies and real problems to deal with. [Added:]But even if you had one that worked, there would probably be a whole network of beliefs/institutions/etc. that supported it.
This is one reason why I think David Friedman’s work on alternative legal/social systems is so interesting. It’s cool to see some worked examples where you get a functioning society with nothing that looks much like an IRS or a draft to the salt mines or whatever. Such examples might give us a kind of roadmap to decrease the amount of coercion by the state in our society, as we did when we got rid of the military draft in the US.
See, I’m not sure this is true. I think even most “limited government” libertarians (i.e. not specifically AnCap) can be led to freely admit that they agree that taxation is theft. Their belief is not “taxation is morally justified” but rather something to the effect of “in certain situations, one immoral thing is better than the alternative.”
I see it as almost similar to Scott’s point about “coordinated meanness.” He’s not necessarily saying that well-coordinated meanness is a morally virtuous outcome, only that it’s better than the alternative of non-coordinated meanness, and that “nobody is mean at all” is probably a utopian ideal that we cannot actually achieve.
I think most libertarians see AnCaps as naieve utopians. That it’s totally fine in theory, it just wouldn’t “work” in real life. That a little bit of theft is acceptable in order to stop a whole lot of murder.
I think a lot of libertarians would also believe that a use-based tax is not theft, as long as they aren’t forced to use that thing. For example, a toll road is not theft because you are paying for the privilege of driving on that road. If you don’t want to do that, you can just stay home. Something like property tax is very different because you can’t avoid it, even if you don’t want any of the services it provides.
The first half of Michael Huemer’s book on the problem of political authority consists of discussing and rebutting all of the arguments used to show that taxation is not theft, more generally that governments are entitled to do the sorts of things we regard as wrong when individuals do them.
The second half is devoted to the one argument he thinks cannot be so easily rebutted–that if governments are not free to do such things very bad things will happen. He eventually rejects that argument too on the grounds that a stateless society is workable, but that’s what rejecting it requires.
Similarly, I argued long ago that if we could not solve the national defense problem in an A-C system we were better off not eliminating that part of government, because Moscow would charge higher taxes than Washington.
This is a debate we need to have, because I really, really don’t think that Ancap is going to be able to solve it. Next OT?
The power to collect tax is a form of property.
I agree that libertarianism per se is not that offensive. But if you want to embarrass a libertarian before mainstream liberals, you only have to ask them about the Civil Rights Act, segregation in restaurants and hotels, racial discrimination in hiring, etc.. If people understood libertarianism better they would find it more offensive for that reason alone — that libertarian position is outside the Overton Window.
And I would say “that situation was a massive exception, of course; if you were a black guy traveling you really might end up sleeping on the street because no hotel would take black customers! Even if that’s not really an NAP violation, it’s pretty close. But remember, freedom of association is also the reason things like the Civil Rights movement could even happen. The government was pretty open about how much it hated MLK, if there wasn’t a clear right to associate with whoever you want and refuse to associate with whoever you want, the government might well have arrested people just for engaging with Civil Rights protests. And look at how the Rat Pack refused to play for any venue that segregated its customers; even though that anti-gay bakery was clearly in the wrong, it’s the same right being exercised.”
Feedom of Association in the sense of the right to hold political meetings might well have contributed to the civil rights movement, but it is perfectly possible to have that narrower version without the wider version that allows business owners to discriminate. Most democracies do.
Unimportant nitpick, but isn’t “associate to talk about political ideas and make plans for demonstrations” wider, not narrower, than “associate to exchange goods and services for money”?
Once you acknowledge that my ownership of my property imposes a cost on the rest of the world (i.e., the non-owners of that property), the whole foundation of libertarianism crumbles.
In particular, if a traveler who cannot find a decent place to sleep while traveling is being “aggressed” upon by the property owners of the world collectively, then any homeless person has an even stronger claim.
Weren’t there popular books that were basically black-people travel guides such that they could plan their route in such a way as to always be near black-friendly establishments?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Motorist_Green_Book
Remember too that it wasn’t just racist business owners individually choosing to serve only whites and not blacks; in many areas there were actually laws mandating that businesses not serve both whites and blacks. So the committed libertarian answer would be to focus on those laws and argue that if they’d been removed private action could have solved the rest of the problem.
Richard Epstein has argued that the problem was implicit requirements by local governments. It wasn’t illegal to seat both blacks and whites at your lunch counter, but if you did it you might get a visit from the health inspector.
Wasn’t Plessy vs Ferguson a case of a railroad wanting to integrate, but the state government refusing to allow it?
And since those issues are almost never in the news (at least not relative to gay marriage a few years ago or Muslim immigration now) the libertarian doesn’t get that opportunity.
The hatred of libertarians that I’ve seen seems to be about fear and rage that libertarians will eliminate government programs which are keeping people alive.
Back in October I conducted an SSC survey comprised of lots of random-ish questions, meant to uncover any weird skews among SSC readers. The survey was on Google forms. I haven’t dug into the data yet and I don’t know when I’ll get around to it, but it’s all up in tabular form here for those who are interested. If anyone can recommend the best way to post a downloadable CSV of the data for others to download (does Google Forms have a built-in way to do that?), I’m all ears.
Just as a fun threadstarter: What words have you only seen written, and aren’t sure of the pronunciation? (Or, at least, until you write it here and then go to merriam-webster.com to look up.)
For me, one is “metastasis/metastasized”. I can’t recall having it come up in conversation, nor was I watching a medical show where it was used.
I was reminded of this when my parents and I were talking about “hegemony”. I had always thought the stress in that word was on the first, not the second syllable.
Edit: One other I thought of, though I found out the pronunciation after talking to a professor 15 or so years ago: Keynes (as in John Maynard Keynes)
For me, quite a few French expressions, and anytime you must chose between a hard and a soft C or G: “treacle” and “truculent,” for example, I always thought had soft Cs, and “oleaginous” a hard G. Wrong, wrong, wrong…
In younger days I ran into the same problem with “egregious”.
On a similar note, a lot of people pronounce Genghis Khan with two hard ‘g’s, whereas only the second one should be hard (that’s why it has an ‘h’ after it in).
Can’t think of any words off the top of my head, but I’m reminded of a This American Life episode where they had on a woman who thought “misled” was pronounced with a long “i” – i.e. “ma-ee-zl-d” and was the past tense of “to misle,” a word meaning something along the lines of “to deceive” because she had only ever seen it in writing, rather than the past tense of “mislead.”
For at least a few months in my childhood, I thought “mature” rhymed with “nature,” because I had only ever read it in a Calvin & Hobbes comic. Also, I was still learning English at the time, and the idea that words that have similar spellings but completely different pronunciations was still a concept I was getting my head around.
I remember playing Monopoly as a child and thinking the Community Chest card was “life insurance matures” (rhymes with natures).
When I was a wee lad, I figured “action” must be pronounced “AK-tee-yon”. I didn’t mispronounce nation or station or fraction, but for some reason I thought that’s how action was pronounced.
Until about age 19 I thought “homage” was pronounced “HOME-edge” until a friend corrected me, laughing that what I was talking about was a way to describe a quantity of Homer Simpsons.
I once pronounced “environs” and my friend thought I was joking with my pronunciation. I went along with that and pretended I was joking, except now I don’t remember which way I pronounced so I have no idea what the correct pronunciation is. Oh, and I once pronounced the “c” in “victuals”.
BTW, both pronunciations of “hegemony”are ok from what I can tell.
I didn’t know that the “proper” pronunciation of “victual” was “vittle”! I thought that was a regionalism. (Where I come from, “creek” is pronounced as “crick”)
Hegemony ought to be pronounced in a way that rhymes with macaroni.
Yankee Doodle went to town
A-riding on a pony
Pushed the other nations around
And called it hegemony
“Chagrin”. Please don’t tell me, I want to remain ignorant.
I was visiting the US recently and wanted to buy some melatonin before going back home, to help with the jetlag (it’s prescription-only in my country). Stood on the sidewalk before going into the pharmacy for a few minutes, debating with myself where to put the stress in “melatonin” so I don’t sound silly. Convinced myself it was definitely one way, went in, asked about it, the clerk repeated it back with a different stress.
The “misled as paste tense of misle” mentioned above is frequent – I remember a long thread on mispronounced words on salon.com back in the 90s where dozens of people admitted to it. Ever since then I pronounce it liked that jokingly with my then-gf, now-wife and some friends (“you misle-d me!”).
Chagrin is pronounced CHAG-rin. Should rhyme with “flag grin”. The “ch” is a gutteral H, like you often hear in Hebrew.
Melatonin is pronounced mee-LAT-oh-nin. Should rhyme with “he sat on skin.”
Into my early twenties, I thought “subterfuge” was “SOOT-er-fudge”. I am not aware of any words that I have the same issue with now, but I didn’t know that I didn’t know how to pronounce subterfuge either.
I don’t usually notice until I do try to pronounce them. One I ran into lately was “homage” — I heard someone say “homadge” and thought to myself “Surely it’s o-mazh”? Then I decided it’s “paid homadge” but “an o-mazh”. Looking it up, it appears Merriam-Webster agrees with me, but I wasn’t sure.
Pretty sure you’re right (from UK perspective, and assuming mazh is roughly how one would pronounce marge as in the spread or Simpson
No, definitely not Marge as in Simpson; the a is not a diphthong, there’s no r, and the final consonant is a voiced fricative rather than an affricate. It’s difficult to describe with common words with someone from the UK (something about separated by a common language), since I’m not sure how many are pronounced there.
I think marge is pronounced differently in the UK. We would say it in the same way as the ending of “mirage” (at least, I would). I imagine you would pronounce the second syllable of “homage” as in “an homage” in the same way as “mirage”, we would too. But I think we’d say “miraadg”, “homaadg” (“dg” as in “grudge”) and you say “miraaj”, “homaaj” (“j” as in French “je”).
Going back to your original comment, what sound is the “a” in “paid homadge”? I’d say “paid homidg”, “i” as in “pit”.
Yes, that’s right, assuming we pronounce “mirage” similarly. I thought David meant the American prounciation of Marge because that’s the one used on The Simpsons. Unless they dub it to UK English? (which would be hilarious, but seems unlikely)
Same, with the caveat that’s it’s one of those lazy unstressed vowels that isn’t very distinct unless one is carefully enunciating.
I meant what rlms says. I apparently remember American ‘Marge’ in a way that translates it into our pronunciation
Interesting. I (Oxfordshire, posh schools, Oxford, mid 30s) would say “miraazh” and “homaazh” but “Mardge”.
But now that I think about it, imagining the words in most regional accents “dg” sounds right to all of them, so this is probably a class and/or regional thing.
Further possible confound: my Granny was a French teacher, I spent a fair bit of time in France as a kid, so maybe French is influencing me here.
Update: checked with a friend from the same general background but without the France stuff: his pronunciation is the same as mine.
Oh, and also yes to “pay homidge”.
Dour and quay are words I recently got to correct people on.
It’s been quite a few years since I first heard it out loud and realized my error, but for the longest time I thought “epitome” was pronounced “epi-tome.”
You might owe that one to Ernest P. Worrell; as I recall he had a commercial where he talked about the epi-tome of excellence.
Oh man, I think you might be right about that; I used to love Ernest when I was little. I don’t remember the commercial, but I can definitely imagine one making an impression on me. Thanks!
For this reason, I am disappointed that the guitar brand Epiphone is not pronounced the same as ‘epiphany’ 🙂
I learned “hegemony” relatively recently too.
Um, how is “Keynes” pronounced?
like Kaynz, the word “cane” with a z at the end. Or at least that’s how I do it.
Well, that’s my answer then. I always thought “Keens”.
Better than me…I thought it was “Key-ness.” And, of course, I’m arguing with the professor (not about the pronunciation, but about economics) so I got to look really stupid that day.
I’m sure the prof judged you a peynes 😉
Oddly, it apparently is “Keens” if you’re talking about Milton Keynes. It’s just the dead-in-the-long-run economist who’s “Canes”.
One of my old ideas for a computer program to teach economics was a simulation in which you were the authorities in charge of either a monetarist or a Keynesian economy and your problem was to figure out which it was at minimum cost in avoidable unemployment, inflation, etc.
I was going to call it Milton Keynes.
@DavidFriedman
Obligatory Yes, Minister
A sim called Milton Keynes really ought to give you the option to reign in Hell rather than serve at the central bank.
If you want to get really confused, check out the correct pronunciation of Gonville and Caius.
I didn’t really think about it when I posted, but this reminds me of a YouTube video that doesn’t have enough views: Shibboleth
> Trottiscliffe
Apparently pronounced trozli?!? Not sure why but that one seemed most outrageous to me.
Great video.
@Brad
The captions have all the pronunciations in IPA if you want to verify.
l note that the comments say that “Godmanchester” is not pronounced as in the video, but as it’s spelled. So this video may not be the be-all and end-all of pronunciation guides. All of the other ones I’ve verified from the video have been correct, though (Featherstonhaugh, for example)
Thank you – that video was delightful!
Colin Farrell; Colin Powell. Their first names are pronounced differently.
The various derivatives of hyperbol- always gave me problems (having seen them in print long before my peers were using such words in speech). I thought “hyperbole” was pronounced hyper-bowl (i.e. 3 syllables, like a high-strung eating vessel) and “hyperbola” was “hyper-BOLA” (a string-and-ball weapon with ADD) rather than “hi-PER-bulluh”.
Oh yeah, that’s another one that always used to get me.
“Hysteresis” I have heard it pronounced, but only by a Frenchwoman, so I am not sure if it is pronounced differently by English speakers.
Also, despite growing up with an economist father, I still have a tendency to start pronouncing it “eco-NOM-ist”
Hysteresis — four syllables, accent on the third. Not three syllables, accent on the second, as I initially thought.
I used to think “segue” rhymed with “league”. And “Penelope” rhymed with “antelope”. And “Hermione” was pronounced HER-me-own.
I thought it was pronounced HER-my-OWN-ee. Then a friend pointed me to the right pronunciation, and pointed out that Rowling had Victor Krum make exactly that mistake so as to inform all her readers of the right way to pronounce that name.
I thought Margot was pronounced MAR-gott (rhymes with star spot).
Penelope still makes me think of cantaloupe. My friend Penelope is sweet, juicy, and best served cut up into domino-sized pieces.
So did Jean Harlow, at which point Margot Asquith told her “It’s Margo. The ‘t’ is silent — as in Harlow.”
(or so the story goes)
Oof! That had to sting a bit.
Most of mine are foreign borrowed phrases.
fait accompli – is it faye accomplee?
prima facie – preema fassie?
Synapse – Sigh-naps or sinnaps?
There are probably plenty others but I get the benefit of the doubt with an Australian accent so they don’t become issues.
“Fate a-kumplee” and “pry-ma fay-shee”, roughly, using American pronunciations for those. I pronounce “synapse” as “sinnaps” but Wiktionary says both are correct if I’m parsing the IPA correctly.
Merriam Webster allows various pronunciations for “fait accompli”, but the “t” is pronounced in all of them. I pronounce approximately as “fet akomplee”. My problem with that one is I usually think it’s spelled with an ‘s’ in the singular, which it is not.
According to the same source with “prima facie” it’s “pryma fashee” “pryma fasee” “pryma fashia” or “pryma fasia” but not “preema” anything. Which is too bad because I would have agreed with your pronunciation.
English public school Latin – and hence UK received pronunciation – is preema fackeeay, or at a stretch preema fasseeay or preema fasheeay. Pryma may well be the default US pronunciation (see also bona fyeds vs. bona feedays).
In general Received Pronunciation for Latin phrases is not similar to public school Latin pronunciation. The pronunciation you’re taught in school is a mimic of how the Romans would have pronounced it, but normally these phrases have conventionalized English pronunciations which have been modified by centuries of sound change and therefore sound quite different from how the Romans would have pronounced them, with lots of diphthongs and stuff. In general, actually, it’s British usage which tends to prefer these conventional Anglicized pronunciations, while Americans tend to backcorrect to the 1 AD pronunciation. For example, the OED gives the pronunciation of “prima facie” as: British, pryma fayshy; American, preema fayshy.
Huh. That has not been my experience. Pronunciation is weird.
“Preema fayshy” isn’t very close at all to the Classical pronunciation, which should be something like “preemah fackiay”.
Also, fuchsia. Which, out of trollishness, I will continue to pronounce as ‘fuchs’ (the German name of the guy for whom the flower, and therefore the colour, is named) + ‘-ia’. Being from Scotland, I have in my native phonology the ‘ch’ sound as distinct from ‘ck’.
German “Fuchs” isn’t pronounced with that ‘ch’ sound, though. It’s just [fʊks]. In general, the cluster /ks/ is spelt in German as “chs”, not as “ks”; I don’t think the cluster /xs/ occurs in any German words.
It does, but only if there’s a morpheme boundary in between. That is, if the stem ends in -ch and then the suffix -s is attached. Compare Dachs the animal and Dachs the genitive of roof.
Come to think of it, I don’t remember being drilled thoroughly in the pronunciation rules of German back at school. They just kind of glossed over that part. I eventually picked up that the ‘ch’ in ‘ich’ is different from the ‘ch’ in ‘ach’, but I obviously never picked up that it assimilates to a ‘k’ before ‘s’. Even after listening to a lot of Rammstein – either it’s a rare combination or I just never noticed.
Well, I will change my pronunication, but only to more accurately reflect the botanist’s name. ‘Fyu-sha’ is still a bridge too far 🙂
Fun fact: the fait in fait accompli is pronounced as “fet” (rhymes with “bet”), but only because of the initial vowel at the start of the next word. (This is called a liaison.) Otherwise it would be “feh”.
It’s French; of course it is.
I was probably 20 years old before I realized that “Chloe” was pronounced “clo-ee”. I knew that “clo-ee” was a name, I just always assumed that Chloe (pronounced “clo” in my mind) was just a different name. To this day though, I still read it as “clo” and have to make a concerted effort to change it in my mind.
I had something similar with Siobhán.
I had the same problem with Phoebe. I watched Friends and I knew there was a character there named “feebee” whose name I wasn’t sure how to spell; and separately there was the written name Phoebe which I wasn’t sure how to pronounce, but probably something like “feb”.
See also the Greek god “Phoebe’s Apollo.” 🙂
For a long time I didn’t know that hors d’oeuvres and “auderbs” were the same thing.
ObLink: Wakeen
Ditto for me with ren-divis and ron-dayvu.
One I can’t wrap my head around is reconnoiter. Google claims I’ve been pronouncing it wrong all this time, but frankly “ruh-KAHN-ih-ter” sounds a lot less stupid to me than the suggested “ree-kuh-NOI-ter” or “reh-kuh-NOI-ter.”* It even fits better with reconnaissance, with which it shares its etymology.
*I know Google suggests placing the accent on the second syllable, but that’s not how the voice is pronouncing it, or how I’ve actually heard it pronounced. I truly give up on this word.
The vicar in the village where I grew up told a story about asking a pregnant parishioner what she planned to name her child.
“Gooey,” she replied. “It’s the name of the hero in this book I’m reading.”
“Oh, really? How do you spell it?”
“G-U-Y.”
Most of them, until I came to the US. For a while, it was common for me not to understand words people said, ask them for the spelling, and figuring out it was a word I knew, but whose pronunciation I had guessed entirely wrong.
That has not happened in a while, but I don’t know if it’s because my pronunciation got better, or because people have decided that it’s “not nice” to correct me (thereby leaving me to be forever wrong).
Can I use this thread to bitch about other people mispronouncing words? Specifically, every time I hear an american say “hamartia”, they pronounce it with the t sounding like an s (i.e. like you would pronounce “Martian”) whereas it should be pronounced like the t in “Art”. I don’t know why but this drives me crazy.
I have to look up the pronunciation of “nicoise” every time I order it.
*Deleted comment* it’s the feminine demonym for Nice and apparently a type of salad, in case anyone else was wondering 🙂
I definitely screwed up “Keynes” for a few years. It probably didn’t help that my freshman year economics professor also mispronounced it….
Calliope. When I’d only seen it written, I thought it was pronounced “kall – e – ope”.
And macabre — “mak’ – uh – bur”.
The dictionary tells me that duchy is pronounced dutch-ee, not duke-ee, but I still find it hard to convince myself.
Hegemony can be pronounced with the stress on the first syllable, wikitionary backs me up on this! https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hegemony 😛
(But seriously, I’ve definitely heard “HEDGE-amony” but never “hiJEMiny or heJEMiny” — apologies for aproximating IPA with regular roman alphabet letters).
A similar example that I’m still in denial about: it’s apparently “in-TRE-pid”, not “IN-tre-ped” (but the latter one still sounds way better to me so…)
There have definitely been some cases where I was familiar with a word as spelled and a word as pronounced and didn’t realize they were the same word for years, but I can’t remember examples right now.
================
Edit: on a similar topic — does anyone have internal pronunciations that they know are incorrect/uncommon but maintain for convenience? Like in my head I pronounce “fuchsia” the xkcd for spelling.
Also, throughout elementary school I mentally pronounced letter closings, “since-rely”. I knew the correct pronunciation and I don’t think I ever verbally mispronounced it but just whenever writing or reading it, basically to remind myself of the proper spelling.
Two others:
1. the only way I can spell ‘medieval’ correctly is to think of it as ‘medi eval’ (Just like Middle Ages! This might be part of the reason I’m into etymology…)
2. Necessary — “neckess ary” is the only way I can remember whether the ‘c’ or the ‘s’ is doubled (also got this trick from Latin — specifically the pronunciation of the adjective “necesse”) 😛
I do this for spelling a lot, or did anyway. Usually it’s an “if it were phonetic” pronunciation.
Yeah, basically goddamn everything. And not even for convenience so much as amusement. The accent I use when writing (or talking quietly to myself) is totally ridiculous.
For example, the word “wheat” contains an audible whistle at the beginning, and the h in “whom” is drawn out so it lasts a few actual seconds, and the whole word is spoken at a comically high regal pitch.
I know how to properly pronounce Poughkeepsie but I mentally say “poe-KEEP-see” anyway because it’s funnier.
I pretty much only say “soap” in an Australian accent, like “SOR-rip”. Same with fiber: “FAW-yee-bah”.
Chalk it up to having been a twin and developed a knack for microphasia.
I still cannot bring myself to say “beetlejuice” instead of “bet-ull-geeze” (Betelgeuse). It makes me feel like a kid trying to scare his friends at a sleepover.
On Naval Gazing: Bringing Back the Battleships. Specifically, why it’s a bad idea.
ah, but what if we bring them back as amphibious assault battleships!
Cassander,
That is only exceeded in stupidity by the designs which leave Turret III. The ship is basically rebuilt aft of the conning tower (seriously, why are they mucking about in the superstructure?), which is expensive. There will be serious weight and balance problems because of the loss of Turret III. See Ise and Hyuga for an example of this. And there’s the topweight issues of the flight deck and the stuff on it. And the problem that the ship as a whole is pretty full already. Where do the flight crews, maintenance staff, and Marines go?
Wait…. Is that a twin-arm launcher FORWARD OF TURRET I? Leaving aside the fact that there isn’t space for the magazine there, can anyone tell me the big problem?
Yes. Blast damage. Seriously, people?
(Also, there are no guidance radars.)
Also, it looks ugly. And it makes no sense. Let’s compare it to the USS America. The running cost should be broadly similar. (Actually, America will be a lot cheaper, but that’s not the important bit.) America cost $3.4 billion. My $2 billion estimate was for a fairly simple reactivation, so this conversion would probably equal or exceed America’s cost. And for what? Fewer helicopters, fewer Marines, worse access.
Digging into my reference books, this looks to be pretty closely based on an early 60s proposal to convert the Iowas into Commando Ships (sort of proto-LPHs). The twin-arm launcher was supposed to be an ASROC (weird, but almost understandable) and the conning tower looks like it was supposed to be replaced, which didn’t happen on that model. The design almost got approved, and might have if not for the squeeze that Polaris put on the Navy’s budget. But it’s a lot less attractive today, because you can’t cram 1,800 Marines onboard with modern habitability standards, and the ships have been out of service for about three times as long as they had been when it was mooted.
Oh, I know. It’s not a good idea. It wasn’t even a good idea in the 60s. It just amuses me.
If the numbers given in Friedman had worked out, it might have been a good choice then, actually. But I suspect they wouldn’t have been quite that good, and the situation has changed a lot since then.
Also, a correction. This appears to be a similar 80s scheme, with the intention of carrying Harriers. Lightly loaded, they would have been used for spotting for the main guns and Tomahawk batteries. Which makes absolutely no sense at all.
@bean
how could they possibly have thought that was a good use for harriers? Putting aside that they already had RQ-2s, and that helicopters would be better at the job, using a fully combat capable fighter for that is insanely extravagant even by the standards of the US military. They must have been intended for air defense as well.
Beats me. I’m just reporting what Dulin & Garzke had to say about the design. The person who dreamt it up was apparently one of the advocates of the guns in the fire support role, and it’s pretty obvious what I think of that.
This was part of Phase II, which was cancelled fairly quickly. I don’t think RQ-2 was on the table at that time.
For the guns, yes. Maybe not if you’re planning on playing with TASM, but that’s what the OTH-T is for.
Yep. Hence my derision.
The radar-equipped Harrier didn’t even start development until 1987, well after Phase II was dead. A visual-only Harrier with Sidewinders is not a particularly good air-defense fighter. It was a stupid idea on all levels.
You all are forgetting that the 16″ gun is such an awesome weapon that the Marines will be able to simply walk in and take over, the enemy’s morale having been utterly shattered along with his bunkers and his bodies by that awesome ballistic awesomeness. But without 16″ guns firing in support, the Marines are doomed, DOOMED!, because the pansy girlie-man weapons of the modern navy simply don’t have the raw bunker- and morale-shattering awesome awesomeness of the only true fire support weapon, the 16″ gun.
At least, I think that was the theory.
Pretty much. But that does raise the question of why they planned to remove 33% of the 16″ guns to make this mod.
(Also, the obvious counterargument is that it didn’t work all that well on the Japanese.)
What would a modern warship designed to optimally fill a battleship-type role look like? It would need to be:
1) Large and very powerful (probably nuclear powered?), able to keep up with supercarriers
2) Primarily a surface combatant / fire support platform (but with sufficient self-defense AA resources)
3) Survivable – able to either avoid or absorb significant hits from modern anti-ship weapons
I’m guessing it would not have big guns, other than maybe something like what they were talking about for Zumwalt (long range precision shells, one or two guns). Would it be significantly armored? Is there any point to significant armor anymore (that seems to be one of the biggest knocks against the “battleship” in modern warfare – so much deadweight steel being hauled around to defend against weapons that no longer exist)?
You know, I might even point at the nuclear submarine as the modern successor. If my fairly scant knowledge holds up, they’re a primarily anti-warship platform (leaving aside the nuclear deterent boats) to which vessels of other types have little ability to threaten. While they are very different constructions, their place in operations seems quite similar on the face of things.
Indeed. The role of the battleship is split between the SSN and the CVN these days, and while there might be some room to build big surface ships, trying to build a ‘modern battleship’ is not a particularly good way to get something useful.
What do you mean when you say “battleship-type role”? I’m not trying to be difficult, because it’s a very important question. If you’re trying to replace the battleship in its original role, build a carrier. Those have taken over as the sea-control capital ship. (Alternatively, build an SSN. Depends on exactly what you want to do.)
If you’re trying to replace the role they had in the 80s, then I’d say ~25,000 tons, good looking, fairly standard AEGIS fit, and fleet flag facilities, so you also can replace the LCCs. Probably a relatively heavy gun armament to impress visitors (4-6 of the biggest guns you can get cheaply, and they don’t even have to work that well).
You seem to be looking for a ship which has the traits of a battleship, but those are incidental to role, and don’t make that much sense today. Aircraft, submarines, and maybe LRASM from VLS are the way to go for surface strike. Fire support has loads of options, none of which need heavy guns. And there are better ways to get survivability than armor, so we should probably leave it off.
Edit:
To expand on this slightly, let’s consider the question “What would a modern warship designed to optimally fill a galley-type role look like?”
Either it would look like a galley made of steel and we’d all point and laugh, or it would look like a destroyer because that’s what it is. The battleship’s role is better filled by other ships, and attempting to bring back something identifiable as a battleship is basically spending the defense budget on LARPing that it’s 80 years ago. This isn’t a notably better idea than LARPing that it’s 800 years ago, although it’s somewhat more obvious in the second case what we’re doing.
To clarify, I’m not saying such a ship would be a good idea or a good use of reaources (indeed, this exercise might show that the best possible ship isn’t that good).
Basically, I want a surface combatant designed to plausibly defeat any and all other surface combatants, and to survive attacks from the same. Basically a pure Dreadnought, with modern weapons and defenses.
OK, so you do want to LARP. John basically covered this one. (I’ve been reading a lot about strategy and fleet design lately for upcoming columns, so I tended to think in those terms.)
I’m honestly not sure how harsh being dismissed as “LARPing” should be taken from you (or anyone on this blog for that matter) 😉
It’s not intended to be harsh unless you start lobbying people to build it. It’s interesting enough to look at, so long as everyone understands that we’re not serious.
(I may have read too much about people making stupid procurement decisions lately, so I’m coming down kind of hard on this stuff. I suspect that nobody important to defense procurement reads SSC Open Threads, and I really should lighten up.)
The singular requirement for a battleship is that it be very, very hard to sink. That goes back to the old “line of battle” concept that gave battleships their name – lose one, and you’ve got a gap in your formation that means you lose the whole battle and maybe the war, so there’s a minimum standard that a ship has to meet or you just won’t include it in the line of battle at all. This becomes even more important if we don’t have lines of battle but rather task forces built around a single capital ship.
I’ve argued elsewhere that even at the height of the dreadnought age, it wasn’t citadels of impenetrable armor that actually kept battleships from sinking but size and damage tolerance, meaning compartmentalization and redundancy, reserve buoyancy and stability margins, and more damage control capability than you ever thought you’d need (no, still more than that). Against modern weapons, you probably will want splinter protection everywhere (particularly the antennas), but not much more than that. Maybe a modest armored deck at the waterline, as with the old “protected cruisers”.
Mostly, survivability is going to come from a very robust air and missile defense system. The Aegis system on modern US destroyers and cruisers would be a good place to start, but has inadequate redundancy and the directors can’t really be armored. There are roughly equivalent systems abroad, as well. Make a hardened, redundant version of one of those, and back it up with lots of point-defense systems, not just a couple of RD-D2s. Laser weapons are a wild card, but might be the thing that makes battleships practical in the 21st century.
Then figure out how you’re going to do torpedo defense, which people mostly have clever unproven ideas on.
Then figure out what you’re going to do with your big, expensive, nigh-unsinkable, expensive ship that doesn’t yet have a mission to justify the great and terrible expense.
That’s roughly what I was looking for, thanks.
The problem seems to be that such a ship could basically only plausibly built as more than a one-off by the USN, and apart from the USN there aren’t really any fleets to justify turning such a beast loose on.
Does the equation change at all if there were a peer or near-peer blue water navy to fight? Or is it still just supercarriers and subs as the premier anti-fleet platforms?
The Chinese could afford to build 3-4 of them. The Soviet Union used to be able to, and that’s sort of what lead to the Kirovs, but the Russian economy has not and may not recover to that point again. Then again, maybe they will.
Doesn’t mean they will make battleships, because it might be that a mix of SSNs and CVNs can cover the same missions better and cheaper. That’s probably the way to bet at present, but if you tell me that someone is going to build a “battleship” in the next decade that’s where I’d bet on it coming from.
If you want to focus on anti-ship, build submarines. Carriers are decent at fighting other ships and very good at projecting power. I can’t see why this would be better than lots of LRASMs in the VLS cells of conventional escorts. Kirov is a bit of an odd duck, but I’m still trying to wrap my head around the Soviet Navy in general.
Submarine dominance in naval warfare depends on a set of assumptions that may not prove valid in the future. That, plus submarines being nearly useless for show-of-force missions, could well lead to someone hedging their bets in the way the Russians did with the Kirovs.
Presumably survivability, but if the answer is “any hit(s) from modern anti-ship weapons on any plausible surface ship will be at least a mission kill” then LRASMs distributed across multiple ships could certainly be better than concentrating them into a single larger platform.
Really this was just thinking about whether such a thing would even be plausible/possible. For a long time the primary mission of capital ships was to sink other capital ships, and in modern warfare that is not really the case (carriers and SSBNs are all about power projection, meanwhile SSNs and various anti-ship platforms are designed to sink capital ships but aren’t themselves really capital ships).
@John
The same is true of any weapon proposed. Water has proved remarkably difficult to see through, so I’ll bet on the submarine as being quite potent for a long time to come.
AIUI, the Kirovs were intended to be the flagships of Bastion-protection forces way up north. That sort of requires a surface ship, and some of the size and propulsion choices were a result of Soviet tech being big and power-hungry. Also, the seas are really rough up there. I could see the US building something of approximately that size for presence/flagship missions, but I wouldn’t really call it a battleship successor.
@gbdub
I wouldn’t say that, but I do think that the trends today are definitely such that 3 ships of 10,000 tons apiece are a better choice than one of 25,000.
Aviation allowed naval forces to develop power projection in a way previously impossible. There was no equivalent to the cruise missile in Nelson’s or Jellicoe’s day. I can’t say I’m surprised that this has played rather heavily with the categories.
Nitpick: The big problem with doing that is that the installation of CIWS is apparently limited by electronic interference. (This is a surprisingly common problem on modern warships, and one of the main reasons that the BBG conversions never happened. They couldn’t fit that many more missile launchers than they could on a CG, and it would have been a lot more expensive.)
That might well be a serious problem for the whole ship, actually.
There’s no reason you can’t use electro-optical fire control for a PD-SAM or a CIWS, with no interference problem and probably not much degradation of performance outside of really horrid weather. The US military is biased towards absolute dominance of the EM spectrum and a reluctance to acknowledge that photons smaller than an inch across have any military relevance, but I think that’s a blind spot that may bite them in the future and a number of foreign systems (e.g. Kashtan, Millenium) have at least a secondary EO mode.
AIUI, those are OK, but not as reliable or effective as radar. I’ll check sources later for more details, but I think you probably seriously underrate how bad weather will affect them.
On another tangent – it seems like the USN has an anti-ship missile gap. We’re puttering around with Harpoons, relatively short range subsonic weapons that would take several shots to take out any sort of sizable warship, even if they could get past modern anti-missile defenses (which seems unlikely). Or Tomahawks, which are bigger but still slow and sound like they would have been pretty iffy from a targeting/guidance standpoint. LRASM is a bigger and more survivable weapon, but still subsonic (and only recently coming online).
Meanwhile the various potential enemies have big supersonic missiles designed to at least put a very big hole in a supercarrier and sink anything smaller outright.
How bad is this gap actually, and how much does it matter? The problems of targeting being what they are, are the adversaries actually dangerous weapon systems, or just scary missiles that would be lucky to get an aimed shot off?
The problems I outlined in last Friday’s post are not unique to targeting carriers at all. With the demise of the Soviets, it’s made more and more sense to not worry about going after enemy ships with the surface fleet. And the world grows less tolerant of collateral damage all the time, so submarines and aircraft (which can get better locks on the target before firing) are the ASuW platforms of choice.
The other issue is that the USN doesn’t face a symmetrical situation. Big ASMs are essentially an inferior substitute for aircraft, but we have aircraft. And I can’t think of very many supercarriers for us to shoot at, either, so we don’t need missiles designed to kill them.
More of the later. They’re potentially dangerous, but not nearly as dangerous as their proponents think.
It does and it doesn’t. The harpoon is admittedly pretty lousy, but the USN doesn’t really have a lot of potential enemy ships to sink right now, so it doesn’t really need a good ASM. Should such enemies emerge, the US will still have its large fleet of submarines and carriers, both of which are perfectly good at sinking enemy ships.
Heavy supersonic cruise missiles are big. the Shipwreck/Granit weighs 15,000lb and delivers a 1,500lb warhead compared to 3,000 and 1,000lb for a tomahawk, and 1,500 and 500 for a harpoon you can get about 4 tomahawks in a VLS cell big enough for one granit. I’d much rather stuff my surface ships full of many more defensive missiles than an enemy can possibly bring, dramatically reducing their PK, then use aircraft and subs to sink anything that needs sinking.
Assuming for the moment the planes don’t get shot down (we have reasonable air superiority and OPFOR doesn’t have US-quality AAW surface combatants [1]) what’s a carrier commanders’ best weapon system for sinking a surface combatant from the air? Harpoons are air-launchable, sure, but as you say they’re not that good. Do we have other good air launched munitions that could effectively sink a modern destroyer, even putting aside whether point defense would take them out?
[1] For that matter, a question I’m not clear about: assuming for the moment everyone know where each other is, since you make it quite clear that’s a big deal: suppose the ComDesRon of CSG3 says something unflattering about CSG11’s commander’s mother, and in a fury he orders Nimitz’s air wing to sink CSG3’s surface combatants. (We’ll also assume Stennis does not get involved, so there’s no air-to-air component of this battle.) Could our F/A-18s get within strike range of CSG3, or would they get shot out of the sky pretty reliably by a hail of Standards?
@Andrew Hunter
Well, we will have LRASM shortly. And if the enemy is using their sensors, then EA-18s are supposedly capable of providing target quality data via passive listening and triangulation, which means you can use a whole bunch of other weapons, including air launched tomahawks. And if you can get relatively close, the SDB-II has an anti-moving target capability.
Air-launched tomahawks? That’s not a thing. I do think TacTom has some anti-shipping capability, but they haven’t air-launched in ages.
SDB has a fairly absurd glide range. You don’t have to get that close.
@bean
You’re right of course, I was somehow getting the JASSM mixed up with the tomahawk.
Actually, I think the Harpoon is a pretty good missile for what it’s intended for, which is hunting frigates/small destroyers. If you want to kill big ships, not so much, but we have LRASM coming for that.
Cassander points out LRASM. Honestly, LGBs are probably what we’d use today. They don’t care that much if the target is moving, although you have to get closer than I’d want to use them.
Right, but for anyone who doesn’t have an aircraft carrier, “aircraft” may in this context default to “a helicopter or maybe an MPA”. Asking either of those to take on anything bigger than a corvette with their typical on-board weaponry is probably asking too much. If they can whistle up a couple dozen SSMs from a task group a hundred kilometers away, that’s probably a fair substitute for a squadron of carrier-based strike aircraft.
Taking the Harpoons off US destroyers is basically an admission that the United States is going to run away rather than fight with anything less than air supremacy. Which, being basically true and already obvious, makes it a sensible economic move. The rest of the world can’t afford to do that.
Granted, but the question was explicitly in the context of the US, which has basically all of the aircraft carriers.
I’m not sure I’d frame it that way. We’re more concerned about collateral damage than we are about fighting without air supremacy, and Harpoon is easy to install. We could get it back pretty quickly if we need to.
I think using the on-board helo for targeting eliminates the collateral damage risk in almost all practical circumstances, particularly with Block II+ Harpoon and the ability to take mid-course updates from the helicopter. But even with a fixed trajectory, TOF is going to be less than ten minutes, not enough time for the target to move more than a few miles, so it should be possible to set the aquisition window tight enough to include the target and nothing but the target.
It might sometimes be possible for the target to e.g. hide in the immediate shadow of a container ship or something, but I don’t buy that we’re taking away the missiles because we think the target will always be so hidden, or that we don’t think our helo aircrew can tell the difference.
And while the US and its allies have basically all of the carriers, I’m not convinced we have enough carriers that there will always be one available wherever the US Navy has to fight.
I’m not quite as sanguine as you are about this. I’ll grant that the Block II+ changes things, but before that, you did have the 10 minute blind spot, which is enough for a warship to run about 5 nm. I can’t say for sure how the seeker can be set up, but potentially anything within 5 nm could be vulnerable. In practice, add about 50% to these numbers because of delays in the process.
Again, I point out that Harpoon is easy to install. A couple of days, max. And I kind of doubt we’ll be fighting people with air defense systems in that many places at once without enough warning to put it back on.
The idea that America’s enemies will always give us advance warning and whatever time we need to deploy the preferred force mix is another conceit that I think is going to bite us hard some day.
W/re the Harpoons, though, my preference at the time was to replace the deployed Block I’s with a surface-launch SLAM or SLAM-ER. Datalink can be provided by the helos or by the ship itself if the missile climbs to a modest altitude during cruise and acquisition. Result should be almost as good an anti-ship missile as a straight Harpoon with a more responsive tactical land-attack capability than Tomahawk.
Useful for, say, taking out missile batteries and radar stations in Yemen immediately after they shoot at US destroyers, rather than waiting a few days for someone to set up a Tomahawk strike plan. Plus you get to assess the collateral damage risk through the missile’s FLIR thirty seconds before impact.
That’s an irritatingly good point. Thinking it over, I’m not sure why SLAM was never surface-launched. (SLAM-ER won’t fit in a Harpoon tube because of the wings.) I think it’s probably fair to blame the aviation community for this.
WRT the Harpoons themselves, though, what hasn’t been pointed out here yet is the use of SAMs in surface-to-surface mode. Standard and ESSM will do a perfectly good job sinking ships, and we’re carrying them anyway. Yes, it may be horizon-limited (or not, I’m not sure), but given that they’re a lot faster, and thus harder to shoot down, I suspect the Harpoons wouldn’t do a whole lot against a serious opponent.
We can probably blame a lot on the aviation community, yes. Whatever naval aviation uses for stand-off strike missions, against land or sea targets, there’s little excuse not to have a version with a solid booster on it for surface launch, and it’s particularly galling when the base system was surface-launched from day one.
Actually, they don’t seem to be very good at all at sinking ships; what they can do is mission-kill ships, if you can get close enough. Rather like the 6″ HE shell in the ironclad age.
I do think that over-the-horizon attack, cued by helos, drones, ESM, whatever, is likely to be decisive, and I don’t think people will generally shy away from firing them for fear of hitting merchant ships. Well, the USN will until it starts losing destroyers. Meanwhile, we’re seeing just about everybody but the USN field a new generation of SSMs designed to defeat modern missile defenses. The LRASM is about a decade late to that party, IMO, and it remains to be seen whether stealth beats speed in this area.
Slight imprecision on my part, but I will stand by the sense that they’re not much less effective than conventional SSMs. AAW warheads are nasty.
Fortunately, some of those people are our friends. I know there’s been interest in NSM.
Why the carriers are not doomed, Part 2 (originally Part 1) is up now.
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Anybody have good suggestions for Latin texts on the easier side that are not Caesar’s Commentaries?
The Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible?
If you like poetry, I’ve always found Catullus to be fairly easy (especially if you get The Student’s Catullus by Garrison). For prose, Apuleius has an offbeat style but isn’t usually too demanding. But he might be later than you’re looking for.
But yeah, this is good advice if you aren’t too fussed about the dates. I practice some Greek with the New Testament since it’s much easier than any other prose writer I know of. Plus, if you’re familiar with the Bible, that makes it easier to get into a language you’re not too familiar with.
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve read a little bit of Catullus, and he’s a good way to learn some, ahem, interesting vocabulary. I should amend my post above; I’m not super picky about being purely classical (I mostly meant “not written by a Latin teacher”). I have very little sense, though, how different classical is from late or medieval Latin.
I’m not an expert, but my impression is that between classical and medieval Latin spelling and vocab changed a lot, grammar less so. (And grammar — or at least syntax conventions — changed a lot from early to later Classical Latin also, so if like me you mostly learned from Vergil and Empire writers you’ll probably find the older stuff like Plautus very difficult).
Another poetry rec — Martial’s epigrams are short and hilarious, so low effort and high pay off 🙂
If you can find a book on medieval Latin there will often be an introduction reviewing the major changes. Beeson’s has an intro like that, although it’s not the one I primarily relied on for my Medieval Latin class, and skimming it again it looks briefer than I remember.
ETA: The two biggest grammar changes are probably 1) subjunctive becomes a mess and 2) indirect discourse is done differently.
Haha, if there were a better way to scare off a novice Latinist…
I’ve been working through Moreland & Fleischer’s textbook, and I really appreciate them putting the subjunctive at the very beginning; last time I tried Latin was with the Cambridge series in high school, and introducing all that complexity in the 3rd or 4th book just made me want to give up altogether.
@Evan
That’s a good suggestion! I suppose it’ll be helpful (too helpful?) I already will have an idea what’s going on in, say, Genesis 1.
Eutropius is a pretty easy read, much easier than Cicero, anyway. He was actually used as a textbook for classical Latin in the Late Empire. And its nice to get a History that isn’t Tacitus